Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 2A, Panel (continuation)
Panel organiser: Rupert Cox (University of Manchester )
This panel investigates some of the ways in which the past is preserved, represented and consumed in Japan; analysing in particular the roles of oral testimonies, material forms and visual and acoustic media in socially constructed historical narratives.
Rupert Cox (Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, Manchester University)
Chris Marker is probably the most celebrated of a number of filmmakers who have used the visual elements of Tokyo’s urban landscape to reflect on the making of memory in an increasingly image saturated world. His film Sans Soleil starts with images recorded in Japan and mixes them with others made in different countries at different times. Through a provocative montage, that constantly runs the risk of Orientalising its subject, Marker presents the city as a theater of memories wherein the first hand recollection of places, people and events may come to be replaced by images of the same; images which are paradoxically mediated by the recording apparatus that produced them. This journey through time and space, made possible by a cinematic play of analogies and correspondences, suggests a role for the documentary / essay film, in investigating and representing the shifting, transitory and ambiguous relationship of memory and place.
Fabio Gygi (University College London ,Anthropology department)
In this paper I attempt to interpret the mnemonic signature of monsters and ghosts as embodiments of traumatic memories that are repressed by hegemonic discourse. Monsters arise from the interstices of discursive contradictions and resist forgetting by returning in disguise. The monster as a mnemonic figure represents an irreducible excess of meaning that cannot be accomodated by the system and hovers at the threshold of absence/presence, making itself felt through a structure of feeling we refer to as ‘haunting’ (Gordon 1997). I aim at understanding the dynamics of traumatic war memories by deciphering the agents and carriers of these memories. With Murakami (2001), who calls the world of manga and anime a ‘culture of impotence’, I argue that a lot of what is usually perceived as youth culture in Japan is actually a covert form of dealing with an unacknowledged past that mainstream discourse with its inclination towards victim consciousness is masking. What cannot be articulated sinks to the ‘low brow’ level of popular culture and finds ambiguous expression in displaced and recontextualized narratives. As the cultural task of monsters is to create heroes, I do not only look at monsters but at a the wide variety of popular culture from Godzilla who keeps haunting postwar Japan to ghostly resurrections such as the ‘Space Battleship Yamato’ and enduring agents like Momotarô the Peach Boy, who survived its wartime propaganda duty (Dower 1986) and returned in the shape of Tetsuwan no Atomu as early as 1946. I do not aim at a history of those cultural templates, but at a ‘hauntology’ (Derrida 1994), a study of how the past makes its force felt in the presentWilliam Kelly (Department of Anthropology & Sociology, SOAS, London)
It is often said that enka, a popular song genre which has been closely associated with karaoke-singing since its inception in the mid-1970s, expresses the true Japanese heart. Although enka is by no means an entirely uniform song genre, encompassing some degree of stylistic and thematic variation, enka songs are characteristically melancholy, expressing themes related to separation, lost love and loneliness, as well as a nostalgia for the past as expressed most potently through the concept of furusato (hometown), but also through a panoply of symbolic images which serve to contrast contemporary, modern, urban Japan with its more traditional, rural counterpart of another (better) age. Focusing on the visual images used to illustrate enka songs in the context of karaoke and their categorisation by the karaoke industry, this paper examines how, through a series of oppositions - rural and urban, past and present, western and Japanese - such images serve not only as a symbolic discourse mediating modernisation, but also to articulate a collective notion of Japanese identity, at least as it is expressed through the emotive symbolism of enka songs.