Section 5 | Anthropology and Sociology | Session 3A, Panel (continuation)
Panel organiser: Rupert Cox (Manchester University )
Pia Vogler (MARC /Modern Asia Research Center, Université de Genève)
Between 1886 and 1894 the Meiji government established five major prisons on Hokkaido. The inmates of these institutions, many of whom political convicts, provided a cheap labor force for the colonization of the Northern periphery of the modern Japanese nation-state. Whilst the existence of this prison-network and the role of convict labor during the colonization process of Hokkaido seem to be less known in contemporary Japan, one of these five prisons - the Abashiri prison at the Sea of Okhotsk - holds a prominent role in post-war Japanese popular culture similar to that of Alcatraz in San Francisco. From 1965 to 1972 a series of 18 Abashiri bangaichi (Abashiri without address) movies featuring the movie star Takakura Ken portrayed an adventurous and exciting image of the prison in the Northern periphery. Since 1983 tourists can visit the reconstructed Abashiri prison and many souvenir shops offer articles that give "proof" of a safe return from Abashiri. Finally the title of the violent anime Abashiri ikka (The Abashiri Family) suggests that the name of the prisons functions further as a synonym of the Evil. On the first glance this recurrent presence in popular culture seems astounding, considering that the Meiji Abashiri prison was not one of Japan's central prisons, but only a branch institution of the Kushiro prison. In my presentation I will reflect on the reasons why Abashiri became a kind of post-war-synonym for the Japanese prison. I will argue that the geographical space of the "far North" plays a vital role in the construction of this imagery inasmuch as it permits to locate the subject of prisons and convict labor itself at the margin of the nation's memory.
Jane Marie Law (Cornell University)
This paper is an exploration of the memorials, museums, and cultural exchanges which have been prompted by the acts of the Japanese diplomat to Lithuania during World War II, Sugihara Chiune. Credited with having written over 6,000 visas to save the lives of Jews fleeing German occupied Poland into Lithuania, Sugihara is regarded in Europe, in Japan, and within the Jewish community as an altruistic person. This study is not an inquiry into the merits of Sugihara's action, but rather a study of how the process of memorializing, narrativizing and celebrating the life of Sugihara is part of a larger project of selective cultural memory on the part of various Japanese organizations and institutions. This paper situates the themes of altruism and heroism in the larger discussions of cultural memory, to see how such themes operate to advance other projects of collective memory. The case of Sugihara is fascinating precisely because the vastly differing processes of cultural memory of the Holocaust - in Lithuania, in Japan, and in a wider post-World War II, post Holocaust Jewish Diaspora each have different ways of constructing, disseminating and consuming narratives of altruism. This paper is based on fieldwork in Kaunas and Vilnius Lithuania in 2003 and 2004, and in Japan, as well as at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Milena Markov (Department of Basic Education, Akita International University)
This paper will investigate the way in which past is preserved, represented and consumed in the vernacular houses (minka) turned into museums in Akita prefecture, Japan. Several examples will be analyzed: the row of warrior houses (buke yashiki) in Kakunodate town, Nara family house (a part of Akita Prefectural Museum), Kurosawa house, Showakan minka (a part of a community center) and others. The examples illustrate three different approaches to preservation: designation as a group of important traditional houses (the case of Kakunodate), designation as a municipal important cultural treasure (dismantling, moving and rebuilding of a single house) and an inclusion of a single house into a newly built complex without any designation. The examples from Akita will be analyzed in terms of the roles of original wooden structures, spatial composition, interior treatment, exhibited artifacts, visual and acoustic media are playing to present a socially acceptable, visitors' attractive image of the past. The proportion between historic authenticity, scientific objectivity and 'beautification' of the socially constructed historical environment will be used to argue that a process of 'purification' or 'taming' of the past constitutes the unquestionable substance or imperative of historic preservation practice in Japan.