Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan (review)

By 2001 Mariko Tamanoi had completed the first draft of a new book, one that explored "Japanese people's memories of Manchuria in order to understand the sense of nostalgia in twenty-first century Japan" (p. 2). She had even identified the image she wanted to appear on the book's cover: a photograph she had long admired of a bucolic landscape in Manchuria, taken by South Manchuria Railway employee Terashima Banji. Tamanoi tracked down one of Terashima's former students, Yamashita Yasukazu, to obtain permission to use the photograph, and learned something that changed how she saw both the photo and her book. The site depicted in the photograph, the former student revealed, had been an execution ground, used by Japanese troops to kill Chinese "activists." "What had been tactfully concealed in Terashima's photo," Tamanoi writes, "was now revealed to me: the Japanese executioners, the Chinese nationalists, and the power of the Japanese state. I had to revise my manuscript" (p. 3).

Memory Maps—the product of those promised revisions—begins with this revelatory anecdote. While one of the questions it raised for me was how in her work on Manchuria Tamanoi had managed up to that point to avoid confronting the power of the Japanese state, if indeed she had, her candor about her own positionality in relation to the study of Manchuria's meanings in postwar Japan is nothing if not disarming. Her own parents, she tells us, were repatriated from Beijing at the end of the war; her father had been a military doctor. Another relative, who had held an important position in the South Manchuria Railway, stayed behind after Japan's surrender to assist the Chinese Communist Party and wrote about his experiences after his 1955 return to Japan. The "sense of nostalgia" Tamanoi experienced in twenty-first century Japan, we learn, stemmed at least in part from these familial ties. Returning to Terashima's photograph again at the end of Memory Maps, Tamanoi writes that it

made me "nostalgic" for a land about which I had heard so many stories while growing up in Japan. Although I have never animated this particular space [the site depicted in the photograph] with my own body, I have done so many times in my imagination. I then talked to Mr. Yamashita, and his story shattered my nostalgia for Manchuria but enabled me to "see" the power of the Japanese state in the figures of the Japanese executioners. Once I saw them under the trees, I remembered the Japanese state in Manchuria that had exercised formidable power in the age of empire.

(p. 160)

Tamanoi's own complex and personal encounter with memory, nostalgia, and the Japanese state is reflected to a significant degree in her approach to the sources and arguments that shape Memory Maps.

Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. One of the book's strengths is its rich array of memoirs, testimony, and other materials produced by and about former agrarian settlers of Manchuria, the children left behind during the struggle to return to Japan, the Chinese adoptive parents of those children, and the children of those children. So far as I am aware, no other English-language monograph offers a comparable collection of perspectives on Japan's changing relationship with Manchuria as a destination and as a collection of memories. While some of the sources Tamanoi uses—interviews conducted in Nagano in the mid-1970s by the historian Yamada Shōji, for example—will be familiar to readers of other scholarship on emigration to Manchuria, the book's agenda in many ways begins where earlier English-language works on Manchuria end. Sandra Wilson and Louise Young, for example, were concerned with Manchuria's meanings to citizens and the state in the context of the 1930s.¹ Tamanoi's concerns lie elsewhere, both chronologically and analytically. Memory Maps uses interviews and other sources not to illuminate the past so much as to...