Monday, February 27, 2006

Conclusion: Sharing History between the “Good People” of China and Japan

So my piece was not selected for an essay contest, and that is disappointing, but second best of course is being featured on my own private soap-box. This is the conclusion to the piece, where I attempt to weave together miscellaneous musings on history, subjectivity, and Sino-Japanese relations.

Niki Fumiko articulates the point that the Japanese perpetrators of the massacre of Chinese after the Great Kantô Earthquake were after all, “good people.” This is not in any way intended to justify their actions. Her point is that under ordinary circumstances they probably considered themselves to be good and ordinary folk, just like you and I. Yet they were capable of picking up bamboo spears and perpetrating these atrocities under extraordinary circumstances. By framing the issue in this manner, she turns the question of responsibility for the massacre back onto ourselves; instead of simply indicting “the Japanese,” Niki is pulling us out of our complacency to reflect on whether that could have been us.

My own discussion of the aftermath of the Kantô Earthquake illuminates the presence of people who at even the darkest of times stood up to the frenzy of ethnic hatred and through their actions undermined the simple categories of Chinese victim and Japanese perpetrator. More than the “good people” who perpetrated the massacres, the story of these unnamed Japanese who defended and harbored Chinese students and laborers compels us to question the way we have constructed Sino-Japanese relations in terms of ‘us versus them’. They force us to reflect on the hegemonic power of national identity, and how it can compel us to forget our other forms of identity -- as human being, brother, or sister. Only when we recuperate that consciousness can we approach an understanding of how humans who fundamentally share so much in common, can paradoxically deem themselves so starkly divided.

In searching for a way forward, I have chosen to discuss historical method for three important reasons: First, the Sino-Japanese conflict revolves around unresolved issues of historical interpretation. Second, the national history paradigm demarcates boundaries between people at the sites of their culture and identity. And finally, the theoretical critique of objectivity in recent decades lies at the heart of the movement to revise Japanese textbooks. Because historical practice is so tightly interwoven with the problem, it may hold the key to its resolution. Recent debates over historiography suggest that history is not a source of transcendental, universal knowledge, but rather a human enterprise, attempting to bridge the gaps between individuals and subjectivities. Thus, when we conceive of history as a transnational consensus-building project, we are not only producing a reliable, pragmatic body of knowledge. By promoting dialogue across national borders this very practice can draw Chinese and Japanese interpretations of war responsibility closer together, and undermine the importance of national subjectivity in our views of each other.

It is no easy task for history to bear the complexity of emotion and subjectivity. The public debate over history and textbooks in the spring of 2005 served as an inter-subjective flashpoint, but failed to generate significant consensus between China and Japan. Worse, it reemphasized the gap in consciousness that exists between people of the two countries, and thus produced a context in which fewer, rather than more people in Japan and China are willing to see each other as people with similar values. Nevertheless, I see this as an empirical failure of consensus-building, rather than a failure of method. Participation in a shared historical project can enable a more global historical consciousness, and hence a cultural milieu ever slightly more conducive to recognizing each other, regardless of nationality, as fellow humans.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

good movies, bad movies

It's been a while since I last felt moved to update this blog. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since having a busy offline life is nothing to be ashamed of. Nevertheless, it sometimes disturbs me to think that I have little to express verbally (or at least to the wider net), because it seems to suggest a certain failure to process what I am experiencing. But that's enough self-referential blogging.

I just finished watching two dislocated and plot-challenged movies, one of which was willfully wondrous, and one that somehow turned out on the contrary to be a horrendously pretentious cinematic exercise in superfluity. Oddly enough both movies feature the well-nigh ubiquitous Asano Tadanobu. As a quick aside, I had no idea that Asano is married to Chara, and is part native-American. I truly adored Last Life in the Universe, but his mere presence in a movie is no guarantee of artistic merit. As I have always said, it's silly to make assumptions about the value of a movie based on its actors; it makes far more sense to judge a movie by its director.

Cha no aji (Taste of Tea) by Ishii Katsuhiko (who by the way directed the animated sequences in Kill Bill vol. 1) was the spur to my sudden desire to blog again. It's a movie with too many characters, and too little plot, yet sustains itself with a gentle sense of human connectedness. It's comparable with the open-ended and gently inscrutable early writing of Murakami Haruki, especially his first novel Hear the Wind Sing. The story in Cha no aji follows a slightly off-kilter family living among the rice paddies of Ibaraki Prefecture as they individually try to find love through playing go, escape the haunting of a gigantic dopplegaenger, produce an anime short film, and (re)mix a manga tribute song. How does all this fit together? It doesn't. It really doesn't cohere into a trenchant message like Lily Chou-Chou though both films share a certain penchant for lingering over rice paddies. But it's no simple celebration of rural life either, as it shows how deeply otaku culture can permeate into Japanese society through the interconnecting power of the media. Ultimately, its a reflection on the magical realism of quotidien life, and a rejection of the movie temporality which collapses eternity into "The End" and vertical scrolling credits. There's no closure for the movie, and you may as well pause the film for tea breaks without really interrupting its aesthetic message. You are left with the sense that life probably goes on just as before even after the credits roll, that is, full of magic, inanity and quiet beauty. (Much like Cafe Lumiere, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien).

Bright Future (Akarui mirai) by Kurosawa Kiyoshi on the other hand was a terrible waste of time and cinematic seriousness. I really did feel cheated after wading through its 2 hour, unpredictably paced, running time. Here, dispensing with standard plot development yields a disagreeably tedious and pretentious film. More stunning was how poorly Kurosawa develops his characters, mostly notably the roles played Odagiri Joe and Asano Tadanobu. Overloaded with obscure metaphor and imagery, the story seems to suggest very little. If there is any message on the surface, it is intensely negative; it's hard to see any redeeming value in teenage rebellion when there is no comprehensible motive. I'm half convinced that the director was too lazy to work any causality into the plot. . . (also inexplicable is the use of Gas Panic Yokohama as the setting for several scenes).

One interesting juxtaposition posed by these two films is their conflicting approaches to youth and family in contemporary Japan. The sense of crisis in Bright Future is shrill and unmistakeable. What it lacks of course is any concrete answer, or even question(!), regarding that crisis. The families are fractured, and the children live in a Charlie Brown world where the adults all seem to be speaking a language they don't comprehend. The only way out seems to be suggested by magical role played by hordes of poisonous red jellyfish, mystically thriving in Tokyo's river and sewer system. The Japanese countryside seems to be much better adjusted to modern life, where the joys of playing go (and the naive elation of sharing an umbrella on a rainy day) seem to coexist with acting out super-hero anime on the train (a dinky two-car rattler that only seems to run twice a day). Whatever. They're both fiction. But I'm getting tired of hearing of the evocation of crisis among the Japanese young. It's there to be sure, but the unilateral message seems to be aimed at producing a reactionary solution, suggesting that Japanese society is in decay and in need of a return to tradition. I've taught young Japanese (in the countryside, naturally), and my experience mirrors the playful oddity of Taste of Tea far more closely than anything in Kurosawa's piece.