Abstract
The recent spate of Japanese films dealing with World War II or with Japan fighting modern wars raises questions about what kind of histories are being narrated, both wartime and postwar, what they say about Japanese responsibility for war and atrocities in the Asia-Pacific War, and how they relate to current trends in nationalism. The fear is that such movies resonate with other phenomena, from the comments of Japanese officials, most recently exemplified by the speeches and writings of retired General Tamogami Toshio, Japan's former Air Self-Defense Force [ASDF] Chief of Staff, to popular manga like Kobayashi Yoshinori's work, that seem to legitimize Japan's pursuit of war in East Asia and deny Japanese responsibility for atrocities. 1 I have already argued in Japan Focus, with regard to two cinematic imaginations of Japan at war, the alternative World War II history Both works present a "victorious" Japan, populated by young people willing to sacrifice themselves for their community, but through an entertainment cinema that appears so conscious of a consumer base with conflicting opinions about the war and nationalism, that it attempts to construct a hegemonic vision of the nation that appeals to all sides, only to end up portraying an empty Japan that can mean anything to anyone. One could argue that this emptiness is a product of the fact that these films, both of which are fantasies, do not carry the burden of the real memory of WWII and its aftermath. What of the recent films that take up actual historical moments and figures, such as kamikaze pilots or other suicidal missions? Yamato (Otokotachi no Yamato, 2005), for instance, about the final days of the famed battleship, was a significant box office success, grossing ¥5.1 billion in ticket sales, the fifth best selling Japanese film in a year when Japanese movies out-grossed foreign films for the first time since 1985 (it was also the most successful Japanese war film in decades). Advertisement: Yamato "rattles the soul" Yoshikuni Igarashi has argued that post-2000 kamikaze films such as Fireflies (Hotaru, 2001) respond to the end of the Shōwa Era and the Cold War by moving away from narratives that previously marked a division between the war and the postwar by depicting the heroic deaths of the kamikaze, as if their demise signified the end of the war and its problems. Newer films are considering the lingering traumatic effects of the war on postwar Japan in the form of surviving kamikaze. 3 I contend, however, that the effect of many of these films is to engage not their manifest subjects, the post-1989 present or even the wartime, but the problematic, usually unrepresented history in between. Igarashi argues that Fireflies avoids dealing with the trauma of the war by narrating a second set of deaths in the present, which cleanly conclude the postwar and divide it from today. I contend that Yamato, on the other hand, which offers no such deaths, performs wartime trauma in a vicarious fashion, using the disruptive effects of depicting WWII trauma so as to divert the audience's attention away from what might be for the majority of the audience, born after the war ended, the greater trauma: the postwar era and its history of economic upheaval, American bases, student protest, or "democracy." That these films are also appearing at the time of the "Shōwa 30s" boom, featuring nostalgic narratives of Japan between 1955 and 1965 such as the successful film series Always-Sunset on Third Street, is no coincidence. Some films ignore the war and the long history of postwar conflict to construct an idyllic postwar, while others "remember" wartime trauma in order to skip to a present where that trauma has been solved. Both, however, construct a postwar empty of problems in order to avoid dealing with its traumatic and divisive history, primarily in order to establish the illusion of a more unified present. Yamato was produced by Takaiwa Tan, the chairman of Tōei, and Kadokawa Haruki, a maverick producer who in the 1970s and 1980s introduced into the Japanese film industry new marketing strategies for big-budget spectaculars. The film was Kadokawa's return to success after his cocaine bust in 1993 and reunited him with director Satō Jun'ya, who had helmed such early Kadokawa blockbusters as Proof of the Man (Ningen no shōmei, 1976). Purportedly budgeted at 2.5 billion yen, quite high by Japanese standards, Yamato featured an all-star cast, including Nakadai Tatsuya, Sorimachi Takashi, Nakamura Shidō, Matsuyama Ken'ichi, Okuda Eiji, Suzuki Kyōka, Aoi Yū, Terajima Shinobu, and Watari Tetsuya, and a colossal set: a life-size reproduction of the front half of the Battleship Yamato, itself the largest battleship ever constructed. Yamato narrates the last days of the famous battleship, which was sunk off Japan on 7 April 1945 with a loss of 2740 lives after being sent on a suicidal mission to defend Okinawa. It does this through two structuring devices: the first focusing on several young recruits who were only 17-years old at the time of the last battle, Lost youth: Kamio (by the flag) and the other recruits and the second, a framing narrative in which one of those recruits, Kamio Katsumi, is asked sixty years later by Makiko, the daughter of Uchida Mamoru, one of his former shipmates, to take her to the site of the sinking. Both are central in articulating the film's ambiguous, if not contradictory politics. By concentrating on the young men, the film, which was based on the award-winning book by Henmi Jun (Kadokawa Haruki's sister), is able to narrate a tale of innocent, promising spirits needlessly sent to their grisly deaths by a central command that even the fleet commander, Itō Seiichi, registered objections to. Although the older, adult trio of Moriwaki Shōhachi, Uchida, and Karaki Masao, who are directly in charge of these young recruits, can convincingly voice their desire to sail to their deaths because of their love for Yamato (and, correspondingly, the nation it is named for) and their hope of defending their families at home, the greenhorns' similar statements lack force and are even questioned by Moriwaki at one point. Quite a number of voices, including that of the director, claimed Yamato was an anti-war film, one revealing the horrible waste of life caused by a reckless leadership. 4 Yet right-wing commentators could also point to the same chaste sailors and, especially by citing other texts like Nagabuchi Tsuyoshi's honorific ending song, claim they were presented as an example of selfless patriotism that all Japan should follow. 5 e framing structure only reinforces these possible, contradictory readings. Kamio's narration of what happened after Yamato's loss, especially the deaths of his girlfriend Taeko and Uchida's lover Fumiko in the atomic attack on Hiroshima, prompts him to declare that even the hope of dying to save their families came to naught. Kamio in particular is presented as a victim of trauma after the war, unproductive (without wife or children) and reclusive (he did not even know Uchida had survived the Yamato sinking), whose problematic relation to memory is exemplified both by his refusal to take part in Yamato memorials, and a physical debilitation (a heart ailment) that worsens as the site of his traumatic experience nears. Coupled with Uchida, who was presumably rendered sterile by the war (his children are all adopted), Kamio represents the loss of the masculine bravura that Moriwaki and Uchida exemplified during the war. The present-day narrative is supposed to show the overcoming of such trauma, and, like films in a similar vein, such as Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, makes Yamato a film that combines ostensibly accurate spectacles of past events with the work of processing memory for contemporary purposes. Perhaps it belongs in the "trauma cinema" that E. Ann Kaplan, Joshua Hirsch, Janet Walker, and others have discussed. 6 One would initially think not, however. Given that mental trauma is usually theorized as coming from an experience so shocking and forceful that normal psychological structures are unable to manage it, thus leaving the traumatic memory in the mind unprocessed and occasionally able to wreak havoc, many have labeled trauma cinema those motion pictures which deal with experiences so overwhelming that normal modes of film, particularly the classical realism of Hollywood, cannot properly deal with it. Prominent examples of trauma cinema are then films like Alain Resnais' Night and Fog that are modernist in form, which evince in their disjunctive cinematic structures both symptoms of the rupturing effects of trauma, as well as innovative methods of representing experiences that are inherently difficult to represent. Yamato, however, as many critics noted, even when judging it favorably, is largely conventional, if not clichéd in style. The form it relies on is not just the war film, but the television history program, since it features both the familiar voice of TV Asahi announcer Watanabe Noritsugu as the narrator, and the explanatory titles common to Japanese television documentaries and historical dramas. Actually starting with documentary footage and images of the Yamato Museum in Kure, Yamato manages a loss that, at least in terms of its own film form is not hard to represent, that has already been memorialized in conventional ways. In some ways, it is simply a reminder for those who haven't gone to the museum. That, however, does not account either for the film's pretensions or its effects and popularity. Uchida's daughter, Makiko, visits the Yamato Museum at the beginning, but must go further to the spot where the Yamato sank.
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