Japan's Long Postwar: The Trick of Memory and the Ruse of History

The last days of the twentieth century witnessed an explosion of memoration and an unprecedented proliferation of mnemonic devices that have not just reinforced the earlier separation between memory and history but confused their respective functions in such a way as to invite the substitution of one for the other, as if the order of knowledge and experience each represented no longer mattered. This misrecognition was undoubtedly prompted by the effort to retain from the history of World War II the memory of a record of barbarism so unparalleled that it became a moral imperative of each generation to recall the painful moment when millions were systematically murdered. In the lengthening shadow of that historical trauma, we have seen an obsessive enlistment of memory and experience in the court of history to judge those acts of unpardonable and almost unrepresentable terror nations and peoples have inflicted upon each other to enlarge the vast tapestry of horror that even now, a half-century after the event, we still bear witness. Every contemporary instance of mass, genocidal destruction—Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia—jars the great memory-desiring machine to recall the violence of the past in order to act in the present, even though the act of memoration is often made to serve as a substitute for acting. In France, Vichy and its complicity in the Final Solution has become a virtual industry, producing histories, memorial accounts, movies, and novels; in Germany, until reunification, generations were constantly reminded of the depredations of the Nazi past and the fear of historical reprisals. Since the early 1990s especially, there has been a virtual cascading of books, discussions, and articles occasioned by the fiftieth anniversary of the end of Japan's war with the United States and Asia that have sought to make sense of the consequences of that momentous event in the intervening half-century. Like others, the Japanese have appealed to memory, as such, and the retrieval of "experience" but less, perhaps, to grasp the meaning of the events that led to genocide in Asia, destruction, and defeat than to refigure the relationship between victimizer and victim. While the Japanese example seems more overdetermined than, say, the French or German efforts to restore a collective memory of war and its aftermath, we must also recognize in this appeal to memory and forms of memoration a structure of repetition driven by a fetishized object, an absent but ghostly apparition that reappears to remind Japanese they are not really modern but Japanese.

It would be hard, in any case, to find a national experience that has dwelled so long and longingly on the postwar. It is a post that refuses postponement—so much so that contemporary photographer Tomotsu Shomei misrecognized what he called "Americanization" as dominating the scene of the 1960s to conclude that it "had originated from the American military bases" and thus from the time of the Occupation. "I have the impression," he wrote as late 1981, "that America gradually seeped out of the meshes of the wire fences that surrounded the bases and before long penetrated the whole of Japan." Yet this misrecognition, driven by cultural amnesia, revealed only the excess of expenditure caused by the overdetermined importation of American-style commodity culture and prompted a willful forgetfulness that the process had originated well before World War II and the hated army of occupation from a country he had never seen. This sense of forgetfulness articulated by Tomotsu was already a negative image that aimed to replace quality with quantity, value with desire, and the enduring old with the ever new in the ever same. Above all else Americanism, as it was called, destroyed memory and encouraged social forgetfulness, as Kato Norihiro would point out, to make possible Japan's long and interminable postwar. It was for this reason that Tomotsu asserted that the Occupation had obliterated Japan...