The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 9 | Issue 30 | Number 1 | Jul 20, 2011

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Against Forgetting: Three Generations of Artists in Japan inDialogue about the Legacies of World War II　　忘却に抗う−−第二次世界大戦の遺物にとりくむ三世代の日本人芸術家

Laura Hein, Rebecca Jennison

Aga ins t Fo rge t t ing : ThreeGenerations of Artists in Japan inDialogue about the Legacies ofWorld War II

Rebecca Jennison and Laura Hein

Although international consensus has it thatthe Japanese people are unusually reluctant toface their own wartime past, this generalizationhas never been entirely true, as regular readersof The Asia Pacific Journal already know. Likehuman beings everywhere, since 1945 Japanesehave debated the lessons of war and disagreedabout its meaning among themselves. And,also like people everywhere, many Japaneseregret both official policies and widespreadindividual behaviors of the past. They not onlydesire reconciliation with Koreans, Chinese,and other Asians, but also recognize that, asJapanese, they cannot dictate its terms. Somehave already entered into cross-nationaldialogue about the war and the colonialviolence that reached its crescendo during thewar years. Moreover, precisely becausereflection on such issues is uncomfortable, theystruggle over how to do so, often turning tooblique or refracted approaches, what DoraApel calls “the sideways glance,” such asthrough literary or artistic expression.1 Boththis ambivalence and these strategies arehuman rather than Japanese traits.

Visual artists, filmmakers, and fiction writershave far more experience expressing complexand contradictory emotions than do historians,so their prominent role in memory studies

globally is not surprising.2 They show us how toconvey the complex and sometimes messyindividuality of actors. When we appreciatethe ways that people are simultaneously well-meaning, bigoted, intelligent, obtuse, flawed,internally contradictory, and/or troubled humanbeings, it is easier to recognize the individualityof perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, whilestill acknowledging the actions that dividedthem as groups. Artistic work also directs ourattention to the processes of imagination and toaffective linking, explaining why some acts ofhistorical imagination feel so much moresatisfying than do others. Finally, identifyingthese contradictory qualities helps indicate astandpoint that can make reconciliationpossible.

Of course, the style in which people imaginethe past is not the same for everyone. Oneobvious difference is generational. Whiledebates over war remembrance havereverberated through Japanese society atregular intervals ever since 1945, their natureis shifting as the generations of people whoexperienced the 1940s “join the great majority”that will one day claim us all.3 In many ways,2010 served as a powerful symbolic reminderof that generational shift in Japan because somany significant twentieth-century events werecommemorated— including the 100thanniversary of the annexation and colonizationof the Korean Peninsula by Japan, the 55th yearsince World War II ended, the 60th anniversaryof the beginning of the Korean War and the 10th

anniversary of the 2000 International Women’sWar Crimes Tribunal.4 In East Asia as

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elsewhere, the grey-haired individuals whotestified to their direct personal experiences ofwar and colonial domination have had their sayand now are yielding to people who have nochoice but to make a larger imaginative leap inorder to understand the wartime past.

Dialogue Across Generations: Individualmemories, Postremembrance, andImaginative Reconstruction

People who lived through the war in Japan needlittle prompting to remember how that erasmelled, sounded, and felt, as one of us realizedlast year when an older friend casuallymentioned that she would instantly recognizethe sound of a B-29 plane overhead eventhough it had been decades since she heardone. These individuals also carry in their headsthe internal logic of Japanese society in the1940s. By contrast, the social ethos andinstitutional environment of the wartime eraare so distant now that it is extremely hard toimagine twenty-somethings of today’s Japanconforming to its outmoded expectations. Young J apanese t oday—l ike youngAmericans—can barely fathom many elementsof the wartime cognitive universe, such as itsrigid class and gender hierarchies or the casualdaily violence meted out within military ranks. They have no choice but to piece togetherisolated fragments of the past, using a varietyof strategies to shape their images of the waryears. And, while all generations interpret thehistorical events of the decades before theirbirth through assumptions that differ fromthose of their parents, such shifts are especiallypronounced when social change is asmomentous and as abrupt as it was for mid-twentieth century Japanese.

And what of the generation in between,particularly individuals born in the 1940s and1950s? Although they do not remember thewar, they still experienced it in a profound anddistinctive--although indirect--manner asnumerous memoirs and commentaries attest.

Marianne Hirsch has written about thedifferences between acts of remembrance bypeople with first-generation experience of thewar versus those of their children. She callsth is second-generat ion exper ience"postmemory," and also differentiates it fromthe preoccupations of historians or othersinterested in more far-flung outposts of thepast. Difficult experiences–as World War II wasfor nearly everyone in East Asia–mark people inways that profoundly affect their child-rearingpractices.5 Her primary example, ArtSpiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,brilliantly evokes the ways that Art’s parents’harrowing experiences in occupied Poland andAuschwitz shaped his identity despite his farmore comfortable childhood in New York City. In the opening pages of that memoir, young Artexpects sympathy when some other kids roller-skate off without him. Instead, his father stopssawing a board: “Friends? Your friends? If youlock them together in a room with no food for aweek then you could see what it is, friends!” Small wonder that Art feels compelled tounderstand the forces that shaped his father’sworld v iew, or to express that questartistically. 6

Hirsch’s work has been very influential becauseit builds on Freudian theory about howindividuals respond to trauma—through unconscious processes of repression andd i sp lacement . P roper ly speak ing ,“postmemory” refers only to a singlegenerat ion : the peop le who pursueremembrance in order to make the bafflingconditions of their own upbringing morecomprehensible. Their personal historiesinclude elements that are completelyirreconcilable with the rest of their lives. Thelives of postrememberers are indelibly marked“by traumatic events that can be neitherunderstood nor recreated.” In her formulation,t h e i r r e s p o n s e t o t h a t d i l e m m a i s“postmemory,” which is “a powerful and veryparticular form of memory precisely because itsconnection to its object or source is mediated

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not through recollection but through animaginative investment and creation.”7 Hirschactually waffles on whether “postmemory” canextend to a third generation, both in her bookand a recent essay, but, either way, hercontention is that family stories andphotographs are the mechanisms by whichpeople reframe the years before their birth asessential to their identities.8 Some of theseeffects may stretch beyond a single generationbut they are surely most powerful for thechildren of the people directly traumatized. Asshe explains, “postmemorial work ….strives toreactivate and reembody more distantsocial/national and archival/cultural memorialstructures by reinvesting them with resonantindividual and familial forms of mediation andaesthetic expression.”9 Most valuably, she callsattention to the profound emotional investmentin the past by people too young to remember ita n d e x p l a i n s w h y t h i s o c c u r s . Postrememberers feel an intense desire tomake their own sense out of that past toaddress the profound cognitive dissonancecreated by growing up in the homes of peoplestill responding to already-vanished events.

Hirsch, like other memory studies scholars, hasstruggled with how to expand this analysis toinclude remembrance by larger communities. It is particularly vexing when applied to peoplewho did not personally experience the terribleevent in question. While Freudian theoryprovides an elegant explanation for individuals’engagement with the traumatic past, it is farless useful in showing how larger groups arriveat a common understanding of that past or howa second generation does. One way to handlethat problem is to move to a more genericunderstanding of trauma, the strategyemployed by Dora Apel, writing on “the art ofsecondary witnessing” of the holocaust, herterm for second-generation remembrancethrough artistic expression.10 And perhapsdoing so better captures the processes bywhich individuals as well as communities makesense of their world. Yet the work of scholars

such as Hirsch and Cathy Caruth remainshighly influential precisely because theyground it in Freudian theory.11

One way to retain their rigorous explanation forindividual behavior while opening it out tobecome a social phenomenon is to treatpostmemory, like memory itself, as a strategythat incorporates intergenerat ionaldialogue—which functions as a kind of talk-therapy--as well as an internal psychologicalprocess. Depictions of the past frequentlydevelop out of intergenerational dialogue,particularly as the event in question recedes intime. This is one reason why people so oftenonly begin talking about the past openly andfrequently a decade or more after an importantevent. Hirsch identifies family photographsand family stories as key to postremembrancebut this misdirects attention to the talismanicobject when the emotional power comes fromthe process of conveying historical knowledge,something that artists integrate into themaking of new and intensely personaltalismanic objects in the form of paintings,prints, collages, videos, and other art media. The members of the generat ion thatremembers World War II across the globe haveembarked on remembrance in large part tosway younger people out of a desire to makethe war emotionally comprehensible to them.Often these older individuals were only movedto begin because earlier interactions revealedthe cluelessness of young people. This is why,for example, the National World War IIMemorial in Washington D.C. was only plannedin the 1990s and completed in 2004.

Intergenerational dialogue is central to theremembrance of the next two generations aswell, although in differing ways. Moreover,such dialogue is the precise point at which thefundamentally psychological familialrelationship intersects with understandings ofthe past for a larger community, such as anation. Indeed, while Apel’s main concern iswith the problem of finding a way to represent

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the holocaust that does not “risk either a falselymanipulative and moralizing politicalinstrumentalization or a depressing sense ofobsession and despair,” the strategy she chartsas a more successful form of representationactually incorporates intergenerationaldialogue as a central aspect of the art workitself. As she points out, Art Spiegelman solvedthe problem of how to tell his parents’ storywithout being consumed by it by explicitlyframing it as a dialogue with his father.12

Nearly all people under fifty years old todaywho engage the events of the 1940s are ratherarbitrarily choosing to do so rather thanseeking to manage powerful emotions thatpsychically cannot be ignored, the behaviorHirsch labels “postmemory” and identifies ascrucial for Art Spiegelman. To be precise,individuals so far removed from the war mayidentify some stubbornly incompatible shardsof the wartime past that linger in the present,and may also incorporate them into theircreative expression, but these projects areindirect and idiosyncratic imaginativereconstructions of the past. Such individualsoften are deliberately selecting specificelements of their heritage as importantstatements of identi ty whi le equal lydeliberately ignoring other elements. Bydefinition, such a thoughtful and consciousprocess cannot be a Freudian response totrauma. Older people too, are contributing to afundamentally public social process when theyshape their message for younger generations,rather than “just” giving voice to a profoundpsychological trauma. But, as the strategies ofartists described here suggest, theirengagements with their audiences, often muchyounger than themse lves , funct ionsimultaneously to bring their concerns onto thelarger social stage and to partially resolve theinternal conflict. And, while the art object itselfmay be arresting, it is the human engagementsurrounding its production, dissemination, anddisplay that operates as therapeutic treatment.

Artists who experienced the war

How then have artists and writers contributedto reimagining the war in Japan and howimportant is the intergenerational process? Quite a few, including most whose World War IIremembrance are internationally famous, havenot only challenged wartime priorities, but alsohave specifically sought to reach younger people. This group includes both the creator ofthe autobiographical manga (and film) BarefootGen, Nakazawa Keiji, (b. 1939) and NosakaAkiyuki, (b. 1930) whose novel Grave of theFireflies was made into a prize-winninganimated film in 1988 by director TakahataIsao (b. 1935).13 These works shine a harshlight on the cruelty of both the wartimegovernment and of many individual Japanesetoward young children. Nakazawa alsoaddressed the distinctive suffering of Koreancolonial subjects in Japan, beginning in theearly 1970s. Because these works are aboutthe experience of children and are in visualform, both were immediately accessible toyoungsters. Nakazawa began depicting theatomic bombing in manga form the day afterattending his mother’s funeral, where he wasshocked to discover that her bones had becomeso brittle due to her exposure to radiation aquarter-century earlier that nothing but ashremained after her cremation. Nakazawa’swife was expecting their first child when hismother died, and both were troubled by thethought that she would never meet hergrandchild. Sleepless over these personalsorrows, Nakazawa then moved beyond his ownfamily story: “I thought and thought, and italways came to this: ‘Have the Japanesepursued and settled responsibility for the war?’‘Have the Japanese pursued and settled theissue of the atomic bomb?’ I realized that bothissues had been rendered ambiguous, thatneither had been settled.…I resolved to fight aone-man battle.”14

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Cover of Richard Minear, Autobiography ofBarefoot Gen

Internationally recognized painters Maruki Iri(1901-1995) and Maruki Toshi (1912-2000)were impelled by the same impulse to conveythe horrors they personally experienced inHiroshima in 1945 and they too squarelyaddressed Japanese oppression of other Asiansfrom the 1970s. Their work includes, forexample, a large 1972 painting of crows flyingpast a Korean woman’s chima chogori dress,symbolizing the Koreans who were brought toHiroshima to work in the local armamentsfactories and who perished in 1945.15 Theychose the subjects of their later paintings bytalking to visitors of all ages at their firstexhibitions and responding to their commentsand criticisms.16

Th is and o ther work i s v i s ib le here(http://www.aya.or.jp/~marukimsn/english/gen

bakuE.htm).

Similarly, in 2006, contemporary artistTomiyama Taeko expressed her frustration atfailing to fully convey the savagery of Japan’simperial policies to her compatriots. “I feel sosad and angry. What did we do? What did I do?It is difficult to create art that expresses anyperspective other than ‘Japan is the victim.’When I try to show how many Korean peoplesuffered, it is seen as a Korean issue. Perhaps itis easier to express this through artwork thanthrough literature because the visual mediumcan communicate directly. But it is hard to findp l a c e s t o s h o w s u c h w o r k h e r e i nJapan.”17 Tomiyama, who is still painting at age89, is one of the last artists of her generation toretain significant control over the ways that herexpression is interpreted in public. She iskeenly aware that few in her audiences todayshare her experiences and struggles toovercome this chasm, for example by avoidinginteraction with professional art dealers and artcritics and exhibiting where studentscongregate instead. Yet Tomiyama has enjoyedfar more publicity in the last fifteen years thanat any earlier time, suggesting that she hassuccessfully connected to younger Japanesewho approach the war on ly through“postmemory” or in even less intimate ways.Her first major exhibit in Tokyo was not until1995, when Tama University Art Museumshowed Silenced by History.18 Tomiyama’ssignature theme is the moral obligation toremember the unnamed victims of war. She iscurrently hard at work, finishing a series ofpaintings about today’s war in Afghanistan,drawing on her own travels there in 1967 aswell as more recent images of Afghanistantaken by photojournalists.19 She has also begunthree large oil paintings in response to theMarch 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and ongoingnuclear disaster in Fukushima, connecting thepast to the present in new ways.

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Tomiyama Taeko, Foundation ofManchukuo, painting from “Harbin:Requiem for the 20th Century,” 1995

The work of artists of Tomiyama’s generationis now nearly all mediated by younger museumcurators, gallery owners, and art historians,who are making such art more visible, both inJapan and abroad. This group includes such“postrememberers” as museum curatorsKobayashi Hiromichi at the Tama ArtUniversity Museum and Mizusawa Tamotsu atthe Kamakura Museum of Modern Art. Kobayashi has also played a central role asphotographer and collaborator in theproduction of Tomiyama Taeko’s slide and DVD

works; in effect he is transmitting the artist’sideas through new media, while developing hisown “postrememberer’s” representationalstrategies in innovative sites of expression,further illustrating our point that these twogenerations work in dialogue with each other inmany kinds of ways.20

Both Kobayashi and Mizusawa also haverecently displayed works by Miyazaki Shin,another artist whose work is infused with hiswartime memories. Like Tomiyama, Miyazakiis far better known in the 21st than he was inthe 20th century. Miyazaki, born in 1922, is nolonger an active artist.21 He grew up inYamaguchi prefecture, graduated from artschool in 1942 and was drafted a few monthslater. His unit was dispatched to northeastManchuria and, when the Kwantung armydisintegrated in August 1945, Miyazaki at firstwas stranded there without food, and then wastaken prisoner and transported to Siberia,returning home only in 1949. He resumedpainting but did not then depict his wartimeexperiences. In 1965, Miyazaki not onlyenjoyed his first exhibition but also won theNitten Exhibition Prize for one of his paintings,“Night of the Festival” (Matsuri no Yoru). Twoyears later, Miyazaki’s canvas “SideshowPerformers” (Misemono Geinin) won theprestigious Yasui Sōtarō Memorial Prize. Miyazaki began teaching painting at TamaUniversity in 1981, at age 59, and his careerreally only took off when he was in his sixties,after his personal experiences of the 1940sbecame the main topic of his work. He won aprize in 1984 for “Winter Light” (Fuyu noHikari), and had a major exhibit of his work atTama Art University Museum in 1992. In 1999the Yamaguchi prefectural art museumdisplayed the first of his monumental paintingsabout Siberia, some of which were also shownat the Kamakura museum in 2001. Mizusawa,the curator in Kamakura, also commissionedtwo canvasses from Miyazaki for the Sao PauloBiennale of 2004, and Miyazaki chose to depictin abstract form the miserable weeks just after

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Japan’s surrender. His work is visible on hiso f f i c i a l w e b s i t e h e r e(http://www.shin-miyazaki.com/).

Miyazaki’s large, dark, densely texturedcanvasses have a potent impact for viewers butreproduce poorly. Like Tomiyama, Miyazaki isprimarily concerned with giving expression tothe feelings of powerless people, whosesuffering is of no concern to others. Heincludes his former self in that group more thandoes Tomiyama, but never frames hisexperience as a national Japanese one. Nordoes his work convey bitterness at his captors.Rather, it emphasizes loss, abandonment, thefragility and value of human life, and, mostimportantly, the intensity of his own feelingsabout the past. Miyazaki explains that, likeTomiyama, he is motivated in part by his horrorthat younger people have not yet learned toavoid war. While he struggles to articulate histangled emotions about his personalexperiences, Miyazaki is crystal-clear that heembarked upon that struggle “because we haveonce again entered a period of warfare.”22 Hisinsistent demand for our attention helpsexplain why sustained direct interaction withsurvivors is such a powerful phenomenon.

Indeed, postrememberers not only receivethese messages, they actively solicit and helpshape them through their interactions with theolder artists. Mizusawa describes Miyazaki’swork as follows: “When we experience a workby Shin Miyazaki , we are f i rs t o f a l loverwhelmed by the silent voices that emanatefrom the physical object that is the artwork,regardless of its size or medium.….We hear,too, intermixed, the voices of others, for in hisworks the artist has committed his prayers forthe eternal repose of their souls.”23 Mizusawaexplains that he said this to Miyazaki in 2003and that the artist, then 82 years old,responded to his comments by producing fivehuge canvases in six months rather than justthe two Mizusawa had requested. One of thesewas “Mud,” a work that Mizusawa describes as

at first seeming to signal “bottomless despair,”but, after more extended viewing, reveals “aplace of surging energy that is not entirelynegative.” Mizusawa, the “postrememberer,”expresses his own stance to wartime society aswell as to the artwork when he explains that“these paintings present unstable, incompletesituations and fail to provide a port of refugefor the viewer’s emotions.” That emotionalstate, in turn, “arouses numerous memoriesand cannot be compressed within individualexperience.”24 Message received indeed.25

Postrememberer Shimada Yoshiko

The postmemory generation includes not onlycurators and art historians but also artists suchas Shimada Yoshiko. Shimada, born in 1959,was raised in the shadows of the U.S. Air ForceBase in Tachikawa near Tokyo, formerly usedby the Imperial Japanese Army. After attendinguniversity in the United States, she spent timein Berlin, where she viewed the work of artistsengaging directly with the question of Germanwar responsibility. Later, she lived in NewYork at the time of the first Gulf War, and sawartists dissent through their art. Comfortablein English and German, Shimada has built atransnational platform for herself, meaning thather reflections on her country of birth areinformed by deep knowledge about warexperience and war remembrance elsewhere. On visits to Japan in the early 1990s she wasangered by the nostalgic portrayals of Japan’swar and the Shōwa Emperor, who had passedaway in 1989, and so began her artisticreflection on the wartime past. In her series“Past Imperfect,” she both challenged thesimplistic view that the war was an unavoidablet ragedy and t i ed tha t theme to herlongstanding interest in gender.

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Shimada Yoshiko, “White Aprons” from theseries “Past Imperfect” 1992

“Past Imperfect” explored the extent to whichJapanese women had participated in andstrengthened the war effort—and the costs ofthat collaboration to themselves, to otherJapanese women, and most of all to Asianwomen. She chose as her symbol for theirenthusiasm the white aprons, or kappogi, thatwartime Japanese patriot ic women’sorganizations had adopted. Using oldphotographs of these mothers holding smilingbabies, waving flags, and lighting thecigarettes of soldiers, she created collages thatcommented on their choices. Her critique wasmade sharper by the border around one ofthese collages, which incorporated photos ofyoung “military comfort women.” As sheexplained, “I realized that Japanese womenwere not entirely the voiceless victims of male-dominant militarism. Many were enthusiasticfascists and willing to sacrifice themselves andto victimize others in the name of theemperor.”26 This project emphasized the waysthat wartime Japanese women were drawn intothe conflict as mothers of soldiers, a form ofrecognition that simultaneously celebratedthem and severely limited their life choices,while also noting that Asian women wereassigned far harsher tasks.

In this early work, Shimada seems to bedistancing hersel f from the wart ime

generation’s self-serving romanticizedremembrance but as time went on, shechallenged herself and other postrememberersto acknowledge their own responsibility for thepast, despite being born after the war. Indeed,the impetus for “Past Imperfect” came fromShimada’s recognition that she shared some ofthe qualities that had led so many wartimeJapanese to accept the need for millions ofpointless deaths. As Shimada put i t ,“Personally, I basically like absolute discipline,and tend to be swayed by emotion rather thanlogic and so I suppose it would be quite simplefor me to become a fascist.”27 And, even morefundamentally, she doubts that anyone ever canbe completely confident of the morality of theirown behavior within a repressive society. Asshe put it, “when I talk about art and activism, Ido not make art from the viewpoint of theoppressed or the victimized. I make art tomake the oppressors think of what they do fromwhere they are. But there is no clear borderlinebetween the oppressors and the oppressedanymore.”28 Shimada feels a responsibility torevisit the war precisely because she did notherself experience it and so cannot beconfident that she would have behavedethically.

S h i m a d a ’ s 1 9 9 5 w o r k , “ C o m f o r tWomen/Women of Conformity,” expanded onthe images of military comfort women that hadfirst appeared in “Past Imperfect” by includingphotographs of the aged survivors and snippetsof their testimonies in installation works.29 Shejuxtaposed them with startlingly racisteugenicist comments by famous presurrenderfeminists such as Hiratsuka Raichō, pointingout the racial boundaries of Hiratsuka’simagination. If earlier feminists had combinedacute gender analysis with such an absence ofempathy for Asian women, how can feministstoday be sure they are not replicating thatpattern?

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Shimada Yoshiko, image from “BlackBoxes + Voice Recorder” 1996

Shimada’s willingness to ask herself “would Ihave behaved differently?” became moreevident in a major exhibit at the TokyoMetropolitan Museum of Photography in 1996.Shimada’s installation piece, “Black Boxes +Voice Recorder,” featured photographs offormer “military comfort women” exhibited in

chained black wooden boxes. Placed on thefloor of the gallery with “lids off,” the boxescontained the portraits of the womensubmerged under several inches of water. Meanwhile, recordings of the women’s voicesgiving testimony about their wartimeexperiences played continuously. Shimada’saim was to create a space in the museum forthese testimonies, as well as to encouragevisitors to investigate the “internal conditions”of wartime Japanese society that allowed suchcallous exploitation of poor Asian women. Asshe saw it, fully appreciating the harm inflictedon them required looking critically at theactions of Japanese women during the war andalso acknowledging the ways in which Japanesemen’s “humanity had been violated” under themilitary regime. Shimada encouraged viewersto feel empathy for the people most victimizedbut also to acknowledge that the worstperpetrators were trapped in a fascist systemthat did not protect their best interests either. Curator Kasahara Michiko wrote thatShimada’s work “represents a resistance toforgetfulness, an active will to remember. Sheis not an outsider, producing her work in somesafe place; rather, as a Japanese woman she isplaced in the ambiguous place of being one ofthe assailants.” And, Kasahara continues,Shimada’s labor is necessary, “or we will neverbe free of the nightmare of war.”30

It seems that Shimada could only fully expressher discomfort with the values of wartimeJapan when she imaginatively entered that pastsociety rather than merely viewing it from adistance, suggesting that successfulr e m e m b r a n c e — a s o p p o s e d t opostremembrance--may require a kind ofdouble vision that includes empathy for allinvolved. In other words, rather thanunconscious displacement to manage trauma, itrequires not only conscious acknowledgementof the pain fe l t by others but a lso animaginative acceptance of responsibility forthat pain. In other exhibitions in the early1990s , Sh imada inc luded a l i ve -ar t

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performance in which she herself appearedwearing the symbolic white apron, which alsobecame the screen for projected images of theformer “military comfort” women.31 Her workis effective because it encompasses both asympathetic understanding of the weaknessesof wartime actors and a firm rejection of thevalues on which their actions were based,achieving a genuine dialogue with the past. AsKasahara explained, Shimada and the otherartists in the 1996 exhibit “have the will toquestion the very basis of their way ofthinking… to look at things from a viewopposite to that of their own perspective andreconstruct the way they think.” Kasaharaargues that feminism provided Shimada withthe sense that “we Japanese, alive today, have aduty not to erase, but to preserve and pass onto future generations….the numerous crimesthat were committed by the Japanese duringthe Second World War.”32 In the same volume,Ōgoshi Aiko draws an even stronger connectionbetween feminism and an anti-war stance,arguing that “the threat of war lies at the rootof the genderization of authority, that this iswhat led to the acceptance of the structure ofsexual prejudice and violence, even inpeacetime.”33 The question to the oldergeneration in this implied dialogue is less about“what happened” than it is about “how did youlet it happen?”

We note that here too we see intergenerationaldialogue. Shimada’s choice of the militarycomfort women as her theme was triggered bythe testimonies of Kim Haksun and otherformer “comfort women.” Shimada was alsofamiliar with Tomiyama’s series of 1988 on thesame subject, while Tomiyama incorporated thewhite apron (stylishly worn by lady foxes in herrendition) into her 1995 series “Harbin:Requiem for the 20Th Century” and “The FoxStory” of 1999. The DVD version of “The FoxStory” also featured photographs of the youngcomfort women, suggesting an intertextualitythat moved in both directions. Both artistsevoke the lost world of the past in order to

warn viewers against the self-deludingcharacter of nostalgia, and both rely onfeminism as a moral guide through the past. Shimada’s critique also was powerful enough toimpress “Resident Korean” artist and activistHwangbo Kangja (b. 1957), who had alreadyspent several years giving lectures andproducing documentaries about the militarycomfort women. Hwangbo met Shimadathrough this show and invited her tocollaborate on a joint exhibit based on familyphotographs, which was displayed inVancouver and Gwangju.34 That projectbecame an opportunity to work out more fullySh imada ’s own re la t ionsh ip to warremembrance.

In this exhibit and in a later project, Shimadafocused on the personal experiences of her ownrelatives, adopting the strategy identified byHirsch as characteristic of postrememberers. Like Art Spiegelman, Shimada suggests thatthe secrets of the past resemble a locked boxthat retains its power as long as she carries itforward unopened, also explaining her chainedblack boxes of 1996. But, unlike Spiegelman,she is less interested in the inter-generationaleffects of traumatic war experience on herselfthan in the ways that keeping secrets hasprotected her from understanding the harm sheand her family may have done to others. Indeed, while researching her family history forthis project, Shimada uncovered part of herown family’s past: her grandfather, who hadworked as a policeman before the war, wasordered by his superior to “dispose ofdangerous criminals” in the aftermath of theGreat Kanto Earthquake of 1923. This was notan isolated case. Vigilante groups and policeresponded to rumors that Koreans werecausing mayhem by murdering as many as6,000 indiv iduals in the wake of theearthquake.35 Shimada herself recalled that hergrandfather never allowed them to make a“snapping” sound with wet towels because itreminded him of the sound of Korean victims’skulls being struck with wooden bats. (Later,

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Shimada’s grandfather quit the police force tobecome a farmer. According to her mother, healso helped Korean conscripted laborers escapeduring the war.) This is precisely the kind ofchildhood experience that makes the case forretaining the psychological concept of“postmemory,” now expanded to include copingwith the memories of perpetrators as well asvictims, while examining how it becomes abroader socially relevant experience. ForShimada working through “postmemory”necessari ly means refusing to evaderesponsibility and making amends by openlyacknowledging her own connections to thispast.

Shimada Yoshiko, Copenhagen installationof “Bones in Tansu: Family Secrets” 2004

That disturbing discovery led to Shimada’s nextproject, Bones in Tansu: Family Secrets, an‘interactive’ installation piece that was firstexhibited at A.R.T in Tokyo in 2004 and then inseven other locations internationally.36 Shimadabegan by exploring the boundary markersbetween her own private memories and publicremembrance, and over the next three yearssolicited the anonymous personal memories ofgallery viewers, which she incorporated intothe exhibit. Once again, she began with familyhistories, although this time with memories

generated by strangers, to make visible theemotions evoked by the past. This ever-expanding dialogue revealed much trauma,sometimes linked to war histories, but mostoften to an unexpectedly high incidence ofdomestic violence, including incest and sexualabuse. These traumatic stories crossed nationallines. For example, participants in Manilawrote about the experience of being abused aschildren in response to a similar “secret”revealed by a Korean participant at theprevious site. Some of the Manila childrenwere vulnerable to predatory adults becausetheir parents had been forced by poverty tobecome global migrant workers, revealinganother way in which “private” family trauma ispart of transnational history.37 Shimada isfacilitating an open-ended dialogue amongvisitors that makes no assumptions in advanceabout who may be a victim or a perpetrator,while unequivocally condemning transgressionsby making visible the pain they caused.

The Next Generation

What aspects of the wartime past matter mostto younger people in Japan who wish to take astance “against forgetting” World War II? Their engagement with the war seems to beginwith their recognition that they know littleabout the lives of the older individuals whopeopled their childhood and grow into anagging feeling that such ignorance is a debtthat requires redress, meaning that a desire formore intergenerational dialogue is at the heartof their quests. It seems likely that, as with theolder artists, their interactions with historians,art historians and curators—as well as largeraudiences—will continue to shape theirinquiries into the past, as will transnationaldialogues with other artists and social-justiceactivists. Eventually, so will their interactionswith people younger than themselves.

One recent collaborative project arrayed“against forgetting,” Asia, Politics, and Art, isitself a transnational venture that brought

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together artists, musicians, scholars, andcurators of various ages to explore the legaciesin East Asia of World War II, the Korean War,the Vietnam War, and the current American-ledwars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lee Chongwhaof Seikei University organized this project onthe “lingering wounds” of past wars in order todevelop new kinds of dialogue for the future. Their efforts between 2006 and 2008 led to aunique collaborative publication, Zanshō noOto (Sounds of lingering wounds).38 Their workis also in dialogue with deceased artists, as issymbolized by the fact that the inauguralconference for Asia, Politics and Art was held inthe Sakima Art Museum in Ginowan, Okinawain March 2007, in a room whose walls arecovered with the enormous panels of the“Battle of Okinawa,” by Maruki Iri andToshi.39 (Link (http://sakima.jp/?page_id=31))

Oh/Okamura Haji (b. 1976, hereafter Oh Haji)and Yamashiro Chikako (b. 1976), both ofwhom participated in this project, are twogenerations removed from direct experience ofthe war but explore its meaning today in theirwork. Not only are they far younger thanTomiyama and Miyazaki, their respectivepositions as a “Resident Korean” and anOkinawan complicate their status in relation toJapan. Both artists, still at formative stages intheir careers, evoke the wartime era in theirwork, in ways that emphasize their temporaldistance from the 1940s and underline theirpostwar identities. Interestingly, they also usesome of the “postmemory” techniquesdiscussed by Hirsch and explored artistically byShimada, such as creating an imaginative worldfrom the fragmentary images provided by oldphotographs and objects used by theirrelatives, and building out from the testimonyof older family members and neighbors aboutpast experiences.

Oh Haji uses a variety of spinning, weavingand dyeing techniques to create originalgarments, objects, and installations that givematerial expression to the layering of time and

memory.40 The death of her Korean-borngrandmother prompted the artist to explorethemes of personal history and memory ingreater depth. Although she had shared ahome with her grandmother all her life, sinceOh spoke only Japanese and her grandmotherwas only comfortable in Korean, they had nevercommunicated easily. Her regret at not havingworked harder to overcome the painful silencesbetween them prompted Oh to imaginativelyrecall her grandmother’s life in a large, mixed-media installation piece, “Memory” (2006). “Memory” recalls Oh’s grandmother’s forcedprewar move from her original home on ChejuIsland in Korea to Osaka. Oh painstakinglycovered a semi-sheer white cloth with a flowerpattern like those on skirts worn by hergrandmother. For Oh, clothing, like familyphotographs, provides a physical object thatcan bear the weight of the tasks of creating animaginative investment and framing identity,and so—at least partially—replace theemotional sat is fact ion derived fromcommunication through language.

Oh Haji, Image from “Memory” 2006

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Oh had previously used thread that she hadcarefully unraveled from her grandmother’sKorean dresses in other projects, and laterdecided to photograph her Korean chimablouse, which she had hung on the wall of herroom. Oh said that interacting in such wayswith her grandmother’s clothing helped her“feel as if she were really there, as if she was‘physically present.’ That was the inspirationfor this work.” Knowing l i t t le of hergrandmother’s thoughts and feelings, Oh hopedto gain an imaginative understanding of her lifeexperience by making art from the clothing sheleft behind after her death. While they sharedthe label of being Korean in Japan, they sharedlittle else until Oh decided to learn more aboutthe older woman’s life. Oh acknowledges inher art that she moves through Japanesesociety with far more linguistic and culturalease than did her grandmother and wasoffering redress—literally re-clothing—for herown you th fu l ob l i v i ousness t o he rgrandmother’s linguistic isolation. Herforthright acknowledgement of her owncomplicity in that isolation and her feelings ofregret give her work its power, as does theintensity of her desire to capture as muchmeaning as she can from the threadbareswatches of her grandmother’s garments.

Yamashiro Chikako, an Okinawan video andperformance artist, has also begun exploringremembrance of the war in recent highlyinnovative video works that, l ike Oh,imaginatively place her in an ambiguous ethicalrelationship with elderly victims of war andcolonial violence.4 1 Yamashiro becameinterested in this topic after June 2007 whenthe Japanese government eliminated passagesfrom history textbooks that made reference tothe “mass suicides” in the Battle of Okinawa. In the last weeks of the war the Japanesemilitary had encouraged and sometimesordered Okinawan civilians to kill their familiesand themselves in order to avoid capture by theadvancing American forces. The subsequentprotests against the textbook changes (Link

(http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20071003a1.html)) prompted Yamashiro to interviewsenior residents in a nearby care center inOkinawa on video, which she then transformedinto works she exhibited at two Tokyomuseums, the National Museum of Modern Artand the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum ofPhotography in 2009 and 2010. In a statementdescribing “Your Voice Came Out Through MyThroat” (2009), the artist explains that many ofthe elderly people had never spoken of theirwartime experiences. Like Yamashiro,however, they were so offended by thegovernment’s move to revise textbooks thatthey told their stories to her. She extended thistheme in a 2010 series, “Sinking Voices, RedBreath.”

Yamashiro Chikako, still image from video“Sinking Voices, Red Breath” 2010

They also passed on their feel ings ofresponsibility for remembering the past, tellingYamashiro, someone of their grandchildrens’generation, “because we survived you wereborn into this world. And now 65 years havepassed since the war ended, we have to tellwhat really happened.”42 Yamashiro said shecould feel the exact moment when eachspeaker t rans fe r red the burden o fremembering the past to her in an interviewwith Kum Soni, another participant in the Asia,Politics, and Art project.

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When talking about the war there was amoment when the elderly people would stopspeaking. Perhaps, it was the instant thatbrought back what was most painful, mostdevastating in the minds of the speakers. Atthose moments, when they were about to speakabout the most painful things, they fell silent,and began to shake or weep. …so then I justasked them to touch me and express what theywere feeling in some other way.”43

In January and February 2011, Yamashiroparticipated in an artists’ exchange and festivalin the Philippines, and began doing researchfor new work based on oral histories andmemories of Okinawan migrants and war-brides who moved there during and after thewar. She wanted to showcase Okinawanresponses to the ongoing presence of USmilitary bases in Okinawa, and also make aconnection between that situation today andOkinawan participation in the Japanese militaryoccupation of the Philippines in the 1940s. This experience will add greater moralambiguity to her already-arresting photographsand v ideo works . I t w i l l a l so add at r a n s n a t i o n a l d i m e n s i o n t o h e rintergenerational commentary.

These young artists are gathering fragments ofthe war experience and are connecting them totheir own postwar stories in ways that bothrequire intergenerational dialogue andencourage it in others. While they are clearlymotivated by their sense of shared identity withspec i f i c groups o f people who weresystematically wronged during the war, theyare not drawing a stark distinction between thedescendents of victims and of perpetrators orbystanders, nor absolving themselves ofresponsibility. Finding a stance that expressesrecognition of their own distance from thewartime victims while sympatheticallyacknowledging the injust ice of theirvictimization is crucial to powerful imaginativereconstruction. This distance can be as little asthe passage of time in an individual life, as with

Miyazaki Shin, or it can involve soliciting theviews of people who previously seemed of littleinterest, as with Yamashiro Chikako. What isbeing bridged here is the gap betweenpostremembrance as displaced attempts atpsychological healing by traumatizedindividuals and conscious social acts based oninteraction with older or younger people.

Why do these acts matter? Acknowledgementby young people and bystanders as well as byperpetrators that victims’ suffering was notonly very real but also unjustly imposed is aform of redress. This is why people feel suchdeep satisfaction when their own experiencesare belatedly acknowledged to be of publicimportance, i.e., part of history. In the end,providing that sense of satisfaction to theirelders is a major way that young people makethe experiences of earlier generations part oftheir own lives. Much of the time thesetransactions happen invisibly around holidaydinner tables or in everyday public settings,such as classrooms. These artists are findingways to initiate dialogue, which, rather thanthe art work itself, becomes a talk-therapy forthemselves and frequently for others as well. The Marukis, Nakazawa, and Miyazaki allreport that they were unable to expressthemselves on other topics until they painted ordrew the war, while Shimada visited the pastbecause she wondered how she would havebehaved then—and was honest enough to admitdoubts that her choices would have beenethical ones. Oh and Yamashiro both stumbledinto their projects for reasons that they couldonly articulate after paying close attention tothe older generation for the first time. Sometimes the impetus is the emotionaldesperat ion at the heart of Hirsch’sremembrance/postremembrance while othersbegin to care about unacknowledged war-related traumas through more cerebralprocesses. Both paths lead to the same result:they remind us with admirable clarity andpoetic subtlety that all of us today bearresponsibility for redressing the injustices of

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the war. And without such redress, it is verydifficult to create a future that truly movesbeyond the injustices of the past.

Rebecca Jennison is a professor at Kyoto SeikaUniversity in the Department of Humanities,Division of Culture and Arts, and an Asia PacificJournal. She is active in a variety of feministand peace networks. She recently curated withFran Lloyd (Kingston University London) TheArt of Intervention Now - London & Kyoto 介入の芸術、現在（いま）〜ロンドン＆京都 at theFleur Gallery, Kyoto Seika University (24thSeptember - 23rd October 2010). (Link(http://www.art-of-intervention.com/)) Hermost recent publications include an essay inZanshō no Oto, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.(2009)『残照の音―アジア・政治・アートの未来へ』岩波書店、2009） and, wi th Laura Hein ,Imagination Without Borders: Feminist ArtistTomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility, AnnArbor: Center for Japanese Studies, TheUniversity of Michigan, 2010.

Laura Hein is a professor of Japanese history atNorthwestern University in Chicago and anAsia Pacific Journal coordinator. Her mostrecent publications, in addition to the bookedited with Rebecca Jennison mentioned abovea n d i t s c o m p a n i o n w e b s i t e(http://imaginationwithoutborders.northwestern.edu/), include “Reckoning with War in theMuseum: Hijikata Teiichi at the KamakuraMuseum of Modern Art” Critical Asian Studies,43.1 Winter 2011, pp. 93-110 and “Japan, theVulnerable, and All of Us” foreword to Dreamsof Repair, Eleanor Rubin Milan: Charta, 2010.

Recommended citation: Rebecca Jennison andLaura Hein, "Against Forgetting: ThreeGenerations of Artists in Japan in Dialogueabout the Legacies of World War II," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 30 No 1, July 25,2011.

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Notes

1 Dora Apel. Memory Effects: The Holocaustand the Art of Secondary Witnessing. NewBrunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.2002, p. 3.

2 Examples include Jay Winter and EmanuelSivan, War and Remembrance in the 20 th

century, Cambridge: Cambridge University

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Press, 1999. Lisa Saltzman. Making MemoryMatter: Strategies of Remembrance inContemporary Art. Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 2006. 3 For example, Franziska Seraphim, Warmemory and social politics in Japan, 1945-2005,Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University AsiaCenter, 2006; Beatrice Trefalt, Japanese ArmyStragglers and Memories of the War in Japan,1 9 5 0 - 1 9 7 5 , L o n d o n : N e w Y o r k :RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Takashi Yoshida, TheMaking of the "Rape of Nanking": History andMemory in Japan, China, and the United StatesNew York: Oxford University Press, 2006.4 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Free Speech – SilencedVoices: The Japanese Media, the ComfortWomen Tribunal, and the NHK Affair,” AsiaPacific Journal: Japan Focus, March 8,2 0 0 7 . L i n k(http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tessa-Morris_Suzuki/2305). Also see proceedings of “BuildingPeace with a Gender Perspective in the Era ofBacklash—On the 10 th Anniversary of theInternational Women’s War Tribunal” Dec. 19,2010, a symposium sponsored by theInternational Institute of Language and CultureStudies, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto.5 Mar ianne Hirsch , Fami ly Frames :Photography, Narrative, and Post-memory,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1997. She had dropped the hyphen in“postmemory” by 2008. 6 Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, NY:Pantheon Books, 1973, vol. 1, p. 6. 7 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, 1997, p.22. 8 Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation ofPostmemory” Poetics Today, 29.1 (Spring2008): 103-128. 9 Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” p.111. 10 Apel, p. 6, 20-22. 11 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience:Trauma, Narrative and History, , Baltimore,John Hopkins University Press, 1996; Trauma:Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, JohnHopkins University Press, 1995.

12 Apel, p. 6 1 3 Richard H. Minear, Hiroshima: TheAutobiography of Barefoot Gen, Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, 2010; and NakazawaK e i j i a n d R i c h a r d H . M i n e a r(http://www.japanfocus.org/-Keiji-Nakazawa/3416), "Hiroshima: The Autobiography of BarefootGen," The Asia-Pacific Journal, 39-1-10,September 27, 2010. Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓, Hotaru no Haka) 1967. The DVDwas brought out in 2002 subtitled in English byCentral Park Media Corporation. 14 Minear, Hiroshima, p. 152.15 Hiroshima no pika & Hellfire: a journey fromHiroshima; Noriaki Tsuchimoto, director; JohnJunkerman, writer, director. First RunFeatures, 2005/1986, DVD. See also John W.Dower, Japan in War and Peace: SelectedEssays, New York: The New Press, 1995. 16 Ann Sherif, “Art as Activism: TomiyamaTaeko and the Marukis,” in Laura Hein andRebecca Jennison, eds., Imagination WithoutBorders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko andSocial Responsibility, Ann Arbor: Center forJapanese Studies, The University of Michigan,2010, pp. 29-50. 17 Tomiyama comments in “Talking Across theWorld: A Discussion Between Tomiyama Taekoand Eleanor Rubin,” in Hein and Jennison, pp.107-127, quote p. 127. 18 ‘Asia eno Shiza to Hyōgen’ OrganizingCommittee, Silenced by History: TomiyamaTaeko’s Work, Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu,1995. Images of Tomiyama’s most recentexhibit, “Looking at Asia—On the 100 th

Anniversary of Japan’s Annexation of Korea”c a n b e v i e w e d h e r e(http://www.youtube.com/user/TokyoYWCApeace). 19 For a photograph of part of this series inprogress, see Laura Hein and Nobuko TANAKA(http://www.japanfocus.org/-Laura-Hein/3334),“Brushing With Authority: The Life and Art ofTomiyama Taeko," The Asia-Pacific Journal,13-3-10, March 29, 2010.20 See Kobayashi Hiromichi, “Slides andCollages” in Tomiyama Taeko and Takahashi

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Yūji, Hiruko and the Puppeteers, A Tale of SeaWanderers, Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu, 2009,b i l i n g u a l b o o k a n d D V D , I S B N978-4-7738-0908-4 21 The Kamakura exhibit was a retrospective offifty years of prizewinning art by localpainters. Miyazaki also published a memoirabout his years as a POW in 1998.『宮崎進画集私のシベリア 森と大地の記憶』 文藝春秋1998.11. Miyazaki Shin, Gaka watashi noshiberiamori to taichi no kioku , Tokyo: BungeiShunjū Press, 1998. 22 Shin Miyazaki and Tsutomu Mizusawa,“Hanging ‘myself’ on the wall: A Dialogue withShin Miyazaki,” pp. 53-61 in TsutomuMizusawa, “Voices of Siberia: On the CurrentWork of Shin Miyazaki,” Shin Miyazaki, Vozesda Siberia/Voices of Siberia, Tokyo: The JapanFoundation, 2004, quote from p. 53. 23 Mizusawa, “Voices of Siberia,” p.16. 24 Mizusawa, “Voices of Siberia,” p. 20. 2 5 While our focus here is artists, thisgeneralization holds true for others who haveshaped the postwar history of the war years aswell. See, for example, Yoshiko Nozaki, WarMemory, Nationalism and Education in PostwarJapan, 1945-2007, London and New York:Routledge Contemporary Japan Series, 2008. 26 Quote from Nancy Shalala, “Artist reveals a“Past Imperfect,” The Japan Times, October 3,1993. 27 Shimada Yoshiko, “Japanese Women and theWar, 1930-40,” Tokyo Metropolitan Museum ofPhotography and Asahi Shinbunsha, eds.,Gender Beyond Memory: The Works ofContemporary Women Artists, Tokyo: TokyoMetropolitan Foundation for History andCulture, 1996, pp. 104-116, quote p. 104. 28 Shimada in Jennifer Chan, Another Japan isPossible: New Social Movements and GlobalCitizenship Education, Stanford CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 2008, pp. 242-246, quote, p.244. 29 Hagiwara Hiroko, “Comfort Women/Womenof Conformity: the Work of Shimada Yoshiko,”in Generations and Geographies, ed. byGriselda Pollock, Routledge, 1996, pp.

253-265. 3 0 Kasahara Michiko, “Gender BeyondMemory,” in Tokyo Metropolitan Museum ofPhotography and Asahi Shinbunsha, eds.,Gender Beyond Memory: The Works ofContemporary Women Artists, Tokyo: TokyoMetropolitan Foundation for History andCulture, 1996, pp.159-168, quote p. 163. 31 Shimada was thus part of a broader trend inpublic art that foregrounded audienceparticipation in enacting social memories. SeeJoan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory,London: I. B. Tauris, 2009, chapter 5. 32 Kasahara, pp.167 and 163. 33 Ōgoshi Aiko, “Gender’s Pitfall –FromFeminism’s Changing Viewpoint,” in TokyoMetropolitan Museum of Photography andAsahi Shinbunsha, eds., Gender BeyondMemory: The Works of Contemporary WomenArtists, Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Foundationfor History and Culture, 1996, pp. 155-158,quote from p. 158. 34 “Art Activism and Korean Minority Rights,”Hwangbo Kangja in Jennifer Chan, ed. AnotherJapan is Possible: New Social Movements andGlobal Citizenship Education, Stanford CA:Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 281-283.Hwangbo curated an exhibit “FamilyPhotographs” in Toyonaka City in January,2011. 35 For an on-line site with photographs andinformation about the earthquake, see this link(http://dl.lib.brown.edu/kanto/).36 This work was first shown in, “BorderlineCases: Co-responses on the Borderlines”(2004), an exhibition that brought togetherartists, curators and scholars working in Koreaand Japan. It was also shown in Korea, thePhilippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Denmark,Great Britain, and Shanghai. See RebeccaJennison, “Borderline Cases—Co-responses onthe Borderlines,” n.paradoxa, (2004) 3 7 R e b e c c a J e n n i s o n , “ Y o s h i k oShimada—Silence, Secrets and Sex in theGallery,” C-ARTS, Vol. 9, July-August, 2009 pp.34-36 (Singapore). 38 See Zanshō no Oto (Sounds of Lingering

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Wounds), ed. by Lee Chongwha, IwanamiShoten, 2009. This volume includes 12 essaysby participants in the project and a DVD ofinterviews and works of seven artists producedby another participating artist, Soni Kum.Selected articles in the volume are now beingtranslated into English. 39 Another transnational project concerningAsian war art and remembrance that involvesyoung scholars and curators is led by MingTiempo, a Chinese-Canadian art historianbased in Tokyo, Asato Ikeda, a Japanese scholarbased in Canada, and American professorLouisa MacDonald. Louisa MacDonald, AsatoIkeda, and Ming Tiempo, eds., provisionallytitled The Dark Valley: Japanese Art and WorldWar II, Leiden: Brill, in press.

40 “Oh/Okamura Haji,” in Unbound—Gender inAsia, Kyoto Journal, No. 64, Oct. 2006. Alsosee articles by Kim Hyeshin and RebeccaJennison in Zanshō no Oto, Iwanami Shoten,Tokyo.(2009). 41 Yamashiro is introduced briefly in ANPO: ArtX War The Art of Resistance, directed by LindaHoaglund, Videorecording New Day Films,2010.42 Yamashiro Chikako, “Anata no koe wawatashi no nodo wo tōta” (Your voice came outthrough my throat), Video work, Artist’sStatement, Exhibit at Tokyo MetropolitanMuseum of Photography, 2009. 43 Yamashiro Chikako, Interview with Soni Kum,Zanshō no oto II, DVD (The Sound of LingeringWounds II, DVD) , Iwanami Shoten, 2009.