In-Person Panel PS3.5

The Intergenerational Impact of the Asia Pacific War

Intergenerational Manga: Preserving War Memories Visually

Roman Rosenbaum

This paper investigates the visual catharsis of intergenerational trauma originating from a cataclysmic event that occurred nearly eight decades ago via a cadre of surviving manga artists that make up the laureates of graphic discourse in Japan. High profile manga artists like Chiba Tetsuya continue to educate contemporary generations about the aftereffects of a war that still threatens to engulf future generations. Now in their eighties and confronting the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the end of the Asia Pacific War, their experiences is somewhat unique since they spend their childhood in the colonised Chinese territories.  Artists like Morita Kenji and the late Akatsuka Fujio all lived through the traumatic evacuation and repatriation of Japanese settlers in Manchuria following World War II, theirs was a yakeato childhood of ostracism, repatriation, and the so-called hikiage experience. Despite psychological scars they continue to draw on their experience via the modern manga media to insist that conflict must be avoided at all costs in an increasingly war-torn world. This talk will focus on their joined projects depicting their childhood experience of war, which lay dormant until the 21st century.  

Takarabe Toriko and Intergenerational Trauma in Verse

Barbara Hartley

Born in Niigata in 1933, Takarabe Toriko moved with her family to Jiamisu, north-east China, when three-months-old. Her father, initially with the Manchurian Army, sometimes 'pacified' recalcitrant locals. He later supported Japanese emigrants. With this father conscripted and Japanese officialdom fleeing, Takarabe, her mother and siblings faced invading post-9 August 1945 Soviet forces with other emigrant Japanese women and children only. Her father’s eventual death left the family adrift in the immediate post-war chaos. 

Takarabe's poetry often depicts children’s and women’s war-time ordeal. She further had a lifetime distrust of officialdom. Post-March 2011, she declared that Fukushima people should not expect assistance from the government which, she argued, was interested in its own welfare only. 

Devotion to her father arguably resulted in Takarabe's poetry largely overlooking imperial army atrocity. Nevertheless, later in life, she collaborated with China's ‘Misty Poets,’ so-named because, unlike Maoist-era poets, their work was obscure or 'misty.' 

Takarabe’s chronicling of her family's China experiences has an intergenerational dimension. So, too, does her ‘misty poets’ interest. Perhaps initially drawn by the language of her childhood language, Takarabe surely found like-minded spirits in these artists resisting pre-Cultural Revolution China protocols in their highly personal verse that obliquely critiqued the state.

The Tokyo Trials as Seen by a Kamishibaiya (a picture-card show performer): How "Yume no sakeme" by Hisashi Inoue was Written

Masahito Takayashiki

Hisashi Inoue (1934-2010) is a highly regarded contemporary playwright and novelist of postwar Japan. Inoue's wartime childhood experiences were the driving force behind his playwriting, and he has shown a keen interest in the war responsibilities of ordinary people, wartime leaders, and the emperor in postwar Japan. This presentation will focus on his masterpiece, "Yume no sakeme" (2001), the first of three plays dealing with the Tokyo Trials (IMTFE: International Military Tribunal for the Far East). In this work, Inoue attempts to clarify whether the common people and the Emperor of Japan in the immediate postwar period fulfilled their responsibility for having caused the Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. Before writing this play, Inoue carefully examined the testimonies of approximately 400 people who appeared as witnesses at the Tokyo Trials. These testimonies include those of ordinary people, such as a kamishibaiya (picture-story showman), and Inoue asks the audience to consider how the Tokyo Trials could be viewed from the standpoint of ordinary people. "Yume no sakeme" was revived at the New National Theatre in 2018, and Inoue's longing for world peace and his anti-war campaign live on today in the work of many directors and writers. 

An Intergenerational Perspective of the Family of the Returned Ex-soldiers

Yasuko Claremont

In this short presentation I will only focus on two cases of the relationship between the returned ex-soldiers and their sons, selected from many cases worth investigating: Shikoku Hikaru (b. 1956) and his father Shikoku Gorō (1924-2014) as well as Oguma Eiji (b. 1962) and his father Oguma Kenji (b. 1925). Both fathers were Siberian repatriates whose experiences were similar. Equally, both sons are actively engaged with their fathers and published books about them.  The sons’ records are poignant not only in portraying intimately their fathers, but also in critically evaluating their lives with a certain distance as if they were compiled by a third person. This attitudes towards them achieves a wider perspective than a simple biographical account. Their publications denounce war as being cruel and folly. Particularly, Oguma Eiji discovered that the Japanese government at the time agreed with the Soviet Union to use unarmed Japanese ex-soldier detainees for hard labour. Arguably, the government had had no choice facing the severe reality of the defeat, but even decades later following the war the government’s intransigence in managing postwar settlements is unclear.