Perilous Memories

T. Fujitani

Description

Perilous Memories makes a groundbreaking and critical intervention into debates about war memory in the Asia-Pacific region. Arguing that much is lost or erased when the Asia-Pacific War(s) are reduced to the 1941-1945 war between Japan and the United States, this collection challenges mainstream memories of the Second World War in favor of what were actually multiple, widespread conflicts. The contributors recuperate marginalized or silenced memories of wars throughout the region-not only in Japan and the United States but also in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea.Firmly based on the insight that memory is always mediated and that the past is not a stable object, the volume demonstrates that we can intervene positively yet critically in the recovery and reinterpretation of events and experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of the past. The contributors-an international list of anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, literary scholars, and activists-show how both dominant and subjugated memories have emerged out of entanglements with such forces as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. They consider both how the past is remembered and also what the consequences may be of privileging one set of memories over others. Specific objects of study range from photographs, animation, songs, and films to military occupations and attacks, minorities in wartime, "comfort women," commemorative events, and postwar activism in pursuing redress and reparations.Perilous Memories is a model for war memory intervention and will be of interest to historians and other scholars and activists engaged with collective memory, colonial studies, U.S. and Asian history, and cultural studies.Contributors. Chen Yingzhen, Chungmoo Choi, Vicente M. Diaz, Arif Dirlik, T. Fujitani, Ishihara Masaie, Lamont Lindstrom, George Lipsitz, Marita Sturken, Toyonaga Keisaburo, Utsumi Aiko, Morio Watanabe, Geoffrey M. White, Diana Wong, Daqing Yang, Lisa Yoneyama

Sujets

• Histoire
• World War II
• Southeast Asia
• Pacific Ocean
• History of Asia

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 21 juin 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822381051
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Perilous Memories

Perilous Memories

The Asia-Pacific War(s)

edited by t. fujitani,

geoffrey m. white,

and lisa yoneyama

Duke University Press Durham and London 2001

∫2001 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper$ Typeset in Quadraat by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. This book is made possible in part by a subvention from the Japan Foundation.

Contents

vii Acknowledgments 1T. Fujitani, Geo√rey M. White, and Lisa YoneyamaIntroduction

1: memory fragments, memory images

33Marita SturkenAbsent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment 50Daqing YangThe Malleable and the Contested: The Nanjing Massacre in Postwar China and Japan 87Ishihara MasaieMemories of War and Okinawa 107Lamont LindstromImages of Islanders in Pacific War Photographs 129Morio WatanabeImagery and War in Japan: 1995

2: politics and poetics of liberation

155Vicente M. DiazDeliberating ‘‘Liberation Day’’: Identity, History, Memory, and War in Guam 181Chen YingzhenImperial Army Betrayed 199Utsumi AikoKorean ‘‘Imperial Soldiers’’: Remembering Colonialism and Crimes against Alliedpows

218Diana WongMemory Suppression and Memory Production: The Japanese Occupation of Singapore 239T. Fujitani Go for Broke, the Movie: Japanese American Soldiers in U.S. National, Military, and Racial Discourses 267Geo√rey M. WhiteMoving History: The Pearl Harbor Film(s)

3: atonement, healing, and unexpected alliances

299Arif Dirlik‘‘Trapped in History’’ on the Way to Utopia: East Asia’s ‘‘Great War’’ Fifty Years Later 323Lisa YoneyamaFor Transformative Knowledge and Postnationalist Public Spheres: The Smithsonian Enola GayControversy 347George Lipsitz‘‘Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army’’: Black Soldiers and Civilians Confront the Asia Pacific War 378yoToeiKganao¯rubasColonialism and Atom Bombs: About Survivors of Hiroshima Living in Korea 395Chungmoo ChoiThe Politics of War Memories toward Healing

411 Bibliography 435 Filmography 437 Index 461 Contributors

vi

Contents

Acknowledgments

Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) was first conceived as an international conference in 1995, the year commemorated as the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II. The conference was enabled by generous funding and institutional support from the Japan Foundation and the East-West Center. We would like to thank the East-West Center sta√ and students for their assistance throughout. At the conference, we also benefited from the attendance of four discussants, Chungmoo Choi, Susan Je√ords, Masao Miyoshi, and Shu-mei Shih, all of whom o√ered invaluable comments. Many of their insights were taken up and developed in the papers and in our introduction. We also would like to thank the participants of the concurrent evening symposium on Public History and War Memory, chaired by Patricia Masters with Tom Crouch, Daniel Martinez, Qinglin Shen, and Seiko Takana, all of whom added immeasurably to our discussions. We are grateful to Amy Parry for her assistance in editing Chen Yingzhen’s chapter and to Andrew Morris for checking the Chinese ro- manization. We would like to thank artist Sam Adelbai, designer Amy Ruth Buchanan, Karen Neso, and Tina Rehaber for their work. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean terms and proper nouns are transliterated following the pinyin, modified Hepburn, and McCune-Reischauer styles, re- spectively. The only exceptions are when there are other conventionally used romanizations, such as ‘‘Park Chun Hee.’’

Introduction

t. fujitani, geoffrey m. white,

and lisa yoneyama

Remembering and Dismembering the Asia-Pacific War(s)

Over the past several years we have been witnessing the massive production and reproduction of memories of the last military conflict to have been named a world war. This unmaking and remaking of war memories has taken place on a global scale, accelerating with the most recent spurt of fifty-year commemora- tives: of the Rape of Nanjing, Kristallnacht, the Pearl Harbor attack, Japa- nese American internment, D-Day, firebombings, the liberation of Nazi death camps, the dropping of the atomic bombs, V-J Day, and the liberation of Korea and other former colonies from Japanese rule, to recall only some of the most widely reported. Not only professional historians but other agents of cultural production, both o≈cial and uno≈cial—government agencies, filmmakers, artists, journalists, writers, curators and custodians of museums and war me- morials, and so on—have contributed to a historically unparalleled period of memory making on the subject of the Second World War. One of the most obvious observations about this flurry of memory activities is that memory production concerning imagined collectivities is never simply about the politically disinterested recovery of a pure and undiluted past. Memo- ries of the war do not loom up before those who remember in a natural, mechanical, or predictable fashion. There is no one-to-one correspondence between a discrete experience and a particular memory, for even experience ∞ itself might come to us through mediation. Experience and memory, in other words, are always already mediated and this mediation in turn is always shaped by relations of power. Memory work continually figures and refigures the past as a method for present purposes, particularly within contemporary social and cultural strug-