Consuming Asia, Consuming Japan: The New Neonationalist Revisionism in Japan

Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 30-36

  Gerow, Aaron ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GEOPOLITICS; HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION; NATIONALISM; TEXTBOOK;

JAPAN;

EID: 0031723214     PISSN: 00074810     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/14672715.1998.10411041     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. Fujioka Nobukatsu and Jiyushugi Shikan Kenkyukai, Kyokasho ga oshienai rekishi (Tokyo: Sankei Shinbun Nyusu Sabisu, 1996), p. 10.
2. In Japanese, "Honto wa kono kuni no koto, yoku shiranakatta. Nihonjin no kokoro ni kizamitai 78 no monogatari."
3. Such mothers typically lost children in the war or struggled greatly in the poverty-stricken aftermath (both tragedies very real to contemporary Japanese), but their sacrifices always go unrecognized by their children or community. The masochistic pleasure involved in identifying with this suffering was a central means by which 1950s Japanese film audiences narrativized wartime and postwar history as a tale of unjust and unrecognized, but still stoically endured misery. Two of the more interesting examples of the genre are Kinoshita Keisuke's A Japanese Tragedy ("Nihon no higeki," 1953) and Naruse Mikio's Mother ("Okasan," 1952).
4. Such mothers typically lost children in the war or struggled greatly in the poverty-stricken aftermath (both tragedies very real to contemporary Japanese), but their sacrifices always go unrecognized by their children or community. The masochistic pleasure involved in identifying with this suffering was a central means by which 1950s Japanese film audiences narrativized wartime and postwar history as a tale of unjust and unrecognized, but still stoically endured misery. Two of the more interesting examples of the genre are Kinoshita Keisuke's A Japanese Tragedy ("Nihon no higeki," 1953) and Naruse Mikio's Mother ("Okasan," 1952).
5. There are many discussions of the relation between masochistic pleasure and melodrama in feminist film studies, with Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) providing a good outline.
6. The "reasianization" that Laura Hein and Ellen H. Hammond have discussed - in which conservatives have called for Japan to rejoin Asia (as its leader) - is I believe the other side of the same coin of the perception of Asia as a threat See "Homing in on Asia: Identity in Contemporary Japan," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 27, no. 3 (1995): 3-17).
7. This theme dominates much of the discussion between Sato Manabu, Kang Sangjung, Komori Yoichi, and Narita Ryuichi in "Taiwa no kairo o tozashita rekishikan o do kokufuku suru ka?" Sekai 635 (May 1997): 185-199.
8. Kang Sangjung has pointed to Fujioka's personal experience of staying in the United States during the War, witnessing both the power of American nationalism and the utter impotence of Japan, as fundamental in this ex-communist's switch to the right. See his comments in "Taiwa no kairo o tozashita rekishikan o do kokufuku suru ka?" pp. 187-188.
9. See Ukai's comments in the discussion, "Rekishi to iu senjo kara," Impaction 102 (1997): 68-69.
10. A point perceptively made by Kano Mikiyo, "Seikimatsu kyokasho kyosokyoku to sei no daburu standado," Impaction 102 (1997): 36.
11. The ninkyo or yakusa genre occupied a central position in the output of the Toei studio in the 1960s after jidaigeki entered into a decline. Many of the plots, such as in the Showa zankyoden or Nihon kyokakuden series, featured the conflict between new, modern yakusa (defined by their Western clothes and disrespect for the chivalric codes of the gangster) and the representatives of more traditionally Japanese yakusa ways (with Takakura Ken and Tsuruta Koji often representing this faction).
12. See his comments in "Taiwa no kairo o tozashita rekishikan o do kokufuku suru ka?" 194. Treating historical research as a field unconnected to mass public discourse is not new: it was why many of the Marxist historians could continue publishing in specialized journals well into the 1930s without severe regulation. The publicity of the discourse - and how much it appears before children - has historically been the measure of how much government oversight it earns. The history of film censorship in Japan compared to that for publication also reveals this, given how the stories of many uncensored novels were cut only when they came to the screen.
13. See for instance, one such set of minutes printed in the Asahi Shinbun, 29 March 1993, p. 11.
14. Fujioka Nobukatsu and Jiyushugi Shikan Kenkyukai 10.
15. A point Komagome Takeshi makes in analyzing the same phrase: "Jiyushugi shikan wa watashitachi o 'jiyu' ni suru no ka?" Sekai 633 (April 1997): 64-66.
16. Fujioka Nobukatsu, Ojoku no kin-gendaishi (Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 1996): 135, quoted in Komagome 62.
17. My use of the term "self-centered" resonates with Takahashi Tetsuya's use of "jikochu" to critique Kato Tenyo's controversial assertion that Japan must bury its dead before it can deal with the dead of Asia. See his comments in the roundtable talk, "Sekinin to shutai o megutte," Hihyo kukan II-13 (1997), particularly pp. 13-16.
18. Quoted in Ogoshi Aiko, "'Jugun ianfu' mondai no poritikkusu," Hihyo kukan II-11 (1996): 37.
19. See comments by Sato and Kang in "Taiwa no kairo o tozashita rekishikan o do kokufuku suru ka?" 187
20. Otsuki Takahiro, "Boku ga 'Atarashii Rekishi Kyokasho o Tsukuru Kai' o sukedachi suru wake," Seiron (April 1997): 56.
21. Suga Hidemi, "Kyoiku hihanron josetsu (6): Sono tame ni shiniuru 'kokka'," Hatsugensha 33 (January 1997): 86-91.
22. Much has been written on the relationship between travel/tourism, the gaze, and (post-)coloniality: how the hierarchy of vision (the seer and the seen), supported by the economics of consumption, works to reproduce colonial relations of power between the Western traveller and the Eastern native. Two recent examples are James Clifford's Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Nicholas Thomas's Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). For a new anthology of essays on the colonialist gaze in cinema, see Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds., Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
23. Much has been written on the relationship between travel/tourism, the gaze, and (post-)coloniality: how the hierarchy of vision (the seer and the seen), supported by the economics of consumption, works to reproduce colonial relations of power between the Western traveller and the Eastern native. Two recent examples are James Clifford's Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Nicholas Thomas's Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). For a new anthology of essays on the colonialist gaze in cinema, see Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds., Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
24. Much has been written on the relationship between travel/tourism, the gaze, and (post-)coloniality: how the hierarchy of vision (the seer and the seen), supported by the economics of consumption, works to reproduce colonial relations of power between the Western traveller and the Eastern native. Two recent examples are James Clifford's Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Nicholas Thomas's Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). For a new anthology of essays on the colonialist gaze in cinema, see Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds., Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
25. The strategic use of subtitles, silencing some and allowing others to "speak," effectively makes Japanese the linguistic locus of the film.
26. The image of furusato becomes more and more an object of consumption, an ideology in need of selling, as many Japanese lose any real contact with their rural hometowns. For examples of the marketing of furusato, see Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).