(Essay) How Do Japanese Artists Combat Historical Amnesia Surrounding Imperial Japan?

“Last year nothing happened. The year before nothing happened. And the year before that nothing happened.” This is the sentiment that many people who have lived in a postwar era can relate to, especially Japanese people living through the post-WWII era who were dealing with both the traumas of war and the guilt of their own country. Many don’t remember it at all—living in the state of historical amnesia due to the government’s insistence on keeping children’s pride in their country. Despite this, Japanese artists remain critical to imperial era Japan and depict wartime in art and popular culture. This essay will examine how Japanese people remember the tragedies experienced and committed in war through popular media, while comparing them to modern Japanese artists that use war as a theme for their artworks. Specifically, I will dive into the works of Tomatsu Shomei (1930-2012), Miyazaki Hayao (b.1941), Yanagi Yukinori (b.1959), and the manga series Golden Kamuy (2014-2022) by Noda Satoru.

The historical amnesia present in Japanese citizens is caused mostly by the government’s refusal to acknowledge the wrongdoings of Imperial Japan, and the country’s role as a major aggressor in WWII. Ex-Prime minister Shinzo Abe is notorious to many people for his acts of actively discouraging education on Imperial Japanese war crimes and for denying the existence of comfort women. Compared to Germany, it is much easier for Japan to forget about their committed atrocities after WWII, as Japan’s actions were only committed in the scope of Asia—away from Western eyes. Instead, the government was able to victimise themselves through the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The phenomenon of Japanese peoples’ historical amnesia can be seen clearly through popular media amongst citizens—especially anime and manga. Space Battleship Yamato is easily one of the most influential science fiction manga in Japan. It initiated Otaku culture and was the inspiration for anime/manga that are still popular today, such as Evangelion and Gundam, as described in Murakami Takashi’s essay “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture”. However, due to how much the story relies on the context of WWII and how it uses a Japanese battleship as one of its biggest elements, it incites many discussions surrounding not only historical amnesia, but a glorification of wartime Japan. It is indeed ironic for Space Battleship Yamato to depict Battleship Yamato as a hope for humanity, as Murakami writes also in “Little Boy”: “this landmark anime still relied on the idea of radiation as a key narrative device. Thirty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese experience of the atomic bombings was beginning to fade into the past, but the memory could not be forgotten.” There are many less influential manga that are more heavily nationalist, such as Neo Gōmanism Manifesto Special - On War, a controversial series written by a right-wing author. Despite this, many artists and authors create works that demonstrate their awareness of their own country’s history.

Tomatsu Shomei, a person who lived through war during his teenage years, says, “the memories I have carried with me since postwar years right down to the present are not memories of the war as such, rather they are memories of the shadow of war.” Remembering a traumatic event such as war is a difficult thing. Miyazaki Hayao is a famous director both in Japan and in the West, known for Studio Ghibli’s peaceful and calming Japanese imagery. Though what most people overlook in the leftist, previously Marxist director’s works is the perpetual theme of war. In Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), we are shown a scene of weapon creation depicted in an abstract and dreamy way, where grimy aircrafts fly through the sky, exploding, as the land beneath them is engulfed in flames. We see a similar image in Tomatsu Shomei’s The Pencil of the Sun—a small cloud hovering over a body of water, lingering like smoke from an explosion would. The two artists, expressing themselves in very different mediums, are bonded by their shared awareness of Imperial Japan, disdain for American consumerist culture, and the Americanisation of Japanese society. Tomatsu has a series of photography documenting Nagasaki after the nuclear bomb, and Nagasaki is a photo from that series depicting a boat with the Japanese flag on it. Being put into the context of the series, it can easily be read as a criticism of Japan’s nationalism during wartime and how it failed its citizens in Nagasaki and across the nation. Tomatsu’s work possesses a lot of water imagery, and we can see the same in the warship depicted in Miyazaki’s first known work, Future Boy Conan. The warship is an antagonistic force symbolising the dangers that come with industrialisation and technological development under dangerous systems, which the protagonist, Conan, took down to save his land. Many of Miyazaki’s films depict the creation and use of WWII technology, such as aircrafts in the films The Wind Rises—a fictionalised biopic about the man who designed the Mitsubishi A5M fighter aircraft, and Porco Rosso—about a retired WWI pilot who was cursed to live in the form of a pig. In these works by both Miyazaki and Tomatsu, there is a presence of the artists’ cynicism towards the Japanese government and towards technology, such as ships, aircrafts, and bombs. Through this cynicism, the artists demonstrate an act of remembrance.

Many people also choose to remember through the depictions of strong symbols such as Japan’s Rising Sun flag. The Rising Sun flag was Japan’s national flag during their imperial era, and afterwards often seen as a symbol of hate and associated with right-wingers. It is said to hold the same impact that the Nazi symbol often induces in the West. Just recently during the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, the appearance of the Rising Sun flag created controversies within politically active crowds across East Asia. Some described Japan as trying to turn a symbol of pain and suffering into a symbol of peace, as if they have forgotten about the history associated with this flag. Yanagi Yukinori’s artworks often involve the Rising Sun symbol and Japan’s Hinomaru flag, using semiotics to directly criticise the ideas hidden behind the symbol. His work Banzai Corner involves numerous Ultraman figures with their arms held up, arranged in a corner of mirrors in a pattern that would reveal itself to be the Rising Sun symbol. The “banzai” in the title refers to the pose the Ultraman figures are doing, a celebratory pose that’s paired with the shout of “banzai!”. This phrase is also a call used during war—“banzai charge”, a military tactic involving honourable suicide. The manga series Golden Kamuy focuses on characters who are veterans that participated in the Russo-Japanese war, set earlier than WWII but still in the scope of Imperial Japan. This series depicts Meiji era Japan with exaggerated characters but great attention to realistic historical detail. In the cover for chapter 165, we see the character Hanazawa Yuusaku charging towards battle while holding up the Rising Sun Flag. Hanazawa was a son of a lieutenant general, and he became a flag-bearer during the Russo-Japanese war.

The manga explains how flag-bearers serve less as army power but as somebody who is able to influence and motivate a large group of people, and due Hanazawa’s soft and yielding nature, he became a flag-bearer under the pressure of his father’s expectations and his own selfish desire to avoid killing people in the war. In a flashback scene, we see Hanazawa charging into battle in the front lines, proudly waving the Rising Sun flag, as he gets shot in the head by friendly fire and falls limp onto the ground while everyone else charges past him. While Noda Satoru is never known to be vocal about his criticisms towards Imperial Japan, the narrative of Golden Kamuy and specifically the character of Hanazawa Yuusaku can be read as a result of the failure of the Imperial Japanese government towards even their own people—where the Empire could corrupt and exploit even good-natured men such as Hanazawa. This message becomes inherently more powerful with the involvement of the Rising Sun flag, just as Yanagi Yukinori uses in his artworks. Through the use of the Rising Sun, the audience will be able to understand the subject matter that the artist/author is dealing with even without deep understanding of the social and historical context of ideas such as banzai charge, flag-bearers, the Imperial Japanese Army, and so on.

Through looking at the works of Tomatsu Shomei, Miyazaki Hayao, Yanagi Yukinori, and the manga series Golden Kamuy, we see how artists across mediums reject the historical amnesia that lingers in Japanese society. Media such as Space Battleship Yamato bases its narrative around the nostalgia for the WWII battleship Yamato in a way that seems to forget the atrocities committed during Japan’s Imperial era. In opposition to that, these artists go out of their way to include intricate, critical narratives/imagery in their works to draw the audiences’ attention to the multifaceted experience Japan went through during wars. By the way of these artworks, we see how the method to provide Japanese society with a complete memory of their history is not through nationalist ideals, but a critical look at their government in both the past and the present.

Bibliography:

Dazai, Osamu. The Setting Sun. New Directions: New York, 1956. 

Johnny. “Yukinori Yanagi’s Banzai Corner | deciphering Japan’s political past using ultramen.” Spoon & Tamago. 14 August 2012. https://www.spoon-tamago.com/yukinori-yanagi-banzai-corner/.

Kim, Hyung-Jin, and Mari Yamaguchi. “EXPLAINER: Why Japan ‘rising sun’ flag provokes Olympic ire.” ABC News. 22 July 2021. https://web.archive.org/web/20211114134442/https://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/explainer-japan-rising-sun-flag-provokes-olympic-ire-79003591. 

OGAWA, SHUKO. “The Difficulty of Apology: Japan’s Struggle with Memory and Guilt.” Harvard International Review 22, no. 3 (2000): 42–46. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42762634. 

“Miyazaki’s Marxism - The Politics of Anime’s Legendary Director.” Zeria. 31 December 2019. Video, 1:23:46. https://youtu.be/UMXN6B-tqZM?si=PW2KKstc1qf5Z1bZ. 

Murakami, Takashi. Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture. Japan Society: New York. https://gwern.net/doc/anime/eva/little-boy/2005-little-boy.pdf.

Simbulan, Roland. “The other side of Shinzo Abe: historical revisionism, denial of war crimes.” Inquirer.net. 26 July 2022. https://opinion.inquirer.net/155428/the-other-side-of-shinzo-abe-historical-revisionism-denial-of-war-crimes.

Yeoh, Peter. “The Sky in Flames: Photographs of Tōmatsu Shōmei.” Impressions, no. 34 (2013): 96–107. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42597903.