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- Convenors:
-
Rotem Kowner
(The University of Haifa)
Sven Saaler (Sophia University)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Christopher Szpilman
(Sophia University)
- Discussant:
-
Christopher Szpilman
(Sophia University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- History
- Location:
- Lokaal 1.12
- Sessions:
- Friday 18 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
During the last decade, Japan has been engulfed by a vibrant discourse about its past, and its wartime era in particular. This panel aims to examine several major facets of the current discourse about the wartime era and to analyze its significance and possible cultural and political ramifications.
Long Abstract:
During the last decade, Japan has been engulfed by a vibrant discourse about its past, and its wartime era in particular. Although its roots go back to the 1990s, this discourse has intensified considerably during Abe Shinzō’s long tenure as prime minister and partly due to his agenda to embellish the nation’s past. This panel aims to examine several major facets of this discourse and to analyze its significance and possible cultural and political ramifications. The first of four presentations explores the contemporary discourse of the 1930s domestic terror, with a focus on the political assassinations and abortive putsches. The second presentation examines the decision of several municipalities to demolish memorials marking the sites of wartime forced labor and its consequences. The third examines the Ritsumeikan Peace Museum in Kyoto and the meaning of its exhibit of black urn that contains ashes of Auschwitz victims, where the fourth presentation investigates the contemporary commemoration of wartime assistance to Jewish refugees and its motives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 18 August, 2023, -Rotem Kowner (The University of Haifa)
Paper short abstract:
In recent years, Japan has evinced a consuming interest in the help extended to Jewish refugees during the wartime era. At present, there are several museums that commemorate this help. This presentation explores the scope of this commemoration and analyze its motives.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, Japan has evinced a consuming interest and even fascination with the help extended to Jewish refugees during the wartime era. The most important figure with this regard is Sugihara Chiune, the Japanese consul in Lithuania, who in 1940 issued several thousand transit visas to refugees and so facilitated, in part, their departure for East Asia. Sugihara has been commemorated in several museums, exhibitions, many books and films, and recently even a symphony. At present, there are efforts carried to track and commemorate several other Japanese who arguably helped rescuing Jewish refugees during the wartime era. This presentation will explore the scope of this sort of commemoration and analyze its motives within the broader discourse of war and memory in Japan.
Sven Saaler (Sophia University)
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, I examine the change in government perceptions of wartime forced labor. I will show that revisionist views have gained influence both on the national and the local level, leading to the revision of apologies and the demolition of memorials marking sites of wartime forced labor.
Paper long abstract:
During the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945), Japan recruited millions of workers through various mechanisms of labor mobilization. To achieve its ultimate objective of victory in the war, the government reallocated laborers, moving them from one sector of the economy to others, and from one region to another. This policy of mobilization and reallocation affected the whole Empire, including the colonial territories. Due to the increasing number of Japanese men being drafted for military service in the last years of the war, an increasing number of women were mobilized to work in war-related factories, while workers from colonial and occupied territories were conscripted in growing numbers to be sent to Japan, where they were allocated to mines or construction sites.
In this presentation, I examine the change in postwar perceptions of wartime labor. I will show that revisionist views have gained influence both on the national and the local level.
Responding to inflammatory media campaigns, such as the launch of the column “History Wars” (rekishisen) by Sankei Shinbun in 2014, several Japanese municipalities have demolished memorials marking the sites of wartime forced labor. Defying academically established definitions, judicial rulings, previous government statements as well as the commonsensical usage of such terms, the national government has shifted its position to one of non-recognition of forced labor, arguing, for example, that “expressions such as ‘forced to work’ … do not mean ‘forced labor’.” (Foreign Minister Kishida, 2015)
However, subtle distinctions were made between the memorials dedicated to Chinese forced laborers and those dedicated to Koreans. As I will show in this presentation, relations with Korea massively deteriorated due to these changes in interpretations, but Sino-Japanese relations remained relatively unaffected.
Ran Zwigenberg (Pennsylvania State University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examine the exhibition of Holocaust survivor remains in Japanese museums and the way war memory in Poland, Israel, and beyond intersected with local war memories. The Auschwitz urns' journey reveals the complex politics and cultural landscape of the transnational commemoration of WW II
Paper long abstract:
At the Ritsumeikan Peace Museum in Kyoto exhibit there stands a little, black urn that contains ashes of Auschwitz victims. The urn is one of several urns in Japan, the first of which arrived in Hiroshima in 1963– a history I explored elsewhere, yet its story is separate and unique. It was brought to Kyoto by peace activists, who were wishing to make amends for the crimes of their own countryman in China, as part of their efforts to promote peace education in Kyoto. Their journey was both transnational, converging with the Polish Communist Party memory diplomacy and its use of the camps to forward its agenda and the use of the remains of the dead in global commemoration, as well as a very local one. The Auschwitz and other camp museums have sent dozens of similar urns all around Poland and globally, building a secular network of pilgrimage sites with its own relics and altars in schools, museums, and memorials. Importantly, the likely Jewish identity of the remains was usually not mentioned. In Japan, the Poles connected with a group of veterans and activists who wished to uncover the activities of Kyoto’s own 16th Division, which was heavily involved in the Nanking massacre. The (literal) objectification of the Jewish dead in a place so far removed from Europe meant different things for different actors in this story. Tracing the urn’s journey and its various uses, reveal the complex politics and cultural landscape of the transnational commemoration of World War II in its very local meanings in Japan, Poland, and beyond.
Sarah Kovner (Columbia University)
Paper short abstract:
Recent years have seen an outpouring of discourse on the US internment of Japanese civilians, but less on the captivity of its POWs in Japan. As descendents seek to reshape the stories of their parents, how can we more fully understand the experience of internees and POWs in the Pacific War?
Paper long abstract:
The previously unpublished letters of Futoru Yoneoka reveal life at Tule Lake: flower-arranging and poetry-writing juxtaposed against fires, shootings, and martial law. After requesting to return to Japan to join his parents and siblings, Yoneoka was marked "disloyal" and held from 1942-1946. Strikingly, Allied POW diaries and recollections detail quotidian baseball and plays, against violence and rotten food. Allied POWs such as Leland Chandler were moved from camp to camp throughout the Japanese empire. Taken together, these experiences shed light on the complex story of captivity during the Pacific War.
At the time, Washington diplomats sent missive after missive detailing the torture of American servicemen held in Japanese POW camps, to which Tokyo diplomats returned cables protesting the treatment of Japanese internees at Tule Lake. Examining the particulars of these experiences can reveal the parallels and ruptures of internees in the US with those of Allied POWs in the Japanese empire, and help us shed light on the meaning of captivity in war.