Beyond Hiroshima: The Return of the Repressed; Wartime Memory, Performativity and the Documentary in Contemporary Japanese Photography and Video Art ed. by Ayelet Zohar (review)

The titles and subtitles of this catalogue for an exhibition that took place at the University of Tel Aviv in 2015—written in Hebrew on one side of the cover and English and Japanese on the reverse—reflect complex provocations. Highlighting ten Japanese photography and video artists born in three different generations whose work has unflinchingly dealt with the collective trauma of the Pacific War that continues to shape postwar Japan, the trilingual “Wartime Memory · ” might equally implicate Americans, Japanese, Israelis—or indeed citizens of any nation. “Beyond Hiroshima” mainly means complicating the Japanese culture of victimhood. Troublingly, from the time this exhibition took place, “The Return of the Repressed” has manifested itself in real-world terms in stirrings toward more aggressive action on the part of the Self Defense Forces. The last day of this exhibition, August 15, 2015, coincided with the seventieth anniversary of Japanese surrender, and Japanese wartime responsibility in the region was yet again a heightened question: at the yearly memorial Prime Minister Abe Shinzō gave a studied nonapology, while the emperor compensated with a sense of sorrow. Less than a month later, in the face of huge demonstrations in front of the Diet and a fierce brawl between Diet members, within the Diet the prime minister’s administration succeeded in taking another step toward “reinterpreting” the antibelligerency Article 9 of Japan’s constitution. As I write this at the end of May 2016, Barack Obama has just performed a moving nonapology in front of the Hiroshima Memorial. Yet cynics point to an overall rise in military weaponry and view this peace building as merely a strengthening of alliances. Everywhere, rising strains of nationalism and xenophobia swim in amidst rising world crises.

How do modern and contemporary Japanese photography and video artists create, address, or embody wartime memory? The way that photography and video are omniscient on screens, public and private, arguably gives photo media a special onus to change historical mindsets. This beautifully designed catalogue (available online as well as in hard copy) contains all the photographs, many stills from the videos, shots of the installation, as well as six significant essays by critics, academics, and a curator (variously working in history, Asian studies, and photography). Of the many themes running through the project, the most stimulating and original in the case of Japan is the concept of “postmemory.” Borrowed from Holocaust studies, the idea is that memory of trauma passes down transgenerationally.¹ In her important introduction, Ayelet Zohar, the curator of the exhibition and editor of the catalogue, states her hope for the third generation. If the response of the first generation was “silence,” the crucial role for the second generation was “rehabilitation,” and now those of the third generation “fac[e] the dilemmas, pain, and suffering of the past through accepting the idea of Japan’s responsibility, in a more direct and honest manner” (p. 12). In her essay referencing Jacques Ranciere who advocates the emancipatory capacity of art, the 50 works Zohar as curator chose for the exhibition—each reproduced in this catalogue—collectively exemplify Nicholas Bourriaud’s concept of “relational aesthetics” in which artists are agents of social change. Dividing them into “documentary” or “performative” practices, the prior is based on having been there, then, whereas the latter are based on a re-enactment of the past. Yet, as almost all of these works blur the line between these categories to some degree, the distance between past/present, here/there, us/them becomes an evocative and shifting dynamic.

Although not emphasized in this way, three documentary series by two now deceased photographers taken during 1945, 1960, and 1974 take on the burden of chronicling three postwar moments. A series taken directly of the...