Organizer: Aaron W. Moore, Princeton University

Chair and Discussant: Edward A. McCord, George Washington University

A common approach to sources on war experience is to create a hierarchy of "truth" according to how "private" they are. Nevertheless, many "private" documents mimic the language of "propaganda," and, conversely, public descriptions of war rely heavily on personal experiences. This panel will discuss the dynamic between personal and public narratives in China and Japan about World War II to better understand how individuals come to have both common and divergent understandings of their war experience. David Stahl will examine the relationship between collective/personal catharsis and responsibility in Nosaka Akiyuki’s personal memoirs of the war along with Nosaka’s short story "Grave of the Fireflies" and the anime adaptation. Steven Day will address Shi Tuo’s Shanghai Correspondence, and the significance of the text’s shift from an epistolary form, which draws its authenticity from personal letters, to montage, which offers a direct critique of the basic assumptions of this discourse. Aaron William Moore will compare the language used in field diaries by Nationalist Chinese and Japanese servicemen with that of reportage in order to show how personal accounts are shaped by popular discourse but also necessary for its production. Edward McCord will bring to bear his expertise as a historian of war in modern China as discussant. We will address the following basic questions: how useful is the public/private binary for analyzing these texts? What function do they serve for the authors and their audience? Such questions are essential when thinking about the mobilization for total war and its subsequent remembrance.

Aaron W. Moore, Princeton University

Servicemen in national armies around the world have been keeping diaries and writing memoirs throughout the twentieth century in an attempt to narrate the strains, joys and trauma of battlefield experience. Simultaneously, state and media actors have attempted to guide and profit from these compelling tales. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, both of these trends reached a fever pitch in Nationalist China and Japan as the state, mass media and individuals mobilized for total war. Forms of expression, tropes and ideology moved almost seamlessly between the public/private barrier, suggesting the absence of any "authentic" language of battlefield experience outside of popular discourse. When considering this the perspective of the individual serviceman, it is important to ask what purpose documents such as diaries and published texts such as "tales of heroism" served. If servicemen are guilty of merely reproducing popular discourse, then it should follow that their postwar writings are simply expressions of the vicissitudes of struggles over historical memory. In a country like Japan, where publishing houses hold writing seminars for veterans wishing to compose memoirs, or China, where publishing racy accounts of resisting the Japanese army is a profitable industry, how are postwar accounts different from those produced during the war? When are servicemen linguistically deviant, and why? In order to address these problems, it is first necessary to examine how servicemen subjectified themselves—a kind of self-discipline—during and after war, and then suggest what function diaries performed in this process.

"Faux Epistolary: Shi Tuo’s Shanghai Correspondence and the Aesthetics of Literary Montage in Accounts of Wartime ShanghaiShanghai

Steven P. Day, University of California, Los Angeles

Correspondence stands out as one of Shi Tuo’s most innovative yet least researched works. Ostensibly epistolary in form, this work provides a rich text to examine the aesthetic and epistemological implications of both private and public accounts of wartime Shanghai. Written between 1939 and 1940, the title seems a misnomer since the "letters" are not dated, signed, or addressed to anyone, resembling instead a series of unconnected vignettes during wartime in the city. In fact, Shi Tuo plays with generic conventions and expectations throughout this work, combining personal travelogue, recognizable historical events, scenes from everyday life, and newspaper clippings. After the breakdown of the linear narrative detailing his railway journey back to the city following the outbreak of hostilities, Shi shifts to literary montage to depict Shanghai’s fragmented urban space. The use of montage as aesthetic choice puts the author’s work in the company of other great modernist depictions of urban space and history in fiction (namely Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer, and Joyce’s Ulysses). But what may such an aesthetic choice signify? This paper will investigate how literary montage and the work’s own liminal generic position between history and fiction may function as a self-reflexive critique of both. Since montage signifies by juxtaposition and context rather than direct forms of exposition, I argue that the work levels its critique by drawing attention to its own constructed nature and challenging readers to question the boundaries that separate categorical divisions such as history/fiction, public/private, subjective/objective, or authentic/false.

David C. Stahl, Binghamton University

Since personal survival—particularly for the defeated—is such an overwhelming, conflicted and multi-dimensional experience, artistic works that facilitate collective visceral confrontation with essential, yet repressed and avoided aspects of modern war can be especially valuable and illuminating. "Hotaru no haka" ("Grave of the Fireflies") does just this. The original short story (1967) and the animated film version (1988) effectively address unresolved issues concerning the suffering and loss of innocent children during the indiscriminate Allied incendiary bombing attacks on Japanese cities toward the end of the Asia Pacific War. By comparing and contrasting Nosaka Akiyuki’s psychologically complex memoirs on his home front trauma with his imaginative reworking of his experience in "Grave of the Fireflies" and Takahata’ Isao’s anime adaptation, this paper will argue that these artists endeavored to treat and heal their deep spiritual and emotional wounds through remembering loss, cathartic reenactment, and deliberate memorialization of the defenseless children—and by extension vulnerable non-combatant civilians—sacrificed en mass so impersonally by Japan and America alike. The paper devotes special attention to the relationship of survivor-narrators to their personal historical traumas, and general audiences to the popular products of their creative endeavors. Does a work produced with an eye to bringing about some measure of psychological relief for the author necessarily do the same for the reader/viewer? Or might a work that is cathartic for the author not simultaneously function to confront the audience with disturbing matters of collective responsibility?