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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how The Ants (2006) challenges existing approaches to the memory of World War II through the history of the Japanese presence in China after 1945. Recent contributions from Memory Studies are used to examine how the film calls into question the patterns of Perpetrator Cinema

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to re-examine the history of the Japanese military presence in China after the surrender of the Japanese Empire in World War II through Kaoru Ikeya’s The Ants (Ari no heitai, 2006). The important role that the Japanese soldiers played in the last phase of the Chinese Civil War (1945-49) has not received enough scholarly attention yet. Almost 4 million of Japanese civilian and soldiers who were stationed in China proper when the empire collapsed, including 1.5 million of Japanese troops at disposal of the Nationalists. Since they were better equipped and trained than any side of the Chinese conflict, many major cities in China were under control of the Japanese authorities even after the surrender. Having them to fight against the Communists was an offer that Chiang Kai-shek could not refuse. As a consequence, they became the main force in the Shanxi Province, where 15,000 Japanese soldiers fought alongside the warlord Yen His-shan and played a key role in battles against the Communists. By following one of them, the paper assesses how this film challenges existing approaches to the Japanese and Asian memory of World War II by questioning all previous narratives on the conflict. The analysis uses two major shifts in Memory Studies, the “perpetrator turn” and the “transcultural turn”, in order to interrogate how The Ants calls into question the patterns of “Perpetrator Cinema” and showcases a potentially new tendency to transnational memories. While the film engages in certain repetitive tropes that can be found in other “perpetrator films”, the goal of this paper is casting light into how it also distorts that genre by giving less predominance to the concepts of trauma and guilt, bringing to the fore the very problem of articulating a narrative. To that end, it will be explored how the film touches elements from the several culture memories of World War II in Japan but without fitting into any of them. Do we need to redefine concepts of “perpetrator” and “victim” in contemporary Japanese documentary? Is this a “memory film”? The paper will try to answer all these questions.