Organizer: Ken Ruoff, Harvard University
Chair and Discussant: Laura Hein, Northwestern University
The half-century contest to shape the national memory of the Pacific War (1931–45) continues in Japan. Battles over memory occurred along generational, ethnic, class and gender lines; official, public and personal memories overlapped and competed. This panel compares the construction of vectors, or carriers, of memory in Japan with Germany, France and Okinawa, as well as within Okinawa itself. The comparative framework permits conclusions about the specificities of Japan’s experience of remembering the war.
Franziska Seraphim examines how in contrast to Germany in the late 1960s, when the critical inquiry of the first postwar generation into their parents’ involvement with the Nazis facilitated a radical break in public memory of the war, in Japan, early postwar leaders of war-dead organizations on both the left and right recruited those with no war experience to endorse, rather than to challenge, their interpretations of the war. Ken Ruoff traces how General Charles de Gaulle and the Showa Emperor were cast as referents for sanitized official memories of the war in France and Japan, and how these soothing memories crumbled in both these countries after de Gaulle died in 1970 and the Showa Emperor passed away in 1989. Linda Angst reaches beyond the gap between Okinawan and mainland Japan’s memories of the war by demonstrating long-standing tension in Okinawa between official and personal memories, especially among women, of suffering within the prefecture. This panel examines Japanese debates over remembering the souls of the war dead, the Showa Emperor, and Okinawa’s special suffering in a comparative context.
Fraziska Seraphim, Columbia University
While generational change may be seen as a "natural" component of the memory process, it also serves various political aims as a social construct. The transmission of Holocaust testimonies became part and parcel of Jewish identity after the war. The critical inquiry of Germany’s first postwar generation into their parents’ participation in the Nazi regime facilitated the first official attempts to popularize knowledge of and responsibility for the Nazi past, a cornerstone in the politics of social-democratic governments in the 1960s and 70s. In Japan, too, generation and public memory formed a politically ambitious pair, yet with ultimately conservative rather than revolutionary results.
This presentation explores various ways in which the argument (and reality) of generational change in Japan played into the process of constructing public memories during the half-century since 1945. It focuses on associations of the war bereaved, in particular the Association of War Bereaved Families (Nihon izokukai) and the pacifist Association for Memorializing Student Soldiers Fallen in Battle (Wadatsumikai). They combined specific political goals—such as state recognition of Japan’s war dead as national heroes or the abolition of the Emperor System—with the desire to reproduce themselves as organizations of the war bereaved, whose membership and messages were in danger of erosion with changing generations.
Although both groups, during the first postwar decade, celebrated the contemporary youth as the promise of the "new Japan," they considered the generation coming of age in the 1960s and 70s a "social problem" in need of guidance by those who understood the reality of war from experience. On the political right as on the left, the generational argument aided the reproduction of interpretations of the war as the "old guard" understood it in the contemporary political contexts.
Ken Ruoff, Harvard University
Both General Charles de Gaulle and the Showa Emperor (Hirohito) were cast as referents for sanitized official memories of the war in their respective countries, and in France and Japan these soothing memories crumbled only after the respective deaths of de Gaulle in 1970 and the Showa Emperor in 1989. It was de Gaulle himself who articulated a glorious and immediate interpretation of the Vichy era (1940–44) which became postwar France’s founding myth: those French who had collaborated with the Nazis were limited to a few traitorous misfits, while the majority of citizens resisted and eventually drove the German armies from France. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was widely considered to be unpatriotic to raise the issue of collaboration in France. Post-de Gaulle France could no longer sustain the myth of unified resistance, however, and widespread French collaboration with the Nazis was eventually acknowledged.
In Japan, leading politicians provided their countrymen with glorious interpretations of the Showa Emperor’s "majestic decision to end the war" (goseidan). The emperor’s decision was said not only to have saved the Japanese race from extinction, but to exemplify his true nature, that of a pacifist who had been victimized by the military establishment. When Nakasone Yasuhiro, in a 1952 session of the Diet, asked the government’s opinion on the emperor’s abdicating to assume moral responsibility for the war, Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru responded that anyone who proposed the abdication of the beloved emperor was a non-citizen or un-Japanese (hikokumin).
The people came to see themselves in the emperor, symbol of Japan: like he, they, too, had been victims of the militarists. But the Showa Emperor’s death opened the door to public debate about the emperor’s and people’s wartime roles as participants rather than mere victims of the military establishment. No other than Emperor Akihito emerged as a referent for revised memories by offering apologies to neighboring countries for Japan’s wartime transgressions.
Linda Angst, Yale University
Since the death of the Showa Emperor in 1989, the Japanese have been engaged in a struggle of national conscience about how to remember their role in the Pacific War. Aging Asian victims of Japanese wartime agression, most prominently the ianfu, or "comfort women," have stirred up memories of a time most Japanese felt was safely a part of the past, thereby challenging not only what many Japanese considered their country’s deserved, rightful place as a leader in the postwar international arena, but also challenging official interpretations of wartime history, and hence the meaning of postwar history. For Okinawans an on-going American military presence creates a distinctly different "postwar" history. Ostensibly Japanese by virtue of national affiliation, Okinawans represent a critique from within the body politic as an ethnic minority which endured wartime losses of tragic proportion. Their critique questions the idea of unified Japanese culture and civil society.
Yet even within Okinawa, there is tension between official narratives of Okinawan wartime suffering, particularly as symbolized by the battlefield experiences of the elite Himeyuri Student Nurses, and other, unofficial stories of working-class women. The ruins of memory become a site subject to restoration within these narratives. The gender and class dimensions of official/unofficial and public/private war narratives are particularly salient in the aftermath of the rape of a schoolgirl in 1995 by three American servicemen. Today, through the vehicle of a powerful and emblematic anti-war movement, part of an explicit discourse of identity politics embracing Okinawan ethnic difference, Okinawans offer a critical dimension to the national debate about wartime memory and the meaning of Japanese identity in the postwar era.