Seeing Past Destruction: Trauma and History in Kaikō Takeshi

Twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present.

—Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

In my own way, I was no exception. I had eyes only for atrocities. Corpses I found atrocious because I wasn't involved. Were I in any way involved, I would have been able to see beyond them. But the fact is I didn't kill, so nobody killed me. I knew it was possible I might be bombed someday at a restaurant or a bar, but it wouldn't be because I was a revolutionary or an anti-revolutionary or even a non-revolutionary. I was only a voyeur, lurking in a narrow ribbon of dim twilight.

—Kaikō Takeshi, Into a Black Sun

Introduction

On July 18, 1965, the Sunday Mainichi magazine published an article trumpeting its release of "rediscovered" World War II–era photos, a set of images that depicted "the long fifteen years of war, from the Manchurian Incident and the China War to the Pacific conflict."¹ These previously censored images, part of over twenty-four thousand negatives in total, had been "secretly safeguarded" by the Mainichi newspaper organization for over two decades, an act that, as the editors put it in the article's preface, rescued them from the air raids, incineration orders, and occupation directives that had destroyed so much of the war's pictorial record.² In the early months of 1965, the editors proclaimed, the company had decided to pull the negatives from their basement packing crates, restore them for publication, and show them to the world.³

But even as editors emphasized the timeless significance of their "hidden record," they nevertheless acknowledged that the appearance and publication of these photos in 1965 was due in large part to the retrospective mood of the reading public.⁴ The twenty-year anniversary of the end of the war brought a rash of books chronicling the country's past, both its origins in antiquity and its recent emergence from the ashes of World War II.⁵ Magazine publishers, feeding off and fueling this tide of remembrance, devoted dozens of their July/August issues to the anniversary of the atomic bombs and the imperial surrender broadcast.

But the article in the Sunday Mainichi also acknowledged that another conflict contributed to these photos finally seeing print, a conflict much in the news in the spring and summer of 1965—the Vietnam War.⁶ With anxiety mounting that China might enter the conflict (thereby attacking U.S. bases in Japan), the fact that these World War II photos "look just like the Vietnam War," as the first line of the editors' preface puts it, helps to explain why these pictures were finally finding such widespread dissemination. It also helps to explain why the editors chose the novelist Kaikō Takeshi to write the article itself, an author who was only fourteen when World War II ended, but whose "experience in 'today's war'" seemed to ensure insight into yesterday's conflict. Kaikō had just returned from a well-publicized three-month trip to Vietnam. He had written several widely read articles about the Southeast Asian war and had just released a best-selling book about his experiences in and among the fighting.

While Kaikō's Sunday Mainichi article ostensibly presents a discussion with eight photographers who produced some of the photos in the Mainichi's collection, it actually spends a great deal of time contemplating the nature of viewing such images in the modern age. Specifically, Kaikō discusses the reception of violent imagery in a media-saturated culture, a culture that craves the shocking image even as (or perhaps because) it feels itself exempt from the scene being displayed. In bemoaning the...