Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan 2019034238, 9780810141292, 9780810141308, 9780810141315

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Ghosts of the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan
Chapter 1. Lingering Legacies of the War: Performance and Specters at Yasukuni Shrine
Chapter 2. Returning Kamikaze: Popular Culture, Affect, and Theatrical Repetition
Chapter 3. Staging Response-ability: Historical Omissions and the Audience
Chapter 4. Becoming Missing "Comfort Women": Embodiment, History, and Position
Chapter 5. Acts That Do Not Transfer: The Battle of Okinawa and Situated Testimony
Chapter 6. Making Unresolved Japanese American Histories: Transpacific Possession and Response-ability as Conflict
Epilogue. Ghosts and the Future
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Transgenerational Remembrance

SERIES EDITORS This series publishes books in theater and performance studies, Patrick Anderson and focused in particular on the material conditions in which Nicholas Ridout performance acts are staged and to which performance itself might contribute. We define “performance” in the broadest sense, including traditional theatrical productions and performance art, but also cultural ritual, political demonstration, social practice, and other forms of interpersonal, social, and political interaction that may fruitfully be understood in terms of performance.

Transgenerational Remembrance Performance and the Asia-­Pacific War in Contemporary Japan

Jessica Nakamura

northwestern university press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2020 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2020. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Nakamura, Jessica, author. Title: Transgenerational remembrance : performance and the Asia Pacific war in contemporary Japan / Jessica Nakamura. Other titles: Performance works. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2020. | Series: Performance works | Revised version of the author’s thesis (doctoral)—­Stanford University, 2014. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019034238 | ISBN 9780810141292 (paperback) | ISBN 9780810141308 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810141315 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Theater—­Japan—­H istory—­20th century. | Theater—­Japan—­ History—­21st century. | Japanese drama—­20th century—­H istory and criticism. | Japanese drama—­21st century—­H istory and criticism. | World War, 1939–­1945—­Literature and the war. Classification: LCC PN2924 .N29 2020 | DDC 792.095209045—­dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034238

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction Ghosts of the Asia-­Pacific War in Contemporary Japan

ix

Chapter 1 Lingering Legacies of the War: Performance and Specters at Yasukuni Shrine

3

Chapter 2 Returning Kamikaze: Popular Culture, Affect, and Theatrical Repetition

27

Chapter 3 Staging Response-­ability: Historical Omissions and the Audience

49

Chapter 4 Becoming Missing “Comfort Women”: Embodiment, History, and Position

71

Chapter 5 Acts That Do Not Transfer: The Battle of Okinawa and Situated Testimony

93

Chapter 6 Making Unresolved Japanese American Histories: Transpacific Possession and Response-­ability as Conflict

117

Epilogue Ghosts and the Future

145

Notes

149

Bibliography

193

Index

207

Acknowledgments

This book’s journey started more than ten years ago, as a small kernel of an idea in a graduate seminar at Stanford. It (and I) had the great fortune of benefiting from many people along the way, too many to mention here. I hope to acknowledge some of them, while expressing my thanks to all. The book would not exist without my wonderful dissertation chair, Jisha Menon. I am grateful for her generosity, patience, and rigor. I also thank my committee members, Branislav Jakovljevic, in whose seminar I wrote that first paper, Peter Eckersall, and Jun Uchida. In addition, I had the great privilege of receiving feedback from Stanford faculty and graduate students. Thanks to Alice Rayner, Peggy Phelan, Jennifer Brody, Sebastián Calderón-­Bentin, Derek Miller, Isaiah Wooden, Daniel Sack, Lindsey Mantoan, and Kellen Hoxworth. The fabulous VK Preston commented on multiple drafts throughout the revision process and urged me on through the darkest of times. I am grateful for support from wonderful colleagues: Rob Gander, Julianne Lindberg, Meredith Oda, Brett Van Hoesen at the University of Nevada, Reno, and all my colleagues in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara: Hamit Arvas, Ninotchka Bennahum, Leo Cabranes-­Grant, Frances Ya-­Chu Cowhig, William Davies King, Christina McMahon, Greg Mitchell, Carlos Morton, Simon Williams, former and current chairs Risa Brainin and Irwin Appel, and colleagues outside the department—­Katherine Saltzman-­Li, Sabine Frühstück, Kate McDonald, and Naoki Yamamoto. Such a project would not have been possible without the help of the staff at these institutions—­in particular, Carla Geib, Justin Leung, and Eric Mills. I am grateful to my students, who continue to push me to read and think better. And, I benefited from Jaime Gray’s excellent research assistance in preparing the final manuscript. Research for the project was supported by the Graduate Research Opportunity Grant and Diversity Dissertation Opportunity Grant at Stanford University and the International Activities Grant at the University of Nevada, Reno. An early version of chapter 1 appeared as “Kamikaze Spectres and Transgenerational Memories in Winds of God” in Performing the Secular, edited by Milija Gluhovic and Jisha Menon, and a version of chapter 3 was published as “Reflecting on the Unknowns of History: Theatrical Ghosting, Transgenerational Remembrance, and Japanese Imperialism in the Seoul Shimin Play Series” in Modern Drama. I have presented research from the book at the Performance Studies international, American Society for Theatre

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viii Acknowledgments

Research, and Global Asias conferences. Feedback from editors and conference participants has been invaluable. I could not have asked for a more supportive publisher than Northwestern University Press. It was a pleasure and an honor to work with Gianna Mosser, Patrick Anderson, and Nicholas Ridout—­I am grateful for their comments and belief in the book from its early days. Feedback from anonymous readers was crucial in improving the book. I also thank Mike Ashby for superb copyediting, and Trevor Perri, Anne Gendler, and Marianne Jankowski for their guidance in the later stages of the editing, production, and marketing process. I have been humbled, time and again, by artists who have generously provided access to their work: Shimada Yoshiko, Koizumi Meiro, Kondō Aisuke, Yamashiro Chikako, Narahashi Yōko, Hirata Oriza, and Sakate Yōji. I also thank contacts in Japan who provided support, access, and feedback at various points in the process: Rebecca Jennison, Kushida Kiyomi, Hanashiro Ikuko, Chiba Yumiko, and John Oglevee. I hope that the analyses here do justice to the thought-­provoking work in which I have had the privilege to research. Finally, I am grateful to my parents and in-­laws for all their support and to my friends, who have sustained me throughout the years. Most of all, I thank David Kaczorowski, who took this journey alongside me through many hours of graduate school, at performances, and in archives. He read drafts, asked difficult questions, engaged me in debates, and, above all else, brought joy to my life. Japanese names are given following the Japanese convention, last name before first, unless that person works primarily outside Japan. Japanese terms well established in English appear without italics. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

Introduction

Ghosts of the Asia-­Pacific War in Contemporary Japan

Every year on August 15, Japan’s official anniversary of the end of the Asia-­ Pacific War (1931–­45), the country becomes overrun with spirits.1 Within a mere three blocks in Tokyo, millions are remembered by means of the ceremonial, participatory, and performative. The country officially commemorates the day with the Zenkoku Senbotsusha Tsuitōshiki (National Memorial Service for War Dead) at the Nippon Budōkan arena in central Tokyo. The ceremony, attended by the emperor and prime minister and observed by thousands in person and broadcast throughout the country, memorializes the millions of Japanese who died during the war. Across the street from the Nippon Budōkan, the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to the apotheosis and pacification of fallen soldiers, attracts another large group of people—­ some are there to pray for deceased family members, while others, dressed as soldiers, perform unofficial commemorative ceremonies. At noon, everyone stops whatever they are doing, turns to the shrine’s main worship space, and, together, bows their heads in silence, connecting with spirits of fallen soldiers through embodied action. The war dead are not the only ghosts present. Rather, August 15 falls in the middle of obon, the Buddhist holiday devoted to the return of ancestral spirits. The holiday is so important that the entire country shuts down to allow people to travel to their hometowns to prepare for the arrival of their long-­departed loved ones. The designation of August 15 as the anniversary of the end of the war points to the careful framing of its remembrance. The date is not the only option for “the last day of the war”—­another is September 2, the date of the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on the USS Missouri.2 August 15, selected after the end of the U.S. Occupation, forever links the war with Emperor Hirohito, who announced Japan’s surrender on that date. And, it doubly connects the war’s commemoration with obon, ensuring that the anniversary of the war’s end is gravid with ghosts. The war’s anniversary highlights the ghostliness of its remembrance, ghostliness that has only intensified in the contemporary period (1989 to the present). During this time, other ghosts appeared outside of institutional

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memorial sites and services.3 Taking a number of forms—­confessions by former soldiers, testimonies by survivors of Japanese aggression, and lingering questions of one’s own family involvement—­these ghosts disrupted, challenged, and undermined understandings of the war, chief among them the dominant narrative focused on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.4 Haunted by a war more than fifty years in the past, younger generations have been left with questions of how to relate to it on historical, epistemological, and affective levels. Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-­Pacific War in Contemporary Japan explores the role of artistic production at the intersections of collective remembrance and forgetting, generational loss, and individual responsibility. The book argues for the diverse role of performance in addressing the contemporary period’s overabundance of ghosts. Performance, instead of neutralizing these revenants, positions younger generations to address, attend, and respond to them. I locate case studies of performances created by grandchildren and great-­grandchildren of the war generation. By relating audiences to events that are unknown, disputed, and inaccessible, these performances cultivate engaged modes of responsibility, applicable and necessary regardless of personal histories or knowledge of the war.

Personal Histories and Transgenerational Hauntings Central to Transgenerational Remembrance is the temporal and spatial distance between younger generations and the war past. Topics ignored, elided, and intentionally erased for decades messily erupt in the contemporary period. What Nicolas Abraham calls phantoms, these unaddressed events and people haunt younger generations and vex understandings of the war.5 Phantoms disrupted any certainty I had about my family history, more than four thousand miles away and five decades after the end of the Asia-­Pacific War. In my childhood home on Maui, my great-­granduncle’s photograph hung in the foyer. His was an imposing but mysterious presence. Wearing his Japanese Imperial Army uniform, his steely gaze watched over our comings and goings. Despite his spectral presence throughout my childhood, I understood a different family story about the war: my great-­grandfather (and the brother of the man in the photograph) was one of the few Japanese immigrants in Hawaii to be incarcerated in an internment camp in the mainland United States. In my twenties, my father told me that my great-­granduncle was a general in the Japanese army. Because of his status, the FBI arrested my great-­ grandfather on the night of the Pearl Harbor attack, months before President Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 incarcerated more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans. My father’s story, told casually over dinner, was full of exaggerations—­he boasted that my great-­granduncle was

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in charge of operations in Manchuria. In the months that followed, I experienced unsettling responses to this story that often blurred the lines between personal histories and national atrocities: sometimes I felt shock that I had spent most of my life unaware of his crimes, sometimes shame that I was connected to someone who could have caused so much suffering. The discovery of a family member’s past deeds is one form of ghostly return in contemporary Japan. Silences surrounding war service in the postwar period (1945–­89) contribute to felt distance between the past and younger generations, what I refer to as the large, multigenerational group born after 1960.6 In the contemporary period, some former soldiers have confessed their crimes on their deathbeds, leaving their children and grandchildren to assess and potentially address transgressions they previously knew nothing about.7 Others die without making confessions, leaving younger generations completely divorced from the war past. The understanding of family histories becomes further convoluted when their telling is manipulated or doubted in the present. Another twist in my story reflects complexities of transgenerational remembrance: I later learned that some of my father’s details were not historically accurate—­my great-­ granduncle was a lower-­ranking general and not the orchestrator of the atrocities in Manchuria. In my father’s mind, scattered details took on a horrific grandeur, a process, I later hypothesized, that might have been his response to his grandfather’s internment and his mother’s experiences of anti-­ Japanese sentiment living in Oahu after the Pearl Harbor attack. Learning about my great-­granduncle’s military status left me knowing less, unclear about his activities and uncertain about my relationship to them and to him. My experience typifies the challenges for younger generations grappling with the war in contemporary Japan. I was haunted by irruptions of emotion brought on by gaps in information and uncertain testimonies, and I felt accountable to this past without being certain about what I should do. To highlight these messy acts of reappearance and recall, in this study I use “transgenerational remembrance” to characterize the movement of memories across wartime and postwar generations despite distant battlefields and lost connections.8 “Transgenerational remembrance” acknowledges that by 1989, memories of the war, summoned or unbidden, are capable of crossing generations. Such mnemonic exchange may not even involve living survivors. Instead, as in the way that my father, born after the war ended, embellished my great-­granduncle’s military history, transgenerational remembrance may manifest in the transfer of memories among those born entirely after the war, albeit potentially inaccurate descriptions of events. The idea of an erratic transgenerational mnemonic exchange diverges from Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory.” Defined as the memories of the children of Holocaust survivors, postmemory involves “imaginative investment and creation,” generative for analyses of cultural production.9 Multiple scholars have applied Hirsch’s postmemory to remembrance of the Asia-­Pacific War.10 Through

xii Introduction

“transgenerational remembrance,” however, I aim to separate the complex “returns” of war memories in Japan from the trauma theory central to Hirsch’s postmemory.11 Transgenerational Remembrance takes as a given the institutional and systematic erasure in memory discourses in postwar Japan. Because younger generations are separated from the war on a number of epistemological, spatial, and temporal levels, transgenerational remembrance is founded on not knowing and not, necessarily, on the incomprehensibility of trauma.12 While trauma and transgenerational remembrance are not mutually exclusive, I employ “transgenerational remembrance” to radically shift focus away from trauma theories, theories that can be overdetermined by the Holocaust.13 Silences surrounding Japanese aggression and imperialism can sever younger generations from the past. To address questions of responsibility and relationality for those completely disconnected from past events, these silences necessitate thinking beyond models of trauma theory.

Postwar Dominant Narratives and Contemporary Hauntings To understand the contemporary period’s returning ghosts and their disruption of narratives of the war, I explain how memories came to be obscured in the postwar period. Despite the fact that almost all Japanese citizens participated in the war, from civilian support to military service, responsibility for the war was offset almost as soon as it ended.14 The 1946–­48 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, also known as the Tokyo Trials) located culpability for military aggression with few of Japan’s wartime elite.15 Because U.S. Occupation officials saw Emperor Hirohito as an important strategic vector for introducing democracy to the country, they quickly pardoned him, freeing him from the scrutiny of the IMTFE.16 As Norma Field explains, Hirohito’s pardon, along with a “chrysanthemum taboo” that prevents any public criticism of the imperial family, “produced a national amnesia” about war aggression, by extension releasing the Japanese public from addressing their own responsibility.17 Instead, the dominant narrative that emerged in the postwar period focused on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings.18 Consequently, memories ignored Japan’s occupation of the Asia-­Pacific region and limited the scope of civilian war experience to hardships within the country.19 Resulting from the quick transformation of the United States and Japan from world war enemies to Cold War allies, the narrative, according to Yoshikuni Igarashi, obscured “any history between the United States and Japan that was incongruous with the political necessity of the Cold War.”20 Further, Japan’s economic recovery in the 1960s, and later economic boom in the 1970s and 1980s, situated the war as a period of hardship on the way to economic prosperity. Carol Gluck describes how as the postwar period went on, “social, economic, and political

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developments moved the center of national value toward preservation, not alteration, of the status quo.”21 With the booming economy, each successive postwar generation became further distanced from the hardships of the wartime and postwar periods. According to Gluck, those born in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “had neither war nor early postwar experience to burden their inner retrospection.”22 With Japan’s economic growth at the end of the postwar period, those born in the 1970s and 1980s found “housing costs and traffic accidents as banes of their particular slice of history.”23 In the first two decades of the twenty-­ first century, the even younger generation’s growing separation is, in part, reflected in their ignorance of the very details of the war. Surveys by the Japanese public broadcasting company NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai) show a surprising lack of knowledge about facts, including the dates of the atomic bombings.24 By the time Hirohito’s death in 1989 ushered in the contemporary period in Japan, topics of Japanese aggression and imperialism had largely remained out of the public sphere for decades. Hirohito’s death, along with shifting economic and political dynamics in East Asia, prompted the reexamination of his, and by extension the general public’s, culpability, and sparked the reemergence of memories of Japanese atrocities.25 In that same year, the end of the Cold War altered the region’s geopolitical dynamics: Japan’s developing economic partnerships with East Asia began to overshadow the long-­standing U.S.-­Japan alliance. Japanese commemoration practices, including memorials celebrating Japan’s military achievements and statements from politicians reiterating narratives of victimhood, became accountable to an audience across Asia.26 At this time, survivors of Japanese aggression and imperialism reemerged. A major moment in survivor outcry occurred in 1991, when Koreans forced to serve as laborers during the Asia-­Pacific War filed a class action lawsuit against the Japanese government. One of the plaintiffs, Kim Hak-­ soon, became the first woman to publicly testify about her experiences as a former “comfort woman,” sex slave for the Japanese military. The lawsuit reflects ways in which shifting power dynamics in the Asia-­Pacific region cleared the way for protest groups to bring attention to wartime atrocities in their call for redress and reparations.27 As Lisa Yoneyama argues, the “political and epistemic shifts” after 1989 made it possible for “earlier unfulfilled, interrupted, or aborted attempts at transitional justice” to resurface.28 Survivor outcry confronted the Japanese public like a ghost “demand[ing] its due” and complicated remembrance in a number of ways.29 First, their testimonies broadened questions of responsibility—­instead of limited to an individual’s family history, transgenerational remembrance expanded to considerations of a person’s place as citizen of Japan and the world.30 While postwar peace treaties reflected state-­to-­state negotiations and reparations (often in the form of Japanese loans to recovering countries), survivor lawsuits

xiv Introduction

suggested that individuals across East Asia did not benefit from original payouts. As Yoneyama explains, “the post-­1990s redress culture highlights the inability of the State to fully represent its own subjects.”31 Second, strong, dismissive reactions to survivor outcry by Japanese conservatives fueled a historical revisionist movement. Conservatives’ statements of denial were, in part, buoyed by rising nationalism. As Akiko Hashimoto traces, survivor testimonies in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in apologies from politicians, along with “the growing recognition for the perpetrator past in popular culture,” but the first decade of the twenty-­first century saw a “neonationalist backlash.”32 At this time, the country’s now-­flagging economy, in a long-­term recession beginning in the early 1990s, undermined ideas of Japanese exceptionalism. Expressions of nationalism aimed to offset fears about Japan’s future prospects.33 Conservative historical revisionists strategically deployed popular culture to shape younger generations’ understandings of the war. For instance, Kobayashi Yoshinori’s best-­selling manga Sensōron (On War, 1998) realized the power of media in affirming a revisionist narrative of the war in public discourses. Dismissing survivor claims and celebrating the sacrifices of soldiers, Sensōron concerns itself with the pride of younger generations.34 Conservative historical revisionists aimed to vouchsafe pride in Japan’s history by omitting acts of Japanese aggression from educational materials.35 In 1997, conservatives across realms of politics, culture, and education established the group Japan Society for History Textbook Reform.36 They campaigned to remove commentary on Japanese aggression and imperialism from Japanese junior and high school textbooks. In the 2010s, younger generations were further separated from memories of the Asia-­Pacific War—­ although textbooks in the 1990s had begun to include information about Japan’s atrocities, by 2012, references to Japanese atrocities, including mentions of the “comfort women,” had disappeared.37 The fierce debates over history textbooks reveal the interconnectedness of “memory” and “history” of the Asia-­Pacific War in contemporary Japan, where both play out in battles over national identity and the country’s future direction.38 The conflict between survivors and conservative historical revisionists reflects the historiographical impossibilities inherent in contemporary remembrance. When conservatives deny survivor claims, they demand written documents as verification.39 Narrowly defined as official military orders for Japanese atrocities, such documentation does not remain from the war. Historical circumstances, including the destruction of documents by Japanese officials in the two-­week period between Hirohito’s announcement of surrender and the U.S. Occupation, left few archival records of wartime acts of atrocity.40 The very absence of written documents from the archive ensures that debates about events during the Asia-­ Pacific War are unresolvable. Despite these circumstances, existing scholarship continues to offer testimony as an alternative to written documentation, inadvertently reaffirming

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distinctions between the written and the oral.41 Given the lack of documents and long-­standing survivor silences, a historiographical stalemate has developed between conservative historical revisionists on one side and survivors and progressive scholars on the other. What is clear is that ongoing arguments about veracity and legitimacy cannot adequately amend erasures in memories of the war.42 Against these historiographical impossibilities, I explore performance as a means of transgenerational remembrance, in which a range of performances, from the quotidian to the artistic, forge connections between younger generations and the war past.43 Following scholarship that includes Philip Seaton’s Japan’s Contested War Memories, Akiko Hashimoto’s The Long Defeat, and Yoneyama’s Cold War Ruins, Japan is no longer considered singularly amnesiac, unable to come to terms with its past.44 Instead, understandings of the war are contrasting and multiple, and this instability means that historical revisionists are just one group fighting fiercely over remembrance to cement ideas of Japan’s past for its increasingly precarious future.45 Transgenerational Remembrance acknowledges the central role of cultural production in these debates, in which the war manifests on multiple ideological and affective levels.46 The book focuses on performance and its ability to effect alternative approaches to the past, separate from archival, evidentiary, and documentary concerns. By connecting performance with remembrance, Transgenerational Remembrance engages in a conversation with established scholarship that describes performance as twice-­behaved behavior (Richard Schechner), acts of surrogation (Joseph Roach) and transfer (Diana Taylor), and that which remains (Rebecca Schneider).47 Augmenting this body of work, Transgenerational Remembrance’s focus on contemporary Japan considers performance in relationship to the fundamental inability to know the past. Across Schechner, Roach, Taylor, and Schneider, performance has the ability to transmit something from the past into the present. In contrast, in contemporary Japan the fading connections between younger generations and the Asia-­Pacific War necessitates a shift from thinking about performance as a mode of transfer. Instead, Transgenerational Remembrance asserts that it is critical to think about performance as creating interchange between the present and the unknowns of history.48 Some of the performances I examine deliberately obscure and withhold; they assert that easy understandings are impossible. By collecting these performances here, the book investigates the role of artistic production in the face of long-­standing, and at times systematic, processes of erasure and revision.49

Response-­ability and Performance To explore how younger generations may engage, respond to, and honor the overabundance of ghosts from the war in the contemporary period,

xvi Introduction

Transgenerational Remembrance identifies performances that develop relationships between audiences and the war past. Because the Asia-­Pacific War involved everyone in Japan, younger generations, beckoned by spectral obligations, must negotiate between unknowns of the past, personal confessions, and legal actions against the state. They are left with questions such as: how is everyone responsible when it seems like no one is? When survivors reemerge, what is the role of younger generations to respond to their calls? Japanese philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya takes up these questions, reevaluating the nature of responsibility for those born well after the war.50 To account for generational differences, Takahashi proposes the term “postwar responsibility.” He distinguishes “postwar responsibility” (sengo sekinin) from “war responsibility” (sensō sekinin) for actual crimes committed during the war, addressed through legal realms, including the IMTFE.51 For Takahashi postwar responsibility, separate from the law, extends to the general Japanese public. Instead of the typical Japanese word for “responsibility,” sekinin, Takahashi introduces postwar “response-­ability,” creating a neologism in Japanese, 応答可能性 (ōtō kanōsei), by putting together the word for “response” with that for “possibility.”52 In Takahashi’s conception, “response-­ability,” based on the everyday act of call and response, is a dialogic relationship activated when a person is called to by another.53 Taking as a given Japan’s atrocities in Asia, “response-­ability” tasks all Japanese to respond to survivors of the country’s aggression and imperialism, regardless of their direct connection to or knowledge of the war. Takahashi’s response-­ ability may seem reminiscent of Emmanuel Lev­ inas’s concept of responsibility in its emphasis on dialogue and interactivity.54 Similar to Levinas, Takahashi does not define what form the response to survivors or past events should take; to whom younger generations respond and how they respond is left to interpretation. In a key departure from Levinas, however, Takahashi’s response-­ability applies to specific atrocities of the Asia-­Pacific War.55 When Takahashi asserts that response-­ability is not limited by national borders, he addresses the fact that many survivors are from East and Southeast Asia.56 For Japanese citizens, responding to their calls is an ethical obligation. Moreover, Takahashi connects response-­ability and contemporary-­period hauntings; in the same edited volume in which he outlines response-­ability is an essay that describes war memory as ghostly.57 Takahashi references the ghost in Hamlet to assert that war memories are the burden of younger generations, even for those who think they have no connection to the past.58 A scholar of Jacques Derrida, Takahashi extends Specters of Marx to a Japanese context, where his insistence on the involvement of younger generations reminds us of Derrida’s early comments that “being-­with specters” “would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations.”59 Given this connection, younger generations’ relationships with specters of the war are inherently ethical in nature, based in dialogic responsibility.

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Working from Takahashi’s definition of response-­ ability, Transgenerational Remembrance analyzes performances that, in the face of such ghostliness, model, prompt, or demand response-­ability. In so doing, the book continues the recent exploration of performance as an ethical mode of relationality and intersubjectivity, what Nicholas Ridout describes as a turn from theater’s social or political efficacy to its ethical potential, where “ethics displaces politics.”60 Hans-­Thies Lehmann explains that theater can develop an “aesthetic of responsibility (or response-­ability),” activating the audience because it acknowledges the “mutual implication of actors and spectators.”61 Helena Grehan similarly focuses on “politically inflected” performances that can “provid[e] an alternative space of resistance.”62 More recently, Schneider moves the ethical relationship from the stage to broader realms of performance in her conception of gestural response-­ability, where gesture “can help us as we greet each other and lean, always again, toward ethical calls and responses, both anew and in historical re-­irruption.”63 Along similar lines, Transgenerational Remembrance argues that performance’s integration of the audience distinguishes it from the vast collection of postwar and contemporary film, television, and print media about war topics. Following Takahashi, Transgenerational Remembrance asserts that the live experience of performance goes further than narration and spectacle by foregrounding the understanding, involvement, and, by extension, complicity of its audiences.64 I identify performance as central to establishing relationships of response-­ability between younger generations and the war past. Case studies insist on the need for younger generations to respond to the past, identifying parties and topics of response. While some performances model responses and others leave them open-­ended, all put younger generations in a position to attend to the war past, known or not. Given the growing temporal and spatial gaps between the war and the present, Transgenerational Remembrance discusses performances that build attentiveness to a past that may not call out for a response; in other words, case studies think through what a call and response may look like for absent people or elided events.

The Noh Theater’s Ghostly Encounter If contemporary Japan is overabundant with ghosts of the Asia-­Pacific War, both honored by institutions and forgotten, summoned and possessing, then Transgenerational Remembrance outlines the role of performance in learning to “live with ghosts.”65 To understand how performance relates younger generations to the past, I turn to the Japanese traditional theater form of Noh. A model of more than six hundred years of encountering ghosts, Noh focuses my inquiry on the dialogic, and thereby ethical, qualities of the ghost’s return.66 Noh, in the words of playwright Tada Tomio, a “theater of ghosts,” revolves dramaturgically around the reappearance of the ghost

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onstage to emphasize the encounter between the living and the dead.67 The past comes back as a powerful force that is embodied, has agency, and must be addressed. The Asia-­ Pacific region’s multiple conflicts and lingering, unaddressed violence have prompted multiple scholars to apply terms of “haunting,” “phantoms,” and “ghosts” to complex elisions and troubled returns in transgenerational remembrance. Grace Cho connects transgenerational remembrance, haunting, and diaspora in the yanggongju, which “broadly refers to a Korean woman who has sexual relations with Americans.”68 A postwar figure, the yanggongju evokes memories of sexual violence during the Asia-­Pacific War at the hands of the Japanese government: she “bears the traces of this devastation as a haunted and haunting figure that transmits her trauma across boundaries of time and space.”69 Focused on the “1.5 generation,” children during the Cambodian genocide or born shortly after, Cathy Schlund-­Vials explores the “absented presence” of the “Killing Fields” era, in which “the ghost of the killing fields” “continually haunts Cambodian American writers who autobiographically attempt to structure feelings via an unreconciled genocidal past.”70 Scholarship in theater and performance studies has long focused on the haunted qualities of the stage in thinking through presence, repetition, and spectatorship. In particular, the ghost in Hamlet has sparked much scholarly inquiry.71 Before Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Herbert Blau used “ghosting” to describe theater’s “signifying power” in rehearsal and performance.72 Marvin Carlson connects what he calls the phenomenon of ghosting with memory, casting ghosting as theatrical recycling that “presents the identical thing” the audience has “encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context.”73 Alice Rayner, following Blau, states that “theatre itself is a ghostly place in which the living and the dead come together in a productive encounter.”74 More recently, Andrew Sofer has explored the force of the unseen onstage; he offers “spectral reading” as a method to expand “our investigative spectrum beyond material bodies and objects in order to discern hidden wavelengths beyond the reach of the naked (critical) eye.”75 In these cases, the ghost becomes a hermeneutics of the space between theater and its spectatorship, where meaning making in theater depends on the recognition and association of audience members. In Noh, Transgenerational Remembrance brings together the ghostly qualities of the theater and the haunted contexts of postwar and contemporary East Asia. This traditional Japanese theater remains largely absent from discussions of spectrality in performance, with Takahashi himself neglecting to mention a ghostly form from his own country in favor of Hamlet.76 Even scholars of transgenerational hauntings in Asia, including Cho and Schlund-­ Vials, refer almost exclusively to trauma theory and Western concepts of ghosts. Concerned with dialogical dilemmas, the Noh theater provides a conception of the ghost that remains largely separate from trauma theory.

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Instead, through Noh Transgenerational Remembrance analyzes how contemporary performance makes younger generations answerable to the past. In contemporary Japan, Noh maintains a unique role in attending to the return of the dead. Developed in the Muromachi period (1336–­1573), Noh’s staging of the specter continues the tradition of portraying ghosts and spirits as powerful creatures.77 As novelist Tawada Yōko limns, when Noh was first created, religious and cultural beliefs located spirits not as locked in people’s individual minds but as phenomena that could travel between places.78 Yet the rise of science in the modern period neutralized the power of spirits. In the contemporary period, Noh is one of the few practices that physicalizes the “memories of the dead,” making it a form uniquely attuned to engage audiences with those long deceased.79 Applied to contemporary commemorative and historiographical debates about the Asia-­Pacific War, my focus on Noh brackets questions of content, including what happened and what can be known. Centered on the ghost’s return, Noh deemphasizes the plot. Because the stories of Noh plays are taken from classical Japanese literature, including The Tale of Genji and The Tale of the Heike, the Japanese audience has been and continues to be well aware of what will happen. As Tada asserts, Noh is not dramatic in an Aristotelian sense. Events do not unfold to disarm and delight the audience. Instead, the form’s drama emerges from the interaction between a ghost (shite) and a living person (waki).80 The plot typically centers on the encounter between the waki, usually a traveling priest, and the shite, a returning spirit. The ghost, disguised as a living person, after meeting and engaging in conversation with the waki, reveals his true identity and reenacts a moment that keeps him trapped in this world. In this encounter, Noh illustrates ways in which the past imposes itself on the present. The waki often does not know the ghost but in the course of their dialogue becomes responsible to him, promising to pray for his release from this world. Transgenerational Remembrance uses Noh’s interaction between living and dead as a model for response-­ability to the past, to understand the work of both artists and audiences. Throughout, the book applies different elements of Noh, from structure to characterization to acting, to understand performance’s complex encounters between elided yet returning pasts and present individuals. In Transgenerational Remembrance, performances circumvent unresolvable arguments about available information and existing documentation to instead build relationships of response-­ability to an increasingly distant war. In terms of spectatorship, Noh refocuses my attention on how many of these works treat their audiences, not to imagine an ideal audience response but rather to consider how performances situate their audiences in relationship to the past. These constructed relationships between audiences and their histories, including identifying what the audience might be response-­able or obligated to, become sites of interpretation, without making assumptions about what goes on in the audiences’ minds.

xx Introduction

Transgenerational Remembrance, however, does not derive its analysis solely from Noh. Instead, as illustrated in Takahashi’s references to Derrida and Hamlet, ghosts from the Asia-­Pacific War are not cut off from the West; rather, the U.S.-­Japan Cold War alliance shaped dominant narratives of the war in postwar Japan. Accordingly, Transgenerational Remembrance takes a syncretic approach, weaving in critical theory from theater and performance studies. Further, I use the Noh canon in the same way that Blau, Derrida, and Rayner reference Hamlet to “think with” spectrality. Noh plays and staging conventions are access points for exploring modes of articulating response-­ ability onstage. As with references to Hamlet, my use of Noh does not require or contain a discussion of the form’s long history or its varying social or religious functions. Transgenerational Remembrance is not about Noh, nor do its case studies actively integrate Noh.81 Instead, Noh is a living performance and literary tradition that presents a framework for understanding how performance stages the past’s demands of younger generations. By recuperating a Japanese theater tradition as an analytical lens, Transgenerational Remembrance decenters the Western canon as the primary inspiration for the spectral in performance studies. For too long Western plays, and in particular Hamlet, have shaped our thinking about the ghost in performance. Working from a tradition of haunting outside Western drama, Transgenerational Remembrance intervenes in the frequent yet underexplored acknowledgment that diverse and unique specters haunt non-­Western cultures.82 In turn, I reassess Noh’s role in the field of performance studies. In early writings, Noh was central to defining universal attributes of performance but has been ignored as an independent interpretive framework.83 Finally, Transgenerational Remembrance continues recent work on Japanese performance studies that contemplates the theoretical approach to non-­Western aesthetics and performance in Japanese society. Recently, scholars have called attention to and reversed the prior tendency of Japanese performance scholarship to utilize solely Western-­based theoretical frameworks.84 Along these lines, performance studies in Japan tends to apply Western theories, typically gained in a performance studies program abroad, to artistic and cultural practices.85 Further, Transgenerational Remembrance widens its exploration of performance from the stage to Japanese society. While the consideration of performance on multiple levels of society is widely accepted across the field of performance studies, in Japan, as Uchino Tadashi explains, the “pervasive anti-­theatrical and anti-­performative sentiments in Japanese academia” “work against a larger acceptance of performance studies and research.”86 Performance writing in Japan has been groundbreaking in identifying and analyzing important contemporary artists, including Okada Toshiki and his theater company chelfitsch, but it less often turns to quotidian, social, or political realms.87 Applying a syncretic theoretical framework and taking a broader approach to performance in Japan, Transgenerational Remembrance considers the central role of performance in discourses of remembrance.

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The Scope of the Book Transgenerational Remembrance elaborates on the ways in which contemporary performances make relevant, personal, and ethically imperative unknown and obscured war events. When many of the war’s atrocities have been elided for decades, these live events provide spaces, both literal and imaginative, for connection, reflection, and inquiry. Throughout, I explore the ethical, affective, and physical demands of a temporally and spatially distant war, and I consider how performances make memories matter when the war events took place decades and hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away. The book aims to provide a diverse picture of contemporary performance forms, created by artists born after 1960, and all performed after 1989. I analyze a variety of case studies that enact past returns, from commemorative sites to theatrical performances to performance art to video installations. This diversity reiterates the centrality of performance in Japanese culture and highlights that commemoration and historiography of the Asia-­Pacific War remain key social and cultural concerns. I begin by identifying the key role of performance in dominant narratives of remembrance. Chapter 1 focuses on the enduring institution Yasukuni Shrine, where the fallen soldier was central to the construction of the nation and affirmation of the war effort.88 Under the State Shinto belief system, the official religion of Japan during the war, spirits of the war dead returned to Japan to Yasukuni, and shrine priests transformed them into gods of the nation; during the Asia-­Pacific War, the shrine played a major part in the state’s construction and dissemination of its remembrance of fallen soldiers. Despite Yasukuni’s postwar demotion to a private religious institution, the complex remains in Tokyo. Examining the layout and architecture of Yasukuni’s enduring space, I analyze elements of the embodied and spectacular in the visitor’s experience. The shrine stages what I call a spectral performative, where the space transforms visitors into national subjects, who will eventually return to Yasukuni as fallen soldiers in future wars. To trouble the ways in which the shrine encourages participation, I end the chapter with those who actively engage with war dead by dressing up as former imperial soldiers; as I argue, their very embodiment poses challenges to Yasukuni’s fixed image of the past. The chapter thus situates performance as a central mechanism in Yasukuni’s mnemonic operations and as a potential mode of resistance against its rhetoric. After I investigate Yasukuni’s reiteration of anachronistic attitudes of the war, I turn to performances that stage alternative conceptions, returns, and iterations of the past. If Yasukuni positions its younger-­generation visitors to honor and eventually become fallen soldiers, contemporary performances craft differing relationships between younger generations and the war. Each chapter applies Noh to explicate the role of performance in prompting, modeling, or establishing response-­ability between present-­situated individuals and the Asia-­Pacific War.

xxii Introduction

Chapter 2 identifies theater artists who directly counter the portrayal of fallen soldiers in popular culture. The chapter focuses on the kamikaze pilot, known in Japan as the Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (Special Attack Forces), one of the most controversial figures from the war. Today, a contemporary resurgence of popular films celebrates the kamikaze’s sacrifice to the nation and casts younger generations as passive recipients of the war past. In contrast to these highly affective representations in popular culture, I apply the effective return of the ghost in Noh to the work of artists Imai Masayuki and Koizumi Meiro. Imai’s The Winds of God (1988–­2015), a frequently produced play, film, and television miniseries drama, portrays an encounter with the past when a traffic accident propels two contemporary comedians into their former lives as kamikaze pilots. Beyond play content, The Winds of God’s repeated productions propose an iterative process where the playwright-­actor Imai investigates the past again and again. Koizumi’s video installations about the kamikaze (2009–­14) reiterate popular culture’s affective mechanisms to expose them, thereby identifying viewer complicity in cultural consumption. Moving from topics related to dominant narratives in chapters 1 and 2, chapters 3 through 6 cover topics that have reemerged in contemporary Japan: Japanese imperialism, the “comfort women,” the Battle of Okinawa, and Japanese American internment. Some topics, like the “comfort women,” are so harshly debated that artistic productions about them in contemporary Japan are relatively rare.89 This means that performances explored appear in realms that range from mainstream popular culture to experimental durational performance. Chapter 3 considers how theater performances move response-­ability into the domain of the audience. Concerned with the seemingly apolitical and hypernationalist “quiet theater” movement in contemporary Japan, I contemplate how theatrical representation of the past changes as temporal distance from the war grows. The chapter focuses on Hirata Oriza’s Seoul shimin (1989–­2011), a series of four plays set in Seoul during Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula (1910–­45). Applying the figure of the waki, the Noh character responsible to a ghost he typically does not know, I argue that the play series prompts audience response-­ability to elided and seemingly unconnected colonial pasts. On the surface, Seoul shimin’s portrayal of the everyday life of a family of Japanese merchants seems to obscure the responsibility of colonial settlers. Examining the depiction in the series of historical events as offstage yet marked, however, I assert that the series manifests invisible malignancies of the domestic and points to omissions in contemporary historical discourses of Japan’s colony. In so doing, Seoul shimin builds connections between the audience and colony, implicating them in its historical representation. To explore how embodiment in performance develops response-­ability for those absent, chapter 4 features Shimada Yoshiko’s durational performance Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (2012–2015). While

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“comfort women” came forward in the early 1990s to intervene in public memory debates, those who testified represent a small number of “comfort women.” The question remains as to how to account for those who were left behind after the war, those who passed away before testifying, and those who have decided not to come forward. In her performance, Shimada embodies the controversial Japanese “comfort woman,” a figure still silent in public discourses. In conversation with The Peace Monument (2011), a statue of a Korean “comfort woman” across the street from the Japanese embassy in Seoul, Shimada replicates a statuelike pose, sitting immobile as a Japanese “comfort woman” in bronze paint in front of major political sites. Working from the Noh performer’s evocation of a multitude of figures—­actor, character, and past teachers—­I argue that Shimada’s body implicates contemporary individuals in memory debates, relating viewers to absent figures and calling attention to their position as individuals, outside national affiliations. Chapters 5 and 6 complicate notions of how performances encourage or prompt audience response-­ability to past events. Chapter 5 considers the limitations inherent in histories of violence as it explores the troubled transfer of testimony across time and space. The final major battle of the war, the Battle of Okinawa, saw immense civilian casualties, some of which resulted from Japanese military coercion. While contested by conservative historical revisionists, survivor testimonies of the battle have been actively documented in print and on video since the 1980s. Working from Noh’s situated testimonies, where the ghost’s retelling is dependent on the listener’s copresence in a particular location, I identify performances that complicate the accessibility of testimonies of the Battle of Okinawa. I compare works that re-­create testimony—­Sakate Yōji’s play Umi no futten (1997), initially performed at the Kinokuniya Hall in Tokyo, and Yamashiro Chikako’s Inheritance Series (2009–­present) of videos and photographs. When Sakate’s play reenacts a testimony onstage in Tokyo, the work makes a localized tragedy accessible to a larger Japanese audience. Yamashiro’s series, on the other hand, foregrounds the inaccessible qualities of inherited testimonies and reasserts the importance of location, severing her viewer from testimony’s content to highlight differences between Okinawa and Japan. Chapter 6 considers how response-­ability may result in conflict and contention. The chapter moves westward to examine the U.S.-­Japan alliance and Japanese American internment. In contrast to the other omissions discussed in Transgenerational Remembrance, internment has resulted in U.S. legislative action. As I discuss, however, work by Japanese nationals Yanagi Miwa and Kondō Aisuke illustrates the unsettled nature of internment. Read through Noh possession and exorcism, these performances disrupt any appearance of resolution of the event and, by extension, trouble the postwar U.S.-­Japan alliance. Yanagi’s theater performance Zero Hour: Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape (2013) revisits the wartime Zero Hour Japanese state-­run radio program staffed by Japanese American female announcers. Zero Hour’s performance

xxiv Introduction

and 2015 North American tour evoke forgotten historical figures, who possess history narratives and disrupt constructions of national belonging and citizenship. Kondō’s Matter and Memory series (2013–­present) portrays Japanese American internment as a possessing force and situates Kondō, himself the great-­grandson of a former internee, as responsible for battling it. Transgenerational Remembrance examines commemoration and historicization of the Asia-­Pacific War during the digital age, when digital modes of documentation and connectivity ensure that, in the words of Andreas Huyssen, “the past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries.”90 Despite the proliferation of information always available to us, remembrance of the Asia-­Pacific War involves historical events steeped in uncertainty, of destroyed documents, lost connections, and systematic and institutional erasure—­events that may seem ever more removed given increasing dependence on accessible and, at times, excessive information. Transgenerational Remembrance recuperates a six-­hundred-­year-­old theater form to identify performance as a mode of response and address despite the loss brought by spatial and temporal distance. Performances in Transgenerational Remembrance challenge us to live with the unknown, insisting that the act of listening to missing voices builds valuable and necessary connections with the past.

Transgenerational Remembrance

Chapter 1

Lingering Legacies of the War Performance and Specters at Yasukuni Shrine

At Yasukuni Shrine, the religious institution in central Tokyo devoted to the spirits of fallen soldiers, a crowd surrounded men in military uniforms as they marched toward the shrine’s main gate. There, the men stopped, held up their weapons, and saluted. Given Yasukuni’s prominent role in supporting the Asia-­Pacific War, it is not surprising that men celebrated military action in uniform there. What may be surprising, however, is that this procession did not take place in 1869 when the shrine was built or in 1943 when the shrine was well established as a site for honoring the war dead. Instead, it occurred on August 15, 2017, on the seventy-­second anniversary of the war’s end, well after Article 9 in Japan’s postwar constitution prohibited the country from entering into combat. As part of what the shrine’s head priest once called “our annual circus,” these men joined thousands who had gathered at Yasukuni, ranging from bereaved family members to antimilitary protestors to foreign tourists.1 At Yasukuni, where the spirits of fallen soldiers have been apotheosized as gods of the nation and are still regularly pacified through religious rites, those who dressed as soldiers illustrate the way in which the shrine repeats past attitudes of the war. In their procession, the men blurred the lines between past and present, living and dead. It was unclear whom, exactly, they were performing—­were they living soldiers during wartime? Or were they specters returning to the shrine after dying in battle? Or was their performance to be taken at face value, as contemporary mourners who wore uniforms to honor their deceased family members? On the anniversary of the war’s end, the same time as the obon holiday, when spirits return to their ancestral homes, such ambiguity reinforces the ubiquity of spirits in war commemoration. Yasukuni plays a central role in the war’s ghostliness when it conflates contemporary visitor, soldier, and specter. This chapter explores the lingering traces of the war in contemporary Japan and how the shrine, as a major institution of remembrance, encourages younger generations to replicate anachronistic actions of honoring the war.

3

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Chapter 1

I focus on the workings of the shrine complex to identify ways in which Yasukuni stages war rhetoric through the bodies of younger generations. From its very start, the shrine has used techniques of performance to celebrate fallen soldiers. The shrine space has existed in Tokyo since 1869. By housing spirits of fallen soldiers in one location, Yasukuni unified national mourning and commemoration with the spectral. The shrine’s ideological role culminated during the Asia-­Pacific War, but after the war’s end, the shrine, stripped of its state sponsorship, endured as a private religious institution in central Tokyo. Today, Yasukuni remains linked with the Asia-­Pacific War. Because no official monument or memorial for the war exists in contemporary Japan, Yasukuni has become what Harry Harootunian describes as “the place of memory” in the public imaginary.2 Yasukuni’s continued presence in Japan reiterates the nation’s wartime rhetoric. Such rhetoric was further reaffirmed when men convicted of Class A war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) were secretly enshrined at Yasukuni in 1978.3 The apotheosis of these men, in effect, rejected the IMTFE’s guilty verdict and promoted a nationalistic narrative that justified the war.4 Since the 1980s, Yasukuni has become a controversial site in Japan and highly contentious to Japan’s neighbors in Asia. At the same time, Yasukuni is celebrated by Japanese conservatives. When politicians visit Yasukuni on August 15, they show support for the shrine’s celebration of militarism, despite the strain such visits put on relations between Japan and its East Asian neighbors.5 As philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya asserts, no matter how strongly politicians argue that their visits to the shrine are personal, because Yasukuni was established to promote nationalist interests, the shrine is inherently political.6 The clear performative maneuverings in visits by politicians have been much discussed in the scholarship on Yasukuni. In contrast, I explore how the shrine establishes a relationship between younger-­ generation visitors and the war dead.7 The shrine’s endurance reflects remaining legacies of war. Young people born after Hirohito’s death in 1989 have become involved in Yasukuni’s mnemonic mechanisms, with some even taking to dressing up as soldiers on August 15.8 Yet as I explore, Yasukuni’s space prompts participation beyond active expressions of patriotism. If, following Rebecca Schneider, we need to rethink “remains” “not solely as object or document material, but also as the immaterial labor of bodies engaged in and with” the past, it is critical to contemplate how this past mnemonic institution drafts contemporary bodies to carry on its work.9 By analyzing the performative qualities of Yasukuni Shrine, this chapter investigates aspects of the shrine seldom discussed in detail—­the spatial, embodied, and experiential.10 I focus specifically on the physical shrine complex and the ways in which it choreographs visitors’ bodies into past national narratives regardless of visitors’ beliefs or intentions. As I argue, the space’s choreography shapes the visitor’s relationship to the past by constantly aligning her with the spirit of the fallen soldier. Throughout Yasukuni, the shrine

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deploys what I call a spectral performative, where the space makes implicit connections between visitors and the absent bodies of the war dead. To vouchsafe the state’s efforts in future wars, visitors are superimposed over the war dead, who in their deaths are cast as ideal subjects of the imperial state. At the end of the chapter, I turn to performances that enact Yasukuni’s spectral performative, when men dress up as fallen soldiers. These embodied expressions call attention to Yasukuni’s portrayal of the disembodied spirit of the war dead and suggest that live bodies may exceed and potentially trouble Yasukuni’s rhetoric.

Eirei: Yasukuni’s Spectral Precedent From its founding in the late nineteenth century, Yasukuni established and promoted an idea of the specter that became central to Japan’s militarization. Yasukuni was built in 1869, one year after the transition of political power from the Tokugawa bakufu, the military-­led government (1603–­1868), to the emperor-­centered Meiji government (1868–­1912). Initially named Tōkyō Shōkonsha (literally, “Tokyo shrine to invite in spirits of the dead”), Yasukuni was not initially connected to Shinto religious belief.11 When the shrine received its current name in 1879, it was transformed into a Shinto shrine and the national site for honoring the dead. Yasukuni was part of the Meiji government’s efforts to turn Shinto, formerly a loosely organized animistic tradition, into the nation-­building and emperor-­centered State Shinto. As a key institution within State Shinto, the shrine’s management of the war dead was critical to the developing modern nation.12 From the Meiji period until the end of the Asia-­Pacific War, Yasukuni and death in battle featured more and more prominently in the Japanese public imaginary. Children’s songs, slogans, and poems included lines about returning to Yasukuni as a fallen solider.13 By the time of the Asia-­Pacific War, soldiers were sending one another off to battle with the phrase “meet you at Yasukuni.”14 Public gatherings and popular entertainments turned the shrine into a famous location, a place to visit in the capital.15 The government connected shrine spectacle with national pride when it held postbattle rallies for the Sino-­Japanese War (1894–­95) and Russo-­Japanese War (1904–­5).16 During the Asia-­Pacific War, as Takenaka shows, Yasukuni shaped grief for fallen soldiers when the government invited bereaved family members to the shrine for regular shōkon rituals of apotheosis.17 As the site for remembering war dead, Yasukuni curated the public’s relationship with fallen soldiers. Starting in the early twentieth century, the spirits of the war dead at Yasukuni were described using the neologism eirei.18 Written using the characters 英霊, the term is a compound of “heroic” (英) and “spirit” (霊) and is distinguished from the more common words for the otherworldly, including yūrei (ghost), written with the characters for “profound” (幽) and

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“spirit” (霊), and reikon (“spirit” or “soul”), written with the characters for “spirit” (霊) and “soul” (魂). Beyond personal loss, eirei were designated as gods of the nation, for all to mourn.19 Central to Yasukuni’s definition of eirei were the Meiji state’s efforts to produce soldiers for future wars. As Takahashi explains, up until the Sino-­Japanese War, the public celebrated living soldiers who survived the war more than those who had died in action. After the Sino-­ Japanese War, Yasukuni’s influence shifted the public’s attention to honoring the war dead.20 Yasukuni’s conception of eirei is not just about remembering the past but rather about securing a particular national future. After Japan’s surrender at the end of the Asia-­Pacific War, U.S. Occupation officials severed the link between the state and State Shinto.21 Yasukuni, however, remained in Tokyo as a private, religious institution. Well into the postwar period, Yasukuni priests continued to enshrine fallen soldiers from the Asia-­Pacific War, replicating the same wartime rituals that supported military efforts. This process blurred the separation of religion and state established in the postwar constitution as it relied on the Ministry of Health and Welfare for information about the fallen.22 Yasukuni’s endurance into the contemporary period indicates the shrine’s continued influence in Japanese society. Despite the careful rebuilding of Japanese cities in the postwar period to reflect the country’s forward-­looking economy (Tokyo) or bright future promise (Hiroshima), Yasukuni, as an unchanged physical complex, reveals the persistence of beliefs from the time of the Asia-­Pacific War.23 Bridging the wartime, postwar, and contemporary periods, Yasukuni defines remembrance through the eirei, with individual fallen soldiers subsumed into the shrine’s generic images of honor and sacrifice. Different from sites of national mourning like the Arlington National Cemetery, Yasukuni does not house physical remains of the war dead. Instead, Yasukuni’s eirei, disembodied and separated from their identities, are symbolically transformed, integrated into a national collective. In contrast to ancestral spirits, who annually return to their hometowns during the obon holiday, Yasukuni’s eirei stay at the shrine, an example of state efforts to control the national subject after his death—­in Takenaka’s words, eirei are “held hostage by the state.”24 Notably, Yasukuni’s eirei fundamentally departs from ideas of the ghost and spirit in Japan, including the concept of the Noh ghost.25 As eirei, the war dead are a collective; they individually lack bodies and voices. Accordingly, unlike the Noh ghost, the eirei do not speak and cannot engage in a dialogue with contemporary visitors. Without being able to call out to the living, Yasukuni’s eirei obscures war responsibility, especially any responsibility that might extend to the Japanese public. As Takenaka asserts, in Yasukuni’s apotheosis process the shrine separates individual soldiers from their actions during the war.26 Further, Yasukuni, associated solely with military dead, emphasizes a particular image of the fallen soldier in its eirei.27 As Takahashi suggests, the shrine ignores the diversity of its eirei, eliding other spirits apotheosized,

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including female nurses, former colonial subjects (particularly Taiwanese and Korean soldiers), and civilians who died during the Battle of Okinawa.28 Because Japan’s former colonial subjects are often enshrined against the wishes of their family members, these eirei reflect continued imperial control. Bereaved family members, including Japanese Christians and relatives of colonial soldiers, have requested the removal of their family members from the shrine. When Yasukuni priests refuse these requests, they doubly reiterate Japanese imperial practices and the wartime construction of the eirei, honored yet controlled by the shrine.29

The Shrine Space: Yasukuni’s Spectral Performative If Yasukuni constructed the machine that promoted sacrificing one’s life for the nation, what happens at the space today? The shrine complex remains almost entirely from the war, so how might it cast its visitors in a similar drama?30 Here I take up the shrine complex’s endurance as a persistent ideological tool. Today, shrine priests regularly conduct the same rites of apotheosis and spirit propitiation that Yasukuni officiants did during war.31 Along similar lines, as a surviving physical complex, the shrine brings visitors back to replicate the wartime public’s relationship to the eirei. My analysis of Yasukuni’s space identifies the performative elements deployed in producing its anachronistic and militaristic remembrance. While the eirei remain disembodied, the shrine space activates visitors’ bodies by means of performance, transforming visitors into national subjects, who will eventually sacrifice their own lives.32 This process, what I call the shrine’s spectral performative, reflects the ways in which the shrine makes visitors central to, and thereby responsible for, the production of meaning and remembrance at Yasukuni. Yasukuni’s performative elements reflect the Meiji state’s interest in shaping monuments and landmarks in the capital of Tokyo, what Takashi Fujitani discusses as “a calculated transformation of the physical appearance of various shrines, buildings and other public places.”33 According to Takenaka, from early in the shrine’s existence the shrine’s physical space furthered the state’s wartime agenda. The shrine’s parklike atmosphere and entertaining events made it an enjoyable place to visit. During the Sino-­Japanese and Russo-­ Japanese Wars, the government displayed spoils of war on shrine grounds; and during the Asia-­Pacific War, the shrine made these spectacles more extravagant by building additional structures to display information about military victories.34 Outlining the workings of Yasukuni’s physical site thus further explicates the political functioning of space in modern Japan and identifies its influence in the present. To elaborate on Yasukuni’s methods of visitor mobilization, I attend to the shrine’s layout and architectural flourishes.35 As a former instrument of the state but one that still promotes its ideals, Yasukuni can be considered,

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in Louis Althusser’s terms, a private, ideological state apparatus.36 SanSan Kwan explains how a physical space deploys meaning in her conception of choreography as the “mutual process” by which “bodies choreograph space; space choreographs bodies.”37 In this way, Yasukuni’s space positions visitors’ bodies in support of former state ideology and current conservative rhetoric of war remembrance.38 Without assuming a visitor’s level of belief in the shrine’s narrative of the Asia-­Pacific War, I consider how the shrine space inserts visitors’ bodies into its mnemonic drama. Yet visitors are not simply performers at the shrine. Following Yoshimi Shun’ya’s description of the Tokyo pedestrian as simultaneously embodying the roles of actor and audience member, Yasukuni casts visitors’ bodies in its nationalistic drama and performs this drama for these same visitors.39 In the following, I outline how Yasukuni’s large complex choreographs visitors to enact its rhetoric in order to convince others of the shrine’s militaristic remembrance. I derive my analysis from multiple visits to Yasukuni from 2011 to 2018, when I observed the shrine on ordinary days and special occasions, including on August 15.40 I also consult Yasukuni’s published guidebook, Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e: Ofisharu gaidobukku (Welcome to Yasukuni Shrine: Official Guidebook; hereafter Yōkoso), measuring the guidebook’s portrayal of the shrine against my readings of its space.41 Available at the shrine museum, Yūshūkan’s gift shop, Yōkoso provides a pictorial tour that explains the aims of Yasukuni; the guidebook not only describes the significance of buildings in the shrine complex but also instructs a Japanese visitor on how to interact with these structures. Continuing the space’s representational practices, Yōkoso makes clear the efforts of the shrine to involve younger generations in processes of remembrance. Throughout, the guidebook’s explanatory tone and use of cartoon images gear its explanations toward a youthful Japanese audience increasingly unfamiliar with the once-­popular shrine.42 Yasukuni Shrine is a collection of buildings that occupies an area of three city blocks. The impressive size of the shrine’s footprint, containing a worship space, a garden, sumo ring, Noh stage, and museum, is particularly striking given the scarcity and cost of space in Tokyo today. Yasukuni’s large complex shapes its choreography; its major structures are oversized, dwarfing visitors by its mnemonic performance. Along with its size, Yasukuni is conveniently located in the center of the city, close to major business and political centers and easily accessible by public transit.43 Yōkoso describes Yasukuni’s accessibility in terms of inclusivity and identity. A passage in the guidebook’s opening pages asserts that even though the war seems far away, it is “improbable that Japanese people do not have a personal connection” to the shrine.44 In one turn of phrase, Yōkoso transforms readers into Japanese subjects while simultaneously obscuring the fact that eirei include Korean and Taiwanese colonial soldiers, among other non-­Japanese groups. Not only does the shrine’s physical presence serve as a reminder of the country’s wartime past but also its central location can impose this past on

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1.1. The first torii at Yasukuni, looking into the shrine. Photograph by the author.

the everyday life of Tokyoites. The shrine’s size and wide entrances integrate it into the city. A large boulevard runs through the Yasukuni complex, making it easy for pedestrians to take a shortcut through the shrine space. In addition, the narrow sidewalks around the complex funnel pedestrians through its open walkway. When people cross through the shrine as part of their daily routines, they may, in the words of M. Christine Boyer, “project” its militaristic images “into recomposed and unified stagings.”45 Yasukuni’s war imagery, its representations of battle scenes and statues spread throughout the complex, can become part of a pedestrian’s quotidian city performance. And, as I discuss, the shrine doubly integrates these bodies into its own narrative of war remembrance. Yasukuni’s main entrance quickly establishes the visitor’s dual roles of performer and spectator. Yasukuni’s prescribed journey to pay respect to the eirei begins with a large torii, a gatelike structure, one of three in the shrine complex (fig. 1.1). This torii is what the visitor first sees when walking up the short hill toward Yasukuni; in Yōkoso, it serves as the “facade” or “front entrance” of the shrine, beginning the guidebook’s virtual tour.46 As “facade,” the torii introduces the visitor to Yasukuni’s signifying practices. More than eighty feet tall, the torii’s height, in the words of Fujitani, are reflective of the “monumentalism” of “the modern era.”47 Its materials, iron and bronze,

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are a reminder of the country’s militarization; during the Asia-­Pacific War, the government removed the structure, repurposing its materials for the war effort. Indicative of the shrine’s practices of repeating the war past, Yasukuni rebuilt the torii in 1974.48 The torii, evocative of a proscenium arch, is a visual representation of Yasukuni’s spectral performative. The structure’s ties to Japan’s war history immediately casts any visitor’s action, even simply walking under it, as supporting its militarization. Further, with the torii’s resemblance to theater architecture, when a visitor stands underneath it, she is on display to others. The torii, functioning as the main entrance and exit, allows visitors’ approaches from both sides to establish her dual actions of performing and spectating. Visitors near the torii become actors and audience members at the same time—­they are part of Yasukuni’s nation-­affirming drama while they simultaneously look through the torii to observe others. From the first torii, Yasukuni’s layout guides visitors to its main worship space, the location of the eirei. Additional torii create multiple frames that reinforce performing and spectating. The torii placement in Yasukuni, one after the other, outlines a clear path to the spirits of the war dead. After walking under the first torii, the visitor travels under the second one, approximately the same size as the first, through the shrine’s main gate and under a slightly smaller, third torii to the main worship space. The order of the torii and main gate is standard to Shinto shrines, but at Yasukuni the structures are set in a line to turn them into checkpoints that move visitors forward. In comparison, at Meiji Shrine, another major shrine in modern Japan, located in Tokyo and built less than one hundred years after Yasukuni, the three torii and main gate meander the visitor through a lush parklike space. Yasukuni’s layout thus choreographs a single way of approaching the eirei. Apparent in figure 1.2, the torii telescope the visitor’s line of sight, making it possible to see all the way back to the main worship space when standing under the first torii. Yasukuni forecasts its linear route from its entrance; its prominent walkway creates a sense of forced perspective that prompts movement toward the eirei. In terms of the shrine’s spectral performative, this route situates the main worship space as a future goal, aligning the visitor’s main destination with that of the soldier after death—­the visitor rehearses the same movement a fallen soldier takes when entering Yasukuni as spirit. Further, visitors repeat the same route as those during the war. Looking toward the main worship space, successive torii visually cast other bodies as participants in such movement, both in the present and the past, evoking bereaved family members from the war and fallen soldiers, all ghostly figures in transit toward the main worship space.49 Along with the shrine’s prescribed path toward the eirei, statues align visitors with soldiers, encouraging them to share the same perspective. The statue of Ōmura Masajirō, the architect of the modern Japanese army, centrally

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1.2. The shrine’s pathway after the first torii. From the shrine’s entrance, the main worship space is visible. Photograph by the author.

located on the pathway between the first and second torii, performatively transforms contemporary bodies into Meiji-­era soldiers (fig. 1.3). As the first Western-­style bronze statue forged in Japan in 1893, it stands at almost forty feet tall.50 Elevated on a pedestal over Yasukuni’s visitors, the statue evokes a panopticon to reinforce the sense of being seen at the shrine.51 Its height also calls attention to the overbearing nature of the nation’s past; one cannot escape from under the statue just as one is always implicated in Japan’s war history. Positioned in the middle of the pathway that diverges and circles around the figure, Ōmura’s statue prompts visitors to pause, if ever so briefly, to change directions as they move around it. The statue’s pose stages a mini reenactment of an important moment in Japan’s military history. Yōkoso’s description reminds us that Ōmura holds binoculars and faces his opponents, those loyal to the Tokugawa shogun before the 1868 Battle at Ueno Hill.52 Ōmura’s clothing appears as if it is wind whipped, with the lower edges of his coat slightly raised, to suspend Ōmura in time. As visitors walk around Ōmura, the statue choreographs them in the midst of a battle scene, joining the eirei to become his troops. Correspondingly, visitors who see Ōmura’s statue from afar watch others participate in the performance beneath him. In part, the statue reveals how this national

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1.3. Statue of Ōmura Masujirō. Photograph by the author.

subject is limited; when visitors become part of Ōmura’s battle unit, his statue reiterates the image of Yasukuni’s eirei as enlisted males. Given Ōmura’s role in the modern Japanese nation, Yasukuni spatially aligns visitors as its supporters; their contemporary bodies rehearse masculine national subjecthood, one fully realized through sacrifice to the nation. Ōmura’s statue represents a past battle. But, to recall early twentieth-­century efforts to link remembering soldiers with creating future ones, it is also possible to consider that the statue anticipates future wars. Its choreography inspires visitors to follow their soldier predecessors. Between Ōmura and the second torii, two large stone lanterns imaginatively connect visitors with soldiers. The lanterns add to Yasukuni’s spectacular imagery of the war and promote a positive image of this past; surrounding their bases are metal reliefs of army and navy battle scenes from the Sino-­Japanese War (1894–­95) to the early years of the Asia-­Pacific War.53 Located in the area before the main worship space, their continued existence tem­porally returns Yasukuni to a time before its privatization, reminding the

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1.4. Relief of the Shanghai incident of 1932. Photograph by the author.

visitor that Yasukuni was originally a war shrine. The scenes, all positive, celebrate war glory in a one-­sided portrayal—­there is no reference to the harsh battles at the end of the Asia-­Pacific War. Similar to the choreography of Ōmura’s statue, these reliefs frequently align the visitor’s viewpoint with that of the soldier. Some of them, like the one pictured in figure 1.4 of the Shanghai incident in 1932, encourage the visitor to adopt the soldier’s perspective in midbattle, providing a rehearsal of war for a brief moment. The lanterns also illustrate the importance of spectacle in Yasukuni’s spectral performative. As the visitor moves closer to the main worship space, spectacle becomes further apparent. Next to the main worship space stands the war museum, Yūshūkan, where visual displays present a revisionist history of the Asia-­Pacific War.54 Without even venturing into Yūshūkan, however, in front of the museum is a courtyard where statues honor wartime contributions of kamikaze pilots, service animals, and war widows. These structures mark the importance of triumphant images of the war in Yasukuni’s remembrance, employing spectacle that, in the words of Guy Debord, is “not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images.”55 In Yasukuni’s case, the shrine’s spectacle connects visitors to an imagined eirei. Glorying past military accomplishments, these spectacular statues depict the fallen soldier in terms of honor and celebration. The war widow and the kamikaze pilot are generic icons of the war; they reinforce the

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shrine’s portrayal of the eirei as a nation-­affirming collective and prevent any dialogue between the living with the war dead. Yasukuni’s main worship space visually associates the shrine with the emperor-­centered patriotism of Japan’s past. After a third and final torii, the visitor arrives at the shrine’s main worship structures, the honden, where the spirits are enshrined, and the haiden, the building in front of the honden where visitors pray. Prayer at the shrine space brings together embodied engagement of visitors with the shrine’s spectacle. On the front of the haiden is a large cloth imprinted with four chrysanthemum seals of the imperial house. Visitors who pray at the main worship space do so under the emperor’s chrysanthemum seal, repeating the former relationship between shrine, war, spirit, and emperor.56 Yōkoso describes prayer as the way in which visitors participate at Yasukuni; explanations about how to worship appear in the first chapter, alongside its tour of the shrine’s layout. Special text boxes in the guidebook’s 2016 edition carry titles like “Let’s cleanse our mouths and hands before praying!”57 These instructions, written in enthusiastic language, suggest the need to educate and encourage a younger generation of Japanese visitors. Yasukuni’s space casts visitors as national subjects, but it is important to note that not all visitors go along with the shrine’s rhetoric. Rather, in years of observing visitors at the shrine I have noticed a variety of behaviors and interactions that may produce performances counter to the shrine’s choreography. Yasukuni is easily accessible, with many entrances and exits. The first torii marks the shrine complex as its main entrance, but additional entrances allow for alternative ways to enter the space and approach the eirei. These entrances also provide shortcuts through the complex, where pedestrians use Yasukuni for an alternative function. On a visit in July 2018, for instance, I witnessed a large group of elementary schoolchildren crossing through the shrine on their way to the Kudanshita subway station. They entered from a road that bisects the shrine between the first and second torii and walked toward the first torii in groups of two or three. Visible from the entire walkway, they appeared as a line of yellow hats moving away from the main worship space. The multiple and divergent ways a visitor can walk through the shrine recall Michel de Certeau’s comments that the city “is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power.”58 In de Certeau’s theory of everyday practice, quotidian movements, on the one hand, enact the shrine’s militaristic message; the pedestrian “makes them exist as well as emerge.”59 On the other hand, when the pedestrian engages with the space in different ways, she “transforms each spatial signifier into something else” and “increases the number of possibilities” of the space.60 At Yasukuni, the pedestrian is not simply a cog in the shrine’s machinery but can interact with the shrine in ways that may elude or run counter to its rhetorical grasp.

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Along with shortcuts, visitors’ actions may fall outside honoring fallen soldiers. While not necessarily prohibited by the shrine’s rules, posted clearly at its entrances, visitors engage in behaviors that are not entirely in keeping with a shrine devoted to the war dead. Yasukuni’s notoriety makes it an attraction for foreign tourists, who may not understand posted rules or be cognizant of Shinto practices. Japanese visitors also push the boundaries of shrine behavior. On a visit in the summer of 2017, a couple at the main gate spent several minutes posing their two children for photographs—­making V signs for peace, the entire family seemed unfazed by the irony of such a gesture at a war shrine. Counterperformances can dispute Yasukuni’s narrative of the war and undermine its spectral performative. The Japanese couple posing their children, for instance, may suggest to other visitors that younger generations are not in complete agreement with Yasukuni’s rhetoric. At the very least, the many ways pedestrians move through and behave at Yasukuni indicates the complex position of the shrine in contemporary Japan. Yet I would caution that, given Yasukuni’s history of mobilizing visitors, counterperformances at the shrine may not be so impactful or legible. In her history of Yasukuni, Takenaka describes its deployment of entertainment activities to develop supporters of the country’s military. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tokyo residents viewed the shrine as a leisure space, but, as Takenaka asserts, they “often unconsciously—­became an integral part of the state-­sanctioned narrative that came to celebrate the successes of the growing nation, which ensued from the loss of lives.”61 While people may visit the shrine for other reasons, their presence can still contribute to the shrine’s narrative of remembrance. When the shrine’s large, spectacular architecture turns visitors into spectators and performers, it is possible to interpret counterperformances as supportive of the shrine’s rhetoric. For example, the group of schoolchildren I observed became, from afar, a mass of young national subjects. Walking under the statue of Ōmura, they evoked grotesque images of child soldiers. Because the mechanisms of Yasukuni encourage implicit participation, the shrine’s choreography of contemporary visitors seems almost unavoidable. An analysis of the shrine space thus reveals visitors to be more active than they may think, integrated into the space’s mechanizations whether they want to be or not.

Performing Specter I: Dressing Up on August 15 Given Yasukuni’s overwhelming and pervasive nature, it becomes important to consider what happens when people actively engage with the shrine’s spectral performative. While Yasukuni’s space choreographs bodies in everyday visits, those who visit Yasukuni dressed as soldiers on the war’s anniversary illustrate the shrine’s spectral performative in action. Men who wear military uniforms to the shrine on August 15 are not part of an organized

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group, though some take part in this performance annually. Their range of ages, from early twenties to midsixties, make them two to three generations removed from the Asia-­Pacific War. In 2017, many waited, socialized, and reminisced in the area before the shrine’s main gates; some were alone, some were in pairs, and some gathered in a large group, taking cover from intermittent rain under a grove of trees. A smaller number interacted directly with the crowd, speaking “in character” about wartime experiences. While the men have different reasons for appearing—­informally speaking to those who participated, some wanted to share their family histories to prevent war while others wished to honor the sacrifices of relatives enshrined at Yasukuni—­ their very presence at the shrine reaffirms the importance of performance in Yasukuni’s remembrance of the war dead. I turn again to the procession discussed at the start of this chapter to further explore how these men embody Yasukuni’s spectral mechanisms. While the procession is not necessarily representative of all the men who wear uniforms to the shrine on August 15, it reveals the workings of Yasukuni’s spectral performative and highlights its limits. The procession began with seven men, dressed in Imperial Japanese Army uniforms, heads bowed in a line facing the shrine. After some consultation between them, the men marched toward the second torii and main gate of the shrine; there, they stopped and stood at attention, holding up their weapons (fig. 1.5). Then they turned and marched to their starting point. One of the men served as a director or commanding officer, yelling orders to coordinate their movements. While the men did not travel far—­approximately fifty feet—­they drew a crowd, who captured their performance in photographs and video. An eighth man in contemporary dress helped clear a path through the crowd to allow the procession to move to and from the shrine’s main gates. As a reflection of Yasukuni’s spectral performative, the procession illustrates how the shrine encourages younger generations to relate to the past through repetition. The procession marks the shrine’s connections between embodiment, appearance, and expressions of patriotism.62 The men made clear efforts to accurately assemble period clothing, wearing wool uniforms in the August heat. They copied soldier’s movements, practicing their procession toward the torii. I observed what resembled a final rehearsal: in between the men’s bowing their heads and walking toward the shrine, a man in his fifties played the role of a director when he coached one of the younger men on his marching technique. For these men, replication was the mode of remembering the war dead: if they dress and walk a certain way, they can honor their ancestors and the heroes of the nation. Their actions illustrate the work of Yasukuni’s spectral performative in returning visitors to the past. The procession also enacts Yasukuni’s simultaneous work of casting visitors into the roles of future soldiers. The men reveal the inevitability of death during the Asia-­Pacific War, fueled by Yasukuni’s war-­promotion machine, when soldier and specter are one and the same. The men’s movements

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1.5. Procession in front of Yasukuni Shrine’s main gate on August 15, 2017. Photograph by the author.

anticipate military training. The procession marks the dangers of Yasukuni’s endurance; if the shrine’s spectral performative encourages becoming a solider, even if it is the act of dressing up as one, then it potentially prompts a repetition of militarism. It is unclear what is to stop the enduring war shrine from being mobilized again to support Japan’s military efforts. While Article 9 in Japan’s constitution prohibits war, Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party politicians were able, after Abe Shinzō took office for his second term in 2012, to put forward a more flexible interpretation of the article to expand Japan’s international security role.63 Such participation in Yasukuni’s rhetoric was not limited to the men in the procession. A crowd gathered and joined the men to document their every move on their phones and cameras. The spectacle of Yasukuni thus extended from the shrine to those who replicated it. The men were performing not just for the eirei or other visitors to the shrine but also for the cameras, their procession turning into future images to circulate beyond Yasukuni in news

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media. The shrine’s spectacle also enveloped spectators—­bystanders inadvertently entered into images behind or next to the performers, transformed into willing participants in the consumption and circulation of Yasukuni’s militaristic support. While highly spectacular, the procession also called attention to the limited nature of Yasukuni’s eirei and those who can participate in Yasukuni’s remembrance. The procession reinforces Yasukuni’s focus on fallen soldiers and ignores other spirits enshrined at Yasukuni, including female nurses, Okinawan civilians, and those not enshrined at all. Beyond the procession, those who performed as eirei at Yasukuni on August 15 were predominantly male. Few women joined them, and those that did often played roles of support. In 2015, for instance, a woman, dressed in a kimono, asked visitors to sew stitches into an obi, reflective of such wartime efforts in the domestic sphere to aid those on the front lines. In my visits to Yasukuni on August 15, I did not witness cross-­gender participation; there were no women dressed as soldiers, an indication that Yasukuni’s spectral performative reaffirms national and gender roles. Upon further analysis, however, the bodies of men in the procession, when enacting Yasukuni’s spectral performative, contrast and exceed the eirei. While the men worked to replicate the past as accurately as possible, it was clear that their costumes were a mix of prewar, wartime, and contemporary items. As one participant explained, his gun was from the Meiji period, well before the start of the Asia-­Pacific War.64 Others wore new shoes to go along with their period uniforms (fig. 1.6). These out-­of-­time flourishes served as a reminder of temporal changes between the end of the war and today, while gesturing toward the potential mobilization of Yasukuni in support of future wars. The men’s use of contemporary items unsettled the men’s claim that the procession was an act of honoring the war dead; instead, it cast their embodied actions in a more sinister light. Further, the contradictory appearances of the men troubled the image of Yasukuni’s eirei. The mixture of their ages, from early twenties to midsixties, indicating engagement by multiple generations in honoring the war dead, added an additional level of anachronism—­men in their sixties would not have been on the front lines as infantry soldiers during the Asia-­Pacific War. And the men, a variety of body types, from slender to out of shape, did not reflect the near-­starvation conditions of Japanese imperial soldiers at the end of the war.65 The real bodies of these participants thus mark the very limits of enacting Yasukuni’s spectral performative. Visitors cannot become eirei at the shrine by dressing up, but only by dying in battle and losing their bodies. When these live bodies are dressed as soldiers, they begin to call attention to the harsh realities of war, to raise questions about whether soldiers during the war’s final days would have looked like these men, with their mix of ages, body types, and clean, pressed uniforms, free of blood. While the men dressed as soldiers aimed to honor the war dead, their actualization of Yasukuni’s

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1.6. Footwear of procession participants. Photograph by the author.

spectral performative suggests that the shrine’s image of eirei depends on the elision of such visceral images. The eirei, a national symbol of the ultimate patriotism, both requires the sacrifice of the body and its continued absence.

Performing Specter II: Becoming the Fallen Soldier The artist Koizumi Meiro uses his own body as the very tactic to challenge the shrine’s spectral mechanisms. In his performance Melodrama for Men #5: Voice of a Dead Hero (2009), Koizumi does not simply engage in counter­ performances at the shrine. Instead, he takes on the image of the fallen soldier directly when he becomes an eirei; he dresses up as a fallen soldier to stage a literal return of the real-­life kamikaze pilot Anazawa Toshio to Yasukuni.66 In the performance, Koizumi appeared as a dead Anazawa, limping and crawling through Tokyo neighborhoods. Eventually, Koizumi ended up at the

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shrine. Trying to enter the shrine, he was stopped by guards after he crossed through the main gate. Koizumi performed Voice of a Dead Hero on August 8, 2009, and edited the piece into a twenty-­minute video that he exhibits at museums and galleries. Voice of a Dead Hero exemplifies the resistant potential of performance by upsetting Yasukuni’s mnemonic mechanizations. Specifically, by dressing up as the fallen soldier, Koizumi replicates the shrine’s choreography to expose and undermine its portrayal of the eirei. As I explore, Voice of a Dead Hero dismantles Yasukuni’s strategy of connecting visitors to the eirei; in its place, the video proposes alternative relationships between contemporary Japanese and war dead based on confrontation and imaginative participation. Born in 1976, Koizumi is a rare Japanese artist who has defined his career by exploring controversial subject matter, from kamikaze (discussed at length in the next chapter) to Japanese imperialism to the emperor.67 After graduating from International Christian University in Tokyo, he studied and worked in London and the Netherlands, developing his aesthetic abroad.68 Since 2008, Koizumi has created live performances, and Voice of a Dead Hero represents one of the few times that Yasukuni has served as a setting for performance outside state-­and shrine-­sponsored events.69 Playing upon the location of Yasukuni, Voice of a Dead Hero reflects an interest common to Koizumi’s work: confronting audience preconceptions. Central to Voice of a Dead Hero is Yasukuni’s image of the eirei as a patriotic fallen soldier. Koizumi structured his performance to expose assumptions about the eirei—­his initial idea was to show Yasukuni priests turning away the ghost of a fallen soldier.70 This very premise calls attention to Yasukuni’s construction of a particular image of war dead—­young, male, and willing to die. In Voice of a Dead Hero, Koizumi’s appearance recalls and refutes this image. A young artist, he wore a pilot’s uniform and a rising-­sun national flag headband, common for kamikaze pilots. Alone, this image of a young man in his uniform appears frequently in the displays at Yūshūkan. However, Koizumi wore heavy white makeup and bloody bandages on his arms to give the appearance of being dead (fig. 1.7). When he walked, he limped slowly, covering one of his eyes, as if to tend to an injury on his face. Instead of the collective eirei, Koizumi portrayed an actual man, Anazawa Toshio, a kamikaze pilot who died in April 1945. Anazawa’s final letter to his fiancée Chieko, expresses his love for her instead of devotion to country and emperor.71 Emphasizing his personal feelings and interests, Anazawa ends the letter with a list of books he would like to read, his wish that Chieko will move on, and the statement, “Chieko, I want to see you, to talk with you, with all my heart.”72 Koizumi foregrounds the stark differences between Anazawa’s emotions and Yasukuni’s nationalist rhetoric when he projects the text of Anazawa’s letter in the opening moments of Voice of a Dead Hero. In Voice of a Dead Hero, Koizumi’s literal act of becoming a specter identifies the violence and pain that Yasukuni’s eirei elides. The first five minutes

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1.7. Still from Melodrama for Men #5: Voice of a Dead Hero (2009). Copyright © Koizumi Meiro.

of the video show Koizumi limping through neighborhoods in Tokyo, including the shopping hubs of Shinjuku and Shibuya. Looking like what Koizumi himself has termed a zombie, his appearance is disturbing and pained. As Anazawa, he seems to suffer from the injuries he has sustained in the plane crash that ended his life. Koizumi’s performance as the ghost of a fallen soldier exposes the fact that Yasukuni obscures the painful and potentially violent moment of soldiers’ deaths.73 At one point, on a city sidewalk he doubles over and crawls, prompting one pedestrian to stop and ask if he is okay. At other times, Koizumi’s appearance is ridiculous in its excess—­walking across the busy intersection known as the Shibuya scramble crossing, Koizumi lingers because of his limp. When the crowd clears, Koizumi, left behind, awkwardly but dramatically jolts forward as cars pass by. The only word Koizumi speaks in Voice of a Dead Hero is “Chieko,” with Koizumi crying, screaming, and whispering the name of Anazawa’s fiancée, a word that becomes more disturbing and humorous the more Koizumi utters it.74 At Yasukuni, Voice of a Dead Hero replicates the journey of fallen soldiers into the shrine. Koizumi walks directly up the path to the main worship space, enacting the shrine’s choreography. With Koizumi’s portrayal of Anazawa, however, the fallen soldier does not have a smooth journey. After crossing under the shrine’s main gate toward the worship space, Koizumi falls down and crawls, attracting the attention of the shrine guards. Although first expressing concern for his well-­being, their questions quickly turn into pleas to “please go someplace else,” and eventually they forcibly move him out of the path.

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Staging a literal return of the spirit to Japan, Koizumi’s embodiment troubles Yasukuni’s image of the eirei and calls attention to the shrine’s work in maintaining it. The guards’ refusal implies that the shrine will take only spirits of the war dead who look a certain way—­unharmed, heroic, and bodyless. The insistence on this particular image not only ignores victims of Japanese aggression and imperialism but also excludes the fact that death in battle was, presumably, bloody. It is Koizumi’s embodiment that reveals Yasukuni’s own treatment of the bodies of war dead. Koizumi’s bloody makeup and costume recall the physical trauma of battle, a contrast with Yasukuni’s abstract and disembodied eirei. There are no representations of blood or gore at the shrine; even displays in Yūshūkan do not focus on the horrors of war. Koizumi’s appearance thus reinforces the fact that Yasukuni’s eirei, without bodies, elide any violence experienced on behalf of the state. Voice of a Dead Hero exposes the work of Yasukuni’s spectral performative to control the image of the fallen soldier. In contrast, the men who dress as soldiers on August 15 portray soldiers in a positive light and are allowed to move freely throughout the shrine grounds. The Yasukuni guards’ rejection of Koizumi constitute an insistence on a single way of relating to the spirit through the actions prescribed by the shrine space. Not only is remembrance of the war at Yasukuni predicated on a particular kind of specter but also the refusal of Koizumi as Anazawa suggests the need for the shrine to vouchsafe its conception of the eirei. The guards’ desperate insistence that Koizumi leave exposes ongoing efforts of the shrine to maintain its image of the eirei. Further, the guards’ very presence points to Yasukuni’s need to control its particular approach to the war dead. As he explained to me in an interview, after the guards had moved Koizumi out of the walkway, he stood up and left the shrine. On his way out, he noticed that a police car had parked by the main gate, presumably to help contain Koizumi’s disruption, another connection between the state and Yasukuni.75 The ending of Voice of a Dead Hero undermines the spectacle of Yasukuni. For all its striking visuals, the video does not show the final interaction between Koizumi and the shrine guards. When Koizumi arrives at Yasukuni, Voice of a Dead Hero keeps the camera fixed on the ground immediately after Ōmura’s statue, where it remains for the rest of the video (fig. 1.8). The camera allows the viewer to see all the way up to the main worship space, again a feature of the layout of the shrine, but as Koizumi limps toward the main worship space, he gets smaller with each step. When Koizumi crosses beneath the main gates to the shrine, the viewer can no longer see him. The guards remain off camera, their disembodied pleading voices a striking parallel to the stately eirei. According to Koizumi, the camera angle was a mistake: his friend had placed the camera, and Koizumi was so nervous about being at Yasukuni that he did not notice it. Despite being a “mistake,” the ending of Voice of a Dead Hero resists any spectacle associated with fallen soldiers. The video severs the viewer from

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1.8. Still from Melodrama for Men #5: Voice of a Dead Hero (2009); the video ends at Yasukuni Shrine. Copyright © Koizumi Meiro.

seeing Koizumi’s refusal at Yasukuni, a contrast to the men who performed the August 2017 procession. While spectacle is central to Yasukuni’s mnemonic strategy, Voice of a Dead Hero gestures to what cannot be seen, in essence turning this moment of exchange between the guards and Koizumi over to the viewer’s imagination. This mistake thus mobilizes its viewer to implicitly participate by asking her to imagine its ending. By encouraging audience participation, however imaginative, Voice of a Dead Hero proposes different ways of relating to the war dead. Throughout, the video portrays multiple levels of such engagement, both for passersby on the street and for the viewer. As Koizumi walks through the streets of Tokyo, his uniform and bloodied appearance bring pedestrians face-­to-­face with the Asia-­Pacific War dead. When Koizumi walks through Tokyo as Anazawa, he confronts passersby with the fallen soldier, including the gore and violence apparent in his body. His appearance silently demands a response. Koizumi is, however, ignored by those around him. Those who are curious, including a young boy in Shinjuku Station, stop to watch Koizumi yet do not intervene—­ the boy’s mother quickly pulls him away. A few ask if he needs help, but when Koizumi does not respond to their questions, they leave him on the sidewalk. When the video plays upon and challenges pedestrian responses, it comments on the repression of such memories in contemporary Japan—­the war dead are relegated to Yasukuni, where a patriotic image of them is maintained. The video illustrates the need for interacting with the past. When in the contemporary period younger generations are tasked to respond to those long departed, what Takahashi describes as response-­ability, Voice of a Dead

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Hero portrays one form of call from the dead to the living. Koizumi stages a literal return of the dead pilot that confronts the Tokyo pedestrian. And in its final moments, the video leaves the viewer with an image of the shrine’s walkway as she hears the guards plead with Koizumi. Showing Yasukuni’s main thoroughfare, Voice of a Dead Hero calls out to the viewer to imagine Koizumi’s interactions with shrine guards. The video’s ending diverges from Yasukuni’s spectral performative. Voice of a Dead Hero presents a fallen soldier with agency who exceeds Yasukuni’s image of the eirei. Koizumi’s fallen solider requires the viewer to react to him in different ways. The final image of the video, of the shrine’s walkway, instead of choreographing the viewer as supporting Yasukuni’s nationalistic rhetoric transforms the shrine into part of the viewer’s imaginative interaction with the past. The video asks the viewer to visualize the war dead and their presumed entry into the shrine without setting foot in its space. By orchestrating a role in which the viewer remains separate from the shrine’s imposing architecture, the video simultaneously complicates the war dead and suggests other avenues of engagement. My reading of Yasukuni Shrine’s space unveils its performative strategies to reproduce its anachronistic remembrance of the Asia-­Pacific War. Yasukuni, from the war until today, continues to promote Japanese militarism and nationalism through the deployment of a particular idea of the specter, the eirei. The idea of the honorable spirit of the fallen soldier provokes honor and gratitude in Yasukuni’s younger-­generation visitors, encouraging them to celebrate the dead. When the space turns visitors into actors and audience in a nationalistic drama celebrating fallen soldiers, it does so regardless of their beliefs or intentions. Yasukuni, as a powerful site in contemporary remembrance, not only illustrates the ways in which wartime attitudes are pervasive but also demonstrates how younger generations become involved in that remembrance. Yasukuni choreographs its visitor, ever younger and more distanced from the war, to engage with its celebratory vision of the past. The visitor, simply by wandering through Yasukuni, participates, however unwillingly, in Yasukuni’s mnemonic performance. In this way, Yasukuni prompts replication of past attitudes toward the war without further contemplation. This passive repetition is the opposite of Takahashi’s response-­ability; instead of answering to the war past, Yasukuni visitors are released from any call from it. As I have explored, the active participation in Yasukuni’s spectral performative, dressing up as war dead, can elaborate on the shrine’s mechanizations while potentially troubling them. While the two performances I discuss are different in how they view Yasukuni, both illustrate ways in which performances can challenge the continued circulation of the eirei today. As I turn to artistic performances in the following chapters, I work from Yasukuni’s dependence on the visitor as actor and audience member to explore ways in which performances situate their audiences. These performances, in

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contrast to Yasukuni’s silent and disembodied eirei, forge dialogic relationships between the living and the dead. As Voice of a Dead Hero indicates, just as Yasukuni can cast the visitor as a future eirei, performance can provide entries into dialogue with the past. It is by turning to Noh, a form that preceded Yasukuni’s establishment by more than four hundred years, that I explore ways in which artistic performance models, enacts, and encourages interactions with ghosts.

Chapter 2

Returning Kamikaze Popular Culture, Affect, and Theatrical Repetition

In the blockbuster film Eien no 0 (The Eternal Zero, 2013), the kamikaze pilot, Miyabe, returns to Tokyo, literally, when he flies his plane through the city.1 This moment, the penultimate one of the film, stages a transgenerational encounter between Miyabe and his grandson, Kentarō. At the beginning of Eien no 0, Kentarō, in his early twenties, discovers that his grandfather died as a kamikaze pilot in the war. Over the course of the film, Kentarō and his sister Keiko interview survivors from Miyabe’s unit in an attempt to learn why their grandfather came to sacrifice his life—­not for the nation but for his family. When Kentarō finally “meets” Miyabe, he stands on an overpass in Tokyo and watches as Miyabe flies by. When the two lock eyes, Miyabe salutes Kentarō and flies away. Miyabe’s flight is, on the one hand, a ghostly reappearance, a specter of the war that returns in the present to confront his grandson. On the other hand, it can be read as the merging of past and present: as Miyabe’s plane continues, it flies over open ocean, headed on a collision course with an American ship; in the final shot of the film Miyabe prepares for impending impact. The seamlessness with which Miyabe’s plane moves from contemporary Tokyo to the war, further connected by music, reflects the film’s replication of wartime attitudes toward the kamikaze, as if no time has passed between the war and today. Kamikaze refers to the end-­of-­the-­war operation Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (Special Attack Forces), abbreviated as tokkōtai in Japan. From its inception in October 1944 until the end of the war, more than thirty-­five hundred pilots died in tokkōtai suicide operations.2 In contemporary Japan, images of the kamikaze reappear in such box-­office successes as Yamato (2005), Ore wa kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku (2007), and Eien no 0 that portray the kamikaze as honorable, self-­sacrificing soldiers.3 These popular-­culture returns contribute to what Rumi Sakamoto describes as “the culturally specific trope of the tragic hero.”4 Outside Japan, the image of the kamikaze is often deployed to indicate fanatic behavior. The word frequently appears in media to describe a range of actions, from political decisions to driving style, as reckless.5

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The frequent reference to the kamikaze exemplifies the affect such positive images of the war manifest in contemporary Japan. Sara Ahmed’s assertion that “emotions do things” elucidates how this kamikaze image establishes links between younger generations and the war; emotions “align individuals with communities—­or bodily space with social space—­through the very intensity of their attachments.”6 Through Ahmed, I consider how the kamikaze becomes ever more affective, not because the sign itself contains affect but because it gains emotional force through its circulation.7 Such affect is at play in Eien no 0 when, upon seeing his grandfather, Kentarō attempts to get closer to him, reaching out toward the passing plane. The moment, however, further illustrates how this affective image of kamikaze prompts a passive reaction from younger generations: blocked by the overpass railing, Kentarō sobs, an emotional response that is so violent that he doubles over, silenced. Despite spending the entire film searching for clues about his grandfather, when the two men finally come face-­to-­face, Kentarō is unable to say anything, prevented not only by his emotions but also by the film when extradiegetic music plays loudly over their exchange. This chapter considers alternative approaches to the affective-­laden kamikaze that haunts popular culture. As is apparent in Eien no 0’s closing scenes, the kamikaze stirs feelings of honor and gratitude but does not provoke dialogue, encouraging younger generations to emotionally and unquestioningly honor the war dead. In other words, the kamikaze, as it appears in popular culture, disrupts Takahashi Tetsuya’s call for response-­ability, in which younger generations are tasked to respond to those long passed. Instead of dialogue, in the face of his returning grandfather, Kentarō is emotional and reverent. Further, the affective image of the kamikaze is highly sanitized, predicated on a number of historical omissions, including the inexperience of pilots, harsh and violent training, pilots’ conflicting emotions about the war, and their very desire to live until their final moments.8 In contrast, I turn to the role of performance in representing the kamikaze outside the affective reverberations of popular culture. In particular, the fallen soldier in the Noh theater introduces a drastically different model based on interaction between the living and the dead. Because it focuses on dialogue, this model diverges from honoring fallen soldiers at Yasukuni Shrine or celebrating their sacrifices in popular culture. In contrast to the silence between Miyabe and Kentarō in Eien no 0, when the war dead reappear on the Noh stage, their return sparks conversation.9 A key example occurs in the Noh play Atsumori when the ghost of a fallen soldier from the Genpei War (1180–­ 85), Taira no Atsumori, returns to tell his own story. Initially disguised as a grass cutter, Atsumori reveals his true identity after the waki, a traveling priest, asks about his flute playing; after leaving the stage as the grass cutter, Astumori returns in his battle gear to relive the moment of his death. This structure is typical of mugen, or phantasmal, Noh, where the ghost appears in the present to reenact a moment from his life.10 What is notable

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about Atsumori is that the waki is the warrior Kumagae, who became a priest after he killed Atsumori in battle. The reappearance of the ghost transforms both men: Kumagae promises to pray for Atsumori’s release from this world.11 As I explore throughout this book, Noh’s ghostly manifestations model, evoke, and rehearse transgenerational response-­ability. In this chapter, Noh encourages me to think about the function of the ghostly return and, by extension, of theatrical repetition. Atsumori’s return is efficacious: when he appears onstage as a grass cutter then exits and reenters, his return is connected to telling his story and his ultimate goal to transcend this world through the prayers of others. Beyond individual play plots, Noh has throughout its long history embodied what Rebecca Schneider calls the “space of repetition” that “invites critical opening for (re)experience, for analysis, for further engagement.”12 From the early development of the form, artists altered plays when they reperformed them to win sponsors among the military ruling class of fourteenth-­century Japan.13 Zeami’s treatises, the form’s foundational texts, include discussions about adjusting a play for its audience.14 Noh identifies the efficacy in repetition: when a character returns to the stage, it is for a purpose; when a Noh play is performed again, it consciously aims to influence its viewers. With Noh’s efficacious iterations in mind, I identify two artists, Imai Masayuki and Koizumi Meiro, who exemplify the potential of repetition to challenge the kamikaze in contemporary Japan. Imai’s play The Winds of God follows two men who leap from the present into their former kamikaze-­ pilot selves during the final days of the war. While the play itself makes no revolutionary claims about the kamikaze, I argue that the multiple productions of the play—­in different locations, media, and languages from 1988 to 2015—­enact a process of repeatedly returning to the kamikaze figure to inquire into it. Koizumi, a generation younger than Imai, creates video installations that confront and revise viewer consumption of the popular-­culture image of the kamikaze. Both artists show varying strategies, based in performance, of representing the imposing and ubiquitous figure of the kamikaze. In so doing, both artists disrupt popular culture’s affective images and develop response-­ability to the kamikaze. While Imai himself attempts to respond to the kamikaze in repeated productions, Koizumi turns this response-­ability to the audience, raising questions of complicity in consuming popular-­culture representations of the kamikaze.

Affective Remembrance in Popular Culture First I consider how cultural productions, exemplified in Eien no 0, promote an affective image of the kamikaze and encourage younger generations to passively accept it. This emotionally charged portrayal can be traced to

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Yasukuni and Yūshūkan, the war museum on the shrine grounds. Scholars have long explored the emotional force of Yasukuni.15 Takahashi, for instance, begins his Yasukuni mondai with a discussion of the shrine’s ability to provoke violent, and sometimes contradictory, emotions.16 More so than Yasukuni, Yūshūkan crafts an affective portrayal of the kamikaze as heroic soldier. In “Mobilizing Affect for Collective War Memory,” Rumi Sakamoto argues that by evoking emotions of gratitude and honor, Yūshūkan connects younger-­ generation visitors “horizontally” to the national community of Japan and “vertically” to past generations.17 As Sakamoto hypothesizes, the museum’s kamikaze image “promote[s] uncritical acceptance of Yūshūkan’s revisionist history.”18 Notably, affective remembrance at Yūshūkan obfuscates any responsibility of the state and the civilian support system that led to the establishment of the kamikaze system. Eien no 0 reflects the role of artistic production in circulating this image of the kamikaze in the contemporary period. According to David Desser, combat films increased in the first years of the twenty-­first century, partially a result of “resurgent nationalism” and “revisionism.”19 When it premiered, Eien no 0 was wildly successful, receiving an endorsement from Prime Minister Abe Shinzō and becoming one of the top ten grossing Japanese films of that year.20 Centered around Kentarō and Keiko’s search for answers about their grandfather’s war past, the film illustrates the role of the kamikaze’s affective image in transgenerational remembrance. Eien no 0 moves between the present, where Kentarō and Keiko interview surviving pilots, and the past, where Miyabe, a skilled pilot, attempts to stay alive despite intensifying war efforts. When Miyabe volunteers for the kamikaze mission, Eien no 0 reaffirms the rhetoric of kamikaze as young men who sacrificed their lives when there was no hope of winning the war. Eien no 0 reveals the kamikaze’s affective mechanisms, positioning younger generations as passive receptacles of the past. Kentarō’s reaction to seeing his grandfather at the end of the film not only insists on the emotional weight of the kamikaze but also illustrates how familial relationships motivate such expressions of emotion. Kentarō and Keiko explore the war past through the actions of their relative; they do not concern themselves with other kamikaze pilots or additional information.21 These transgenerational connections value blood relationships, with Kentarō and Keiko eventually connecting more with Miyabe, a man they discovered to be their biological grandfather only at the start of the film, than with their adoptive grandfather, the man who raised their mother after the war. Eien no 0 proposes a limited connection to the war, where the only war past that matters is a personal one. As such, the film’s affective portrayal of the kamikaze releases all involved parties from responsibility—­it severs Miyabe from military machinery and limits Kentarō and Keiko’s remembrance to honoring a family member.22 By its final moments, Eien no 0 has become a story of family sacrifice, one that separates the kamikaze pilot from national, militaristic motivations.

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Eien no 0’s sentimentalized portrayal, while personal, does not give free voice to Miyabe. Despite Kentarō and Keiko’s connection to Miyabe and despite Miyabe’s charming character in flashbacks, when Eien no 0 brings Miyabe to the present, he does not speak to Kentarō. The film leaves Miyabe’s ghostly reappearance as a fixed image, one unaffected by time. Miyabe’s silence replicates the voicelessness of the eirei at Yasukuni, integrated into national narratives of honor and devotion. As discussed in the previous chapter, when apotheosized at Yasukuni, eirei are separated from their physical remains and lose their individual identities. Accordingly, Sakamoto reminds us that Yūshūkan “limits its object to the dead,” who “do not speak, reflect or criticize,” a silence central to the “aestheticization and romanticization” of the kamikaze.23 Miyabe’s silence reinforces the image of the kamikaze as dutiful, eternally in service to the nation, a complete opposite from the extended dialogue between the ghost and priest in the Noh play Atsumori. Miyabe is not the only silent character; when Kentarō greets his grandfather without speaking, the moment is emblematic of the film’s portrayal of Kentarō and Keiko as receptacles for survivor stories. Eien no 0 stages transgenerational remembrance as one-­sided: during these scenes, it cuts from the survivor’s story to a reenactment, giving the impression that viewers witness Miyabe’s “true” story. These reenactments support Eien no 0’s affective resonances: viewers can experience the heartbreak of war while learning a version of the past that can be known and mastered. Flashbacks reinforce the connections between the film’s spectator and Miyabe’s grandchildren—­when Kentarō and Keiko passively accept these events from the past, so do we. As discussed in this book’s introduction, the ability to know the past is central to the rhetoric of historical revisionists, who deploy the logic of “objective” facts to advance an emotional agenda that protects the nationalistic version of Japanese history.24 Kentarō and Keiko do not truly engage with the past. Instead, they learn about their biological grandfather, but they neither question nor criticize. If in Takahashi’s terms response-­ability of younger generations to the past involves call and response, Eien no 0 releases Kentarō and Keiko from such a response.

The Winds of God and the Mnemonic Process of Return In contrast to the passive grandchildren in Eien no 0, The Winds of God activates younger generations by sending two men from the contemporary period back in time to experience life as kamikaze pilots at the end of the war. The play’s title comes from the English-­language equivalent of the characters that make up the word kamikaze—­神 (god) and 風 (wind).25 The translation reflects one of the ways in which the play and its many versions reexamine and revise the image of the kamikaze as tragic hero. Produced almost continuously for more than twenty-­five years, the performances of The Winds of

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God (1988–­2015) tackled this image on the stage, in film, and on television screens in Japan as well as abroad. Read through Noh’s complex modes of return, The Winds of God creates a process of remembrance based not on the affective but on the iterative, where younger generations repeatedly inquire into the past. Led by the play’s main actor, The Winds of God’s repeated performances create ongoing transgenerational dialogue with the kamikaze while its multiple productions undo the affective kamikaze image from popular culture. The force behind The Winds of God, playwright and actor Imai Masayuki, was born in 1961 and grew up after the harsh realities of wartime Japan. Following advice from his father, an officer in Japan’s Self Defense Forces (SDF), Imai served in the SDF for two years before devoting himself to an acting career.26 Fascinated with the kamikaze from an early age, Imai worked with director and acting coach Narahashi Yōko to write The Winds of God after interviewing more than one hundred former kamikaze pilots and their superiors.27 After he premiered the play in 1988, Imai spent the rest of his career staging The Winds of God in multiple theatrical productions and, later, adapted it into a Japanese-­ language film (1995), an English-­language film (2005), and a Japanese television miniseries (2005).28 In all these versions, Imai played the main character, Aniki, and served as the show’s director in later productions.29 Imai’s continued return to The Winds of God made the play a life obsession. He performed as Aniki until his death in 2015 and left the show’s national tour only when advanced cancer forced him to retire from the stage.

Disrupting Affect, Encouraging Dialogue In contrast to Miyabe’s reappearance in the present, The Winds of God transports younger-­generation manzai (Japanese comedy) performers Aniki and Kinta to the past.30 After a motorcycle accident in the present day, Aniki and Kinta wake up in a kamikaze ­training camp in the final days of the Asia-­Pacific War. Instead of as Aniki and Kinta, the other men in the unit know them as Kishida and Fukumoto, kamikaze pilots in training. When Aniki and Kinta have difficulty understanding where they are, The Winds of God criticizes younger generations as uninformed about the war. After they wake, Aniki and Kinta misidentify the place and time of their surroundings, and Aniki offends all the men when, thinking it is 1992, he explains that Emperor Hirohito died four years ago.31 Aniki and Kinta begin to understand their situation only when they see Zero fighter planes outside, a moment that emphasizes ways in which younger generations encounter the past through popular culture: they exclaim that the planes are “like the ones we saw in the film.”32 In order for younger generations to understand the war beyond such mediations, The Winds of God suggests the need to send them back to the past

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to seriously inquire into it. By transporting Aniki and Kinta to the end of the war, the play revises the appearance of kamikaze in the present in films like Eien no 0. Instead, after Aniki and Kinta wake in the past, The Winds of God features transgenerational exchange—­Aniki and Kinta develop attachments to other pilots based on dialogue and solidarity. Much of the action of the play occurs in the pilots’ free time when characters frequently pursue personal interests, from supernatural psychology to sports. The lighthearted activities develop the idea that kamikaze pilots are complex individuals. And these scenes provide opportunities for Aniki and Kinta to have conversations with fellow pilots. But, in The Winds of God dialogue is not synonymous with agreement. While Kinta becomes attached to the other men, concurring, at times, with the war cause, Aniki frequently challenges the actions of his unit and the direction of the war.33 Aniki is not alone; other men join him in questioning the war to imply that pilots did not blindly follow military orders. Further, The Winds of God’s suggestion that Aniki and Kinta are reincarnated spirits of former pilots challenges the static concept of the eirei. The kamikaze image in popular culture inherits from Yasukuni the idea that the spirits of fallen soldiers are fixed the day they die, designated to return to Japan to reside at Yasukuni Shrine as eirei, gods of the nation. In contrast, The Winds of God asserts that Aniki and Kinta’s journey to the past is possible because they are the reincarnated spirits of the pilots Kishida and Fukumoto. Explained by fellow pilot Yamamoto, Aniki and Kinta were in a traffic accident on the same day that Kishida and Fukumoto were in a training accident, and the present-­day accident propels Aniki and Kinta backward to 1945. The Winds of God’s conception of reincarnation is fairly simplistic; similar to soul mates, Aniki and Kinta are tied to each other to be born again and again. As such, this idea of reincarnation is not reflective of Japanese religious beliefs about the afterlife, a complex intermingling of concepts from Shinto and multiple sects of Buddhism.34 The plot device of reincarnation, however, revises the affect-­laden image of the kamikaze as unchanged once dead. Instead of the assumption that fallen soldiers will end up at Yasukuni, to be apotheosized as gods of the nation, reincarnation in The Winds of God separates their souls from eventual residence in Yasukuni and later disembodied circulation in popular culture. Reincarnation shapes the play’s ending, leaving it open to future possibilities. The play ends on August 15, the final day of the war. Despite knowing that the war will be over in hours, Kinta decides to follow through on his orders; he tells Aniki that, based on solidarity with the men in the unit, it will be unfair for him to survive when so many others have died.35 Unlike Kinta, Aniki refuses to comply with his orders to sacrifice his life. Although unconvinced by Kinta’s reasoning, Aniki pursues him, and they both crash into a U.S. ship. This accident transitions the play to the present day: Aniki wakes from a coma in a hospital room to learn that Kinta passed away the day before. In this moment, reincarnation grants the play a happy ending—­hearing

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about Kinta’s death, Aniki smiles, realizing he will meet his friend again in his next life. In contrast to Miyabe’s reappearance in the present, always fixed as a kamikaze pilot, The Winds of God imagines a different future for Kinta’s spirit. This future acknowledges temporal progression—­Kinta’s spirit can change with time. And Kinta’s eventual returns are ultimately unknown, making the ending of the play unresolved—­we know the story between Aniki and Kinta will continue, but we do not know how. The lack of resolution pairs with the play’s diverse image of the kamikaze—­they are neither helpless cogs in an oppressive military system nor are they self-­sacrificing national deities.

Repeated Productions as Transgenerational Remembrance The Winds of God does not follow Aniki and Kinta into their next lives. Instead, its reiteration in multiple productions over twenty-­five years stages future encounters between Aniki, Kinta, and the kamikaze. In the theater alone, the play appeared more than fifteen separate times—­in national tours to major cities across Japan and in overseas tours to the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Along with stage productions, multiple versions of The Winds of God—­two feature films and a television drama—­ continue Imai’s inquiry across different media. Imai’s timing for stagings and adaptations point to the mnemonic significances of play productions. For every major anniversary of the end of the war, including the fiftieth, fifty-­fifth, sixtieth, sixty-­fifth, and seventieth anniversaries, Imai organized national and international tours, effectively adding The Winds of God to the proliferation of commemorative events, cultural productions, and public apologies by politicians that occurred in special anniversary years.36 For the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, for example, The Winds of God appeared in a national theater tour in Japan, an English-­language tour to the United States, and a Japanese-­language feature film directed by Narahashi.37 Press materials and performance reviews call attention to The Winds of God’s multiple stagings. Even though Imai often followed a production of The Winds of God by another after a year or two, publicity flyers visually distinguished each staging as separate, each flyer using its own unique photograph, font, and layout. The flyers differentiate The Winds of God’s multiple productions from a long-­running engagement. And when preview and review articles in Japanese newspapers mention the show’s many stagings, they suggest that the show’s repeated productions were public knowledge.38 Restaging a popular show is common in postwar and contemporary Japanese theater. Modern and contemporary theater, including the realism-­based shingeki (new drama) and the experimental angura (underground) theaters, moved away from a repertory system of set plays in the traditional Japanese forms of Noh and Kabuki. But restaging a commercially successful play

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or production can help financially support theater companies. For instance, Brian Powell describes the production of Onna no isshō (A Woman’s Life) as having “saved” the shingeki company Bungakuza “financially on several occasions.”39 In the contemporary period, Hirata Oriza, discussed in the next chapter, produced his award-­winning Tokyo Notes more than fifteen times since its premiere in 1994. The Winds of God, however, betrays the standard logic of restaging a commercially successful show. Over its multiple productions, The Winds of God struggled with critical acclaim and corporate sponsorship. The production received mixed responses from conservatives and liberals.40 In 1999, The Nikkei Weekly reported that Imai experienced difficulty securing Japanese sponsors, despite the fact that, as a well-­known television actor, he had developed relationships with several major companies through his work on advertising campaigns.41 The Winds of God’s continued theatrical run, however, indicates that it had an established audience. In the same article, the Nikkei Weekly noted that, eleven years into its production history, more than sixty thousand had seen the play.42 Until 2015, The Winds of God continued to open at midsize theaters in Japan, with the Tokyo leg of its final 2015 tour playing in the smaller, four-­hundred-­fifty-­seat theater in the New National Theatre complex. While sustainable, these numbers do not approach the theater boom of the 1980s, when a theater company could sell out venues that seated more than a thousand. Instead of indicating commercial or critical success, The Winds of God’s multiple productions, read through Noh’s complex modes of repetition, create a process of remembrance based on iteration. Noh’s staging practices, from the form’s development to today, make reappearance onstage even more of a discrete event. As noted, in Noh’s early development Zeami altered performances, tailoring elements of the play depending on the demographics of that day’s audience. In contemporary Japan, while the staging conventions of Noh are relatively fixed, individual Noh performances are onetime events: it is rare to see a theatrical run of multiple performances of a single Noh play; instead, performances of Atsumori, often months or years apart, will feature an entirely new set of artistic personnel. With Noh’s iteration in mind, every new production of The Winds of God is neither a complete restaging nor a complete replication. A minimal aesthetic connects the play’s theatrical productions, where a piece of furniture establishes the setting—­a few beds for the unit’s barracks or two chairs for an airplane (figs. 2.1, 2.2).43 In contrast to these similarities, Imai altered the play script for each production, amending its content and structure throughout the years.44 The Winds of God begins with these differences because the first scene of the play is Aniki and Kinta’s manzai performance in the present day. Manzai dialogue integrates political events and popular culture, so from 1989 until 2015 Imai frequently updated jokes to keep references current. These changes, however small, immediately mark the fact that productions

2.1 and 2.2. In The Winds of God theatrical productions, director Narahashi used two chairs for an airplane. Images courtesy of Narahashi Yōko.

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do not simply restage a fixed script. Small differences between productions reflect the passage of time between the war and the present, where alterations propose the need to continually update the play’s portrayal of the past. The sheer number and frequency of productions, along with the play’s adaptation in different media, shift The Winds of God’s representational work from individual play productions or film screenings to a continued process of reperformance and reproduction. Some versions of The Winds of God gestured toward the need to continue producing the play. The ending of the 1995 Japanese film version of The Winds of God, for instance, anticipated its return to the stage. After the penultimate scene of Aniki’s new manzai act with a different partner, the film closes on a shot of the theater’s exterior. Instead of announcing Aniki’s new manzai performance, there is a poster for The Winds of God, referencing the play’s past stagings while anticipating future ones. This ending reminds the viewer the individual film is part of a longer history of reiteration. Like Atsumori’s efficacious return to the stage, Imai, in repeated productions, models transgenerational remembrance and response-­ ability. Imai wrote, revised, directed, and starred in a majority of the versions of The Winds of God. Offstage, Imai began his work on The Winds of God in dialogue with surviving pilots. When he frequently staged the plays, he continued this inquisitive work, illustrative of his need to take up this subject again and again but never in the exact same way. As an actor, Imai played Aniki in a majority of the productions. Onstage, Imai engaged in transgenerational remembrance through conversation with other kamikaze characters. His continued staging of the play suggests that a onetime conversation is not enough, proposing instead multiple, repeated conversations. Appearing in the role from his twenties until his fifties, Imai’s aging privileged ongoing exploration of the past over a realistic portrayal of the character. Again, Noh’s representational practices can illuminate the significance of Imai’s frequent appearances onstage. Because Noh actors play all characters without any attempt to conceal an actor’s age or gender, the Noh actor does not representationally become the character. Applied to Imai, his continued portrayal of Aniki, a character in his twenties, aligns the act of playing this character with inquiring into the past. Despite Imai’s casting, the actor playing Kinta changed throughout the years, further calling attention to the age difference between Imai and his character. By later productions, Imai, in his forties and fifties, and the actor playing Kinta, often in his twenties, represented members of different generations both tackling the war past. For audiences aware of Imai’s iterations, the multiple productions of The Winds of God work together to destabilize the image of the kamikaze, transforming it from a known, frequently circulated image in popular culture to that which is unfamiliar. The repeated productions of The Winds of God introduce additional and contradictory ideas of the kamikaze to leave loyal

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viewers with an unstable image of the pilot. In contrast to the recoverable past in Eien no 0, staged through reenactments, The Winds of God suggests that such mastery of the past is not possible—­if events or figures were knowable, repeated returns would not be necessary. In the language of Bertolt Brecht, The Winds of God makes the kamikaze “appear strange,” infusing the kamikaze with unknowability.45 By returning repeatedly to the pilot, The Winds of God insists that the historical figure and representation of kamikaze demands constant inquiry. In so doing, The Winds of God makes remembering a continued project of reiteration, not only for Imai but also its audiences. Unlike Eien no 0, younger generations cannot passively accept The Winds of God’s portrayal of the kamikaze—­there is no certain portrayal to accept. Instead, along the lines of Takahashi’s response-­ability, The Winds of God compels a transgenerational response to the kamikaze, of investigating the figure again and again. With Imai as a model for frequent returns, this response is not based on recovering a fixed version of the past but on interacting with an uncertain one. As a process of remembrance based on theatrical repetition, The Winds of God suggests that it will continue its investigation. This implication orients The Winds of God toward an unknown future, full of possibilities but, as is apparent in the multiple actors playing Kinta, certain to change with time. This version contrasts the futurity of Yasukuni’s spectral performative, where visitors are encouraged to imagine themselves as eventual soldiers of future wars; in the case of Yasukuni, such a future is fixed, whereas in The Winds of God, the future is open, not based on war but rather on connection and camaraderie. The Winds of God’s futurity further revises the temporal return of the war in contemporary Japan. When Aniki wakes up from his coma on August 15, the play recasts the anniversary of the war’s end in terms of recovery, one that moves forward in time instead of returning to the same past. Moreover, international productions of The Winds of God alter the kamikaze image to unravel its implications overseas. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, U.S. media returned to an image of the kamikaze as a way in which to understand the terror attacks, a reframing that anticipated the war effort that followed the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.46 In response, Imai developed the 2006 English-­language film version of The Winds of God. In it, Las Vegas–­based Caucasian comedians get in a motorcycle accident that transports them to Japanese bodies in a kamikaze ­training camp in 1945. While the film was not distributed in the United States, screening only at a few film festivals, the characters’ journey from the contemporary United States to wartime Japan related racial slippage to temporal slippage, exposing ways in which U.S. media outlets distanced terrorism through the label of “kamikaze.”47 If, as Ahmed writes, “the sliding between signs also involves ‘sticking’ signs to bodies: the bodies who ‘could be terrorists’ are the ones who might ‘look Muslim,’ ” then the English-­language Winds of God calls attention to this sliding of terrorist to racialized other.48

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Repeated productions of The Winds of God demonstrate the force and functioning of theatrical iteration. While an affective image of the kamikaze circulates in Japan and abroad, The Winds of God creates multiple returns that, understood through reappearance in Noh that results in dialogue between living and dead, are interrogative, engaging with the kamikaze night after night, year after year. Although the kamikaze represents clear, fixed ideas in popular-­culture representations like Eien no 0, The Winds of God’s multiple productions cast the kamikaze as uncertain and insist on the need to continue to reexamine the figure. In 2015, The Winds of God’s demands to engage with the past took on new stakes when Imai, diagnosed with cancer, retired from the stage and passed away in May. Without his support, at the time of writing The Winds of God has yet to be performed again. Because The Winds of God imagines future returns to the stage, Imai’s passing raises questions about the nature of the play’s remembrance and whether the play loses its efficacy without the certainty of future iterations. Imai’s death asks how we might carry on his work without his being able to appear again, an uncertainty that illustrates how the passage of time continues to alter the kamikaze image, where forward movement demands adjusting to temporal change.

Koizumi Meiro: Popular Culture and Audience Complicity A generation younger than Imai, Koizumi Meiro engages with such temporal changes. Like Imai, Koizumi repeatedly takes up the subject of the kamikaze in multiple performances and video pieces, including Voice of a Dead Hero (2009), Portrait of a Young Samurai (2009), Defect in Vision (2011), Double Projection #1 (2013), and Double Projection #2 (2014). The number of artworks about the kamikaze suggest that Koizumi also engages in a process of return, evoking the figure again and again to inquire into it. Similar to The Winds of God, Koizumi’s body of work illustrates the artist’s role as response-­able to the war past—­to continue to remember through repeated investigation. While The Winds of God forges direct connections between younger generations and kamikaze pilots, Koizumi takes on popular culture, challenging the involvement of younger generations in consuming images of the kamikaze. Further, Koizumi makes iteration a central representational strategy in his pieces. Whereas the multiple productions of The Winds of God undo the circulating image of the kamikaze in filmic representations, Koizumi focuses on the audience, identifying their complicity in the kamikaze’s affective mechanizations in popular culture. Understood through Noh, repetition becomes effective in Koizumi’s videos. In Atsumori, the ghost appears twice in the play—­once disguised and once in his true spectral form. When he leaves the stage to reenter dressed as his true identity, his return is efficacious: in telling

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his story to the waki, we learn about Atsumori, and the character advances his goal to be released from this world. In Portrait of a Young Samurai, Double Projection #1, and Double Projection #2, Koizumi deploys reappearance as a strategy in his use of multiple takes. In Koizumi’s case, instead of Atsumori’s release from this world, scenes repeat to question the spectator’s viewing experience and, ultimately, her consumption of the kamikaze image in popular culture. In contrast to Eien no 0’s suggestion that younger generations passively receive information about the war past, Koizumi insists on the viewer’s active participation in any spectatorship. As is apparent in Voice of a Dead Hero (discussed in the previous chapter), Koizumi has experimented with performance throughout his career.49 While much of his work appears in the medium of video, he uses techniques of performance to confront and challenge audience expectations. Koizumi calls his pieces video installations to describe the ways in which they shape audience experience.50 And, he attends to the viewer’s reception of his work by altering the gallery space.51 For the premiere of Defect in Vision at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011, for instance, Koizumi divided the exhibition space in half diagonally and projected a different version of the video on each side of the screen. When the viewer first enters the room, she sees a touching video set during the Asia-­Pacific War: a husband and wife are torn apart when the husband volunteers to be a kamikaze pilot; in the end, he dies, calling out for his wife in his final moments. On the other side of the screen, the second video reveals that the actors playing the couple are blind. This video includes moments between scenes when, unknown to the actors, Koizumi and his assistant move table settings around, resulting in actor confusion and laughter. The final scene undoes the reverence experienced in the first video when the actor playing the husband appears to ride a roller coaster, calling out for his wife. By contrasting the two videos in one space, Defect in Vision calls attention to and undermines the audience’s initial, heartfelt emotional reactions.

Exposing Affective Mechanisms of Representation Portrait of a Young Samurai plays upon audience experience to directly focus on the act of viewing popular culture. More so than in Defect in Vision, in Portrait of a Young Samurai, repetition serves a key role in challenging the consumption of the affective kamikaze image in contemporary films.52 In the ten-­minute video, an actor (Sunaoshi Masaki) plays a young man giving a monologue in which he says good-­bye to his family before departing for a kamikaze-­training camp. After this minute-­long monologue, Koizumi, off camera, instructs the actor to give his speech again, but with more “samurai spirit.” Over multiple takes, the actor repeats the scene, only to be interrupted by Koizumi again and again. Eventually, Koizumi, still off camera, plays the young man’s mother, begging her son not to leave. This interjection prompts

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2.3. Still from Portrait of a Young Samurai (2009). Copyright © Koizumi Meiro.

the young man to break down sobbing at the end of the video. Portrait of a Young Samurai’s repetition of the monologue works to push the expression of feeling in the kamikaze image to its limit and undermines affective excess at the center of popular-­culture representations. In its aesthetics and sentiment, Portrait of a Young Samurai references kamikaze films of the first decade of the twenty-­first century. Koizumi was particularly interested in Ore wa kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku (It Is for You I Will Die, 2007).53 The film, about a kamikaze ­training camp in the southern Kyushu town of Chiran, tells the stories of trainees from the perspective of the local eatery’s female proprietor, Torihama Tome.54 Written by conservative novelist and politician Ishihara Shintarō, the film follows as Torihama becomes a motherly figure to pilot trainees.55 Released several years before Eien no 0, Ore wa is littered with nationalistic speeches and emotionally charged scenes that celebrate and mourn the sacrifices of young kamikaze pilots. The high quality of Portrait of a Young Samurai’s video resolution created a filmic appearance, and the actor wore a kamikaze uniform used in final missions, complete with aviator goggles and a Japanese flag wrapped around his head to closely resemble the look of actors in Ore wa (fig. 2.3). The text of the actor’s speech replicates the sentimental quality of Ore wa in expressions of patriotic duty.56 The young man tells his mother that he will leave to fight for his country. When he insists despite his mother’s pleading, Portrait of a Young Samurai becomes further reminiscent of a scene in Ore wa when family members of a kamikaze pilot travel to the Chiran training camp to beg him to save himself, and he refuses.

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Given these comparisons, Koizumi’s calls for more “samurai spirit” exposes the spectral mechanisms of the kamikaze image in popular culture. Koizumi has explained that the “moving image is not a good medi[um] for discussions,” so “if you want to think deeply, you have to stop the video.”57 By stopping the take to repeatedly demand “samurai spirit,” Koizumi names the force behind affect in popular representations of the kamikaze, one dependent on romantic images of Japanese warriors. “Samurai spirit” makes use of the Japanese word damashī, a word for “soul,” not limited to the spirit of a dead person. While the word is different from eirei, the “heroic spirits” enshrined at Yasukuni, in Portrait of a Young Samurai “samurai spirit” evokes images of the warrior of old. According to Koizumi, the phrase “samurai spirit” was central to Japanese militarization during the Asia-­Pacific War, but when “samurai spirit” is used today to cheer for Japan’s national sports teams, its history is obfuscated.58 In Portrait of a Young Samurai, “samurai spirit” reminds the viewer of its military history and also calls attention to how the “samurai spirit” is produced. Instead of the heroic yet sanitized image of the kamikaze death in Ore wa or Eien no 0, Koizumi endows this “samurai spirit” with embodied attributes. When Koizumi tasks his actor to constantly redo the scene to heighten his “samurai spirit,” he proposes that “samurai spirit” can increase and decrease in the body: he asks the actor to replicate eyes of the “samurai spirit,” to repeat the scene “like you are shivering with your ‘samurai spirit’ within,” and throw up the “samurai spirit” from “your stomach.” When the actor replies to these commands with a physical reaction, shivering, coughing, and retching, Portrait of a Young Samurai transforms “samurai spirit” from abstract spectral essence, found in the eirei, into something that physically manifests, a reminder that the kamikaze operation played out in actual bodies. As Koizumi continues to demand more “samurai spirit” from the actor, the affect of the sentimental scene turns into overabundance. The scene’s emotion becomes heighted and humorous when Koizumi plays the pilot’s mother—­his falsetto voice is exaggerated and off-­putting. But the actor uses Koizumi’s improvisation to further his emotional intensity. Sobbing, he attempts to meet the melodrama of Koizumi’s lines. His facial expressions seem pained while the force of his delivery causes him to cry, spit, and drool. In these final moments, the actor’s affective expression has become too much, moving from realistic representation to the excessive, verging on the comic. To contribute to the moment’s humor, stately horn music fades over the top of the scene, marking the false seriousness with which the actor plays his character. At first glance, this outpouring of emotion seems to surpass what is conveyed in filmic representations. Yet on further consideration, Portrait of a Young Samurai’s framing isolates the emotional intensity of popular culture. The actor’s crying is not substantially over the top. Rather, Portrait of a Young Samurai highlights his expressions of emotion through its close-­up on the actor’s face and repetition of a single scene. As a point of comparison, Portrait

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of a Young Samurai exposes the fact that emotions in Eien no 0 or Ore wa are overwrought and overdone. At the end of the video, the actor retches again and bends over, dropping out of the frame, presumably to throw up. With this final image Portrait of a Young Samurai undoes the extreme emotion of popular culture and asserts that what will come out will be, simply, vomit. In so doing, the video challenges one of the functions of Yasukuni’s depictions of the eirei—­to vouchsafe the production of soldiers for future wars. Instead, as Portrait of a Young Samurai suggests, the intensification of “samurai spirit” will result in expulsion. Through its replication of emotion, Portrait of a Young Samurai distills the flaws of popular culture’s portrayal of the kamikaze. Koizumi’s repeated interruptions interrogate Ore wa’s and Eien no 0’s curation of affective yet passive relationships between younger generations and the kamikaze. Through repeated takes, Portrait of a Young Samurai shows the many tries to get at its final shot, exposing the mechanisms involved in creating the kamikaze image. While any viewer knows that such film productions are constructions, Portrait of a Young Samurai puts its artifice on display. Koizumi’s video installation identifies the work of actor training, rehearsals, and costumes that all contribute to the affective representation of the kamikaze on screen. Further, Portrait of a Young Samurai connects spectatorship to participating in the circulation of kamikaze affect. Throughout, when Koizumi remains off camera, his position puts him in parallel with the audience. Viewers share Koizumi’s point of view as he blends roles of director and audience member. With each interruption, Koizumi’s actions become our own, done by one of us—­Koizumi—­and for our benefit. The audience becomes complicit in the video’s excess of emotion. The installation space also calls attention to the audience’s viewing experience. When Koizumi exhibited the video at the Hara Museum in Tokyo in 2011, the exhibition space was a small, darkened room, separated from the rest of the exhibition by a black curtain. Evoking a movie theater, the setup of the space connected watching the actor in Portrait of a Young Samurai to viewing films like Ore wa. In this scenario, Portrait of a Young Samurai suggests that when consuming popular culture, the audience does more than passively sit in a darkened theater; instead, viewers are an active party, responsible in the continued circulation of images of the kamikaze.59 Portrait of a Young Samurai evokes ambiguous emotions to further question the audience’s affective relationship to the kamikaze image. Koizumi’s falsetto voice, combined with the actor’s emotional intensity, creates feelings of patriotism, horror, and humor. As Koizumi has mentioned, popular culture results in conflicting emotional responses. For Koizumi, a moment of inspiration came during an in-­flight viewing of the American movie The Last Samurai (2003). While Koizumi laughed at scenes of exaggerated sentiment and Tom Cruise as the “last samurai,” he noticed that others were moved to

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tears. Work in the early part of his career, including Portrait of a Young Samurai, aimed to re-­create such emotional ambiguity.60 In Portrait of a Young Samurai, conflicting emotions demand a reaction from the viewer: Does the viewer laugh at Koizumi’s falsetto voice? Does the viewer feel uncomfortable after watching the actor’s excessive outpouring of emotion and violent embodied reaction? These implicit challenges reveal the complicity of audience members’ emotional investment in the kamikaze—­audience members’ consumption of media is central to the creation of the kamikaze in popular culture.

Younger Generations as Interlocutor If Portrait of a Young Samurai makes younger generations complicit in their consumption of the kamikaze image in popular culture, Koizumi’s later videos describe a different role, one of active participant in a dialogue between past and present. Koizumi develops the artist’s and audiences’ mnemonic efforts in When Silence Falls (Double Projection #1) and When Her Prayer Is Heard (Double Projection #2). While both video installations treat the audience more subtly than in Portrait of a Young Samurai, both deploy repetition, showing scenes multiple times to create a unique viewing experience. These pieces place the audience in parallel to Koizumi, but in this case he has changed from the demanding director in Portrait of a Young Samurai to a kind, yet firm, interlocutor in Double Projection #1 and Double Projection #2. In this role, Koizumi models his own position as a member of a younger generation inquiring into the kamikaze figure. Both videos represent a return to the kamikaze on multiple levels. Not only does Koizumi revisit the subject matter of kamikaze but also the videos’ subjects, survivors of the kamikaze operation, engage in dialogue with pilots who died during the war. Double Projection #1 features Itazu Tadamasa, a former kamikaze pilot who, because of engine failure, was unable to complete his final mission and fulfill his promise to die alongside his friend Ashida.61 Double Projection #2 is about Nagura Kazuko, whose boyfriend, Ōhashi Ken, died in a kamikaze mission. Both videos follow the same format: they open with Itazu and Nagura speaking about their wartime experiences; then Koizumi, off camera, asks them to say something to the person they lost in the war. In the following scene, Koizumi asks Itazu and Nagura, dressed as Ashida and Ōhashi, respectively, to respond to the survivor’s message. The result is a dialogue between the speaker and the speaker dressed as the deceased loved one, an imagined conversation in a double projection (fig. 2.4). For Koizumi, Itazu, and Nagura, the passage of time has shaped their inquiries into the kamikaze. In both Double Projection videos, the two survivors are now in their eighties. Koizumi himself reexamines the kamikaze four

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2.4. Still from When Her Prayer Is Heard (Double Projection #2) (2014). Copyright © Koizumi Meiro.

years after premiering Portrait of a Young Samurai, a period that brought changes to Koizumi’s life and altered his art. After the birth of his son, Koizumi began to create more serious work—­the humor in his earlier pieces, including in Portrait of a Young Samurai, is not as prevalent as in Double Projection #1 and #2.62 The return of Koizumi, Itazu, and Nagura to the kamikaze brings together multiple temporalities. For Koizumi, this marks the distance between the war and the contemporary period. For Itazu and Nagura, the double projection demonstrates ways in which the war still stays with them. In both videos, Itazu and Nagura replicate wartime rhetoric—­ Itazu reiterates regret that he lived, and Nagura expresses pride in her boyfriend’s sacrifice. Within Double Projection #1 and #2, repetition becomes an effective strategy for developing an engagement with the past. After Itazu and Nagura speak to their loved ones, each video replays their messages as Itazu as Ashida and Nagura as Ōhashi respond. Itazu’s message to Ashida, for instance, plays twice in Double Projection #1: first with Itazu relaying a message to his deceased friend and then Itazu playing his friend who speaks back to Itazu. During these “conversations” between Itazu and Ashida, Nagura and Ōhashi, Koizumi interrupts to give notes to the survivors. Most frequently, he asks them to actively respond when playing Ashida and Ōhashi to create the impression of a dialogue. Through these repetitions, Double Projection #1 and #2 craft responses of the living to the dead. The videos resemble the conversation between the living and dead in Astumori—­in the play, the waki, now a monk, was Kumagae, the warrior who killed Atsumori. The Noh play

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portrays the encounter of former enemies, one living and one dead, after many years. In parallel, Double Projection #1 and #2 stage Itazu and Nagura conversing with those long deceased. Koizumi identifies a transgenerational role in this dialogue when he inserts himself as a participant in their exchange. In his interruptions, Koizumi, again unseen, plays several crucial roles. Serving as the director, he asks Itazu and Nagura to emphasize certain reactions and highlight nuances. Further, in his questions to them and eventual challenges to their stories, Koizumi becomes an active interlocutor. The conversations in both Double Projection videos are not simply Itazu-­Ashida and Nagura-­Ōhashi but Itazu-­Koizumi-­Ashida and Nagura-­Koizumi-­Ōhashi, with Koizumi facilitating encounters with the past. And, as interlocutor, Koizumi does not tell Itazu or Nagura what to say but often questions what they do say. As interlocutor, Koizumi’s interruptions and reiterations alter the content of the videos. When Koizumi asks both to refine their responses as Ashida and Ōhashi, his questions and Itazu’s and Nagura’s answers to them add further layers to their stories. In Double Projection #1, we learn that Itazu feels regret for not dying, a regret he clings to in his reluctance to express any happiness at surviving. Koizumi stops Itazu and asks him, as Ashida, to tell his friend that he is glad he survived. While Itazu complies, Double Projection #1 shows Koizumi interrupting him several times to play the line with more enthusiasm, a further illustration of Itazu’s reluctance to articulate any positive feelings about surviving. In Double Projection #2, Koizumi interrupts Nagura when, speaking for Ōhashi, explains his pride to die for Japan. Koizumi stops the exchange and asks Nagura whether Ōhashi would still be happy to die to “save Japan”; after Koizumi’s request, Nagura as Ōhashi explains that in a peaceful time, he would want to spend the rest of his life with her. In this moment, Koizumi undoes Nagura’s repetition of past militaristic ideas. Each repetition in the Double Projection videos adds additional information; in both videos, these iterations reveal the way in which wartime rhetoric still shapes Itazu’s and Nagura’s thinking. And, in terms of Takahashi’s response-­ability, the Double Projection videos identify one mode of response for younger generations. While Koizumi does not provide a script for Itazu or Nagura, his interruptions change the direction of the conversation to remind us of the powerful role of editor in portrayals of the past. Koizumi’s role is subtle: he guides, he prompts, he gives directions, but he also clearly situates himself as separated from the experiences of the kamikaze and their loved ones. But, even in his subtlety, Koizumi’s interlocution is efficacious, able to alter the conversation between the present and past and show how interactions between younger generations and the past can be productive. Koizumi’s position off camera extends this productive role to his audience. In Portrait of a Young Samurai, Koizumi’s and the audience’s shared point of

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view illustrates the complicity of audience consumption. In contrast, in the Double Projection videos, the viewer’s placement alongside Koizumi shares his interlocutor role to propose a relationship to the past based in inquiry and dialogue. Koizumi suggests that younger generations can and do take part in shaping the past. When Koizumi takes on a third, dialogic role, he reaffirms that the viewer is more active than she may seem and, by extension, more response-­able than she may seem.

Response-­ability and the Limits of Representation Given the circulating kamikaze image in contemporary Japanese popular culture, Imai’s and Koizumi’s works propose theatrical repetition as interventionist practice. Read through the complex role of repetition in the Noh theater, Imai’s and Koizumi’s inquiries into the kamikaze become opportunities to relate to the past. For both Imai and Koizumi, the artist becomes a model for younger generations, questioning the past again and again. Significantly, for all the works discussed, this questioning does not produce answers about the kamikaze; instead, the frequent repetitions make the kamikaze unstable and only demand further inquiry. In addition to modeling a process of engaging with the past, Koizumi’s video installations challenge the consumption of the popular-­culture kamikaze image, identifying the audience member as complicit in her spectatorship. The limits of representing kamikaze as an image strongly tied to nationalist rhetoric reflect questions of complicity and audience spectatorship. In a 2017 interview, Koizumi stated that after Double Projection #2, viewers expressed their shared love of Eien no 0 and his Double Projection video installations. These statements indicate the pervasiveness of the kamikaze image in popular culture while eliciting questions about what is compelling to younger generations about this particular image—­how might popular culture allow the viewer to feel comfort and reassurance about her national past? How can an artist address such feelings of comfort when portraying the kamikaze in critical ways? For Koizumi, audience interest in Eien no 0 and the Double Projection videos was so troubling that he left the subject of the kamikaze behind. He claims he will not return to the topic, reflecting his own sense of responsibility to not participate in popular culture’s affective mechanizations.63 Koizumi’s remarks point to the perils of tackling topics prevalent in dominant narratives of remembrance. Given Yasukuni’s endurance in reiterating past narratives of the war and the overabundance of kamikaze images in popular culture, how might the audience misread the kamikaze through this rhetoric, however differently an artist situates it? Koizumi’s decision to move on from the subject matter points to the limits of its representation, in which the current affective image of the kamikaze prevails over other representational strategies.

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With these potential limits of representing dominant narratives in mind, I turn to performances about subject matter elided, ignored, or obscured before the contemporary period. Moving from the kamikaze to Japanese imperialism and the civilian colonial settler in the next chapter, I examine a play series that explicitly leaves any representation of historical events off the stage as I ask, how must artistic representations of the war change with the growing temporal distance between the war and the present? And, by extension, I explore how the contemporary play series Seoul shimin shifts response-­ability to the war past from the artist to the audience.

Chapter 3

Staging Response-­ability Historical Omissions and the Audience

Villager: This pine is linked with the memory of two fisher girls, Matsukaze and Murasame. Please say a prayer for them as you pass. Priest: Thank you. I know nothing about them, but I will stop at the tree and say a prayer for them before I move on. —­K an’ami, Matsukaze

In the first moments of Kan’ami’s play Matsukaze, the waki character demonstrates an active engagement with a past and people he does not know. Immediately after arriving at Suma Bay in western Japan, the waki, a traveling priest, asks a nearby villager about a single pine tree he sees on the beach. When he learns that the pine commemorates “two fisher girls,” he promises to pray for them. Most of the play’s focus is on the ghosts of the two young women, Matsukaze and Murasame (as shite and tsure, main character and companion), who relive a moment from their lives. In Matsukaze, the waki decides to spend the night in a shed on Suma Bay. After meeting the shed’s owners, two female salt makers, he recites a poem by the deceased nobleman Ariwara no Yukihara, and the women cry. When he asks about their tears, the women reveal themselves to be the ghosts of Matsukaze and Murasame, trapped in this world by their love for Yukihara. Before he even meets the ghosts, the waki’s promises to act on their behalf perform a version of philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya’s response-­ability. In Takahashi’s definition, younger generations are tasked to respond to survivors of Japanese aggression and imperialism from the Asia-­Pacific War.1 Because Matsukaze’s two fisher girls have died centuries before the waki arrives in Suma Bay, the waki enacts an early example of transgenerational exchange. His willingness to respond to a call from those long departed before they even appear drastically differs from the legal responsibility defined by the postwar International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). As discussed in the introduction, the IMTFE publicly convicted a small group of men for leading Japan to the Asia-­Pacific War, notably leaving wartime Emperor Hirohito out

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of public scrutiny. The IMTFE’s limited scope elided any culpability of the general Japanese public in supporting the war. In contrast to the IMTFE, the waki is not concerned that there is no apparent connection between him and the two fisher girls in Matsukaze. Despite his initial lack of knowledge about their past, his actions extend response-­ability beyond direct accountability for specific events. Considered by some scholars as a representative of the audience, the waki can serve as an important model for audience response-­ability for people and events from the Asia-­Pacific War.2 The previous chapter elaborated on one form of transgenerational response-­ability: artists Imai Masayuki and Koizumi Meiro frequently take up representations of the kamikaze pilot. Theatrical repetition, in the case of Imai’s multiple stagings of The Winds of God, positions the artist as respondent to the past, acknowledging the need for continued dialogue and investigation. In this chapter, I consider how contemporary theater productions extend response-­ability to the audience. In other words, how does the theater stage craft response-­ability for younger-­ generation audience members? If Yasukuni Shrine (discussed in chapter 1) always integrates its contemporary Japanese visitors into nationalistic remembrance through participation and spectatorship, how can theater, a form cognizant of its effects on its audiences, offer alternatives to Yasukuni’s mnemonic mobilization? Unlike the previous two chapters, which address dominant narratives of the war in contemporary Japan, this chapter explores response-­ability for the elided events and obscured individuals of the Japanese colony in Korea. I focus on Seoul shimin, a four-­play series that holds a central place in Japanese theater. Key to influential playwright-­director Hirata Oriza’s landmark “contemporary colloquial theater” style, Seoul shimin defined the contemporary realistic movement in the 1990s. Hirata has produced it frequently, from the premiere of the first play in the cycle in 1989 until the present. The series does not articulate criticisms about Japan’s imperial expansions but takes an indirect approach, positioning its audience to inquire into events of Japan’s empire. The plays in the series, Seoul shimin (1989), Seoul shimin 1919 (2000), Seoul shimin 1929: The Graffiti (2006), and Seoul shimin 1939: The Contrapuntal Music of Love (2011) (hereafter referred to as 1909, 1919, 1929, and 1939), span the twentieth-­century history of Japan’s colonization of the Korean Peninsula.3 Each play, however, leaves historical events off the stage and instead portrays a day in the life of the Shinozaki family, Japanese stationery merchants living in Seoul. Characters converse about everyday issues—­school, meals, work, and love interests. Seoul shimin summons people and behaviors from the colony to rethink activities that have not been traditionally identified as significant factors in the Asia-­Pacific War. The setting of Hirata’s series, the Japanese colony in Korea (1910–­45), played a major role in the war’s invisible infrastructure and citizen involvement. Japan’s early colonial acquisitions, Taiwan and

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Korea, fueled Japan’s expansion and motivated future war efforts. Policies of assimilation resulted in the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of Koreans as laborers and, later, soldiers, who traveled to Japan for work and, as the empire grew, to the far reaches of Japan’s occupied territories.4 In parallel, the Korean colony required Japanese civilian participation in imperialism; businessmen settled on the Korean Peninsula, and in Japan civilian groups actively encouraged more to move abroad.5 By the end of the war, almost everyone was involved in what Louise Young describes as Japan’s “total empire,” the nation’s war efforts intertwined with its empire building.6 However, dominant narratives in the postwar period elided civilian support of Japan’s colonial expansion. Contemporary historical representations of the colony emphasize primarily the Japanese military and bureaucracy.7 As a result, many current discourses continue the narrative created during the IMTFE, limiting responsibility for Japanese imperialism to a small group of officials. As I argue, the Noh waki can elucidate the ways in which Seoul shimin positions its audience to inquire into Japan’s colonial history. According to Yasuda Noboru, the waki is more than a supporting role; instead, the waki serves as a bridge that facilitates the appearance of the shite and the revelation of the shite’s story.8 While the waki is central to Noh’s dramaturgy, this role does not appear in contemporary theater forms, leaving Tawada Yōko to lament that Noh is one of the few places in the modern world in which a person can listen to the dead.9 Without the waki, who is to listen to, and potentially relieve, the experiences of those long passed? I explore how the Seoul shimin series, instead of putting a waki onstage, positions its audience as waki to not only be response-­able to the Shinozaki family but, further, to events and people that do not appear. Theories of ghosting in the theater elaborate on Seoul shimin’s emphasis on what it leaves offstage. Herbert Blau defines ghosting as a “process” of meaning making beyond what appears onstage: “Theatre is hollow at the core,” “until its signs” “are retrieved by reflection.”10 When the total theater mechanism of ghosting points to what is beyond the stage, it elicits additional inquiries, meanings, and associations from audience members.11 By identifying ghosting in Seoul shimin on levels of plot, staging, and historical background, elisions about the Korean colony become invitations for audience participation. Analyzing the 2011 remounting of the entire series in Tokyo, I continue to evaluate the relationship between transgenerational remembrance and artistic representation—­when younger generations are separated from past events, how must theater and performance forms change to adjust to this vast spatial and temporal distance? As I explore, Seoul shimin develops audience response-­ability through indirect and subtle cues. The series calls attention to gaps in information about the colony while it gestures toward its civilian support. Seoul shimin creates a bridge between audiences and the colony when the series highlights the imperial effects of domestic activities,

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and it challenges contemporary historical understandings of the colony. In so doing, Seoul shimin insists that audience members are involved in Japan’s imperial history, response-­able to it, despite apparent lack of connections or knowledge.

Series Synopsis This chapter discusses Hirata’s cycle of four plays in its entirety.12 For readers unfamiliar with Seoul shimin, I provide a brief synopsis of these works as follows: 1909: A day in the life of the Shinozakis several months before Japan formally annexes the Korean Peninsula in 1910. Sōichirō, the family patriarch, completes a business deal with his neighbors, the Hottas. A magician, attempting to meet one of Sōichirō’s stationery shop workers, disappears from the bathroom. Sōichirō’s brother, Shinji, meets with an associate, who gives him false papers to enter Russia. Sōichirō’s children, Ken’ichi, Aiko, and Yukiko, return from school, and Ken’ichi slips out to elope with one of the family’s Korean maids, Toshiko. The play ends when the family sits down for lunch and discovers him missing. 1919: On the day of the March 1 Korean Independence Movement, Ken’ichi is now head of the household, married to a Japanese woman; Aiko, now married, lives in Japan; and Yukiko’s newly divorced status concerns many in the family. Throughout the play, family members mention the growing crowds of Koreans outside but remain puzzled as to why they are there. The family’s Korean maids, Mioku and Kanrei, leave the house to participate in the protests. The Shinozakis host a sumo wrestler from Japan, but he slips out. The play ends with the Shinozaki family gathered around Yukiko and her teacher, Shimano, playing the organ, unaware of the events outside their home. 1929: On the day of the U.S. stock market crash, Ken’ichi’s grown children, Shin’ichi, Sumiko, Kiyoko, and Yoshiko, begin to take over the family business with Sumiko’s fiancé, a wealthy Japanese businessman, Sōgorō, tentatively in charge. The economy in Korea is stagnant, and characters look to Manchuria for future prospects. The family spends the day preparing for Shin’ichi’s return from a stay in a mental hospital. A nurse arrives to take care of him, and when another nurse appears, family members cannot tell who is the real nurse and who is the imposter. The play ends with the events leading up to the stock market crash: Sōgorō receives a phone call from his

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company that the London market has opened to mass selling, and he tells his workers to buy. 1939: During the Japanese military escalation in the Asia-­Pacific War, the stage is filled with care packages for soldiers. Sumiko is married to Teruo, a different man from her fiancé in 1929. Newly returned from the front, Teruo has become bitter; he refuses to be involved in the Shinozaki business. The family hosts members of the Hitler Youth Group, but the play quickly suggests the youth may be imposters. One of the family’s former student boarders visits before leaving to fight in the war; the family, thinking he is interested in one of the maids, attempts to leave the two alone together. Sumiko and Teruo, after avoiding each other for most of the play, end the play in tense conversation, the status of their marriage uncertain.

Hirata’s Contemporary Colloquial Style On the surface, the Seoul shimin series seems to reflect an increasingly unengaged, apathetic public—­despite its historical setting, it privileges everyday dialogue, domestic matters, and personal conflicts. The series and its playwright have been criticized for such a lack of direct address. However, when contextualized in experimental postwar Japanese theater, Seoul shimin reveals a debt to theater artists who merged content, political activism, and staging choices. By understanding the series within this history, I assert the need to investigate Seoul shimin’s naturalistic style alongside its content. And I use ghosting to describe how the series marks what it leaves off the stage—­ Japan’s colonial past. In parallel to the developing postwar avant-­garde theater movements in Europe and the United States, 1960s Japan witnessed a blossoming of theatrical experimentation in the angura (underground) theater movement. While angura describes a diverse, and largely unaffiliated, group of artists, including Kara Jurō, Satō Makoto, and Terayama Shūji, these playwright-­directors created work that responded to ongoing political and social turmoil in the 1960s.13 The decade started with nationwide protests against the renewal of the U.S.-­Japan Security Treaty (Anpo Jōyaku, known as Anpo). Established in 1951 during the U.S. Occupation, the treaty granted U.S. military access to Japanese land, sea, and airspace in exchange for contributing to the country’s defense. In May 1960, Japanese prime minister Kishi Nobusuke pushed the treaty’s renewal through the Japanese legislature, prompting hundreds of thousands of citizens to take to the streets in protest.14 Many future angura artists, college students at the time, participated in the protests and were greatly disappointed when, despite overwhelming public opposition, the treaty was automatically ratified in June 1960.

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For these theater artists, the Anpo protests and their inability to effect change made clear the failure of the established theater form shingeki (new drama) and its political leanings. Shingeki, influenced by the introduction of Western realism to Japan in the early twentieth century, bridged the difficult years before and after the war, emerging as a popular-­theater form in the postwar period.15 Shingeki promoted a style of realism based in part on Marxist values. But as Brian Powell argues, the political engagement of shingeki-­theater artists reinforced “an old style of politics and a longstanding political system that was soon to be rejected by the youth in Japan.”16 The renewal of Anpo reaffirmed the disparity between shingeki’s Marxist message and its lack of political influence.17 In response to shingeki, angura combined performance style, activism, and political criticism. Angura performances in the 1960s and 1970s challenged shingeki’s realistic dramaturgy; artists sought to discover new modes of expression by experimenting with structure, spectacle, and embodiment.18 Instead of Western realism, angura directors took inspiration from the traditional Japanese theater forms of Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki. The content of angura plays explored recent and ongoing political issues, including the U.S. Occupation and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.19 In their experiments, many angura artists revised the role of the audience member from shingeki’s passive observer to active participant.20 While theater artists in the 1960s and 1970s experimented with content and style to stage bold, interactive, and politically charged performances, theater in the 1980s jettisoned political messages in favor of spectacle. The booming Japanese economy of the 1970s and 1980s influenced the style of theater makers and expectations of audiences.21 Artists of the 1980s such as Noda Hideki created increasingly commercial theater based on angura aesthetics without its political commentary, what Peter Eckersall calls “a decoupling of performance from politics, an appropriation of style and its reconstitution as a commodity.”22 Looking inward to ideas of Japaneseness, Noda developed a frenetic performance style that referenced the Japanese popular culture forms manga and anime.23 His work was extremely popular among Japanese youth, regularly selling out venues of more than a thousand seats.24 In the 1990s, Hirata and his contemporaries developed work that broke with Noda’s spectacle. While Hirata (b. 1962) was raised during the successful years of Japan’s postwar economic boom, by the early 1990s, Hirata, now in his thirties, experienced the major upheaval of Japan’s economic downturn and prolonged recession. During this time, Hirata devised a naturalistic style, one he termed gendai kōgo engeki (contemporary colloquial theater). Described by critics as a major contribution to the 1990s shizukana engeki (quiet theater) movement, Hirata’s performances explored quotidian expression through dialogue full of pauses, hushed tones, and interruptions.25 Often performances are set in the home or other unremarkable spaces to feature personal conflict.26 Representative of this emerging theater movement,

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the Seoul shimin plays take place in the Shinozaki family living room with much of the action devoted to quotidian activities. While each play in the series occurs before a major historical event—­the annexation of the Korean Peninsula, the March 1 Korean Independence Movement, the Manchurian Incident, and the escalation of the Asia-­Pacific War—­each focuses on Shinozaki everyday occurrences, leaving any discussion about Japan’s colonial history off the stage. Some Japanese theater critics have suggested that the absence of historical analysis in Hirata’s work reflects political apathy and heightened conservatism in Japan in the 1990s. Uchino Tadashi critiques Hirata’s work as unengaged: “Faced with the making of history, Hirata chooses not to participate in the process and escapes instead into a localized and personalized space of ‘national poetics.’ ”27 “National poetics,” a concept from H. D. Harootunian’s essay on constructions of national identity in postwar Japan, refers to reaffirmations of Japanese uniqueness divorced from the country’s history and, instead, situated in an “endless present.”28 For Uchino, the representational strategy of national poetics “effectively works to deprive cultural production of its critical power.”29 Locating political apathy in what he reads as a lack of historical awareness in Hirata’s plays, Uchino’s critique focuses on the content of Hirata’s work. Similarly, Carol Sorgenfrei asserts that Hirata’s Seoul shimin “fail[s] to confront Japanese responsibility for its imperialistic past,” valuing “stylistic innovation over intellectual rigor.”30 Uchino and Sorgenfrei consequently separate Hirata’s subject matter from his performance style, taking at face value pauses, hushed dialogue, and elided historical analysis in Hirata’s plays. While Uchino and Sorgenfrei read Hirata’s work as apolitical, Hirata’s biography portrays him as internationally inquisitive and politically active. As a youth, Hirata spent several years living outside Japan: at sixteen, he took a bicycle tour to more than twenty countries around the world, and during college he studied abroad in Seoul. After Hirata established his theater company, Seinendan (Youth Group), in 1982, he actively collaborated with artists from East Asia. In 2002 he cowrote Sono kawa o koete, go gatsu (Across That River in May) with South Korean playwright Kim Myung-­Hwa. Hirata continues to create forward-­looking theater with robotics professor Ishiguro Hiroshi; together they have staged multiple productions that integrate robotics technology. Throughout his career, Hirata has expanded theater’s influence to broader realms of Japanese society, including developing workshops about communication now in use in elementary and middle schools. Hirata has also been politically involved on the national level: from 2009 to 2011, when the liberal-­leaning Democratic Party of Japan held majority control over the Japanese diet, Hirata wrote speeches for Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio and served as special cultural adviser to Hatoyama’s successor, Prime Minister Kan Naoto.31 Hirata’s political work, unusual for a Japanese playwright, indexed both the success of his career and his reach beyond the stage.

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Like the angura vanguards before him, Hirata has expressed the desire to move away from shingeki aesthetics to find a unique mode of expression. In particular, Hirata aims to create a hypernaturalistic style that distinguishes itself from the overt political dialogue in shingeki. In his treatise Gendai kōgo engeki no tame ni (For the Purposes of Contemporary Colloquial Theater), Hirata discusses the tendency of modern realism to focus on expressions of “ideology.”32 Instead, questioning what theater should convey, Hirata explains his decision to create a “straightforward” portrayal of life.33 Although his play dialogue seems to lack political commentary, its very focus on the quotidian attempts to intervene in Japanese representational practices: everyday language becomes the medium through which to revise the theater. Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson, and Barbara Hatley briefly identify the political force of Hirata’s prizewinning Tokyo Notes (1994), where “audiences are made complicit in Hirata’s everyday because of its colloquialism.”34 As such, Hirata’s work can be considered not as a break from angura but as an evolution of its politically engaged criticism, one suited to Hirata’s postwar generation, born in the 1960s and 1970s, after the country had mostly recovered from wartime destruction. Central to Hirata’s career, Seoul shimin demonstrates the synthesis of his contemporary colloquial theater, quotidian dialogue, and representation of history. Hirata’s year abroad in South Korea provided the inspiration for developing his style; there he “began thinking about the unique character of the Japanese language and . . . why the language of Japanese theater became like it is.”35 As Yoshiko Fukushima traces, Hirata wrote and staged three plays about Korea—­The Capital of Light (1987), The Tiger at Han River (1988) and Hwarang (1988)—­where he experimented with style before 1909’s first production in 1989.36 He continued during 1909’s rehearsal process, describing it as focused on a “new methodology” for staging.37 With subsequent sequels premiering throughout Hirata’s career, each addition extended his aesthetic and dramaturgical development. Pace Uchino’s and Sorgenfrei’s criticisms, Hirata’s contemporary colloquial style shapes the unfolding of Japan’s imperial history onstage.

Omissions, Ghosting, and Audience Involvement Although Seoul shimin’s focus on the domestic withholds explicit discussion of historical events, the series frequently highlights what it leaves off the stage. These omissions, understood through the phenomenon of theatrical ghosting, can evoke audience involvement by way of additional associations. Central to writings on ghosting is the creation of meaning between the stage and the audience. For Blau, everything onstage refers to a past version: “No sound is purely made, no gesture in absentia from time, no image without memory, not a particle of behavior in a state of nature.”38 Following in part from Blau, Alice

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Rayner describes her experiences with ghosting when watching a production of Waiting for Godot.39 The Irish actors prompted associations beyond the content of the play: “The processes of imitation that produced those particular voices, with their specific timbres, rhythms, tones, and accents, combined with the words of the text, evoked more than what was manifest, in the same way a dream image will evoke latent associations.”40 Applying Blau and Rayner to Seoul shimin, the series points to its historical setting via exclusions and excesses. Ghosting thus describes how the series evokes significance for its audience, engaging reflection in matters beyond the stage. Before I connect Seoul shimin’s ghosting and audience response-­ability to Japan’s imperial history, I locate it on multiple levels in the series. Hirata builds his series around lacunae to leave major plot points unresolved, construct gaps in character stories, and raise unanswered questions throughout the series. For example, 1909 minimizes the play’s main plot of Ken’ichi’s running away with the Korean maid Toshiko. The play devotes three brief moments to their romance: the pair exchange a look when Toshiko tidies up; Toshiko tries to sneak out of the house but is prevented by her Japanese supervisor (she later leaves unnoticed); and Ken’ichi’s family learns of his plans when they discover his farewell letter. The two earlier moments disappear into the fabric of quotidian dialogue, with only the third revealing their significance. Because 1909 ends when the family discovers that Ken’ichi is missing and 1919 begins with Ken’ichi as the head of the household, married to a Japanese woman, Toshiko remains a specter in 1919—­except for a brief reference to Ken’ichi’s affair in 1929, the rest of the series does not mention her after 1909 and never by name. Seoul shimin leaves it to the audience to make associations among the reappeared Ken’ichi, his new Japanese wife, and his past Korean girlfriend. Because Hirata premieres each sequel in repertory with previous plays, these elisions become more pronounced with each successive play.41 While Hirata asserts that his contemporary colloquial theater style reconstructs “an objective sense of time as it is lived,” his staging, meticulously set in scripts and rehearsals, highlights what the audience cannot see or hear.42 Actors speak in hushed dialogue, turn their backs to the audience, overlap conversations, and take frequent pauses.43 Hirata marks these staging choices as important when he builds them into scripts, notating simultaneous conversations and interruptions. Softly spoken and concurrent lines cause audience members to miss parts of the dialogue. Other staging choices move audience attention offstage. Seoul shimin calls attention to what audience members cannot see when, in each play, characters exit to continue domestic activities, leaving the stage completely empty.44 Throughout, the series builds interest in unseen occurrences in the world of Seoul, established in 1909 in moments when Shinji tells his associate about their neighbor who owns a monkey, asking if she saw it on her way in.45 In parallel, casting choices evoke meanings that the dialogue leaves unarticulated. In Seinendan’s 2011 production of the entire four-­ play series,

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Hirata cast actors in different roles across multiple plays. While this doubling was made necessary by financial and personnel considerations, it prompted audience reflection on connections between roles since, as Marvin Carlson asserts, audience members “carry some memory of . . . actors from production to production.”46 For example, Yamauchi Kenji played Shinji in 1909 and Shinji’s nephew, Ken’ichi, in 1919. Of note, as indicated in the series’s doubling of Yamauchi in 1909 and 1919, many of the actors in the 2011 production appeared in either early plays or later plays; it was rare to see an actor, for instance, in 1909 and 1939. This doubling, especially for an audience member viewing the series in chronological order, further emphasizes actors’ reappearances and impresses traits of one character onto the other. In 1919, Ken’ichi’s reliability as the rising head of the family is undermined insofar as it is shadowed by the restlessness of Shinji in 1909. Marked omissions in Seoul shimin on levels of dramaturgy, staging, and production choices establish a mode of viewing the series—­when watching Seoul shimin, audience members must decipher dialogue by picking lines out of multiple conversations that occur at the same time and put together loose threads in conversation, plot, and referenced offstage events. On the one hand, this audience involvement parallels Rayner’s own experience of watching Waiting for Godot. On the other hand, Seoul shimin diverges from Blau’s and Rayner’s ghosting: it applies its associative viewing to the understanding of Japan’s colonial history. This divergence, as I explore, establishes audience response-­ability not only to the Shinozaki family but also to the country’s colonial past. While Seoul shimin does not directly confront audience members with information about Japan’s colony in Korea, it references people, behaviors, and events that prompt further reflection and inquiry. Read through the opening of Matsukaze, Seoul shimin’s ghosting presents a number of pine trees and leaves it up to the audience to figure them out. In what follows, I explore how Seoul shimin develops audience response-­ ability to events in the colonial past and to the historical representation of the colony in the present.

Hidden Malignancies of Imperialism How do omissions become fodder for audience response-­ability? In Seoul shimin’s focus on the home, the series broadens complicity for the colony when it encourages audience associations between the quotidian and imperial. Seoul shimin’s domestic setting evokes previously obscured dynamics of imperialism, making visible networks of power, sites of subjugation, and performative behaviors of colonization. When Seoul shimin reveals Shinozaki behaviors to be subtle vehicles that construct empire, the series extends imperial actions to everyday activities. Seoul shimin thus implies that everyone may be connected to the colony, whether or not they have or even know their

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family histories, to make clear the ethical imperative of audience response-­ ability to the colonial past. The Shinozakis themselves hold an ambiguous position in the colony. Private citizens, the Shinozaki family migrated to Seoul for personal financial gain. In its very title, the series distinguishes the family from official institutions of empire. While Seinendan’s promotional materials use the English translation “Citizens of Seoul,” the characters that make up shimin betray the Shinozakis’ lack of attachment to official national or military realms.47 Written using the characters 市 (city) and 民 (subject), shimin refers to inhabitants of a city. This term is a stark contrast to kokumin, the common word for “citizen,” written with 国 (country) and 民 (subject). As Simon Avenell describes, “being part of the kokumin . . . is to proclaim one’s citizenship in the Japanese nation and, hence, involvement or complicity in the policies of the Japanese state.”48 The term shimin describes the position of the Shinozaki family, separate from nation as civilian stationery merchants.49 Despite being shimin, residents of the city, however, the Shinozakis remain unconnected from Seoul, a distance the series establishes in its opening lines. Sōichirō’s brother, Shinji, born and raised in Seoul, asks the family’s Japanese handyman if “Korean people eat octopus,” revealing his perspective as that of a distanced observer.50 Despite this surface separation between the individual and state, the colonial settler, underrepresented in historical portrayals, was, in Jun Uchida’s terms, a “broker of empire,” a key player who “mediated Japan’s rise as a modernizing nation and empire.”51 It was the settler, more often than the soldier, who interacted with Korean colonial subjects, living side by side with them in the cities of Seoul and Busan.52 In Seoul shimin, Shinozaki family history parallels that of modern Japan’s involvement in Korea. Japan formally established trade relations with Korea in 1876, and the Shinozaki family set up their business on the peninsula only three years later.53 Despite this sustained involvement, however, after the Asia-­Pacific War, hardships in Japan overshadowed settler experiences. As Lori Watt discusses, when these civilians returned to Japan after the war, their time abroad caused them to be cast as a foil for Japanese who survived in the metropole.54 Creating differences between repatriate and Japanese at home further displaced general responsibility for the past colonial project. While Seoul shimin’s title illustrates the ambiguous relationship between the Shinozakis and the nation, the series portrays the home as the place where colonial settlers advance Japan’s imperial project. Set in the Shinozaki living room, Seoul shimin frames the colony through the home. The play 1909 establishes the domestic focus of the series when the Shinozakis debate the impending annexation with the Hottas, neighbors and fellow colonial settlers. Family heads sit around the dining room table and hypothesize as to when Itō Hirobumi, Japan’s resident general of Korea, will return from his trip to Manchuria. Itō’s assassination by the Korean An Jung-­geun in

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October 1909 prompted Japan to formally annex the peninsula.55 When the Hottas bring up Itō’s travels, however, domestic matters frequently interrupt discussion: Ken’ichi, Sōichirō’s eldest son, returns home from school, and the domestic staff ask him what he would like to drink.56 The Hottas never get past their initial comments about Itō, reflecting the way in which the impending annexation becomes no more than a mention within everyday discussion. With the home as its only location, Seoul shimin evokes imperial capital and labor through everyday activities. Highlighting the interconnectedness of private enterprise and imperial expansion, the series stages mundane trans­actions. In the same discussion about Itō in 1909, the Hottas, print merchants, purchase colored pencils from the Shinozakis.57 This small deal, made at the dining room table, connects business with the focal point of Shinozaki daily activities. The Shinozaki domestic staff display mechanisms of imperial labor. In every play in the series, the Shinozakis employ Japanese and Korean maids. The distinction between the two highlights hierarchies of empire: the Japanese maids hold supervisory positions over their Korean counterparts. Because the only business portrayed on the eve of Japan’s annexation of Korea features office supplies and the only colonial laborers are maids, the series connotes that settlers built the colony on small business interactions and domestic labor relations rather than on military power.58 Yet because the series does not call overt attention to the imperial dynamics of these activities, it illustrates how the empire secrets itself in the banality of capital. With its focus on the home, Seoul shimin situates everyday domestic behaviors as activities that manifest imperial power. Historians have long established the connection between home and empire in settler colonialism. Writing about the Victorian empire, Anne McClintock describes the domestic realm as not just a “space (a geographic and architectural alignment)” but also “a social relation to power,” involving “processes of social metamorphosis and political subjection.”59 Similarly, Jordan Sand elaborates on the political potential of the domestic in Meiji Japan (1868–­1912) when he connects “the modern imagining of domestic space” with the production of citizens.60 In this light, the word shimin in the series title takes on a double meaning. After the 1960 Anpo protests, the term began to refer to politically active individuals. So while shimin suggests the Shinozakis’ position of remove, it can also refer to their potential to participate in the colony. Imperial dynamics manifest in Shinozaki everyday activities on multiple levels, including those as basic as the language spoken in the home. In the Japanese colony, language learning was part of the colonial assimilation policy known as dōka (literally, “to make the same”). Historian Mark Peattie describes the philosophy behind dōka: Japan’s colonial subjects could be transformed “into diligent, loyal, law-­abiding ‘imperial peoples’ (kōmin), imbued with the same values, bearing the same responsibilities, and sharing the same life-­styles of Japanese.”61 The play 1909 illustrates how the domestic sphere deploys dōka, first calling attention to language learning when the Hottas comment

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on Toshiko’s excellent Japanese.62 Later, the play subtly reveals that Japanese is an employment requirement when Ken’ichi gives the family’s Korean maids permission to speak their native language.63 In this moment, the series shows that dōka, despite its assertion of sameness between Japanese and Koreans, continually distinguishes between colonizers and colonized.64 Further, Seoul shimin calls attention to the performative dimensions of dōka. The play 1929 connects everyday patterns of speech with potentially transformative acts of citizenship when Sōichirō’s daughter Aiko attempts to teach the Korean student Lee Saigen how to say “five yen fifty sen” (go en gojū sen).65 Lee has passed the exam to become a colonial bureaucrat, suggesting that his Japanese is excellent. Aiko, however, demands Lee perform “five yen fifty sen,” her reasoning that he needs to master the phrase to avoid danger after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. Aiko explains to Lee that she was in Tokyo during the earthquake’s violent aftermath. She does not explain, however, the details of the violence: Japanese vigilante groups, fearful of unrest from Korean or Chinese immigrants, asked those who did not appear to be Japanese to say simple Japanese phrases. If said “incorrectly,” the vigilantes would beat the “foreigners” to death, resulting in a massacre that claimed more than three thousand lives.66 Aiko’s lines reference dangers associated with incorrectly performing Japaneseness, while obfuscating any discussion of the Great Kanto Earthquake or its subsequent mob violence. While there is no apparent danger—­the scene occurs in Seoul six years after the earthquake—­Aiko asks Lee to repeat “five yen fifty sen” after her several times. She asserts her own citizenship as the person who can teach Japanese pronunciation and demands a performance from a Korean colonial subject. This brief moment points to the menace in everyday encounters when Lee, despite his fluency, complies with Aiko’s requests. While many of the colonizing behaviors in Seoul shimin are subtle, the series punctuates quotidian dialogue with overt comments that express Japanese prejudice. In 1909, a young Aiko voices negative Japanese attitudes about Koreans when discussing literature with the family’s Japanese and Korean domestic staff. Exhibiting arrogance reflective of her teenage years, Aiko tells the staff, “Though I know only a few greetings in Korean, it does not sound suited for literature.”67 She hopes that the annexation happens soon, so that, as new Japanese subjects, the Korean people can finally have a literature.68 Comments like Aiko’s serve to halt the audience’s enjoyment of the production, disrupting the ease of the portrayal in the series of the everyday.69 As Fukushima asserts, moments of racism in Seoul shimin impede any feelings of nostalgia that contemporary Japanese audience members may have toward the colony.70 In addition, through expressions of prejudice in the home, the series calls attention to more subtle behaviors. Aiko’s comments about Korean literature serve as reminders of the dynamics underlying everyday exchange when Toshiko listens silently to Aiko’s negative comments about her native language. Over the course of the series, the plays

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trace ingrained attitudes between colonizer and colonized, referencing the ways in which they and their resulting behaviors transfer from generation to generation. Uchida discusses how these dynamics were learned: “It was in the comfort of home that Japanese children came to be embedded in asymmetrical relations of power.”71 The plays of Seoul shimin, each set ten years apart, similarly follow the development of Shinozaki attitudes toward Korean colonial subjects. From 1909 to 1939, the distance grows between the Shinozakis and their Korean staff. In contrast to Ken’ichi’s relationship with Toshiko in 1909, there are no dalliances between the Shinozakis and Koreans in 1929 or 1939. The series replaces the messiness of Ken’ichi’s affair with a love story between a Korean maid and former Korean student boarder in 1939. As the series progress, it exposes how the quotidian mechanisms of imperialism become invisible. The play 1909 begins with the Shinozaki Korean staff already answering to new, Japanese names. When Sōichirō explains to the Hottas how he selected Toshiko’s name, choosing one that could be read in Japanese and Korean, the play alerts the audience to this act of renaming.72 Yet the audience never hears the Korean name given to Toshiko by her parents. At the beginning of 1909, Toshiko’s Korean identity has already been replaced with a Japanese one. The act of renaming domestic help within the settler home parallels the renaming of Korean cities, which is subtly revealed throughout the series. In 1909 characters call their city of residence Seoul, but in later plays they more frequently refer to the city as Keijō, Seoul’s new name in the Japanese empire. Seoul shimin thus casts light on the ease with which imperial, assimilation practices occur through habit. Toshiko blends into her Japanese name and speaks excellent Japanese just as Keijō quietly replaces Seoul as the series progresses. Since Hirata always stages previous plays when premiering a new play in the series, each addition thus further marks the development of imperial attitudes in the Shinozakis. Read with reference to ghosting, Seoul shimin’s domestic setting exposes the unseen imperial-­power dynamics behind quotidian practices via oblique references, implicit connections, and unstaged violence. In this way, the series makes the Japanese colony more accessible and relevant for the general Japanese public. While memories of military force and the bureaucracy of Japan’s colonial project often overshadow what appears to be everyday banality, Seoul shimin demonstrates that the domestic is anything but benign. By staging everyday activities and domestic spaces as sites of colonization, the series extends culpability for building empire to the home, connecting quotidian behaviors with imperial actions. Because familiar activities, including discussing literature or drinking tea, are not limited to the colony, Seoul shimin suggests that anyone’s past can contain such malignancy, linking younger generations, regardless of family history, to the empire. When the series expands what can be considered involvement in the empire from military actions and bureaucratic policies to quotidian activities, it insists that response-­ability to such a colonial past should not be similarly bounded.

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Historical Omissions and Audience Response-­ability While Seoul shimin’s setting evokes invisible, colonizing dynamics of the home, its domestic focus leaves major events in the history of Japan’s empire off the stage. These omissions, instead of obscuring the colony, elicit contemplation of its representation in the contemporary period. Here I explore how Seoul shimin’s ghosting involves audience members in constructing and interpreting the past. While information about Japan’s colonial history seems absent from Seoul shimin, the series makes pointed references to key events. These references mark what does not appear onstage, establishing a historiography based on what is unseen and, ultimately, unknown. Turning historical events over to audience interpretation and analysis, Seoul shimin’s series develops the audience’s role as response-­able, following the waki, to inquire not only into the imperial past but also into its representation in the present. The program materials for the 2011 production foreground questions of historical representation. Each audience member received a timeline of the “Related Events for the Seoul shimin Five-­Play Series Performance” covering events from the opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 to the end of the Asia-­Pacific War in 1945. The timeline lists major events in the empire and war, including the annexation of the Korean Peninsula, the Manchurian Incident, and the Pearl Harbor attack. When asked about this timeline, Hirata claimed he included it because Japanese schools do not cover this history in detail, leaving younger generations with gaps of knowledge about Japan’s war past.73 What the timeline does, however, is point out an audience member’s lack of knowledge more than provide her with information. It is sparse and without historical analysis, so it does not help an audience member who is completely unaware of Japan’s imperial expansion. Further, by marking the grand sweep of the modern Japanese empire, the timeline reflects traditional discourses of history that organize the past according to important political and military events. In contrast, Seoul shimin takes a completely different route, casting major historical events as uncertain and inaccessible. To unpack the significance of the oblique allusions to historical events in the series, I turn to its portrayal of the March 1 Korean Independence Movement in 1919. On this day, representatives of the movement read their declaration of independence out loud in Seoul’s Pagoda Park, prompting large-­scale demonstrations in cities throughout the Korean Peninsula.74 Japanese colonial forces responded violently, killing more than seven thousand protestors and injuring fifteen thousand.75 The March 1 Independence Movement and its subsequent suppression can be considered the most significant omissions of violence against Koreans in Hirata’s series.76 In Seoul shimin’s representation of this event, however, history emerges as full of gaps but necessary in which to engage. Despite taking place on the day of the March 1 protests, 1919 leaves historical details and analysis off the stage.77 Instead, 1919 follows a day in the

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life of the Shinozaki family. The Shinozakis remain within their cocoon of the home, unaware of the growing political unrest around them. Dialogue about everyday issues displaces the looming event. Family members discuss concerns over Yukiko’s plans for a second marriage, catch up with fellow colonial settlers, and host a sumo wrestler from Japan. The protests affect the play plot only when the family’s two Korean maids, left alone onstage, discuss joining the protest and eventually slip out, leaving the Shinozakis unsure of their whereabouts. Like the other plays in the series, 1919 subtly calls attention to the important role of Korean labor in building the colony; Shinozaki family members scramble to reorganize the division of household duties, with Japanese domestic workers taking on more responsibilities. But because the play ends before the protests begin, the violence against the Korean protestors at the hands of Japanese colonial officials remains off the stage. The play makes repeated, yet subtle, references to the protests. Throughout, tension builds as family members report seeing growing crowds of Koreans outside. When characters return from running errands, they mischaracterize the protests, hypothesizing that there must be a Korean spring matsuri (festival) going on. At other moments, characters bring up Korean independence, but their discussion does not go anywhere. In one scene, one of the family’s student boarders hands Ken’ichi a flyer he has found, but 1919 emphasizes the Shinozakis’ ignorance of Korean culture when no one can read the Korean hangul text. The family members, able to read only the kanji characters associated with the call for independence, are unsure whether the flyer takes a position for or against independence from Japan.78 These scenes in the play do not result in additional information; audience members ignorant of the event will be lost. Rather, they demonstrate the ghosting in the series: they direct audience attention to offstage events. The vague allusions in 1919 to protests position audience members in parallel to the Shinozakis. Along with the Shinozakis, audience members attempt to decipher what is happening outside the Shinozaki home, and some audience members, as with the Shinozakis, may be completely uninformed about the Korean Independence Movement. As critic Maruta Shingo asserts, the play creates unease as it confronts audience members with their own knowledge, precisely by not portraying March 1 onstage.79 The final scene of 1919 charges the ignorant Shinozakis as complicit in the event. Family members wait for lunch and listen to youngest daughter, Yukiko, play the organ. In the play’s final moments, the family sings a parody of the popular song “Tokyo Season.” Although the original song lists the famous sites of Tokyo, the Shinozaki version describes the important places in Seoul.80 An informed audience member knows that the protests will start soon, transforming locations in the song into sites of violence and oppression. The ending is pointed in its criticism. First, it contradicts any assumption that the Shinozaki family, in its remove, is innocent. Gathered around Yukiko, they instead appear callous, unconcerned about their missing Korean maids.

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In addition, the fact that the Shinozakis—­third-­generation colonial settlers living in Seoul—­believe that Koreans may be gathering for a matsuri suggests that they are out of touch with their general surroundings. They are sufficiently ignorant of the lives of Koreans that they do not know whether the events of that day are usual or not. The ending of 1919 portrays the Shinozakis’ ignorance as malignant, long-­standing, and systemic. At the same time this final scene criticizes the audience’s own impartial knowledge and viewing experience. Indeed, the judgment on contemporary audiences could be considered more scathing: even more so than the Shinozakis, present-­day spectators should know what happened. The play’s treatment of the March 1 protests challenges the audience’s lack of knowledge of the past. It asks, if the audience is unengaged or uninformed, are they as unfeeling as the Shinozakis at the end of the play? While Hirata’s colloquial style makes Seoul shimin an entertaining series to watch, punctuating the dialogue with jokes that elicit audience laughter, 1919’s ending disrupts this enjoyment. The violence to come, continually evoked yet omitted, builds tension in the final scene. Yukiko’s organ playing seems frantic; the song’s upbeat melody creates a sense of unease about passively watching the play. The ending forces spectators to consider how they reconcile their knowledge of the event with the enjoyment experienced during the performance. Later plays similarly reflect on the processes of generational forgetting and condemn omissions in historical narratives. Despite 1919’s cliff-­hanger ending, 1929 opens with no mention of the events of March 1. The play makes clear the erasures of history when it leaves the protests and their aftermath entirely off the stage. The play 1939 recalls the March 1 Independence Movement when Sumiko, Ken’ichi’s eldest daughter, discusses the protests with the family’s Japanese maid. The maid’s father, another Japanese colonial settler, died working as a policeman during the protests. Sumiko mentions his death, but characters limit their brief discussion to the maid’s family tragedy, and Sumiko does not press the maid for details about her painful past.81 The scene does not expand on the events in 1919; instead, everyday pleasantries elide details of the March 1 protests to illustrate how the history of violence disappears from one generation to the next. Reading the Shinozakis as parallel figures to audience members, Seoul shimin highlights transgenerational forgetting, calling attention to the ellipses in personal histories. Seoul shimin’s domestic setting, coupled with its portrayal of everyday activities as colonizing behaviors, creates opportunities for audience members to contemplate their own family histories. Tracing family drama and historical events from 1909 to 1939, Seoul shimin suggests that contemporary gaps in the knowledge of the past do not indicate absence of involvement or violence. Rather, as in 1929 and 1939, omissions in historical narratives point to ways in which the past has been elided and obscured. If the timeline presented to audiences reflects a traditional view of history, one where important political, economic, and social events define the past, Seoul

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shimin illustrates that this history is full of omissions, misunderstandings, and disappearances. As the series progresses, the past continues to recede further. In 1929, for example, Ken’ichi’s children discuss how their father ran away with a Korean maid in 1909, but they seem unfamiliar with the circumstances that brought him home again. Bereft of discussion or critical consideration, unresolved plots continue to haunt the series, creating a narrative of history where more is unknown than known. Seoul shimin’s ghosting situates audience members in relationship to a past they do not know, referring to offstage events to prompt audience members to ask about and interpret them. Ghosting thus establishes inquiry into the past understood through the waki. The waki, in Matsukaze, passing through the seaside area, asks about and acts on behalf of women he has yet to know to suggest that he is already response-­able to their past. Similarly, Seoul shimin positions the audience as response-­able to the elided and uncertain colonial past. The series provides an alternative to the IMTFE, connecting all audience members, regardless of family relationships, prior knowledge, or available information, to the colony. In portraying representations of history as replicating colonial dynamics, the series makes it even more crucial for contemporary audience members to be response-­able to the past. Throughout Seoul shimin, powerless characters disappear from the Shinozaki household, their presence unacknowledged by family members in later plays. When, in 1939, Sumiko discusses the March 1 protests with her maid, they do not bring up any of the seven thousand Koreans killed during the aftermath of the protest. The 1939 audience never learns about what happened to the Korean workers in 1919 who leave to participate in demonstrations. Along with Ken’ichi’s girlfriend in 1909, Seoul shimin marks the fact that omissions about the past often involve those with the least power—­female colonial subjects.82 In contrast, the series follows characters like the Shinozaki neighbors, the Hottas, over thirty years. The print-­merchant neighbors appear in the periphery in 1909 and 1919; in 1909, the Hottas buy office supplies from the Shinozakis, and in 1919 their daughter takes organ lessons with the Shinozaki daughter Yukiko. In 1929, facing financial difficulties in their printing business, the Hottas leave for Manchuria. Yet unlike the Korean maids who are lost to the past, the Hottas appear again in 1939 when Hotta Yumiko visits the Shinozakis to update them on the family’s success in Manchuria and China. Within the Shinozaki household, the Hottas’ story is allowed to continue, contrasting with the disappearances of other characters in the series. In its different representations of the Korean maids and the Hottas, Seoul shimin portrays ways in which history is biased, suggesting that those in power are remembered. Representations of history are not only shrouded in unknowns but also potentially malignant; contrasting the Korean maids in 1919 with the Hottas, Seoul shimin exposes how contemporary historical narratives can reiterate imperial relations.

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Given the prejudiced nature of representations of the colony, Seoul shimin asserts that regardless of personal connections, response-­ability to the past is critical for contemporary audiences. Without relying on audience members’ family histories, the series expands who can be response-­able: those without a clear connection to wartime events enter into the same interactive relationship with the history of Japan as those whose family members were involved in the military or empire. Seoul shimin also suggests that it is necessary to rethink the contemporary audience member’s relationship to past events. In the Shinozakis’ behavior, even everyday activities can have malignant implications. Throughout, the series does not develop a clear commentary on historical representation. Instead, it favors relating contemporary spectators to what cannot be known. Nonetheless, the series does not demand a particular response from its audience. Audience members are not, for example, encouraged to apologize or publicly condemn their family members for participating in imperial mobilization efforts. The series insists that the audience must engage with this past; it calls out to them, but it does not tell them what to say.

Hirata’s Response-­ability The Seoul shimin series prompts its audience to inquire into and relate to a past to which they may not be connected, but it does not explain what this engagement should be. In Noh, this action is prayer: when the waki in Matsukaze hears about the two fisher girls, he offers to pray for them. Throughout Noh, prayer is critical to the relationship between the living and dead; in other plays, ghosts directly ask the waki to pray for their release from this world. Albeit the series does not fully realize the waki’s actions, Hirata’s production choices, including frequent tours to South Korea, read via the waki’s actions of prayer, enact an obligation to the colonial past. Hirata’s offstage actions reveal another level of response-­ability that suggests the need to revise both theatrical representation and how theater is made to address Japan’s imperial histories in the contemporary period. Hirata’s multiple stagings of the series can be considered part of his response to Japan’s colonial history. Hirata, through his company, Seinendan, has produced plays from the Seoul shimin series multiple times between 1989 and the present. In chapter 2, I discussed repeated productions of The Winds of God as creating a mnemonic process in which younger generations inquire into kamikaze pilots again and again. Similar to The Winds of God, the frequent productions of Seoul shimin reflect the need to return to the issue of the colony. Given the use in the series of the domestic setting to broaden connections between younger-­generation audiences and the empire, productions of Seoul shimin work to maintain civilian colonial involvement as a relevant issue, making the Shinozakis and their imperial behaviors part of contemporary discourses.

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Along with restaging the series in Japan, Hirata, in his tours to South Korea, adjusted the plays and their stagings to counter past manifestations of colonial power. In Seinendan’s 1993 tour to Seoul and Busan, Hirata presented half the performances of 1909 in Japanese and half in Korean. As Hirata writes in Gendai kōgo engeki no tame ni, the project was both personal and time-­consuming. From Hirata’s college year abroad in Seoul, he used his knowledge of Korean to translate the play, and Seinendan actors spent approximately one and a half years studying Korean to be able to convincingly perform in the language. Considering dōka’s forced Japanese-­ language acquisition among the Korean populace, Seinendan’s Korean-­tour preparations represented a reversal of Japanese imperial practices. In its Korean-­language performances, Seoul shimin acknowledged former assimilationist practices and at the same time the difficulty audience members may experience hearing Japanese. The South Korean productions contrast the historical role of performance in the colonial period. Japanese traditional and modern theater productions toured Korea and Manchuria in the 1920s and 1930s.83 Working to disseminate Japanese culture and involve colonial subjects in Japan’s growing empire, these colonial tours positioned, in Jennifer Robertson’s words, “theatre as a technology of Japanese imperialism.”84 Moreover, as Iwabuchi Koichi asserts, the rise of popular-­culture exchange across the region in the contemporary period runs the risk of positioning Japan again as the vanguard in the region, reiterating imperial practices of education and civilization.85 Against the role of culture in colonialism, 1909’s performance in South Korea called attention to past colonial power dynamics. In contrast to colonial-­era tours to the Korean Peninsula that aimed to connect audiences with Japan, Hirata’s language choices for the 1993 tour modified the performance of 1909 itself for former colonial subjects. South Korean audiences responded to the Shinozaki family’s negative comments about Koreans, leading to a reception that was, at times, icy.86 Instead of reading this reception as unsuccessful, however, it illustrates how audiences were able to easily pick up on the mechanisms of imperial power at all levels of the civilian colonial settler household. Along with performing the plays in Korean, Hirata collaborated with South Korean artistic personnel to further adjust performances there. In a 2000 production of 1919 in South Korea, Hirata oversaw changes to the script when South Korean director Lee Yoon-­taek altered characters and content of the play, increasing the number of Korean characters from three in the original to half the cast and emphasizing the idiocy of the Shinozakis.87 Hirata notes that the Korean audience laughed throughout the performance, a marked difference from the more reserved audience reception of 1919 in Japan.88 In contrast to colonial-­era theater tours, Lee’s production divested the Shinozakis of authority and turned them into buffoons. An example of his collaborations with artists from Asia, Hirata’s collaboration with Lee to

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adapt 1919 for South Korean audiences reveals the need for back-­and-­forth in regional culture exchange. Hirata’s efforts insist that Japanese artistic productions be modified to undermine the continued legacies of the Japanese empire. Instead of the waki’s prayers, Hirata’s response-­ability for Japan’s imperial past manifests in staging, production, and collaboration decisions. Korean productions of Seoul shimin highlight the importance of theater’s production processes, where Hirata’s changes to theatrical representation go hand in hand with altering plays for their performance locations based on artistic collaborations. As with Seoul shimin’s portrayal of historical events, Hirata’s efforts are not readily apparent and are not visible when watching the final performance. Like the other elements in Seoul shimin, however, they suggest that an engaged relationship between younger generations and the past events of Japan’s overseas empire may happen off the stage itself. My analysis of Seoul shimin illustrates the need for theatrical style to change to adequately represent the past in the contemporary period. In the 1960s, the first generations of angura theater artists created bold stagings, working to effect change through artistic expression. These artists can be thought of as representative of the generation born during the war, when artists and their audiences had experienced the hardships of the wartime and postwar periods and were eager to make a difference. Events of the war, including the atomic bombings and Japan’s overseas colonies, were fresh in audiences’ minds. In contrast, later generations, without such experiences, were removed from and ignorant of wartime activities. Given diminishing connections to and knowledge of the past in the contemporary period, it is unclear whether overt portrayals are effective in addressing it. Instead of bold, critical theater, the Seoul shimin series presents different ways of relating to Japan’s imperial history to account for generational distance. Set during important moments of Japan’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula, the Seoul shimin series crafts audience response-­ability to the colony. Despite criticisms of Seoul shimin’s domestic setting as a lack of critical engagement in the past, the series omissions, read through theatrical ghosting, emphasize what does not appear onstage. When Seoul shimin’s focus on the domestic depicts everyday behaviors as empire building and challenge audience members’ understanding of Japan’s colonial history, the series positions its audience to enact response-­ability, inquiring into the unknowns of the past. In the next chapter, I continue to examine the workings of contemporary artistic production in confronting obscured events and missing persons. I focus on sexual violence in the Asia-­Pacific War, a topic elided in postwar discourses, and I move from examining the waki as a model for response-­ ability to investigating the power of the shite’s appearance as a ghost onstage.

Chapter 4

Becoming Missing “Comfort Women” Embodiment, History, and Position

the image of Narihira, seeing it, I yearn, ’tis my own self, yet I yearn —­Z eami, Izutsu

Izutsu’s ending is typical of mugen (phantasmal) Noh plays—­the ghost returns to reenact the connection keeping her tied to this world.1 Yet in Izutsu, the subtlety of this climactic moment identifies other representational strategies at work in the ghost’s reappearance: instead of performing a battle scene, the ghost wears her husband’s robe and looks at her costumed reflection in a well. The lines in the epigraph reflect when past and present, absence and presence briefly merge, the ghost mistaking what she sees on the water’s surface for her husband. This quiet moment stages a double embodiment—­the actor becomes the ghost, and the ghost, missing her husband, summons him not by calling out to him or thinking of him fondly but by wearing his clothing. In the play, Ariwara no Narihira is an absent yet influential presence. He never appears onstage, but the ghost still feels his influence. When they were both living, Narihira frequently left his wife to spend time with his mistress. Fearing his wife was also unfaithful, he tries to catch her in the act, only to discover that she waits for him, alone. When the ghost wears her husband’s clothing, embodiment becomes key to remembering her long-­deceased husband; it connects her presence to him to summon him again. Applied to the Asia-­Pacific War, Izutsu identifies the body as a multivalent and dialogic medium for conjuring missing figures. To Izutsu’s embodiment of the dead, the Asia-­Pacific War adds another dimension: those completely absent, ignored during their lives and now elided from the historical past. The fifteen-­year war, fought by and over multiple countries and vast distances, produced countless missing soldiers and civilians.2 In the contemporary period, the “comfort women” from East and Southeast Asia, those forced to be sexual slaves for the Japanese army, have been the most influential and controversial of those missing, at the center of commemorative and historiographical

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debates.3 Remembrance of “comfort women” is shaped by missing and absent bodies, where “missing” or “absent” does not just describe the dead but also includes those whose whereabouts are unknown, either by circumstance or by choice.4 While the total number of “comfort women” is disputed, it is commonly estimated that one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand women were coerced into serving in military brothels.5 After the war’s end, the Japanese military did not provide former “comfort women” with a secure way home—­some were murdered, and some were left behind and still remain abroad.6 Those who were able to return to their home countries were ostracized because of their experiences of sexual violence; social stigma forced former “comfort women” to keep quiet until activism and redress efforts prompted survivor outcry and resultant public testimonies.7 While the reemergence of some “comfort women” played a major role in the escalation of historical revisionist debates in the contemporary period, many remain silent.8 Within this already elided group of “comfort women,” there is another group almost entirely neglected from public discourses—­Japanese “comfort women.” Despite efforts by international groups for reparation and redress from the Japanese government, former Japanese “comfort women” have yet to come forward in significant numbers. As Maki Kimura describes, even during major events, including the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery in Tokyo in 2000, there were no Japanese “comfort women” in attendance.9 The continued absence of Japanese “comfort women” reflects the complexities facing survivors in their own countries and in the international redress community. Japanese “comfort women” have been silenced by social stigma, like their counterparts across Asia, but their ongoing absence can be attributed partially to the conflict between their elevated status during the war and redress narratives of “comfort woman” victimhood. Along with preferential treatment in “comfort stations,” as Kimura explains, because Japanese “comfort women” “were supposed to have worked as prostitutes or to have been sold into prostitution, it was likely that they did not consider themselves as deserving victims.”10 As missing and controversial, the figure of the Japanese “comfort woman” asks how younger generations can be response-­able to those who do not come forward. If younger generations engage in response-­ability, defined by Takahashi Tetsuya as a response to the calls of survivors of Japanese atrocity, how can they respond to those who do not call out? This chapter examines how embodiment in performance can develop response-­ability to this missing figure, while respecting her ambiguity and complexity. I focus on visual and performance artist Shimada Yoshiko and her performance as a Japanese “comfort woman” in the durational piece Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (2012–­15).11 To understand what Shimada elicits, Noh becomes a model for thinking through how the performer’s body conjures absent and multiple figures. In the climactic moment in Izutsu, the appearance of the ghost evokes a number of bodies:

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the actor portrays a ghost, who dresses up as a character who never appears onstage. The longevity of Noh, a form passed down generation to generation, summons others in the actor’s body, including the actor’s many teachers, a lineage that extends back to the founders of Noh, Kan’ami and Zeami. As Rebecca Schneider explains when discussing the ghost in Hamlet, the ghost’s potential to confront the audience with past figures can take on an intersubjective ethical dimension: “That we might meet the eyes of an other—­the eyes of the dead—­in the very wink of the real in one another’s eyes—­now that would surely be syncopated time, not to mention ‘endless trouble.’ ”12 Noh’s staging conventions realize the significance of this “endless trouble,” where the audience not only sees the actor but also encounters many other bodies, living, missing, and dead. In Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman, Shimada’s body conjures multiple figures to develop the individual audience member’s role in transgenerational response-­ability. In her initial performance on a London sidewalk in January 2012 and later in front of major Japanese landmarks, Shimada became a Japanese “comfort woman.” Her appearance referenced the South Korean The Peace Monument, the original 2011 statue of a Korean “comfort woman” in Seoul, and challenged ethical and historiographical debates surrounding “comfort women.” Read via the Noh actor’s body, Shimada evokes a number of bodies to undo any singular understanding of the “comfort woman.” Offering a complex and ambiguous figure, Shimada challenges the audience’s perceptions the missing “comfort woman” and locates audiences in relation to her multivalent body. Shimada’s performance thus tasks audiences to reassess their individual positions in remembrance and response-­ability.

Body, Nation, and History When Shimada’s Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman directly portrays the Japanese “comfort woman,” it enters into the complex battles over “comfort women” remembrance in contemporary Japan. To understand Shimada’s intervention, I elaborate on issues surrounding the “comfort women” in general. I focus in particular on the ways in which the reemergence of the “comfort women” calls attention to complex and troubled relationships between individual and nation. From the origin of the “comfort women” brothel system in 1932 to historiographical debates in contemporary Japan, “comfort women” exemplify how national identities simultaneously construct and are threatened by the female body.13 The Japanese term ianfu (literally, “comfort women”), composed of the characters 慰 (comfort) 安 (peaceful) and 婦 (wife or bride), evokes benign images of relief and solace while it distills women into vehicles for such emotional support. In wartime, the government metaphorically transformed the “comfort

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women” into “gifts” for soldiers, further turning them into commodities when they were listed as “supplies” on ship-­cargo paperwork. This categorization is one of the many reasons why few “official documents” about the “comfort women” remain.14 After the war, “comfort women” bodies become marked by their trauma, stigmatized in their home countries across East and Southeast Asia. As Chungmoo Choi describes, the pain of “comfort women” has been “drowned in a magnified sense of national shame—­particularly because their bodily experiences intersect with the discourse of anticolonial nationalism.”15 These conditions contributed to the widespread silence about “comfort woman” experiences from the end of the war until the late 1980s. After former “comfort women” came forward in the 1990s, the harsh reactions by Japanese conservatives illustrate the stakes of portraying the female body. Fierce debates over the representation, and in particular historicization, of the “comfort women” situate the female body as a threat to the nation to be constantly neutralized. “Comfort woman” survivor outcry also led to efforts, spearheaded by historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki, to locate and publish rare military documents about the government’s involvement in the “comfort women” system, which prompted a public apology from Chief Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei in 1993. In response, conservative politicians, scholars, and public intellectuals, eager to downplay survivor testimonies, fueled a conservative historical revisionist movement aimed at dismissing survivor claims and removing “comfort women” from history textbooks.16 Conservative historical revisionists put forth what appears to be a “historical argument,” demanding official military documents to corroborate survivor testimonies.17 However, these arguments attempt to undermine the legitimacy of survivors, in effect aiming to control them yet again.18 Responses to the “comfort women” outcry reveal issues with representing the female body inherent in traditional historiographies of the Asia-­Pacific War.19 While conservative historical revisionists demand documents that do not exist, early Japanese scholarship aimed to locate documents to disprove historical revisionist arguments. Protest groups, along with scholars, placed oral testimonies as countermemories to written documents. These efforts work to reinforce the importance of written documents, reinscribing divisions between the written and the oral, what Schneider calls the “logic of the archive,” which measures material, occurrence, or event as that to be documented.20 As Kimura discusses, locating testimonies within a framework of “truth” further ignores how testimonies themselves are mediated.21 Conservative and progressive arguments do not account for those missing, unable or unwilling to come forward. This stalemate illustrates what Michel de Certeau describes as the manipulation of the body in the writing of modern Western history, “built upon a division between the body of knowledge that utters a discourse and the mute body that nourishes it.”22 Parallel to historiographical debates, “comfort women” reappearances troubled any neat distinction between national and personal responsibilities.23

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4.1. The Peace Monument (2011) “comfort woman” statue in Seoul, designed by Kim Eun Sung and Kim Seo Kyung, across from the Japanese embassy. Photograph by the author.

Despite Kōno’s public apology in 1993, the Japanese government refused to pay reparations to survivors; instead, the government established the Asian Women’s Fund in 1995, a private endowment supported by citizen donations to be distributed to surviving “comfort women.” “Comfort women” survivors and their supporters dismissed the Asian Women’s Fund as an evasion of responsibility by the government.24 The fund illustrated how “comfort women” survivor redress was not just a problem for the Japanese government. Instead, when it mobilized individual Japanese citizens on behalf of the state, the fund raised the question of the relationship of younger generations to former “comfort women” when the state refuses to take action. Against long-­ standing manipulations of “comfort women,” “comfort women” survivors deploy representations of the female body to intervene in public discourses. At weekly Wednesday protests, overseen by the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Sexual Slavery by Japan, the umbrella organization for women’s groups in South Korea, the presence of former “comfort women” is central. In honor of the group’s one-­thousandth weekly protest in 2011, the Korean Council dedicated a bronze statue at its protest site (fig. 4.1). Reflective of unease provoked by the “comfort woman” body, the statue,

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known as The Peace Monument, has caused Japanese uproar and remains a point of contention between the Japanese and South Korean governments.25 Since 2011, additional statues have been commissioned by municipalities and protest groups around the world, from California (Irvine in 2013 and San Francisco in 2016) to Australia (Sydney in 2016).26 The Peace Monument statue counters the representation of the “comfort women” body in postwar and contemporary discourses. Immediately, the youthfulness of the South Korean “comfort woman” statue contrasts with the image of aging “comfort women.” While former “comfort women” have been central to the protest movement, they were already in their seventies by the time they came forward to disclose their experiences, earning them the nickname halmoni, a Korean term of endearment for grandmother. This term suggests reverence but also, as C. Sarah Soh asserts, arrests them in the public imaginary as old women and erases their sexuality.27 In contrast, the bronze statue’s youthful visage reminds us that when these women were forced to become “comfort women,” they were often as young as fifteen or sixteen.28 The statue functions as an enduring monument, undermining efforts to erase the “comfort women” from historical narratives. During Wednesday demonstrations, former “comfort women” provide an anchor to impassioned pleas to the Japanese government for recognition and reparation. As time goes on, however, there are fewer former “comfort women” present.29 The bronze statue insists that the protests will continue for the foreseeable future. As Elizabeth Son argues in her study of “comfort woman” redressive performances, the statue does not simply present an updated image of the “comfort woman”; rather, it positions bodies around it into relationships of solidarity with the “comfort women.” Using Robin Bernstein’s concept of the “scriptive thing,” Son argues that the statue activates the passerby.30 The young figure sits next to an empty chair that solicits the viewer to sit beside her, as a neighbor, confidante, or conspirer, what Son describes as inviting us “to become part of a chain of co-­presence, insisting that we can keep the issue alive only by literally putting our bodies on the line next to the statue.”31 The statue’s location across the street from the Japanese embassy further situates viewers against the Japanese state, integrating the viewer into the complex conflicts between citizen and state inherent in “comfort women” remembrance.32 The Peace Monument statue indexes state unease surrounding “comfort women” bodies. After the statue was unveiled, the Japanese and South Korean governments immediately became involved: the Japanese government requested its removal, but South Korean officials refused, asserting that it would not intervene in the actions of protestors.33 When I visited the statue in 2013, however, I found a Seoul metropolitan policeman standing beside it; he told me that an officer must always guard the statue from vandalism. Despite publicly distancing itself from the statue, South Korean state institutions provide police manpower to protect it, implicitly casting itself as a (masculine)

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protector to “comfort women.” Japan’s anxiety about the statue appeared in its 2015 agreement with South Korea to apologize and provide financial reparations for former “comfort women.” As part of the multimillion-­dollar settlement, the Japanese government requested the statue’s removal.34 What seems to be a small detail betrays the Japanese government’s fear about the danger the statue poses to national interests. In 2016, when a citizens’ group unveiled another statue across from the Japanese consulate in Busan, the Japanese government reacted by suspending economic talks with South Korea and recalling its diplomats.35 Japanese reactions indicate not only unease about the female body but also the way in which the state will intervene in an attempt to alleviate such anxiety.

Art, Activism, and Encounter Shimada’s activation of the body as political tool must also be contextualized in the work by 1960s Japanese performance groups, which used embodiment to challenge the status quo. Analogous to the activities of 1960s angura theater artists, discussed in the previous chapter, postwar performance art emerged in the lead up to and aftermath of the countrywide protests against the renewal of the U.S.-­Japan Security Treaty (also known as Anpo) in 1960.36 Performance artists worked primarily in collective groups, reflective of their desire to challenge traditional modes of art production in the conservative Japanese art world.37 Beyond unsettling the art world, these collectives created live encounters with the Japanese public to disrupt the comfortable routines of everyday life in Japan’s rapidly developing postwar economy. The changing city in postwar Japan prompted performance a­ rt collectives to engage with the quotidian spaces around them. Describing 1960s Japan as particularly performative, Peter Eckersall proposes an idea of the city as “a theatre of performing bodies, all experimenting, in this case, with experiences of the early decades of post-­war culture in Japan.”38 This performativity resulted in part from the major changes to the cityscape ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, related to which government infrastructure and cleanup campaigns radically shifted the atmosphere of Tokyo. As Yoshikuni Igarashi describes, discourses of the body played an equally important role in the rebuilding of postwar Japan. Central “for the reconfiguration of Japan’s national image,” rigorous advertising campaigns imagined a healthy, athletic body to match the reconstructed Tokyo.39 Against this backdrop, artists responded by inserting their bodies into public spaces to, in the words of William Marotti, “repoliticize daily life through interventionist art practices.”40 In his lengthy study of 1960s performance art, Nikutai no anākizumu (Anarchy of the Body), Kuro Dalaijee places “bodily expression” (shintai hyōgen) as integral to these emerging

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performance art forms.41 Groups like Hi Red Center (1963–­64) left the gallery space to engage with the public, replicating government initiatives in the Cleaning Event (1964). In the group’s final performance, Hi Red Center members cleaned parts of the city, calling attention to civic improvement campaigns. Their timing, after the Olympic Games had opened, made visible these efforts while undermining their efficacy. As illustrated in the Cleaning Event, embodied expressions in public challenged passersby and their implicit acceptance of and participation in postwar Japanese progress. Central to these public engagements was the staged encounter between artist and audience. Miryam Sas, in her study of experimental arts in Japan in the 1960s to 1980s, identifies the importance of the “encounter,” or deai, across artists’ writings. Arts practitioners grappled with “the process that takes place between theatrical audience and theatrical performer, viewer and painting, spectator and screen.”42 The interest in encounter spans performance art to visual art to the theater. Reflective of the disruptive quality of the encounter, Sas ends her exploration with its complex description in Terayama Shūji’s writings, in which “a certain anxiety and discomfort are central . . . nowhere is one truly safe.”43 While the activities of performance art groups faded by the early 1970s, Shimada’s Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman can be read as deploying their strategies of embodiment and encounter.44 As one of the artists who turned to performance in the 1990s as a feminist response to the “comfort women” outcry, Shimada has experimented with a mix of visual art, performance, and public protest throughout her career. Born in 1959 and raised in Tachikawa, a suburb in western Tokyo and home to the former U.S. Tachikawa Air Force Base (in operation 1945 to 1977), Shimada frequently witnessed the uneven gendered dynamics between U.S. military personnel and Japanese women.45 Shimada attended angura performances as a youth and trained initially as a fine artist at Mills College in Oakland, California.46 It was not until the 1990s, after the death of Hirohito, that Shimada learned of the country’s history of sexual slavery during the Asia-­Pacific War.47 Soon after, in her first solo-­performance piece, Comfort Women, Women of Conformity (1994), Shimada read testimonies of former “comfort women.” Her costume, a style of white apron favored by Japanese women during the war, referenced acts of domestic complicity as part of the war effort.48 Although artistic productions of the “comfort women” in Japan have been rare, Shimada returns to the topic to challenge the portrayal of “comfort women” in public discourses.49 Despite her efforts, however, Shimada continues to be ignored by the Japanese art world.50 For Shimada, the subject matter of her work has limited her options as a working artist in Japan, garnering few invitations to participate in group or solo exhibitions, outside of infrequent exhibitions at Ota Fine Arts, the contemporary a­ rt gallery that represents her.51 Shimada’s experiences are the norm—­artists who address controversial topics from the Asia-­Pacific War have experienced censorship

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and what Hiroko Hagiwara describes as “fear of ultranationalist attack.”52 As illustrated by Shimada’s experiences, the art world also manifests continued desires to control the “comfort woman” body, effectively erasing it once again.

Shimada’s Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman In the original Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman, Shimada wore a kimono, covered herself in bronze paint, and sat outside the Japanese embassy in London for several hours in January of 2012 (fig. 4.2). Shimada staged this initial London performance less than one year after The Peace Monument statue had been erected as a reaction to calls on the part of conservative Japanese politicians to remove the statue. Given the politically charged nature surrounding representations of the “comfort women,” Shimada does not simply replicate the representational strategies of 1960s performance artists. Encounter is a critical part of her work, but, as I argue, Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman creates a complex encounter with audience members, best understood by way of Noh’s evocation of multiple figures. Shimada’s performance is both historically pointed, referencing “comfort women” and the response by politicians to them in performance flyers, and it is subtle, open to misinterpretation and pedestrian disregard. Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman was also an informal reentry into art making for Shimada, who, while completing a Ph.D. in art history at Kingston University, had suspended her practice.53 Later in 2012, in response to rising conservatism in Japan, Shimada performed the piece in Japan, in front of the National Diet Building and Yasukuni Shrine.54 In 2015, she returned to the topic to create a video that frames her three performances in London, in front of the Diet, and at Yasukuni; Shimada has exhibited this video, along with performance photographs, in galleries in Japan, the United States, and China. At its center, Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman connects the missing Japanese “comfort woman” to questions of historical representation. Alongside Shimada’s seated figure, Shimada’s friend and fellow performance artist Soni Kum passed out flyers with the headline, “Missing: Where Are the Japanese Comfort Women?”55 Shimada’s flyer text identifies the Japanese “comfort woman” as an absent figure, explaining that while at least 10 percent of “comfort women” were Japanese, “they suffered in silence, and few have talked about their experiences because of social stigma.” With the Japanese “comfort woman,” Shimada’s performance calls attention to the incompleteness of known “comfort women” histories; there are figures elided from historical discourses who might not ever emerge. Shimada’s performance asserts that it is impossible to understand the scope of the “comfort women” system—­those who do not or could not speak outnumber those

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4.2. Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (2012). Photograph by Soni Kum. Copyright © Shimada Yoshiko.

who have come forward. The sheer number of silent women suggests that what is known is strikingly incomplete and biased. At a time when historiographical debates create an unresolvable conflict between survivor testimonies and calls for written documents by conservative historical revisionists, Shimada’s performance piece marks the expressive failure of both. Her performance flyer stands in for written documents. The location of her performance, on a public street, exposed the inability of documents to fully communicate to an audience when not all passersby were able to or interested in receiving a flyer. In addition to her flyer, Shimada tapes over her mouth to make visible the multiple levels of silence surrounding the “comfort women”—­state, social, and self-­imposed. Her taped mouth refers to the dismissal of oral testimonies by historical revisionists and to the absence of Japanese “comfort women” voices in existing testimonies. Undermining written and oral forms of documentation, Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman identifies the very limitations of historicizing the “comfort woman” figure. In contrast to written and oral documentation, Shimada’s living body becomes the vehicle in which to represent the missing “comfort women.”56 Shimada’s body expresses itself unimpeded; not dependent on the flyer or

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spoken testimony from Shimada, her body is the most visible, accessible to all and seen from far away.57 Shimada’s body results in a different outcome from that of written documents or oral testimonies. Shimada’s act of becoming does not offer new or alternative historical narratives. Rather, her appearance relates the viewer to the missing “comfort women,” effectively complicating relationships of the contemporary individual to personal and national histories.

Becoming the Missing Applying Noh’s staging of the ghost to Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman reveals how Shimada’s embodied performance relates to her viewers. As Kunio Komparu explains, Noh’s interactions between the shite, waki, and audience “brin[g] about a very sophisticated self-­ other relationship” “long before any scholarly discussion of such concepts.”58 The Noh actor onstage confronts us with a host of bodies, living and dead, including the actor himself, spectral characters in the play, and long-­deceased teachers who developed the form. The simultaneity of these multiple figures extends and develops Joseph Roach’s surrogation, where a performance exhibits “various candidates in different situations.”59 When Shimada portrays the elided Japanese “comfort women,” her body evokes a number of bodies, living, missing, and dead, from The Peace Monument to the Japanese “comfort woman” to Shimada’s own body. These work together to create an interactive yet subtle and ambiguous experience for the viewer. The performance’s title acknowledges the complexity of Shimada’s embodiment, situated in representational and transgenerational entanglements. Shimada does not simply “become” a Japanese “comfort woman”; rather, “becoming a statue of a Japanese comfort woman” qualifies Shimada’s efforts as mediated through representation. Her title, on the one hand, indicates that Shimada cannot completely recover the “comfort women”; because Japanese “comfort women” remain silent, Shimada has no living model to replicate. Shimada, the younger-­generation artist left to grapple with their absence, can only “become” a “statue.” The role that Shimada embodies, on the other hand—­the Japanese “comfort woman”—­is complex in its ambiguity. The Japanese “comfort woman” is left out of protest discourses in part because her potential wartime complicity excludes her from generalized narratives of “comfort women” victimhood. Shimada’s use of “becoming” thus calls attention to conservative historical revisionist dismissals of “comfort women” and the protest movement’s image of the “comfort woman” as aggrieved party. The body in Noh asks us to think about how the visibility of Shimada’s own body intervenes in representational practices. Noh staging conventions do not obscure the body—­the mask does not cover the actor’s entire face,

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and, when playing a female character, the actor does not alter his voice, so the actor’s visible face and audible voice are a constant reminder that an actor plays the ghost. Applied to Shimada, her own body contributes to the significance of her piece, insisting that the “comfort woman” issue is an ongoing one. Shimada’s middle age distinguishes her body from the signifying practices of the Korean Council Wednesday protests. According to Son, the protests feature the young and the elderly. On the one hand, youth, including the statue, “transfor[m] ‘comfort women’—­whom Confucian-­influenced Korean society viewed as ‘tainted’—­into young, ‘virginal victims,” and “convey the future-­oriented nature of the movement.”60 On the other hand, the aging “comfort women” survivors have “also complicated symbolic invocations of young women’s bodies as a way of constructing national identity and history”61 In contrast, Shimada, as a middle-­aged woman, marks the temporal distance between the end of the war and her performance in 2012, implicitly referencing the postwar period, when “comfort women” were silenced.62 Her body and its age betray these moments of quiet violence, a history of postwar oppression, ongoing for former Japanese “comfort women,” who still have not come forward. Shimada’s aging body, along with the present progressive in the performance title’s “becoming,” reminds us that representations of the “comfort women” reflect present-­day concerns, including continued historical revisionists’ attempts to erase the “comfort women” from public discourses. The ongoing nature of Shimada’s performance further insists on the importance of younger generations in engaging with these issues.

Beyond the Confines of Nation Shimada’s living body not only makes the “comfort women” issue relevant but also creates complex encounters with her viewers. This complexity derives from Shimada’s ambiguous appearance, where, following the multiplicity evoked in the Noh-­actor’s body, Shimada has the potential to be read and misread as multiple roles. The Peace Monument portrays a clear figure and develops a particular relationship with its viewer, one of solidarity that, according to Son, enacts a “performance of care”—­people dress the statue and leave it gifts.63 In contrast, Shimada provokes an entirely different audience relationship; she resists care. Instead, Shimada’s figure is entirely unclear, with her clothing breaking down the distinction between survivor and conspirer. Her kimono reads as Japanese, but it leaves open to interpretation whether she is a “comfort woman” or a Japanese woman in another role. Unless the viewer is knowledgeable of the original statue in Seoul, Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman does not make it immediately legible that Shimada is portraying a “comfort woman.” Shimada’s kimono, for instance, is not representative of the clothing often worn by “comfort women” or, for the most part, Japanese women during the war. Her flyer provides information

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about the Japanese “comfort women” and the figure’s absence from public discourses, but it does not identify Shimada as embodying one.64 The viewer, without knowing the performance’s title, when encountering Shimada on the street, must infer that Shimada is posing as a Japanese “comfort woman” or guess she is someone else. The potential for multiple interpretations extends to the spectator. Rather than scripting the viewer to join in solidarity, to protect and empathize, Shimada’s body rehearses diverse roles for her viewer. Unlike The Peace Monument in Seoul, cast weekly in the Korean Council’s protest against the Japanese government, Shimada does not clearly define a particular role the audience member should take. Without an event to frame her performance, it is easy to misread or simply ignore Shimada’s body on the sidewalk. Similar to the bronze statue in Seoul, Shimada sits next to an empty chair, but in Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman, the empty chair scripts the viewer into fellow “comfort woman” or someone else. Rather than a limitation of her piece, I would argue that Shimada’s potential to be read in multiple roles follows from the unclear wartime status of the Japanese “comfort woman.” Shimada’s performance represents the figure’s ambiguous position during the war and in contemporary discourses. My reading follows from her previous work, including the early performance Comfort Women, Women of Conformity, where Shimada juxtaposes domestic activities in Japan with coerced ones abroad to complicate the nature of women’s roles during the war. With her past work in consideration, the empty chair next to Shimada in Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman can cast the viewer as “comfort woman” or soldier or others complicit in the system. As such, Shimada’s performance distinguishes itself from the work of The Peace Monument in that she does not provoke empathy.65 Shimada’s performance asks its viewers what it means to confront this complicated yet absent figure. The layout of her performance piece on the city sidewalk further muddies the gendered and national distinctions between participant, conspirer, and survivor. Shimada’s sits with her chair against the Japanese embassy’s wall. Read as both a representative of the state and turning her back on it, her chair invites the viewer to join Shimada in this double role. In contrast, The Peace Monument encourages its viewer to take a clear role of support against the Japanese government. The protestors placed the statue against the sidewalk curb, making it impossible to face without standing in traffic. The statue’s location across the street from the Japanese embassy replicates the relationship between South Korea and Japan. With South Korea on one side and Japan on the other, this positioning reinscribes the oppositional relationship between these neighboring countries. Those next to the statue become allies and those standing across the street, its detractors or victimizers. In the weekly protest, these national relationships are confirmed and gendered—­ the Japanese victimizer is male and the South Korean survivor is female.

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At the protest I observed, Seoul metropolitan policemen stood between the protest and the entrance to the Japanese embassy, while, in contrast, predominantly policewomen stood on the side of the protest to facilitate foot traffic. In Shimada’s piece, without a curb the roles of survivor, conspirer, and supporter are not so clearly delineated. Instead, when viewers must stand to the side of her or face her, the performance also activates complicity and confrontation. In this configuration, viewers can inhabit multiple roles in relation to Shimada and Japan. Shimada’s legible age increases this variety with additional temporalities—­ the Japanese “comfort woman,” either in wartime or, given Shimada’s middle age, in the postwar period, and, in the present, Shimada as a member of a younger generation attempting to connect with the missing figure. In part, this multiplicity shifts the emphasis onto the viewer and her relationship to the Japanese “comfort woman”: the performance asks how the viewer sees and relates to the figure. Critically, this ambiguity falls to each viewer to discern, reflecting back upon the viewer’s own conceptions and assumptions. Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman’s staging of multiple viewer roles engages with what Japanese feminist Ueno Chizuko distinguishes as an issue of “positionality” facing younger generations in relation to the reemerging “comfort women.” Qualifying conservative historical revisionism as “that desire to see ‘national stories’ repeatedly reproduced in new guise,” Ueno proposes that Japanese citizens must move beyond the binary relationship of nation and individual. Younger generations must instead each consider how “I” can “take responsibility as an ‘I’ ” and evaluate “where does the ‘I’ speak from.”66 Arguing that “the ‘comfort women issue’ is not [the survivors’] problem, it is a problem for every ‘I,’ ” Ueno asserts that younger generations must confront the great wrong done to the “comfort women” while also considering from where they respond.67 Ueno’s “positionality” enhances Takahashi’s concept of response-­ability; it tasks younger generations with the work of heeding the call of the past and the duty of examining who they are as responders. Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman physicalizes Ueno’s call for individual assessment. When Shimada portrays a figure that is ambiguous, any interpretation of the figure relies on the viewer’s own assumptions and subject position. Further, Shimada’s complex figure insists on complex viewers. The performance avoids casting the viewer or survivor too narrowly, a tendency discussed by Chandra Mohanty in Feminism without Borders. Mohanty delineates how Western feminist theory’s narrow definition of the third world woman “discursively colonize[s] the material and historical heterogeneities” of their lives.68 While The Peace Monument serves a critical activist function, it distills the image of the “comfort woman” to a South Korean who has come forward to testify. And by extension it casts its viewer into the role of supporter and protector of the survivor. More recent statues, especially the

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San Francisco statue of three women from Korea, China, and the Philippines, broaden the image of the “comfort women,” and the network of statues across the Pacific and North America suggest grassroots action, reflective of a transnational feminist solidarity.69 Yet these efforts, working in part against the Japanese state, can also obfuscate violence against women in their home countries. Soh argues that in framing the “comfort women” “as exclusively a Japanese war crimes issue,” South Korean activists have “diverted attention from the sociocultural and historical roots of women’s victimization in Korea.”70 Situating audience members in roles based on their individual positions, Shimada’s performance resists any singularity.71 Her relationship with her audience illustrates Mohanty’s description of feminism without borders, “to draw attention to the tension between the simultaneous plurality and narrowness of borders and the emancipatory potential of crossing through, with, and over these borders in our everyday lives.”72 Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman reveals complex relationships between the individual, state, and historical figure, providing opportunities to rehearse multiple roles of relationality. Shimada’s performance thus creates a diverse political intervention into representations of the “comfort women.” Shimada prompts her viewer to turn her inquiry inward without knowing the details of the past. It is also possible to read Shimada’s performance as a figurative response to the original statue in Seoul; whereas the original statue faces the embassy, Shimada, with her back to the embassy, faces the statue. In this reading, Shimada’s statue displaces the policemen standing at the embassy entrance to instead model a relationship of feminist solidarity between Japanese and Korean “comfort women,” in effect troubling the protest’s oppositional gendered and national relationships. Originally performed in London, Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman moves questions of response-­ability beyond the Asia-­Pacific region. In taking her performance outside Asia, Shimada insists that the issue of wartime sexual violence is not limited to Japan or South Korea. She expands its transnational scope to the West to remind us that historians have shown that Allied soldiers knew about the “comfort” stations during the Asia-­Pacific War.73 Shimada’s performance location calls attention to this underdiscussed history while gesturing toward global networks of sexual violence, including systems of human trafficking today. By extending beyond the Asia-­Pacific, Shimada’s performance expands response-­ability to younger generations separated by time and place. Since at the center of her performance, however, there is an interrogation of the individual audience member’s relation to this issue, Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman avoids statements of universal response-­ ability. Rather, in creating an encounter between Shimada and the viewer, the performance demands that everyone respond individually to the missing “comfort woman” figure.

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Documenting “Comfort Women” and Disrupting the Archive After Shimada’s original performance in London, her subsequent performances of Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman in front of the Diet building and Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo intertwine questions of embodiment with those of commemoration and historiography, working to extend the longevity of her piece and craft “comfort women” legacies for younger generations. Unlike the original London performance, her performances in Tokyo were not durational; instead, Shimada appeared in front of the Diet and Yasukuni to pose for photographs. In 2015, Shimada compiled these images along with documentary footage to create a video piece of the three performances. These works, manifesting in enduring forms—­photograph and video—­doubly challenge the current archive and amend it for future generations. Shimada’s emphasis on complex interactions between viewer and missing figure does not go away. Rather, these new works interrogate the viewer’s relationship to enduring material, extending Shimada’s efforts to make interventions into future representations of the “comfort women.” The original Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman examines the complex relationships between the body, durational performance, and its photographic documentation. Because Shimada performed the piece as a reaction to statements by Japanese politicians, she appeared spontaneously, without issuing a public announcement beforehand, leaving fans and scholars, including myself, no opportunity to see her statue performance in person. Instead, like many others, I encountered her piece by way of the photograph in figure 4.2, as well as interviews with the artist. While indicative of Shimada’s desire to react to politicians’ comments, the original piece presents a problem—­ how to interpret and document the missed event. Exploring the issue of missing the live performance art piece, Amelia Jones describes the interdependence of live art and documentation, “confirming—­ even exacerbating—­the supplementarity of the body itself.”74 As Jones later writes, this dependence alters the body itself: “The body, in its unpredictable temporalities, cannot be properly included in the aesthetic or written into art history, at least not without some serious distortions.”75 With Jones in mind, when the photograph is the only available way in which to view Shimada’s performance, it marks what the viewer has been unable to see in person, while suggesting that the live body cannot be fully documented. Shimada’s body foregrounds the fact that we have always missed the event. “Missing,” the title of her performance flyer, takes on a double meaning—­the missing Japanese “comfort woman” and the missing of Shimada’s representation of the Japanese “comfort woman.” The way in which the audience may see Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman stages the ways in which the body evades documentation, and by extension comments on failures inherent in the production of history. Just as documents frame the historical event, the photographs of Shimada’s performance determine its

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experience, pointing to the relationship between documentation and the event itself. The viewer’s relationship to Shimada’s performance replicates the historical event, one that cannot be experienced by younger generations, calling attention to the event’s inaccessibility and undermining the ability of traditional methods of history production to accurately represent the past. Later photographs at Yasukuni Shrine and in front of the Diet building issue further challenges to photographic documentation. When Shimada reperformed Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman in Japan, she did not linger at the sites. Instead, she remained in front of Yasukuni and the Diet only long enough to take photographs (figs. 4.3, 4.4). In part, the photographs at the Diet and Yasukuni reflect Shimada’s concerns for her own safety.76 Even in 2012, the potential for violence threatened representations of the “comfort women” in Japan—­earlier that summer threats temporarily shut down the Nikon gallery exhibition of photographs of former “comfort women.”77 At the Diet, when her photographer started to take photographs of Shimada, a policeman ordered Shimada to leave, illustrating ways in which the state still meddles in representations of the “comfort women.” Despite remaining momentarily at these locations, Shimada’s choice of site comments on the major mnemonic and political institutions in Japan. As discussed in chapter 1, Yasukuni celebrates Japan’s past militarization, and the shrine becomes a gathering site for those in support of the nation-­affirming narrative of war. The Diet, as Japan’s parliament building, represents the nation’s legislative power and has been the backdrop of major protests against the government, notably the 1960 protests against the renewal of the U.S.-­Japan Security Treaty. Both structures lie in the Tokyo city center. In the photographs of Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman, Shimada’s body inserts the “comfort women” into commemorative and political sites, imagining a legacy for Japanese “comfort women.” Shimada’s presence at Yasukuni Shrine and the Diet building acknowledges the importance of these institutions, reflected in the composition of both photographs: in contrast to her original performance photograph, in these later pieces the buildings take up more space than Shimada’s body. In part, these photographs imagine “comfort women” statues at Yasukuni and the Diet, turning Japan into a more accepting place where Japanese “comfort women” are commemorated. In appearing in front of Yasukuni Shrine, Shimada reinserts the “comfort women” into Yasukuni’s eirei, honorable spirits of the nation. At the same time, Shimada’s presence marks differences between her performed fantasy and the actuality in contemporary Japan, where Japanese “comfort women” have not been apotheosized as eirei and representations of the “comfort woman” threaten narratives of the nation. Shimada’s performance at Yasukuni (fig 4.4) places her outside the shrine. Her location in front of Yasukuni instead of within its grounds reinforces the fact that “comfort women” are missing from Yasukuni’s conception of the eirei and its corresponding narrative of the war. Further, her position in front of the

4.3. Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman at the Diet building in Tokyo (2012). Photograph by Robert Gibson. Copyright © Shimada Yoshiko.

4.4. Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman at Yasukuni Shrine (2012). Photograph by Robert Gibson. Copyright © Shimada Yoshiko.

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first torii recalls the fact that those who can participate in Yasukuni’s remembrance are limited to supporters of its rhetoric. Given the missing documents about the “comfort women” system, photographs of Shimada at Yasukuni and the Diet attempt to alter and augment the archive. Throughout her career, Shimada has incorporated archival materials into her work. In the collage White Aprons (1993), for instance, she located period photographs of Japanese colonial settlers in the midst of target practice, a woman in the home, and a women’s group during the war, collecting them together to visually associate their actions and wartime complicity through their similar white aprons.78 This early work aligns Shimada with the important work of the historian Yoshimi, who found material in archives in Japan to affirm the existence of the “comfort women.” In White Aprons, Shimada foregrounds archival material of women’s roles during the war to literally locate culpability in historical documents. In Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman, the photographs add to the “comfort women” legacy by physically intervening in the archive. In this case, Shimada’s body stands in for those missing from the visual record and creates traces of them where there may be none. Images of Shimada as a Japanese “comfort woman” realize Schneider’s assertion that the archive, the collection of enduring documents and other materials, is interpreted, manipulated, and edited—­essentially, it is enacted in the present as “another kind of performance.”79 The glossy aesthetic and high resolution of Shimada’s photographs at Yasukuni Shrine and the Diet building presuppose their place in the archive, destined for preservation and longevity. In the words of Jacques Derrida, the archive becomes “an irreducible experience of the future,” where Shimada casts the images of “comfort women” to intervene in their future representations.80 Along with inserting images of “comfort women” into the archive, Shimada’s photographs continue their work in the future when they imaginatively transform these public sites. The viewer, on her next visit to Yasukuni Shrine or the Diet building, can cast Shimada in these spaces, imagining her spectral presence there, without Shimada’s actually being there. When considering the shrine’s overwhelming positioning of visitors into its performance of militaristic remembrance, Shimada’s photograph of Yasukuni offers a way, albeit imaginative, of counterpresence in the shrine space. In so doing, the photograph supposes imaginative work as potential resistance to Yasukuni’s mnemonic influence. The viewer, as future pedestrian, can recall Shimada when visiting Yasukuni. This imaginative work activates and empowers the audience. When the viewer visits Yasukuni and the Diet, as Shimada’s photographs suggest, the viewer has further responsibility to think through the visual workings of these very sites. Accordingly, the photographs of Shimada at Yasukuni Shrine and the Diet building do not include the empty chair next to her. The chair’s function in the original performance piece when absent from the Diet and

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Yasukuni photographs transfers the chair’s work of situating the audience to the imaginative space between the photograph and the viewer, what Jones describes as the “equally intersubjective” “documentary exchange.”81 These later pieces, while they lack the immediate experience of Shimada’s live body, show how embodiment still works as an effective tool to prompt viewers to engage with the missing “comfort woman” while questioning their own position in relationship to her. Shimada’s body evokes absent figures while it contemplates where they should be commemorated in Japan. Consequently, Shimada’s photographs at the Diet and Yasukuni activate questions of positionality in relationship to the archive—­what does it mean to view archival photographs? What is the viewer’s agency and complicity in seeing these images? The final iteration of Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman is a ten-­minute video piece that frames her original performance while questioning the viewer’s relationship to it. The video first contextualizes Shimada’s original performance before displaying her recent performances at the Diet and Yasukuni. The video’s introduction initially appears to solidify the message of Shimada’s piece, creating an overarching narrative and moving it away from ambiguities and potentials for misreadings in the original performance. After the title screen, the video describes Shimada’s original Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman as a response to the South Korean “comfort woman” statue. It shows a photograph of the statue, superimposing Shimada’s flyer text from her durational performance in London. Ending with the question, “If we refuse to recognise and learn from our past, what kind of future will we have?” the text reaffirms the importance of younger generations in addressing this issue. Despite this frame, however, as the video continues, it shows varied audience responses. After its initial shots, the video devotes five minutes to audience reactions and interactions. As Shimada sits outside, pedestrians walk past her; some pause before Shimada, not wanting to get between her and the camera; some ignore her; and some take photographs of her with their cell phones. Compared with the South Korean “comfort woman” statue and its use in Wednesday protests, reactions to Shimada’s durational performance are subtle and multiple. On the one hand, as a “protest” piece with a clear message, the video exposes Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman as not particularly efficacious. By showing mixed audience reactions without commentary or information about pedestrians, the video reasserts the need for audience members to address the “comfort woman” figure in ambiguous and multiple ways. On the other hand, the video reaffirms the complicity of younger generations. The five minutes of watching pedestrians ignore Shimada and take photographs of her reveals the continued treatment of the female figure as that to be simultaneously ignored and spectacularized. Those who simply walk past her, within the framing of the video, are cast as ignorant,

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participating in the ongoing obfuscation of the Japanese “comfort woman.” In the video, these varied audience responses insist on the need for viewers to increase their own awareness; by literally placing their uninterested reactions on display, the video renews the importance of the encounter. The video’s ultimate message calls out to the viewer; like with the Shinozakis in the previous chapter, it asserts that a lack of knowledge is no excuse for not engaging with the missing “comfort woman.” Shimada’s Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman shows how complex the Japanese “comfort woman” is while raising questions about her portrayal. Read through Noh’s staging of the ghost, Shimada’s living body evokes multiple figures, rehearsing multiple roles for her viewer to take in relation to the missing Japanese “comfort woman.” The performance, in its ambiguity and complexity, points to how public discourses invariably reduce the “comfort woman” figure, typically for institutional or national agendas. As an alternative, Shimada’s work proposes an open-­ ended relationality. Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman thus asks viewers to consider their own position in relationship to the missing figure. Returning to transgenerational remembrance and response-­ability, Shimada’s performance aims to create connections and stage confrontations between younger generations and past figures. Shimada’s work, like the previous case studies of Imai Masayuki, Koizumi Meiro, and Hirata Oriza, reflects a hopefulness for effecting change for future generations. Largely positive attitudes toward the unclear and inaccessible war past connects performances in chapters 2, 3, and 4. These performances acknowledge the absences in dominant historical narratives while working to forge relationships between younger generations and the past. In the chapters that follow, I turn to pessimistic case studies, ones that not only acknowledge loss with the passage of time but also assert the need to mark what cannot be transferred. In the next chapter, I examine a different colonial relationship, that between Okinawa and Japan, by which Okinawa, annexed in 1879, remains a prefecture of Japan. I explore how this continued imperial relationship influences commemorating the Battle of Okinawa, with a particular focus on performances that insist on inaccessibility from generation to generation and from within Okinawa Prefecture to the rest of the country.

Chapter 5

Acts That Do Not Transfer The Battle of Okinawa and Situated Testimony

These blossoms, O monk, drew you on to seek lodging here, because I wished that you should hear my tale. —­Z eami, Tadanori

In Zeami’s play, the appearance of the ghost of Taira no Tadanori (1144–­84) demonstrates that retelling in Noh is never removed from a specific place. In Tadanori, the ghost enters after the waki, a traveling monk, has stopped to take shelter under a tree planted in Tadanori’s honor. The image of shelter repeats several times in the play to create a strong connection between the waki’s arrival in that location and the ghost’s appearance. Tadanori describes the tree as enticing the waki on his behalf: its blossoms “drew” the monk to stop “because I wished that you should hear my tale.” An embodiment (or precursor) to Derrida’s assertion that the ghost “first of all sees us,” Tadanori has coaxed the waki to visit.1 As the moment reveals, the ghost depends on the waki’s presence in order to share his story; in the dialogue between the living and the dead, the ghost of Tadanori, his story, and location are inextricably linked. Given fading connections to the war past in contemporary Japan, location is particularly pertinent to testimonies of the Battle of Okinawa. The last major battle of the Asia-­Pacific War, and the only one to take place on Japanese soil, the Battle of Okinawa lasted eighty-­two days from April to June 1945.2 The length and intensity of fighting, concentrated on the prefecture’s main island, also named Okinawa, coupled with U.S. bombing in the months leading up to the April 1945 landing, has left the island littered with sites of tragedy. Okinawa’s unique geography further shaped the battle and its remembrance. Its natural caves became places of refuge for civilians and later sites of atrocity when Japanese military officers took them over, expelled civilians, and, worse, encouraged or forced them to commit suicide to avoid enemy capture. The physicality of battle sites and their locations in Okinawa

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are critical to remembering the events that occurred there. Today, some of these have been marked by monuments, but many have not. Covered over or hidden in subterranean caves, they haunt the present with their latent, yet obscured, potential. Locations of the Battle of Okinawa stand in contrast to mnemonic institutions in the metropole, exemplified by Yasukuni Shrine, the place to remember the war dead through spectacular, performative, and affective means. As the southernmost point of Japan, closer to Taiwan than to Tokyo, Okinawa’s remove troubles the relationship between the prefecture’s war history and that of the rest of the nation. Along with distance, the Battle of Okinawa must be considered through imperial power dynamics. By the Asia-­ Pacific War, Okinawa, annexed by Japan in 1879, had already endured more than fifty years of Japanese imperial modernization and assimilation practices.3 The sheer number of civilian casualties during the Battle of Okinawa reflects Japan’s continued positioning of Okinawa as colonial other, sacrificed by the nation as a deterrent against an all-­out land battle on the Japanese main islands. During the Battle of Okinawa, Japanese military forces relied on the construction of the Okinawan as Japanese citizen, demanding that Okinawans perform their loyalty to the emperor and nation through self-­ sacrifice. At the same time, Okinawan difference prompted imperial soldiers to suspect civilians of betrayal. These factors led to military violence against civilians and resulted in mass casualties—­approximately a third of the population during or immediately after the battle.4 Okinawa’s sacrifice did not end in 1945; rather, the prefecture remained under American military control until 1972, well after the end of the U.S. Occupation in mainland Japan. Okinawa continues to sacrifice today as Japan requisitions Okinawan land for U.S. military bases. In the postwar period, atrocities during the battle, in particular Japanese military violence against Okinawan civilians, remained obscured for decades until local groups in Okinawa started to document survivor stories in the 1980s.5 These efforts produced a large number of written and video testimonies, some circulating outside the prefecture as published volumes or digital archives.6 As Matthew Allen asserts, these testimonies, outlining Japanese military violence against Okinawan civilians, threaten Japan’s myth of a unified nation.7 In response, conservative historical revisionists dispute the veracity of these testimonies, demanding written documentation to prove Japanese military involvement in civilian deaths.8 Historical revisionist challenges make it critical to evaluate the relationship of the metropole to the Battle of Okinawa and to more fully consider the power dynamics involved in listening to testimonies across time and place. As such, memories of the Battle of Okinawa further complicate Takahashi Tetsuya’s concept of response-­ability, where younger generations are poised to respond to the calls of survivors of Japanese atrocities. Okinawa’s place in the nation troubles the very accessibility of memories in which to be response-­able.

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In this chapter, I explore the ways in which performances of testimony address the complex relationships between younger generations and memories of the Battle of Okinawa. Read through Noh’s situated acts of retelling, these performances privilege interactivity between speaker, listener, and location. Noh, in its dialogic relationship between the living and dead, recognizes the importance of place. When the waki rests at Tadanori’s grave site, his presence there sparks the ghost’s return. Further, Tadanori emerges as the agent of the testimony; it is Tadanori who entices the monk to stop at his grave site and “detain[s]” him to tell his story.9 When he appears to share his story, the play shows that the speaker and his location are contingent partners in meaning making. Tadanori cannot appear separate from his location, and the waki’s presence at this location prompts Tadanori’s very entrance. Noh’s interrelated dependence on place and speaker makes copresence critical to thinking about the Battle of Okinawa. It asks, can testimony leave its witness and place of residence and carry the same force? Inspired by Okinawa’s complex colonial circumstances that raise questions of listening to testimonies across time and place, this chapter focuses on performances that grapple with testimony’s very accessibility. These performances call into question the easy circulation of recorded testimonies and instead reexamine the ability for those from outside Okinawa to listen and respond to testimony. First, I examine Japanese theater artist Sakate Yōji’s Umi no futten’s (1997) re-­creation of testimony on a Tokyo stage to consider how testimonies in Okinawa may be so tied to their location that restaging alters their very form. In contrast, Okinawa-­born artist Yamashiro Chikako’s Inheritance Series (2008–­present) of photographs and videos portray testimony as a live exchange to foreground what cannot be shared from one generation to the next and between the prefecture and Japan. Yamashiro’s pieces develop listening to testimony as a difficult task to characterize the response-­ability of younger generations as effortful dialogue with survivors, searching for the past despite its inaccessibility and the very pain experienced in listening.

Lingering Empire and Suspended Occupation To understand the effects of Sakate’s and Yamashiro’s performances, I must first situate testimonies of the Battle of Okinawa within ongoing Japanese and American imperial control. If, as Mika Ko describes, “Okinawa and its people have been ‘otherized’ in various ways throughout modern history,” it stands to reason that testimonies, especially when read or viewed outside the prefecture, may cast Okinawan tragedies through colonial lenses.10 Okinawa’s experience of colonial modernity, including practices of assimilation in the late nineteenth century, according to Lisa Yoneyama, “has been for the most part overshadowed by cultural memories of the Battle of Okinawa

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and the U.S. military-­ colonial settlement that ensued.”11 Yet the current state of Okinawa continues to be shaped by imperial power dynamics, what Yoneyama refers to as the “specter of Japan’s colonial empire,” ever present in land use, lack of state-­sponsored infrastructure, and in the consumption of Okinawan culture outside the prefecture.12 U.S. and Japanese imperialism manifests today most prominently in the continued occupation of Okinawan land. Okinawa houses the majority of U.S. bases in Japan—­more than 75 percent of U.S. military bases in Japan are in Okinawa, bearing Japan’s postwar burden of providing land for bases.13 According to Gavan McCormack, bases transform Okinawa into “ ‘Japan’s virtual colony,’ a dual colony in effect to the US and Japan, a status unchanged in thirty years since reversion.”14 In Okinawa, U.S. bases have altered the geographic makeup of the island. Because the Battle of Okinawa leveled many of the island’s structures, the United States built bases immediately after the war without concern for land ownership, agricultural potential, or historical or cultural significance.15 On the crowded main island of Okinawa, U.S. bases occupy former battle sites, disrupt daily life, and evoke memories of the battle to suspend Okinawans in a continued state of war.16 At memorial events for the battle, speakers frequently call for base removal, rhetorically connecting the Battle of Okinawa with the prefecture’s continued sacrifice to Japanese and American military interests.17 In parallel, contemporary Japanese popular culture imaginatively transforms Okinawa from a site of violence to one of natural beauty. The 1990s saw an Okinawa boom in Japanese popular culture that cast Okinawa as an island paradise with a rich indigenous culture.18 Traditional Okinawan music and food became fashionable, and there was an increase in Japanese films set in Okinawa.19 The Okinawa boom turned the prefecture into material to be consumed by mainland Japan—­in the words of Tanaka Yasuhiro, “images of Okinawa have . . . become attractive commodities.”20 Such consumption has led Davinder Bhowmik to describe the “Okinawa boom” as the “latest type of colonization,” one that is “cultural rather than material in form.”21 In turn, the Okinawa boom obfuscates Japan’s colonial relationship with the prefecture: the sanitized image of a culturally rich island destination overlooks much of Okinawa’s history, including Japan’s annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom and the Battle of Okinawa, and it obscures problems in Okinawan everyday life.22 In the context of the Okinawa boom, memories of the Battle of Okinawa have become sightseeing fodder. Bus tours, in operation since the postwar period, take tourists to battle sites, integrating remembrance into Okinawa’s tourism machine. As Gerald Figal describes, these tours were created precisely to promote tourism in the prefecture.23 Today, battle-­site tours further link commerce and the battle when they culminate at Okinawa World, a theme park composed mainly of kiosks selling cultural artifacts and food souvenirs. This destination recasts former sites of atrocity as stops to be easily organized

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in an afternoon itinerary, and Okinawa World frames memories of the battle as substances to be consumed in the same way as the local brown-­sugar candy.24

The Form of Testimony Given the circulation of Okinawan culture in contemporary Japan, it is critical to consider the form and accessibility of testimonies of the Battle of Okinawa. In particular, video testimonies have become an important mode of documenting the stories of survivors and circulating them beyond the prefecture. Following Shoshana Felman’s assertion that testimony is performative and thus a doing, I contemplate how video testimonies shape our understanding of the past and our response as viewers.25 While existing scholarship tends to emphasize the political potential of testimony’s doing, qualifying it as interventionist or transformative, in the context of Okinawa I consider how video testimony has a potential to play a role in reiterating Japan’s imperial gaze.26 If, according to Allen Feldman, the documentation of testimony into a digestible, “museum format” can “situate the past as an object of spectatorship, no matter how emphatic this gaze may be,” then testimony’s circulation in digital realms can further objectify past events.27 Official sites of remembrance in Okinawa have established the video testimony as a key medium for documenting and circulating survivor experiences. In the state-­sponsored Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, one of several structures in the Peace Memorial Park, video testimonies are central to the museum’s portrayal of the Battle of Okinawa.28 Throughout the museum there are consoles for viewing them. The museum website reinforces this importance when it describes testimony as “speak[ing] the very truth of history” and works to make video and written testimonies as accessible as possible, even going so far as to provide written translations in English, Chinese, and Korean in one display.29 Video testimonies further become available outside the prefecture in the database peacelearning.jp, found on the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Museum’s website. Peacelearning.jp, featuring more than a hundred video testimonies, demonstrates the importance of circulation among virtual viewers anywhere in the world.30 Yet, following Japanese film critic Imamura Taihei’s assertion that documentary film “cannot escape its responsibility as a human act,” the video testimony cannot escape the implications of its form.31 Although video testimonies of the Battle of Okinawa are critical in documenting survivor experiences, they follow a form similar to many other testimonies. The camera focuses on the speaker’s upper body, with the speaker telling his or her story to an unseen interviewer. By concentrating on the survivor, the video testimony privileges the content of his or her story. The Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum reiterates this privileging in published volumes

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of testimonies, available at the museum gift shop. Testimonies of the battle, when treated as information sources, as the “truth of history,” can fall into the realm of evidence to be challenged by conservative historical revisionist groups. Not only does this tendency limit testimony to narrowly defined categories of “true” or “not true” but it also does not consider the form’s aesthetic or political effects.32 In its visual composition, the video testimony elides regional specificity of the event, speaker, and listener. Video testimonies can cast viewers as universal listeners. When video testimonies take on the same composition, what Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker call the “talking head” framing, they align the viewer of testimony with the live listener, who remains off camera.33 The same process can happen in digital realms. Caroline Wake describes viewing video testimonies as “tertiary witnessing,” where viewers experience emotional copresence, and digital video testimonies perform “in front of a potentially limitless audience of tertiary witnesses.”34 The video brings events to a wide audience while ignoring any need to adjust for where they are from. By extension, the online video testimony severs testimony from the moment of listening, the location of atrocity, and from the prefecture itself. Given Japan’s continued imperial relationship with Okinawa, video testimonies run the risk of replicating Japan’s colonial consumption of Okinawan culture. Following Aaron Gerow’s assertions that the medium of film works “to reconfirm Japan’s centrality and Okinawa’s marginality,” the video testimony’s form and circulation make it primed to reiterate similar representational practices.35 With the potential for “tertiary witnessing” over the internet, it is possible for video testimonies to erase distinctions between Okinawan and Japanese viewers, negating the very differences created by Japan’s treatment of the prefecture. In this scenario, not only is the history of Japanese imperial oppression obscured but also memories of the Battle of Okinawa might be further integrated into postwar dominant narratives of national victimhood. The Noh theater, with its focus on dialogue between speaker and listener, dead and living, provides an alternative model. Noh privileges the agency of the speaker, dependent on the live exchange with a listener, where both are in the same place at the same time. As I have discussed throughout this book, the primary structure of Noh plays revolves around the disclosure of the ghost’s story, where the ghost tells the living person, the waki, why she is trapped in this world. It is the ghost who determines how she tells her story; she is not typically conjured by the waki/listener, and it is only after questioning by the waki that the ghost speaks. The ghost’s story, like Tadanori’s grave site in Tadanori, is linked to a particular location, one significant to the ghost, but it is also dependent on the listener’s copresence. Noh’s triangulation of speaker, place, and listener points to the need to consider the location of testimony. And Okinawa’s colonial history requires further rethinking about how such representation can happen outside the

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prefecture. The new Noh play Okinawa zangetsuki (2007) by Tada Tomio foregrounds these issues by removing the moment of the ghost’s testimony from the place in which it occurred.36 The play follows a young man in the part of the waki who travels from his home on the main island of Okinawa to the island of Miyako. There, aided by a spiritual medium, he channels the ghost of his grandmother to ask about her experiences during the Battle of Okinawa. When she appears, she tells her grandson about losing one of her children during the hostilities. Okinawa zangetsuki illustrates the state of remembrance about the war, capturing the fading connections between younger generations and the past, while Noh’s focus on dialogue with the ghost emphasizes the moment of connection between generations. What is particularly notable about Okinawa zangetsuki is that Tada moves the action to Miyako, distancing the play from the past event. In this adjustment, Okinawa zangetsuki refuses to re-­create the site and scene of atrocity onstage. Instead, the play implicitly suggests that the ghost emerges because of the waki’s journey away from the location of battle. In contrast to video testimonies, Okinawa zangetsuki asks what can truly be transferred and whether Okinawa’s historical conditions demand different portrayals of testimony. Following Noh’s interweaving of testimony and place, I attend to atrocity’s accessibility in Sakate Yōji’s and Yamashiro Chikako’s works to elucidate the political implications of transferring testimony from one generation to the next and from inside to outside the prefecture.

Umi no futten: Reenacting Testimony in Tokyo When Sakate Yōji’s Umi no futten re-­creates the testimony of a mass suicide from the Battle of Okinawa in Tokyo, it inadvertently exhibits issues in representing testimonies outside the prefecture. The play premiered in July 1997 at Kinokuniya Hall, a plush theater in Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighborhood, less than a mile from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.37 While written by Sakate, a playwright-­director known for politically engaged theater, the production was directed by Kuriyama Tamiya, shingeki director and later the artistic director of the nationally sponsored New National Theatre from 2000 to 2007. Along with Kuriyama’s aesthetic, the Kinokuniya Hall location makes Umi no futten’s premiere a work of mainstream theater, giving the play and its scene of replicated testimony great visibility to a broad Japanese audience. Umi no futten thus offers a unique opportunity to consider how staging testimony away from its site of origin may alter its content and force. Umi no futten is not primarily about a testimony from the battle. Rather, the content of the play follows from Sakate’s political-­ theater aesthetic. Born in 1962, the same year as Hirata Oriza (discussed in chapter 3), Sakate

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established his theater company Rinkogun (Phosphorescent Group) in 1983, one year after Hirata established Seinendan. Nonetheless, the two men create drastically different theater. If Hirata cultivates a new style based in quotidian expression, Sakate builds on the established theater aesthetics of shingeki to articulate a political message. Plays feature political discussions in realistic dialogue to raise awareness and encourage debate.38 According to theater critic Noda Manabu, Sakate values theater because of “its mobility, which enables quick responses to aspects of the political agenda that call for urgent attention.”39 And his political messages are overt—­while Sakate claims that it is “for the audience to decide,” he acknowledges, “I do have a moral to the story in a play.”40 Umi no futten is designed to raise awareness of the oppression of U.S. military bases in Okinawa. Set in the small town of Yomitan, Umi no futten follows the lead up to and aftermath of the arrest of real-­life activist and grocery-­store owner Chibana Shōichi. Chibana received national and international attention when, in 1987, he was arrested for burning a Japanese flag to protest Japan’s treatment of the prefecture.41 Throughout Umi no futten, Chibana, his family, and his friends express disappointment that the Japanese government continues to allow the U.S. military to use Okinawan land. The play focuses on Okinawa’s sacrifice to Japanese national interests, and reviews of the first production took note of its clear message.42 In the middle of this politically engaged play, Sakate inserts the Chibichirigama scene, a testimony about an incident that occurred in Chibichirigama (Chibichiri Cave) in Chibana’s hometown. The Chibichirigama incident is one of many “group suicides” that occurred during the Battle of Okinawa. Near the end of the war, the Japanese military promoted suicide over enemy capture, termed gyokusai, even for civilians. With the literal translation of “shattering jewels,” when conservatives refer to gyokusai, they activate a euphemism of beautiful death while obscuring military responsibility; because “shattering jewels” does not identify a subject who commits the act, the term obscures the military’s role in forcing these suicides.43 Incidents like Chibichirigama refute the romanticism of gyokusai and its historical representation. The cave was initially a site of refuge for Yomitan villagers.44 Shortly after American forces landed on Okinawa near Yomitan, some of those staying in the cave decided that everyone there would commit gyokusai. After attempts over several days to light garbage at the mouth of the cave, they eventually started a fire that resulted in chaos and mass suicide. Because the Japanese army had drafted Yomitan’s young men and women, most of these casualties were elderly people, mothers, and children—­more than half the total dead were children under the age of twelve.45 Those who survived kept the events in Chibichirigama secret for decades. In the 1980s, Chibana, along with fellow Yomitan villager Heishin Higa and Tokyo artist Shimojima Tetsurō, all born after the war, began to document survivor stories and give tours to the cave.

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The Chibichirigama scene replicates Chibana’s work of guiding visitors to Chibichirigama, the location of atrocity. From Norma Field’s account, the real-­life Chibana’s retelling of the Chibichirigama incident is gestural and experiential—­he gives visitors candles and guides them to the back of the cave, where he “presents a simple, sober account.”46 At the end, he instructs visitors to blow out their candles to “feel the darkness and try to imagine the conduct of daily tasks, and then to envision the confusion and terror when some, but not all, decided it was time to die.”47 Composed solely of Chibana’s testimony, the Chibichirigama scene resides mostly outside the action of the play—­it takes place in a different location, predominantly separate from the timeline of the play, and the script distinguishes the scene by titling it “Chibichirigama” instead of using a scene number as elsewhere in the script. In Sakate’s political-­theater style, Umi no futten positions the Chibichirigama scene within the play’s activist message, emphasizing the content of its testimony. Set immediately after Chibana is arrested, the Chibichirigama scene provides motivation for Chibana’s flag burning, connecting atrocities experienced by Okinawans to their present hardship from the U.S. military bases.48 In Umi no futten, the Chibichirigama testimony becomes a critical story to tell when Umi no futten substitutes an outsider for Chibana. When he is arrested, Chibana cannot keep his appointment to meet visitors at the cave, and one of his store workers, Naomi, offers to go in his place. The Chibichirigama scene begins with Naomi starting Chibana’s testimony. After a couple of lines, Chibana appears in a different area and gives the testimony alongside her, the two switching back and forth. Chibana resides in a different time than Naomi, outside the events of the play, referencing an earlier visit to the cave. Umi no futten makes the Chibichirigama testimony accessible on a number of levels. While the actual Chibichirigama is hidden in the middle of sugarcane fields of Yomitan, about an hour’s drive from the prefecture capital, Naha, Umi no futten brings Chibana’s carefully curated experience to a Tokyo audience. By sending Naomi instead of a member of Chibana’s own family, Umi no futten further opens the act of giving testimony to those outside the prefecture. Because Naomi is originally from Tokyo, neither a member of Chibana’s family nor originally from the village, the play privileges accessibility over any claims at authenticity—­in this moment, the content and dissemination of the testimony are more important than who tells it. Naomi not only speaks Chibana’s testimony but repeats his same gestures, turning the testimony into a role to be learned and performed. Theatrical acts of rehearsal and reenactment become modes of accessing the past, with Naomi able to learn Chibana’s story in the same way as an actor learns a part in a play. Naomi’s presence legitimizes Sakate’s own position as an outsider writing about Okinawa, with her ability to pass on the story of Chibichirigama as an affirmation of Sakate’s ability to tell it. In contrast to the actual cave, Umi no futten thus situates the stage as the place where Tokyo audiences can listen to the Chibichirigama testimony.

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The Space of Chibichirigama Although accessible, Umi no futten’s transfer of testimony to the Tokyo stage shapes the audience’s experience of it. In Field’s description, the physical attributes of Chibichirigama are central to Chibana’s telling. Yet Umi no futten re-­creates this testimony on a bare stage in Tokyo. When I contrast the physical cave space with Umi no futten’s representation, the Chibichirigama scene positions audience members as consumers, similar to the act of viewing video testimonies. Compared with the cave space, Umi no futten’s restaging of testimony reveals representational limitations of video testimonies, inadvertently calling attention to what the video testimony elides when it moves testimony outside Okinawa. The influence of the actual cave on testimony became clear to me when I visited Chibichirigama in 2013.49 From the time it took to travel there from Naha to its location in the middle of a cane field, Chibichirigama is not accessible. The cave’s geological features elucidated the difficulties that Yomitan villagers must have experienced. Despite the fact that more than one hundred people took refuge there, it is quite small. When I saw the cave’s narrow opening—­approximately three to four feet wide—­I understood how hard it would be to leave if there was a fire at the cave’s entrance. Further, the physical attributes of the cave altered how I listened to the Chibichirigama incident. The cave’s low ceiling created a sense of confinement—­I had to hunch over to avoid hitting my head. Human remains from the war, hidden under and behind rocks, exerted their own invisible force, adding to my discomfort and evoking emotional reactions of unease and pain. For me, experiencing the cave’s physical space, including feeling emotional pain and physical discomfort, became a critical part of listening to the Chibichirigama incident. In contrast, in Umi no futten, the Chibichirigama testimony takes place on an empty stage. As described in Sakate’s script, the scene begins with one concentrated spotlight on Naomi, but as the scene progresses, the lights brighten to show that there is no scenery to represent the cave. Because the rest of the play is filled with scenery—­a large set consisting of Chibana’s storefront—­the blank, dark stage in the Chibichirigama scene seems strikingly empty. While, on the one hand, Umi no futten’s re-­creation of the cave can be read as Noh inspired—­the bare stage becomes the site of atrocity just as the empty Noh stage transforms into Tadanori’s place of death.50 On the other hand, the sparse staging divorces testimony from the cave’s physical impact; there is no discomfort at the possibility of stepping on human remains, no hunching over to avoid hitting the cave’s ceiling. Further, the scene diverges from Noh in a major way—­there is no ghost retelling the story. Without a ghost, the play does not feature the dialogue between the living and the dead, and the living listener does not have anyone to be response-­able to. In this way, the Chibichirigama scene reaffirms the importance of presence during the dialogue in Noh plays—­all must be in the same location to share the ghost’s story.

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Umi no futten’s original production further emphasized spectacle in its testimony scene. It took its cues from the script and performed the scene on a bare stage, first completely dark, then with a spotlight on Naomi and then on Chibana. Along with this sparse scenery, at the end of Naomi and Chibana’s testimony, the director, Kuriyama, projected two photographs of the cave’s ruins onto the theater’s back wall. These photographs made Chibichirigama appear flat, offering the cave space and its physical and affective force to be consumed by the audience, turning the event into that which can be understood. Removed from the cave, Umi no futten’s scene engages audience members in imagining its space. Naomi’s first line, “This is Chibichiri Cave,” sets the location, and as Naomi and Chibana continue, they describe its attributes, including the fact that “it resembles a gourd” to project the cave into the audience’s imaginations.51 The staging connects the audience to those listening in the cave when additional actors stand in the audience area during the Chibichirigama scene. By moving actors into the audience space, Umi no futten further distinguishes the audience’s role in the scene. Elsewhere, Umi no futten uses a fourth wall to divide the audience from the stage, but in the Chibichirigama scene, Umi no futten suggests that watching Naomi onstage is the same action as visitors who travel to Chibichirigama to hear Chibana’s story, a transformation that erases the tension of the cave’s physical space. Instead of experiencing the discomfort of being in the cave, Umi no futten audience members sit in comfortable chairs and imagine the setting of tragedy. When the play repeats testimony to fuel its activist message, its staging turns the testimony into a story to be manipulated and, ultimately, consumed. Stripping away the difficulty of traveling to the cave, the confines of its physical space, and proximity to human remains transforms the Chibichirigama testimony from an experience into a story about the past. In this way, the Chibichirigama testimony in Umi no futten situates the audience in an identical role to the listener of testimony, replicating the same viewer position of video testimony: both spread the message of what happened during the battle, placing importance on the transfer of the content of testimony to those outside Okinawa. Umi no futten unwittingly illustrates the importance of place in listening to testimony in Okinawa and reveals what making these testimonies accessible may elide. When compared with the cave space, Umi no futten’s portrayal of the Chibichirigama testimony obfuscates the cave’s physical elements and distills the space into visual images. This staging ignores that journeying to and listening to testimony in Chibichirigama is logistically, physically, and emotionally difficult. In contrast, despite all the work Umi no futten does in presenting Chibana’s anti-­ U.S.-­ base cause, the play’s Chibichirigama scene betrays the power dynamics involved in realistic theatrical representation, where sharing testimony can lead to false senses of understanding

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and audience consumption. The play not only illustrates how theater can reinforce dominant modes of remembrance but also shows how important presence in Okinawa is to remembering the battle.

Yamashiro Chikako’s Testimonies as Acts of Not Transferring In contrast to Umi no futten’s staged testimony in Tokyo, Yamashiro Chikako’s Inheritance Series focuses on the difficulties of receiving testimony to resist its transfer. Read through Noh’s in situ retelling, the photographs and videos that make up the Inheritance Series highlight and complicate Yamashiro’s role as listener. Instead of passive consumer of a video testimony, a role replicated for the audience in Umi no futten, Yamashiro can be considered more in relation to the waki, as present with the speaker. In chapter 3, I applied the waki to Hirata Oriza’s Seoul shimin series as a model for audience response-­ ability to inquire into unknown and unrelated past events. Here I focus on the waki’s active role when listening to the ghost’s story. Yamashiro’s series highlights the obligation in listening, portraying its difficulties to trouble any easy consumption of video testimonies. Instead, Yamashiro’s works elaborate on her response-­ability to the speaker: she cannot just listen at a remove but must be present with the speaker to listen and respond, however painful it may be. Accordingly, the series distinguishes between Yamashiro, as listener, and the audience, repeatedly severing the content of testimony from Yamashiro’s viewers. Yamashiro’s body of work must be contextualized in her own experiences as a local Okinawan. Born in 1976, four years after the prefecture reverted to Japanese rule, Yamashiro has frequently exhibited photographs, video art, and installations since the first decade of the twentieth century.52 Despite recent national and international success, however, she continues to live in Okinawa.53 Her early work confronts Japan’s tourist gaze toward the prefecture. In the video I Like Okinawa Sweet (2004), Yamashiro seductively eats three cones of Okinawan sweet-­potato ice cream; looking into the camera, her consumption transitions from erotic to excessive. Later pieces raise questions about the U.S. military base presence. Āsa onna (Seaweed Woman) (2008) follows as Yamashiro, transformed into a seaweed woman, swims to various sites offshore, her mobility identifying porous qualities in the borders between U.S. military bases and Okinawan life while highlighting restrictions for regular Okinawans.54 Yamashiro started work on the Inheritance Series more than a decade after the premiere of Umi no futten, and her series reflects Okinawan frustrations over the continued presence of U.S. military bases. Despite efforts of protestors like Chibana, bases remain, imposing on Okinawan daily life. Antibase efforts focus on the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. The base’s close proximity to Ginowan City has caused conflict between Marines and

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Okinawan civilians. Activities at the base, including fighter-­plane and Osprey flight training, routinely disrupt the everyday lives of residents.55 Plans for Futenma’s relocation have been in place since the mid-­1990s, when civilian protests rose to a fever pitch after the 1995 kidnapping and rape of a twelve-­year-­old Okinawan schoolgirl by U.S. Marines. Described by Bhowmik as “a signal event in global politics,” the attack “painfully underscored Okinawa and its residents’ liminal place in the nation.”56 In response, the Japanese government proposed a new base in the north of the island to replace Futenma, but, as protestors assert, the exchange of one base on Okinawa for another continues the prefecture’s sacrifice for Japan’s international relations.57 While the Japanese government builds this new base, operations continue at Futenma. This stalemate in U.S.-­Japan-­Okinawa relations indicates that issues raised by Sakate in the late 1990s still face Okinawans in the decades later. Yamashiro’s artwork echoes the frustration with the Japanese government’s refusal to remove bases from Okinawa; while political change seems attainable in Sakate’s play, its possibility is largely absent in Yamashiro’s work.

Difficulties Listening and Haptic Testimony The first three pieces in Yamashiro’s Inheritance Series, photographs, Kaisōhō (Reminiscence) and Bācharu keishō (Virtual Inheritance) (2008) and eight-­ minute video Anata no koe wa watashi no nodo o tōtta (Your Voice Came Out through My Throat) (2009) came out of Yamashiro’s experiences visiting an adult day care center in Okinawa.58 According to Mori Art Museum curator Kondo Kenichi, during her discussion with the elderly there, Yamashiro “had participants telling their stories of old times in an attempt to ascertain the potential for inheriting their experiences through such interaction.”59 Yamashiro became so overwhelmed by their stories from the war that she asked them to stop and surround her, taking hundreds of photographs of the moment. Out of these, Yamarshiro selected two: Kaisōhō, a wide shot of elderly survivors seated around Yamashiro, and Bācharu keishō, a close-­up of Yamashiro’s face, held by the survivors’ hands.60 The video Anata no koe, based on an interview during the same day-­care visit, premiered a year later in 2009.61 Kaisōhō, Bācharu keishō, and Anata no koe all reference the video testimony to directly challenge its representational practices. While the video testimony’s standard framing shows a speaker telling her story to an off-­ camera listener, Yamashiro’s pieces reverse this composition: Kaisōhō turns the camera around, placing Yamashiro in the center of a group of speakers; Bācharu keishō removes the speakers from the shot entirely; and Anata no koe replicates the same format of the video testimony but with Yamashiro’s face appearing instead of the speaker’s. In this way, all three pieces shift

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5.1. Kaisōhō (2008). Copyright © Yamashiro Chikako. Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

attention from the speaker to the relationship between the speaker and listener. Read as a waki figure, Yamashiro’s role becomes more arduous and complex, and the three pieces insist that her copresence with the speakers is critical to listening to them. Together, Kaisōhō and Bācharu keishō mark the pain of listening to testimony and show alterations necessary to address those difficulties. In Kaisōhō, Yamashiro’s facial expression depicts listening to testimony as a challenging moment (fig. 5.1). Seated in the middle of a group of elderly survivors, the testimony seems at an impasse. Those closest to Yamashiro touch her, but there is no other connection between them: some look at her and others look away, with a man in the foreground looking directly into the camera. Yamashiro, in the center of the group, appears trapped, and the bright lighting makes the moment of testimony sterile. While some of the elderly are smiling, their postures are uncomfortable: some seem to have just settled in, while a body in the upper left appears in midmovement, as if leaving the scene. Because no one appears to be speaking, Kaisōhō depicts testimony in suspension. The moment is analogous to the moment that the ghost suspends his testimony in Noh. Exemplified in Tadanori, the ghost, in disguise, begins to tell the story of Tadanori’s life; he reveals his identity and then immediately exits the stage. Before Tadanori’s ghost returns, this interruption leaves the

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waki to fill in the gaps, and he speaks to a villager, who explains the ghost’s situation. While the moment dramaturgically repeats Tadanori’s story in the villager’s vernacular to ensure the audience understands it, for my purposes this moment illustrates the complex relationship between speaker and listener, where the listener must work to learn more about the speaker’s situation. With the waki in mind, Kaisōhō depicts Yamashiro as abandoned, without any guidance in listening to difficult testimonies. She looks toward but not into the camera, her gaze unfocused, illustrative of her inability to continue to hear about atrocities from the Battle of Okinawa. Kondo remarks that Yamashiro’s “stiff expression” indicates that “it just wouldn’t be possible to gain a comprehension of something that is incomprehensible.”62 The tension in Kaisōhō demonstrates the failure of verbal communication between Yamashiro and the survivors, emphasized by the title: Yamashiro translates Kaisōhō as “Reminiscence,” but the Japanese title is made up of the characters 回想法, a combination of “remembrance” and “method.”63 Considering that the first two characters mean, literally, “revolve” and “thought,” the title evokes a method of mulling, of turning thoughts around. The image’s awkward poses and apparent suspension of dialogue contradict its title, suggesting that verbal expression as a “method” of reminiscence fails. In contrast to Yamashiro’s pain in Kaisōhō, Bācharu keishō shows Yamashiro at peace. The photograph focuses on Yamashiro’s face, with hands cradling her (fig. 5.2). Her expression, a marked divergence from the painful one in Kaisōhō, implies that a transformation has happened, one that Kondo describes as Yamashiro “absorbed in the sense of togetherness,” realizing “communication through emotional and physical contact.”64 The photograph’s title, Bācharu keishō, combines the Japanese word for “virtual” and the Japanese word 継承 (keishō), made up of the characters meaning to “inherit” and “receive.” While Kaisōhō places emphasis on the survivor recalling, Bācharu keishō points to the moment of reception, of interchange between speaker and Yamashiro. While the “reminiscence” in Kaisōhō is incomplete, the “virtual inheritance” in Bācharu keishō seems to have occurred. The difference between the two photographs suggests that Yamashiro has, like the waki, made some effort to move from the uneasy state in Kaisōhō to the peaceful expression in Bācharu keishō. Part of Yamashiro’s work is turning testimony into a haptic exchange—­a new model for listening that is drastically different from viewing video testimonies. Significantly, Yamashiro’s haptic exchange is dependent on her sharing the same space as those giving testimony. She must be present with them for the speakers to touch her. Such an exchange would not be possible if Yamashiro had encountered their testimonies remotely. By proposing a haptic interaction, Bācharu keishō undermines the relationship between testimony and information to suggest that the verbal expression of video testimonies is no longer efficacious, and that different modes of inheriting the past must be found. As “inheritance,” Bācharu keishō

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5.2. Bācharu keishō (2008). Copyright © Yamashiro Chikako. Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

distinguishes itself from the “truth of history” frame in which the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum casts video testimonies. When viewing the photograph, it is uncertain what, exactly, has transferred from an elderly speaker to Yamashiro. While the bright lighting in Kaisōhō exposes the discomfort and lack of connections between Yamashiro and the survivors, the shadows in Bācharu keishō point to what is missing from the frame. The transformation between photographs identifies Yamashiro’s response-­ ability as perseverance. Although she is clearly pained by hearing stories about the Battle of Okinawa, Yamashiro remains from Kaisōhō to Bācharu keishō. Her duties contrast the role of the viewer in video testimonies, where the viewer can passively listen and, in the case of an online database, the speaker can be summoned by the touch of a button. By extension, the listener of video testimonies can easily abandon a difficult testimony. In contrast, in Yamashiro’s case, her efforts to hear the stories of the elderly, despite her difficulty, characterizes listening as an arduous and potentially painful task.

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Yamashiro responds to the elderly with her presence, further elaborating on the response-­ability of younger generations; these two photographs are not about a verbal response, if any, that she gave to the speakers; instead, her response is embodied and haptic. Portraying testimony as a situated, interactive exchange between speaker and listener, Kaisōhō and Bācharu keishō disrupt the transfer of this experience to the viewer of the photographs in the art gallery. The photographs identify three parties: speaker, listener, and viewer, distinguishing Yamashiro’s work from video testimonies, where listener and viewer share the same point of view. When the video testimony encourages the viewer to take the perspective of the listener, to become, in the words of Wake, a “tertiary witness,” it participates in disseminating content about events of the past. Kaisōhō and Bācharu keishō undermine any viewer consumption by blocking the circulation of information of the event. Both photographs cut the viewer off from testimony, both verbal and haptic. Viewers of the photographs, without contact with the speakers, do not hear what the speakers have to say, and because Yamashiro suspended their stories in favor of touch, she cannot retell them. In these pieces, the photograph, what is left, reflects what cannot be transferred out of the particular place of Okinawa. On the one hand, this lack of accessibility anticipates a time in the future when these testimonies will not be available. On the other, it calls attention to what the documentation of testimony, especially in video form, leaves out. Yamashiro’s photographs elide the content of testimony to suggest that the experience of receiving testimony cannot be distilled into a transferable format. When Yamashiro exhibits these photographs in Tokyo, they further mark differences between Okinawa and Japan. While Umi no futten re-­creates the Chibichirigama testimony, Kaisōhō and Bācharu keishō leave information about the Battle of Okinawa behind in the prefecture, making Okinawa and the tragedies that occurred there not easily available for understanding without copresence and response-­ability.

Failed Attempts to Voice Anata no koe further develops the relationship between speaker and listener by highlighting the demands of the listener and the agency of the speaker. In the video, we hear a man’s story about watching his family commit suicide during the Battle of Saipan, the three-­week battle in the summer of 1944 that resulted in a large number of civilian casualties.65 Instead of the speaker, however, the video plays his voice and shows Yamashiro mouthing his words while she struggles, at times, to complete this task (fig. 5.3). When Yamashiro is confronted with the arduous work of responding to survivors, Anata no koe demonstrates the dialogic attributes of listening despite her strong emotional reaction.

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5.3. Still from Anata no koe wa watashi no nodo o tōtta (2009). Copyright © Yamashiro Chikako. Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

Similar to other pieces in the Inheritance Series, Anata no koe does not disclose any events from the Battle of Okinawa. Instead, the speaker’s story is from the Battle of Saipan, more than one thousand miles away. In Anata no koe, Yamashiro marks her own distance from the event. Okinawa and Saipan may be linked by their tragedies, but the speaker’s story is separate from Yamashiro’s home and family history. Removed from the testimony of the past event by space and time, Yamashiro mouths the survivor’s words but does not voice them. In contrast to Umi no futten, where Naomi seamlessly repeats Chibana’s story, Yamashiro’s lack of a voice implies that she is unable to transfer testimony. Replicating the framing of video testimonies, Anata no koe places Yamashiro at center to shift attention to the listener and provide her with a more active role. Throughout Anata no koe, Yamashiro stares off camera with intense focus. According to Yamashiro, she looked to the side of the camera because, in her attempt to exactly replicate the timing of his speech, she was watching a video of the survivor.66 Instead of passively consuming his story, Yamashiro develops an interactive reception that necessarily separates her work as listener from the viewer of Anata no koe. The title of the piece, Your Voice Came Out through My Throat, describes Yamashiro as receiving and channeling the past, the survivor’s voice literally passing through her throat. In this case, in the words of Joshua Chambers-­Letson, Yamashiro’s body becomes “a conduit” for “intergenerational transmissions.”67 Yet Yamashiro is not a passive vessel, and the title gestures toward her dialogic role. Instead of “his voice,” the title uses the second person—­“your voice”—­to make it

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a phrase that Yamashiro would say to a survivor. The dialogic quality of the video’s title triangulates a performative relationship with Yamashiro, the viewer of Anata no koe, and the past, and whenever a viewer utters the title, she, too, places herself into relationship with the past, to let “your voice pass through my throat.” Anata no koe reveals the emotional toil of such an act when it stages moments of disconnect between Yamashiro and the survivor’s story. As the man continues to tell of harsh wartime conditions, Yamashiro exhibits a clear emotional reaction to him.68 Tears begin to stream down her face, and when the survivor describes gathering with his family at a cliff, Yamashiro continues to mouth his words but stops when he says they jumped off the cliff. She closes her mouth on “jump” (tobikonde), the moment of violence, and continues to stare off camera, crying. With Yamashiro’s pause, Anata no koe suggests that testimonies of the past cannot be replicated—­without the man’s voice, we would miss out on his tragedy. Not only does Yamashiro’s suspension reflect what Chambers-­Letson describes as the “incommensurable nature” of the man’s story but it also marks the distance between herself and the speaker.69 Anata no koe refutes the logic of Umi no futten’s transferability. In contrast, Anata no koe insists on the inability to reiterate or even channel painful events. After the survivor discloses his family’s suicide, Anata no koe cuts to footage in an unidentified, but official-­looking, archive to further contrast Yamashiro’s work from traditional forms of documentation. The scene begins with silent shots of shelves of books and documents. These items remain indistinguishable—­the camera does not zoom into any markings or titles on their covers, turning everything into nondescript materials. Compared with Yamashiro’s emotional outpouring in the preceding scene, the archive appears cold and sterile. Further, the documents do not transmit any information on their own; rather, like Yamashiro’s inability to mouth the emotional moments of testimony, Anata no koe’s interlude points to what cannot be accessed without being there. As this scene continues, the survivor’s voice echoes as background noise. His words, indecipherable, are a ghostly presence that remind us of what the archive lacks—­the voices and emotional resonances of survivors. After its interlude in the archive, Anata no koe develops the speaker-­ listener relationship by acknowledging the speaker’s agency. Yamashiro appears again, mouthing the survivor’s words. But now, when the man speaks about rebuilding during the postwar period, he appears—­Anata no koe projects a video of his face onto Yamashiro’s (fig. 5.4). A translucent image, he comes back like the Noh ghost, his presence confronting the present to make his mark on it.70 In one of his final lines, “we must never let war happen again,” Anata no koe alters the translucency of his image, making it opaque and causing his face and Yamashiro’s to merge into each other—­it is unclear where his face ends and hers begins. His face reminds us that his testimony cannot be easily separated from the survivor.

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5.4. Still from Anata no koe wa watashi no nodo o tōtta (2009), when the survivor’s face merges with Yamashiro’s. Copyright © Yamashiro Chikako. Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

With the man’s appearance, Anata no koe disrupts any impression that testimony can be easily consumed. These final moments highlight the ways in which Yamashiro has been affected by the speaker’s story. The video centers on her reactions, those of pain and struggle to connect and continue. Anata no koe complicates the act of viewing video testimonies by identifying how they are demanding. The video’s production resulted in additional burdens on Yamashiro. In preparing to mouth the man’s words, Yamashiro watched his testimony again and again. Viewing the survivor’s emotionally draining testimony so many times altered her in a lasting way. She felt that performing the video caused her to internalize the man’s testimony, and within her it turned into “meat,” inhabiting part of her body, until she was able to expel it in a later video piece.71 Illustrative of the toll this story took on her, Yamashiro stopped appearing in videos after Anata no koe to avoid being transformed by her subjects. Yamashiro’s experiences imply that younger generations cannot just watch a testimony and come away unaltered. Instead, as Anata no koe shows, testimony has the potential to transform those who view it. If I consider Yamashiro as waki, her transformation in Anata no koe expands and alters the waki’s role. In Noh, the effects of the ghost’s story on the waki are not explicit. Noh plays culminate in the ghost’s story. In Tadanori, after the ghost tells the story of his death, he states he is happy that the monk heard his tale and leaves. Then the waki leaves silently, without a clear acknowledgment of being altered by the ghost. In contrast, the lasting effects of the speaker’s story on Yamashiro suggest that the force

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of the tragedies experienced by survivors of the Battle of Saipan (and, by extension, the Battle of Okinawa) irreparably marks those who listen to their stories. Anata no koe refuses to believe that a person can easily replicate a testimony, as Naomi does in Umi no futten. Rather, the video goes further to adamantly insist that viewing testimonies can forever alter the spectator. Along with portraying difficulty in hearing testimony, Yamashiro enacts an engaged response to the survivor. Despite her intense emotional reaction to the survivor’s story, Yamashiro continually works to connect with the survivor. At the very end of the video, Yamashiro finally speaks, not to reiterate the man’s testimony but to express her own thoughts about the event. She begins to speak his words softly and is completely audible for a more general statement, “We must never let war happen again.” At this point, the image of his face fades, and Yamashiro continues to explain that war sacrifices civilians. Her final line of the video links the events in Saipan to those of Okinawa. With the survivor’s image and voice gone, Yamashiro says, “I think that the Battle of Okinawa was the same.” The line asserts Yamashiro’s difference, separate from Saipan—­she makes it clear that this is her opinion with the qualifier “I think” (omou desu). If in Anata no koe Yamashiro models a response-­able way of viewing video testimonies, she insists on the need to speak, engaging in dialogue with survivors and past events. Although Yamashiro fails to voice all of the speaker’s testimony, the ending of the video shows her efforts to relate to his story. As in Kaishōhō and Bācharu keishō, Anata no koe identifies ways in which Yamashiro, as a member of the younger generation, can respond to survivors even when their stories are emotionally painful.

Disappearing into the Sea In the video that follows Anata no koe, the Inheritance Series further severs testimony’s transmission by connecting it to location. From the dialogic “your voice,” the series moves to the site-­specific title Sinking Voices, Red Breath in Shizumu koe, akai iki (2010), a video piece that reinscribes Okinawa as the place where testimonies remain. In six minutes, Shizumu koe, akai iki diverges from earlier works in that Yamashiro is absent, but it continues the exploration in the Inheritance Series of the difficulties of listening to and passing on testimony. Shizumu koe, akai iki characterizes testimony as so tied to location that it cannot transfer from one generation to the next and from Okinawa to the rest of Japan. Lacking a central figure, the first half of the video focuses on an old woman. The video starts in her apartment; a tangled mess of microphones lies on the floor, presumably part of some kind of effort to document her story. In these opening scenes, the woman sings a barely audible song and speaks indecipherable words. Then, moving quickly,

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the woman carries the bundle of microphones to the shore. After a shot of the sea washed with a red filter, the woman throws the microphones in, and they sink to the ocean floor. In the second half of the video, a young woman dives into the ocean to search for the microphones, but instead of locating them, she meets another diver. Shizumu koe, akai iki, like the other works in the Inheritance Series, disrupts the transfer of testimony to its viewer. The content of the woman’s speech and song at the video’s opening is inaudible. Instead, the video endows the speaker with the power to discard testimony when the old woman throws the microphones into the ocean. There, Shizumu koe, akai iki suggests that the content of testimony is not always destined for documentation. In the ocean, the testimonies become so attached to a place that the video negates the possibility of their circulation beyond the prefecture. In this manner, Shizumu koe, akai iki insists on the force of place. Tying testimonies to the prefecture reminds us that the Battle of Okinawa occurred for more than two months across the southern half of the main island. While community groups or the prefectural government have marked some of the sites of tragedy with memorial plaques or statues, many remain unmarked. Although postwar rebuilding covered over these places, Shizumu koe, akai iki reminds us that they are still there. Further, the video challenges the Okinawa boom’s revision of the prefecture as a tourist location. When the old woman throws the microphones into the ocean, the video connects memories of the battle and nature. Notwithstanding the white sand beaches and clear blue ocean as part of the prefecture’s natural beauty, they were sites of atrocity, the video’s red filter gesturing toward the blood that spilled during the battle. In Shizumu koe, akai iki, the situatedness of testimony implies that the stories take on an oceanic life of their own. In the video, the bunch of microphones resemble coral (fig. 5.5) and sway back and forth under the water like seaweed. The bundle of microphones, a clear connection to forms of documentation, are in themselves ineffective—­they begin Shizumu koe, akai iki on an apartment floor unconnected to any machine. In the ocean, the microphones become completely inoperable, and testimony literally turns to air when a bubble rises up from the microphones. This bubble of air is without voice, without meaning. It rises, evading the young female diver, and pops at the ocean’s surface, dispersing before reaching the younger generation in search of it. As the video highlights, when testimony leaves its place, it loses its substance. The diver’s unsuccessful attempt to locate the microphones imagines efforts of younger generations. In this case, the member of the younger generation, instead of listener, becomes a seeker, a treasure hunter, who might not find testimony. This act of searching for something that may not be there develops the response-­ability put forth by the Inheritance Series. Shizumu koe, akai iki portrays a process of attempting to connect with the past, despite the

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5.5. Still from Shizumu koe, akai iki (2010). Copyright © Yamashiro Chikako. Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

possibility that the past may not be found. The young woman must interact with the natural elements of Okinawa, venturing into the sea to find the past. Again, the video ties listening to testimony (and engaging with the past) to the physical location of Okinawa. This interactivity is the complete opposite of that of Umi no futten, where the play elides the difficulties of traveling to Chibichirigama in Yomitan. Instead, Shizumu koe, akai iki presents the efforts to locate testimony without its discovery. When Shizumu koe, akai iki reiterates that testimonies remain in Okinawa, it keeps the viewer in the gallery separate from even the search for the past. In this case, the viewer of the work watches the unsuccessful attempt of the diver, who is another step away from testimony than Yamashiro in earlier videos. While Yamashiro receives testimony in Bācharu keishō, albeit through haptic means, such reception is not even possible in Shizumu koe, akai iki. Throughout the Inheritance Series, Yamashiro models an ethics of the attempt. When younger generations are response-­ able to the past, they are presented with arduous tasks—­in Kaisōhō and Bācharu keishō, to stay despite difficulties and find a different mode of listening; in Anata no koe, to try to relate to testimony despite emotional pain; and in Shizumu koe, akai iki to search for testimony despite the potential inability to locate it. In all the attempts in the Inheritance Series, younger generations never easily receive testimonies, a point that the series reiterates when it separates viewership from listening to testimonies. Yet, apparent in Yamashiro’s repeated efforts despite all her troubles, the series does not want testimonies to stop,

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but rather it reminds us that such work is part of testimony and must be undertaken. This chapter considered the act of listening to testimonies in the contexts of Okinawa’s history of imperialism and sacrifice at the hands of the Japanese government. Reading Noh’s interdependence of place and presence in the ghost’s retelling, I compared two artists’ portrayal of testimony to assert the importance of location in the remembrance of the Battle of Okinawa. Sakate’s Umi no futten portrays the political dynamics of continued Okinawan land use by the U.S. military. But when the play’s Chibichirigama scene re-­creates a testimony of a tragedy from the Battle of Okinawa, it distills the past event, reflecting limits in circulating testimonies beyond the prefecture. In contrast, Yamashiro’s Inheritance Series argues for the situatedness of testimonies in Okinawa. Taking the role of listener, Yamashiro portrays the dialogic elements of testimony and develops her response-­ability, where Yamashiro, as a younger-­generation Okinawan, experiences difficulty listening to testimony but remains to continue to listen. Throughout Transgenerational Remembrance, I have explored questions of form in representation: in the case of the kamikaze and Koizumi Meiro, how to portray the past when images of it are overdetermined; in the case of the colony and Hirata Oriza, how to connect a distant past onstage to its audiences; and in the case of the “comfort women” and Shimada Yoshiko, how to represent those figures who remain silent because of their potential past complicity. In this chapter, both Sakate and Yamashiro call attention to the form of remembrance itself, challenging whether video testimony can disseminate information about the Battle of Okinawa. While Sakate’s re-­ creation of testimony raises questions about what the circulated testimony loses, Yamashiro’s Inheritance Series demands that testimony remain within the prefecture. In the next chapter, I expand these questions to that of place and production, exploring Japanese artists who move across the Pacific to explore memories of Japanese American internment.

Chapter 6

Making Unresolved Japanese American Histories Transpacific Possession and Response-­ability as Conflict

Along with ghosts seeking release from this world, Noh features malevolent and demonic spirits that return to disrupt it. There is no dialogue between the living and these violent dead. Instead, the places they inhabit are rid of them by spiritual purification and exorcism. Dōjōji exemplifies the disordered and unresolved qualities of the Noh exorcism piece. On the day when Buddhist temple monks dedicate their new bell, a demonic serpent spirit beguiles them by posing as a dancer. She uses her disguise to get close to the bell so that she can destroy it, having exacted vengeance on an unrequited lover during a past, earthly life in that temple, and with a bell.1 Unlike other Noh plays mentioned here, her return is not a try at salvation, nor is there any dialogue between the living and the dead. The second act is a standoff between the spirit in her true serpentine form and Buddhist priests, who recite prayers to pacify and expel her. While the priests force her from the temple grounds, they do not kill her. The spirit, in a last-­ditch attempt to ruin the temple bell, vomits fire at it; then “her body burns in her own fire. She leaps into the river pool, into the waves of the river Hitaka, and there she vanishes.”2 Her final escape anticipates future attacks, ones realized every time the play is reperformed. Just as the spirit in Dōjōji attempts to destroy the temple bell, acts of Japanese aggression and imperialism come back in the contemporary period to undermine long-­standing narratives of the Asia-­Pacific War. Dōjōji’s unresolved ending, however, also serves as an apt analogy for a particular facet of the war: Japanese American wartime experiences. While the Japanese American does not factor predominantly in discourses of memory in contemporary Japan, the figure nonetheless represents elided histories of wartime oppression, reflective of the normalizing influence of the postwar U.S.-­Japan alliance. This chapter reads representations of Japanese American experiences by Japanese artists through the malevolent spirits in Noh’s exorcism plays. In these cases, Japanese artists deploy Japanese Americans as undead, lingering, and potentially disruptive forces, forces that can be exiled but never destroyed.3

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Internment, the mass relocation and incarceration of U.S. immigrants of Japanese descent from 1942 to 1945, is the representative wartime experience of Japanese Americans.4 This imprisonment displaced families, eradicated communities, and enforced unconstitutional injustices on Japanese immigrants, most of whom were U.S. citizens. In U.S. contemporary remembrance, this wartime incarceration has simultaneously been elided in dominant histories, revisited by activist groups, and seemingly resolved through legislation. The event, however, possesses U.S. World War II history. During the war, the War Relocation Authority heavily censored visuals of the camps, and after the war, those interned remained silent about their experiences in an effort to reenter U.S. society. Accordingly, Marita Sturken describes internment as a stain on U.S. national history, and it is thus defined by “absent presence”; few images remain, making the event, “for the most part, absent from the litany of World War II images that constitute its iconic history.”5 As Caroline Chung Simpson further develops, internment’s “absent presence” contributes to its haunting influences “in the articulation of nationhood in the tumultuous postwar and cold war years.”6 Unlike Japanese atrocities in Asia, internment has been addressed by U.S. legislation. The 1988 Civil Liberties Act issued an apology and paid reparations to survivors and their families. Yet as Elena Tajima Creef asserts, forced relocation and incarceration resulted in “the visual and psychic colonization of the Japanese American body,” an occurrence that “has yet to be fully resolved.”7 A. Naomi Paik echoes this sentiment when she asserts that despite the 1988 Civil Liberties Act and its narrative of finality, “internment lives on.”8 Critically, internment’s haunting suggests that legislative action, the kind called for by survivors of Japanese atrocities, does not end historiographical debates or relieve experiences of personal pain caused by unconstitutional, oppressive, or violent acts. In postwar and contemporary Japan, the Japanese American experience has figured very little in narratives of the war.9 Even when topics of Japanese aggression reemerged in the contemporary period, internment never became a central issue in debates about transgenerational remembrance. Internment has nevertheless had a lasting effect on Japan—­during the war U.S. officials saw internment as an opportunity to learn about Japan, despite differences between Japanese Americans and their former homeland, and applied those lessons to postwar occupation policy making.10 Rather, internment’s lack of prominence in postwar Japanese discourses can be considered symptomatic of the continued U.S. influence in postwar remembrance.11 As discussed in this book’s introduction, the U.S. Occupation government, driven by Asia’s emergence as a Cold War battleground, worked to transform Japan into a key U.S. ally.12 Benefiting from this alliance, Japan became an exemplar of first-­world prosperity, and U.S. Occupation forces shaped Japanese discourses of the war, downplaying wartime atrocities in Asia.13 While the U.S.-­Japan alliance has weakened after the end of the Cold War, the countries’ economic and

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military partnership continues. The recent importation of Japanese popular culture to the United States is the latest development in this ongoing relationship, one that persistently favors the benefits of trade over the recollection of wartime antagonism. Whereas internment has remained a predominantly U.S.-­domestic issue, I explore how artists from Japan disrupt its geographic confinement when they journey across the Pacific to stage and reassess these wartime memories in the continental United States. This chapter thus takes a transpacific approach critical of the bilateral U.S.-­Japan alliance. Here “transpacific,” a recent, interdisciplinary term adopted by Asian American studies, critical studies, and area studies, reflects the movement of people and capital across the Pacific beginning at the end of the nineteenth century.14 Unlike other conceptions of the region that categorize it based on its interior (Pacific) or exterior (Pacific Rim), the “transpacific” is a site of ambiguous spaces and crossings, what Yunte Huang describes as “both a contact zone between competing geopolitical ambitions and a gap between literature and history that is riddled with distortions, half-­truths, longings, and affective burdens never fully resolved.”15 Following Huang, I explore the transpacific movement of artists who reveal internment to be an unresolved event from the Asia-­Pacific War. Further, the “transpacific,” in the words of Yoneyama, becomes “a critical methodology by which to consider alternatives to transwar, interimperial, Cold War formations.”16 Accordingly, transpacific artistic productions call forth the lingering presence of internment, pointing out contradictions in the U.S.-­Japan alliance.17 And, by engaging with mass wartime incarceration, these Japanese artists insist that internment is not just a stain on U.S. history but also an event pertinent to younger generations in Japan. To “transpacific,” I add “possession,” what I consider to be a potentially political act of disruption. Aoi no ue, another Noh exorcism play, portrays the power of possession; in it, a woman’s jealousy of her romantic rival becomes so intense that the emotion manifests as a spirit that physically harms. Steven Brown identifies the political nature of spirit possession in Noh, where “destructive influence was thought to be exerted by the malign spirits of both the living and the dead, against the enemies or their enemies’ descendants, in order to exact vengeance for political injustices suffered in the past.”18 By extension, “transpacific possession” would describe the wild might of past wrongs, conjured on the stage. Unconstrained by the local and its associated modes of control and censure, such possession may be able to undermine social or political institutions.19 I apply “transpacific possession” as a representational strategy for summoning specters from beyond U.S. borders, to unravel U.S. narratives of Japanese American experiences and, ultimately, to undermine the status quo of the U.S.-­Japan alliance. The disruptive qualities of “transpacific possession” add to previous scholarship on haunting and internment that focus, necessarily, on the felt pain that lingers in multiple generations after the war.20 Instead, along similar lines to the destructive

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spirits in Dōjōji and Aoi no ue, I consider ways in which these performances take revenge for past injustices experienced by Japanese Americans. In this chapter, I follow Japanese artists as their movements across the Pacific expand the issue of Japanese American experiences beyond U.S. borders. Accordingly, I contrast contemporary performance against state-­to-­state resolution and domestic legal reparations to inquire, when the state acts, how can performance expose elided parties and lingering traces and re-­create conflict?21 This inquiry thus expands my discussion of performance as modeling Takahashi Tetsuya’s response-­ability, the insistence that younger generations answer the calls of Japan’s war past. Examples here portray response as disruptive and antagonistic. Yanagi Miwa’s play Zero Hour: Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape (2013) and Kondō Aisuke’s Matter and Memory series (2013–­present) of videos, performances, and installations cast the Japanese American subject and wartime experiences as possessing forces. Both artists traverse the Pacific to become visitants at sites across North America. Zero Hour revises the story of the real-­life Tokyo Rose, a Japanese American woman trapped in Japan at the outset of U.S. involvement in the war and later tried for treason in the immediate postwar period. The performance and subsequent North American tour of Zero Hour deploys Japanese American characters as possessing entities capable of troubling the foundations of citizenship in the postwar period. Kondō’s Matter and Memory series visits locations that were significant in his great-­grandfather’s thirty-­seven-­year history in the United States, from San Francisco to the Topaz War Relocation Center internment camp in Utah. There, Kondō identifies internment as a possessing, malevolent force, and he proposes conflict as a means to address this event and its ghostly traces.

Internment’s Hauntings When Japanese artists call attention to the unresolved nature of the internment, they illuminate the event’s temporal and spatial hauntings. In dominant narratives in the United States, the legislative redress of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was the resolution to internment. The text of the act itself, however, only partially accounts for internees who have passed away, with money going to their spouses or children. Because it limits reparations to surviving children of internees—­ not grandchildren or great-­ grandchildren—­ it reinforces the idea of a temporal end to the event.22 As scholars have discussed, despite redress, “irreparable harm” of mass incarceration continues to haunt not only those who endured the camps but, as Paik describes, their children and grandchildren.23 Yet the internment’s temporal registers are only one aspect of its legacy. Dominant histories spatially limit internment to U.S. borders. Despite the harsh expulsion and imprisonment of Japanese immigrants elsewhere in North

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and South America, historian Brian Hayashi reminds us that postwar redress arguments focused solely on the U.S. domestic experience, in effect “deglobalizing . . . the internment story.”24 This focus ignores other experiences, both in the United States and in Canada and South America. When portrayed as solely a domestic issue, histories of Japanese American internment highlight stories of Japanese American patriotism. According to Joshua Chambers-­Letson, “Nikkei are regularly depicted as volunteering for and accepting the injustice of the incarceration as a means of demonstrating their loyalty.”25 Historical narratives emphasize Japanese American military sacrifice, in particular the heroic feats of the 442nd and 100th combat units.26 Even within the United States, the narrative of internment camps ignores U.S. foreign policy and imperial expansion. Stories of Japanese American wartime experiences within the continent, for instance, do not include the Japanese experience in Hawaii, where immigrants were, for the most part, not incarcerated. Obfuscating Hawaii downplays its status as a U.S. territory and, by extension, its illegal acquisition by the U.S. less than fifty years prior to the Asia-­Pacific War. Further, dominant narratives in the United States ignore the precarious legal standing of those incarcerated, what Hayashi describes as the “struggles of aliens and their dependents.”27 During the war, the Japanese American experience was defined by incarceration and statelessness. Challenges to Asian American subjecthood began with late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century immigration policies. These curtailed Japanese and Asian immigration, limited citizenship, and restricted land ownership.28 During war, the status of Japanese Americans became more insecure when Executive Order 9066 stripped them of their citizenship rights. More than one hundred twenty thousand Japanese immigrants were held in internment camps from 1942 to 1945. While two-­thirds of those interned were American citizens, as Chambers-­Letson argues, their relocation and incarceration demanded that they “display, exhibit, and paradoxically legitimate their subjection through daily performances of patriotic national identification.”29 Applied to Japanese American experiences, “possession” can not only describe wartime history as unresolved but also comment on the precarious political standing of Japanese American subjects during the war. Brown examines possessing spirits in Japanese culture to summarize, “What most of these tales of spiritual possession and vengeance have in common is political dispossession.”30 Without any political or social standing, Brown argues, when spirits possess in Noh they enact the only influence they have. Not all portrayals of Japanese American incarceration enact such resistant potential, however. One such example is Inoue Hisashi’s Manzana, waga machi (Manzanar, Our Town, 1993). One of the few Japanese plays about internment, Manzana, waga machi follows five Japanese American women as they adjust to life in the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California.31 Instead of portraying a unique Japanese American identity, Manzana, waga machi connects the women through their interest in traditional Japanese

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culture, making an argument for their shared cultural roots. In so doing, Manzana, waga machi replicates the Nihonjinron discourse of Japanese exceptionalism, reaffirming Japanese uniqueness and superiority. Further, Manzana, waga machi casts internment as a past, resolved event. The ending of the play projects a slide that explains that the “honor” of Japanese Americans was “finally restored” with the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.32 This moment reiterates the idea that legislative redress finalizes historical events, casting them into the past. Yet when Manzana, waga machi discusses the Civil Liberties Act, the play betrays its own sense of resolution. The same text that mentions the U.S. legislation explains that approximately fifty thousand former internees had already died before the passage of the act.33 Those who never received an official apology inadvertently haunt the final moments of the play.34 In contrast to Manzana, waga machi, Yanagi Miwa and Kondō Aisuke highlight the way in which internment is still unresolved, temporally and spatially. Through their transpacific crossings, their works point to what has been elided in legislative redress, widening the event’s geographic scope and making the issue relevant for younger-­generation Japanese.

Zero Hour: Japanese American Possession In the face of this false sense of resolution, visual artist turned performance maker Yanagi Miwa extends the Japanese American wartime experience beyond internment and U.S. borders. Her play Zero Hour: Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape enacts transpacific possession on multiple levels. The creation of the play results from a transpacific and transgenerational encounter: Yanagi, a Japanese artist, revisits the story of Japanese Americans trapped in Japan at the outset of war with the United States. The play focuses on events leading up to and following the postwar treason trial of Japanese American Iva Toguri d’Aquino, known as Tokyo Rose. The real-­life d’Aquino was one of several women who served as announcers for Japan’s wartime Zero Hour radio program that made its own transpacific journeys over invisible radio waves from Japan to Allied troop locations throughout the Pacific. Yanagi’s play rewrites this history, taking up these crossings and ultimately traversing the Pacific in 2015 for a five-­city North American tour. Read through Noh possession, the transpacific journey of Zero Hour depicts the Japanese American as a possessing force who disrupts the known history of Tokyo Rose and its accompanying ideas of nation and citizen. As I explore, this possession questions definitions of citizenship and national allegiance while challenging the contemporary audience’s part in furthering these long-­held definitions. By focusing on d’Aquino, Zero Hour portrays a historical incident that illustrates the precarious position of Japanese Americans while illuminating the demands placed on their citizenship and loyalty even after the war’s end.

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In the United States, Tokyo Rose was a notorious figure, an American citizen who turned on her country during the war and who appeared for decades after the war’s completion in media and political rhetoric as a manifestation of the “enemy within.” Reflective of Japanese Americans’ uneasy status during the war, a series of events forced d’Aquino into work as an announcer and, later, to identify herself as Tokyo Rose. D’Aquino, born and raised in the United States, was in Japan to visit a sick relative on December 7, 1941. Like other Japanese Americans outside the country after the Pearl Harbor attack, d’Aquino was denied reentry into the United States.35 In need of work, she became a typist at Japan’s national broadcasting corporation NHK (Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai). There, officials made her one of the announcers for the Zero Hour wartime propaganda radio program. Designed to lower Allied troop morale, Zero Hour played jazz standards and featured female announcers who boasted of Japanese victories and unfaithful girlfriends back home.36 After the war, American journalists Clark Lee and Harry Brundidge located d’Aquino in Tokyo and offered her two thousand dollars to tell her story as the one and only Tokyo Rose.37 Lacking funds for her trip back home, d’Aquino agreed to an interview. Despite evidence that other announcers worked alongside d’Aquino, she emerged as the program’s sole announcer. Upon her return to the United States, d’Aquino faced treason charges and was convicted in a 1949 trial in San Francisco.38 She served more than six years in federal prison and fought deportation until President Gerald Ford pardoned her in 1977. As Chung Simpson discusses, d’Aquino’s trial occurred at a critical time in the U.S.-­Japan alliance, when Japan was transitioning from enemy to ally and Japanese Americans from internees to citizens. Neutralizing the threat of Tokyo Rose became important not only for fragile postwar peace but also for Japanese Americans’ unstable postwar citizenship.39 The Tokyo Rose figure fulfilled “the needs of the U.S. occupation of Japan” and became “a cultural narrative tailor-­made to succor rankling fears about postwar gender reconversion” of women returning home after serving in the workforce during the war.40 D’Aquino’s trial thus allayed anxieties of U.S.-­Japan relations and postwar domestic changes, along with lingering concerns over Japanese American patriotism. Yanagi’s performance piece Zero Hour is about the very construction of postwar historical discourses that situated d’Aquino as a treasonous character. The play creates its own alternative history, changing the name of its main character from Iva Toguri d’Aquino to Annie Oguri. Yanagi’s play also introduces Daniel, a Japanese American soldier. Gifted with an exceptional ear, Daniel meets the program’s five female announcers and matches each woman to her distinct radio personality but is unable to find Tokyo Rose. Halfway through the performance, the play reveals to its audience that the personality Tokyo Rose is actually Shiomi, the station’s male sound engineer, who creates Tokyo Rose by manipulating a recording of his voice. At the end of the play, in the present day, an elderly Daniel figures out the identity of Tokyo Rose.

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When Zero Hour’s revision of historical events turns the Tokyo Rose treason trial into a detective story, it questions the position of women in postwar historiography. Yanagi’s play focuses on Daniel’s search for and eventual discovery of the true nature of Tokyo Rose. His obsession mirrors the ways in which the U.S. media became singularly focused on d’Aquino’s guilt despite evidence to the contrary. As Daniel searches, the play marks the elision of women in Japanese American historical narratives. The first part of the play follows Annie’s transition from typist to radio announcer to alleged traitor, but after her trial she disappears from the stage, an absence noted in reviews of the touring production.41 Zero Hour leaves Daniel to convey details about Annie’s conviction and jail sentence as Zero Hour continues into the present day. Instead of Annie, the play follows Daniel and Shiomi’s friendship that develops over chess games waged across the Pacific. When the play elaborates on the postwar lives of these male characters, it reflects on how men become the agents of history, subjects in and writers of the past. Further, Daniel’s and Shiomi’s roles connect postwar historiography with the U.S.-­Japan alliance. The bond between Japanese American Daniel and Japanese Shiomi embodies the U.S.-­Japan alliance as male, derived from military engagement, and based in (friendly) conflict. Their chess matches reflect the work of neutralizing any animosity between the two countries. Zero Hour’s feminist historiography of Tokyo Rose evokes Shimada Yoshiko’s reenactment and reevaluation of the Japanese “comfort woman” (discussed in the previous chapter). Both artists insert complex female figures back into narratives of the war. The play also reflects Yanagi’s body of visual and performance work. Initially a visual artist working primarily in photography, Yanagi has explored assumptions surrounding the roles of women in Japanese society. One series, Elevator Girls (1994–­98), creates theatrical stagings of the identically dressed women who operate elevators in high-­end Japanese department stores. When the photographs group women together in surreal scenes, the series asks what is behind their perfect appearances, gesturing toward hidden inner lives. In My Grandmothers (2000–­2009), Yanagi interviews young women about what they want to be when they are grandmothers and, based on their answers, poses them in action scenes. The women, shown riding a motorcycle or in a snowy field surrounded by children, challenge prior conceptions of age and femininity.42

Possessing Spirits and Legal Standing In keeping with Yanagi’s oeuvre, Zero Hour introduces a chorus of female announcers who contribute to the play’s feminist reevaluation of history. The chorus’s very presence actualizes period recordings that suggest there were multiple announcers for the Zero Hour radio program. When Zero Hour puts them onstage, it locates these women in the omissions of history. Zero

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Hour identifies each member of the chorus, giving them names and personalities. We see all five training to develop unique radio personalities under the watchful eye of Jane, a Japanese Canadian in a supervisory position at the station. Japanese and American newspaper coverage of Zero Hour reintroduced d’Aquino’s story, including her unjust verdict, into American and Japanese public discourses.43 Thus, the chorus in Zero Hour realizes Yanagi’s program note for the North American tour, “Perhaps it is only through live theater that we can replay these voices that have disappeared into the waves of history.”44 Read through the serpent spirit in Dōjōji, the chorus of women become possessed and demonic forces, whose presence undermines historical understandings of the trial and ideas of citizenship and patriotism the trial sought to safeguard. While Daniel identifies Annie and four other women as radio announcers, these women play additional supporting roles, including Shiomi’s nurse in the present. At other times, they work together as a movement ensemble to punctuate action onstage. When, for instance, Annie signs her contract with reporters to sell her story as Tokyo Rose, the rest of the chorus does as well, their “Annie Oguri” signatures projected on a screen above the stage. Their constant presence calls attention to the radio program’s multiple announcers while their changing roles disrupt even this understanding of them. Throughout Zero Hour, the chorus haunts the stage, their bodies reminding us of the other female announcers and challenging us to acknowledge them. Just as the spirit in Dōjōji destroys the temple bell, the women in the play obliterate any certainty about d’Aquino’s verdict. As Masayo Duus describes, d’Aquino’s 1949 treason trial was “one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in American legal history.”45 Chung Simpson adds that d’Aquino was already tried in the popular media, her guilt decided before her trial.46 Part of the prosecution’s case was that one person made the Tokyo Rose recordings.47 The women onstage undermine this case and point out that the trial elided the other announcers from legal and historical records. When d’Aquino alone was tried for the Zero Hour radio program, her fellow announcers were effectively released from any legal scrutiny. In Yanagi’s play, the onstage presence of the female chorus illustrates ways in which the legal realms fail to account for everyone while also calling attention to the sameness with which the U.S. public discourses view Japanese Americans. But, d’Aquino’s trial was about more than her participation in a wartime radio program. Rather, as Chung Simpson argues, the Tokyo Rose trial, in essence, reinforced definitions of U.S. citizenship and Japanese American loyalty to the nation.48 In Creef’s words, “d’Aquino’s history signifies one of the most extreme case studies in the literal deterritorialization of home, citizenship, language, identity, and body of any Japanese American caught on either side of the Pacific during or after the war.”49 For Japanese Americans, the Tokyo Rose trial required another public performance of patriotism even after the war. Japanese American groups, including the influential Japanese American Citizens League, aiming to restore normalcy after the war, publicly distanced

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themselves from d’Aquino during her trial.50 The female chorus counters the definition of national subject that the Tokyo Rose trial sought to reassert and police. When the trial outcome strips Annie of her citizenship, as it did for the real d’Aquino, the women in the chorus become unattached from any clear-­cut definitions of citizen. They remind us that other announcers never emerged after the war, prompting us to wonder about their whereabouts. As elided but free agents, these women challenge the very parameters the trial worked to reinforce. If Daniel and Shiomi manifest the U.S.-­Japan alliance and their chess match stages a contained yet friendly conflict, the unrestrained nature of the female chorus in Zero Hour undermines this tidy relationship.

Can You Hear Me? As possessing spirits, the chorus disrupts not only their reception throughout history but also our understanding of them. Early in the performance, Zero Hour foregrounds how the women have always been subject to others’ perceptions when it plays an audio recording of Allied soldiers longing for Tokyo Rose. The soldiers’ fantasies about Tokyo Rose remind us that these female announcers were always subject to the male gaze, imaginatively cast by the listeners. Simultaneously, the moment subverts the male imagination: when Zero Hour shows the chorus members, identifies each, and provides a bit of their backstories, the female announcers cease to be abstract, disembodied voices. In contrast, the male soldiers never appear on the stage and instead are voices imagined by the audience. Beyond wartime male fantasies, Zero Hour challenges how audiences today perceive the announcers. As the play goes on, the women, while ever present, become indistinguishable. They wear the same costume, a white blouse and black skirt; cloche hats obscure their faces to turn them into identical ensemble members. Further creating confusion about who is who, the women lose their established identities when they play additional supporting parts or move the modular stage furniture into different configurations. Because Zero Hour simultaneously differentiates between each female announcer and erases that distinction through identical costumes, the play makes it impossible to distinguish the individual announcers. Their indistinguishability challenges any sense that Daniel, and the play Zero Hour, identify a real version of events. Instead, they mark what his search and the later historical narrative elide. Throughout the performance, the chorus possesses the audience’s attention, interrupting with the frequent question, “Can you hear me?” The question immediately situates the audience’s spectatorship as an act of response-­ability in which figures from the past demand a response. During a Los Angeles performance, this call was so strong that the audience felt the need to answer back.51 Considering these women as possessed spirits, the

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audience is prompted by their refrain to respond to something disruptive and potentially malevolent. In part, Zero Hour tasks audience members with relating to the demonized traitor, Tokyo Rose. Yet because the women are indistinguishable, their calls ask whom, exactly, the audience is to respond to. The repeated question, “Can you hear me?” further interrogates the audience’s understanding of historical narratives, challenging whom, what, and how we hear. Discussing Japanese ghosts in the early modern period (1603–­ 1868), Satoko Shimazaki suggests that because ghosts remain in this world, it is possible to think of ghosts not as “revenants,” as that which come back, but as entities that have always remained and “simply entered another stage of life.”52 Applied to the female chorus, their constant presence suggests that they have always been there, but we have not noticed them—­their absence from historical narratives results from our lack of attention. Their repeated question, “Can you hear me?” confronts our prior obliviousness and challenges us to rethink how we see and hear them. Zero Hour puts the audience alongside the voices of Allied soldiers, asking how we imagine and project upon the “me” in their voiced refrain. As possessing spirits, the chorus disrupts our historical understanding of them, yet Zero Hour provides little information and few answers about the chorus members. Unencumbered by restrictions of citizenship, the women remain uncontained agents, elided from postwar history. They constantly remind us that they are there—­both in their movement and calls of “Can you hear me?” At the same time, Zero Hour acknowledges that knowing “me” in their calls is impossible. In the context of response-­ability, “Can you hear me?” asks audience members to acknowledge previously elided figures without explaining or neutralizing the mysteries surrounding them.

Further Transpacific Crossings In 2015 Zero Hour made another transpacific journey: in a five-­city North American tour, it traveled from Japan to the United States and Canada. The movement of the tour replicated Iva d’Aquino’s while asking whether her fellow announcers did the same. On the surface, tour sponsorship positioned Zero Hour in an agenda of promoting positive relations between the United States and Japan. The Japanese government (through the Agency for Cultural Affairs and the Japan Foundation) and the U.S. government (through the National Endowment for the Arts) served as major sources of funding, along with corporate sponsors, including the Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido. The New York–­based Japan Society aided with tour organization and made the play one of the events in its 2015 series Stories from the War. Composed of performances, film screenings, and lectures, Stories from the War commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Asia-­Pacific War. The series was supported by a grant from the Japan–­United States Friendship

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Commission, an independent office established by the U.S. Congress in 1975. The very occasion of the Zero Hour’s North American tour thus reflects the state’s mobilization of artistic production to maintain relations between the United States and Japan. In light of governmental and corporate sponsorship, Zero Hour becomes, in some sense, an ideal choice to support friendship between the two countries. In its portrayal of Daniel’s search for Tokyo Rose, the play unites audiences in a common mystery and elides any bilateral tension. Further, Daniel and Shiomi’s friendship realizes the U.S.-­Japan bond in the postwar period—­ former enemies evolve into lifelong friends. Focused entirely on Tokyo Rose, Zero Hour’s narrative does not address any wartime violence between the two countries. And despite the fact that the play is about Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians, Zero Hour does not discuss internment as a major event in Japanese American history. Other production elements of the Zero Hour tour, however, disrupt tidy reaffirmations of transpacific alliance. In North America, the female chorus, as possessing spirits, haunt the stage and undermine the narrative of friendship. The chorus’s constant presence reminds us of the parties ignored in the Tokyo Rose trial, and when performed in North America, the tour connects this erasure to the U.S.-­Japan alliance. The performances in U.S. cities make apparent internment as an obscured subject matter in Zero Hour. When I attended a performance in Los Angeles, less than three miles from the Japanese American National Museum’s permanent exhibition on internment, I could not help but wonder about the wartime experiences of Annie’s or Daniel’s parents back in the United States.53 Zero Hour’s omissions of wartime oppression, when situated as part of a U.S.-­Japan friendship tour, illustrate ways in which the U.S.-­Japan transpacific alliance continues to shape representations of the Asia-­Pacific War. In the tour program, sponsor logos, on the same page as the cast and artistic and production staff, became additional important players. Nevertheless, other production elements of the touring performance work alongside the chorus of female announcers as disruptive forces. In particular, actor accents and biographies contribute to the mystery surrounding the female announcers and undo strict definitions of citizenship. In the North American tour, actors spoke a mixture of Japanese and English, with supertitles projected on the back wall of the set. Many of the actors who played second-­or third-­generation Japanese Americans or Japanese Canadians did not speak with standard American or Canadian accents. For instance, the actor playing Daniel spoke as if English was his second language. When Daniel says he is a Japanese American but speaks English with an accent, his statement about origin is cast in doubt. In part such ambiguity is reminiscent of how the U.S. government made Japanese American citizenship uncertain during the war. As Chambers-­Letson asserts, it took only the words in Executive Order 9066—­“all Japanese persons, both alien and non-­alien”—­to

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“disarticulat[e]” Japanese Americans from their prior legal status.54 These actors, then, challenge the place of the Japanese American in the U.S.-­Japan alliance—­who is Daniel and where, exactly, is his place within international security negotiations and global markets? In contrast to the wartime definitions of national subjects, Zero Hour’s actor biographies propose other ways of negotiating across borders. In the tour program, the actors’ written biographies reveal that their working lives move them through transpacific networks.55 For instance, the actor playing Annie, Arao Hinako, was born and raised in Japan, studied abroad in Argentina, and graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia; her acting credits include work with American and Japanese groups, including Philadelphia’s Pig Iron Theatre Company. Actors’ international biographies, coupled with their ethnically Japanese bodies and unplaceable accents, confront the audience with their ambiguous positions in the world. Further, because program biographies can be considered forms of actors’ self-­performances, the Zero Hour tour shows, on the one hand, the work of global arts practices in negotiating the boundaries of the nation. But, on the other, it is important to consider that the tour was so clearly determined by arts organizations and governmental organizations. Aihwa Ong reminds us that the mobility encouraged by “cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement” does not produce subjects wholly resistant to definitions of the nation-­state.56 Rather, these mobile subjects “emphasize, and are regulated by, practices favoring flexibility, mobility, and repositioning in relation to markets, governments, and cultural regimes.”57 Applied to Zero Hour, the play and tour remain within the national and cultural systems that constrain their citizens. As actors cross borders, they are affected by and highlight the clear-­cut ideas of national belonging enforced by internment and reaffirmed by d’Aquino’s trial.58 In addition, the tour’s clear start and end dates suggested that their visit to and travel in North America was temporally limited. The actors’ mobility in official capacities thus further contrasts the unrestrained movement of the chorus characters. Read through Ong, the North American tour doubly reinforces the constraints of state power to suggest that the restrictions facing d’Aquino and her fellow announcers may continue today. In any case, Zero Hour’s tour, like the play’s content, does not offer a clear answer or solution to these issues. It enacts what Jodi Kim calls a politics of refusal by “refusing the seductive will to total knowledge or revelation of the ‘truth’ of the ‘Asian American experience.’ ”59 Such a resolution was not possible for d’Aquino when, after her conviction and incarceration, she settled into a quiet life in the Chicago area under the threat of deportation until her pardon in the late 1970s. Zero Hour’s possessing forces, whether the chorus of women, their accents, or working histories break down historical narratives, including ones offered by the play itself, and accompanying categories of citizenship and patriotism without offering alternative histories. Instead, Zero Hour suggests that any “answer” to d’Aquino’s story is unsatisfactory.

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In so doing, the play reinforces the notion that Japanese American wartime experiences are unresolved and reminds us of lingering damage caused by the U.S.-­Japan alliance. This lingering damage, as the play asserts, continues on in our ongoing inability to see or hear the other important players in this history. In Zero Hour transpacific possession thus works as feminist historiography to undermine dominant historical narratives without providing clear alternatives and to link past inequalities to today.

Kondō Aisuke’s Transpacific Exorcism Kondō Aisuke’s performance videos and installations move from the imagined radio announcers of Zero Hour to his own family history to widen the geographic scope of Japanese American internment. In his Matter and Memory series (2013–­present), Kondō makes a transpacific journey to the United States; he traces his great-­grandfather’s experiences as a U.S. immigrant and later detainee in an internment camp during the Asia-­Pacific War. Unlike Zero Hour, Kondō does not become the possessing agent; rather, his presence in the United States works to conjure the past. Over the course of his video series, Kondō identifies the event of the internment as a possessing force, an evil spirit that is still unresolved in the contemporary period. Instead of friendship proposed by the U.S.-­Japan alliance, Kondō privileges contentious and contrary transgenerational and transpacific interactions. Again Noh provides an analytical frame in which to understand the complex hauntings of the past in Kondō’s work. First, the role of the waki can describe Kondō’s journey as the living person, a member of a younger generation, whose travels prompt the ghost’s return. Throughout the Matter and Memory series Kondō highlights the importance of visiting locations as a means to connect with his great-­grandfather’s history. When Kondō occupies locations where his great-­grandfather resided, Noh possession and exorcism clarify Kondō’s relationship to this past: as Dōjōji shows, the possessing specter who appears to menace the living is not the ghost of a person but rather a malevolent spirit. In the play, the transformation from the young maiden to evil snake spirit happened many years ago—­the spirit who returns to destroy the temple bell is a nonhuman force. With Dōjōji in mind, Kondō’s works call forth and confront internment and its invisible stain on historical discourses. Possession can describe the way in which internment refuses to be neutralized as a past act in the United States. As discussed, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans remains as a latent trace in the narrative of the Asia-­ Pacific War, owing in part to its quick erasure in the immediate postwar period. During the war, Japanese American relocation and imprisonment did not produce many images, and after internment the camps were leveled, removing explicit traces of them from the landscape.60 Similarly, those

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interned secreted their experiences in some cases, leaving their children to discover in school their forced relocation and incarceration.61 It was not until the 1980s that Japanese Americans began to speak about internment, as a part of legal proceedings for redress.62 Like the children of former internees, Kondō did not know about his family’s history until his early thirties. A Japanese national, Kondō trained as a visual artist in Germany. He has lived in Berlin for nearly twenty years and frequently exhibits video, installation, and performance work internationally.63 From the start of his career, Kondō has explored links between the body and the past. In the early series Atomic Memory (2011–­14), Kondō superimposes drawings of human figures over images of atomic bomb explosions, relating personal, somatic pain and loss of control—­his own frequent injuries as a child—­to larger scales of destruction. After some time abroad, Kondō began to feel a connection to his great-­grandfather. Kondō Miki immigrated to the United States in 1907, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area and starting a family. After researching his great-­grandfather’s life, Kondō learned that Miki was incarcerated at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah after being held for six months at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Southern California.64 Since this discovery, Kondō has created videos, performances, and installations that attempt to evoke and investigate his great-­grandfather’s elided past. Unlike many descendants of internees, Kondō grew up in Japan and experienced the internment on the other side of Pacific Ocean. Kondō’s grandfather fought in the Japanese army during the Asia-­Pacific War. While Kondō was born and raised in Japan, he felt that his great-­grandfather’s experiences in the United States always positioned him as an outsider in Japanese culture, but not within an American one. Kondō’s complex perspective opens up discussions of internment and its haunting aftermaths across the Pacific. In Kondō’s works, the event takes on larger geographical reverberations, making it an issue to be addressed by younger generations beyond the United States. And Kondō’s engagement with this topic repeatedly undermines any appearance of the event’s resolution and any neat division between the United States and Japan and their sides of war and the Pacific Ocean. In 2017, funded by the Asian Cultural Council, Kondō replicated his great-­ grandfather’s journey from Japan to San Francisco to Santa Anita to Utah. His travels resulted in three videos: The Past in the Present in SF, Santa Anita, and here where you stood, and an installation of videos, photographs, and other found objects at the Mintmoue gallery in Los Angeles.65 Together these videos not only follow Miki’s history but also tell the story of his imprisonment as an uncontrolled and eventually possessing spirit in need of exorcism. The Past in the Present in SF starts in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Miki lived for more than three decades; Santa Anita is set at the racetrack outside Los Angeles, where Miki was held for six months in 1942, and finally, in here where you stood, Kondō visits the former site of the Topaz War Relocation Center near Delta, Utah, where Miki was incarcerated from October 1942

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until August 1945. Throughout these pieces, Kondō attempts multiple transgenerational and transpacific encounters, using his body to cite, evoke, and battle remains of the past.

Transpacific Journeys and Transgenerational Dialogue The Past in the Present in SF illustrates the interconnectedness of Japan, the United States, past, and present. The video, the start of Kondō’s transpacific journey, intersects the artist’s family history with Japanese immigration and wartime experiences to narrow the gap between the two countries. Kondō himself bridges this distance. He travels to San Francisco and visits locations that his great-­grandfather photographed. In the six-­minute video, Kondō shows photographs from Miki’s four decades in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kondō then replicates each photograph, standing in for Miki. Through his reenactments, Kondō attempts to connect with his great-­grandfather, whom he never met, and of whom he has heard little. Kondō’s recovery process privileges interaction over information. Throughout, the video marks Kondō’s inability to discover the details of Miki’s life, elided, in part, by U.S. immigration policy. In the mid-­1920s, Miki’s wife became ill and, in 1925, left the United States to stay with her family in Japan with their young son. The Immigration Act of 1924 prevented them from returning to the United States. Miki was separated from his family from 1925 until 1954, when he returned to Japan for the birth of his grandson, Kondō’s father. By then, Miki’s wife had passed away. Miki was reunited with his son only for two years before he passed away in 1956. Kondō learned of his great-­grandfather from his grandmother and the items Miki left behind. The Past in the Present in SF highlights Kondō’s gaps in information about his great-­grandfather’s life when the video re-­creates photographs of Miki in the midst of multiple groups of men (fig. 6.1). When Kondō replicates group shots (fig. 6.2), unsure about who these men were, he appears alone, evoking their absence in his present knowledge. Although separated from his great-­grandfather by time and place, when Kondō stands in for Miki, his body serves as a conduit between past and present, near and far. Again, the model of the waki can, in part, illuminate Kondō’s interactions with his surroundings—­Kondō’s travels evoke memories of the past. Reminiscent of Takahashi’s definition of engaged response-­ability, Kondō attends to the perspective of his great-­grandfather, physically replicating it. When the video identifies physical locations as opportunities in which to connect, it emphasizes the importance of Kondō’s transpacific journey as the impetus for transgenerational exchange. It suggests that Kondō can connect with Miki only by physically inhabiting the same places he did. While The Past in the Present in SF relates Kondō to his family past, the video’s reenactments also elicit viewer comparisons between the past and the

6.1. Still from The Past in the Present in SF (2017). Copyright © Kondō Aisuke.

6.2. Still from The Past in the Present in SF (2017). Copyright © Kondō Aisuke.

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present. Read as a series of “before-­and-­after” photographs, the images in The Past in the Present in SF can, in the words of Kate Palmer Albers and Jordan Bear, “foreground and interrogate with special acuity the temporal and referential dimensions by which other modes of photography are silently governed.”66 According to Albers and Bear, before-­and-­after pairs of photographs, prevalent in multiple realms of artistic and social production, from the before-­ and-­after shots of a successful fitness regimen to those of a natural disaster, call attention to photographic conventions, including the convention of the photograph as documentary evidence. Applied to The Past in the Present in SF, Kondō’s reenactment of Miki’s shots identifies ways in which photographs from Miki’s time fail him as historical evidence—­their inability to fully reveal Miki’s past do not allow Kondō to connect with his great-­grandfather. In between past and present is another event, that of Miki’s internment. When the video frequently measures the past against the present, it conjures the haunting force of the internment in the imaginations of viewers. Kondō’s reenactment reminds the viewer that Miki no longer lives in San Francisco—­he left long ago, first forcibly relocated in 1942 and then after the war living briefly in the area from 1949 until his return to Japan in 1954.67 For most of the video, the reason for Miki’s departure is not visible. Instead, the before-­and-­after photographs “relate both to one other, and, most intriguingly, to a third, generally unseen, event,” Executive Order 9066 and mass incarceration.68 Even when The Past in the Present in SF references the internment, it illustrates the proximity of wartime events to present ones. After multiple photographs from Miki’s personal album, the penultimate shot of the video shows Roosevelt signing papers (fig. 6.3). A clear reference to the signing of Executive Order 9066, interwoven into the video’s image is a color photograph of another man signing documents. Presumably of President Donald Trump, this image connects past xenophobic policies with ones in the present. In this before-­and-­after photograph, a single collage of both presidents, internment haunts the immigration policies of today. Roosevelt’s actions will soon disrupt Miki’s seemingly pleasant and settled life in the Bay Area, and despite the marked unconstitutional nature of Roosevelt’s executive order, similar presidential decrees are still issued. Yet the image of Roosevelt/Trump is not the video’s final one. The Past and Present in SF further puts this photographic collage in conversation with Miki’s life when it follows the image with one of Miki seated in a tea garden. In part, Kondō shows U.S. national history’s effects on his familial past in the video’s final moments, in his words, “observing political history from the perspective of individuals.”69 Miki’s return, another image to juxtapose Roosevelt, Trump, and Kondō, leaves a haunting impression of the personal toll of internment and of the lost connections between Kondō and his family’s past. The Past in the Present in SF prompts its viewer to make connections between the transgenerational, transpacific, personal, and political. All these

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6.3. Still from The Past in the Present in SF (2017). Copyright © Kondō Aisuke.

elements together disrupt the narrative of resolution promoted by the postwar U.S.-­Japan alliance. The Past in the Present in SF, instead of a limited story of postwar friendship and economic progress, identifies the messy temporal eruptions of Japanese diasporic experiences. Kondō’s journey to sites across the Bay Area connects to his great-­grandfather, identifies the lingering traces of the past, and simultaneously marks what he cannot recover. In later pieces, when Kondō continues to bridge geographic and temporal gaps between transgenerational-­transpacific and personal-­political, they interact not in terms of alliances but in conflict.

Conjuring from Absence As Kondō continues to follow his great-­grandfather’s life in the United States, Miki’s forced relocation and incarceration begin to take on uncontrolled and forceful attributes. Kondō’s next video, Santa Anita, portrays how the elided past can erupt into the present. The video takes place at the Santa Anita Racetrack, the first part of Miki’s incarceration. During the war, the Santa Anita Racetrack became the Santa Anita Assembly Center, housing approximately nineteen thousand Japanese Americans for months while the U.S. government built permanent internment camps. As Emily Roxworthy discusses, the temporary assembly center further dehumanized Japanese Americans by making them sleep in former horse stalls and endure poor living conditions during a months-­long state of uncertainty about their future destination and citizenship status.70

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Despite Santa Anita Racetrack’s role as a wartime incarceration site, Kondō’s video begins with the erasure of this history in the present. In contrast to what remains from Miki’s life in The Past in the Present in SF, Santa Anita contains neither buildings nor the infrastructure used to house Japanese Americans during the war. Rather, the five-­minute video marks the elision of Japanese American internment after the war. The video’s connection between the racetrack and internment is initially not clear. Santa Anita begins with mundane shots from the racetrack’s exterior in the present day, showing palm trees, shipping containers, stacks of hay, and a weathered parking lot. Moving to images of the racetrack itself, there are no remaining signs of what it was used for during the Asia-­Pacific War. Santa Anita’s opening moments illustrate how internment has been obscured in its physical location. In the face of this erasure, Santa Anita uses Kondō’s great-­grandfather’s cane as a point of contact. Santa Anita first shows the cane on the ground, as part of its early shots of the racetrack parking lot. But it is only after Kondō uses it that the cane is activated. After its initial footage of the present-­day racetrack, Santa Anita pauses on an empty road overlooking the racetrack. Kondō walks into the road and, with his great-­grandfather’s cane, half limps until he arrives at a bend in the road (fig. 6.4). There he stops and, leaning against the cane, looks out onto the racetrack. His partial limp reminds us that Kondō fills in for his great-­grandfather, identifying an in-­between space of reenactment and connection to the past—­he is simultaneously Miki and Aisuke, great-­grandfather and great-­grandson, taking on his great-­grandfather’s point of view while also asserting his own identity. As Rebecca Schneider describes, when “times touch” in a reenactment, this touch can “(partially) collapse the distance marking one thing as fully distinct from another thing.”71 In other words, Kondō’s half limp undoes the clear-­cut boundaries between past and present. Even when the past appears erased in Santa Anita, when the video merges Kondō’s body with his great-­ grandfather’s, it suggests that one time bleeds into the other. As Kondō pauses on the road, his body calls forth the historical event of the internment. From Kondō standing, the video cuts to period photographs of the racetrack as the Santa Anita Assembly Center. Because these images appear after Kondō enters the space, Santa Anita suggests that it is Kondō’s presence that revives the past event. The moment echoes the work of the Noh waki, who, when passing through a location, triggers the ghost’s return. Yet in Santa Anita what comes back is different—­Kondō’s presence does not conjure Miki. Instead of Miki’s ghost, what appears is a rapid succession of images—­black-­and-­white photographs of barracks surrounding the racetrack, Japanese Americans standing among boxes of household goods. In this flood of images from the past, Santa Anita illustrates its uncontrollable nature. Kondō unleashes the force of the internment as a wild and unresolved event. While memories of forced relocation are not immediately apparent in the landscape of Santa Anita today, Kondō’s video considers memories

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6.4. Still from Santa Anita (2017); Kondō walks with his great-­grandfather’s cane. Copyright © Kondō Aisuke.

as possessing spirits, a fundamental part of the landscape that cannot be so easily forgotten. As such, reminiscent of the powerful Noh spirits Brown describes as returning to seek justice for past wrongs, these untamed memories undermine the erasures of U.S. postwar historiography. It is noteworthy that Kondō does not do anything with his summoning. After the flood of wartime images, Kondō puts the cane on the ground and walks away, upright and without a limp. It is then that Santa Anita, in its final moments, discloses the historical significance of the site to its viewer. In white text on a black screen, the video explains that the U.S. government used Santa Anita as a relocation way station for Japanese Americans; in this capacity Kondō’s great-­grandfather resided there from April to October 1942. The video ends on an unresolved note, revealing Kondō’s connection to Santa Anita and its historical significance, but it does not go into any further details—­we do not know about Miki’s experiences at Santa Anita, and we do not learn how they have affected Kondō in the present. The cane, left on the ground, remains latent with potential to be activated. This lack of resolution to the uncontrolled past suggests future returns where changes to Santa Anita cannot erase events that occurred there.

Exorcism and Conflict as Response-­ability If Santa Anita conjures the past, here where you stood, the next video in Kondō’s series, exorcises it. In here where you stood Kondō uses his

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great-­grandfather’s cane again, but in this video he deploys it as a weapon to fight the malevolent force of internment. The video ends Kondō’s trans­pacific journey at the former site of the Topaz War Relocation Center, in Utah, where Miki was incarcerated for three years. There, here where you stood portrays internment as an unresolved force that must be handled through conflict. The beginning of here where you stood resembles a Noh play, again with Kondō in a parallel role to the waki, primed to encounter a ghost. In the opening moments of here where you stood, Kondō takes what could be understood as the waki’s michiyuki, a traveling scene, where the waki describes his travels to the eventual location where the play takes place. After a shot of an undisclosed empty field, Kondō’s video begins with his perspective of a changing landscape, in a moving car, from urban to rural areas, until the video stops in an open field, the former Topaz War Relocation Center. As Kondō’s final destination, Utah extends transpacific boundaries and sites of conflict away from the coasts and further into the interior of the United States. As in Santa Anita, here where you stood ends in a place that looks completely different today than it did during the Asia-­Pacific War. Any former buildings that might have suggested an internment camp are gone; the empty space reinforces the erasure at the center of contemporary discourses of the war in the United States. The former site of the Topaz camp houses a museum and commemorative plaque, but here where you stood shows only an open field to highlight the work of elision in past representations of Japanese American experiences. While here where you stood begins with a journey, it soon diverges from a Noh play when the ghost does not appear. After Kondō arrives at the former site, here where you stood shows several still shots of uninhabited landscapes from the former camp. Then, the camera stops on an empty road. The video cuts to a photograph of internees, Miki standing among them. Then the photograph fades out while an image of Kondō standing in this empty road fades in (fig. 6.5). He walks, leaning on his great-­grandfather’s cane, half limping down the road, reminding the viewer of the transgenerational exchange that happens in his very body. The ghostly presence of both images—­the photograph of Miki and video of Kondō, along with Kondō’s body and use of the cane, intersect these multiple times. Following The Past in the Present in SF and Santa Anita, here where you stood insists on the persistence of the past in sites. As the video continues, Kondō’s embodiment becomes a way to exorcise the unjust historical event. When he gets about thirty feet from the camera, Kondō stops and, standing, begins to swing the cane back and forth as if fighting off something (fig. 6.6). Read by way of possession in Noh, Kondō battles the ghost of internment. These movements turn the event into a possessing spirit, dead but potentially able to reappear and alter the present. For Jacques Derrida, “conjuring” and “exorcising” are similar—­both evoke

6.5. Still from here where you stood (2017). Copyright © Kondō Aisuke.

6.6. Still from here where you stood (2017); Kondō swings his great-­g randfather’s cane. Copyright © Kondō Aisuke.

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the dead in an attempt to neutralize the spirit, with exorcism’s key difference being that it “consists in repeating in the mode of an incantation that the dead man is really dead.”72 Exorcism’s work of neutralization can be found in medieval Japan, when, as Brown explains, if possession was the only way politically disposed individuals could influence or harm those in power, “rituals of exorcism were performed in order to reinstate both the cosmological and sociopolitical order of the nation,” essentially reestablishing the status quo.73 Because Kondō deals with a history that has been seemingly resolved through American legislative channels, however, his violent fighting works against the past neutralization of internment. In the same way that the Dōjōji’s open ending makes it possible for the possessing spirit to come back, Kondō recasts exorcism. When here where you stood summons, it reminds us that internment is still an underlying issue in the contemporary period. Despite the fact that the camp has been erased in the empty landscape, in here where you stood internment becomes an evil spirit in need of exorcism. While the 1988 Civil Liberties Act attempted to heal the wounds of Japanese American incarceration by providing reparations to living survivors, here where you stood asserts that such efforts were not complete. By exorcising this event, here where you stood casts it as a malevolent force that must be fought and implies that internment still can wound like the serpent spirit in Dōjōji. If Kondō’s actions resemble the priests in Dōjōji who expel the malicious spirit, here where you stood identifies a way of addressing the past through confrontation and violence. Kondō’s exorcism portrays the internment as a malevolent force to take on its prejudices and inequalities. Simultaneously, it stages transgenerational remembrance through actions of conflict. Kondō’s movements foreground how younger generations may be upset with the past. His transpacific journey becomes one of recognizing existing negative emotions and urging younger generations to view the distant past with hostility. In here where you stood, such hostile actions become as important as dialogue with the past and broaden the idea of “response” in transgenerational response-­ability. Significantly, Kondō’s battle reflects the unresolved qualities of the historical event. As Kondō continues, his movement begins to take on an uncontrolled quality. He swings his cane with more force, and the momentum of this movement starts to pull on his body, making him look like a child who flails against a monster instead of a man in his midthirties. Eventually, Kondō hits the cane on the ground and breaks it, reflective of further loss of control over his actions. His movements anticipate even younger generations while acknowledging the futility of fighting the past. When Kondō stops swinging, here where you stood suggests that the battle with the past does not produce any outcome for its injustices. Instead, here where you stood offers an initial inquiry into the past. The video ends with internment open to future returns, reiterating the importance of Kondō’s attempts while also warning of their

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futility. As a Japanese national, Kondō’s antagonism toward his family’s past is recast here as doubly distant and ineffective—­without knowledge of Miki’s past, Kondō was unable to receive any resolution from the Civil Liberties Act. Even though we know that a true resolution is not possible, Kondō did not have any opportunity to engage in the dialogue surrounding reparations.

Replicating Conflict While Kondō fights the malevolent force of internment, the viewer does not simply observe his actions. Rather, Kondō’s series integrates the viewer in parallel processes of engaging with the past. In exhibitions, Kondō shapes the space to surround the viewer, identifying latent traces of the internment in the present. As part of his 2017 U.S. residency, Kondō exhibited at the Mintmoue gallery in Los Angeles. Instead of projecting The Past in the Present in SF, Santa Anita, and here where you stood on large screens, Kondō, as he has done throughout his Matter and Memory series, created an installation in the gallery space (fig. 6.7). Alongside videos, Kondō exhibited photographs, found objects from Santa Anita and Topaz, and Life magazines from the war, on which he superimposed internment camp barracks (fig. 6.8). Life magazine is infamous for its wartime anti-­Japanese coverage, including the 1941 article “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese.” When Kondō alters and displays the magazine he references popular culture and evokes this history of discrimination, marking it on its covers instead of hidden inside. In the gallery space, Kondō envelops his viewer. As is apparent in figure 6.7, Life magazines, photographs, objects, and videos vary in height—­some are suspended above the viewer and others are well below eye level. When his exhibition surrounds the viewer, it suggests she is integrated in this history of internment, marking the connections between the war and today. Further, the distribution of these items in the gallery shapes viewer movement through the space. Kondō thus stages a mnemonic experience, one parallel to the journeys he took to Santa Anita and Utah. While the viewer cannot travel with Kondō to these sites, he replicates the transgenerational and transpacific experiences of envelopment. To recall Huang’s definition of “transpacific,” Kondō transforms the gallery into a “contact zone” between past and present, Japan and the United States. The viewer, in the middle of such a zone, can productively engage with it, whether that is through dialogue or, as Kondō repeatedly suggests, conflict. Whereas Yanagi’s Zero Hour and Kondō’s Matter and Memory series manifest transpacific possession in different ways, both characterize the historicized Japanese American wartime experience as incomplete. It is, as both suggest, full of elisions, absent figures, and unresolved questions. Zero Hour and the Matter and Memory series explore movement through and across the

6.7. Photograph of installation at the Mintmoue gallery, Los Angeles (2017). Copyright © Kondō Aisuke.

6.8. One of the Life magazine collages at the Mintmoue gallery exhibition, Los Angeles (2017). Copyright © Kondō Aisuke.

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Pacific as opportunities to disrupt historical narratives and the concepts of citizen and nation embedded in them. Bringing together time and place, these performances call attention to the continuing influence of the U.S.-­Japan alliance on remembrance in Japan and in the United States. Applied to Takahashi’s model of response-­ability, Zero Hour’s return of unsolicited spirits asks the audience to respond and potentially reevaluate the possessed spirit. Considering the demonization of d’Aquino before, during, and after her trial, transpacific possession in Zero Hour becomes an interventionist practice for reevaluating the past. In Kondō’s video pieces, especially here where you stood, Kondō readies himself, as a member of the younger generation, for the call of his great-­grandfather’s ghost. And when the ghost does not appear, Kondō prepares to battle the past, identifying conflict as a potential response. In both cases, transpacific engagement complicates and challenges current historical discourses, gesturing toward the modes of power and oppression that continue from the war. Along with continued imperial practices in wartime remembrance, including the enshrinement of colonial subjects at Yasukuni Shrine and circulation of memories of the Battle of Okinawa beyond the prefecture, the U.S.-­Japan alliance perpetuates omissions and elisions in narratives of the past, narratives that transpacific possession can undermine and expose.

Epilogue

Ghosts and the Future

As the contemporary period continued, the 2010s were a time of again-­ ness. The 2011 triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear emergency) resulted in images of mass destruction that evoked the Asia-­Pacific War. Lingering aftershocks disrupted everyday life across Japan, and the atomic bomb’s embodied effects haunted the constant threat of radiation exposure after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant meltdown. Illustrating Jacques Derrida’s comment that “a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-­back,” five days after the earthquake and tsunami, when Fukushima’s radiation was still a major threat, Emperor Akihito broadcast a message of compassion, his reedy voice summoning his father’s imperial address that announced the end of the war in 1945.1 Herbert Blau writes, “Ghostliness begets ghosts,” and as the 2010s went on, the ghosts multiplied.2 Another revenant appeared a year and a half later when Abe Shinzō became prime minister in 2012 for the second time after leaving office in 2007. Indicative of the many spectral returns of the war past in contemporary Japan, Abe’s second rise to power evoked that of his grandfather, Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, who was also twice in power. During the Asia-­Pacific War, as a bureaucrat, elected official, and cabinet member, Kishi contributed to development of Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria after 1931. After the war, Kishi was imprisoned by the U.S. Occupation government for war crimes, released without trial in 1948, and became prime minister in 1957. From this position, he orchestrated the renewal of the U.S.-­Japan Security Treaty in 1960 that led to large-­scale protests in Tokyo. If Abe’s return summoned memories of Kishi, his public statements about the Asia-­Pacific War reiterated conservative rhetoric about war remembrance. A member of the Japan Society for History Textbook Reform, Abe actively visited Yasukuni Shrine and released statements dismissing Japanese wartime atrocities, including “comfort women” testimonies.3 In part, Abe reflects the country’s nationalistic turn in the early decades of the twenty-­first century, a reaction to the reemergence of memories of Japanese aggression and imperialism in the 1990s. It is also possible to read Abe’s firm adherence to postwar

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narratives as an extension of a fear of ghosts. At the start of his second term, a rumor circulated that he had initially refused to live in the prime minister’s official residence because it was haunted.4 In the same way, Abe’s dismissal of survivors of Japan’s atrocities reflects his desire to neutralize them—­what Avery Gordon calls “ghost-­busting.”5 Although Abe’s conservative comments can be read as dismissing ghosts of the war, his actions evoke past returns, albeit through different means. Abe’s second term was possible because he promised to bring the country back to its former economic glory. Since reelection, he has worked to revitalize another former strength of Japan—­the military. In the postwar constitution, Article 9 prohibits Japan from using military force except for self-­defense. In 2015, Abe successfully put forward legislation to reinterpret Article 9 to expand Japan’s national security, despite countrywide opposition to it.6 Abe’s plans to bolster the military, still ongoing as of his 2018 campaign for reelection, effectively work to send the country back in time. Yet reflective of remembrance’s future-­looking orientation, Abe’s policies simultaneously cast forward toward future generations. A conservative historical revisionist himself, Abe’s future hope reflected revisionist forward-­looking arguments to instill national pride in younger generations by erasing Japanese war atrocities from textbooks. The 2011 triple disaster and Abe’s return to power are two markers illustrating that memories of the Asia-­Pacific War will not disappear anytime soon. Commemoration ceremonies similarly look forward to ensure war remembrance in the future. In 2015, the seventieth-­anniversary commemorations memorialized past events while anticipating their portrayal in coming years. In 2015, these future prospects had greater stakes: commemorations for the Battle of Okinawa (June 23), the Hiroshima atomic bombing (August 6), and the Nagasaki atomic bombing (August 9) fell during Abe’s legislative efforts to reinterpret Article 9. Abe’s proposed security expansion made the past destruction of the Asia-­Pacific War again a possibility in the years to come. Commemoration ceremonies at Okinawa and Nagasaki reflected clear efforts to engage past events in order to not repeat them in the future. At the Battle of Okinawa commemoration ceremony, the prefecture’s governor called for the expulsion of U.S. military bases, and older residents heckled Abe during his speech.7 Symbolically casting toward the future, many of 2015’s commemorations included children. The same ceremony in Okinawa featured a reading of the winning entry from a youth poetry contest. For these even younger generations, as those with direct war experiences pass away, commemorative ceremonies, along with museums, textbooks, and artistic productions, will be the only sites of connection to the past. As the past fades and the future demands, Transgenerational Remembrance has explored the role of performance at this critical turning point. I considered how younger generations can relate to the past when there is nothing left, when the war generation is no longer alive to augment or

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refute narratives of the war that still linger at institutions of remembrance. Throughout the case studies, I identified ways in which performances position younger generations as response-­able to the past, ready to address the call of those long departed. Some performances model response-­ability while others call out to audiences with inaccessible historical events or missing people. A constant is that performances work outside traditional historiographies, reliant on oral and written documentation. Performances offer little additional information about the Asia-­Pacific War. Instead, they depict the past as uncertain and unavailable but also necessary to address. Parallel to commemoration ceremonies that simultaneously look backward and forward, Transgenerational Remembrance recuperates the Noh ghost as a model for remembrance. Noh’s existence as a six-­hundred-­plus-­year-­old form still summons ghosts from the Muromachi period to show living characters take response-­ability to the long dead. Following the mechanism of the Noh ghost, in Transgenerational Remembrance performances become a promise to the future for continued response-­ability to the past. Accordingly, the analyses in Transgenerational Remembrance called into question representational strategies and spectatorship for war memories. I frequently asked, how can artistic production portray events of the war after so much time has passed, and I examined artists who experimented with form and process. Throughout, Transgenerational Remembrance has insisted on the agency of returning memories and on younger-­generation audience members. While anachronistic institutions of memory aim to make younger generations passive receptacles of a fixed war past, performances demand their active participation in that past’s ongoing narration and portrayal, participation critical for the future. If the contentious debates over war commemoration and historiography in the contemporary period prove anything, it is that as much as some wish memories to be banished, they never go away but instead continue to haunt. Transgenerational Remembrance insists that to move into the future is to speak to, listen to, and live with ghosts.

Notes

Introduction 1. As Akiko Hashimoto, The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8–­9, explains, issues in contemporary Japan’s “cacophony of memory narratives” manifest in the naming of the war. From 1941 to 1945, Japan called the engagement the Greater East Asian War, a title that still evokes militaristic associations. “World War II” and the “Pacific War” or “Pacific Theater,” commonly used in the United States, refer to the conflict from the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack until the end of the war. Lisa Yoneyama clarifies in Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016) that these names, along with the “Second Sino-­Japanese War” and “Fifteen Year War” fall “into a binary discourse of civilization by casting the war as fought either exclusively between the West and the rest or among discrete and internally coherent nation-­state universals” (x). Following the reference to “many wars” by T. Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-­Pacific War(s) (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 3, I use “Asia-­Pacific War” to refer to Japan’s multiple conflicts from 1931 to 1945. In so doing, I acknowledge Japan’s aggression in Asia, from the Manchurian Incident in 1931, along with the many sites where the war played out across the Asia-­Pacific region. 2. As Hashimoto describes, during the U.S. Occupation (1945–­52), the end of the war was commemorated on September 2. It was not until the mid-­1960s that Japan began its official commemoration for the dead on August 15, “establishing the association between the deaths of obon and the deaths of soldiers, fathers, and sons” (The Long Defeat, 53). 3. I reference Avery F. Gordon’s definitions of “ghost” and “haunting” to illuminate the complex reemergence of multiple sources of war memories: “If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-­for-­granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place”; Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 8. 4. See James Orr, The Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001), for a discussion of the development of “victim consciousness” about the Asia-­Pacific War in the postwar period. 5. For Abraham, secrecy or nondisclosure leads to the return of the phantom: “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others”; “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology,” in

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The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 171. 6. Carol Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 78, explains that those born in Shōwa single-­digit years (1927–­34) with direct experiences of the war “captured the memory market in the postwar decades.” 7. See Philip Seaton, “ ‘Do You Really Want to Know What Your Uncle Did?’ Coming to Terms with Relatives’ War Actions in Japan,” Oral History 34, no. 1 (2006): 53–­60, and Kurahashi Ayako, My Father’s Dying Wish: Legacies of War Guilt in a Japanese Family, trans. Philip Seaton (Sheffield, UK: Paulownia Press, 2009), for stories of deathbed confessions. Discussing published testimonies in the Asahi shinbun newspaper, Hashimoto asserts, “In many ways, the intergenerational project of biographical repair has amplified the unfinished moral and political responsibilities of the war” (The Long Defeat, 49). For a recent discussion of Japanese veterans who “are testing their ‘response-­ability’ to their victims” by testifying about their crimes, see Etsko Kasai, “Responding to Other Voices: War Criminals’ Testimonies on the Asia-­Pacific War, 1931–­1945,” positions 26, no. 4 (2018): 817–­45 (818). 8. Kyle Ikeda uses “transgenerational” to analyze how Okinawan writer Medoruma Shun, the son of survivors of the Battle of Okinawa, “recuperates” the “personal, emotional, and traumatic experiences” that are “occluded” in dominant forms of remembrance; Okinawan War Memory: Transgenerational Trauma and the War Fiction of Medoruma Shun (New York: Routledge, 2014), 3. My use of “transgenerational” expands to those born multiple generations after the war who may not even be knowledgeable of their own family’s wartime experiences. 9. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. Pacific War remembrance 10. Scholars who apply “postmemory” to Asia-­ include Kyle Ikeda (Okinawan War Memory), Akiko Hashimoto (The Long Defeat), and Rebecca Jennison (“ ‘Postmemory’ in the Work of Oh Haji and Soni Kum,” in Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, Art to Come, ed. Lee Chonghwa, translation edited by Rebecca Jennison and Brett de Bary, 114–­33 [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015]). 11. For instance, Hirsch explains that the younger generation’s “own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Family Frames, 22). 12. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Cathy Caruth describes trauma as based on incomprehensibility: “What returns to haunt the victim . . . is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known” (6). Much scholarship in theater and performance studies follows suit in analyzing the role of artistic production in “bearing witness to some forgotten wound” (5). Milija Gluhovic’s recent Performing European Memories: Trauma, Ethics, Politics (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) explores performances, mainly by artists who lived through World War II in Europe, that engage in witnessing and mourning. 13. Andreas Huyssen warns, “To collapse memory into trauma, I think, would unduly confine our understanding of memory, marking it too exclusively in terms

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of pain, suffering, and loss”; Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8. See also Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), for post­ colonial critiques of trauma theory. 14. At the war’s end, some 6.5 million Japanese were abroad, of whom 3 million were civilians; see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999), 45–­48. 15. See Richard H. Minear, Victors’ Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971), and Yuma Totani, The Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), for discussions of the IMTFE. Onuma Yasuaki, Tōkyō saiban, sensō sekinin, sengo sekinin (The Tokyo Trials, War Responsibility, Postwar Responsibility) (Tokyo: Tōshindō, 2007), iv, makes the assertion that the IMTFE consistently serves as the background in disputes over war responsibility. 16. In Dower’s words, “Occupation authorities chose not merely to detach the emperor from his holy war, but to resituate him as the center of their new democracy” (Embracing Defeat, 278). 17. Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), 45–­46. 18. The U.S. firebombing operations between 1944 and 1945 destroyed a majority of sixty-­five major Japanese cities and killed at least one hundred eighty-­ seven thousand people; see David Fedman and Cary Karacas, “A Cartographic Fade to Black: Mapping the Destruction of Urban Japan during World War II,” Journal of Historical Geography 38, no. 3 (2012): 306–­28, for what they call a conservative estimate (307n8). Mark Selden has described the firebombings as a “forgotten Holocaust,” in that “there has been virtually no awareness of, not to speak of critical reflection on, the US bombing of Japanese civilians in the months prior to Hiroshima” (“A Forgotten Holocaust: U.S. Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities, and the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq,” Asia-­Pacific Journal 5, no. 5 [May 2007], https://apjjf.org/-­Mark​ -­Selden/2414/article.html). Akiko Takenaka discusses the work in the 1960s and 1970s to preserve memories of “Japanese suffering in the final months” of the war, including experiences of firebombing (“Japanese Memories of the Asia-­ Pacific War: Analyzing the Revisionist Turn Post-­1995,” Asia-­Pacific Journal 14, no 20 [2016], https://apjjf.org/2016/20/Takenaka.html). 19. As Carol Gluck, Franziska Seraphim, and Philip Seaton show, during the postwar period groups fought over multiple narratives of the war. For instance, Gluck identifies four “custodians” of the recent war past in postwar Japan—­ progressive intellectuals, conservatives, popular media, and personal memories (“The Past in the Present,” 70–­76). See also Seraphim’s War Memory and Social 2005 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Politics in Japan, 1945–­ 2006) and Seaton’s Japan’s Contested War Memories: The ‘Memory Rifts’ in Historical Consciousness of World War II (New York: Routledge, 2007). 20. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–­1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 20. 21. Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” 82.

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22. Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” 78. 23. Gluck, “The Past in the Present,” 78. 24. In Dare mo sensō o oshiete kurenakatta (No One Told Me about the War) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2013), youth specialist Furuichi Noritoshi (b. 1985) articulates the effects of such distance when he discusses a 2010 survey by NHK, in which only 25 percent of those between twenty and thirty years old correctly identified the date of the Hiroshima atomic bomb (12–­13). In 2017, the Japan Times reported on a similar NHK survey, where 14 percent of those aged eighteen to nineteen could not correctly identify August 15 as the day Japan surrendered (Alex Martin, “For Young Japanese, War Mostly Seen as Something from Dim and Distant Past,” Japan Times, August 15, 2017, https://www.japantimes.co​ .jp/news/2017/08/15/national/young-­japanese-­war-­mostly-­seen-­something-­dim​ -­distant-­past/#.Wm1E5JM-­fOQ). 25. See Kenneth Ruoff, The People’s Emperor: Democracy and the Japanese Monarchy, 1945–­1995 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001), for Hirohito’s role in postwar Japan and the effects of his death on discourses of responsibility. 26. In Watashitachi no sensō sekinin: “Shōwa” shoki 20-­nen to “Heisei”-­ki 20-­ nen no rekishiteki kōsatsu (Our War Responsibility: A Historical Consideration of the First Twenty Years of the Shōwa and Heisei Eras) (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 2009), 195, Kōketsu Atsushi argues that part of Japan’s task of recovery is to acknowledge its war aggression against its Asian neighbors. 27. Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 3, notes that it was not until the 1990s “that calls for redress took on a renewed and intensified international visibility and extensiveness.” 28. Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 5. 29. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, xvi. 30. As Rebecca Schneider comments, “The problem of transgenerational memory becomes a matter of account”; Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 59. 31. Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 6. 32. Hashimoto, The Long Defeat, 18. In “Japanese Memories of the Asia-­ Pacific War,” Takenaka traces the development of war memories from politician apologies in the mid-­1990s to the rise of historical revisionism. Contextualizing “the mid-­90s apologies . . . as a strategy for improving Japan’s foreign relations with China and South Korea, rather than a full acknowledgement of wrong­ doings in the wartime past,” Takenaka categorizes recent revisionism in Japan as “a kind of reactionary nationalism (https://apjjf.org/2016/20/Takenaka.html). 33. Takahashi Tetsuya begins his discussion of “postwar responsibility” by referencing the rise of Japanese “neo-­nationalism” in the 1990s; see Sengo sekininron (On Postwar Responsibility) (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999), 10. See also Rumi Sakamoto, “ ‘Will You Go to War? Or Will You Stop Being Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshino’s Sensoron,” Asia-­Pacific Journal 6, no. 1 (2008), https://apjjf.org/-­Rumi-­SAKAMOTO/2632/article.html, for a discussion of popular nationalism in contemporary Japan. 34. Sakamoto, “ ‘Will You Go to War?’ ” 35. In Minoru Iwasaki and Steffi Richter’s lengthy discussion of historical revisionism in Japan, they assert that it “has mainly targeted history education and

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textbooks”; “The Topology of Post-­1990s Historical Revisionism,” trans. Richard F. Calichman, positions 16, no. 3 (2008): 507–­38 (510). The content of history textbooks has long been a contested site in Japan; as Hashimoto describes, the lawsuits by historian Ienaga Saburō (1965–­1997) “helped keep alive the critical narrative of national history in the public arena” (The Long Defeat, 13). 36. Hardly a fringe group, many in the society are high-­ranking government officials—­current prime minister Abe Shinzō has been a member, and nearly half of Abe’s 2012 cabinet participated in the group; see Maki Kimura, Unfolding the ‘Comfort Women’ Debates: Modernity, Violence, Women’s Voices (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 18. Manga artist Kobayashi is also a key member. 37. Kimura, Unfolding, 17. See also Koide Reiko, “Critical New Stage in Japan’s Textbook Controversy,” Asia-­Pacific Journal 12, no. 13 (2014), https://​ apjjf.org/2014/12/13/Koide-­Reiko/4101/article.html, for a discussion of recent activities of the conservative revisionist movement. 38. Lisa Yoneyama explains that to distinguish memory from history would cast “history” as “rational and scientific knowledge” and “memory” as “nostalgic passion, longing, devotion, or allegiance”; Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 27. Similarly, Hashimoto states that “the distinction between history and memory is at best blurred, and that memory narratives do not render definitive truths about historical events and facts” (The Long Defeat, 21). Following Yoneyama and Hashimoto, I use both “memory” and “history” throughout. 39. Iwasaki and Richter refute this argument, explaining that “for historical revisionism, reality consists of such an impoverished world and facts are to be narrowly conceived” (“Post-­1990s Historical Revisionism,” 518–­19). 40. Other historical circumstances include Japanese-­government censorship of reporting the Asia-­Pacific War and U.S. incendiary bombing. John W. Dower describes the effects of these circumstances: “The fragmentary papers that remain from the war years on the Japanese side thus have come to carry a heavy burden of suggestiveness for scholars”; War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 262. 41. For example, in “History and Memory: The ‘Comfort Women’ Controversy,” Hyun Sook Kim describes textbooks as “official history writing” and testimonies by former comfort women as “constituting competing counter­ memories”; positions 5, no. 1 (1997): 76. 42. Similarly, Norma Field identifies the need to expand the idea of testimonies: “We need to be prepared to extend our imagination to fragmentary testimonies, to barely distinguishable testimonies, to testimonies that never reach us because their utterers perished first and because their locus, in terms of political geography, didn’t matter enough”; “War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After,” positions 5, no. 1 (1997): 36. 43. In so doing, Transgenerational Remembrance engages in dialogue with Christopher T. Nelson’s Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), about how practices of performance (storytelling, dance, and rituals) manifest the past in Okinawa, and Adam Broinowski’s Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan: The Performing Body During and After the Cold War (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), about embodied responses to the U.S. Occupation.

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44. For instance, in The Long Defeat, Hashimoto asserts, “There is no ‘collective’ memory in Japan; rather, multiple memories of war and defeat with different moral frames coexist and vie for legitimacy” (4). 45. See Anne Allison, Precarious Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 7, for a discussion of the “precaritization of labor and life” in Japan in the contemporary period. 46. Tracing media around the August anniversary of the war, Hashimoto asserts that these “concerted acts of commemoration show how deeply war memory is still embedded in contemporary life in Japan” (The Long Defeat, 52). See also Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories, for a discussion of media about the war. 47. Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 36; Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2; Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 5; Schneider, Performing Remains, 98. 48. Transgenerational Remembrance enters into conversation with Tavia Nyong’o’s exploration of the “ethical chance that may lie within getting it wrong” (The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009], 136) and in the “politics of dislocation and relocation” that Schneider identifies in the work of artists Suzan-­Lori Parks and Linda Mussmann (Performing Remains, 104). 49. The book extends Vivian M. Patraka’s work on the “goneness” of the Holocaust and its “terrifying, powerful absence and the profusion of discourses it produces”; Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism, and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 7. Transgenerational Remembrance focuses the role of performance in the face of pervasive erasures of history. 50. Along with Takahashi’s Sengo sekininron, other publications on responsibility during the contemporary period include Onuma’s Tōkyō saiban and Kōketsu’s Watashitachi no sensō sekinin. 51. Takahashi, Sengo sekininron, 30–­33. The term “postwar responsibility” is not Takahashi’s but, as Akiko Takenaka explains, part of a recent trend in Japan “mobilized since the 1990s”; Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2015), 202. See Carol Gluck, “Sekinin/Responsibility in Modern Japan,” in Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon, ed. Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 83–­106 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), for a history of the term “responsibility” (sekinin) and “four different directions in which it moved [in the postwar]—­ personal responsibility, responsiblity in politics, war responsibility, and social responsibility” (85). 52. Takahashi, Sengo sekininron, 23–­24. 53. Takahashi, Sengo sekininron, 26, explains that when a person says “good day” (konnichi wa), she inherently expresses the “appeal” to recognize her existence. 54. In his conception of ethics, Emmanuel Levinas asserts, “It is my responsibility before a face looking at me as absolutely foreign . . . that constitutes the original fact of fraternity”; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans.

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Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), 214. For the most part, Takahashi does not discuss Levinas in his essay on responsibility. 55. In Theatre and Ethics (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Nicholas Ridout describes Levinas’s concept of ethics as both “fruitful” in that it can “permit ways of thinking about what is going on in performance or in the theatrical relationship” (54) and “problematic,” “because it loses, in its transfer across from Levinas’ philosophy to theatre and performance, much of what is distinctive in Levinas” (55). 56. Takahashi, Sengo sekininron, 46. 57. Takahashi, Sengo sekininron, 68. 58. Takahashi, Sengo sekininron, 73. 59. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xviii; emphasis in original. 60. Ridout, Theatre and Ethics, 56. Helena Grehan reminds us how recently theater and performance studies has turned to ethical inquiry when she hopes that her monograph Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), will be a “starting point for scholars and practitioners who want to explore and push the limits of an exchange between performance, spectatorship and ethics” (8). Years before this, however, Alice Rayner considers the “audience as a model for intersubjective relations as opposed to a model for a unified community”; “The Audience: Subjectivity, Community and the Ethics of Listening,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 7, no. 2 (1993): 6. Munby 61.  Hans-­Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-­ (New York: Routledge, 2006), 185, 186; emphasis in original. 62. Grehan, Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship, 8, 19. 63. Rebecca Schneider, “In Our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Responsibility,” Performance Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2017): 118. Schneider bases her concept on the Althusserian hail, the idea of “call and response,” and critical race theory. 64. For Peggy Phelan, “the possibility of mutual transformation of both the observer and the performer within the enactment of the live event is extraordinarily important, because this is the point where the aesthetic joins the ethical”; “Marina Abramović: Witnessing Shadows,” Theatre Journal 56, no. 4 (2004): 575. 65. Derrida, Specters of Marx, xviii. ability, or response to 66. In her exploration of “subjectivity as response-­ address,” Kelly Oliver challenges the notion of the Other as always “an object for the subject,” and instead asks, “What of the subjectivity of this so-­called other?”; Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 5, 6. The Noh ghost, in part, reflects Oliver’s concerns, where the ghost is endowed with agency. I am interested, however, not in Oliver’s concerns with subjectivity as response-­ability but, following Phelan and Ridout, in theatrical encounter as response-­ability. 67. Tada adds that Noh is a theater of the “feelings and emotions of souls”; “Nō to reikon” (“Noh and Spirits”), in Nō no mieru fūkei (Noh’s Visible Scene) (Tokyo: Fujiwara Shoten, 2007), 25. 68. Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 3.

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69. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 8. Cho later refers to the yanggongju as a “spectral agent more powerful in death than in life” (124). 70. Cathy J. Schlund-­Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 3, 121. 71.  In “Ghosts—­in Theory—­in Theater,” Intertexts 18, no. 2 (2014), Kevin Riordan asserts that among the many theoretical uses of ghost and haunting, it is theater studies that “provides a productive framework to recover and to better understand the ghost’s powerful and crucially unstable position in contemporary thought” (165). 72. Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 199. 73. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 7. 74. Alice Rayner, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xii. 75. Andrew Sofer, Dark Matter: Invisibility in Drama, Theater, and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 5. Other recent scholarship that utilizes “ghosts” or “haunting” include Christian Ducomb, The Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonation in Philadelphia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), and Jaclyn I. Pryor, Time Slips: Queer Temporalities, Contemporary Performance, and the Hole of History (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 76. In Western writings on the ghost in the theater, Noh is seldom discussed or, if it is, relegated to a quick reference. In, for instance, The Haunted Stage, Carlson describes Noh as “the most intensely haunted of any of the world’s classic dramatic forms” (20) but does not devote lengthy discussion to it. 77. There is an established history of attending to ghosts in scholarship about Japan. For example, in her study about modernity in Japan, Marilyn Ivy uses the “organizing theme” of the “vanishing,” where “the vanishing can only be tracked through the poetics of phantasm”; Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 20. Transgenerational Remembrance is unique in that it recuperates the Noh ghost as a framework for understanding contemporary performance’s role in transgenerational remembrance. 78. Tawada Yōko, “Shishatachi no gekiba” (“Theater of the Dead”), Butai geijutsu 4 (2003): 117. 79. Tawada, “Shishatachi no gekiba,” 117. 80. Tada, “Nō to reikon,” 29. 81. While contemporary artists do not make overt references to traditional Japanese theater, postwar performance artists, including 1960s theater artist Suzuki Tadashi, have looked to traditional Japanese performance forms to invigorate theatrical style and structure. See Ian Carruthers and Takahashi Yasunari, The Theatre of Suzuki Tadashi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 27, for a discussion of Suzuki’s collaborations with Noh actors Kanze Hisao and Kanze Hideo. 82. Too often this assertion is made before explaining that the focus of a particular monograph or edited volume will deploy an “Anglo-­American frame”; see, for example, Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin, eds., Theatre and Ghosts:

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Materiality, Performance and Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2. 83. Schechner frequently references Noh in Between Theater and Anthropology as an example of restored behavior. Carlson mentions Noh throughout The Haunted Stage but is interested in Noh as a performance culture where “the attempt to repeat the original has resulted in a codification of actions and physical objects so detailed as to be almost obsessive” (11). Recently, scholars have begun to briefly integrate elements of Noh as frames of interpretation. For instance, SanSan Kwan uses the concept of ma, the “in-­betweenness of both space and time,” central to Noh, to understand the “synesthetic potential” of the dance Revolutionary Pekinese Opera; Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 85. Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson, and Barbara Hatley analyze the Nohinflected “ambiguities” and “liminal spaces” of contemporary Japanese theater artist Okada Toshiki’s Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise; see Theatre and Performance in the Asia-­Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 123. 84. In part, Transgenerational Remembrance enters into conversation with Takeuchi Yoshimi, whose “Asia as Method” asserts the need for Japan to “stop pursuing the West and ground itself on Asian principles”; What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans. Richard F. Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 164. Kuan-­Hsing Chen cites Takeuchi in his monograph Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010) when he describes “Asia as method” as a “practice” that “begins with multiplying the sources of our readings” (255). 85. For instance, in Takahashi Yuichiro’s half of “Performance Studies in Japan,” cowritten with Uchino Tadashi, Takahashi describes Sato Ayako’s application of the New York University performance studies model to business and other nonverbal communication; see Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research, ed. Jon McKenzie, Heike Roms, C. J. W.-­L. Wee (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 101. 86. Uchino, “Performance Studies in Japan,” 96. When Uchino published the cowritten essay with Takahashi in 2010, the two scholars acknowledge that the word “performance” only “came into the Japanese vocabulary over the last 20 years or so” (102). 87. In the United States, Europe, and Australia, broader conceptions of Japanese performance have been established and can be seen recently in Nobuko Anan, Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Peter Eckersall, Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Miryam Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011). 88. See John Breen, “The Dead and the Living in the Land of Peace: A Sociology of the Yasukuni Shrine,” Mortality 9, no. 1 (2004): 76–­93, for a discussion of connections between Yasukuni and the state. 89. In Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 105, Elizabeth

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Son describes the “growing number of stage productions about the ‘comfort women.’ ” In Japan, however, there are still very few productions about the “comfort women.” 90. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 1. Chapter 1 1. John K. Nelson, “Social Memory as Ritual Practice: Commemorating Spirits of the Military Dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine,” Journal of Asian Studies 62, no. 2 (2003): 459. 2. Harry Harootunian, “Memory, Mourning, and National Morality: Yasukuni Shrine and the Reunion of State and Religion in Postwar Japan,” in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer and Harmut Lehmann (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 150; emphasis in original. 3. The inclusion of Class A war criminals was not made public until the publication of an Asahi shinbun exposé more than six months later. 4. Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–­2005 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 245. In Yasukuni’s complex, a monument to the IMTFE’s only dissenting judge, Radhabinod Pal, affirms the shrine’s rejection of the proceedings. 5. For instance, in the museum on the shrine grounds, Yūshūkan, the main exhibition about Japan’s military history promotes a revisionist narrative of the Asia-­Pacific War, portraying Japan as Asia’s liberator from Western imperialism. 6. Takahashi Tetsuya, Yasukuni mondai (Yasukuni Issue) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2005), 174. Takahashi’s Yasukuni mondai illustrated ongoing interest in the shrine—­the book went through twelve printings and sold more than two hundred thousand copies in the five months following its release in April 2005; figures from John Nelson’s review of Yasukuni mondai in the Journal of Japanese Studies 33, no 2 (2007): 559. 7. Scholarship on political debates about Yasukuni includes John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), Masaru Tamamoto, “A Land Without Patriots: The Yasukuni Controversy and Japanese Nationalism,” World Policy Journal 18, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 33–­40, and Daiki Shibuichi, “The Yasukuni Shrine Dispute and the Politics of Identity in Japan: Why All the Fuss?,” Asian Survey 45, no. 2 (April 2005): 197–­215. 8. In Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2015), Akiko Takenaka explores how the shrine, and Yūshūkan in particular, aims to “encourage the postwar generation to learn and participate in revisionist history” (166). 9. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 33. 10. In contrast to scholarship that “frames Yasukuni Shrine as a ‘political problem that needs to be resolved,’ ” Takenaka makes “memory and spatial practice” “central” to her history of the shrine (Yasukuni Shrine, 5). Providing an invaluable spatial history of the shrine, a majority of her study is devoted to Yasukuni before 1945. Other exceptions include J. Nelson’s “Social Memory,” about the commemorative events at Yasukuni on August 15 and the Yūshūkan museum.

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11. The “Tōkyō Shōkonsha” translation is from Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, 24. Yasukuni’s current name, “shrine of the peaceful country,” designates its role in pacifying the spirits of war dead (J. Nelson, “Social Memory,” 451). See Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, chapter 1, for a history of Yasukuni’s development from a relatively unknown shrine in the 1870s and 1880s to “a powerful vehicle for the glorification of war in general and of death in battle in particular” (91) after the 1890s. 12. Shinto is a loose system of animistic beliefs that existed in Japan before the arrival of Buddhism in the sixth century. See Helen Hardacre, Shintō and the State, 1868–­1988 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), for a discussion of State Shinto’s role in creating a national community “through its worship calendar and national network of shrines” (39) in the Meiji period. In State Shinto’s “national community,” Hardacre identifies “a concerted and sustained effort to promote a cult of the war dead” (90), in which Yasukuni was central. 13. See Kimiko Akita and Rick Kenney, “Of Kamikaze, Sakura, and Gyokusai: Misappropriation of Metaphor in War Propaganda,” Japan Studies Review 18 (2014): 27–­45, for a discussion of images in wartime propaganda. See also Emiko Ohnuki-­Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), for connections between Yasukuni and the kamikaze system. 14. For instance, Ohnuki-­Tierney, Kamikaze, 140, provides an example of a song from 1938 in which two cadets plan to meet each other at Yasukuni Shrine. 15. Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, 54–­57. 16. See Breen’s introduction to Yasukuni for an overview of these wartime spectacles. 17. In chapter 4 of Yasukuni Shrine, Takenaka focuses on shōkon rituals during the Asia-­Pacific War, examining the role of “mass media and public spectacle” to create the impression that “the state and the military accounted for and tended to each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who lost their lives each year” (96). 18. Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, 90–­91, traces how the word eirei first appears in 1907 and is first associated with Yasukuni in 1911 to assert that eirei was “a modern invention,” linked to the shrine. 19. Seraphim, War Memory, adds that “for all its emphasis on the war dead as a ‘collective spirit,’ the shrine did (and does) meticulously preserve the name as well as the place and time of death of each enshrined soul on an individual tablet in the Main Hall” (232). 20. Takahashi, Yasukuni mondai, 37. Takahashi references an editorial written in 1895 during the Sino-­Japanese War that calls for honoring the war dead in order to inspire others to fight in future wars. 21. In 1945, the U.S. Occupation government stripped all shrines of public funding. Hardacre, Shintō and the State, 136–­37, explains that the Shinto Directive, issued on December 15, 1945, outlined the Occupation’s official policy on religion. Later, the 1946 postwar constitution legally severed religion from the state. 22. The Ministry of Health and Welfare continued providing information, free of charge, into the 1970s. The ministry encouraged Yasukuni to enshrine convicted Class A war criminals (Breen, Yasukuni, 6–­8).

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23. In Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–­1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), Yoshikuni Igarashi traces Tokyo’s transformation in the years leading up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. See also Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), for Hiroshima’s transformation from a “landscape of death” to “one of opulence, seductiveness, and comfort” (44). 24. Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, 87. Takenaka sees the control over the spirit as a reaffirmation of military power (120). 25. Seraphim, War Memory, traces the creation of the “collective spirit” at Yasukuni, noting that “memory of the war dead became timeless, metaphysical, canonical, and dissociated from any specific historical context” (233). 26. Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, 92. Beyond the ritual significances of eirei, Takahashi, Yasukuni mondai, 77–­80, argues that the focus of Class A War criminals at Yasukuni reiterates the IMTFE rhetoric—­locating responsibility with a select group of men and separating the general public from war culpability. 27. Among those not enshrined include the civilian victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the U.S. firebombs at the end of the war. While Takahashi, Yasukuni mondai, 176–­78, acknowledges that there is a structure on shrine grounds, the Chinreisha, for all victims of wars, he distinguishes it from the main worship space. Built more than twenty years after the end of the Asia-­Pacific War, the Chinreisha does not apply the same enshrinement practices, and the spirits covered by the Chinreisha’s umbrella category of “war victims” are not considered eirei. 28. Takahashi, Yasukuni mondai, 93, lists the count as of 2001 as 28,863 Taiwanese and 21,181 Koreans enshrined in Yasukuni. See Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, 152–­55, for a discussion of financial benefits granted to Okinawan civilians who died aiding soldiers, support that prompted many survivors to revise their family members’ deaths to include such patriotic acts. 29. Breen, Yasukuni, 6, explains the shrine’s stance against removal: Yasukuni priests “insist that, in theological terms, spirits once enshrined can never be dislodged.” 30. According to Breen, Yasukuni, 19, the shrine was spared from the U.S. firebombings at the end of the war. 31. See John Breen, “The Dead and the Living in the Land of Peace: A Sociology of the Yasukuni Shrine,” Mortality 9, no. 1 (2004): 76–­93, for an analysis regarding the religious rites practiced at Yasukuni. 32. This chapter contributes a detailed analysis of shrine space to existing discussions of performance and ritual at Yasukuni. John Nelson has examined the role of Yasukuni’s enshrinement rituals, commemorative events, and Yūshūkan in shaping what he calls social memory of the war (“Social Memory”). Seraphim, using terminology from Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), describes Yasukuni Shrine as a “site of memory” “in which the performative or ‘incorporated’ quality of memory takes precedence over the textual or ‘inscribed’ ” (War Memory, 230). In “The ‘Sacred’ Standing for the ‘Fallen’ Spirits: Yasukuni Shrine and Memory of War,” JongHwa Lee characterizes Yasukuni as an “experiential memory-­scape” to “carefully construct its appearance of heritage and culture in support of a nation proud of its past” (Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 9, no. 4 [2016]: 374, 375).

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33. Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 17. Fujitani’s argument evokes Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that “(social) space is a (social) product”; The Production of Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers 1991), 26. 34. Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, asserts that these spectacles had additional roles—­for instance, they “function[ed] as a source of news about the war and propagat[ed] militarism” (105). 35. The connection between space and performance is well established in performance studies—­for example, Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­ Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), describes everyday sites like “the grand boulevard, the marketplace, the theater district” as “vortices of behavior” that “brings audiences together and produces performers” (28). In contrast, as discussed in this book’s introduction, applications of performance studies theories to social and political life in Japan are relatively rare. 36. Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses are multiple, part of the “private domain,” and “function ‘by ideology’ ”; Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: New Left Books, 1971), 144, 145. 37. SanSan Kwan, Kinesthetic City: Dance and Movement in Chinese Urban Spaces (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4. 38. It is important to keep in mind that in Althusser’s description, in the “one-­ hundred-­and-­eighty-­degree physical conversion” to address a hailing policeman, the transformation is a physical response (Lenin and Philosophy, 174). 39. Yoshimi Shun’ya, Toshi no doramaturugī: Tōkyō sakariba no shakaishi (Dramaturgy of the City: A Social History of Tokyo’s Amusement Quarters) (Tokyo: Kōbundō, 1987), 15–­16. 40. I made fifteen visits to Yasukuni: three on August 15, three during Mitama Matsuri, a July summer festival honoring the war dead, and the rest on ordinary days. I do not incorporate interviews because Yasukuni’s controversial status in public discourses poses too great a danger toward self-­censorship, especially for a foreign researcher. Further, my assertion is not that visitors believe wholeheartedly in Yasukuni’s rhetoric—­and according to Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, 127–­28, at the height of militarization in the country visitors expressed dissenting ideas about Yasukuni. Instead, I argue that Yasukuni’s nearly identical physical complex from the Asia-­Pacific War positions visitors in its performance of anachronistic remembrance. 41. I consult two editions, Tokoro Isao, Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e: Ofisharu gaidobukku (Welcome to Yasukuni Shrine: Official Guidebook) (Tokyo: Mori, 2016) (originally published in 2000), and Tokoro Isao, Shin Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e (New Welcome to Yasukuni Shrine: Official Guidebook) (Tokyo: Kindai, 2007). These books, for the most part, have the same content, with Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e slightly shorter. 42. One could further argue that the very existence of both Yōkoso guidebooks highlights Yasukuni’s efforts to involve the general public. These efforts result in part from financial need—­after Yasukuni became a private religious institution it relied on private donations. 43. See J. Nelson, “Social Memory,” 447, for a discussion of the significance of Yasukuni’s location on Kudan Hill.

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44. Tokoro, Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e, 7. The 2007 edition contains the same phrase (13). 45. M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 32. 46. Tokoro, Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e, 2. 47. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 123. When Yasukuni added the torii in 1887, “for the Japanese of the Meiji period the torii was unlike anything that ever existed” (122–­23). 48. Breen, Yasukuni, 18–­19. 49. Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, describes the shrine space as linear. Between the Russo-­Japanese War and the Asia-­Pacific War, festivals began to utilize the shrine’s linear layout, “suggesting that the religious and commemorative aspects of the space had been strengthened” (105). 50. See Breen Yasukuni, 16–­19, for a history of the structures in the Yasukuni Shrine complex. 51. Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy, 25, uses Foucault’s concept of the panopticon “replicated in practice throughout the social formation” “to think about the construction of the visionary emperor in Japan.” 52. Tokoro, Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e, 14. As an early proponent for Yasukuni, Ōmura supported a cemetery to honor those who fought for the emperor (Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, 22–­24). 53. A full list of the panels on the stone pillars can be found in Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e, 15. 54. See J. Nelson, “Social Memory”; Shaun O’Dwyer, “The Yasukuni Shrine and the Competing Patriotic Pasts of East Asia,” History and Memory 22, no. 2 (2010): 147–­77; and Rumi Sakamoto, “Mobilizing Affect for Collective War Memory: Kamikaze Images in Yūshūkan,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 2 (2015): 158–­84, for a discussion of the exhibition practices of Yūshūkan. 55. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12. 56. From the Meiji period until 1945, the emperor was the head of State Shinto and a central figure at Yasukuni’s war rallies. According to the diaries of Hirohito’s former household staff, Hirohito stopped visiting Yasukuni because he disagreed with its enshrinement of Class A war criminals (Breen, Yasukuni, 3–­5). The shrine nonetheless maintains a connection to the imperial house, which sends representatives twice a year. 57. Tokoro, Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e, 18. Along with these descriptions, a two-­ page spread (22–­23) provides instructions on how to apply to pray in the inner shrine sanctuary. 58. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 95. 59. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 98. 60. Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 98. 61. Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine, 54. 62. As Jisha Menon, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), explains of the “hyperbolic display of nationalism” at the retreat ceremony at Wagah at the

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India-­Pakistan border, “The inflated and highly exaggerated performative idiom dramatizes the absurdity of the extreme antagonism between the two nations and offers an opportunity to read the border ceremony against the grain and meditate on the histrionics that undergird political performances” (47). In the case of Yasukuni, men dressed as soldiers illustrate the grandiosity of spectacle of the shrine while exhibiting ways in which these performances may push against Yasukuni’s rhetoric. 63. In Japan’s Security Renaissance: New Policies and Politics for the Twenty-­ First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), Andrew Oros outlines the 2015 legislation to reinterpret Article 9. Abe, however, continues to push for a revision of the constitution, claiming his intentions in his victory speech for his third term as prime minister on September 21, 2018 (“Re-­elected Abe Emboldened to Pursue Constitutional Amendment,” Asahi shinbun, September 21, 2018, http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201809210014.html, accessed October 21, 2018). 64. Mr. Miura, informal interview by the author, August 15, 2017. 65. In his essay “Legacies of Empire: The Yasukuni Shrine Controversy,” Takahashi Tetsuya asserts, “Yasukuni ideology has sought to cancel out the violent nature of death in war by re-­imagining it as a ‘glorious death,’ ” despite the fact that a majority of deaths in the Asia-­Pacific War were caused by starvation (in Breen, Yasukuni, 119). 66. Koizumi is fluent in English, and many of his works, including Voice of a Dead Hero, have English titles. 67. Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991), describes that even though free speech has been guaranteed by the postwar constitution, the “chrysanthemum taboo,” the implicit media ban on any criticism of the imperial family, extended to “dominant narratives of the war” (45–­46). 68. Koizumi has exhibited solo shows at a global range of locations, including Tokyo (Mori Art Museum, 2009), Gunma, Japan (Arts Maebashi, 2015), New York (MoMA, 2013), London (Tate Modern, 2013), Sydney (Artspace, 2011), and Amsterdam (Annet Gelink Gallery 2010, 2012, and 2014). See Koizumi’s website (meirokoizumi.com) for a full list of solo and group exhibitions. 69. Rare performances at the shrine include Shimada Yoshiko’s Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (2012; discussed in chapter 4). Another is performance group Port B’s pass by the shrine in their 2007 tour bus performance Tokyo/Olympics; see Peter Eckersall, Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). In both cases, the performances were brief and on the periphery of the shrine. 70. Information about and quotations from Koizumi, unless otherwise noted, come from Koizumi, interview by the author, August 2017. 71.  Ohnuki-­Tierney, Kamikaze, 172, notes that in Anazawa’s diaries and letters “despite his repeated references to falling cherry blossoms, he never refers to the emperor.” language translation, is 72. An image of the letter, along with an English-­ available at the Chiran Kamikaze Peace Museum (Chiran Tokkō Heiwakaikan) (“Final Testament and Letter by Toshio Anazawa,” http://www.chiran-­tokkou.jp​ /learn/pilots/AnazawaToshio.html, accessed January 15, 2018).

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73. Writing about Yūshūkan, Rumi Sakamoto asserts that “what is missing” is “the violent death of kamikaze” (“Mobilizing Affect,” 166). 74. The mix of humor and gravity is common to Koizumi’s work. I discuss the emotional ambiguity of his video installation Portrait of a Young Samurai in the next chapter. 75. Koizumi told me that though he feared he would be arrested for his actions, he was not. Chapter 2 1. Navy vice admiral Ōnishi Takajirō invented the kamikaze operation in October 1944; officially called Tokubetsu Kōgekitai (Special Attack Forces), it was often abbreviated as tokkōtai. Ōnishi referred to the tokkōtai as shinpū, known outside Japan as kamikaze, referencing the name of the typhoons that prevented Kublai Khan’s fleets from crossing to Japan in the thirteenth century; see Emiko Ohnuki-­Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 160. I use “kamikaze” here because I discuss primarily its constructed image, and I wish to distinguish the circulated affective image of the kamikaze from the historical realities of the tokkōtai operation. In addition, one of the artists discussed, Imai Masayuki, plays on the word kamikaze. 2. These figures, from Ohnuki-­Tierney, Kamikaze, 167, include both navy and army pilots. Ohnuki-­Tierney acknowledges that these “figures are only approximations” and provides contradictory figures (361). This number does not include the kaiten, the manned submarines that crashed into enemy targets. 3. Yamato is about the final days of the ship of the same name. As Aaron Gerow describes, the film’s focus on young sailors “is able to narrate a tale of innocent, promising spirits needlessly sent to a grisly death”; “War and Nationalism in Recent Japanese Cinema: Yamato, Kamikaze, Trauma, and Forgetting the Postwar,” in Divided Lenses: Screen Memories of War in East Asia, ed. Michael Berry and Chiho Sawada (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2016), 199. 4. Rumi Sakamoto, “Mobilizing Affect for Collective War Memory: Kamikaze Images in Yūshūkan,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 2 (2015): 167. As Sakamoto describes, this trope is “common in Japanese literature, cinema, and popular culture” (167). Luli van der Does-­Ishikawa reminds us, however, that like many memories from the Asia-­Pacific War, the kamikaze “is highly contested” in public discourses; “Contested Memories of the Kamikaze and the Self-­Representations of the Tokkō-­tai Youth in Their Missives Home,” Japan Forum 27, no. 3 (2015): 351. 5.  Ohnuki-­Tierney, Kamikaze, 20, discusses the association between kamikaze and recklessness outside Japan. An October 2017 search in the New York Times revealed that in a thirty-­day period, kamikaze was used to refer to topics as disparate as U.S. president Trump, the U.S. Republican Party, and Polish conservative politician Jarosław Kaczyński. 6. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 119; emphasis in original. 7. Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 120, claims that “some signs . . . increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs: the more they circulate, the more affective they become, and the more they appear to ‘contain’ affect.”

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8. The kamikaze image also secrets the mechanizations behind its creation, including the co-­opting of cherry-­blossom imagery to further bolster the operation (see Ohnuki-­Tierney, Kamikaze, chapter 3). Immediately after the war, the U.S. Occupation censored kamikaze from school textbooks; these omissions continue today as Japanese history education downplays the tokkōtai operation. According to Ohnuki-­Tierney, Kamikaze, 21–­22, the kamikaze, when not addressed in textbooks, “fails to appear in public discourse as the responsibility of all Japanese” and is left to their survivors and the “extreme right wing” to determine their portrayal. See M. G. Sheftall, “Japanese War Veterans and Kamikaze Memorialization: A Case Study of Defeat Remembrance as Revitalization Movement,” in Defeat and Memory, ed. Jenny Macleod, 154–­74 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and Risa Morimoto’s documentary Wings of Defeat (Edgewood, 2007), for discussions of the stigma of surviving and survivor’s guilt. 9. The “warrior play” is one of the five categories of Noh plays, but this categorization came later in Noh’s development, during the Tokugawa period (1603–­1868). 10. Amano Fumio, Gendai nōgaku kōgi: Nō to kyōgen no miryoku to rekishi ni tsuite no jikkō (Contemporary Noh Lectures: Ten Lectures about Noh and Kyōgen’s Appeal and History) (Suita-­shi: Ōsaka Daigaku Shuppankai, 2004), 47–­ 49, reminds us that the term “mugen Noh” did not exist during Zeami’s life but originated in 1926. 11. Kumagae took the name Renshō when he became a priest. And at the end of the play, the chorus describes Renshō’s future transformation: with Atsumori, he “shall be reborn together upon one lotus throne in paradise”; Zeami, Atsumori, trans. Royall Tyler, in Japanese Nō Dramas, ed. Royall Tyler (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 48. 12. Rebecca Schneider, “In Our Hands: An Ethics of Gestural Response-­ability. Rebecca Schneider in conversation with Lucia Ruprecht,” Performance Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2017): 110. 13. Since the late fourteenth century, repetition has further defined Noh’s mode of embodied transmission from generation to generation. But Noh has also changed over time—­the form is drastically different from its early development. These changes challenge Richard Schechner’s and Marvin Carlson’s descriptions of the form as unchanging. In Schechner’s words, Noh’s “whole score” transmits with little changes; Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 44. While Schechner acknowledges small changes across individual performances, Carlson characterizes Noh as a form in which “the attempt to repeat the original has resulted in a codification of actions and physical objects so detailed as to be almost obsessive”; The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 11. 14. In Fūshikaden, Zeami advises actors to attend to the occasion of performance when performing a particular play again; trans. J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakazu in On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, ed. Yamazaki Masakazu (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 44. 15. See, for example, John Nelson, “Social Memory as Ritual Practice: Commemorating Spirits of the Military Dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine,” Journal of

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Asian Studies 62, no. 2 (2003); Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–­2005 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006); and Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2015). 16. Takahashi Tetsuya, Yasukuni mondai (Yasukuni Issue) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2005), 18. See the previous chapter for a discussion of Yasukuni’s space and visitor remembrance. 17. Sakamoto, “Mobilizing Affect,” 172. For Sakamoto, Yūshūkan is “a site of memory for postwar generations with no direct experience or even knowledge of the war” (172). 18. Sakamoto, “Mobilizing Affect,” 175. 19. David Desser, “Under the Flag of the Rising Sun: Imagining the Pacific War in the Japanese Cinema,” in Berry and Sawada, Divided Lenses, 85. In “War and Nationalism,” Aaron Gerow writes about the increased popularity of war films during the first decades of the twenty-­first century, where films like Yamato “re-­ enact wartime trauma in a vicarious fashion” (198). See also Rumi Sakamoto, “ ‘Will You Go to War? Or Will You Stop Being Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshino’s Sensoron,” Asia-­Pacific Journal 6, no. 1 (January 2008), https://apjjf.org/-­Rumi-­SAKAMOTO/2632/article.html, for a discussion of the rise of “pop” nationalism in Japan in the contemporary period. 20. In February 2014, the Japan Times reported that Eien no 0 was on track to gross more than eight billion yen, making it one of the top ten grossing Japanese films of all time. The article also reflected the high sentiment of the film, quoting Abe saying he was “deeply moved” (Mark Schilling, “Debate Still Rages over Abe-­Endorsed WWII Drama,” February 20, 2014, https://www.japantimes.co​ .jp/culture/2014/02/20/films/debate-­still-­rages-­over-­abe-­endorsed-­wwii-­drama/​ #.WmK5cZM-­fOQ). 21. The familial relationships in Eien no 0 resemble what Sakamoto, “Mobilizing Affect,” 168, describes as the “tragic representation” of the kamikaze “as real human beings with whom we can relate and feel for.” 22. While the ending of Eien no 0 leaves open Miyabe’s reasoning for his sacrifice, it is clear that Miyabe does not choose to volunteer to be a kamikaze pilot for the nation. 23. Sakamoto, “Mobilizing Affect,” 169. She continues, “It is easier to objectify the dead as a source of catharsis and inspiration that is at once emotionally authentic and highly controlled” (169–­70). 24. Minoru Iwasaki and Steffi Richter, “The Topology of Post-­1990s Historical Revisionism,” trans. Richard F. Calichman, positions 16, no. 3 (2008): 513, describes historical revisionism as “emotional reactions that have surged forth since the mid-­1990s.” 25. Rather than the kanji characters, Imai used katakana to render his title. The katakana syllabary is typically used to transcribe foreign loan words. 26. Imai Masayuki, Tokkōtai to sengo no bokura: “Za winzu obu goddo” no kiseki (Tokkōtai and Our Postwar: The Locus of “The Winds of God”) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 26–­38. 27. Imai, Tokkōtai to sengo, 8–­9, 16–­18. Narahashi directed the premiere and many subsequent productions of The Winds of God, including the 1995 feature film (Narahashi Yōko, interview by author, August 2017).

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28. The premiere of the stage production in April 1988 was titled Reincarnation (Rīinkānēshon). When the play opened as The Winds of God in October 1991 at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Space 107, it won awards from the Ministry of Culture for best script, best original work, and best acting. 29. Narahashi took over as director again in 2015 after Imai’s retirement. 30.  In “Manzai: Team Comedy in Japan’s Entertainment Industry,” Joel Stocker describes manzai comedy as a dialogue of “friendly, complementary antagonism” between a smart character and a foolish character, in Understanding Humor in Japan, ed. Jessica Milner Davis (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 57. 31. Masayuki Imai, Za winzu obu goddo / ​The Winds of God (Tokyo: Kirihara Shoten, 1992), 60. This published script includes an English translation; because Imai and Narahashi developed this translation closely with the Japanese script, I cite from it (interview with Narahashi, August 2017). 32. Imai, Za winzu, 62. 33. Sometimes the men parrot nationalistic rhetoric associated with the kamikaze; for instance, Terakawa tells Aniki, “I volunteered to go on this mission believing that one person’s death for a thousand can save Japan” (Imai, Za winzu, 146). 34. In the introduction to Death and Dying in Contemporary Japan (London: Routledge, 2013), 16–­18, Hikaru Suzuki summarizes the Buddhist practice of ancestor worship and the practices of mortuary rites for deceased family members but notes that changes in Japan in the contemporary period put these practices in jeopardy. 35. Imai, Za winzu, 167. 36. See Norma Field, “War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After,” positions 5, no. 1 (1997): 1–­51, for an analysis of apologies in the two years leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. 37. For the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war, Imai adapted The Winds of God as a television drama. For the seventieth anniversary of the end of the war, Imai organized another nationwide tour of The Winds of God. 38. The following all mention the show’s multiple productions: “Tokkōtaiin o enjite 23 nen, Imai Masayuki ‘No More War’ no sakebi” (“Performing the Tokkōtai for 23 Years, Imai Masayuki’s ‘No More War’ Outcry”) Asahi shinbun, December 8, 2011; Kameoka Noriko, “Koseiha hayū Imai Masayuki The Winds of God butai, zenkoku kōen” (“One of a Kind Actor Imai Masayuki The Winds of God Full Country Tour”), Sankei shinbun, September 15, 2006; and Makihara Jun and Kaiyama Takehisa’s review in Higeki kigeki 48, no. 9 (1995): 92–­95. 39. Brian Powell, Japan’s Modern Theatre: A Century of Change and Continuity (London: Japan Library, 2002), 130. I offer a brief history of Japanese postwar theater in the next chapter. 40. In “Flying in the Face of Reason,” The Independent feature article (May 5, 2001) for The Winds of God’s tour to London in 2001, Gavin Bell summarizes these mixed reactions: “Many have applauded his boldness in tackling a subject that remains disturbing for the older generation, but there are others who evidently believe he should have left it alone” (8). 41. Mina Hasegawa, “Play Depicts Passion, Tragedy of Kamikaze Pilots,” Nikkei Weekly, July 5, 1999, 4. 42. Hasegawa, “Play Depicts Passion,” 4.

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43. The Japanese and English films and Japanese television drama of The Winds of God, in keeping with the form of film and television, feature realistic sets. The promotional materials for the Japanese-­language film highlighted the use of a period Zero fighter plane for the flying scenes. 44. For example, in the 1995 review in Higeki kigeki, Makihara noted that the energy was higher in a previous production, but this time the production was structurally better with lower energy (93). This review suggests that The Winds of God’s multiple productions invite comparisons. 45. Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre, trans. and ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91. 46. References to the kamikaze in the eventual outpouring of patriotism after the September 11 terror attacks ignored the fact that there were no tokkōtai pilots at the Pearl Harbor attack. 47. In the year following the 2001 attacks, the New York Times used kamikaze in multiple articles, often to describe the attacks (Matthew Wald, “A Nation Challenged: The Nuclear Threat; Officials Fear Reactors Are Vulnerable to Attack by Terrorists,” November 4, 2001), terrorists (Michael Gordon, “A Day of Terror: An Assessment; When an Open Society Is Wielded as a Weapon Against Itself,” September 12, 2001), or potential future targets (Clyde Haberman, “Before and After: Agonized, New York Bends, but It Doesn’t Break,” September 16, 2001). 48. Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 132. 49. Ayelet Zohar, “Performative Recollection: Koizumi Meiro Representations of Kamikaze Pilots and the Trauma of the Asia-­Pacific War in Japan,” in Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture, ed. Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, and Yuval Neria (Cham, CH: Springer, 2016), 119, refers to performance as a “powerful tool” in Koizumi’s work. Zohar alludes to the performativity of Koizumi’s work, what she describes as “video art,” while I explore his careful curation of viewer experiences. 50. He describes Portrait of a Young Samurai, Double Projection #1, Double Projection #2 as “video installations” on his website (http://meirokoizumi.com​ /framepage13.html). 51. I base this assessment on attending a number of Koizumi’s exhibitions in Tokyo, at the Mori Art Museum (2009), the Hara Museum (2011), and the Hermes Gallery (2015), and, in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art (2012). 52. In an interview with MoMA curator Sarah Suzuki, Koizumi stated that “video is a medium that can deal directly with human emotion, and that can offer direct access to the emotion and consciousness of the audience”; Koizumi Meiro: Trapped Voice Would Dream of Silence (Tokyo: Gendaikikakushitsu, 2015), 80. 53. This is my translation. The film’s promotional English-­language title is For Those We Love, which obscures the rhetoric of the eirei that buoys the film. See Yoshikuni Igarashi, “Kamikaze Today: The Search for National Heroes in Contemporary Japan,” in Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post–­Cold War in Asia, ed. Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 99–­121, for a discussion of the souvenirs featuring Torihama Tome available for purchase at Chiran. 54. Koizumi Meiro, interview by author, July 2012. Portrait is not the first time that Koizumi referenced kamikaze films. In Melodrama for Men #1 (2008), his first

Notes to Pages 41–51

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live performance, Koizumi adapted dialogue from Ore wa, in which Vice Admiral Ōnishi, the orchestrator of the kamikaze operation, speaks about the “inevitability of the suicide missions” (http://meirokoizumi.com/framepage13.html). 55. When Ishihara was governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012, he frequently made controversial statements in support of a conservative, nationalist agenda. 56. On his website, Koizumi notes that he “wrote a typically sentimental scene” “inspired” by the increase of war films in contemporary Japan. 57. Koizumi, Trapped Voice, 25. 58. Koizumi, email message to author, December 2018. 59. In his interview with Suzuki, Koizumi elaborates on the complex relationship between him and his audience: “I think audiences feel discomfort because I make them stand in the director’s position, but at the same time, they can never become an active agent in this director-­actor power relationship. They always remain just a passive/powerless viewer of this cycle of exploitation, even though they are in the position of exploiter” (Trapped Voice, 80). 60. Koizumi, interview, July 2012. 61. Itazu was the first director of the Chiran Peace Museum. Located at the site of the former tokkōtai training camp, the museum is devoted to the commemoration of pilots. 62. Koizumi, interview by author, August 2017. Koizumi stated that he also felt a greater responsibility to exhibit work in Japan. 63. Koizumi, interview, August 2017. Chapter 3 1. In a footnote to his translation of Matsukaze, Royall Tyler explains that because the priest is unrelated to the two sisters, he does not “have a natural duty to comfort their spirits”; Royall Tyler, ed. and trans., Japanese Nō Dramas (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 192. The waki’s knowledge of the past varies across the Noh canon: sometimes the waki knows the stories of those departed, other times, as is in the case of Atsumori, the waki has caused the shite’s death. 2. As Kunio Komparu asserts, the “most important function of the waki is to create a reason for the shite to appear and perform”; The Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives, trans. Jane Corddry and Stephen Comee (New York: Weatherhill, 1983), 158. 3. The titles for 1929 and 1939 are the translations by Seinendan, Hirata’s company, used in press materials. 4. Paul H. Kratoska, ed., Asian Labor in the Wartime Japanese Empire: Unknown Histories (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), explores Japan’s forced-­ labor practices. 5. In When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), 2, Lori Watt lists figures of Japanese in colonies and colonial subjects in Japan: by August 1945, there were 6.9 million Japanese overseas (3.2 million civilians and 3.7 million soldiers), and there were 2 million Koreans, 200,000 Ryukyuans, 56,000 Chinese, and 35,000 Taiwanese in Japan. 6. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), examines how efforts in the metropole contributed to the empire when Japanese village

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communities helped draft farmers to Manchuria, in essence “produc[ing] two imperial systems—­one in the colony and one in the metropolis” (5). 7. In “Colonial Korea and the Asia-­Pacific War: A Comparative Analysis of Textbooks in South Korea and Japan,” Chung Jaejeong contrasts Korean textbooks, which “emphasize  .  .  . the wartime exploitation of both human and material resources” and Japanese textbooks, which “focus on the course of the war as it relates to the international political situation at the time” (in History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia: Divided Memories, ed. Gi-­Wook Shin and Daniel C. Sneider [New York: Routledge, 2011], 167). 8. Yasuda Noboru, Ikai o tabisuru nō: Waki to iu sonzai (Noh’s Journey to the Spirit World: The Waki’s Existence) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2011), 25–­30. Yasuda, himself a waki actor, describes Noh as a dialogue between living (waki) and dead (shite) (24). 9. Tawada Yōko, “Shishatachi no gekiba” (“Theater of the Dead”), Butai geijutsu 4 (2003): 117. 10. Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 195–­96. 11. In her analysis of Blau, Alice Rayner reminds us that “ghosting goes beyond the actor to the total theatre event”; Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xvi. 12. When Hirata staged the entire Seoul shimin series in 2011, he also premiered Sao Paulo shimin, about a family of Japanese sugar merchants living in São Paolo, Brazil, in the 1930s. While the Sao Paulo shimin characters are not related to the Shinozaki family in any way, Hirata constructs Sao Paulo shimin out of dialogue from the Seoul shimin series, implicitly connecting Japanese immigration to imperialism. See Yoshiko Fukushima, “Hirata Oriza’s Quiet Theatre Poetics: Citizens of Seoul and Citizens of Sao Paulo,” Journal of Modern English Drama 27, no. 1 (2014): 249–­85, for further discussion of Sao Paulo shimin. 13. Angura is not a cohesive theater movement, and artists represent a range of political viewpoints. For instance, Terayama did not participate in Anpo protests; see Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-­Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2005). 14.  See Wesley Sasaki-­Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001), for a history of protest movements leading up to and including Anpo protests. 15. In Brian Powell’s history of shingeki, he explains that shingeki artists were diverse in their political leanings, ranging from Senda Koreya, imprisoned multiple times for his liberal politics, to Kishida Kunio, who led the Cultural Department of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association during the war (Japan’s Modern Theatre: A Century of Change and Continuity [London: Japan Library, 2002]). 16. Powell, Japan’s Modern Theatre, 167. 17. See David G. Goodman, The Return of the Gods: Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 19–­23, for a discussion of the 1960 Anpo protests and the “sense of helplessness” felt by young theater artists. garde Perfor18. See Peter Eckersall, Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-­ mance and Politics in Japan, 1960–­2000 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), for a description of angura’s experimental dramaturgy.

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19. Angura playwrights wrote about Japanese imperialism. For example, Eckersall reads Kara’s John Silver, about a former imperial adventurer, as a criticism of postwar Japan, “built on the ill-­gotten spoils of war,” “as corrupted and eschatological as its former identity” (Theorizing the Angura Space, 74). 20. Kara’s and Satō’s companies performed in tents in public spaces to create direct encounters with the public. 21. In his article “Japanese Theatre from the 1980s: The Ludic Conspiracy,” Robert T. Rolf describes a clear “absence of any easily identifiable ideology”; Modern Drama 35, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 128. Eckersall, Theorizing the Angura Space, 90–­91, discusses the introduction of corporate sponsorship in the 1980s, when department stores started to serve as theater producers. 22. Eckersall, Theorizing the Angura Space, 91. 23. See Yoshiko Fukushima, Manga Discourse in Japanese Theater: The Location of Noda Hideki’s Yume no Yūminsha (New York: Kegan Paul International, 2003), for a discussion of Noda’s manga aesthetics. 24. Eckersall, Theorizing the Angura Space, 94. As Eckersall notes, this was twice the size of Kara’s venues. 25. Along with Hirata, artists who can be described as part of the “quiet theater” movement include regional theater artists Hasegawa Kōji in Aomori (northern Japan) and Tsuchida Hideo in Kansai (western Japan); see Uchino Tadashi, Crucible Bodies: Postwar Japanese Performance from Brecht to the New Millennium (New York: Seagull, 2009), 21. 26. Hirata sets his most successful play, Tokyo Notes (1994), in the lobby of an art museum. 27. Uchino, Crucible Bodies, 89. 28. H. D. Harootunian, “America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan,” in Japan in the World, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 215. 29. Uchino, Crucible Bodies, 92. 30. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, “Guilt, Nostalgia, and Victimhood: Korea in the Japanese Theatrical Imagination,” New Theatre Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2013): 195. 31. See Fukushima, “Hirata Oriza’s Quiet Theatre Poetics,” for an overview of Hirata’s political activities. 32. Hirata Oriza, Gendai kōgo engeki no tame ni (For the Purpose of Contemporary Colloquial Theater) (Tokyo: Banseisha, 1995), 25. 33. Hirata, Gendai kōgo engeki, 25. 34. Denise Varney, Peter Eckersall, Chris Hudson, and Barbara Hatley, Theatre and Performance in the Asia-­Pacific: Regional Modernities in the Global Era (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 76. For Matsumoto Katsuya, Seoul shimin’s focus on the home brings together important and unimportant aspects of the history of the colony, connecting Japan’s past to its present; “Mienai mono o miru: Hirata Oriza Seinendan Souru shimin shiron” (“Seeing the Unseen: Essay on Hirata Oriza and Seinendan’s Seoul shimin”), Bungei kenkyū 169 (2010): 37. 35. Oriza Hirata, “Artist Interview,” Performing Arts Network Japan, March 23, 2007, http://performingarts.jp/E/art_interview/0703/1.html. 36. Fukushima, “Hirata Oriza’s Quiet Theatre Poetics,” 252–­55.

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Notes to Pages 56–59

37. Hirata Oriza, “Sōru shimin kara Sōru shimin 1919 e,” Higeki kigeki, 53, no. 7 (2000): 21. 38. Blau, Take Up the Bodies, 196. 39. Rayner, Ghosts, xv. Because Marvin Carlson limits “ghosting” to the “phenomenon” of repetition of production elements, where “ghosting presents the identical thing they have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context,” his definition does not apply to Seoul shimin’s historical associations; The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 7. 40. Rayner, Ghosts, 43. While she does not call the experience ghosting, it resembles the evocative process Blau discusses. 41. Since 1989, Seinendan has mounted eleven productions of 1909. Each time the company premiered a new addition to the series, it produced at least one of the earlier plays. 42. Hirata Oriza, Toshi ni shukusai wa iranai (Cities Do Not Need Festivities), 182, as quoted in Cody Poulton, “Introduction,” Asian Theatre Journal 19, no. 1 (2002): 3. 43. Indicative of how different Hirata’s style was when 1909 first premiered, Kobayashi Kazuki panned the premiere production. Calling it an experiment, he describes the result as “total tedium”; “Engeki jihyō,” Higeki kigeki 42, no. 11 (1989): 93. 44. Hirata notes moments when the stage is empty in his scripts. 45. Hirata, “Sōru shimin” (unpublished script from November 2011 production), 38. 46. Carlson, The Haunted Stage, 53. 47. I maintain the Japanese word shimin because of its complex meaning. 48. Simon Andrew Avenell, Making Japanese Citizens: Civil Society and the Mythology of the Shimin in Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 11. Avenell traces the history of shimin from its initial literal, apolitical meaning (inhabitants of a city) in the Meiji period to its slight “bourgeoisie” connotations in Marxist writings in the 1930s to its current activist significances after the 1960 Anpo protests (71–­73). 49. In his Performing Arts Network Japan interview, Hirata gestures toward the complex meaning of shimin: “Since the Shinozaki family is Japanese, they are not really citizens of Seoul, but I chose the irony of giving it that title.” 50. Hirata, “Sōru shimin,” 2. 51. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876–­1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 6. Reflective of how the colonial settler remains absent from public discourses, Uchida mentions that her grandparents, former settlers, “remained all but silent about their own experience as repatriates” (xi). 52. Young, Japan’s Total Empire, 404, describes colonial settlers in Manchuria as almost on the front lines of invasion; “a major part of the settlers’ training program was taken up in military exercises.” 53. In 1909, Sōichirō eagerly discusses a book about his family’s hardships in Korea that he hopes will be published in time to mark their thirty-­year anniversary in Seoul (Hirata, “Sōru shimin,” 8). 54. Watt, When Empire Comes Home, 97.

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55. Discussions of annexing Korea had been circulating in Japanese public discourses since the late nineteenth century. See Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895–­1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), for Meiji-­period (1868–­1912) interest in Korea. Colonial desire toward the Korean Peninsula, however, did not develop in modern Japan—­rather, it can be traced back to Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s failed invasions of the Korean Peninsula in 1592 and 1597. 56. Hirata, “Sōru shimin,” 9–­10. 57. Hirata, “Sōru shimin,” 11. 58. According to Uchida, Brokers of Empire, 41, early immigrants to Korea were not large conglomerates but “small and midsize merchants.” Individual business dealings in Korea, therefore, “guided the course of Empire” (35). 59. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1994), 34, 35; emphasis in original. 60. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space, and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–­1930 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 2. 61. Mark Peattie, introduction to The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–­1945, ed. Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 40. In reality, dōka, while preaching equality, developed colonial subjects with obligations to the nation without the same rights as Japanese citizens. In Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–­1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), Mark E. Caprio explains that the Japanese assimilationist policy in Korea “defined the colonized as the object to be changed: as inferior peoples they had to be prepared for their acceptance as national subjects” (10). 62. Hirata, “Sōru shimin,” 11. 63. Hirata, “Sōru shimin,” 34. 64. In “A Sentimental Journey: Mapping the Interior Frontier of Japanese Settlers in Colonial Korea,” Jun Uchida describes that youth learned to communicate with Koreans through “subtle cultural cues and gestures”; Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 3 (2011): 709. 65. Hirata Oriza, “Sōru shimin Shōwa bōkyōhen,” Higeki kigeki 60, no. 1 (2007): 144. 66. Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 154. While Gordon acknowledges that no clear death toll was recorded, he estimates that the massacre took between three and six thousand lives. 67. Hirata, “Sōru shimin,” 29. 68. Hirata, “Sōru shimin,” 24. 69. In these moments, Seoul shimin verges on Brechtian alienation in preventing the audience “from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play”; Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting,” in Brecht on Theatre, trans. and ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 91. What is unique about Seoul shimin is that its domestic setting connects the Shinozakis with the audience before alienating them, thereby challenging audience identification with colonial settlers. 70. Fukushima, “Hirata Oriza’s Quiet Theatre Poetics,” 266. 71. Uchida, “A Sentimental Journey,” 711.

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Notes to Pages 62–71

72. Hirata, “Sōru shimin,” 11. 73. Hirata, interview by author, July 2012. When pressed, Hirata asserted that reading this timeline is not necessary to enjoy his series. 74. See Ki-­Baik Lee, A New History of Korea, trans. Edward W. Wagner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), for a historical account of the March 1 movement. 75. I take these numbers from Lee, New History of Korea, who elaborates, “In reality the numbers in all these categories far exceeded those officially reported” (344). 76. Korean “comfort women,” forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese army, are completely absent in Seoul shimin. I discuss contemporary representations of “comfort women” in chapter 4. 77. In his program note for 1919, Hirata acknowledges that he felt he had to set its action on the day of the March 1 protests. But, like the play, the program note does not provide a detailed explanation of the event. 78. Hirata Oriza, “Sōru shimin 1919” (unpublished script from November 2011 production), 43. 79. Maruta Shingo, “Ni kyoku no uta chūshin to shūen” (“Song with Two Melodies, Center and Fringe”), Teatoro 701 (2000): 40–­42. 80. Hirata, “Sōru shimin 1919,” 62–­63. 81. Hirata Oriza,“ Sōru shimin 1939 ren’ai nijūsō,” Higeki kigeki 64, no. 12 (2011): 118. 82. Disappearances of Korean colonial subjects inadvertently evoke disappearances of Korean women, taken to serve as “comfort women” during the Asia-­Pacific War. 83. In Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Jennifer Robertson analyzes Takarazuka overseas tours to Japan’s colonies during the 1930s. Shingeki and traditional theater also toured overseas (Powell, Japan’s Modern Theatre, 131–­34). 84. Jennifer Robertson, “Staging Ethnography: Theatre and Japanese Colonialism,” in Anthropology and Colonialism in Asia and Oceania, ed. Jan van Bremen and Akitoshi Shimizu (Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon Press, 1999), 266. 85. Koichi Iwabuchi, “Japanese Popular Culture and Postcolonial Desire for ‘Asia,’ ” in Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan, ed. Matthew Allen and Rumi Sakamoto (New York: Routledge, 2006), 17–­19. 86. Hirata, Gendai kōgo engeki, 73. 87. Hirata, interview, July 2012. 88. Hirata, “Artist Interview.” Chapter 4 1. The ghost in Izutsu lacks a name—­characters refer to her as the daughter of Ki no Aritsune or the wife of Ariwara no Narihira. Pertinent to remembrance of the Asia-­Pacific War, the nameless ghost is evocative of the elision of women from historical narratives. 2. Absent figures reflect Japan’s imperial labor practices—­the country’s reliance on colonial laborers, forced into service in later years, resulted in colonial subjects’ being sent to the far reaches of Japan’s empire.

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3. As Yoshimi Yoshiaki discusses in Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, trans. Suzanne O’Brien (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), some scholars and former “comfort women” prefer to use “military sex slaves” to describe the violence and coercion of the “comfort women” system. Following scholars that include Maki Kimura, I use the term with quotation marks to refer to public discourses of the “comfort women” as well as the term’s euphemistic qualities. 4. In Unfolding the “Comfort Women” Debates: Modernity, Violence, Women’s Voices (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Maki Kimura challenges the belief that “comfort women” were completely silent during the postwar period; she locates studies and memoirs of former “comfort women” before 1990 to argue that “the system was not problematized widely nor was extensive research conducted until a number of former ‘comfort women’ started to come forward to talk publicly about their experiences in the 1990s” (10). 5. This range is standard in scholarship about “comfort women,” including that of Yoshimi, Yuki Tanaka, and C. Sarah Soh. In Chinese Comfort Women: Testimonies from Imperial Japan’s Sex Slaves (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), Peipei Qiu, Su Zhiliang, and Chen Lifei put the number at four hundred thousand, with Chinese women accounting for two hundred thousand of those women, ignored because “Chinese comfort women kidnapped randomly by Japanese troops are rarely mentioned” (5). Yoshimi asserts that the difficulty of pinning down an accurate figure results in part from the mass destruction of documents after the war (Comfort Women, 91). 6. According to Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 192, the Japanese government returned “comfort women” from Japan but not from other countries. 7. In Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 94–­95, Grace M. Cho discusses the stigma surrounding former “comfort women” in South Korea after the war. 8. Minoru Iwasaki and Steffi Richter assert that the “decisive turning point in the narrative of the Asia-­Pacific War during the 1990s took place on the basis of the testimony of women who had been forced to serve as ‘military comfort women’ ”; “The Topology of Post-­1990s Historical Revisionism,” trans. Richard F. Calichman, positions, 16, no. 3 (2008): 511. 9. Kimura, Unfolding, 140. 10. Kimura, Unfolding, 139. 11. Along with Elizabeth W. Son’s book Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018) on the role of performance in the redress movement, other scholarship on performances about “comfort women” includes E. Tammy Kim, “Performing Social Reparation: ‘Comfort Women’ and the Path to Political Forgiveness,” Women and Performance, 16, no. 2 (2006): 221–­49. 12. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 110, quoting Gertrude Stein’s Lectures in America in the end (94). 13. See Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 45–­48, for a discussion of the establishment of the system.

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14. Chunghee Sarah Soh, “From Imperial Gifts to Sex Slaves: Theorizing Symbolic Representations of the ‘Comfort Women,’ ” Social Science Japan Journal 3, no. 1 (2000): 70. 15. Chungmoo Choi, “The Politics of War Memories toward Healing,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-­Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 398. 16. Iwasaki and Richter, “Topology,” explains that Japanese historical revisionism has been in existence since the mid-­1950s but grew “incomparably larger in scale” in the 1990s (511). As of 2012, “comfort women” have been dropped from all Japanese textbooks (Kimura, Unfolding, 17). 17. As discussed in the introduction, few documents remain from the war. Yuki Tanaka identifies another issue: the inability to access Japanese government documents that, as of 2002, were still classified; see Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (London: Routledge, 2002), 19–­20. 18. Iwasaki and Richter, “Topology,” 514, describes historical revisionism as “a certain type of emotion or disposition, an adaptability that can only be expressed as a mode of life.” 19. Kimura, Unfolding, 12, asserts, “From the beginning” “comfort women” testimonies “opened to question the ways that (mainstream) modern history is recorded, documented and studied, predominantly focusing on written materials, in particular the (government) official documents.” 20. Schneider, Performing Remains, 98. Ueno Chizuko, “The Politics of Memory: Nation, Individual and Self,” trans. Jordan Sand, History and Memory 11, no. 2 (1999): 134, discusses this tendency in contemporary Japan, when historians find themselves “in a trap” “as long as they share a logic that privileges documentary sources above all else.” 21. Kimura, Unfolding, 13. 22. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 3. 23. According to Kimura, Unfolding, 136, some research in the 1990s also aimed “to reflect the responsibility of individuals,” which in turn “made many people in Japan uneasy.” 24. See C. Sarah Soh, “Japan’s National/Asian Women’s Fund for ‘Comfort Women,’ ” Pacific Affairs 76, no. 2 (2003): 209–­33, for a history of the fund and its activities. Soh explains that the fund, best understood as a “hybrid national public organization,” “has an inherent dilemma of representation: it does not represent the government sufficiently, yet it is simultaneously viewed as being under the control of the government” (210). 25. See Son, Embodied Reckonings, 150–­53, for a historical overview of the 2011 statue. 26. The “comfort women” statues have received international press. See, for instance, Elise Hu, “ ‘Comfort Woman’ Memorial Statues, a Thorn in Japan’s Side, Now Sit on Korean Buses,” National Public Radio, November 13, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/11/13/563838610/comfort-woman​ -memorial-statues-a-thorn-in-japans-side-now-sit-on-korean-buses; Jacey Fortin, “ ‘Comfort Women’ Statue in San Francisco Leads a Japanese City to Cut Ties,”

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New York Times, November 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25​ /world/asia/comfort-women-statue.html; and Adam Taylor, “Why Japan Is Losing Its Battle against Statues of Colonial-­Era ‘Comfort Women,’ ” Washington Post, September 21, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews​ /wp/2017/09/21/why-­japan-­is-­losing-­its-­battle-­against-­statues-­of-­colonial-­era​ -­comfort-­women/?utm_term=.9235bbb00159. 27. C. Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 73. 28. See Yoshimi, Comfort Women, 102, and Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, 49. 29. In a 2015 article, the New York Times reported that there were forty-­six surviving South Korean comfort women; Choe Sang-­Hun, “Japan and South Korea Settle Dispute Over Wartime ‘Comfort Women,’ ” New York Times, December 28, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/world/asia/comfort​ -­women-­south-­korea-­japan.html. 30. Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27, no. 4 (Winter 2009): 70; Son, Embodied Reckonings, 154–­57. 31. Son, Embodied Reckonings, 158. 32. While Son, Embodied Reckonings, acknowledges that “the bronze statue also invites nationalistic performances” (159), Son’s emphasis is on how the “scriptive object can invite people to find their own way of giving back and showing love and support for the survivors” (157). 33. Son, Embodied Reckonings, 150. As Son asserts, Japanese ambassador to South Korea Bessho Kōrō’s “discomfort with the statue’s proximity to the embassy reinforces its status as a public indictment of Japan’s refusal to resolve the issue” (153). 34. The 2015 agreement between Japan and South Korea on the “comfort women” includes a formal apology from the Japanese government and the establishment of a one-­billion-­yen fund to support surviving South Korean “comfort women.” As of 2018, this agreement has not been honored, and the statues remain in Seoul and Busan. 35. The group responsible for the Busan statue is Youth Make Peace (http://​ www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20170103000764). 36. See Kuro Daraiji, Nikutai no anākizumu: 1960-­nendai Nihon bijutsu ni okeru pafōmansu no chika suimyaku (Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan) (Tokyo: Guramu Bukkusu, 2010), for a discussion of the transition of postwar art to performance in public spaces (chapter 2); he reiterates his argument in the final chapter, describing how this work crossed from “art” (bijutsu) into “society” (shakai) (524). 1970: A New Avant-­ Garde (New 37. See Doryun Chong, Tokyo 1955–­ York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), for an English-­language overview of the experimental art movement in postwar Japan. Charles Merewether, “Disjunctive Modernity: The Practice of Artistic Experimentation in Postwar Japan,” in Art, Anti-­Art, Non-­Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–­1970, ed. Charles Merewether with Rika Iezumi Hiro (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), highlights the “collaborative experiments across the

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arts” (13), from visual to dance to photography to music, to create experiments that “began to redefine the role of the audience” (16). 38. Peter Eckersall, Performativity and the Event in 1960s Japan: City, Body, Memory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3; emphasis in original. 39. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–­1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13; see chapter 5 for a discussion of preparations for the Tokyo Olympics. 40. William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 3. 41. Kuro, Nikutai no anākizumu, 66. 42. Miryam Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), 97. 43. Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan,121. 44. Scholars provide different reasons for the end of the 1960s performance-­art activity, but many identify the 1970 Osaka Expo as a turning point in which artists left publicly engaged work behind. The expo integrated large-­scale artwork into a narrative of Japan’s development as a leading nation and economic power, making it what Merewether describes as “a final turn toward the commercialization of art” (“Disjunctive Modernity,” 28). In the 1990s, artwork about “comfort women” lent itself to performance, as evidenced in Tomiyama Taeko’s work. Predominantly a painter, Tomiyama worked on the series A Memory of the Sea in the 1980s, creating a “slide presentation,” A Memory of the Sea: A Dedication to the Korean Military Comfort Women (1986), that “consists of oil paintings, lithographs and a poem, accompanied by Asian music,” performed before the first public testimonies of former “comfort women” in 1991; Hiroko Hagiwara, “Off the Comprador Ladder: Tomiyama Taeko’s Work,” in Disrupted Borders: An Intervention in Definitions of Boundaries, ed. Sunil Gupta (London: River Oram Press, 1993), 65. 45. Shimada Yoshiko, interview by author, July 2012. 46. Shimada Yoshiko, interview by author, July 2015. Shimada assisted graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo, who created many of the performance posters for several of the angura artists; see Leza Lowitz, “Past Imperfect,” Tokyo Journal (August 1992): 41. 47. Lowitz, “Past Imperfect.” 48. Lowitz, “Past Imperfect.” 49. See Son, Embodied Reckonings, 105, for a discussion of the “growing number” of theatrical representations of the “comfort women,” primarily in South Korea, the United States, and Europe. While Son lists one example by a Japanese artist, Miyagi Satoshi’s Medea (1999), Miyagi’s play is one of few about “comfort women” in Japan. 50. Shimada’s subject matter has garnered her attention outside Japan. In 1997, the New York Public Library acquired two of her etchings, Balloon Bomb, Rising Sun and House of Comfort; see Monty Dipietro, “Feminist Charts No-­Woman’s-­ Land between Peaceniks and the SDF,” Japan Times, November 6, 2002, https://​ www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2002/11/06/arts/feminist-charts-no-womans-land​ -between-peaceniks-and-the-sdf/#.XWoVHJMzawU. 51. In “ ‘Postcolonial’ Feminist Locations: The Art of Tomiyama Taeko and Shimada Yoshiko,” Rebecca Jennison relays the reception of Tomiyama and

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Shimada in the Japanese art world and both artists’ experiences with censorship; U.S.-­Japan Women’s Journal 12 (1997): 104–­5. 52. Hiroko Hagiwara, “Comfort Women: Women of Conformity; The Work of Shimada Yoshiko,” in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ed. Griselda Pollock (New York: Routledge, 1996), 253. See also Julia Thomas, “Photography, National Identity, and the ‘Cataract of Times’: Wartime Images and the Case of Japan,” American Historical Review 103, no. 5 (1998): 1475–­501, for a brief discussion of ultranationalist pressure on art museums and galleries in Japan in the 1990s. Thomas mentions Shimada, who burned one of her paintings and sent its ashes to the Toyama Museum in protest for canceling an exhibition of Ōura Nobuyuki’s work on Emperor Hirohito (1490). 53. Shimada, interview, July 2012. 54. Shimada Yoshiko, email message to author, August 2012. 55. For a description of Kum’s work, see Ikeuchi Yasuko, “Her Narration and Body: On Soni Kum’s Film Work,” trans. Junliang Huang and Brett de Bary, and Rebecca Jennison, “ ‘Postmemory’ in the Work of Oh Haji and Soni Kum,” in Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come, ed. Lee Chonghwa, translation edited by Rebecca Jennison and Brett de Bary (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2015): 80–­113, 114–­33. 56. In Burt Ramsay’s terms, the body both uncovers “history’s destruction of the body and the possibilities of agency and resistance”; “Genealogy and Dance History: Foucault, Rainer, Bausch, and de Keersmaeker,” in Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory, ed. André Lepecki (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 34. Susan Leigh Foster, “An Introduction to Moving Bodies: Choreographing History,” in Choreographing History, ed. Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), identifies how the body can move between categories; it “stands along with Woman, Native, and Other as a neglected and mis-­apprehended subject of inquiry, but it stands uniquely as a category that pivots inquiry easily into any of these marginalized domains” (12). 57. In later performances at the Diet building and Yasukuni Shrine, Shimada did not distribute flyers. 58. Kunio Komparu, The Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives, trans. Jane Corddry and Stephen Comee (New York: Weatherhill, 1983), 20. 59. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-­Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 3. 60. Son, Embodied Reckonings, 44, 47. As Son argues, the youthfulness of the statue “heighten[s] the repulsiveness of the crimes of sexual slavery,” but it also “evokes the survivors’ strong sense of defiance” (154). 61. Son, Embodied Reckonings, 42. 62. Ueno, “The Politics of Memory,” 137, argues that the silence between the end of the war and the “comfort women” outcry in the 1990s indicates that “the crime continued, in the present tense, for that half-­century period.” 63. Son, Embodied Reckonings, 157. 64. Flyer text, 2011 performance. In the flyer, Shimada notes that only one Japanese “comfort woman” has come forward—­Suzuko Shirota, a pseudonym. 65. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997),

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challenges empathy’s positive associations. Hartman argues that empathy “is double-­edged, for in making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration” (19). 66. Ueno, “The Politics of Memory,” 148, 149. 67. Ueno, “The Politics of Memory,” 150. 68. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. 69. As Son, Embodied Reckonings, 8–­ 9, discusses, the “comfort woman” movement has become global, involving a number of activist organizations. 70. Soh, Comfort Women, 1–­2; emphasis in original. 71. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, in their introduction to their edited volume Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 16–­17, privilege multiplicity when they look to postmodernity to move transnational feminisms into diverse and multiple categories. 72. Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 2. 73. Tanaka, Japan’s Comfort Women, 84–­87, asserts that the U.S. military was aware of the “comfort” stations. Tanaka also devotes a chapter to “comfort” stations in Japan during the U.S. Occupation. 74. Amelia Jones, “ ‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation,” Art Journal 56, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 15. 75. Amelia Jones, “Unpredictable Temporalities: The Body and Performance in (Art) History,” in Performing Archives/Archives of Performances, ed. Gunhild Borggreen and Rune Gade (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2013), 56. 76. Shimada, email message to author, August 2012. 77. Ultraconservative groups threatened the 2012 photography exhibition Layer by Layer at Tokyo’s Nikon gallery featuring photographs by South Korean Ahn Sehong of former Korean “comfort women” left behind in China at the end of the war. The gallery briefly closed the show, but after Ahn sued Nikon for breach of contract, Nikon, under court order, reopened the show. See Miho Inada, “Judge Orders Nikon to Hold ‘Comfort Women’ Photo Exhibit,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2012. 78. See Hagiwara, “Comfort Women,” for a discussion of White Aprons. 79. Schneider, Performing Remains, 108; emphasis in original. 80. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 68. 81. Jones, “ ‘Presence’ in Absentia,” 12. Chapter 5 1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 125; emphasis in original. 2. The official start and end dates of the Battle of Okinawa are April 1 to June 23, 1945. Yet, as Ōta Masahide explains in “Re-­examining the History of the Battle of Okinawa,” in Okinawa: Cold War Island, ed. Chalmers Johnson (Cardiff, Calif.: Japan Policy Research Institute, 1999), incidents occurred before and after these dates, so it is more “appropriate” to date the battle from March 26 to September 7, 1945, the date of the U.S. landing on the Kerama Islands, twelve

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miles southwest of the main island of Okinawa, until the date of signing of the Battle of Okinawa’s surrender document (13). 3. In Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), Lisa Yoneyama describes Japan’s implementation of “colonial modernity,” including the subjection of Okinawans to “various modern technologies of nationalization and normalization in schools and factories” (48). 4. Ishihara Masaie asserts that the high percentage of civilian casualties is one of the “striking characteristics of the Battle of Okinawa”; “Memories of War and Okinawa,” trans. Douglas Dreistadt, in Perilous Memories: The Asia-­Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 90. 5. The 1980s and 1990s, as Kyle Ikeda describes, “coincided with retirement and life-­reflection for many Okinawa war survivors, contributing to the intensification of local oral history projects, the recording of family histories, and the establishment of the Himeyuri Peace Memorial Museum”; Okinawan War Memory: Transgenerational Trauma and the War Fiction of Medoruma Shun (New York: Routledge, 2014), 9. 6. Not all testimonies circulate outside the prefecture, but it is easy for tourists to visit the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, where hundreds of testimonies can be viewed. 7. Matthew Allen, Identity and Resistance in Okinawa (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 7. 8. See Minoru Iwasaki and Steffi Richter, “The Topology of Post-­1990s Historical Revisionism,” trans. Richard F. Calichman, positions  16, no. 3 (2008): 507–­38, for a discussion of conservative historical revisionist arguments refuting forced suicides in Okinawa. 9. Tadanori, in Japanese Nō Dramas, ed. and trans. Royall Tyler (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 276. 10. Mika Ko, Japanese Cinema and Otherness: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and the Problem of Japaneseness (New York: Routledge, 2010), 65. 11. Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 48. See also Alan Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” positions 1, no. 3 (1993): 607–­39, for cultural and educational reforms in Okinawa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 12. Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 49. 13. Figure from Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 8. Okinawa accounts for less than 1 percent of Japan’s land; see Steve Rabson, “On Okinawa, Locals Want US Troops to Leave,” Asia-­ Pacific Journal 15, no. 19 (October 1, 2017), https://apjjf.org/2017/19/Rabson​ .html. The bases meet Japan’s security-­treaty requirement of providing land for U.S. bases, creating the sense, in the words of Laura Hein, that “Tokyo politicians today are sacrificing them once again for national strategic policy”; “Introduction: The Territory of Identity and Remembrance in Okinawa,” Critical Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (2001): 34. 14. Gavan McCormack, “Okinawa and the Structure of Dependence,” in Japan and Okinawa: Structure and Subjectivity, ed. Glenn D. Hook and Richard Siddle (New York: Routledge, 2003), 93. Beyond Okinawa, across the world U.S.

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military bases create what Joseph Gerson calls “military colonialism,” in which overseas bases demonstrate U.S. military power while affecting local politics and utilizing natural resources; “U.S. Foreign Military Bases and Military Colonialism: Personal and Analytical Perspectives,” in The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts, ed. Catherine Lutz (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 47. 15. In Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 193–­203, Christopher Nelson documents the activities of a group performing the traditional Ryukyu dance eisā. This group, located in Okinawa City, was displaced from their village, Nishizato, by the Kadena Air Base. Nelson follows the group as they receive permission to perform eisā in Kadena. 16. See Donald Kirk, Okinawa and Jeju: Bases of Discontent (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), for the effects of military bases on everyday life in Okinawa. In Cold War Ruins, Yoneyama reminds us that these bases make Okinawa “implicated in virtually all major American wars since World War II—­in Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and most recently Iraq and Afghanistan” (44). 17. During the 2015 commemoration ceremony for the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Battle of Okinawa, governor Onaga Takeshi (in office from 2014 to 2018) called for their removal. 18. See Ina Hein, “Constructing Difference in Japan: Literary Counter-­Images of the Okinawa Boom,” Contemporary Japan 22, no. 2 (2010): 179–­204, for a discussion of the many facets of the Okinawa boom. In “Constructing Okinawa as Japan’s Hawai`i: From Honeymoon Boom to Resort Paradise,” Japanese Studies 35, no. 3 (2015): 287–­302, Osamu Tada discusses the conscious effort to frame Okinawa as an island paradise. See also Gerald Figal, Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), for a history of tourism in Okinawa from 1945 to the present. 19. See Ko, Japanese Cinema and Otherness, and Aaron Gerow, “From the National Gaze to Multiple Gazes: Representations of Okinawa in Recent Japanese Cinema,” in Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003): 273–­307, for analysis of films set in Okinawa. 20. Tanaka Yasuhiro, “Media ni hyōshō sareru Okinawa bunka” (“Media Representations of Okinawan Culture”) 180, quoted in Ko, Japanese Cinema and Otherness, 73. 21. Davinder L. Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3. 22. I. Hein, “Constructing Difference in Japan,” 180. Hein references the negative records held by Okinawa—­lower average incomes, highest unemployment rate, and lowest educational level (182). 23. Gerald Figal, “Between War and Tropics: Heritage Tourism in Postwar Okinawa,” Public Historian 30, no. 2 (2008): 84, explains that battle-­site visits started early, during the U.S. Occupation (1945–­1972). 24. Based on my experiences on a bus tour in 2013. The Okinawa Bus Company now ends its battle-­site tour at an outlet mall (“Okinawa World & War Memorial Sites,” Okinawa Bus Ltd., http://okinawabus.com/en/bt/bt_regulartourism​ _a/, accessed January 20, 2018).

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25. Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5, explains, “To testify—­to vow to tell, to promise and produce one’s own speech as material evidence for truth—­is to accomplish a speech act, rather than to simply formulate a statement” (emphasis in original). 26. See, for example, Catherine Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), and Ana Elena Puga, Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theatre: Upstaging Dictatorship (New York: Routledge, 2008). 27. Allen Feldman, “Memory Theaters, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-­ Aesthetic,” Biography 27, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 165. 28. Okinawa’s Peace Memorial Park and the Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum have been the center of a number of controversies, including a debate over a diorama in the museum displaying a Japanese imperial soldier pointing a gun at a young mother. See Julia Yonetani, “On the Battlefield of Mabuni: Struggles over Peace and the Past in Contemporary Okinawa,” East Asian History 20 (2000): 145–­68, for a discussion of these controversies. 29. “Shiryōkan no annai” (“Museum Guide”), http://www.peace-­museum.pref​ .okinawa.jp/annai/tenji_sisetu/josetuten/4/index.html, accessed May 1, 2017. 30. This website is run by the Okinawa prefectural government. In April 2018, the website was suspended because of maintenance costs. The government hopes to start it up soon, and for the time being its content has been migrated to the ‘Okinawa Heiwa private site http://okinawa.archiving.jp/ (Yonaha Satoko, “  Gakushū Ākaibu’ ga mirarenai” [“The ‘Okinawa Peace Learning Archive’ Is Not Accessible”], Okinawa Times, August 2, 2018). 31. Imamura Taihei, “A Theory of Film Documentary,” trans. Michael Baskett, Review of Japanese Culture and Society 22 (2010): 52. 32. Peggy Phelan, “Afterword: ‘In the Valley of the Shadow of Death’; The Photographs of Abu Ghraib,” in Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict, ed. Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) discusses the problem of the viewer’s relationship to violence in the “atrocity photograph”: “What looks to be a straight-­forward representation of the real is often staged and manipulated for aesthetic and/or political effect” (374). 33. In this form, “the interlocutor is also there, just beyond the frame; beside, below, or behind the camera, which latter device, like the projector, is invisibly necessary and necessarily invisible”; Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker, “Introduction: Moving Testimonies,” in Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, ed. Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker (New York: Routledge, 2010), 8. 34. Caroline Wake, “Regarding the Recording: The Viewer of Video Testimony, the Complexity of Copresence, and the Possibility of Tertiary Witnessing,” History and Memory 25, no. 1 (2013): 113, 134. While tertiary witnessing shifts “understandings” of “our notions of response,” Wake’s preposition inadvertently privileges the experiences of the spectator (133). Wake extends Dori Laub’s discussion of the listener as “a participant and a co-­owner of the traumatic event” (“Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 57).

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Notes to Pages 98–103

35. Gerow, “From the National Gaze,” 275. 36. Contrary to the assumption that Noh has been fixed since the fourteenth century, there is an active shinsaku nō, or “new play Noh,” movement. This movement is not limited to Japan; rather, international groups such as Theatre Nohgaku apply Noh aesthetics to create new plays about topics ranging from Elvis to the Chinese diaspora. For a discussion of the increase in new Noh plays beginning in the 1990s, see Yamanaka Reiko, “Nōgaku no genzai to mirai—­ ima kangaete mitaikoto” (“Noh’s Present and Future—­ Things to Consider”), in Nōgaku no genzai to mirai (Noh’s Present and Future), ed. Yamanaka Reiko (Tokyo: Nogami Kinen Hōsei Daigaku, 2015), 5–­16. 37. Sakate does have connections to Okinawa—­his wife is from the prefecture (interview by author, August 2012). 38. In his interview with Performing Arts Network Japan, Sakate asserts that the Japanese media is “silent about so many vital issues and it often makes me angry to watch” (“Artist Interview,” Performing Arts Network Japan, February 24, 2005, http://www.performingarts.jp/E/art_interview/0502/2.html). 39. Noda Manabu, “The Body Ill at Ease in Post-­War Japanese Theatre,” New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 3 (2007): 274. An example of Sakate’s quick reaction to current events is the full-­length Tatta hitori no sensō (One Person’s War), about Japan’s dependence on nuclear power, premiering November 2011, only eight months after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. 40. Sakate, “Artist Interview.” 41. For an overview of Chibana’s argument for his flag-­burning protest, see Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991). 42. Mizuochi Kiyoshi and Okamura Haruhiko’s review in Higeki kigeki 50, no. 10 (1997): 88, notes that the play clearly portrays the problems of Okinawa. 43. Based on the Japanese military’s role in these suicides along with the fact that so many young children died, Norma Field uses “compulsory suicide” to “suggest the dark inmixing of coercion and consent, of aggression and victimization at work in the story of the caves” (In the Realm of a Dying Emperor, 67). 44. After the United States began bombing Okinawa in late 1944 in preparation for a ground battle, Yomitan villagers took refuge in Chibichirigama. 45. Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor, 59. 46. Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor, 78. 47. Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor, 78. 48. For more on the U.S. base protest movement, see McCormack and Norimatsu, Resistant Islands, and Kirk, Okinawa and Jeju. 49. Chibana did not give me a tour of the cave, but the person who did replicated his style, illustrative of the influence that Chibana has had on testimony there and on the importance of the cave space. 50. Sakate has been inspired by Noh aesthetic techniques, going so far as to call some of his plays, Umi no futten among them, contemporary Noh plays. Because Sakate does not take into account the ethics of the Noh ghost, I choose not to discuss his “contemporary Noh” at length here. 51. Sakate Yōji, Umi no futten, in Sakate Yōji II (Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobō, 2008), 56.

Notes to Pages 104–110

185

52. Yamashiro is represented by Tokyo gallery Yumiko Chiba Associates and exhibits often in major galleries and museums in Tokyo and outside Japan. 53. Yamashiro’s exhibitions include solo exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and Gallery Rougheryet in Okinawa and group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, Pumphouse Gallery in London, and Fukuoka Asia Art Museum. 54. See Rebecca Jennison, “Unspeakable Bodies of Memory: Performance and Precarity in Recent Works by Yamashiro Chikako,” Kyōtō Seika Daigaku kiyō 44 (2014): 183–­200, for a discussion of Āsa onna. 55. See Kirk, Okinawa and Jeju, for a discussion of effects of base noise on everyday life. 56. Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 13. 57. Since the late 1990s, a group of Okinawans have engaged in a sit-­in at the site of the proposed base (Kirk, Okinawa and Jeju, 36). See Gavan McCormack, “ ‘Ceasefire’ on Oura Bay: The March 2016 Japan-­Okinawa ‘Amicable Agreement’ Introduction and Six Views from within the Okinawan Anti-­Base Movement,” Asia-­Pacific Journal 14, no. 7 (2016), https://apjjf.org/2016/07​ /McCormack.html, for a discussion of the protests. 58. See Laura Hein and Rebecca Jennison, “Against Forgetting: Three Generations of Artists in Japan in Dialogue about the Legacies of World War II,” Asia-­Pacific Journal 9, no. 30 (July 2011), https://apjjf.org/2011/9/30/Laura​ -­Hein/3573/article.html, for Yamashiro’s process. 59. Kenichi Kondo, “Seeing Okinawa’s Real Face: The World of Yamashiro Chikako,” in MAM Project 018: Yamashiro Chikako, ed. Kenichi Kondo (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum, 2012), 40. 60. Chiba Yumiko (Yamashiro’s agent), interview by author, July 2013. Yamashiro first exhibited these photographs in Okinawa in 2008 at Gallery Rougheryet, eventually displaying them in Hiroshima and Tokyo. 61. Anata no koe premiered as part of the group exhibition Hiroshima Art Document. 62. Kondo, “Seeing Okinawa’s Real Face,” 40. 63. Yamashiro uses this translation in publicity materials and in Kondo, MAM Project 018. 64. Kondo, “Seeing Okinawa’s Real Face,” 40 65. The Battle of Saipan began on June 15, 1944, and lasted for three weeks. As Harold J. Goldberg explains in D-­Day in the Pacific: The Battle of Saipan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), “the battle was bloody from its first day to its last; even with American victory assured, the fighting ended only when one side had been totally destroyed” (2). 66. Yamashiro Chikako, interview by author, June 2015. 67. Joshua Chambers-­Letson, “ ‘A Weak Messianic Power’: Yamashiro Chikako’s ‘Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat,’ ” Trans Asia Photography Review 5, no. 1 (Fall 2014), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0005.105. In an endnote, Chambers-­Letson mentions that Anata no koe concerns an incident from the Battle of Saipan, not the Battle of Okinawa, but does not elaborate on the significance of this difference. In contrast, I believe the fact that the speaker talks about the Battle of Saipan and not Okinawa is critical to Yamashiro’s overall representation of memories of the Battle of Okinawa in her Inheritance Series.

186

Notes to Pages 111–118

68. The speaker recounts that the Japanese military took students to serve as soldiers and nurses, leaving behind only those in grade school. He describes living without food or water. 69. Chambers-­Letson, “ ‘A Weak Messianic Power.’ ” Chambers-­Letson further asserts, “It is when he speaks of his personal losses and the bodies of his dead that her synchronous performance comes undone and her lips fail to match his words.” 70. In “Camouflage, Photography and [In]visibility: Yamashiro Chikako’s Chorus of the Melodies Series (2010) and Beyond,” Ayelet Zohar briefly mentions the spectral quality of this moment: “The projection over her face creates a lingering effect of convergence: the young face of Yamashiro, her cheeks wet with running tears, merged with the elderly, wrinkled features that float upon her visage, creating a ghost-­like haunting vision”; Trans Asia Photography Review 3, no. 1 (2012), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0003.105. 71. According to an interview in June 2015, Yamashiro expelled the testimony from her body in the making of A Woman of the Butcher Shop (2012), a video showing women cut up and distribute meat (Yamashiro, interview). Chapter 6 1. Karen Brazell, ed., Traditional Japanese Theater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 194, characterizes Dōjōji as “an exorcism piece (inori mono),” along with the plays Aoi no ue and Kanawa. 2. Dōjōji, trans. Donald Keene, in Brazell, Traditional Japanese Theater, 206. 3. Recent scholarship exploring the U.S. influence in Asia includes Takashi Fujitani, Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016); and Elizabeth Son, Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). 4.  Joshua Takano Chambers-­Letson, A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 101, asserts that the “official acts of euphemistic renaming not only obscured the reality of the camps as concentration camps at the time; it continues into the present.” As with kamikaze in chapter 2 and “comfort women” in chapter 4, when I use the term “internment,” I refer to the event and its normalizing treatment in postwar discourses. Whenever possible, I use “incarceration” and “imprisonment” to describe the event. 5. Marita Sturken, “Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment,” in Perilous Memories: The Asia-­Pacific War(s), ed. T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 38. 6. Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945–­1960 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 4. 7. Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 18.

Notes to Pages 118–119

187

8. A. Naomi Paik, Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 57. Paik’s second chapter is devoted to the “residues of rightlessness” and aesthetic representations of the internment (57). 9. The absence of internment in Japanese postwar discourses contrasts wartime references to U.S. racial inequality in Japanese propaganda. In War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), John W. Dower mentions “two rhetorical questions that would remain effective propaganda to the end of the war: ‘How were American Indians treated? What about African Negros?’ ” (26). 10. Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8, explains that the camps provided a model for how to educate people in democracy; this model was later deployed in postwar Japan and in other sites in Asia (210–­11). 11. According to Kondō Aisuke, there have recently been more Japanese artistic productions about internment (correspondence with author, January 2019). Teresa Watanabe mentions a similar increase of Japanese television programs about internment in “Manzanar Pilgrimage Takes on Broad Themes of Democracy, Civil Rights,” Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2019. 12. See Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–­1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), for a discussion of the U.S.-­Japan alliance in dominant narratives of memory in Japan. 13. The U.S. government pardoned Japanese military personnel for strategic reasons. For example, the United States granted immunity to the officers in Japan’s wartime medical experimentation Unit 731 in exchange for their research; see John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999), 465. 14. In their introduction to Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, ed. Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2014), Nguyen and Hoskins “see the transpacific as one of those ‘spaces of interaction,’ which is not itself a ‘region’ (and does not compete with a new notion of Asian interactions) but which does define flows of culture and capital across the ocean” (7). Similarly, in “Transpacific Overtures: An Introduction,” Christine Mok and Aimee Bahng “describe the Asia/Pacific as a space of encounter, trade, speculation, disappearance, conversion, and militarism. Futurity herein remains contested, critical terrain, haunted by the specters of Pacific imperialisms”; Journal of Asian American Studies 20, no. 1 (February 2017): 6. 15. Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 2. 16. Lisa Yoneyama, “Toward a Decolonial Genealogy of the Transpacific,” American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2017): 472. 17. As Huang makes the assertion that “the Pacific needs to be viewed from different shores,” it is critical to approach the Japanese American experience from the Japanese perspective, however rare (Transpacific Imaginations, 6). 18. Steven T. Brown, Theatricalities of Power: The Cultural Politics of Noh (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 40. 19. In this way, I evoke Avery F. Gordon’s description of haunting as “an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself

188

Notes to Pages 119–123

known”; Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi. 20. Paik, Rightlessness, Simpson, An Absent Presence, and Karen M. Inouye, The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016), are examples of such scholarship. 21. Referring to the U.S. Civil Liberties Act, Paik, Rightlessness, 62, reminds us that the state is “of little help” in dealing with the afterlife of internment because its “redress efforts aimed at closure, not exploration.” 22. See Civil Liberties Act of 1988, sect. 105(a)(7), i–­iii, for “payments in the case of deceased persons.” 23. Paik, Rightlessness, 59. 24. Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy, 217. 25.  Chambers-­Letson, A Race So Different, 102. 26. Fujitani, Race for Empire, 6, describes that this narrative “of Japanese American soldiers fighting heroically for freedom at home and abroad, even in the face of racism and incarceration in camps, has achieved a notable if not always comfortable place in mainstream narratives and memories of the war.” 27. Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy, xiii; we are reminded here that internees were faced with the possibility of “a prisoner-­exchange relegating them to a postwar life in the Japanese empire.” 28. Exclusionary acts include the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement with Japan and the 1924 Johnson-­Reed Act. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), provides a detailed list. Lowe explains that the “life conditions, choices, and expressions of Asian Americans have been significantly determined by the U.S. state through the apparatus of immigration laws and policies” (7). 29.  Chambers-­Letson, A Race So Different, 99. And, according to Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy, 9, politicians and camp officials frequently equated ethnicity with patriotism. 30. Brown, Theatricalities of Power, 40; emphasis in original. 31. Manzana, waga machi premiered in July 1993 at Tokyo’s Kinokuniya Hall, produced by Inoue’s theater company, Komatsuza. 32. Inoue Hisashi, Manzana, waga machi, in Inoue Hisashi zenshibai, sono 5 (Inoue Hisashi Complete Dramatic Works, Volume 5) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1994), 487. 33. Hisashi, Manzana, waga machi, 487. 34. In section 1 of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the purposes are listed as first to “acknowledge the fundamental injustice” of internment and to “apologize.” 35. Simpson, An Absent Presence, 78. 36. As Masayo Duus, Tokyo Rose, Orphan of the Pacific (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 69, notes, Zero Hour had a writing staff of male U.S. POWs. 37. M. Duus, Tokyo Rose, 22–­24. 38. D’Aquino was first held in Japan, where she was released for lack of evidence (Simpson, An Absent Presence, 79). 39. During this changing time, the trial marks the impact of “this transition on a woman who came to represent, all at once, the threat of both Japanese and therefore Japanese American subjectivity” (Simpson, An Absent Presence, 80). 40. Simpson, An Absent Presence, 89.

Notes to Pages 124–129

189

41. The New York Times review notes that “Zero Hour is a very busy production—­so focused on its many moving parts that Annie, the so-­called Tokyo Rose, gets lost in its midst” (Laura Collins-­Hughes, “Appearances Can Be Treasonous,” New York Times, January 30, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01​ /31/theater/zero-­hour-­tokyo-­roses-­last-­tape-­at-­japan-­society.html). 42. Nobuko Anan, Contemporary Japanese Women’s Theatre and Visual Arts: Performing Girls’ Aesthetics (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 54–­64, examines Yanagi Miwa in terms of “girl” aesthetics. 43. See, for instance, Morita Mako, “Tōkyō Rōzu” (“Tokyo Rose”), Mainichi shinbun, January 27, 2015, and Collins-­Hughes, “Appearances Can Be Treasonous.” 44. Miwa Yanagi, “Director’s Notes,” in program for Zero Hour: Tokyo Rose’s Last Tape, REDCAT Theater, Los Angeles, February 27, 2015. 45. M. Duus, Tokyo Rose, 1. Duus continues, “Iva became a victim of politics, and of a government bent on bringing in a guilty verdict by whatever means it could” (2). 46. Simpson, An Absent Presence, 88. 47. M. Duus, Tokyo Rose, 183–­86. 48. Simpson, An Absent Presence, 100–­101. 49. Creef, Imaging Japanese America, 152. 50. Simpson, An Absent Presence, 101, mentions that d’Aquino’s father requested help from the JACL for fund-­raising for d’Aquino’s legal team. The JACL refused his requests, and some Japanese Americans insisted on d’Aquino’s guilt. 51. Reviews noted this audience response as well (Alex Greenberger, “A Typist, Radio Star, and Traitor: Miwa Yanagi’s ‘Zero Hour’ Tackles Tokyo Rose,” Art News, January 30, 2015, http://​www​.artnews​.com​/2015​/01​/30​/a-typist​-radio​ -star​-and​-traitor​-miwa​-yanagis​-zero​-hour​-tackles​-tokyo​-rose/. 52. Satoko Shimazaki, Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 180. 53. Iva Toguri d’Aquino’s family in the United States was incarcerated at the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona (see Duus, Tokyo Rose, 98–­100). 54.  Chambers-­Letson, A Race So Different, 100. 55. In program biographies, actors list a number of credits outside Japan. For example, some performers have worked with the U.S. companies Pig Iron Theatre Company and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Others have extensive training and performance credits in Japan and abroad in Europe and Asia. 56. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), 6. 57. Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 6. Time and again, Ong challenges us to not think of transnational workers and the nation-­state in clear binary opposition: “Attention to specific histories and geo-­political situations will reveal that such simple oppositions between transnational forces and the nation-­state cannot be universally sustained” (16). 58. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 8, describes simultaneity in Asian American immigration, while a “locus of legal and political restriction of Asians,” can also be “the site for the emergence of critical negations of the nation-­state for which those legislations are the expression.”

190

Notes to Pages 129–145

59. Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 6. 60. As Inouye, Long Afterlife, 120–­21, discusses, the unearthing of artifacts at Manzanar Relocation Center became an important way for younger generations to engage with the past. 61. Inouye begins Long Afterlife with the story of the daughter of Fred Korematsu learning of her father’s Supreme Court case against Executive Order 9066 through a classmate’s book report (1). 62. As Creef, Imaging Japanese America, 99, notes, “for many Japanese Americans, the congressional hearings signaled the first occasion where they could finally speak about their experiences.” 63. Kondo has exhibited at galleries in the United States (Mintmoue), Germany (Kommunale Galerie, Neue Galerie), and Japan (Kyoto Art Center, underbar gallery). See his website, aisukekondo.com, for a complete list of activities. 64.  As Chambers-­Letson, A Race So Different, 101, asserts, the naming of these “internment” sites “performatively displaced” “concentration camp.” 65. Kondo’s Mintmoue solo exhibition ran from May 19 to 28, 2017. 66. Kate Palmer Albers and Jordan Bear, “Photography’s Time Zones,” in Before-­and-­After Photography: Histories and Contexts, ed. Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 3. 67. In my article “Diaspora and Performance: Reenacting the Family Album,” I discuss how The Past in the Present in SF reimagines the family album in the context of the Japanese diaspora in the early twentieth century; Trans Asia Photography Review 9, no. 1 (2018), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0009​ .105. 68. Albers and Bear, “Photography’s Time Zones,” 2. 69. Brigitte Hausmann, “Interview with Aisuke Kondo,” in Diaspora Memoria (Berlin: Kulturamt Steglitz-­Zehlendorf, 2018), unpaginated. 70. Emily Roxworthy, The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2008), 114. For Roxworthy, the media ignored the “material violations” of poor living conditions of Japanese Americans in favor of an “emphasis on artifice” that “sought to alleviate reader guilt about the evacuation” (114). 71. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 35. 72. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 59. 73. Brown, Theatricalities of Power, 40. Epilogue 1. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 123. 2. Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 201. 3. While Abe has not visited Yasukuni since December 2013, he still regularly sends donations.

Notes to Page 146

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4. Abe’s refusal prompted articles such as Reiji Yoshida’s “Are Ghosts Keeping Abe from Moving to Official Residence?,” Japan Times, May 25, 2013, https://​ www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/05/25/national/ghosts-keeping-abe-out-of​ -official-residence/#.XVHfjpNKiwV. 5. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 14. 6. In Japan’s Security Renaissance: New Policies and Politics for the Twenty-­ First Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 132–­33, Andrew Oros distinguishes between Abe’s earlier efforts during his first term in 2006 to 2007 to revise the constitution from his 2015 successful attempt to reinterpret it. 7. See Elaine Lies, “Japan PM Abe Met with Rare Heckling at Battle of Okinawa Ceremony,” Reuters, June 23, 2015, https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-­ww2​ -­anniversary-­japan/japan-­pm-­abe-­met-­with-­rare-­heckling-­at-­battle-­of-­okinawa​-­c eremony-­idUKKBN0P30TT20150623.

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Index

Abe Shinzō, 145–­46, 153n36; on Article 9, 17, 146, 163n63, 191n6; on patriotic films, 30, 166n20; Yasukuni Shrine and, 145, 190n3 Abraham, Nicolas, x, 149n5 affect, 28, 164n7 Ahmed, Sara, 28, 38, 164n7 Ahn Sehong, 180n77 Akihito, 145 Albers, Kate Palmer, 134 Allen, Matthew, 94 Althusser, Louis, 8, 155n63, 161n38 Anazawa Toshio, 19–­23, 163n71 angura, 34, 53–­54, 56, 69, 77, 170n13, 171n19; shingeki vs., 34, 54, 56, 170n15 An Jung-­geun, 59–­60 anti-­Japanese sentiment in U.S., xi, 141, 188n28, 188n39. See also Japanese American internment Aoi no ue (Noh play), 119–­20 archives, xiv, 74, 86, 89, 90, 111 Asian Women’s Fund, 75 Asia-­Pacific War: Abe on, 145–­46; civilian hardships during, xii, 7, 93–­94; commemoration ceremonies for, ix, xix, xxi, xxiv, 3–­4, 34, 127, 146–­47; end of, ix, xiv, 3, 33; names for, 149n1; nationalistic view of, 4, 152n32, 158n5; sexual violence during, xiii, xviii, 69, 72, 85; silences surrounding, x–­xi, xii, 74, 79–­80, 179n62; textbook coverage of, xiv; U.S. firebombing during, 151n18, 153n40, 160n27, 160n30. See also “comfort women”; Japanese imperialism and aggression; Okinawa atomic warfare. See Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings

Atsumori (Noh play), 28–­29, 31, 35, 37, 39–­40, 45–­46, 165n11, 169n1 August 15 commemoration events, ix–­x, 149n2, 154n46; The Winds of God and, 34; at Yasukuni Shrine, ix, 3, 4, 8, 15–­18, 22, 23 Avenell, Simon Andrew, 59, 172n48 Battle at Ueno Hill, 11 Battle of Okinawa. See Okinawa Battle of Saipan, 109–­10, 113, 185n65, 185n67 Bear, Jordan, 134 Bernstein, Robin, 76 Bhowmik, Davinder, 96, 105 Blau, Herbert, xviii, xx, 51, 56–­57, 58, 145 body, the: Koizumi and, 19, 23, 42; in Noh, 71, 72–­73, 81–­82; in performance art and activism, 77–­ 78; in political discourse, 73–­77, 82, 179n56; Shimada and, xxiii, 73, 77, 80–­82 Boyer, M. Christine, 9 Brecht, Bertolt, 38, 173n69 Brown, Steven, 119, 121, 137, 140 Bunraku, 54 Cambodia, xviii Caprio, Mark E., 173n61 Carlson, Marvin, xviii, 58, 157n83, 165n13, 172n39 Caruth, Cathy, 150n12 Certeau, Michel de, 14, 74 Chambers-­Letson, Joshua, 110, 111, 121, 128–­29, 185n67, 186n69, 186n4, 190n64 Chibana Shōichi, 100–­101, 102 Chiran training camp, 41, 169n61 Cho, Grace, xviii, 156n69, 175n7

207

208 Index Choi, Chungmoo, 74 Chung Simpson, Caroline, 118, 123, 125 “chrysanthemum taboo,” xii, 163n67 Civil Liberties Act of 1988, 118, 120, 122, 140, 141, 188n34 “comfort women,” xiii, xiv, xxii, 71–­91, 145, 157n89, 174n82, 175nn3–­8; formal apology for, 77, 177n34; as halmoni, 76; Nikon gallery exhibition on, 87, 180n77; scholarship on, 175n5, 175n11; terminology for, 175n3. See also Peace Monument (statue); Shimada Yoshiko Creef, Elena Tajima, 118, 125, 190n62 Debord, Guy, 13 Derrida, Jacques, xvi, xviii, xx, 89, 93, 138, 140, 145 Desser, David, 30 digital culture, xxiv, 97–­98 Dōjōji (Noh play), 117, 120, 125, 140 dōka policy, 60–­61, 68, 173n61 Dower, John D., 151n16, 153n40, 187n9 Duus, Masayo, 125 Eckersall, Peter, 54, 56, 77, 157n83, 171n19 Eien no 0 (kamikaze film), 27, 28, 29, 30–­31, 33, 38, 39, 47, 166nn20–­22; Koizumi’s videos and, 40–­43 eirei. See fallen soldiers, performances of empathy, 83, 179n65 Executive Order 9066, x, 121, 128, 134, 190n61 fallen soldiers, performances of: in Noh, 28; at Yasukuni Shrine (eirei), ix, xxi, 3–­6, 10–­14, 17–­22, 24–­25, 31, 33, 42, 43, 87, 159n18 Feldman, Allen, 97 Felman, Shoshana, 97, 183n25 Field, Norma, xii, 101, 102, 153n42, 163n67 Figal, Gerald, 96 Ford, Gerald, 123 Fujitani, Takashi, 7, 9, 188n26 Fukushima, Yoshiko, 56, 61 Furuichi Noritoshi, 152n24

generational differences, x, xi–­xiii; Hirata and, 51; kamikaze and, 28, 29, 32–­33, 38, 39, 44, 47; Takahashi on, xvi; Yasukuni Shrine and, 4, 16, 30 Gerow, Aaron, 98, 164n3, 166n19 “ghost-­busting,” 146 “ghosting” in theater, xviii, 51, 56–­58, 62, 66, 170n11, 172n39 ghosts (spirits, phantoms, specters), ix–­ xiii, xv–­xviii, 145–­47; Derrida on, 93, 145; haunting vs., 149n3, 187n19; Japanese terms for, 5–­6; in Noh, xvii–­ xix, xxii, 6, 28–­29, 49, 71, 72–­73, 81, 91, 98, 106–­7, 112, 137–­38, 147, 155, 156nn75–­76; Takahashi’s use of, xvi–­ xvii, xviii, xx; in theater studies, xviii, 156n71, 156n76, 170n11; women’s elision from history and, 174n1; at Yasukuni Shrine, 3, 4, 5–­6 Gluck, Carol, xii–­xiii, 150n6 Gordon, Avery F., 146, 149n3, 187n19 Great Kanto Earthquake, 61 Grehan, Helena, xvii, 155n60 Hagiwara, Hiroko, 79 Hamlet (Shakespeare), xvi, xviii, xx, 73 Hardacre, Helen, 159n12, 159n21 Harootunian, H. D., 4, 55 Hashimoto, Akiko, xiv, xv, 149nn1–­2, 150n7, 153n38, 158n44 Hatley, Barbara, 56, 157n83 Hatoyama Yukio, 55 Hawaii, 121 Hayashi, Brian, 121, 187n10, 188n27 Hirata Oriza: background of, 54–­56, 99–­100; colloquial style of (gendai kōgo engeki), 54, 56, 57, 61, 65; critiques of, 55, 56, 171n34, 172n43; early plays by, 56; Gendai kōgo engeki no tame ni, 56, 68; Sao Paulo shimin, 170n12; Seoul shimin, xxii, 38, 50–­53, 55, 56–­69; Tokyo Notes, 35, 56, 171n26 Hi Red Center, 78 Hirohito, ix, xii, xiii, xiv, 32, 49–­50, 78, 145, 151n16, 179n52; Yasukuni Shrine and, 162n56 Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, x, xii, xiii, 54, 69, 146, 160n23, 160n27

Index

Hirsch, Marianne, xi–­xii, 150n11 historical revisionism, xiv–­xv, 84, 145, 152n32, 152n35, 153n39, 166n24; Battle of Okinawa and, xxiii, 94, 98; “comfort women” and, 72, 74, 80; in films, 30; Yasukuni Shrine and, 13, 30, 158n5, 158n8 history versus memory, xiv, 153n38, 153n41, 160n25 Holocaust, xi–­xii, 154n49 Huang, Yunte, 119, 141, 187n17 Hudson, Chris, 56, 157n83 Huyssen, Andreas, xxiv, 150n13 Ienaga Saburō, 153n35 Igarashi, Yoshikuni, xii, 77, 160n23 Ikeda, Kyle, 150n8, 181n5 Imai Masayuki. See Winds of God, The (Imai Masayuki) Imamura Taihei, 97 Inoue Hisashi, 121–­22 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), xii, xvi, 49–­50, 51; Yasukuni Shrine and, 4, 158n4, 160n26 Ishiguro Hiroshi, 55 Ishihara Shintarō, 41, 169n55 Itazu Tadamasa, 44–­46, 169n61 Itō Hirobumi, 59–­60 Iwabuchi Koichi, 68 Iwasaki, Minoru, 152n35, 153n39, 166n24, 175n8, 176n16, 176n18 Izutsu (Noh play), 71, 72–­74, 174n1 Japanese American Citizens League, 125, 189n50 Japanese American internment, x, xxii, xxiii, 117–­43; “internment” term in, 118, 186n4; Japan reactions to, 118; Kondō on, xxiii–­xxiv, 120; prisoner-­ exchange threat during, 188n26; reparations for, 120; Yanagi on, xxiii, 120 Japanese American National Museum, 128 Japanese colonialism, xxii, 7, 48, 50–­51, 169n5, 172nn51–­52; Okinawa and, 94–­96, 98, 174n2, 181n3; roots of, 173n55. See also Korea Japanese exceptionalism, xiv, 122

209 Japanese experimental theater. See angura Japanese immigration to the U.S., 121, 132, 134, 188n28, 189n58 Japanese imperialism and aggression, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, xvi, xii, 22, 48, 49–­51, 117, 145, 169n6; angura responses to, 171n19; culture and, 68 Japan Society for History Textbook Reform, xiv, 145, 153n36 Jones, Amelia, 86, 90 Kabuki, 34, 54 kamikaze (Special Attack Forces), 13, 27; etymology and word use of, 27, 31, 164n1, 164n5; in Imai, 31–­34, 39; in Koizumi, xxii, 13, 19–­21, 39–­47; in popular culture, 27–­47; postwar censorship of, 165n8; “tragic hero” trope and, 27, 31, 164n4; U.S. media use of, 38, 168nn46–­47; Yasukuni Shrine and, 30 Kan’ami. See Dōjōji (Noh play); Matsukaze (Noh play) Kan Naoto, 55 Kara Jurō, 53, 171nn19–­20 Kim, Jodi, 129 Kim Hak-­soon, xiii Kim Myung-­Hwa, 55 Kimura, Maki, 72, 74, 175n4, 176n19, 176n23 Kishida Kunio, 170n15 Kishi Nobusuke, 53, 145 Ko, Mika, 95 Kobayashi Yoshinori, xiv Koizumi Meiro, 20, 29, 39–­47, 163n68, 164nn74–­75; audience for, 43, 169n59; Defect in Vision, 39, 40; Double Projection #1 and #2, 39, 40, 44–­47; Melodrama for Men #1, 168n54; Portrait of a Young Samurai, 39, 40–­44, 45, 46–­47; Voice of a Dead Hero, xxii, 19–­25, 39, 40 Komparu, Kunio, 81, 169n2 Kondō Aisuke: background of, 130–­31; Atomic Memory series, 131; here where you stood, 131, 137–­41, 143; Matter and Memory series, xxiii–­xxiv, 120, 122, 130–­41, 143; Mintmoue gallery installation, 141, 142; The

210 Index Kondō Aisuke, continued Past in the Present in SF, 131–­35, 136, 141; Santa Anita, 131, 135–­37, 141 Kondo Kenichi, 105, 107 Kondō Miki, 131–­35, 136–­38, 141 Kōno Yōhei, 74–­75 Korea, xiii, xviii; Battle of Okinawa and, 7; colonization of, xxii, 50–­53, 58–­69, 173n55, 173n61 Korean Council for Women Drafted for Sexual Slavery by Japan, 75, 82, 83, 90 Korean Independence Movement, 52, 55, 63–­65, 174n77 Kuriyama Tamiya, 99, 103 Kuro Dalaijee, 77–­78 Kwan, SanSan, 8, 157n83

Noh, xvii, xviii–­xx, xxi–­xxi, xxiii, 25, 39, 72–­73, 165n13; angura and, 54; location in, 93, 95, 98–­99, 102, 104, 116, 136; malevolent spirits in, xxiii, 117, 119, 130, 140; multiple figures in, 79, 81; “new play Noh” movement, 184n36; phantasmal (mugen), 28, 71, 165n10; prayer in, 67; staging conventions of, 35, 37; traveling scene (michiyuki) in, 138; waki, xix, xxii, 28–­29, 49–­50, 51, 63, 66, 67, 69, 81, 93, 104, 106–­7, 112, 169nn1–­2; warrior play in, 165n9; Western scholarship on, xviii, xx, 156n76, 157n83; at Yasukuni Shrine, 8. See also ghosts (spirits, phantoms, specters); repetition; return

Last Samurai, The (film), 43–­44 Lee Yoon-­taek, 68–­69 Lehmann, Hans-­Thies, xvii Levinas, Emmanuel, xvi, 154–­55nn54–­55 Life magazine, 141, 142

obon (holiday), ix, 3, 6, 149n2 Ohnuki-­Tierney, Emiko, 163n71, 164n2, 164n5, 165n8 Okada Toshiki, xx Okinawa: Battle of, xxii, xxiii, 7, 91, 93–­116, 143, 146, 160n28, 180n2; Chibichirigama incident in, 100–­ 103; popular culture view of, 96–­97; Okinawa World, 96–­97. See also U.S. Occupation Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, 97–­98, 108, 181n6, 183n28 Oliver, Kelly, 155n66 Ōmura Masajirō, 10–­13, 15, 22 Onaga Takeshi, 182n17 Ong, Aihwa, 129, 189n57 Ōnishi Takajirō, 164n1 Ore wa kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku (kamikaze film), 27, 41, 42, 43, 168nn53–­54

Manchuria, xi, 52, 55, 63, 68, 145, 170n6, 172n52 manga and anime, xiv, 54 manzai (comedy form), 32, 35, 37, 167n30 Manzana, waga machi (Inoue Hisashi), 121–­22 Manzanar War Relocation Center, 121, 190n60 Marotti, William, 77 Matsukaze (Noh play), 49–­50, 58, 67, 73, 169n1 Matsumoto Katsuya, 171n34 McClintock, Anne, 60 McCormack, Gavan, 96 Meiji Shrine, 10 Miyagi Satoshi, 178n49 Mohanty, Chandra, 84–­85 Nagura Kazuko, 44–­46 Narahashi Yōko, 32, 34, 166n27, 167n29 Noda Hideki, 54 Noda Manabu, 100

Paik, A. Naomi, 118, 120, 188n21 panopticon, 11, 14, 162n51 peacelearning.jp (website), 97, 183n30 Peace Monument (statue), xxiii, 73, 75–­77, 79, 81, 82–­83, 84–­85, 90; photograph of, 75 Pearl Harbor attack, x, xi, 38, 63, 123 Peattie, Mark, 60 performance art collectives, 77–­78, 178n44

Index

performance studies, xv, xvii, xviii, 155n60, 161n35; in Japan, xx, 157n86 phantom metaphor, x, xviii. See also ghosts (spirits, phantoms, specters) Phelan, Peggy, 155n64, 183n32 Port B (performance group), 163n69 possession and exorcism, 119, 121, 122, 130, 140, 143 “postmemory,” xi–­xii “postwar responsibility,” xvi, 154n51. See also “response-­ability” Powell, Brian, 35, 54, 170n15 Rayner, Alice, xviii, xx, 56–­57, 58, 155n60, 170n11 reparations, xiii–­xiv, 120 repetition, xvii, 29; in Imai, 67; in Koizumi, 39–­41, 43, 44, 47; in Noh, 29, 35, 39, 165n13; at Yasukuni Shrine, 16–­17, 24 “response-­ability,” xvi–­xvii, xxii, xxiii, 23–­24, 132, 143, 147; Battle of Okinawa and, 94; to “comfort women,” 72, 73, 84, 91; to Japanese American internment, 120; to Japanese colony in Korea, 50, 51–­52, 58–­59, 62–­63, 66–­69; to kamikaze, 28, 30, 38; Noh and, xix, 49–­50; subjectivity and, 155n66 representation: of “comfort women,” 74, 75–­76, 79, 81; limits of, 47–­48 restaging in Japanese theater, 34–­35 return, ix, xii, xviii, xxi; Imai and, 32, 38, 39; kamikaze and, 27–­29; Koizumi and, 19, 22, 24, 39–­40; Noh and, xvii, xix, 32, 39–­40; Yasukuni Shrine and, xxi, 3, 12, 16, 19. See also ghosts (spirits, phantoms, specters) Richter, Steffi, 152n35, 153n39, 166n24, 175n8, 176n16, 176n18 Ridout, Nicholas, xvii, 155n55 Roach, Joseph, xv, 81 Robertson, Jennifer, 68, 174n83 Roosevelt, Franklin D., x, 134, 135. See also Executive Order 9066 Roxworthy, Emily, 135, 190n70 Russo-­Japanese War, 5, 7

211 Sakamoto, Rumi, 27, 30, 31, 164n73, 166n17, 166n21, 166n23 Sakate Yōji: on current events, 184nn38–­39; Noh influence on, 102, 184n50; Umi no futten, xxiii, 95, 99–­ 104, 105, 110, 111, 115, 116 “samurai spirit,” 42 Sand, Jordan, 60 Santa Anita Assembly Center, 131, 135–­ 36, 141 Sarkar, Bhaskar, 98, 183n33 Sas, Miryam, 78 Satō Makoto, 53, 171n20 Schechner, Richard, xv, 157n83, 165n13 Schlund-­Vials, Cathy, xviii Schneider, Rebecca, xv, xvii, 4, 29, 73, 74, 89, 136, 152n30 Seaton, Philip, xv Senda Koreya, 170n15 September 11 attacks, 38, 168nn46–­47 Shanghai incident (aka January 28 incident), 13 Shimada Yoshiko: background of, 78–­ 79; Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman, xxii–­xxiii, 72–­73, 77, 78–­91, 124; burned painting by, 179n52; Comfort Women, Women of Conformity, 78, 83; White Aprons, 89 Shimazaki, Satoko, 127 shingeki, 34–­35, 54, 99, 100, 170n15 See also angura Shinto, xxi, 5, 6, 15, 33, 159n12 shizukana engeki (“quiet theater” movement), xxii, 54–­55, 171n25. See also Hirata Oriza shōkon (apotheosis) rituals, 5, 159n17 Sino-­Japanese War, 5, 7, 12 Sofer, Andrew, xviii Soh, C. Sarah, 76, 176n24 Son, Elizabeth, 76, 82, 157n89, 177nn32–­33, 179n60 Soni Kum, 79 Sorgenfrei, Carol, 55, 56 spectrality. See ghosts (spirits, phantoms, specters) Stories from the War (series), 127–­28 Sturken, Marita, 118

212 Index survivor outcry, xiii–­xiv, 72, 74 Suzuki Tadashi, 156n81 Tadanori (Noh play), 93, 95, 98, 106–­7, 112 Tada Tomio, xvii–­xviii, xix; Okinawa zangetsuki, 99 Taiwan, 7, 50 Takahashi Tetsuya, xvi–­xvii, xviii, xx, 4, 6–­7, 152n33, 158n6, 160nn26–­27, 163n65. See also “response-­ability” Takahashi Yuichiro, 157nn85–­86 Takenaka, Akiko, 5, 6, 7, 15, 152n32, 154n51, 158n8, 158n10, 159n17, 161n34, 162n49 Takeuchi Yoshimi, 157n84 Tanaka, Yuki, 176n17, 180n73 Tanaka Yasuhiro, 96 Tawada Yōko, xix, 51 Taylor, Diana, xv Terayama Shūji, 53, 78 testimonies, xxiii, 95, 97–­116, 153n42; Felman on performative nature of, 97, 183n25; in newspapers, 150n7; in videos, 97, 104, 105, 107, 109–­16 Tokyo Olympics, 77, 78 Tokyo Rose (Iva Toguri d’Aquino), 120, 122–­29, 189n50 Tomiyama Taeko, 178n44, 178n51 Topaz War Relocation Center, 120, 131, 138, 141 “transgenerational remembrance” defined, xi–­xii, 150n8 “transpacific” and “transpacific possession” terms, 119, 141, 187n14 trauma theory, xii, xviii, 150nn12–­13 Trump, Donald, 134, 164n5 2011 disasters in Japan, 145, 146 Uchida, Jun, 59, 62, 172n51, 173n58, 173n64 Uchino Tadashi, xx, 55, 56, 157n86 Ueno Chizuko, 84, 176n20, 179n62 U.S.-­Japan alliance, xiii, xx, xxiii, 118–­ 19, 126, 129, 130, 135, 143 U.S.-­Japan Security Treaty (Anpo Jōyaku), 53–­54, 60, 77, 87, 145 U.S. Occupation of Japan, ix, xiv, 53, 54, 94, 118, 123, 145, 123; postwar presence in Okinawa, 94, 95–­96, 100,

101, 104–­5, 116, 181n13, 182nn16–­ 17; shrines and, 159n21; U.S. “military colonialism,” 181n14 Varney, Denise, 56, 157n83 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 57, 58 Wake, Carolyn, 98, 109, 183n34 waki figure. See Noh Walker, Janet, 98, 183n33 War Relocation Authority, 118 Watt, Lori, 59 Winds of God, The (Imai Masayuki), xxii, 29, 31–­39, 47; reincarnation in, 33–­34; title of, 166n25; versions of, 34–­35, 37–­39, 50, 67, 167n28, 167n37, 168nn43–­44 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, 72 Yamashiro Chikako: Āsa onna, 104; background of, 104; I Like Okinawa Sweet, 104; Inheritance Series, xxiii, 95, 104–­16; A Woman of the Butcher Shop, 186n71 Yamato (film), 27, 164n3, 166n19 Yanagi Miwa: background of, 124; Elevator Girls, 124; My Grandmothers, 124; Zero Hour, xxiii, 120, 122–­30, 141, 143, 189n41 yanggongju, xviii, 156n69 Yasuda Noboru, 51, 170n8 Yasukuni Shrine, ix, xxi, 3–­25, 50, 94, 143; Abe at, 145, 190n3; author’s visits to, 161n40; Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman at, 86, 87–­90; Class A war criminals at, 158n3, 159n22, 160n26, 162n56; emotional force of, 30; history of, 4, 5, 7, 15, 159n11; photographs of, 9, 11, 12, 13, 17, 19; prayer at, 14; spatial aspects of, 4–­5, 7–­15, 162n49; spectacle at, 5, 7, 12–­14, 17–­18, 22–­ 23, 163n62; “spectral performative” at, xxi, 5, 7, 10, 13, 15–­19, 22, 24, 38; unconventional behavior at, 14–­15; war museum (Yūshūkan) at, 8, 13, 20, 22, 30, 31, 158n5, 158n8, 166n17. See also eirei

Index

Yōkoso Yasukuni Jinja e: Ofisharu gaidobukku (Yasukuni guidebook), 8, 9, 11, 14 Yoneyama, Lisa, xiii–­xiv, xv, 95–­96, 119, 149n1, 152n27, 153n38, 181n3 Yoshimi Shun’ya, 8 Yoshimi Yoshiaki, 74, 89, 175n3, 175nn5–­6 Young, Louise, 51, 169n6, 172n52

213 Zeami, 29, 35, 73; Fūshikaden, 165n14. See also Aoi no ue (Noh play); Atsumori (Noh play); Izutsu (Noh play); Tadanori (Noh play) Zenkoku Senbotsusha Tsuitōshiki, ix Zero Hour (radio program), xxiii, 122–­ 23, 125 Zohar, Ayelet, 168n49, 186n70