Popular Culture in Asia

Memory, City, Celebrity

Lorna Fitzsimmons, John A. Lent

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137270191
• eBook ISBN: 9781137270207
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• Index: Social Sciences

Popular Culture in Asia consists studies of film, music, architecture, television, and computer-mediated communication in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore, addressing three topics: urban modernities; modernity, celebrity, and fan culture; and memory and modernity.

Part I

Memory

1

Engaging with the Valley of Death: The Dialogue with Modernity in The Burmese Harp

Lorna Fitzsimmons

Essentializing assumptions have marred a number of American and British readings of Ichikawa Kon’s award-winning anti-war film The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto,

) (1956)¹ and its relationship to its principal source, Takeyama Michio’s canonical narrative of the same title. Hypotext (novel)-hypertext (film)² conflation has led to an apparently contagious tendency to confuse the novel’s plot with that of the film, and vice versa, to the point of misrecognition: overly simplistic in his description of the book’s narrative as “straight-forward enough,” historian Louis Allen misrepresents the cardinal cave scene—a surrender in the book but a “massacre,” to some, in the film—by carelessly slipping from novel to film as if the two were identical, a crucial divergence over which Keiko I. McDonald also falters, but in reverse, by inadvertently substituting the novel for the film.³ Although this kind of error is not unusual in adaptation studies prior to the video cassette recorder era of the 1970s–1990s, that it and other essentializing tendencies in the reception of the film remain uncriticized is rather disquieting, since the texts in question are generally construed as “classics,” managed within secondary and higher education apparati, and highly significant within Japanese collective memory of the Fifteen Years’ War (1931–45).⁴

While it became rather common practice in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom to valorize the film, which has a tied tenth-position ranking among “World Film Authorities,”⁵ by reiterating the grounds upon which the Venice Film Festival jury awarded it the San Giorgio Prize in 1956—for showing “men’s capacity to live with one another”⁶—it is upon the “massacre” scene that this chapter focuses. The aim here is to untangle some of the implications of the film’s intercultural dialogue with the modernity debate, including the issue of war responsibility so pivotal within twentieth-century Japanese culture and of continuing importance today. Adaptation studies must endeavor to engage with turns of the larger dialogical process through which film is encoded if we are to avoid the “aporias of ‘fidelity,’ ” as Robert Stam puts it.⁷ This film negotiates the discourses of modernity almost a decade after the hypotext was first published, affectingly marked by the catastrophe of defeat, and the discrepancy between the two texts is not insignificantly symptomatic of Japan’s trajectory within the centrifugal field of monopoly capitalism in the postwar period.

Doubtless strengthened by Cold War anxieties, the international appeal of The Burmese Harp’s pacifistic rhetoric was, less obviously, enhanced by the renegotiation in which it engages—manifestly less oppositional than that of the novel—effected, as will be shown, through various strategies of semantic, diegetic, and pragmatic transposition, including re-inscription of a significant portion of the novel’s mythopoetic discourse under the realist codes extending within the postwar Japanese cinema under Western influence. In order to illustrate the turns of this renegotiation further, and to demonstrate the shifting contours of memory of the war, this chapter also engages with the film’s relation to the recuperative operations more excessively deployed in Ishiguro Noboru’s 1986 anime, The Harp of Burma

, which was released a year after Ichikawa’s 1985 remake of the film, also based on Wada Natto’s script, was a phenomenal success in Japan. The transtextuality of Harp of Burma narrative at three cultural moments—the immediate postwar period, the mid-1950s, and the growing conservativism of the mid-1980s—will thus be traced, yielding an impression of its modulation and commodification during 40 years of significant change in Japanese society and culture.

The “harp of Burma” concept is a heterogeneous intermedial construct—print, screen, music, and stage—that has played a major role in Japanese collective memory. The narrative centers on a harp-playing soldier who is called on to persuade a Japanese troop to surrender and subsequently decides not to return to his own troop but rather to attend to the remains of Japanese soldiers, dismayed by the loss of life he has witnessed. The construct’s relation to the issue of war responsibility contributes greatly to its continuing significance and the divergences that exist between the hypotext and its adaptations. War memory in Japan remains a profound and emotive point of contestation with which a number of interest groups have been involved. As Philip A. Seaton observes, there are significant “seismic rifts” within Japanese war memory, particularly between liberals, who seek to apologize and atone, and conservatives, who commemorate the war effort.⁸ While Takeyama’s novel is still widely received as an anti-war novel of canonical stature, its reception, including its adaptation into other media, has varied in conjunction with shifts in the “memory rifts” and the changing socio-economic and political climate since World War II.⁹ The reception of the film adaptations has, in turn, mediated reception of the novel.¹⁰ While the tendency to treat the novel as interchangeable with the films may in some instances serve audiences’ long-term memory of the theme, there exists a need for a more critical understanding of the differences between the versions in order to advance “sincere dialogue”¹¹ about the issues involved.

The dialogue with modernity in Takeyama’s novel

Composed during the Tokyo war trials, Takeyama Michio’s Harp of Burma was first published in the children’s serial Red Dragonfly (Akatombo) between March 1947 and February 1948. Takeyama’s idealized story of a singing company of Japanese soldiers caught in the Burmese campaign at the end of the war met with critical acclaim and became widely popular with Japanese adults. Of the approximately 1.74 million Japanese soldiers who died between 1937 and 1945, more than 185,000 lost their lives in Burma. Despite its topical appeal, however, it is not “the true story of one battalion in the Japanese army,” although the Ishiguro anime version, discussed below, makes this claim. A scholar of German literature—and translator of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Christian missionary and musician Albert Schweitzer—Takeyama, having served not in Burma but China, drew on a number of sources in composing the novel, including war correspondents’ accounts, but, as Ichikawa was surprised to learn, the author had no direct experience of Burma:

It was complete fiction. … I heard the story from Takeyama when I met him. In the novel, the writer hears the story from a friend. It’s written as though the events it describes really happened, but that’s just a stylistic device. Takeyama had never even been to Burma. He’s never gone there. He wrote the book based on second-hand sources.¹²

The novel foregrounds this palimpsestuousness with a brief framing narrative that raises the enigma of why one company of repatriated Japanese soldiers looks so “cheerful” as opposed to the “pitiful sight” of the others, thereby motivating the primary narrative, which is narrated by one of the singing soldiers just returned from the Burmese front. Suggestive of the acquired text trope of apocalyptic discourse, from which the discovered manuscript convention in utopian literature, such as James Hilton’s bestselling novel Lost Horizon (1933), descends, the primary narrative is framed as an encountered “tale.” Richard H. Minear recounts, “Takeyama had read of a soldier, a young music teacher, who trained his men to sing; in turn they protected him with their bodies when bullets flew. In contrast to most repatriated units, these men returned in good spirits.”¹³

Entitled “The Singing Company,” the first section of the primary narrative of the novel begins with a utopian figuration of “imagined community” experienced through song.¹⁴ The passage recalls the non-dualist theme of the Nōh drama Atsumori in its emphasis upon the capacity of the lowly to learn music well.¹⁵ Among the soldiers, the protagonist, Mizushima, is an unpretentious corporal with no musical training, but his talent is so great that the effects of his harp-playing have counterintuitive¹⁶ connotations. The ancient Indian arched harp, upon which the Burmese harp appears to be modeled, has been identified in Buddhist cave art and temples from the second century BCE on.¹⁷ In the novel, the harp contributes to the protagonist’s implicit characterization as a shamanic figure redolent, in some respects, of the bodhisattva Jizō¹⁸—but not without traces of political resistance. Foreshadowing his eventual conversion, the first chapter foregrounds the text’s mythopoetic register with the image of the peacock—mount of Amida—beating its wings noiselessly over the lake as the protagonist’s music induces a meditative state in the other soldiers. The company is soon in desperate retreat, although the tone of the narrative is sometimes comic, with Mizushima often assuming Burmese garb to serve as scout, signaling to the others with his harp. Repeatedly, his harp-playing is fetishized as a source of inspiration and empowerment, whether against the enemy or cannibals. After his company surrenders, he attempts to persuade another company, still holding their ground in a mountain cave, to surrender. His own company, uncertain if he has survived the ordeal, attempt to determine if a traveling monk is he, and it is only in the latter part of the narrative, when the captain recites Mizushima’s confessional letter to the other men, that the resolution of the crisis is revealed: initially unable to convince the men to give in, the protagonist plays his harp in the crossfire, oblivious to the threat to his own life, and the men surrender after he is shot. Nursed by cannibals with ulterior motives, he survives through the offices of the chief’s daughter, who gives him a Burmese monk’s robes. Making his way to his company’s prisoner-of-war camp in South Burma disguised in monastic garb, he is disturbed by the abject sight of Japanese corpses strewn across Burma and eventually becomes a Buddhist monk.¹⁹ While the rest of his company returns to Japan, he decides to remain in Burma to bury the dead.

Takeyama approached the topic of Burma from a rather essentialist purview eventuating in the Burma/Japan binary—pitting traditionalism against modernity—pivotal to the narrative structure of the novel but suppressed to some degree in Ichikawa’s film and, much more so, Ishiguro’s anime, as will be discussed. Takeyama’s homodiegetic narrator idealizes the Burmese in primitivist terms as the gentle, devout other, while the Japanese are criticized by the protagonist as “avaricious” and “arrogant.”²⁰ Takeyama represents the Japanese soldiers debating the relative merits of the Burmese—“If you want a more peaceful, civilized world it’d be a lot better for us to imitate the Burmese”—even as potential guardians of the atomic bomb: “We’d be better off if we put a dangerous thing like that in the custody of Burmese monks.”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Memory
• Part II: City
• Part III: Celebrity
• Index