Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan by Jessica Nakamura (review)

In the opening pages of Transgenerational Remembrance, Jessica Nakamura narrates her fraught family history in order to model an engagement with the Asia-Pacific War that holds post-war generations of Japanese – including diasporic Japanese subjects such as her own family – responsible for the atrocities and imperialism enacted in the nation’s name. Nakamura writes that her family’s home in Maui, Hawai‘i, featured a framed photograph of her late great-grand-uncle wearing his Imperial Japanese Army uniform, which served as a “spectral presence throughout [her] childhood” (x). Despite this militaristic image haunting her childhood home, Nakamura relates how she focused instead on the victimization of her deceased great-grandfather, who spent World War II in one of the mainland concentration camps where the US government incarcerated 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent. As Nakamura got older, she learned that her great-grand-uncle may have been responsible for committing atrocities in Manchuria on behalf of Japanese imperialism and that this complicity with the Japanese war effort may have led to his brother’s internment in the United States. Both the shame of her prior ignorance and the shame of her newfound “transgenerational” accountability for war crimes shocked Nakamura into awareness of the “irruptions of emotions brought on by gaps in information and uncertain testimonies” (xi).

Nakamura’s shock of awareness that even generations born long after the Asia-Pacific War had ended on 15 August 1945 and living far beyond Japan’s borders could be implicated in wartime atrocities and imperialism seems to motivate Transgenerational Remembrance’s excavation of performances created after 1989 that challenge hegemonic national narratives about the war. For Nakamura, the death of Emperor Hirohito that year marked the end of Japan’s post-war period, inaugurating a shift in national memory and a new era of cultural production. The book offers two major interventions into the fields of performance studies and Asian studies. First, Nakamura argues that understanding how war memories implicate post-war generations requires an extension of performance studies’ extant understanding of ghosting and haunting. Nakamura rightly notes that most performance studies scholars overly rely on Hamlet and other western plays to understand how ghost characters and themes of haunting play out on global stages, perpetrating a geopolitical myopia that emblematizes the field’s over-reliance on western theory (even when the case studies and/or scholars emerge from non-western locations). To counter this myopia, Nakamura foregrounds the traditional Japanese dance–drama form called Noh theatre, which western scholars generally relegate to the canon’s background, despite Noh’s 600-year performance history extending into the present day.

Transgenerational Remembrance is particularly drawn to mugen Noh, the category of plays that depict a lead character (or shite) who is deceased and haunts the stage; Nakamura argues that “Noh’s ghostly manifestations” can serve as a pedagogical framework for alternative performance dialectics that are rooted in ethical response rather than political efficacy (29). Noh’s performance model indeed expands the Eurocentric focus of most performance studies scholarship and further fuels the field’s investment in the ability of embodied performance “to effect alternative approaches to the past, separate from archival, evidentiary, and documentary concerns” (xv). Nakamura, however, is most interested in how contemporary performances by Japanese artists that emulate Noh’s spectral manifestations in order to represent the Asia-Pacific War might counter dominant narratives that underwrite Japan’s national amnesia about its own role as an aggressor during this period. This national amnesia conditions a “passive reaction from younger generations” who consume narratives that erase Japan’s war culpability and instead emphasize the nation’s victimization through spectacles of warrior worship and atomic mourning (28).

Each of Nakamura’s chapters documents a hegemonic memorial discourse that Japan has propagated about the war and uses a formal aspect of Noh theatre to amplify the resistant potential of alternative performances created by...