Looking Back on the Asia-Pacific war: Art, Cinema
and Media
International Symposium
University of Sydney
Monday 5th November, 9-5
The Cultural Resonance of Conflict and Reconciliation in the
Australian and Japanese Imaginary
Reconciliation is often represented as taking place at an official
level between governments, through memorial diplomacy,
treaties, trade agreements etc. However it can be argued that
the deeper and more significant shifts in understanding are
realised and expressed in symbolic form, in art and literature,
ritual and ceremony.
This symposium explores the cultural shifts in the post-World
War II relationship between Australia and Japan, as these have
been articulated in theatre, film and literature. The keynote
speakers include creative artists and practitioners who have
taken up the challenges of expressing and contributing to these
developments in their work.
Negotiations of the Atomic Gaze in Filmic Reflections since 1945
Adam Broinowski, Deakin University. University of Melbourne
This paper presents an analysis of the scientific gaze that grew from the
19th century anatomical museums to reach its apotheosis in the midcentury American display of its power in the use of the atomic bombs
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although this structure has continued to
develop in the present, my presentation discusses this Event through the
retrospective perspectives of select visual artifacts. These images are
selected from a number of film sources which reflect upon the war and its
end point from both the Cold War and post-Cold War contexts in Japan.
Rather than commemoration sites, I will discuss how these artifacts
devised ways which could not only witness the Event, but which could
query the ethics of its ontological structure.
The Absence of the ‘Other’ in the Japanese War-Retro Film Genre
Mats Karlsson, University of Sydney
Ichikawa Kon’s iconic 1956 The Burmese Harp is universally hailed as a
great pacifistic statement and one of the most powerful anti-war films
ever made. Yet the question of culpability for the war is conspicuously
evaded. In the pivotal scene of the film indigenous Burmese join the
Japanese hero to bury the remains of deceased Japanese soldiers. What
we witness here is how those afflicted by the Japanese aggression help
their own aggressors to soothe the souls of the Japanese war dead. While
the film centers on the suffering of the Japanese soldiers dispersed over
South-East Asia, the suffering of the indigenous victims of Japan’s war
machine is conversely not touched upon. Taking this scene as
symptomatic of Japanese war-retro films on the whole, this presentation
focuses on the non-existence of the ‘other’ within the genre, and goes on
to discuss the concept of ‘victims’ consciousness’ as an explanatory
model for this conspicuous absence and, in more general terms, for why
the Japanese have not been able to comfortably come to terms with their
own culpability.
Rising Sun, Red Centre
John Romeril
The theme of this paper, which is built around my own life, is to question
the extent to which Australia has outgrown its colonial past and examine
what has been gained by social and personal development along 'postcolonial' lines. I shall begin by explaining the attempts I have made to
cast off the Euro-centric, Anglo-Celtic mindset that was bred into me, and
to re-orient my thinking. I am persuaded that the fate of Euro-AngloCeltic Australians is to consciously sense that they are still playing out a
colonial project. Following on from the colonising might of Great Britain
has been the impact of mass immigration, making Australia as an island
continent and a settler society, unsettled in its thinking.
The first, or aboriginal people of Japan, the Ainu, at some point must
have experienced a similar fate to the people of Aboriginal Australia, that
of being imposed upon, supplanted, marginalised by what would become
the dominant or mainstream culture. Both Australia and Japan share guilt
here. While I pretend no expertise with regard to the Ainu I find in my
own efforts to transcend an awareness of being born into a colonising
enterprise, parallels between Australia and Japan. The colonial
adventurism of Britain, France, Holland, Germany, Portugal and Spain;
of Korea, India, China, Russia, the US and Japan has impacted on the
Asia-Pacific region's history. This is our story. Can a post-colonial
mindset build, within nations and between them, saner forms of cross
cultural contact, civilising protocols that will carry us beyond the trickle
down shame and neurosis of conquest and occupation?
Ngapartji Ngapartji: an Australian Indigenous Play Efvoking
Memories of Marralinga, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima
Keiji Sawada (Waseda University)
Premiered in Australia in 2006, Ngapartji Ngapartji is an Australian
indigenous play telling a story about Pitjantjatjara people who were
moved off their traditional land by British nuclear test series conducted in
Marrralinga, South Australia in the 1950s and the 1960s. The play also
tells stories about the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
during World War II. In December 2011, Ngapartji Ngapartji was
translated into Japanese by myself and performed by Japanese actors in
Tokyo. This staging had a powerful impact on the Japanese audience; for
example, Asaya Fujita, a Japanese playwright whose works include both
a play about Hiroshima and a play about Fukushima nuclear plants,
compared dispossessed Pitjantjatjara people with A-bombs survivors in
Hiroshima and nuclear accident victims in Fukushima.
Although a war is always talked about as an issue between states,
Ngapartji Ngapartji evokes a completely different viewpoint: stories
about victims of nuclear bombs outside the framework of the state. This
chapter investigates how this Australian indigenous play was accepted in
Japan, and how “reconciliation” between victims and victimizers shown
in the play should be learnt in Japan in the future.
War and Filmic Remembrance: The Ambon Atrocity, Blood Oath,
and Essential Obstacles to Reconciliation.
Michael Lewis, University of Sydney
In this paper I consider the 1990 film and novel, Blood Oath, as a
“memory site” that has shaped our shared understanding of the wartime
events in Ambon, Indonesia and the war crime trials that followed in
1945. As Pierre Nora (1989) observes, memory sites “…originate with
the sense that there is no spontaneous memory, that we must deliberately
create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce
eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur
naturally.” Such memory sites—cultural products and processes— are
the means that enable individuals to create a meaningful collective
present, one that may not be historically accurate but can be politically
potent as a widely accepted narrative explanation.
In considering how Blood Oath works as a memory site, I question
its capacity to create an understanding capable of contributing to postwar
reconciliation, an avowed intention of the creators of the novel and film.
The novelist’s and filmmaker’s need to tell a gripping story results in
their surrendering accurate history to dramaturgy’s demands.
Essentialized characters— valiant Diggers, bushido obsessed Japanese,
and sly Americans bent on postwar world domination— fail to connect
with one another. Instead they follow stereotypical narrative trajectories
within closed cultural arcs to arrive at predictable ends. Although the
characters never “just connect,” the film and novel do make a powerful
impression on viewer/reader; both inevitably come away with a new and
vivid historical memory of the Ambon events. Unfortunately it is one that
leaves much unexplained and blocks reconciliation by substituting
holistic cultural explanations for evil’s banality.
The Resurgence of Hiroshima: Dramatic Art as an Indictment in
Inoue Hisashi’s play Kamiyacho Sakura Hotel
Yasuko Claremont, University of Sydney
Gradually, all iconic events fade into history. The atomic bombing of
Hiroshima no longer has the same impact in the social consciousness of
Japan that it once had. Today Fukushima has replaced Hiroshima in the
national attention. Nevertheless, one feature of dramatic art is its power to
bring to life issues that have an enduring relevance in society. An
example of art as advocacy is Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’, which was a
forerunner in having as its theme women’s equal rights in society, and
now has a place as one of the great plays of the nineteenth century. A
current example of the same kind is Kamiyacho Sakura Hotel, which
deals with the true story of a group of actors and actresses in a travelling
theatre named ‘Sakura troop’ headed by Sadao Maruyama, a famed actor.
(To perform at all they had to be part of the Japanese military, which
explains why they were known as a troop.) They had the misfortune to be
in Hiroshima on the morning when the atomic bomb was dropped. The
play was premiered for the opening of the New National Theatre in
Tokyo, 1997, and stands as a memorial to all members of the troop who
died within a few days from atomic radiation.
In examining this play my paper demonstrates how powerful and
effective dramatic art can be in its denunciation of nuclear weapons. This
is a universal theme affecting all humanity and goes far beyond political
activism.
Transnational Reconciliation in Film – Solrun Hoaas’s Aya
Roman Rosenbaum, University of Sydney
As Japan struggles with its legacy in the Asia-Pacific War, Australia
struggles to define its identity in Asia. Overt displays of reconciliation
and the negotiation of war memory in Japanese-Australian films are rare
primarily because the ownership of remembrance and commemorations is
still under dispute and continues to be negotiated in the changing bilateral
relationship between the two nations. There are however some
remarkable exceptions to this omission. As a bilateral project Michael
Pattinson’s The Last Bullet (1995) is one example that seeks to excavate
the entrenched ideologies of reconciliation ceremonies. Yet, several years
prior to the auspicious fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the Asia
Pacific War, Solrun Hoaas’s debute feature Aya (1990) tackles the
cultural heritage of the war directly and frankly. This paper focuses on
the status of Aya as a prototype of transnational reconciliation in film and
explores the contemporary ramifications of contested war memories in
the bilateral relationship between Japan and Australia.
Bringing the Spirits of the Aboriginal Diggers to Rest
Rod Plant, Chairperson of the Kokoda Aboriginal Servicemen's
Campaign, with Liz Rechniewski
The Kokoda Aboriginal Servicemen’s Campaign was launched in 2011 to
raise money to perform the culturally appropriate burial rites necessary to
bring to rest the estranged spirits of the Aboriginal diggers who died and
were buried during the Kokoda campaign. It focussed on the case of
Frank Archibald, a Gumbaynggirr man, who died on the Kokoda track on
24th November 1942 while trying to save a (non-Aboriginal) comrade.
His family had made many requests to government agencies and
organisations to obtain financial support to achieve this healing process but in vain. The KASC took up the family’s cause and saw it moreover as
an opportunity to raise community awareness of the role that Aboriginal
soldiers played in all the arenas of war. A documentary is being made of
the visit and the ceremonies, which included rites performed for five
other Aboriginal soldiers. We hope to be able to show extracts from the
film during this session, which will be focussed on the service of
Aboriginal men and women in war, and on the processes of healing that
traditional practices can perform.