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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/trying-protect-conversation-eika-tai-denying-oppression-comfort-women/"></div>It was a 67-year-old woman in a simple white top, adorned in a sash and set behind a table of microphones, in Seoul on August 14th, 1991 who uncovered for the world a historical tragedy and set a movement in motion. Kim Hak-sun spoke of how, as a teenager during the Second World War, the Japanese military forced her into sexual slavery at a comfort station. This was the first time a woman, a member of a group now known as “comfort women,” publicly told her story. Further testimony from others followed, which set the stage for a movement of recognition and compensation that has since been marked by activism in a range of national contexts.
On August 14, 2021, groups in South Korea, Japan, and the United States commemorated the 30th anniversary of her testimony as International Memorial Day for Japanese Military “Comfort Women.” But this event comes at a time of historical revision and nationalist revival in Asia, as elsewhere. Denial of the “comfort women,” a questioning of the women’s experiences, has become pervasive in Japan. And in recent months, J. Mark Ramseyer, a professor of contract law at Harvard Law School, incited controversy with the publication in the International Review of Law and Economics in March 2021 of “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War.” The article, which focuses on the “contractual dynamics” of comfort stations, has been criticized by academics for a misuse of sources and ideological undertones, which, <a href="https://apjjf.org/2021/5/Dudden.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://apjjf.org/2021/5/Dudden.html', 'as one scholar put it');">as one scholar put it</a>, “advocate a current Japanese political ideology.”
In Japan today, the story of “comfort women” is contentious, a site of debate, a memory denied and questioned by a range of individuals and groups often with political and social influence; these actors, primarily on the far right, also dispute other acts of Japanese wartime aggression. But there is another side to the discourse: Japanese activists who fight and struggle for the voices of survivors. To understand the “comfort women” debates and activism in Japan, and the recent Ramseyer controversy, I spoke with <a href="https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/etai/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/etai/', 'Eika Tai');">Eika Tai</a>, a professor at North Carolina State University who researches multiethnic Japan and colonial Taiwan. She is the author of <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo82108085.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo82108085.html', 'Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State');">Comfort Women Activism: Critical Voices from the Perpetrator State</a>, published in August 2020, and one of the first to concentrate on what she has called “comfort women activism in Japan.”
It is hard to set words to paper when writing on the “comfort women.” I grew up with stories of the Holocaust, but I did not learn of the “comfort women” until I was older. There is, I believe, a degree of trivialization and desensitization at work with the Holocaust for me, as an American-born Jewish person, and a ready-made vocabulary to understand and write on survivor testimony. I learned of the stories little by little: I listened to the testimony of a Holocaust survivor at an assembly in high school, watched Schindler’s List, and saw the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London. This is not true with the “comfort women,” a story that I only learned when I could realize the gravity of the trauma, which was as shocking as it was hard to comprehend.
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SPENCER COHEN: Let&#8217;s start with a question on terminology, which is where you begin the book. When we use the term &#8220;comfort women,&#8221; to whom are we referring?
EIKA TAI: This is not a simple question, but opens up a question of the parameter of “comfort women” activism. The term ianfu, the original Japanese expression, refers to those women who were taken from a dozen countries to comfort stations operated by the Japanese military and exploited as sexual slaves for soldiers. Ianfu is a euphemism and activists in Japan use quotation marks to indicate it. Some activists prefer to use “sexual slaves,” which has been used by the United Nations and the international community. The activists as a whole have decided to use ianfu for the name of the nationwide association and for memorial days for victims because it was historically used. Some use the term in order to shed light on the cruel fact that while forcing women into slavery, the Japanese military labeled them as “comfort women.”  I appreciate their stance on the term. I think this ironical effect of the use of the term is understood in the international community where people are aware that “comfort women” were sexual slaves. I use the term in this sense. In face-to-face communication with survivors, activists use the word grandma in each of their languages to express respect and affection. For example, they call Korean women halmoni and Chinese women from Shanxi Province daniang.
The “comfort women” movement is not just about victims who were called “comfort women,” but also about women victimized outside comfort stations. The official operation of comfort stations allowed soldiers to think it would be all right to build makeshift rape centers when finding no such station, and to rape women in streets and houses around the battlefield. That created the need to make more comfort stations. The rampant occurrences of sexual violence in warzones led to the creation of the “comfort women” system in the first place. There was a vicious circle of the forms of sexual violence. I would like to stress that the “comfort women issue” refers to all forms of sexual violence committed by the Japanese military, not just those that took place at comfort stations. This understanding of the term ianfu is important because it captures the extensiveness of the Japanese empire’s sexual violence, and also because it makes clear that the issue is directly relevant to sexual violence in warzones in today’s world. For these reasons, some activists insist on using the expression “victims of Japanese military sexual violence.” Yet, others say that ianfu should be kept to point to the particularity of the Japanese case.
Even with testimony by former &#8220;comfort women&#8221; and archival evidence, an array of far-right politicians, along with others, in Japan have advocated a view best recognized as historical denialism. They oppose the understanding of &#8220;comfort women&#8221; as “sexual slaves,” arguing that the women were volunteers, prostitutes who willfully chose such work; this view has become particularly fervent in the past two decades. Why do you believe there has been such pushback in Japan to the idea of these women as “sexual slaves”?
The question to ask is: what are they trying to protect or assert by denying the history of “comfort women”? It is their nationalism. Those politicians and others who deny the history must have diverse images of Japan, but they all seem to believe that, in the words of former prime minister Abe Shinzō, Japan is or should be a beautiful country. Most of them support the emperor system, a system of hetero-patriarchy, and many believe the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) was a just war against the encroachment of Western powers. Japanese soldiers who fought for the emperor, for Japan should be respected.
They deny all kinds of historical facts about atrocities committed by the Japanese military in Asia and beyond, but the term “sexual slaves” has been particularly problematic to them. For them, it is an insult, defamation, disrespect to the Japan they love and admire. They know slavery is a crime against humanity. Their Japan would not have committed such a crime. The sexual act is an essential constituent of ethnicity. The idea of sexually abusing women of other Asian countries is a threat to the respectability of Japanese ethnicity. Their argument that “comfort women” were prostitutes and therefore not victims reveals their contempt and disregard not only for “comfort women” victims but also for prostitutes and sex workers. More fundamentally, it points to their assumption that women should provide ian (comfort) for men, sexually or otherwise. This assumption is inherent in Japanese hetero-patriarchy.
So, then the “comfort women” issue is about the recognition of not only historical atrocities but also the rights of women. In Japan, how has this shaped activism and the movement in support of former “comfort women”?
I heard activists in Japan talking about two major perspectives for the “comfort women” issue: to see it as a redress issue for Japan’s past and as an issue about sexual violence and discrimination against women. At the beginning, activists and supporters often held one of the perspectives. As the movement evolved, they came to comprehend the issue from a multifaceted point of view, including the two perspectives. The transnational movement has revolved around two problems: the violation of women’s human rights, especially in warzones, and Japan’s historical responsibility. In the international context, the gender perspective presented by activists in Japan is not only universal but particular, for the crimes were committed by Japan.
That said, I want to note when encountering Kim Hak-sun and other survivors, many women in Japan heard the victims’ voices through their own experiences of gender-based discrimination permeated in their country. They saw the concatenation of what happened to the victims and what has been happening to themselves. For them, the encounter was deeply emotional. They hold themselves responsible for what Japan did to other Asian women as its citizens. This recognition is somewhat abstract. I think that their emotional attachments to the issue have been a driving force for them to continue fighting for three decades.
In the book, you write about how activists in Japan “have a perpetrator consciousness (kagaisha ishiki)” and identify as citizens of a perpetrator nation, which they see as responsible for wartime atrocities and aggression. Can you elaborate on how activists have reconciled with what appears a duality of self-identification: as both perpetrators of historical violence and victims of contemporary gender-based discrimination?
Such a duality materialized and troubled those who tried to tackle the Korean “comfort women” issue at the site of the women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s. Because of their self-perception as victims of gendered discrimination within Japan, they could not fully develop a sense of perpetrators’ responsibility to take action on behalf of Korean victims. In the 1990s, women in Japan encountered victims face-to-face. I cannot stress enough how important that was. They were deeply moved by the victims’ courage to publicly tell the stories of sexual violence. They built interpersonal relationships with the victims, inviting them to Japan, visiting them in their home countries, and listening to their stories closely often in intimate contexts. Over time, the Japanese women witnessed many victim-turned-survivors becoming activists themselves. They learned from the survivors a spirit of fighting gendered discrimination. For them, there is little duality or contradiction between two positions: they fight as citizens of the perpetrator state for taking historical responsibility and as women discriminated against for eliminating sexual violence in contemporary Japan and beyond. They see themselves as fighters rather than as victims, like those survivors.
How do activists in Korea, for example, or elsewhere in Asia, view activists in Japan? Is there any animosity?
Over three decades, Japanese activists have built and maintained solidarity with activists in victimized countries such as South Korea. They have been able to gain trust from other activists because they have never forgotten that they are citizens of the perpetrator state Japan and because they have dedicated their lives to survivors.
That said, Japanese activists themselves do not think that they have worked hard enough because they have not succeeded in making the Japanese government apologize to victims sincerely with state compensation. Activists in other countries appreciate their dedication, as well as, I think, their humbleness. I remember the scene where a resident Korean praised Japanese activists’ efforts in front of other activists. As a resident Taiwanese, I shared her view. A Japanese woman standing next to me whispered she could never accept such a compliment.
That is an incredible and enlightening anecdote, which really reveals how activists in Japan understand and view their position within the movement. To conclude, let&#8217;s bring the discussion to the US, particularly to the most recent controversy surrounding remembrance of “comfort women.” How should we understand the article written by Ramseyer and his views?
Activists in Japan first learned about Ramseyer’s article from the January 28, 2021 issue of Sankei Shimbun, a rightwing Japanese newspaper. They did not immediately take action, seeing it as yet another instance of the historical revisionist campaign. Witnessing concerted efforts in South Korea and the US to expose the problematic nature of the article and get it retracted, they became more involved. On March 10, historical associations issued a statement against the article. On March 14, Fight for Justice, an activist group, held in collaboration with other groups an online seminar, “Sick and Tired of Hearing “Comfort Women were not Sexual Slaves,” inviting leading historians and reestablishing historical facts. The international movement against Ramseyer has also encouraged concerned citizens in Japan to publicly criticize him for having presented distorted views on Okinawa, resident Koreans, and Burakumin (people historically discriminated against). Ramseyer’s article has generated these critical responses. Yet, the left-leaning media in Japan has barely reported on it, limiting a social impact.
It has promoted the revisionist campaign. Sankei Shimbun, a newspaper which had been orchestrating “history wars” to spread revisionist views in the US, covered it several times. On April 24, Nadeshiko Action, a women’s rightwing group, held a symposium, where Ramseyer, speaking in Japanese, called for freedom of speech in the academia and reiterated his arguments in the article. Revisionist politicians have grabbed the opportunity to reassert the need to revise the 1993 Kōno Statement, internationally recognized as Japan’s official position on the issue, rebuking it for admitting the use of coercion in treating women and thereby allowing for the criticisms of Ramseyer. Given that he is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies and was awarded in 2018 the “Order of the Rising Sun” by the Japanese government for his contributions to Japanese studies, one could argue that the revisionist campaign had paved the way for his publication of the article.
The reactions to the article in Japan shed light on how deeply Japan as a whole is isolated from the rest of the international community on the history of “comfort women.” Activists in Japan have been struggling with this situation for three decades. I must say that they are committed not only to spreading historical truths that have been documented but also to keeping alive survivors’ individual histories they heard in person. Ultimately, it is the memories of survivors that have given them energy to continue fighting.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/trying-protect-conversation-eika-tai-denying-oppression-comfort-women/"></div>

“What are they trying to protect?” A Conversation with Eika Tai on Denying the Oppression of “Comfort Women”

yoyogi-cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/waning-promise-tokyo-2020/"></div>The house at the end of the path was white and old. Its windows were black with blue trimmings, and the trees, hefty and tall, towered behind. There was nothing special or distinguished about this house in a park surrounded by buildings and roads and highways. I thought it was a shed, maybe a decrepit structure, which recalled nothing in particular and meant nothing at all. To learn that this house was the only vestige of the 1964 Olympic Village was to uncover a past both hidden and obvious.
The house, once home to the Dutch team, beckoned to the past with its walls and windows and a small sign that read: “Olympic Memorial House.” A metal fence, which was newer than the house, cordoned it off as if it were a museum object. It was old, and branches traced the walls. The house recalled the 1964 games, which were Tokyo’s first Olympics (the 1940 games were canceled on account of war) and held the promise of a future that was bright and mighty. After the games, the bubble had burst in 1991, and was followed by <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/japans-shrinking-economy/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/japans-shrinking-economy/', 'economic stagnation that has never really relented');">economic stagnation that has never really relented</a>. But the 1964 games were the apex, the height of the postwar — before it all went wrong. The hopeful past signaled by the Olympics was now lost and set aside, sequestered, as a crumbling ruin, to a corner of Yoyogi Park.
In the early 2000s, Tokyo hoped to hold the Olympics again, and the past that seemed lost was to be reclaimed and recalled. <a href="https://www.asahi.com/articles/DA3S14426199.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.asahi.com/articles/DA3S14426199.html', 'Shunya Yoshimi');">Shunya Yoshimi</a>, a professor at The University of Tokyo, wrote, “In the mood of stagnation of Heisei (1989–2019), people tried to give rise to ‘that glorious era’ with another showing of the Tokyo Olympics.” A second Tokyo Olympics would be the reincarnation of the 1964 games and herald an end to the unyielding “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/Japans-Lost-Decade-Causes-Legacies-and-Issues-of-Transformative-Change/III-Staden/p/book/9781138844797" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.routledge.com/Japans-Lost-Decade-Causes-Legacies-and-Issues-of-Transformative-Change/III-Staden/p/book/9781138844797', 'lost decade(s)');">lost decade(s)</a>” of the 1990s and 2000s.
Tokyo applied to host the 2016 games, and was selected by the IOC as one of four candidate cities, but, in 2009, lost to Rio. The <a href="https://tokyo2020.org/en/news/candidature" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://tokyo2020.org/en/news/candidature', '2020 Tokyo bid');">2020 Tokyo bid</a>, sent to the IOC in 2013, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/tokyo-2020-a-perfect-olympic-vision" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/tokyo-2020-a-perfect-olympic-vision', 'emphasized the legacy of the 1964 games');">emphasized the legacy of the 1964 games</a> and the existing Olympic venues as a ready-made foundation. But it also offered a more immediate promise: the Olympics would be a games of reconstruction, a beacon of hope in the aftermath of the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/japans-311" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.newyorker.com/news/evan-osnos/japans-311', '3/11 disaster');">3/11 disaster</a> (the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami). Though the story helped Tokyo to secure the bid, the loftier promise remained: a return to the glory of the 1964 games and revival of economic prosperity. The day that the IOC awarded Tokyo the games, then <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/69346582-178d-11e3-83b9-00144feab7de" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.ft.com/content/69346582-178d-11e3-83b9-00144feab7de', 'Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced');">Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced</a>, “I want to make the Olympics a trigger for sweeping away 15 years of deflation and economic decline.”
And so, in Tokyo, everything seemed to look towards the games. When I returned in 2018, after a year away, I found a city that swelled with hope and anticipation. At first, the hints were subtle and banal. New taxis, large and black, had the Olympic and Paralympic logos affixed to the sides. A driver said that they were built to accommodate “bigger-bodied foreigners” (this is unverified, but I enjoyed the extra legroom). Posters of the Olympic and Paralympic mascots, <a href="https://www.olympic.org/news/tokyo-2020-olympic-and-paralympic-mascots-make-official-debuts" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.olympic.org/news/tokyo-2020-olympic-and-paralympic-mascots-make-official-debuts', 'Miraitowa and Someity');">Miraitowa and Someity</a>, covered the walls of metro stations. Olympic paraphernalia stocked the shelves of stores. The countdown clock was placed next to Tokyo Station, adjacent to the Imperial Palace. On July 24, 2019, the clock began to tick: one year to the games.
Once a week, on a mad dash to a class, I took the Ginza Line to Shibuya, a tourist hub that also sat adjacent to the Olympics venues built for the 1964 games. For the 2020 games, the venues were to be reused, and Shibuya would be a <a href="https://www.teamusa.org/News/2019/January/22/The-Shibuya-District-In-Tokyo-Is-A-Must-Visit-During-Your-Trip-To-The-Olympic-Games-In-2020" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.teamusa.org/News/2019/January/22/The-Shibuya-District-In-Tokyo-Is-A-Must-Visit-During-Your-Trip-To-The-Olympic-Games-In-2020', 'key center for visitors');">key center for visitors</a> — an already crowded area soon to be overcome by even more people. The train would turn and rumble, and the announcer would announce that the final stop, Shibuya, was approaching. The Ginza Line’s doors would open, and crowds would rush onto a platform that was too small and cramp. The tiled floor was old and yellowed, and the walls were padded and entrances haphazard. The ticker gate took you to other parts of the stations, some newer, others older, and many with views of construction on the streets.
But Shibuya was changing. I remember a video — on subway lines some years ago — that portrayed a time-lapse where buildings grew, and the neighborhood’s skyline became crowded and grand. There was no mistaking: the area was preparing for the Olympics. At the end of 2019, the skyline was punctuated by cranes and the streets with barriers for construction. For 10 years, a new terminal for the Ginza Line was underway, which opened in January of 2020 as the games moved closer. Now, the doors of the Ginza Line opened onto a sprawling terminal, with an M-shaped roof and wider platform. The <a href="https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/01/b0472d519fb9-renovated-shibuya-metro-station-with-m-shaped-roof-begins-service.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/01/b0472d519fb9-renovated-shibuya-metro-station-with-m-shaped-roof-begins-service.html', 'new terminal');">new terminal</a> connected to <a href="https://www.shibuya-scramble-square.com/en/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.shibuya-scramble-square.com/en/', 'Shibuya Scramble Square');">Shibuya Scramble Square</a>, which had opened two months earlier and had 47 floors. The bottom levels were stores, and above were offices. And there was a rooftop platform, which towered above the city, and when you reached the top you were surrounded by glass walls.
From that roof, the city, with crowds and people and buildings, looms below. The city, an Olympic city, is sprawling and grand, and the cityscape is flat but expansive, gray but vibrant. The <a href="https://tokyo2020.org/en/venues/olympic-stadium" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://tokyo2020.org/en/venues/olympic-stadium', 'National Stadium');">National Stadium</a>, designed by Kengo Kuma as the main stadium for the Olympic games, melds into the cityscape below. Here, the opening and closing ceremonies and other events of the 2020 games were to be staged. The stadium was completed in December 2019, in place of the first National Stadium built for the 1964 games. Both stadiums <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tokyo-olympics-displacement/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tokyo-olympics-displacement/', 'displaced people who lived in the area');">displaced people who lived in the area</a>. But that didn’t matter to the organizers. It was to be the symbol of the games, and so a symbol of Japan.
From the roof in Shibuya, you see another roof that twists and turns and foregrounds a mess of trees. It is the roof to Kenzō Tange’s Yoyogi National Gymnasium, the venue that will soon host the Olympic and Paralympic events of handball, badminton, and wheelchair rugby. Nikil Saval has called the gymnasium, which was built for the 1964 games in Yoyogi Park, “the most breathtaking example of Japanese Modernism.” <a href="https://apjjf.org/2020/5/Tagsold.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://apjjf.org/2020/5/Tagsold.html', 'Christian Tagsold');">Christian Tagsold</a> — a scholar of Japan, who has done extensive work on the 1964 games — has found a latent connection to Japan’s imperial past in the gymnasium’s location, which speaks to a promise of patriotic revival in the 1964 games. But he has argued that the 2020 games, which will reuse the gymnasium, “do not promise anything fundamentally new.”
Come 2020, when the games were set to open, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the games were deferred and the countdown clock at the foot of Tokyo Station was <a href="https://apnews.com/article/d2f4e869a983ff5dc07501a6f2112d53" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://apnews.com/article/d2f4e869a983ff5dc07501a6f2112d53', 'unceremoniously reset');">unceremoniously reset</a>. Japan <a href="https://www.mofa.go.jp/ca/fna/page4e_001053.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.mofa.go.jp/ca/fna/page4e_001053.html', 'closed its borders');">closed its borders</a> and <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/09/12/national/social-issues/japan-foreign-residents-discrimination-coronavirus/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/09/12/national/social-issues/japan-foreign-residents-discrimination-coronavirus/', 'foreigners were ostracized and criticized');">foreigners were ostracized and criticized</a>. Tokyo 2020 became Tokyo 2021, though the name was never changed. So determined and driven were officials that they now offered a new promise: “The Olympic flame can really become the light at the end of this dark tunnel the whole world is going through together at this moment,” <a href="https://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-president-the-olympic-flame-can-become-the-light-at-the-end-of-this-dark-tunnel" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-president-the-olympic-flame-can-become-the-light-at-the-end-of-this-dark-tunnel', 'said Thomas Bach');">said Thomas Bach</a>, the IOC president; but, the promise was empty.
The pandemic continues to rage, and the Olympics and Paralympics will be <a href="https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Tokyo-2020-Olympics/Tokyo-Olympics-to-ban-foreign-spectators-as-COVID-precaution?fbclid=IwAR3gx2Ir1CMy71CVKBg5aix-kuvEfmHNKQFn8AVyrK2U-s1uWFzZXBmSqgU" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Tokyo-2020-Olympics/Tokyo-Olympics-to-ban-foreign-spectators-as-COVID-precaution?fbclid=IwAR3gx2Ir1CMy71CVKBg5aix-kuvEfmHNKQFn8AVyrK2U-s1uWFzZXBmSqgU', 'held without foreign spectators');">held without foreign spectators</a>, if not canceled altogether. Satoru Arai, head of the Tokyo Medical Association, which is to supply medical staff to the games, recently told <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-2020-japan-doctors/tokyo-olympics-face-another-looming-headache-no-medical-staff-idUSKBN2A30HO" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.reuters.com/article/us-olympics-2020-japan-doctors/tokyo-olympics-face-another-looming-headache-no-medical-staff-idUSKBN2A30HO', 'Reuters');">Reuters</a>, “No matter how I look at it, it’s impossible.” Doctors, he continued, could not leave their hospitals — pummeled by COVID, short on beds — to aid the games. In a <a href="https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1466/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/backstories/1466/', 'recent survey');">recent survey</a>, 80% of people in Japan thought the games “should be canceled or postponed again.” <a href="https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/77f0251501ace7d42232096621d03f7a736c2391" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/77f0251501ace7d42232096621d03f7a736c2391', 'Yoshiro Mori');">Yoshiro Mori</a>, president of Japan’s Olympic organizing committee, soon said, “The biggest problem is public opinion.” Days later, he would joke that women in a board meeting talked too much. He soon stepped down.
Tokyo 2020 has revived an old promise. A complex legacy is at stake and, if the Olympics are canceled, the nearly reclaimed past — of the 1964 games, of the postwar, of economic growth — will be lost. “After a long night, there will definitely be a morning,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/sports/olympics/tokyo-olympics.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/sports/olympics/tokyo-olympics.html', 'pronounced Mori');">pronounced Mori</a>. The night is our present, a time of COVID and despair, but it is also the economic decline, the time after the Olympics. In one of the final sequences of “<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nations-of-one-and-tokyo-olympiad/">Tokyo Olympiad</a>,” the film of the 1964 games, Kon Ichikawa also laments night, for but a quote adorns the screen to the backdrop of the Olympic flame:
<blockquote>Night,
And the fire returns to the sun; 
for humans dream thus once only in four years.
Is it then enough for us —
This infrequent, created peace?</blockquote>
And so, there was a night, which arose after the games and darkened in 1991.
If the games are canceled, the financial losses will be great. The dreams of athletes will be dashed. But so, too, will the losses be symbolic. New stadiums will sit empty and silent, and grand renovated stations will sit unused by tourists. The city, which planned and prepared and hoped, will be without the games. And the promises of the games, which have been building for years, will be lost yet again.
And that white house, in Yoyogi Park. It has another story that is hidden and unsaid: it was first built to house American military families when Yoyogi was not a park, but an American military base called Washington Heights. “Rather, many of the competition venues that became stages for the Olympic spectacle when the games finally came to Tokyo in 1964,” <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ijjs.12090" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ijjs.12090', 'wrote Yoshimi');">wrote Yoshimi</a>, “were postwar products, built on the sites of former military facilities.” The 1964 Olympics hid a past, an era of American occupation, which never really ended.
That white house still stands and symbolizes a past, lost and hopeful. It bears traces of occupation. But that is forgotten now, sequestered in a corner of the park, overshadowed by Tange’s gymnasium and, come spring, the cherry blossoms.
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The Waning Promise of Tokyo 2020

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/pearl-harbor-film-myth-79-years-later/"></div>In David Shields’ 2015 photobook <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-endless-war/">War is Beautiful</a>, the photographs are stunning, often heroic, but the moments are dreadful. There is the frame of a young boy, bathed in harsh light — mimicry of studio lighting — and placed against a raging flame and burnt-out car. Other images, practically pornographic, portray the bodies of the deceased, non-Americans fallen on reddish clay, and set against the backdrop of an American service member or convoy — allegories for the American war machine as it discards local life.
Over many years, Shields became disillusioned with “the parade of beautiful images” he witnessed on A1 of The New York Times. So, he compiled and published the frames into War is Beautiful, which enlightens, with brutal irony and malice, our collective and manicured gaze of war. War is horrific, he says, but America’s fights are made glorious and just through memorable tropes in well-framed photographs.
His photographs are recent, but the critique, itself, is old. “The argument that modern life consists of a menu of horrors by which we are corrupted and to which we gradually become habituated is a founding idea of the critique of modernity — a tradition almost as old as modernity itself,” wrote <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/looking-at-war" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/12/09/looking-at-war', 'Susan Sontag');">Susan Sontag</a>. And yet, the American acclimation to suffering in war, which is made slightly less horrific when seen daily during a morning coffee, has given way to a particularly fervent dramatization and glorification of war.
There is one particular American tragedy that the passage of time and the American penchant for romance has rendered particularly heroic: Pearl Harbor. It is a date of infamy, of treacherous surprise. <a href="https://www.nationalww2museum.org/media/press-releases/remember-pearl-harbor" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nationalww2museum.org/media/press-releases/remember-pearl-harbor', '“Remember Pearl Harbor!”');">“Remember Pearl Harbor!”</a> cheered Americans in wartime. The attack caused American involvement in the Second World War to be arranged in a noble frame, construed as right and just: intervention was a righteous response to Japanese treachery. And after the war ended, the narrative of December 7, 1941 endured. (Of course, in victory, all of a victor’s acts are remembered as good and justified.) Pearl Harbor has remained unscathed even through national reckonings of the representation and misrepresentation of war, even during American involvement in unpopular wars, as in Vietnam. And so, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/05/07/the-american-raj" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/05/07/the-american-raj', 'John Gregory Dunne wrote in 2001');">John Gregory Dunne wrote in 2001</a>, “Through the perspective of history, 1941’s day of infamy might now be seen as a propaganda victory of incalculable value.”
No medium has been more central to the continued perpetuation of the American story of Pearl Harbor, and all that it signifies and forgets, than film. Roland Emmerich’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Midway-Ed-Skrein/dp/B0813L8F8Y" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.amazon.com/Midway-Ed-Skrein/dp/B0813L8F8Y', '“Midway”');">“Midway”</a> (2019), for instance, is a familiar and recent cinematic example. In it, Pearl Harbor is a traumatic prologue, clad in classic tropes of intelligence failure and innocence, to a grander heroic display of American military might. The special effects are dramatic, and the American tide-changing victory at Midway Island is climactic. But this is an old format, an echo of when cinema, as reportage, was enveloped in webs of censorship and patriotism. Film directors, just as correspondents, were beholden to what <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/354693/once-there-was-a-war-by-john-steinbeck/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/354693/once-there-was-a-war-by-john-steinbeck/', 'John Steinbeck');">John Steinbeck</a> — himself a war correspondent for a stint — called “a huge gassy thing called the War Effort.”
And so, we find one of the earliest cinematic renderings of Pearl Harbor in 1943, during the war itself: <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?322949-1/1943-us-navy-documentary-december-7th" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.c-span.org/video/?322949-1/1943-us-navy-documentary-december-7th', '“December 7th.”');">“December 7th.”</a>  The work of John Ford and Gregg Toland, the film was a masterful failure of wartime propaganda, combining staged shots with a smattering of real documentary footage. The version shown in wartime was not the first, but the second edit, the original not shown until after the war’s end. Both versions open with a sailor’s hat and splattered blood on concrete: a still-life of death. It is overlain by a shadow in the shape of “V for victory,” as if to say the American blood spilled at Pearl Harbor is horrid but patriotic. Ford and Toland make ample use of sailors shooting from the ground, wrought in close-ups, with eyes trained on the sights and faces covered in dirt. The tight shots show the grit and mettle on their faces: ordinary men took the call, heroic and beautiful.
After the war ended, and Allied victory affirmed, Pearl Harbor was fixed as the origins of an American epic, of what we have come to know as “the good war.” And it was in postwar mass culture, as in wartime film and reportage, that a myth took shape, which glossed over trauma and displaced pain with the splendor of victory. “The real war was tragic and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible,” wrote Paul Fussell, the scholar and World War II veteran, in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Wartime-Understanding-Behavior-Second-World/dp/0195065778" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.amazon.com/Wartime-Understanding-Behavior-Second-World/dp/0195065778', 'Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World');">Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World</a>. When the war ended in 1945, it was film, as literature, that helped perpetuate Pearl Harbor’s remembrance and set the attack in a longer historical trajectory.
Take the narrative wrought by Delmer Daves in “Task Force” (1949), a story of a single American naval aviator (Gary Cooper), as he heralds the importance of air power from the interwar to the postwar. Pearl Harbor is rendered through the gaze of civilians in what is perhaps one of the best allegories of national innocence. Adorned in all white, civilians play tennis but are strafed by Japanese planes. The innocence is so raw, and thought of war so remote, that those on the tennis court first mistake the planes for returning American aircraft. A woman falls on the court, held in the arms of tennis partners. Though most of the film is black and white, the final sequences — including beautiful spectacles of aircraft carriers and planes bathed in the light of dawn — are in color. And so, Pearl Harbor is a momentary tragedy, overshadowed by later and beautiful military heroism, out at sea and in the air.
To trace the portrayals of Pearl Harbor in the decades that followed “Task Force” would be to traverse a memory landscape of romantic successes, action flops, sci-fi features, and comedy oddities. There was “From Here to Eternity” in 1953, which sets romance and the darker side of military life to the backdrop of the impending attack — the film’s penultimate act. In 1970, a joint American and Japanese production team crafted “Tora! Tora! Tora!,” released to negative reviews, which reconstructed the lead-up to the attack in both America and Japan. In 1979, Steven Spielberg tried his hand with “1941.” The focus was not on the attack itself, nor the time before, but <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1942/02/28/archives/the-los-angeles-mystery.html?searchResultPosition=4" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nytimes.com/1942/02/28/archives/the-los-angeles-mystery.html?searchResultPosition=4', 'the hysteria after');">the hysteria after</a>. Next, “The Final Countdown,” more a naval advertisement than a historical feature, asked, in 1980, what would happen if an American nuclear carrier, from the height of the Cold War, was sent back to December of 1941.
And then we arrive at Michal Bay’s 2001 film <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/06/04/bombs-away-2" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/06/04/bombs-away-2', '“Pearl Harbor.”');">“Pearl Harbor.”</a> In <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/a-date-which-will-live" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.dukeupress.edu/a-date-which-will-live', 'A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory');">A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory</a>, the historian Emily S. Rosenberg wrote that the film had “turned Pearl Harbor into a veritable cultural industry,” and spurred mass cultural products and a Washington gala. The film was epic in proportion, but the reviews were bad. A.O Scott’s review in The New York Times ran with the headline <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/25/movies/film-review-war-is-hell-but-very-pretty.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/25/movies/film-review-war-is-hell-but-very-pretty.html', '“War Is Hell, but Very Pretty.”');">“War Is Hell, but Very Pretty.”</a> He writes, “the violence has no emotional resonance,” for the action is grand, and grand alone. Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett make for ideal American heroes — white and ordinary, thrust into greatness. But this beauty and glorification came at another cost­: a process of brutalization and racialization.
In the moments before the Japanese fleet attacks Pearl Harbor, Bay brings us onboard to the Japanese fleet, offering a rare glimpse of an ordinary enemy. A young Japanese pilot, or maybe sailor, writes, at sea, on the eve of Pearl Harbor. He is set against an orientalizing tableau set in miniature — shrine, nationalist flag, sake bottle. A voice-over, in English, though with a slight unplaceable accent, begins, “Revered father, I go now to fulfill my mission and my destiny,” before he extolls virtues of “sacrifice,” “honor,” and “nation.” We know his name­ is Kazuyoshi, and we soon see him adorned in aviation dress. But just as quickly as he appears, he disappears. Does he live? Does he die? Does it matter? He is the enemy, a <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/yellow-peril-sinophobia-great-war-qa-dr-anne-witchard/">“Yellow Peril,”</a> not our heroic American aviators.
But this story, of racism and brutalization, embedded in the narrative of Pearl Harbor, is lengthy and dates to the war itself. In the original and longer edit of “December 7th,” we find questions about the patriotism of Americans of Japanese descent in Hawaii. “A hyphenated loyalty,” it is said, an accusation embedded with the same prejudices that led to the callous wartime internment of an estimated 120,000 Japanese Americans. The 1943 Warner Brothers feature, <a href="https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/575/air-force#overview" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/575/air-force#overview', '“Air Force,”');">“Air Force,”</a> a portrayal of American pilots during Pearl Harbor, took it a step farther, fabricating local sabotage on the day of the attack. Even as the war ended, the cinematic renderings of Pearl Harbor never shed racist undertones. The enemy fashioned on screen was just altered, and the racial caricature shifted: a focus on the enemy as a civilian at home (“among us”) to, predominantly, one from abroad, clad in a foreign military uniform. Filmmakers now gazed into the cockpits of Japanese Zeroes during the attack. The pilot as an iteration of evil, crazed and manic — bandana clad head; or the bumbling Japanese sailor, as wrought in Steven Spielberg’s 1979 feature, “1941.” We can place 2001’s “Pearl Harbor” in this tradition.
The beautification and valorization of American war comes with the cost of brutalizing those deemed the Other. The stakes are not hypothetical. Our memories, our cultural portrayals, our collective national stories inform and shape contemporary opinions and politics. “Pearl Harbor” was released in the summer before 9/11, the latter of which recalled, in the minds of many Americans, the events depicted by the former. At the moment after the towers fell, “pundits and politicians and appalled Americans everywhere almost reflexively evoked ‘Pearl Harbor,’” wrote the historian John Dower in <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/days-of-infamy-john-dowers-cultures-of-war/">Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq</a>. “Past and present were momentarily fused, like a flashback in a film.”  It didn’t take much imagination for most Americans. And the same anxieties, once pointed at Japanese Americans after 1941, were then <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/41809552" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.jstor.org/stable/41809552', 'trained on anyone deemed to fit a caricature of Arab or Muslim');">trained on anyone deemed to fit a caricature of Arab or Muslim</a>.
Beautiful wars need clear enemies, and American heroes need their villains.
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Top image credit: Reiner Bajo and Lionsgate.
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Pearl Harbor in Film and Myth: 79 Years Later

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/hiroshima-age-virtual-remembrance/"></div>In my Tokyo apartment in August, I sat at my desk, dressed in shorts and a ragged t-shirt, and prepared for my visit to the <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/renovating-hiroshimas-atomic-memories/">Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum</a>. I opened the web page of <a href="https://www.1future.jp/future_memory/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.1future.jp/future_memory/', 'FUTURE MEMORY’s');">FUTURE MEMORY’s</a> <a href="https://www.1future.jp/future_memory/#3d-portrait-of-a-museum" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.1future.jp/future_memory/#3d-portrait-of-a-museum', '“3D PORTRAIT OF A MUSEUM,”');">“3D PORTRAIT OF A MUSEUM,”</a> a project of the artists Akira Fujimoto and Cannon Hersey, and found myself at the end of a digital hall. A photograph, one that I could not yet make out, rested upon a wall at the long hall’s end. I began to click and moved closer to the saintly glow of a black-and-white portrait. One more click and I was face to face with a young girl, her face and dress splattered in blood, her arm in a cast. Her right eye appeared slightly closed, perhaps swollen, as she stood with a blank expression. I looked out the window of my apartment and saw the busy street below, which is often traversed by school children adorned in bright yellow hats. Back on my screen, I read the caption off to the side of the photo: Yukiko Fujii, 10 years old, survivor of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. She died, in 1977, from cancer-related to radiation exposure.
To witness this suffering from the comfort of my apartment felt exceedingly voyeuristic. Experienced through a screen, in my home, and against a banal tableau of scattered books, papers, and coffee cups, on my table, the atomic trauma existed without the overwhelming and at times deafening <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/30042004?seq=1" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.jstor.org/stable/30042004?seq=1', 'grand narratives of destruction, rebirth, and peace');">grand narratives of destruction, rebirth, and peace</a> that I recalled from my in-person visit to the museum. The silence of other museum goers, the gaze of the guards, and the weight of witnessing pain in the physical space of its occurrence were all absent. I was alone, with Yukiko, or at least a document of her in a singular, traumatic moment.
The act of visitation to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum online is thus a solitary act that dislocates the objects and portraits from crowds, but also from the spatial bounds of Hiroshima and narratives of the museum itself. This means that the museum’s grand narratives — of largely Japanese civilian suffering, at the hands of the American atomic bomb, but also of Japan’s “reckless” wartime leaders and of war itself — are subjugated to personal stories of individual trauma. Hersey and Fujimioto have further dislocated the effects of the atomic bomb through FUTURE MEMORY’s <a href="https://www.1future.jp/future_memory/#no-name-series" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.1future.jp/future_memory/#no-name-series', '“NO NAME SERIES,”');">“NO NAME SERIES,”</a> which includes three-dimensional renderings of everyday items that survived the atomic blast and are now housed in the museum’s collection without any known owner. A melted and bent fountain pen, for instance, exists without any means of identification via ownership, but also, in its virtual display against a black abyss, without a grounding in the museum’s hallowed halls. By transposing pictures, spaces, and objects to virtual space, Hersey and Fujimoto have effectively detached the memory of the atomic bomb from the memory’s central space–the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Museum.
In the present, memories of violent wartime death often remain dislocated from the dead as individuals, and enshrined into sites of memory — <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1598" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1598', 'spaces of “identification,” for Reinhart Koselleck');">spaces of “identification,” for Reinhart Koselleck</a> — as national mythologies. Perhaps, as <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780203610213" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780203610213', 'Andreas A Huyssen');">Andreas A Huyssen</a>  postulated of museums and monuments in 1995, this is related to the allure of, “the material quality of the object” in a world of “the fleeting image on the screen and immateriality of communications.” What we can perhaps call an age of <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Memory-Studies-Media-Pasts-in-Transition/Hoskins/p/book/9781138639386" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.routledge.com/Digital-Memory-Studies-Media-Pasts-in-Transition/Hoskins/p/book/9781138639386', 'virtual remembrance');">virtual remembrance</a> has thus manifested for atomic trauma as a focus on personal stories, grounded in Hiroshima (more so than <a href="https://time.com/5876864/nagasaki-atomic-bomb-overlooked/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://time.com/5876864/nagasaki-atomic-bomb-overlooked/', 'Nagasaki');">Nagasaki</a>), but explicitly, though not implicitly, dissociated from the dominant and grand national story of the bomb in Japan.
Here is but one of many byproducts of our turn to virtual this and virtual that, of which the COVID-19 pandemic has quickened and necessitated. This has ranged from the seemingly banal (<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/zoom-fatigue-and-the-new-ways-to-party" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/zoom-fatigue-and-the-new-ways-to-party', 'virtual coffee shops');">virtual coffee shops</a>) to the educational (virtual museums) to the somber and heartbreaking (<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/04/how-can-we-mourn-properly-over-zoom/610414/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/04/how-can-we-mourn-properly-over-zoom/610414/', 'virtual bereavement');">virtual bereavement</a>). In the realm of war memories, the pandemic has thus helped to accelerate the adoption of new technology and platforms, from Twitter to 3D modeling.  The shift has been exceptionally evident in this year’s 75th-anniversary commemorations of the atomic bomb in and of Hiroshima.
On August 6th, 2020, the day the Americans dropped the bomb on the city in 1945, atomic remembrance and commemoration reach their height in Hiroshima, and thus the event offers a logical, if not essential, starting point. Most years, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony is composed of ritual in the memorial park, attended by tens of thousands from Japan and abroad. This year the ritual remained largely unchanged — an offering of water to the dead, speeches by politicians, a moment of silence, and prayer. <a href="http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13612520" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13612520', 'The');">The</a><a href="http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13612520" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13612520', ' event');"> event</a>, for the now only 785 guests, was punctuated by temperature checks, social distancing, closed spaces, and hand sanitizer. As in previous years, the ceremony was live-streamed online and on TV, but something about the footage, this year, with a small crowd, changed the sensation of watching.
The differences, however, crystalized at night, with the virtual <a href="https://www.hiroshima-navi.or.jp/en/post/037307.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.hiroshima-navi.or.jp/en/post/037307.html', 'toro nagashi');">toro nagashi</a><a href="https://www.hiroshima-navi.or.jp/en/post/037307.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.hiroshima-navi.or.jp/en/post/037307.html', ',');">,</a> which translates to “floating lanterns” and is a ceremony that, in relation to the atomic bomb in Hiroshima,  dates from 1947. Children, though some adults as well, construct wooden and paper lanterns, lit with small candles and inscribed with messages of peace. The participants carry the lanterns, which bathe their faces in a warm glow, down to the foot of the Motoyasu River. After they place the lanterns in the grasp of the currents, the colored objects flow against the backdrop of the lit atomic dome, as colorful specks of light in the overwhelming darkness of the seemingly black water.
This year’s toro nagashi was virtual — <a href="http://tourounagashi.org/en.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://tourounagashi.org/en.html', '“online ');">“online </a><a href="http://tourounagashi.org/en.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://tourounagashi.org/en.html', 'toro ');">toro </a><a href="http://tourounagashi.org/en.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://tourounagashi.org/en.html', 'nagashi');">nagashi</a><a href="http://tourounagashi.org/en.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'http://tourounagashi.org/en.html', '”');">”</a> — enacted with virtual lanterns, with messages inscribed via app, set down a virtual river. In the Hiroshima Municipal Baseball Stadium, the organizers set up screens and rows of real lit lanterns, though unmoving, and stripped of the surreal, ghost-like, and ephemeral qualities. Though some participated in person, some 6,349 individuals from 10 countries participated via the web over the month of August.
The event transcended the spatial confines of Hiroshima — no longer did the participant, whether a <a href="https://www.asahi.com/hibakusha/english/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.asahi.com/hibakusha/english/', 'hibakusha');">hibakusha</a> (survivor of the atomic bomb), family members of the deceased, or tourist, have to be physically present at the atomic dome. And without the weight of the crowd or physical lanterns, the event transformed, for many,  into a solo affair. Yet the virtual river was still a proxy for the Motoyasu, the lanterns as simulations for actual ones built in the city in years past.
For the atomic bomb, virtual memory has thus manifested as old forms, rituals, and spaces, retrofitted to new technology. Take <a href="https://www.nhk.or.jp/hiroshima/hibaku75/timeline/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nhk.or.jp/hiroshima/hibaku75/timeline/', 'Hiroshima Timeline');">Hiroshima Timeline</a>, a Twitter-based project created by a team of 11 individuals, of varied ages, from Hiroshima, along with <a href="https://www.nhk.or.jp/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nhk.or.jp/', 'NHK');">NHK</a>, Japan’s national broadcaster. While the project deploys 21st-century forms of media, the experiences and text are drawn, slightly edited, from traditional forms of memory–diaries. The promise of the project is novel, if not simple, and encapsulated in the project’s tagline: &#8220;What If They Had Social Media in 1945?&#8221;
Three Twitter accounts are each based on an individual who lived in Hiroshima in the early 1940s and kept a detailed diary. The tweets, written in Japanese and sent throughout the spring and summer of 2020, are each premised on the diary entry on the same day in 1945, reformulated into contemporary Japanese, and condensed into just 280 characters–though most tweets are far shorter. The accounts focus on the humdrum of everyday life, set against the backdrop of the war, with an array of tweets that retell the story of the bomb and the horrific aftermath.
At 8:16 am, on August 6th, 2020, the project’s account of Ichiro, a journalist in Hiroshima in the 1940s, tweeted, “It exploded! Something” (「爆発したっ！何か」). In vivid and horrid details, he tweets a seemingly minute-by-minute record of the bomb’s aftermath; at 9:14 am, he writes, “The children are lifting their hands, with peeled skin, like ghosts” (「皮膚がめくれた両手を幽霊のように挙げている子供」). To read the tweets is to forget that this is a historic event from 75 years ago, for his tweets read, in less than 280 characters, as if the trauma were contemporary, the explosion now, in 2020, not 1945.
Hiroshima Timeline has clear links, if only in the use of social media, to <a href="https://www.instagram.com/eva.stories/?hl=en" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.instagram.com/eva.stories/?hl=en', 'Eva Stories');">Eva Stories</a>, an  Instagram account from 2019 based on the diary of Eva Heyman — a young Jewish girl from Romania killed in Auschwitz. While the stories of the atomic bomb and the Holocaust are tenuously connected–by the temporal moments of the horrid acts and subsequent roles in the emergence of a so-called <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=ran+zwigenberg+hiroshima&amp;oq=ran+&amp;aqs=chrome.1.69i57j69i59j0i433i457j46i433j0i131i433j0i433l2j69i60.1669j0j7&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.google.com/search?q=ran+zwigenberg+hiroshima&amp;oq=ran+&amp;aqs=chrome.1.69i57j69i59j0i433i457j46i433j0i131i433j0i433l2j69i60.1669j0j7&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8', '“global memory culture”');">“global memory culture”</a>–both events have parallels in their transposition to remembrance in the virtual, namely web-based, sphere. In a scene on Eva Stories, Eva and her classmates are told to leave school and, as she walks through a door, a column of Nazi soldiers march down the street, flanked by Nazi flags, draped from windows. “The Nazis conquered us” is plastered upon the story, as if the text on any Instagram story. This is followed by the rise of horrid antisemitism and forced relocation to the ghetto, concluded by a sad clip, prefaced with ample historic context, of Eva on a train to the camps.
And yet, there are problems when memories move to the web. Hiroshima Timeline’s use of certain language and descriptions for Koreans has led to <a href="https://webronza.asahi.com/culture/articles/2020083100003.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://webronza.asahi.com/culture/articles/2020083100003.html', 'criticism');">criticism</a> — <a href="https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20201003/p2a/00m/0na/002000c" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20201003/p2a/00m/0na/002000c', '“slammed as racist,” in the words of the ');">“slammed as racist,” in the words of the </a><a href="https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20201003/p2a/00m/0na/002000c" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20201003/p2a/00m/0na/002000c', 'Mainichi Shimbun');">Mainichi Shimbun</a>. In Israel, Eva Stories has been <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/08/instagram-holocaust-diary-evastories-sparks-debate-in-israel" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/08/instagram-holocaust-diary-evastories-sparks-debate-in-israel', 'subject to debate');">subject to debate</a>, criticized as an act of trivialization. In a recent, and oft-criticized, <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-holocaust-pov" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-holocaust-pov', 'TikTok trend');">TikTok trend</a>, young individuals acted as if they were victims of the Holocaust, often overlayed with some brief, though convoluted, backstory and unrelated pop music. As a Jewish individual with extended family lost in the Holocaust, I was pained, disgusted with a trend that I deemed a gross trivialization, which did not honor or recall memories but instead mocked a past. This, I thought, is not memory, but mockery, or content, masquerading as remembrance.
But again, the TikTok trend may be a reflection of a long-standing and perverse <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/', 'societal interest, if not fetishization, of Nazi Germany');">societal interest, if not fetishization, of Nazi Germany</a>. Memories of the atomic bomb, overlain in trauma, have perhaps also transferred to the web in a manner wholly reflected in societal ideas. This has been an act anchored on both Hiroshima and personal stories, now transposed to a 21st-century archive. Now, however, we must ask: how will we remember the trauma from COVID-19, experiences lived against the backdrop of social media and the web? The archive of the event is already made; it is a vast, if not limitless, collection of stories, which future historians must organize, and from which, they must find meaning.
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Top image courtesy of the author.
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Hiroshima in the Age of Virtual Remembrance

Spencer Cohen is&nbsp;a writer based in Tokyo and New York. He recently received a master's degree from the University of Tokyo and has&nbsp;contributed writing to&nbsp;Newsweek Japan&nbsp;and&nbsp;The Japan Times,&nbsp;among other publications.