The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial Japan

Lost Histories

Lost Histories In 2002, the fourth highest grossing film in South Korea was a big-budget science fiction epic directed by Lee Si-Myung entitled 2009: Lost Memories. Based on a bestselling novel by Bok Geo-il, the film poses the intriguing question: “What if Japan had never lost its empire?”1 Lost Memories offers viewers an alternate history in which Korean nationalist Ahn Jung-geun (a real-life figure who assassinated Japanese Resident-General of Korea Ito Hirobumi in 1909) fails to assassinate Ito, with the result that Japan is not defeated in World War II but fights with the United States against Nazi Germany. Atomic bombs are dropped on Berlin, ending the war, and Japan retains its Asian empire intact. In 2009, Seoul is the third largest city in the Japanese empire, a high-tech postmodern metropolis awash with Japanese billboards, stores, and cars. The Japanese Bureau of Investigation (JBI) maintains colonial order, which is challenged only by an underground Korean resistance movement known as the furei senjin.2 The two main protagonists, Korean JBI agent Sakamoto (played by Korean actor Jang Dong-Gun) and Japanese agent Saigo (played by the Japanese actor Nakamura Toru), learn the truth about this false history late in the film. Japan has tampered with the history that you know. In 2008, North and South Korea united after sixty years of separation to be reborn into a mighty East Asian nation with a stable economy and a powerful military. At that time, a movement started to take back land that once belonged to ancient Korea (Goguryeo).3 You may not know this, but all of the territory around Manchuria belonged to our ancestors. Naturally, the Chinese government denied any access to the area, but with persistence, [China] finally admitted a joint research team of Korea, China, and Japan. [The Japanese] discovered a doorway in time [that they used] to escape the shame of defeat in the Pacific War and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A Japanese right-wing extremist group sent an assassin back a hundred years in time to change history. This was the start of our unfortunate history.4 Lost Memories concerns us because it is not simply anti-Japanese Korean nationalist propaganda. It is important to consider that Lost Memories was a mainstream box-office hit and not a documentary or art-house film produced for a limited 2 the attractive empire audience. Equally intriguing is why the film’s producers found the subject of Japanese empire to be commercially viable for both South Korean and Japanese film audiences. The casting of a well-known Japanese actor in a leading role and extensive use of the Japanese dialogue for most of the film acknowledges the producers’ conscious targeting of the Japanese market. This was a shrewd business decision in a year when the last barriers banning the importation of Japanese cultural products into the South Korean market were removed, and liberalization of the Korean market inspired a boom of interest in Korean cultural products in Japan.5 Lost Memories’ subplot of nascent Korean expansionist desires in China suggests that the attraction of empire is not limited to imperial Japan but may even be found in countries like contemporary South Korea, which not only did not possess colonies but were themselves the victims of colonialism. Even the film’s anti-imperialist resistance leaders cling to the notion that Korea once had an empire of its own and will actively seek to regain it in the future.6 Lost Memories alerts us to the fact that over half a century after its official demise the cultural legacy of Japanese imperialism remains a heated and unresolved topic. A growing number of South Korean mainstream films7 like Lost Memories are popular responses to tensions created in part by official and semiof- ficial Japanese statements such as Tokyo Metropolitan Governor Ishihara Shintaro ’s claim that Japan never invaded Korea,8 Japanese politicians’ quasi-official visits to the Yasukuni Shrine for Japan’s war dead, the ongoing debates over Japanese history textbooks, and the comfort women issue, as well as the deployment of Japanese Self-Defense Forces to Iraq.Similarly, a steady flow of recent Japanese films such as Lorelei and Merdeka [Indonesian for “independence”] 17805 (Murudeka 17805) have fueled fears across Asia because they depict a rearmed, hypernationalist Japan as well as for their historical amnesia. That these films speak to political and historical issues, as well as to each other, should...