Memory
and Silence in Japan
How
do Japanese artists respond to Japanese recent past?
Goldsmiths, University of London
Dissertation MA History of Art
Akiko Funo
18/9/2003Dissertation
Although it has
been only two years since it turned to the 21st century, the world has been
disquieting. There have been the
incidents such as the terrorist attack on the U.S., War on terrorism, War on
Iraq and the conflict between Palestine and Israel among many. These incidents make me think about wars in
the 20th century in Japan. Japan has
come to today without dealing with the recent past. The oblivion of this past seems to be a big
issue. Postmemory as a site of
remembrance seems to be limited in Japan, for the memory of the past has been
repressed, and the history has been concealed.
Memory is ambiguous, but it seems that History is also ambiguous in a
different way, for the authority have the power to control it. The authority has manipulated the
silence. Japanese memory of the War has
been silenced in various ways to turn our eyes away from the sense of
guilt. Japanese atrocities have remained
silence in teaching history. Japan has
also remained silence about the responsibility of the emperor for the war. In the art world, war paintings were also
hidden from the public after the War. It
is only recently that the war paintings became open to the public more often
than before, and the re-examination of the war paintings began. Tsuguharu Fujita, who actively produced war
paintings, left or was forced to leave Japan in 1949. Silence as a tool for authorities was imposed
not only within, but also from outside Japan.
The U.S. censorship delayed the publication of Genbaku Bungaku (A-Bomb
literature). However, ‘silencing’ is
only one aspect of silence. It is true
that silence can well be the hindrance of postmemory, but at the same time, I
think that postmemory can be practiced through the silence. Like memory, silence is ambiguous because of
its duplicity. Silence is the opposite
of language as well as a part of language.
Silence makes people imagine what is veiled and what is buried. Moreover, I would like to suggest that
silence might have the ability to hold the past in the present. Thus, I would like to consider other notions
of silence that contains the unsaid and the unspeakability. Postmemory also implies the
unrepresentability. It implies the
distance between the self and the other – postmemory as Matrix in which the
self and the other coexist without fusion.
The works or art practices that deal with Japanese recent past seem to
approach to the silence in various ways.
Some artists usually do not deal with the War, other artists primarily
focus on the War. Many artists deal with
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tadashi
Tonoshiki (born in 1942) was an artist who actually experienced the nuclear
bomb in Hiroshima. He started to produce
works from his recollections of the explosion after twenty years of
silence. Shomei Tomatsu (born in 1930)
keeps taking photographs of the survivors of the past, particularly the
survivors of Nagasaki. Tomatsu’s
photographs draw attention to counter-history.
Tatsuo Miyajima (born in 1957), is also an artist who was haunted by the
nuclear bomb dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Since 1995, Miyajima started a project ‘Revive Time Kaki Tree Project’. It responds to a fading memory. The works of Masao Okabe (born in 1942) focus
on activating the memory of the past. His
works leave the trace not to lose the memory of the war along with the loss of
the remains. Takashi Murakami (born in
1962) is probably the most famous Japanese contemporary artist in the West as
well as in Japan. Recently, he has
exhibited a wall painting Time Bokan (1999). This seems to question the representation of
the nuclear bomb. There are some art
practices that touch upon the hidden part of the official history and try to
break the silence. Yukinori Yanagi and
Yoshiko Shimada both touch upon Japanese unpleasant, hidden or repressed
histories. Shimada uncovers the
repressed histories within her works, whereas Yanagi focuses on the obscurity
of the silence in contemporary Japan.
The young artist Makoto Aida (born in 1965) produced a series called Sensoga
Returns (War painting returns) from 1995 to 1996 in which he draws
attention to the relationship between the present and the past. I would like to discuss how this recent past
is repressed and silenced by considering the notion of memory, history,
postmemory and silence. Then I would
like to discuss art works or art practices that deal with Japanese recent past,
namely World War II.
Talking about the
recent past is difficult especially for Japan which was defeated in World War
II, but at the same time, it is crucial for Japan in which memory of the War
seems to be fading. Various atrocities
were taken place in this War, and each genocidal act cannot be compared to each
other. Furthermore, as Dominick LaCapra points out, subject position restricts
the discourse of this past. LaCapra
argues in the context of Holocaust that ‘[w]hether the historian or analyst is
a survivor, a relative of survivors, a former Nazi, a former collaborator, a
relative of former Nazis or collaborators, a younger Jew or German distanced
from more immediate contact with survival, participation, or collaboration, or
relative “outsider” to these problems will make a difference even in the meaning
of statements that may be formally identical (in Friedlander, 1992: 110). I think that it could fit in the case of
Japan, or maybe in any case. In the case
of Japan, whether those who went to the War, or those who did not participate
in the actual battle even though they were in the military, a survivor of
Hiroshima or Nagasaki, a relative of survivors, younger generation who did not
experience the War will make a difference.
I would like to reflect Japanese recent past from
my subjective position as a Japanese, as one who has never experienced the war,
and as one whose parents were born after the Second World War.
I was eleven years
old when I learned Japanese history for the first time as far as I am
concerned. Since then, I had several
occasions to learn both Japanese and the world history, but I have never
learned much about Japanese recent history, namely history of the twentieth
century. What I remember the most in
Japanese history is primitive era.
Teachers always laid weight on history of primitive era, and there was
no time for history of the twentieth century in the end of the year. The next year, it was the same. It was all again the repetition of a year
before starting from the primitive era. I
might be exaggerating this, but I am writing from my memory that I remember
many things about primitive era, but my knowledge of recent history is limited.
However still, I
feel the fear of forgetting Japanese recent past, Japanese history, atomic bomb
dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I
feel the fear of Japanese people forgetting them. It is because, I think, I have a memory of
absence. I mean that I have a memory
that I did not learn much about Japanese history although I know that there are
many things that are glossed over.
Memory is so fundamental to our lives.
Without memory, we can neither remember nor forget. It ‘acts in the present to represent the past’
(Antze and Lambek, 1996: xxiv). However,
it is true that memory is ambiguous. It
is always already selected. ‘Memories
are produced out of experience and, in turn, reshape it’ (ibid: xii). Thus it occupies the site between the
happened and the imagined. This does not
mean that memory it totally unreliable, for History is always already selected as
well. Memory seems more powerful because
it is something that the authority cannot take away from us.
As I did not learn
much about Japanese recent history, the authority has controlled history. Thus it is not only memory that is ambiguous,
but also history is ambiguous. As
Jacques Derrida argues, the authority has the power to interpret the archives
(1995: 2). ‘The documents, which are not
always discursive writings, are only kept and classified under the title of the
archive by virtue of a privileged topology. They inhabit this uncommon place, this place
of election where law and singularity intersect in privilege’ (ibid.:
3). Trinh T. Min-Ha also argues that ‘the
historical analysis is nothing other than the reconstruction and redistribution
of a pretended order of things, the interpretation of even transformation of
documents given and frozen into monuments.
The re-writing of history is therefore an endless task’ (1989: 84). ‘[R]ecording, gathering, sorting,
deciphering, analysing and synthesizing, dissecting and articulating are
already “imposing a structure”, a structural activity, a structuring of the
mind, a whole mentality (ibid.: 141).
History with
capital H is his story that indicates the notion of patriarchy. It is constructed based on documents. There is not only one History, however. There are many histories. A historical fact is surrounded by silence,
and the silence contains other histories.
As Min-Ha argues, ‘[l]iterature and history once were/still are stories:
this does not necessarily mean that the space they form is undifferentiated,
but that this space can articulate on a different set of principles, one which
may be said to stand outside the hierarchical realm of facts’ (ibid.:
121). When story became history, ‘it
started indulging in accumulation and facts’ (ibid: 119). We need histories that are always in the
process, ‘no end, no middle, no beginning; no start, no stop, no progression;
neither backward nor forward, only a stream that flows into another stream’
(ibid.: 123).
Memory of the War
is not produced out of my experience.
People who did not experience the War can only construct their own
memories of the War through others’ memories.
Postmemory, according to Marianne Hirsch, is the term which describes ‘the
relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the
experiences of their parents, experiences that they “remember” only as the
stories and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so
monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right’ (in Bal et al.
(eds.), 1999: 8). Yet, as Hirsch also
argues, postmemory is ‘not an identity position, but space of remembrance, more
broadly available through cultural and public, and not merely individual and
personal acts of remembrance, identification, and projection’ (ibid.:
8-9). It is ‘ a powerful form of memory
precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not
through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation’ (ibid.:
8). However, in the case of Japan, the
act of postmemory seems to have been limited.
Japan has come to
today without dealing with its own past.
The memory of Japanese recent past seems to be under ‘ instances of
muteness which by dint of saying nothing, imposed silence’ (Foucault, 1984:
17). The authority has wielded its power
to silence and repress memories of the past.
Silence is what the authority manipulated. Japanese memory of the War has been silenced
in various ways to turn our eyes away from the sense of guilt. As I mentioned above, Japanese atrocities has
remained silence in teaching history.
Teachers cannot teach the history because of the equivocation of the
government. There has been the
controversy surrounding a Japanese history textbook that glorifies pre-war
Japan and denies atrocities such as the Nanking massacre or the comfort
women.
Japan has also
remained silence about the responsibility of the emperor for the war. The emperor system is deep-rooted in Japanese
society. The emperor had been regarded
as a living god until he declared that he was human after the World War
II. Furthermore, the structure of the
emperor = authority still remains. The
emperor system is not a kind of authority that controls overtly nowadays. It is an authority that does not usually
appear on the surface. It is regarded as
the normative. The power resides within
silence, and it remains because of silence.
The fact that the emperor Hirohito, who was in charge of the War, did
not take the responsibility for the War, and being officially innocent is, I
think, one of the reasons that caused Japanese people’s ignorance of history.
As Reiko Tachibana argues:
[M]aintaining silence about the emperor’s
responsibility for the war enabled Japanese people to deny their own
responsibility as well, for Japanese soldiers and citizens who were regarded as
the children of the divine emperor believed (or pretended to believe) that they
had had no choice but to obey him.
During occupation period, when their father-emperor lost his identity,
this concept became transferred, and they were temporarily adopted by
democratic father and called “MacArthur’s children”. The adopted father’s assertion of their own
father’s innocence, along with the Japanese government’s post war propaganda –
which now portrayed the emperor as a pacifist – easily convinced them that
their father had been betrayed by the military leadership during the war
(1998:
10-11).
In the art world,
war paintings were also hidden from the public after the War. A number of war paintings were produced as
propaganda during the War, especially during Pacific War. The rations of materials such as paint and
canvas depended on how much artists cooperate with the military. As war paintings disappeared from the public
after World War II, they were erased from post-war Japanese art history. They were not open to public for more than
thirty years after World War II. The
United States confiscated 153 war paintings as booty just after World War II,
and put them into a room of National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. War paintings stayed there for six years, but
the Japanese government was certainly uncomfortable with them. The uneasiness of the government increased
even more when war paintings were inserted in Winston Churchill’s The Second
World War. In July 24th, 1951,
suddenly several American military lorries were drawn up to the Museum, and war
paintings disappeared. War paintings
were taken to the United States, and stayed there for almost twenty years. Although war paintings returned to Japan from
the U.S., they were again confined (my translation, Hariu, 1979: 32-34).
Tsuguharu Fujita,
who actively produced war paintings, left Japan in 1949. While many artists gave up producing war
paintings in the face of the sign of defeat, Fujita kept painting sadistically
and frantically, and actually he could not stop painting (my translation,
Kikuhata, 1978: 41). ‘The moral issue of
artists’ complicity with the military government was quite separate from the
war crimes which were punished at the Tokyo Trials and in purges of the civil
service’ (Hariu, 1985: 24-25). Fujita
was the one to be blamed. In 1947, Iwao
Uchida, who also produced war paintings, told Fujita that Fujita ‘had been
officially condemned by the Japan Art Association because of his leading role
as a war artist’ (ibid: 24). Fujita
first went to the United States, and then went to France. Later, he got a French citizenship and also
became Christian. He never went back to
Japan. As an art critic Ichiro Hariu argues,
‘by using Fujita as a scapegoat many artists were able to expiate their own
guilt and to forget entirely the question of their own moral responsibility’
(ibid: 25).
Recently, war paintings have begun to be open to the public more often than the past. Furthermore, the reconsideration of war paintings has begun. An art critic Noi Sawaragi argues that ‘what we should find from war paintings is neither to condemn the artists who produced war paintings from the moral point of view, nor to analyse war paintings in terms of form setting aside the value judgement of the subject matter. Rather, we should think about how such practices which enabled to depict such kind of fake justice, aesthetics, history and fear without any doubt, came into existence in the concealment of modernity’ (my translation, 1998: 334).
War paintings
eliminated people’s life, people’s struggling, people’s poverty, and brought
sublime and heroic historical scenes that were produced out of the
ideology. In that sense, Sawaragi uses
the term brightness for war paintings and the darkness for people’s life. However, the darkness resides in Fujita’s Attu
Shima Gyokusai (The Massacre of Attu) (1943) (fig.1). In an obturated space in which soldiers
cannot move at all, the soldiers are jumbled together so that friends and
enemies cannot be ascertained. It turns
into the hand-to-hand battle, and the soldiers are dissolved. As Sawaragi argues, Attu Shima Gyokusai rather
seems to ‘disclose the unfoundedness of justice, history and aesthetics’
because Fujita painted too fanatically.
Thus this painting contains the darkness within the brightness. Today Japan has developed economically, and
it might look like Japan is a peace country under article nine of its
war-renouncing constitution (though the president Koizumi recently decided to
send forces to Iraq without a UN mandate).
However, Japan, which has stuck the head in the sand, and has concealed
the memory of the War under the name of pacifism, might have the same kind of
brightness as the wartime that was supported by the ideology. That is to say, contemporary Japan also has
the darkness within the brightness.
Japan might have been supported by the ideology although it is different
from the one in the wartime. The
ideology consists of the concealment of the past.
Silence as a tool
for authorities was imposed not only within, but also from outside Japan. It was not only Japanese authority that
manipulated silence, but also the United States. Genbaku Bungaku (A-Bomb literature) delayed
to be published under the U.S. censorship.
For example, Yoko Ota’s City of Corpses (1948) was completed in
1945, but it was censored at that time.
It took three years to be published.
However, the publisher censored the second chapter, entitled
“Expressionless Faces”, (Tachibana, 1998: 44).
Ota, in her autobiographical short story, mentions about the
interrogation she had with an American officer.
He asked her if anyone else or any foreigners have read it. He finished the interrogation saying, ‘I want
you to forget your memories of the A-bomb.
Since America will never use the A-bomb again, I want you to forget the
event of Hiroshima’ (ibid.: 272).
Tachibana argues that ‘what may have made [the second] chapter
unacceptable to the authorities is not only Ota’s documentation of the effects
of the A-bomb, but her assessment that the bomb marked, rather than caused, the
end of war’ (ibid.: 44).
Silence that was
imposed by the authority had the effect to limit the act of postmemory in Japan
to a great extent. As Foucault argues, ‘in
order to gain mastery over [the people] in reality, it had first been necessary
to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in
speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words
that rendered it too visibly present’ (1984: 17). The authority chose to silence or veil the
fact as though it could be diminished.
Silence here is used as ‘the instrument of the bureaucrat, the
demagogue, and the dictator’ (Haidu in Friedlander (ed.), 1992: 278). However, this notion of silence is only one
aspect of it. Thus, I think that there
is a possibility within silence because silence like memory has got the
ambiguity and the fluidity.
As Peter Haidu
argues, ‘[s]ilence is the antiworld of speech, and at least as polyvalent,
constitutive and fragile…. Silence can
be a mere absence of speech; at other times, it is both the negation of speech
and a production of meaning’ (ibid.).
Silence could imply both yes and no.
Silence can be acknowledgement or ignorance. Silence ‘must be judged in its own contexts,
in its own situations of enunciation’ (ibid.).
Hence, silence has got the duplicity that it is not language, yet a part
of language. It is ‘enfolded in its
opposite, in language. As such, silence
is simultaneously the contrary of language, its contradiction, and an integral
part of language. Silence, in this
sense, is the necessary discrepancy of language with itself, its constitutive
alterity’ (ibid.). Silence ‘neither
bound to nor fragmented by time, is ambiguous and suggestive, implicit and
connotative’ (Kane, 1984: 19). It seems
that silence occupies the space between the said and the unsaid.
In Japan, silence has
been utilized as the instrument of the authority, but silence always contains
the unsaid, that is, things silenced but still there. The hidden past with ‘complex feelings of
indeterminate having happened’ (Lyotard, quoted in Friedlander, 1992: 5) resides
in the long silence of Japan. Silence
itself is the burden. Some people are afraid of the silence to be broken, and
others are waiting for that moment, or trying to break it. I think that the silence has the ability to
hold the past in the present rather than to freeze the past into closure. As Jean-François Lyotard argues, there is ‘something
which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is
negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible’
(1988: 13). It is true that silence
could be the hindrance of postmemory, but at the same time, I think that
postmemory can be practiced through the silence. Thus in the case of Japan, postmemory has
been more like ‘experiences that people ‘remember’ only as the ‘silence’ with
which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute
memories in their own right”. Silence
make people imagine what is veiled, what is buried and what is under the
water. Memory of silence could produce
the fear of not knowing. I would like to
think that the quality of silence has got the possibility of the openness,
though with a great risk. Because of
silence, there are people who try to break the silence with their own memory. For example, three Korean comfort women field
a lawsuit against the Japanese government in 1991 after fifty years of
silence. ‘The military initially refused
to acknowledge responsibility for the system, but once substantial written
evidence showed the extent of this highly organized form of sexual slavery,
which involved about 139,000 Asian women, politicians were reluctant to
compensate the women because they were regarded as prostitutes’ (Lloyd in Lloyd
(ed.), 2002: 84).
However, there is
a great risk within silence when silence becomes obedient to the
authority. Silence allows irrational
narratives or discourses to appear such as the revisionist history textbook,
which I have mentioned above. In
cultural sphere, there is also such kind of tendency. The popularity of Japanese pop culture in
Asia is sometimes used as an excuse for ending the memory of Japanese recent
past history. It is true that silence
caused Japanese people’s ignorance of history.
I personally feel that there must be a place where people can learn
Japanese recent past, and I feel uneasy with the equivocation of the
government. Yet, as an artist Yoshiko
Shimada argues, ‘the language used in the past by activists and feminists is
not effective in moving younger audiences anymore. A dualistic rhetoric tends to paint everything
as black and white, right and wrong, and divide individuals or groups into the
oppressors or the victims. Instead, … we
need to develop a new way of thinking about social and political issues which
is aware of the complex nuances of difference through positioning by gender,
race, class and sexuality’ (ibid.: 189-190).
Moreover, the desire for one single history might be the desire to be
released from the burden of the past by historicizing it. The awareness of silence seems to be
crucial. When we become unaware of
silence, silence could turns into the oblivion.
Thinking about the
inhumanity in the World War II, there is something that cannot be fully told
within historical facts and even within language. Historical facts seem to be never
enough. The writer ‘who attempts to say
what cannot be said, to communicate what eludes language, to convey a unique
experience in the history of mankind, … finds that language is inadequate to
the task (Kane, 1984: 103). In City
of Corpses, Ota writes that she does not want to use the word “hell” ‘because
that would use up her vocabulary of horror, but there was no way to describe
this scene other than as the wrath of hell’ (quoted in Tachibana, 1998:
49). Ota implies the limit of
language. The word “hell” is not enough
to express “the horror”. What silence
contains are not only the unspoken but also the unspeakable. ‘The silence that the crime of Auschwitz
imposes upon the historian, is a sign for the common person. Signs are not referents validatable under the
cognitive regimen, they indicate that something which should be able to put
into phrases cannot be phrased in the accepted idioms. … The silence that
surrounds the phrase “Auschwitz was the extermination camp” is not a state of
mind, … it is a sign that something remains to be phrased which is not,
something which is not determined’ (Lyotard in Friedlander (ed.), 1992:
5). Here silence is not ‘identical with
simple muteness, and the way language breaks down is itself a significant and
even telling process’ (LaCapra in Friedlander (ed.), 1992: 111).
Theodor Adorno
asserts the impossibility of the representation after Auschwitz, stating that ‘[he
has] no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric’ (in Aroto and Gebhardt (eds.), 1998: 312). He means that it is impossible to represent
the real suffering exactly the same within art.
As Min-Ha argues, ‘[t]he truest representation of oneself always
involves elements of fiction and of imagination, otherwise there is no
representation, or else, only a dead, hence “false”, representation (1992:
168). Lyotard also argues that the
unrepresentable exists. ‘[T]he historian
must break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of
phrases, and he or she must venture forth by lending his or her ear to what is
not presentable under the rules of knowledge’ (1988: 57). However, Adorno further argues that ‘this
suffering … demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is
now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice,
consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it’ (in Aroto and Gebhardt
(eds.), op.cit.). Any atrocities have
the dilemma that demand their representation, but at the same time, deny
them. The atrocity is unimaginable
because of its inhumanity, its monstrosity and its enormity (these words can
never be enough).
I would like to
look at the notion of postmemory once again.
As I mentioned above, postmemory is a powerful form of memory that is
not produced out of recollection, but of projection of the others’
memories. Yet, at the same time, as
Hirsch argues, postmemory also ‘implies distance between the self and the other’
(in Bal et al. (eds.), 1999: 9). In any
genocidal acts that were taken place in the twentieth century, distance
remains. ‘[T]he break between then and
now, between the one who lived it and the one who did not, remains monumental
and insurmountable, even as the heteropathic imagination struggles to overcome
it (ibid.). Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
uses the term Matrix as a symbolic space where the self and the other coexist
without fusion. According to her, ‘[i] n
the Matrix a meeting occurs between the co-emerging I and the unknown non-I. Each one neither assimilates nor rejects the
other and their energy consists neither in fusion nor in repulsion, but in
continual re-adjustment of distances, within togetherness or proximity. Matrix is a zone of encounter between the
most intimate and the most distanced unknown’ (1993: 12). Hirsch further suggests that ‘[t]he challenge
of the postmemorial artist is precisely to find the balance that allows the
spectator to enter the image, to imagine the disaster, but that disallows an
overappropriative identification that makes the distances disappear, creating
too available, too easy an access to this particular past’ (in Bal et al.
(eds.), 1999: 10).
Since there is no public history of the twentieth century, or it is still within silence and has not come up to the surface in Japan, art practices, which respond to the recent past, are various. It can be also said that the attitudes of the artists toward the past are different depending on their generations. Of course, there is a gap between the artists who experienced the War and those who were born after the War. The artists I would like to engage with also draws attention to various issues. Some artists usually do not deal with the War, on the other hand other practices of the artists are based on the War. Now I would like to look at works that deal with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How each work responds to these two events is various. Some works imply the unrepresentability, and some works seem to focus on the act of remembrance and work as the counter-monuments.
Tadashi Tonoshiki
was an artist who actually experienced the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima. He was three at that time. It was only in 1975 that he began to produce
works dealing directly with the bombing based on his recollections of the
explosion. He died of hepatic cancer
caused by the nuclear radiation in 1992 at the age of fifty-three. Keloid (1981) (fig.2) is one of his
works. It is a reddish, purplish
grotesque painting. This work was
originally part of a large installation in which this image covered the walls
of an entire gallery. In this work, only
the title refers to the nuclear bomb.
The unspeakability resides in this work.
Although he broke twenty years of silence, the unspeakablity remains.
Probably the mushroom cloud is nothing to him.
For him, some substance cannot represent it. The abstractness is his proximity to the
explosion.
The chaos just
after the explosion is also depicted in the A-Bomb literature and the diaries
of people who experienced the nuclear bomb.
For example, a doctor, Tatsuichiro Akizuki who experienced the nuclear
bomb in Nagasaki recorded his experiences for a week after the bombing until
the official defeat of Japan. He writes,
on the 9th of August, ‘[w]e ran through collapsed houses and burnt-out fields
with bare feet. The sky is dark and the
ground is red. A stark-naked man, a
blood-stained factory man, and a woman with dishevelled hair go this way and
that. Everybody just wanted to escape
somewhere, but nobody understood what had happened’ (quoted in Tachibana,
1998:35).
There are artists who keep taking photographs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shomei Tomatsu is one of them. He was born in 1930 in a city quite close to the military base. Experiencing the occupation of the United States, he experienced the extraordinariness within the ordinariness. During the War, he was told by the adults how nasty the enemies, namely American soldiers, are. However, when he was suffering from the extreme hunger and the poverty, people who gave him food such as chocolate and chewing gum were American soldiers. The world shifted from one side to the other, and he could not believe anything. What he could believe was only what he could see. In 1950, he began to take photographs of ordinary people who were, at that time, American soldiers and half-American, half-Japanese children. In 1960, he was asked to take photographs in Nagasaki for antinuclear campaign. Next year, he started to take photographs of ordinary life in Nagasaki such as people, sites, things and so on and so forth. He was again faced with the extraordinariness within the ordinariness. He was confronted with the lack of aid, discrimination towards people who was the survivor of the nuclear bomb, and the poverty because they could not get a job. His photographs show the extraordinariness within the ordinariness. After World War II, Japan has pretended to have developed and built the country all over again in the shadow of the United States although it is impossible to start from a blank sheet. Even though the wounds are buried, they cannot be eliminated completely. The trace remains like Freud’s mystic writing-pad. As Tachibana argues, ‘in contrast to the claim that one era had been completed and a new one had begun was the fact that [Japan] saw the persistence of excessive materialism, ethnic and racial prejudice, authoritarian institutions, and other cultural trends of the sort that had contributed to the outbreak of World War Two and had been present throughout the war and afterward. In these respects, if a new age was being inaugurated it bore disturbing resemblances to the old – and perhaps no new age was beginning at all’ (1998: 249). Tomatsu’s photographs draw attention to counter-history. In 11:02 A.M. Nagasaki: Urakami Neighborhood with Mount Iwaya in the Distance (1961) (fig.3), a vulnerable tree stand in the field. Close to this site, there was Urakami Cathedral that was destroyed by the blast from the explosion. Tomatsu’s works also show the unrepresentability. All he can do is to take photographs of traces in which a sense of loss resides, and the effect of the nuclear bomb still remains.
There is another artist who was haunted by the nuclear bomb dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tatsuo Miyajima, born in 1957, first encountered with the nuclear bombing in Hiroshima when he was 17 years old on a school trip. He was confronted with the fact that he knew nothing about the nuclear bombings. Since then he could not forget the disquiet he felt in Hiroshima. As an artist, he usually produces works using LEDs with his three concepts: keep changing, connect with everything and continue forever. Since 1995, Miyajima started a project ‘Revive Time Kaki Tree Project’. It responds to a fading memory. Miyajima states, ‘even though the atomic bombings and the Holocaust infringed human rights occurred only a half century ago, memory of these crimes against humanity is beginning to fade. We should remember these crimes as important instructions. One reason for our failure to remember is that daily life today, particularly for the young, is so removed from the tragic events of the recent past. In effect, they have become isolated; become a “closed history”’ (from a Website, Revive Time Kaki Tree Project). Miyajima met the tree doctor, Dr. Ebinuma who had given birth to the second generation of kaki saplings from the trees that survived the nuclear bomb dropped in Nagasaki. Miyajima was deeply moved by alive, green saplings. Then this project started. Kaki saplings are distributed to hosts who applied for them over the world, and are raised by local people. The saplings transform and disseminate around the world with the memory of Nagasaki. Planting the sapling is not the end. It takes ten years to bloom flowers. It is also encouraged to have various activities along with growing kaki trees. The kaki saplings have the presence of the past in the present, and continue to exist over time and space.
The works of Masao
Okabe (born in 1942) focus on activating the memory of the past. Since 1977, he has been doing frottage, which
is the technique of placing a thin paper on an object and rubbing it with
pencil or charcoal so that the form of the object appears. He made frottages of commemorative
copperplate relieves representing scenes of the nuclear bomb ruins which were
taken from a photograph, placed on streets on Hiroshima. He also made frottages of a plate on which is
written ‘n’oubliez pas (don’t forget)’, in memory of the holocaust victims
which sits on a gate in a Jewish ghetto in Paris. He welcomes residents or passers by to
participate in the frottage and combines their cooperative efforts. In The Dark Face of The Light
(1996-2002), he created the works from the remains of the old Ujina station in
Hiroshima. Ujina station was built for
the military usage when Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894. The station is the site where Japanese
colonial history began, and also the site where the nuclear bomb was
dropped. Now the remains of the station are
left in a vast empty space. Okabe
created the frottages of the interstice between kerbstones of the plat
form. He creates the trace of the trace
using the method of frottage. The remains
of the old Ujina station will soon disappear because the superhighway will be
built. This work leaves the trace not to
lose the memory of the war along with the loss of the remains. The act of frottage is in fact the act of memory
and the act of commemoration. It also
seems to me that he tries to uncover what is beneath the surface by peeling the
surface off. Like Miyajima’s practice,
Okabe’s practice brings the past in the present. They try to activate the past. Thus their works are the process rather than
the finished. The act of planting, or
the act of frottage seems to be more important than the outcome.
Each country has developed a different attitude towards its own past. Germany and Japan have dealt with World War II quite differently. As Elsaesser argues, Japan is a country that ‘appears until recently not even to have begun reflecting on the fact that the memory others have of it requires opening up its “history” to outside scrutiny. Germany, on the other hand, has often either invited such scrutiny or has not been allowed by others to forget events that cannot be contained in consensus accounts or exempted from contested representation” (in Sobchack (ed.), 1996: 146). The situation of Japan after the War has been complicated. There are still debates going on whether the War was the invasion or the self-defence among politicians before acknowledging the atrocities that Japanese military committed. There are also people who say that they cannot say anything about the nuclear bomb dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki without taking responsibility for other Asian countries. I do not agree with both of them. The atrocities such as Nanking Massacre and the nuclear bomb dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki both happened. In my opinion, the cause and the effect are not that important. It seems that the act of remembrance is very important in Japan before the past being distorted and forgotten, which it seems that it is already happening. There are some art practices that touch upon the hidden part of the official history and try to break the silence.
Yukinori Yanagi, who was born in 1959, has been primarily working on the question of nation, borderline and system. In World Flag Ant Farm (1990) (fig.5), he created a series of interconnecting boxes, each filled with coloured sand in the pattern of a national flag that represents the nation of the world. He linked each flag to the other flag by plastic tubes. He then released ants into this system which were able to travel between all the networked flags, transporting food and sand. These border crossings eventually resulted in an intermingling of colour throughout the system.
In Wandering Position (1998) (fig. 6), Yanagi placed himself and an ant in a five metre square enclosure. For several hours each day the artist crawled around tracing the paths made by the ant with a red crayon. What interests me in these works is his awareness of the system or the limit represented by boxes and five metre square enclosure. Ants were allowed to wander only within the enclosure. After all, it has been programmed for ants to perform. As Yanagi states, ‘we feel that the incarcerated lack liberty, and that all of their activity is controlled and watched and we assume that this is completely opposite to the way we live our daily life, but I ask myself … Is what I watch, what I watch by my will? Is the direction I am walking determined by me? Is what I am thinking really thought by me? What drives journeys through life?’ (from a Website, Digital Art Resource for Education).
hiko Shimada (born in 1959) is also the artist of post-war generation. Her main focus is the issues of gender, power and nation, and her works centres on issues of sex and consumerism in contemporary Japan in which she makes a connections between ‘the war years, characterized by the rise of nationalism and imperialism, the immediate post-war period, when Japan was occupied by American forces, and, more recently, Japan’s current cultural position within Asia’ (Lloyd in Loyd(ed.), 2002: 84). She locates her works in the political, historical and social context, and questions the way Japanese people have neglected its own past. Her works uncovers repressed histories, and she has produced works which deal with comfort women since 1993. Her works are rather explicit. In A House of Comfort (1993) (fig.8), the military brothel and Asian prostitutes are juxtaposed with a Korean comfort woman standing at the centre. A Month’s Work (1995) (fig.9) is ‘made up of 600 pink condoms in serried rows. [I]t refers to the Korean comfort women’s accounts of the number of men they were forced to serve in a system of enslaved labour, even though many suffered from the painful effects of venereal disease’ (ibid.: 87). She often juxtaposes a woman as object of sex and a woman as a sacred mother. In a handmade artist’s book Comfort Women, Women of Conformity (1994-5) (fig.10), she juxtaposed a Korean woman’s face on the left page with a Japanese woman lighting a soldier’s cigarette on the right page. A statement is attached to each figure. A Korean woman states, ‘once, I had to serve fifty men, and I was so tired. I was given a medicine, but I was still feeling dim. Then the soldier put the cigarette lit into my nose and the womb’ (my translation). On the right page, a Japanese soldier states that how he appreciates the kindness of women. When he is tired, they give him cigarette and light it. He also mentions about white apron, which women wear, that give him energy. In her works, Shimada explicitly asserts the necessity of rethinking Japanese recent past by deploying repressed histories of comfort women. At the same time, she also argues that the issue of comfort women is not the things in the past. A Month’s Work also implies that many non-Japanese women are employed in sex industry. Her works explore ‘how attitudes to women sexuality and the commodification of sex in contemporary Japan are related to deep-rooted issues of nation, race and gender’ (Lloyd in Lloyd (ed.), 2002: 89).
Yanagi and Shimada both touch upon Japanese unpleasant, hidden or repressed histories. Shimada uncovers the repressed histories within her works, whereas Yanagi focuses on the obscurity of the silence in contemporary Japan. He dives into the sea to find something tangible, and something he can grasp, but he ends up finding rusted weapons or fragments of iron. The fragments do not tell many things about the past. Thus he again dives into the sea. It is a repetition of trying to find something tangible which will never be tangible. The fact tells little. The fact is never enough.
Like Shimada, a
young artist Makoto Aida (born in 1965) draws attention to the relationship
between the present and the past. Aida
produced a series called Sensoga Returns (War painting returns) from
1995 to 1996. The series includes Utsukushii
hata (Beautiful Flag) (1995) in which a Japanese and a Korean girl in their
school uniforms and holding their national flags are facing each other, Picture
of an Air Raid on New York (1996) in which New York city is on fire and battle
planes are flying above drawing a sign of infinity, No One Knows the Title
(1996) in which the image of the Parthenon is imposed on the image of the
Atomic Bomb Memorial Dome in Hiroshima and Ohkimi no henikoso shiname
(Let’s Die at the Emperor’s Feet) (1996) (fig.11). All paintings are produced on folding
screens. I would like to focus on Ohkimi
no henikoso shiname. What is in this
work is the jumble. On the background,
travel-agency advertisements are pasted.
They are ads of the southern islands which are transformed from the site
of massacre into tropical resorts attracting Japanese tourists today. According to Aida, dead dolphins are depicted
on the ads. The dolphins refer to the
incident of their mass suicide. Several hundreds
of dolphins were found dead on the beach of Nagasaki, and the local fishermen
eating them were severely criticised by international ecologists. The word ‘JAP’ is written on each dolphin
except for one. On one dolphin, the name
‘Harumi’ is written, who was an adopted child of a literary critic Shinobu
Origuchi, and died in one of the southern islands during the War. The lyrics of a military song, which was used
as a BGM on the radio during the War, is also written with deformed alphabets.
Aida’s series Sensoga
Returns could be dangerous. The
series can be seen as a cry for nationalism.
Yet, what Aida exposes is not nationalism at all. What he exposes is the jumble, the chaos and
the fragility of contemporary Japan. It
is the chaos that resides within the silence, and that is buried. As Midori Matsui argues, ‘Sensoga Returns
was not made with the purpose of inciting nationalism. Aida’s purpose was to use the negative
outcome of Japanese modernisation as an occasion for criticizing the hypocrisy
of post-war democracy, and the tanting effects of its uncritical continuation
of “incomplete modernity” on the present Japanese consciousness’ (in Lloyd
(ed.), 2002: 154). Aida states that he ‘acknowledge[s]
the inevitability of war, discrimination and bullying because they are caused
by [the] erotic drive. Without
recognizing this, there’s no coming up with an effective way to prevent
them. [He thinks] that the hysterical
idealism enforcing the slogan of “love and peace” merely confuses the situation’
(quoted in ibid.: 164). The jumble on
the travel-agency ads seems to be Aida’s attempt to break the silence. Or rather, it might be his abject for the
disguised pacifism that can only exist by silencing the past. In this work, the jumble, which is buried
under the ads, appears on the surface.
In conclusion,
Japan was defeated in the Second World War, and many cities fell into
ruins. Everything disappeared. On the empty field, Japan has rebuilt
buildings and the country. As a result,
Japan has become a peace and economically rich country. However, Japan as peace and economically rich
came into existence only by silencing the past.
The authority has utilized silence, and has repressed history. Therefore, the act of postmemory has been
limited in Japan. It cannot be denied
that the utilization of silence by the authority and the lack of postmemory led
to Japanese people’s ignorance of history.
The history of the twentieth century is silenced in teaching history,
and the responsibility of the emperor Hirohito and war paintings were
silenced. Yet, ‘silencing’ is only one
aspect of the silence. Silence contains
the unsaid, and it also contains the unspeakability and the
unrepresentability. I am not saying that
remaining silence is good. Rather, I
think that silence has the power to make people imagine what is buried, what is
veiled and what is hidden. As long as
there is silence, there can be the act of breaking the silence. The works and practices of the Japanese
artists, which I discussed, seem to approach to the silence in various
ways. The work of Tadashi Tonoshiki
implies the unrepresentability by breaking his own silence. The works of Shomei Tomatsu draws attention
to survivors of the Atomic Bomb and indicates that History is also surrounded
by the silence. Memory is ambiguous, but
the official history, History with capital H is also ambiguous. Yukinori Yanagi took a journey to the
Philippines Sea to search for something hidden in the silence. Yoshiko Shimada breaks silence by uncovering
the past. The art practice of Tatsuo
Miyajima brings the past into the present, and problematizes the oblivion of
the past in Japanese society. Masao
Okabe creates the trace of the ruins not to lose the memory of the War. Takashi Murakami seems to question the
mushroom cloud as the symbol of the Atomic Bomb by painting the mushroom cloud
deliberately. Makoto Aida draws
attention to the similarity between the past and the present. In his work, the jumble that resides within
the silence appears on the surface in the present. In that way, he criticises Japan that cries
for peace without facing the past.
Silence has the possibility of holding the past in the present instead
of freezing the past as the past. Thus
we should always be aware of the silence.
When we become unaware of the silence, it is the real threat of
forgetting the World War II.
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Jacques, Archive Fever: A
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Websites
Digital
Art Resource for Education, http://www.dareonline.org
Revive
Time Kaki Tree Project,
http://www6.plala.or.jp/kaki-project/
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