Paper short abstract:

Despite historians’ growing interest in historical fiction with its potential to make history more inclusive, some issues still remain. Given its fictionality, this paper discusses Endō Shūsaku and his historical novel Silence to consider the ethics of ‘giving voices to the voiceless’ in the past.

Paper long abstract:

‘Kirishitan documents say little about those who apostatised […] Of course, it is impossible to speak of countless unknown converts, but even the most representative apostates have been neglected. […] the weak were silenced by politicians or historians.’

Shusaku Endo, Kirishitan no Sato [Village of Christians] (Tokyo: Chuo Kouron Shinsha, 1974), pp.29-30.

Silence (1966), a novel written by Japanese Catholic author Endō Shūsaku, depicts the history of Christianity in seventeenth-century Japan, focussing on the lives of Portuguese Jesuit priestly apostates under the strict Christian persecution. While Silence has impacted the popular perception of the history of Christianity in Japan, it has tended to be criticised by historians for its historical inaccuracies or used as a ‘tool’ for examination of other topics such as martyrdom, as can be seen in Hirofumi Yamamoto’s work. Historical fiction, however, has gradually been gaining ‘authority’ as a research topic among historians for its ability to challenge the existing dominant history as well as provide a space for being progressive. Borrowing the argument of theorist Hayden White, ‘the practical past’ including historical fiction or the act of its creation, in contrast to ‘the historical past’ (academic history), goes beyond the argument of authenticity. This enables us to consider the significance of ‘the practical past’ among other historical narratives in public. Building upon the current historiographical turn towards analysing historical fiction as a form of public history, this paper analyses Endō as an agent of ‘the practical past’ who attempted to ‘give voices to the voiceless’, the forgotten apostates, and Silence as its production. Endō’s concern was the missing history of apostates, which he saw as veiled under the dominant and glorious narrative of martyrs. This motivated Endō to let apostates ‘live again from the ashes […] to hear their voices’ in Silence. Whilst Endō aimed to make history more inclusive by reviving the stories of marginalised people with no written record, his practice opens up a question: is ‘giving voices to the voiceless’ ethical? This paper examines the ownership of history and ‘recovery’ of marginalised voices as a crucial issue for public and academic historians today.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the ‘legacy successor’ (densōhsha) initiative used in some Japanese museums in place of hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to convey eyewitness testimony on behalf of those unable to do so themselves, asking what ethical issues might arise with such a programme.

Paper long abstract:

‘Can successors pass on the words that come out of our souls, something so painful, our experiences and thoughts and feelings?’ – Emiko Okada (in Rosner, 2017), eight years old at the time of the Hiroshima bombing. Before her death in April 2021, Okada entrusted the retelling of her experience to Yasukazu Narahara from Tokyo, a ‘legacy successor’. This paper analyses Hiroshima ‘legacy successor’ initiative from an ethical standpoint.

For years after the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, acting as kataribe (storytellers), hibakusha recounted their experiences to museum visitors. Hearing a talk from a hibakusha was a fixed feature of a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, or the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, both of which opened in 1955. However, as of 2022, the average age of a hibakusha is 84. This has led to an inevitable decline in living hibakusha who can still visit the museum to give lectures, challenging ‘museum management to maintain an interpretation form where the hibakusha tell their tragic experiences to both visitors and students’ (Yoshida et al. 2016: 36).

In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some memorial museums offer visitors the experience of listening to denshōsha, (legacy successors), who did not directly experience the event. Denshōsha are trained for three years to ‘inherit’ a hibakusha’s experience so that they can still convey their testimony at the museum. However, the idea that someone can give testimony on behalf of a direct eyewitness could be considered ethically problematic. Indeed, some ‘aging kataribe have a dilemma that their stories of agonizing memories are very personal and should not be told by other people’ (Hashimoto and Telfer, 2019).

Based on scholarly literature, publicly available interviews with denshōsha, and fieldwork conducted in Japan between June-August 2022, this paper raises significant questions about the ethics of storytelling, a relatively under-researched area of Japanese museology. This paper is important for those in Japanese Studies, as it offers a different perspective to the extensive scholarship on the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum which usually concerns the display of artefacts.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of language and translation in interpreting historical narratives at heritage sites of conflict in Japan’s major tourist cities. It shall highlight the significance of translation policy in providing access for international stakeholders to narratives of past conflict.

Paper long abstract:

Is there a transnational demand amongst stakeholders of historical conflict to access difficult heritage sites? If so, how far does translation policy at such sites accommodate these stakeholders, whether national citizens or international visitors?

In answering those questions, I shall focus in this presentation on international war memorials in Kyoto, one of Japan’s most popular tourist destinations. Successive Japanese governments have invested heavily in remaking the international image of post-war Japan through the soft power of cultural heritage. This has resulted in over 172 million tourists visiting from overseas in the past decade alone (JTB Tourism Research & Consulting Co. 2022). This has led to the creation of an historical authorized heritage discourse for these visitors which focusses on pre-industrial and post-war Japan (Smith 2006; Fukuma 2019), as well as a high standard of multilingual signage and tourist guidance in internationally popular cities. However, upon closer inspection, the bilingual tourist might notice discrepancies between Japanese-language narratives and those in English at sites related to contentious historical conflict (Moxham 2022). I argue that Asia-Pacific War heritage sites have varying degrees of linguistic access for overseas visitors who may identify as a stakeholder in that history.

These difficult heritage sites might be uncomfortable for national heritage management bodies, but post-conflict development scholars argue that stakeholder access to sites commemorating past conflict is essential for creating discourse between stakeholder groups and allowing them to process traumatic collective memory (MacDonald 2015; Giblin 2014). Furthermore, translational justice theory applied to this transnational context makes it clear that the presence of a stakeholder’s native language creates a sense of recognition and respect much needed in the sorely contested theatre of war memory in East Asia (De Schutter 2017).

I shall present findings on a study comparing Google Maps reviews of Kyoto Ryōzen Gokoku Shrine and Mimizuka, assessing the extent to which translation practice affects public access to international war discourse. This study will focus on English and Japanese-speaking tourists and other visitors, comparing their interpretation with the narrative offered in their chosen language and other translations.