War memory is an extremely politicized and polemic debate. I thinks beliefs and memories of the war should all be taken seriously. I am not trying to express my views about how to remember the war, but to discuss the various ways in which the war has been remembers.
From early to late summer in Japan there are a series of annual rites, including the day for Okinawa, the commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The most controversial ritual takes place on August 15, the day Japan lost the war. Many Japanese pay a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine where the Japanese war dead since the 19th century are commemorated as Shinto spirits. Some prime ministers have visited the shrine and have been criticized for it.
These rituals devoted to remembering the war dead indicate the politics of war commemoration in present day Japan. There seems to be little disagreement over the remembering of Japanese victims, as long as they are civilian. War commemoration then, is a highly selective process, where some are more remembered than others. The focus lies not on the historian’s choice but the collective, communal choice.
The history issue is usually referred to in terms of Japanese amnesia. This is a highly selective process however. This is not limited to Japanese war memories however. Kenneth Foote noted that the veneration of martyrs and heroes adds to the sustaining or strengthening of communal or national identities.
Simone Weil, in her fascinating discussion on the effect of the French revolution on the sense of belonging, noted a significant twist of state-society relations within French discourse on patriotism. It may sound absurd to compare Japan after WWII to France after the revolution, but there was a divorce between the state and society in both cases.
The deconstruction of national symbolism and remorse over the dead not only crushed the basis of wartime nationalism, but added an important twist. After defeat, ordinary people came to see themselves as having been duped by leaders who started a war that could not be won. Here the state was “they” that brutalized “us” in the society; the enemy here was neither the Japanese nor the Americans, but the Japanese state.
Thus emerged a narrative of a victimized nation, where only the Japanese appear as the victim. Public discourse on the war was more commonly told from the viewpoint of Japanese non-combatants. This was not necessarily a self-deception or hypocrisy. After all, most Japanese had no experience in the battlefields. For the majority who stayed at home, the war certainly was the hard life in a regimented society and the fear of bombings. If the Japanese cared little about their victims abroad, they certainly cared about their own sacrifice. That was sufficient to lead them to a denunciation of war as a tool of foreign policy. This sense of victimization became fused with a civic nationalism, one that unites a society against the irresponsible political leaders that had brought the misery of defeat.
Most of the initial movements tried to put soldiers drafted against their will as similar to victims at home. A typical case would be the Wadatsumi-kai, a group of Tokyo University students who were drafted and sent to the Chinese theater of war. For civilian Japanese, Wadatsumi-kai could be tolerated because it denounced the war; for some veterans, it did disservice to the idea by neglecting a just cause. For these hard-liners, representation of the legitimacy of the war accompanies proper representation of the soldiers.
There was a movement to revive the Yasukuni Shrine as a state institution. In October 1978, Grade-A war criminals were incorporated into the immortal spirits remembered in the Yasukuni. Although few recognized the significance of this move, this in effect had connected the representation of dead soldiers and the legitimating of the WWII.
On the one hand the majority of the Japanese has little against the prime minister visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, and another majority however support the view of removing Class-A war criminals from the Yasukuni. From this case of representation in Japanese historiography, one can see from the selection of the dead that issues are still very controversial.
When I started teaching at a university level in 1993, I was not interested in the issue of the atomic bomb in particular although my major was history of the US-Japanese relations. The college where I was first employed asked me to teach a course of American diplomatic history. The Department in which the course was assigned was that of American Studies. Hence, I dealt with the issue of the atomic bomb in the context of American diplomatic history and did not pay special attention to the effect of the bomb on Japan and on the Japanese. Most of the text books on American diplomatic history published in the United States put the atomic bomb in the context of the Allied efforts to end the war and the origins of the Cold War.
Reviewing academic discussions and works, I made my lecture notes which focused on American policy at the end of the war, discussing several opinions prior to the decision. In other words, I introduced Japanese students to the American historiography on the bomb.
However, my students were Japanese and I gradually realized that they were more or less confused and shocked with my lecture. The Japanese students in general endorsed the idea that the bomb was a terrible weapon and killed thousands of innocent Japanese civilians, although their position varied depending on where they were from and how much they had learned before. The field of American diplomatic history has been a very rich and well-defined academic field, and for me it was natural to organize my lecture in the framework of the discipline. However, Japanese students were not used to look at the issue from the American perspective. They had basic knowledge of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki through official education, media coverage, books and a trip to the cities.
This initial experience led me to focus more on the issue of the Bomb itself and I offered a class, “The American views of the Atomic Bomb.” Students’ response to this class was varied, but some students frankly addressed their ambivalent feelings with specific expressions and citations in the materials. It can be said that Japanese students’ previous understanding of the bomb exclusively focused on its effect on Japan and the Japanese. The memory has become a cornerstone of national identity, that Japan was the only country that was bombed by nuclear weapon and with this unique experience we should strive our efforts to abolish nuclear weapon.
However, this national paradigm has resulted in disappearance of foreign victims, due to the fact that the victims of the bomb who were engaged in testimonial practices and reproduced their recollections were mostly Japanese. The Japanese popular narrative consisted of what happened after August 6 and 9, when the bombs were dropped to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hence, it overshadows other important questions in historical context. In the realm of public discourse, there have not been enough discussions over such important questions as the relationship between Japanese delayed decision to surrender and the American decision, or possible effect of the American invasion of Japan.
The bomb in Japanese collective memory has existed as if it were guarded in a compartment that rejects historical inquiry. It remains doubtful whether history, however complete and objective it might be, can come to terms with such powerful presentation of memory.
After teaching Japanese students for several years, I was given a chance to offer a course on the atomic bomb history to foreign students. I tried to organize my course in a more comprehensive and comparative framework, including Japanese, American and Korean perspectives. In a sense, this course itself was my venture to write transnational history over the bomb, although I was well aware of the fact that any historian was incapable of presenting the complete history and no historian was free from his or her bias, that might have resulted from various factors such as nationality, cultural and educational background or the current of the time when one received academic training.
I taught the course to different sets of students: one was for graduate students, the other was American and Japanese college students together. I found it less challenging to teach multinational students than American and Japanese students. In the former class, due to diversity of their origin and background, there did not exist any single dominant narrative of the past. On the other hand, for some foreign students it seemed rather difficult to understand why the Japanese have developed such strong emotional attachment with the bomb. By reading the survivors’ accounts as well as Dower’s writing on Japanese victimization narrative and Yoneyama’s analysis on the survivors’ claims for the universal victimhood and its role in postwar Japan’s political situation, they understood how the Hiroshima legacy had developed domestically and responding to international conditions.
Teaching Japanese and American students together in the same class was somewhat different and again aroused me the same feeling of uneasiness as I had when I taught Japanese students. For most of Japanese students, the content of this class was not a familiar one either because they were presented with more transnational version of the atomic bomb history in which they were required to consider the bomb in a broader context, including Japanese war in Asia and the Pacific.
I did not address different historical narrative to three types of audience. My ultimate vision of history over the atomic bomb remained unchanged although I made necessary adjustments depending upon their background knowledge. At the outset I was not particularly interested in ‘transnational’ history, because I endorsed a position that in the realm of academic scholarship there should not be any national boundaries. I firmly believe that introducing historical scholarship which is to transcend national boundaries certainly helps to broaden the understanding of the past.
Popular memory that roots in Japanese survivors’ and American veterans’ recollection of the past is the raw material and just one of may pieces in history, but this small piece can often have overwhelming power over historical scholarship. History and memory do not necessarily exclude and contradict each other, but sometimes it is not so easy to find all the concerned memories proper space in a single master narrative. It seems quite likely historians’ struggle with public memory might continue.
Writing in April 1915, soon after the release of the Birth of a Nation, the film’s director D. W. Griffith predicted that “the time will come, and in less than ten years… where the children in public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures. Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again.” The movie, in Griffith’s vision, would offer viewers an entirely new way to experience the past.
Griffith’s prediction of the demise of written history may have been premature, but he was correct in recognizing the growing role that new visual media would play in shaping the historical imagination. Though school children today may still be obliged to read history texts, they receive much of their knowledge of the past from film, television and video. The visual image has the power to persuade us that we are seeing what actually happened, and the emotional force of the feature film has the capacity to make its audience identify personally with the participants in past events. In this paper, I shall use the case of two movies (one being Griffith’s Birth of a Nation) to explore some of the ways in which the mainstream Hollywood movie conveys is messages about the past and influences the historical imagination. In doing this, I want to consider the relationship between medium and historical memory.
Griffith’s comments on the educational function of film are particularly interesting when we consider them in the light of his own most famous historical movie. The Birth of a Nation was, on its release, the longest US feature film ever shown to the public, and it helped to establish the tradition of the 2-3 hour movie as the standard form of the Hollywood “blockbuster”. Drawing on the techniques of the realist novel Griffith, for the first time in movie history, made extensive use of parallel montage to create a total image of society.
While mobilizing the latest cinematic techniques to draw his audience into the chaos of the battlefield and the emotional dramas of the divided families, Griffith turned to academic history in his efforts to persuade the audience of the factual accuracy of his interpretation of American history. Early titles in the film present extended quotations from Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People. The emphasis on “scholarly history” was one of the main selling points of the movie. Griffith was able to induce an illusion of realism by punctuating the film with scenes which he describes as “historical facsimiles”.
The Birth of a Nation clearly aimed to give its viewers the illusion of “being present at the making of history”. While Birth of a Nation was part of a boom in the popularity of historical feature films in the second decade of the 20th century, the 1920s witnessed the appearance of a different type of movie, the “documentary”, a term said to have been coined by British film maker John Grierson, whose work was to have a formative influence on the development of the non-fiction film around the world. For Grierson, an essential feature of the documentary was its rejection of dramatization in favor of recorded reality. The documentary film, in other words, “has given itself the job of making poetry where no poet has gone before it… It requires not only taste but also inspiration, which is to say a very laborious, deep-seeing, deep-sympathizing creative effort indeed”.
At first sight, it seems easy to assume that the historical documentary is the film version of the written history text, while the historical feature film is the film version of the historical novel. Yet the relationship is of course more complex than this. Both historical films and history texts come in a variety of forms, embodying varying degrees of imagination. But there are also some inherent and important differences in the ways that the book and the film frame their presentations of historical truth. The written word is adapted to dealing with abstract phenomena.
In trying to address problems of the “truthfulness” of particular representations of the past, I find it useful to make distinction between what may be called “history as interpretation” and “history as identification”.
To explore these ideas further, I shall look at a more recent mainstream historical movie which (like The Birth of a Nation) deals with the theme of race relations in US history: Steven Spielberg’s 1997 movie Amistad. Amistad is a story which stands at the focal point of many intersecting pasts. The Amistad affair has generated a multitude of written accounts. The written versions of the story vary greatly in their style, focus and interpretation of events. In the world of the mainstream movie, by contrast, Spielberg’s account of the case is unique and dominant.
The movie creates a single, unforgettable, widely influential narrative. Like the legends of oral societies, it embodies a moral and narrative structure which shapes popular images of the world in which we live. The movie provides modern society with its mythology. Amistad makes a complex event in the nineteenth century history of West Africa, Spain and the US readily comprehensible to a wide audience by casting it in the familiar pattern of the Hollywood courtroom drama. This interpretation of the past in terms that appeal to present-day viewers raises obvious problems of historical truth. Is Spielberg’s invention of the amiable “Theodore Joadson” a justifiable way of redressing the long neglect of Black abolitionists in US historiography, or is it a misleading insertion of a fictional character into a film which advertises its own historical authenticity?
More broadly, the historical meaning which Spielberg attributes to the Amistad case is also open to questioning at various levels. The way in which Spielberg locates his story case in the broader narrative of American history has also invited controversy. As Simon Schama reminds us, the Amistad case was not actually about the morality or legality of slavery in the United States, but centered on a narrower argument about the legality of the slave trade on the high seas. Spielberg, however, recasts Amistad into a key moment in the abolition of slavery in the US. But in evoking empathy for the reconstructed past, Spielberg is also implicitly offering an idiosyncratic re-interpretation of American history.
The myths created by the Hollywood movie are important not just because they are national myths, but also because they are global myths. The unequal exchange of historical imaginings that characterizes the historical novel is even more apparent in the realms of the mainstream historical movie. Yet the very power of the Hollywood myth has another consequence which is crucial to interpreting the consequences of the filming of history. Mainstream movies and major TV documentaries are no longer single “commodities” consumed in isolation by their audiences. They generate a mass of other forms of historical representation: “books of the film”, reviews, magazine interviews, media debates, TV documentaries on the making of movies, Internet websites, educational material, and so on.
Unlike Spielberg’s movie, which creates a powerful sense of emotive identification with a particular version of the Amistad story, such websites bring users into contact with the primary material related to the case, and force them to consider the multiple perspectives of the actors involved. As the Amistad sites also suggest, the Internet has the potential to reveal the cross-border implications of historical events. Hollywood did not discover the Amistad case, but it certainly made it a focus of far greater interest, debate and research than it had attracted before. It helped to set the agenda within which this upsurge of remembering and re-interpretation took place, but it could not entirely determine the directions of the journey of memory initiated by the film. In the end, therefore, the relationship of film to historical truth cannot simply be understood by examining the content of films themselves.
Film has certain inherent properties: it draws the viewer in to a totalized image of the past, it personalizes, it moves us to laughter and tears and leaves particular images indelibly engraved on our minds. It has a capacity to evoke intense identification with historical experiences, but in the process it casts that identification within a framework of a particular remembering community.
For viewers, reflecting on our own response to particular films, and on the images, techniques and narrative structures that evoke that response, can be a way of enlarging our understanding of the past and its hold on the present. This reflection will often take us beyond the world of film itself, to consider how the events brought to life by a particular movie are represented in other media, and how those media coexist, compete and resonate with one another. In a multimedia world, the process of historical imagining, debate and exploration may in fact begin at the point which the traditional movie firmly proclaims as “The End”.
We should all reread these papers again and look at them as dealing with the challenges of pedagogy and how to confront a student population that is decreasingly interested in the past.
There are two themes: the first is the role of the state. In Kiichi’s paper, you get the nagging impression that the LDP is watching as you discuss the war and seeing that you do not deviate from the standard version of the war.
Prof. Shinohara stated that her students were confused a shocked to hear American perspectives on the atomic bomb.
The selectiveness of what the public can know, as described by Prof. Morris-Suzuki, was interesting looking at the words of Woodrow Wilson and his comments on the Ku Klux Klan and the reaffirmation of racial segregation.
A second point is that the issues discussed in the paper are quite new. This has something to do with the profound changes of Japanese and US societies in the 1960s. This generation went through a lifestyle revolution. The 1960s saw a weakening of the Japanese and US states, starting with the assassination of President Kennedy and the corruption in the political world in Japan.
However the state revived and recovered and expropriated the themes of the critics in order to recover. There was an ideological shift in the 1980s and the state and society were placed on an equal level. In the 1990s it then became possible for Japanese prime ministers to visit the Yasukuni Shrine.
The title of this session is “Writing Under US Hegemony.” How would the US hegemon respond to these papers? One would be to look at these papers as a sign of commercial opportunity. There is an increased flow of people between Japan and the US. Civil rights are also being integrated in the discourse of the American state. The active interest in commercial opportunity, would also be matched however by political apathy. There is political apathy concerning the atomic bomb in the US and we must consider that as it recedes into history, if it is not remembered, the hegemon may consider the atomic bomb again. Finally, apathy comes in the way Spielberg treats Sierra Leone.
Prof. Amoroso asked a question to Prof. Fujiwara concerning the neo-conservative discourse in Japan. She asked why the emperor was no longer included in right-wing discourse.
She also addressed the issue of audience. She noted that teaching has become transnational. She stated that in the kinds of protests against war currently, it is difficult for US citizens to protest against war on the basis that innocent people will suffer, because they are people who are not American. She asked whether the same dynamic occurs within communal situations within countries. Prof. Amoroso also spoke about war crimes and rape.
Prof. Yang mentioned the relationship between American hegemony and history writing in Japan. He stated that stories about the atomic bomb and the Yasukuni Shrine are very different, if not conflicting, in Japan and the United States. He asked whether it would not be better to actually forget, or whether by forgetting another war could occur.
Prof. Seth clarified that had discussed the individual need to forget and the collective need to forget.
Prof. Sarkar stated that she recalled the turn of the century debate about how to represent history in museums.
In response, Prof. Fujiwara stated that concerning the eradication of the emperor from the nationalist cause was because of the very different system that existed before and during the war. He explained that war ideology would be very difficult to repeat.
Concerning discussions of peace, Prof. Fujiwara stated that there was a crude realism that real men do not discuss peace.
Concerning visual narrative, Prof. Fujiwara stated that most visual representation demands some political identification, although it need not support a specific political position. In addition to Birth of a Nation and Amistad, Prof. Fujiwara suggested that it would be useful to consider the Disney interpretation of the classics also.
Prof. Morris-Suzuki stated that student bodies are becoming much more international and more teachers are used to speaking to more than one audience. She took part in a conference in Australia about the Chinese and Japanese see the Australians. She had talked about Japanese responses to the refugee issue in Australia. There is a danger of disorientation when one crosses national boundaries.
Concerning US hegemony in relation to history writing in Japan, Prof. Morris-Suzuki stated that there is a powerful discourse in Japan about history writing during the post-war period and how debates are resurfacing.
Prof. Shinohara stressed the Hiroshima legacy and the link to the Japanese government. She explained that the position on Hiroshima as a message of peace was convenient for the Japanese government. As far as the people of Japan stick to the Hiroshima paradigm there are no diplomatic issues.