Section 7 | History, Politics and International Relations | Session 2B, Panel
Chair: Sven Saaler (The University of Tôkyô)
Because the souls of war criminals are revered in the Yasukuni Shrine, a visit of the Prime minister to this shrine provokes strong reactions both from the pacifist movements and the international co mmunity. Therefore, if this is a major issue, the general situation of the co mmemoration of those dead in the war in Japan is quite unclear. In order to understand this matter better, we will focus on the case of war memorials.
It is sometimes asserted that unlike in countries such as England or France, there are almost no public places in Japan co mmemorating victims of WW2. Actually, however, there are several types of monument (sanctuaries, memorials, parks, sculptures, tombstones, etc.), particularly, but not only, in the big cities that were reduced to ashes like Tôkyô or Hiroshima. They can also sometimes be found in very remote places. There are even some outside Japan. That is why we have asked ourselves how many there are, when they have been built, by whom and for what purpose? None of these questions can be answered easily, for there are almost as many cases as they are monuments. Nevertheless, we will give a first broad classification of the different types of monuments we have found.
In a final stage, we will take a broader point of view. When analysing these monuments, we noticed that among their main characteristics is the fact that mourning of the dead is always mingled with a call for peace. Of course this can be observed in many other countries. Nevertheless, the Japanese case deserves a close attention, as such a phenomenon is much more systematic there than elsewhere. We will try to understand why.
Stefanie Schäfer ( Tübingen University)
My presentation will consist of a concise and close reading of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum as a lieu de mémoire which stores the postwar topos of Hiroshima. This approach is mainly based on a thorough analysis of the present exhibition, a reconstruction of the Museum's history and former exhibitions based on newspaper articles and chronicles, and Pierre Nora's 'Entre mémoire et histoire' in which the author develops his theory of 'sites of memory'.
Applying Nora's theory offers the opportunity to combine several characteristics of this museum within one systematic approach and clarify their interdependencies. One aspect would be the changes within the exhibition which ocurred at certain turning points of Japanese postwar history, such as the death of the Shôwa Emperor. These changes provided the public with a new interpretation of the atomic bombing. Another aspect is the war of memories which has accompanied the museum ever since it was founded in 1955. Even though several interest groups tried to influence the way how the past was remembered, the main controversy took place between two of them: the Hiroshima city council which is still in charge of the museum and the survivors of the atomic bomb who have their own ideas. For the victims this war is a struggle to defend their mémoire against perishing and usurpation of their story as histoire. In fact the atomic bomb is predestined to create a lieu de mémoire. According to Nora history can be a device to reestablish continuity where a group has been cut off from any natural milieu de mémoire. The loss of the Pacific War is such a discontinuity and the atomic bombing which not only damaged but totally annihilated the very substance of memory can serve as its ultimate symbol. History and historiography must now re-connect past and present. We recognise this task already in the name of the museum: In Hiroshima, the chiffre of the traumatic rupture in history and loss of meaning, a Museum, an institution of discoursive history, has to mend past and present to make a meaningful future (Peace) possible.
I will emphasize three aspects which make the museum an extraordinary lieu de mémoire. First, Hiroshima holds a special and controversial position within postwar Japan because it has a twin site of memory, the Yasukuni Shrine in Tôkyô. Secondly, it bears the characteristics of a memory within a non-Christian culture, e.g. a different concept of responsibility and guilt. And lastly the atomic bombing is not just some event but for certain belongs to the extremes of human experience and therefore differs in the way it is treated by history.