Rumi Sakamoto

Engaging with the ‘transnational turn’ in collective memory studies, this article examines how national and transnational elements intersect in cultural memory-making of the Pacific War in contemporary Japan. Through a case study of a recent Japanese television drama (Two Homelands, 2019) about Japanese Americans who were caught up between two countries at war, it argues that the incorporation of transnational Nikkei memories into Japanese national war memory on a popular cultural level both challenges and reinforces the dominant war narratives in Japan. Ultimately, Two Homelands uses Nikkei voices and their wartime experience of racial discrimination and internment to reinterpret Japan’s role in the Pacific War and promote the revisionist-nationalist narrative of the war. As such, the drama exemplifies the desire within Japan to rehabilitate the persisting cultural trauma of the war and defeat.

Resurrecting Nagasaki is an important study that remedies the perception of Hiroshima as the definitive atomic bomb city of Japan. While works like Lisa Yoneyama’s Hiroshima Traces (1999) have show...

This essay examines the transnational impact of mediated memory of Korean forced labour through a case study of the South Korean blockbuster Battleship Island (2017)—a historical action film about the mass escape of Korean coalminers from forced labour on Hashima Island. Rather than focusing on the content of the reconstructed past in the film and its historical (in)accuracies, we explore the film’s entanglement with a wider mnemonic landscape and political intent in and beyond South Korea. We argue that the film became an effective cultural memory through a dynamic network of media and social practices that developed around it. By thus treating the film as a material object in the broader media environment and examining its transnational social performance, we highlight Battleship Island’s role in turning Hashima into a new symbolic focal point of South Korea–Japan memory conflict and a transnationally available icon of Korean suffering. Further, we suggest that the film stimulated the production and circulation of alternative memory narratives of Hashima by Japanese rightist memory activists. While recent works on transnational memory in the European context tend to focus on cosmopolitan memory that promotes cross-border identification with victims, this study provides insight on how transnational memory dynamics can develop towards a different direction of reinforcing nationalism.

Taking a cue from recent works that assert the importance of affect in politics and critical theory, this paper examines affective strategies employed at Yūshūkan, a war museum attached to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Although its revisionist historiography has been generally discredited by historians, over the last decade Yūshūkan has established itself as a key public site for neo-nationalist war memory in Japan. This paper argues that to understand Yūshūkan's appeal we need to address the affective economy it produces around the stories and images of the fallen soldiers. In particular, I analyse the image of kamikaze as a ‘sticky object of emotion’ and ‘somatic marker’ that is both emotionally charged and culturally mobilized. I examine several factors that contribute to its affective capacity: the culturally specific trope of the tragic hero and the aesthetics of self-sacrifice; an emphasis on their ‘ordinariness’ as fathers and sons; and the naturalized, almost moral expectation of the current generations' indebtedness and gratitude to the war dead. A close reading of the museum exhibits, catalogue, website and visitor books suggests that Yūshūkan's rhetorical force relies on the kamikaze icon's ability to arouse visceral and intense emotions. Produced at the intersection of affect and discourse, history and memory, kamikaze is a heavily loaded sign central to Yūshūkan's affective and sub-discursive mode of communication. By illustrating how Yūshūkan mobilizes subjects into its patriotic history and identity via emotional authenticity, I hope to add an alternative approach to the current scholarship that predominantly focuses on the discursive content of Yūshūkan's historiography or religious-spiritual function of mourning. More generally it is also hoped that this study will contribute to thinking through the role of affect in collective war memory by offering a culturally and historically specific case study.

How is war remembered in public places in Japan? The high profile ‘peace’ museums of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Yushukan, the museum that is attached to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, have dominated both the English and Japanese language literature about sites of remembrance since the 1990s. The thrust of much of the literature emphasises the divide between Japan's recognition of its place as a victim of atomic bombing in war, and its recognition or denial of its aggression in East and Southeast Asia. In the 21st century, other less well‐known public institutions in Japan (Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots, Shokeikan Museum for Wounded Soldiers, Showakan, Okinawa Prefectural Peace Park and Memorial Museum, and Himeyuri Memorial and Museum) have produced different perspectives of Japan's wartime history. By briefly examining these lesser‐known museums, we demonstrate how the concept of ‘peace’ has been recast in various ways to provide legitimating contexts in which to rehabilitate Japanese people's experiences during the war. This research suggests that beyond the binary of ‘victim‐victimiser’ analyses of Japanese war memory there is room for research in this field that recognises and engages the complexity of how Japan's controversial wartime past is presented in the Japanese public domain.

Since the 1990s sushi has become a global product with a transnational market. Hybridised and localised sushi like California Rolls and Spider Rolls are now even being reverse-imported to Japan as ‘genuine American sushi’. This article examines some attempts to re-nationalise global sushi, both from the Japanese state and from the vernacular media. We argue that, while popular reporting on the ‘overseas sushi boom’ generates a sense of national pride over ‘them’ eating ‘our’ food, the state's position is a more strategic one. It operates with a clear motive of increasing sales of Japanese food products overseas, mobilising the image of authenticity for this specific purpose. Both state and popular expressions of culinary nationalism claim Japanese ownership of culture not only in its ‘authentic’ forms but in its multiple, creative, hybrid and fusion forms. By examining Japanese responses to foreigners consuming sushi, we hope to provide some insights into the relationship between food, national culture, authenticity and globalisation. A further objective is to understand Japan's culinary nationalism within the larger context of the ‘soft power’ and ‘cultural diplomacy’ discourse.

This paper looks at some literary representations of the ‘pan-pan girls’ in postwar Japan. ‘Pan-pan’ is a derogatory term for street prostitutes who (mostly) served the soldiers of the occupying forces. Immediately after World War II, the Japanese government established the RAA (Recreation Amusement Association) and employed several thousand women to provide sexual services for foreign soldiers, ostensibly to protect Japanese women of middle and upper classes from rape and other violence. When the RAA was closed down in 1946 due to the US concern over widespread VD, many of the women who lost their jobs went out on the street and became private and illegal prostitutes – the pan-pan girls. With their red lipstick, cigarettes, nylon stockings and high-heel shoes, often holding onto the arms of tall, uniformed American GIs, the ‘pan-pan girls’ became a symbol of the occupation, and have been textually reproduced throughout the postwar period. This paper analyses the images and representations of the ‘pan-pan girls’ in postwar Japanese literature, to consider how the ‘pan-pan girls’ have functioned as a metaphor for the occupation and contributed to the public memory construction of the occupation. I identify some major codes of representations (victimisation, humiliation, and national trauma; eroticism and decadence; sexual freedom and materialism) and argue that the highly gendered and sexualised bodies of the ‘pan-pan girls’ have continued to allow simplistic and selective remembering of the occupation at the expense of recalling the pivotal role of Japanese patriarchy in the postwar period.