Persistently Postwar

Media and the Politics of Memory in Japan

Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez, Dolores P. Martinez, Blai Guarné, Artur Lozano-Méndez, Dolores P. Martinez

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785339608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

From melodramas to experimental documentaries to anime, mass media in Japan constitute a key site in which the nation's social memory is articulated, disseminated, and contested. Through a series of stimulating case studies, this volume examines the political and cultural representations of Japan's past, showing how they have reinforced personal and collective narratives while also formulating new cultural meanings, both on a local scale and in the context of transnational media production and consumption. Drawing upon diverse disciplinary insights and methodologies, these studies collectively offer a nuanced account in which mass media function as much more than a simple ideological tool.

Part I

War’s Aftermath

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Chapter 1

The Death of Certainty

Memory, Guilt and Redemption in Ikiru

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Dolores P. Martinez

Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.

—Ernest Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’

Introduction

Ikiru (To Live, 1952) is often cited as a favourite Kurosawa Akira film by Japanese men of the postwar generation and by foreign aficionados of Japanese film such as Steven Spielberg.¹ The common answers to the question of why the story of a middle-aged man’s midlife (and impending death) crisis, which leads to his search for meaning and redemption, should inspire such admiration are interesting: for many Japanese, the era it is set in and the film’s humour are important. For foreign viewers, the humour does translate, but it is the everyman protagonist who has to confront his own mortality that appeals.² Moreover, because the film’s protagonist, Watanabe (Shimura Takeshi), decides to act nobly instead of just living, the narrative is seen as a positive humanist tale.³ That the film also speaks to a nostalgia based on forgetting is noted by film scholars, who examine its complex narrative structure built around flashbacks (Burch 1979, Desser 1992, Goodwin 1994, Prince 1991, Richie 1996).⁴

While the contemporary decontextualized reading of Ikiru demonstrates what makes a great film – the power to cross time and cultures because its central meaning seems to be universal and enduring – I am more interested in the meanings that the film may have had for the immediate postwar audience and how these understandings resonated with Kurosawa’s own experience as a Japanese man born in the Taishō era (1912–1926) and who lived through the momentous events of the Shōwa period (1926–1989). In short, I want to examine Ikiru as a film that spoke to particular uncertainties amongst its first native viewers and consider what this might tell us about a sense of postwar guilt in Japan.

Seaton (2007) makes an important point on the subject of memory in postwar Japan: individuals’ memories and State official history are two different if sometimes overlapping arenas. The former is often personal and varies across generations, genders and class; the latter speaks to the official acts, actions and the political positioning of Japan in East Asia and the West, where it is remembered, in turn, as an aggressor. Other work on the subject looks back at more than sixty years of being ‘postwar’ and often begins an analysis of the subject in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Bourdaghs argues that this long period of postwar subjectivity is analogous to the situation of being postcolonial and quotes Bhabha on remembering; it is never ‘a quiet act of introspection or retrospection, but rather “a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present”’ (in Bourdaghs 2005: 115). As the historian Igarashi also notes: being postwar involves bodies (as abstract concepts) of memory that metaphorically resemble other sorts of tangible and intangible bodies such as that of the nation state:

The healthy body of the nation was dismembered as imperial Japan experienced a radical transformation, and these dismembered bodily images were assembled again in the postwar period in order to articulate the new statehood. Body parts were metaphorically sutured together to regain the nation’s organic unity and to overcome its trauma; yet the suture left on the discursive body’s surface served as a constant reminder of the trauma. (Igarashi 2000: 14)

Ikiru is a postwar film made whilst Japan was still occupied by the allied forces (1945–1952). Thus the film was made while the process of ‘suturing’ was taking place; in an epoch during which the traumas of having fought, suffered through and lost a war, for which crimes some Japanese were put on trial by the victors, were being repressed. It was in this era that an early sense of postmodern uncertainty was being engendered in Japan through the disjuncture between pre- and postwar national discourses (see Frühstück 2007; Galan 2008; Martinez 2009: 39–40): what was true? This question clearly framed Kurosawa’s previous film Rashomon (1950).

That Ikiru has come to be viewed with nostalgia by both Japanese and non-Japanese viewers speaks to the success of a repression that was necessary for Japan to rebuild after the war. This involved acts of amnesia, or selective forgetting, that created both a new sense of nationalism and a yearning for what had gone before, both of which have gone on to fuel the furusato (hometown) discourse based on a sense that there once existed a purer, more authentic Japan. Through still visible but fast vanishing traces, contemporary Japanese can map out continuities that make up modern ‘Japaneseness’. These ‘discourses of the vanishing’ (Ivy 1995) rely on not exploring the lacunae that exist in representations of the past.

Certain historical eras, such as that of immediate postwar Japan, seem especially subject to the production of nostalgic recollections based around celebrating the quotidian rather than focusing on the experience of shared trauma. Consequently, the Japan that pulled itself together and soldiered on, producing the ‘new’ Japan born in 1964 with its hosting of the Olympics, is remembered with much sentimentality by various postwar generations. Paradoxically, while Kurosawa’s films of this postwar Occupation era often examine, in subtle and sometimes darkly ironic ways, the problematic relationships between trauma and memory, and responsibility and guilt that existed during this era, currently these films are viewed more for their ability to evoke that lost Japan than for their critical commentary.⁵

It is important to see Ikiru as a pair with Rashomon, the film Kurosawa had made two years before and which had won the Gran Prix at Venice in 1951. This is not an original insight. Goodwin (1994) notes the similar visual techniques; Burch (1979) is struck by the shared narrative strategies; and Desser, in particular, makes the point most clearly. Ikiru ‘borrows, problematizes, issues raised in … Drunken Angel and Rashomon’ (Desser 1992: 59). With Drunken Angel (1948) the question shared is: ‘what does it mean to be a hero in modern times, under ordinary circumstances?’ (ibid.). The problem raised by Rashomon and shared by the films is: ‘how to live in an existential world, a world rendered meaningless by the death of certainty, by the death, that is, of God’ (ibid.).⁶

The death of God as a shared theme between Japan and the West does not make sense in a society with a complex religious system in which Shinto and Buddhist beliefs dominate, providing their adherents with many deities and bodhisattvas to choose from – and little in Kurosawa’s work speaks to this very Western and post-1960s concern.⁷ However, the death of certainty is an important theme throughout Kurosawa’s work, and his concern with this topic could be seen to arise out of three events, two of which he discusses in his autobiography (Kurosawa 1983) and the third to which he only alludes. These events are: wandering the streets of Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake with his older brother Heigo when Kurosawa was just thirteen; the period of time spent living with his brother in a Tokyo slum, followed by Heigo’s suicide;⁸ and finally, the experience of the Second World War itself. The emotional residue of these events influence his depiction of Watanabe’s midlife crisis, becoming a form of experience shared with his audience.

The first event is described graphically in the autobiography. ‘The people who stood to the left and right of me in this scene looked for all the world like fugitives from hell and the whole landscape took on a bizarre and eerie aspect’ he notes, adding that his brother told him that the way to overcome his fear was to look at things directly (1983: 50). Kurosawa admits that Ikiru grew out of his own fear of impending death and drew on own his dread (Richie 1996: 86). The second event was the period of time he spent living in a Tokyo slum. His description of the people he came to know while living there includes his admiration for their optimism and humour; an admiration that went hand in hand with the knowledge that sympathy was of no help at all – he recounts how he tried to rescue a girl who was regularly beaten but who refused to be saved or she would be abused even more: this engendered an admiration for the urban poor that became a theme in many of his films, including Ikiru.

The last event is only alluded to in his autobiography:

I offered no resistance to Japan’s militarism. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I did not have the courage to resist in any positive way and I only got by, ingratiating myself when necessary and otherwise evading censure. I am ashamed of this, but I must be honest about it. (1983: 145)

Thus the death of certainty in Ikiru as a theme is related to various tropes that are found throughout the work of Kurosawa: the problems of guilt, responsibility, and the role memory plays in the shouldering (or not) of these emotions. The key question is: if memory is multifaceted, unreliable (as in Rashomon) and there is no certainty about past events, how is it possible to be responsible or feel guilt? For Kurosawa this question arose especially in relationship to modern urban life. The importance of women as catalysts also needs to be discussed as does the significance of the mentor/parent and student/child bond. These all link up to Desser’s query on how one might act heroically in modern life; the answer provided in Ikiru requires that the film be contextualized as a profoundly postwar work, much like Stray Dog (1949), made three years before.

That is, the absent presence in Stray Dog, Rashomon and Ikiru is not only the occupying US army but also any direct discussion of responsibility for the war (Gluck 1993: 65–66). It is imperative to recall Yoshimoto’s (2000) argument that many studies of Kurosawa’s films differ from the readings that experts on Japanese film history might bring to bear – issues of censorship, genre conventions (and thus of attempts to overturn these) – as well as the taken-for-granted contexts that an immediate postwar generation might bring to their reading of these films. It is on this last area that I will attempt to shed some light.

Postwar Heroes?

To begin, Stray Dog will be briefly discussed. Of the three films mentioned above, only Stray Dog obliquely alludes to the issue of responsibility, in a short conversation held between Detective Sato (Shimura Takashi) and Detective Murakami (Mifune Tohsiro). They discuss the differences between Murakami as an ex-soldier and his opponent Yusa, another ex-soldier, who has his stolen revolver.

Sato: Wrong is wrong.⁹

Murakami: That’s not the way I think. During the war, I saw men do bad things.

Sato: Is it the difference in our ages or the changing times? They call it something … apuru …

Murakami: Après guerre?

Sato: That’s it! The après guerre generation. You understand him very well.

Murakami: Perhaps I do.

[They then discuss how Murakami’s life resembles that of the criminal they are hunting because at the very end of the war their knapsacks were both stolen and both men felt desperate.]

Sato then comments: It’s this après guerre… There are two sorts. You’re the genuine article,¹⁰ Yusa’s apuru … apuru … A bad apple!

(my retranslation)

The idea that some men are born wrong, or evil, in contrast to good men, who cannot be corrupted, and who always will try and do the right thing, is subtly delineated.¹¹ If we consider Stray Dog within the context of the film noir genre (see Martinez 2015), it seems that for Kurosawa, the noir protagonist and his problematic masculinity formed part of his concern with Japanese postwar masculine identities: after the defeat, when the Americans in particular were putting Japanese on trial for their war crimes, how was it possible to ‘be’ a good man – let alone a hero? To show how thin the line might be, Kurosawa gives us the handsome Detective Murakami, dressed in his pristine white suit, as the other side of the coin of the criminal he is hunting: both were soldiers in the war; both had their knapsacks stolen; both had to remake themselves in the light of this theft (and what might the knapsack represent that the theft of it leads one man to despair and madness and the other to the law and obsessiveness?); and both become involved with the same woman, Namaki Harumi (Awaji Keiko), during their wanderings through Tokyo’s underworld.

The police officer who is the alter ego of his criminal friend, brother or fellow soldier is a common anti-hero. More interesting, as Yoshimoto (2000: 171–72) notes, is that new and Western audiences might not see the calm, humorous and humane Sato, Murakami’s mentor, in a critical light. At the very start of the scene described above, Murakami admires the certificates of merit that line the walls in Sato’s home. These certificates go back twenty-five years to 1924, and Yoshimoto argues that a 1950s Japanese audience would have asked itself what sort of man was Sato if he had been a commendable police officer while he enforced the laws of Japan’s increasingly militaristic government during the late 1920s until 1945. How had he survived postwar and what did his survival mean? Thus we are confronted by a lacuna in certainty: is Sato really a good man? If so, was he always a good man? Has the definition of a good man changed? Similarly, what exactly did Murakami do during the war that makes him such a promising police officer (missing gun not withstanding), keen to follow all rules and obey orders, afterwards?

These questions also can be asked of Watanabe Kanji (Shimura Takashi again) in Ikiru. It is 1951 and he has worked as a government bureaucrat since 1921, while his son Mitsuo (Kaneko Nobuo) was a soldier during the war. These men must have survived by keeping their heads down and thus are guilty of allowing fascism to arise. The often repeated (particularly during the Second World War) aphorism notes that ‘all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing’,¹² but this does not tell us what might happen to these good men after evil has triumphed and then has been defeated. Kurosawa, like many artists of his generation, wrestled with this question through an ancillary query: once defined as ‘good imperial subjects’, the Japanese – after losing the war – were branded as a complicit and thus guilty people who had to be remade as moral democratic citizens; if this was true, then was individual redemption necessary or even possible?

Or, how was redemption possible, particularly given the postwar lack of certainty (see also Harootunian 2005)? This seems an odd question to ask about the members of a society famously described by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict (1989 [1946]) as part of a shame not guilt culture, but this depiction of Japanese society ignores nearly 1,500 years of Buddhist influence in which guilt played a large part (see Martinez 2009: 38). Buddhism does have concepts of sin, guilt and of assuming responsibility for one’...