Cultures of Memory in Asia

Dynamics and Forms of Memorialization

Chieh-Hsiang Wu, Chieh-Hsiang Wu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000599213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

A collection of works by Asian scholars looking at different ways in which relatively recent traumas have been memorialized in their various countries, often while the traumas themselves are ongoing, or the memories of them contested.

Memory studies typically focuses on the study of memorialization after traumatic incidents are overcome, in Asia, however, the past and the present remain closely intertwined. Between the legacies of the Japanese Empire, the respective suppressions by the Kuomintang and the People's Republic of China, and the ongoing protests in much of Southeast Asia against oppressive governments and laws, memorialization is occurring while the histories are still being contested. The contributors to this book are Asian scholars examining the memorializing of events in the countries of Asia, including China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Thailand and the Philippines, using local language sources. They look at a broad range of media of memorialization, encompassing statues, cemeteries, testimonial literature, and film among others.

An insightful resource for scholars of memory and cultural studies, as well as those of twentieth and twenty-first century Asian history.

1 Cultural Memories of State ViolenceA Comparative Study of Kwangju and Hiroshima¹

Mikyoung Kim

DOI: 10.4324/9781003242253-2

Introduction: State Violence in Korea’s Kwangju and Japan’s Hiroshima

The sacrifice of innocent citizens at the hands of their own government leaves deep scars on the victims and their families. Citizens choose to submit themselves to the authority of government in exchange for protection and security. It is thus a reciprocal arrangement. State violence betrays the sacrosanct sovereign contract on the part of the government by encroaching upon citizens’ human rights. Brutal regimes often do not hesitate to scapegoat their citizens to serve the narrowly defined ruling interests by committing heinous crimes against humanity. The list of inhumane crimes is regrettably long, including illegal abduction, summary execution, sexual violence and massacre, among others.

Contemporary history in Asia points to several tragic incidents of state violence, including China’s Tiananmen Square massacre, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge reign of terror and Japan’s Okinawa incident (see Ganesan and Sungchull Kim 2013). This chapter compares Korea’s Kwangju and Japan’s Hiroshima in order to analyse cultural representation of state violence in commemorative practice.

Kwangju is a site where the Chun Doo-hwan military junta brutally suppressed a civilian uprising that lasted between 18 and 27 May 1980. The confirmed civilian casualty reached 166 with 82 still missing as of 2019. It has been confirmed that 110 people died due to post-physical and psychological trauma, including suicide. Hiroshima, on the other hand, suffered from massive deaths due to the first atomic bomb attack on 6 August 1945. The number of civilian deaths reached 500,000, including the sacrifice of 50,000 Koreans.² The two principal perpetrators are the Japanese and US governments. While Tokyo’s wartime government should be held accountable for starting the unwinnable war (Hashimoto 2015), the US government can never be exempted from its use of weapons of mass destruction against unarmed civilians (Tanaka 2006). Given the fact that it was the Japanese government which provoked the United States by attacking the Pearl Harbor in 1941, the primary responsibility for the massive civilian deaths lies with the wartime Tokyo government (Totani 2009). The citizens of Hiroshima³ were victimised by its own government’s inept war planning and poor military execution which invited the unprecedented US retaliation in terms of its nature and magnitude. Both Kwangju and Hiroshima are poignant examples of state-initiated civilian victimisation.

Notable differences do exist between 1980s Kwangju and 1945s Hiroshima. Whereas the Kwangju tragedy occurred in the context of domestic strife, the Hiroshima calamity happened in the course of international warfare. The magnitude of victimhood also differs. While this chapter does not refute these factual differences, it argues that they are not crucial barriers for a comparison. This research draws on two salient observations. First, both Hiroshima and Kwangju witnessed the deaths of innocent civilians because of national government’s prioritisation of self-interests vis-à-vis welfare of the people. And second, depth of human sorrow is hard to quantify in terms of statistics. On a group level, magnitude of human loss can be important. Yet on an individual level, trauma is still trauma no matter how many fellow citizens were sacrificed together in the same incident. What this chapter attempts to do is to understand the cultural practice of collective mourning for the victims of state violence in Japan’s Hiroshima and Korea’s Kwangju.

Commemoration and Cultural Memories

The history of state violence treats the past as indisputable fact (cf. Scott 1999). Historians, therefore, try to unearth the truth of the bygone era as if we can comprehend the truth in a consensual manner. Memory, on the other hand, is mostly a malleable entity being subject to present needs (Le Goff 1992; Ricoeur 2004). Our beliefs about the past are thus dependent on present circumstances where different elements of the past become more or less relevant as these circumstances change. Commemoration, a practice to give a meaning to the past, then, is ‘only possible from an ascertainable intellectual location’ and

presuppose a subject harbouring definite aspirations regarding the future and actively striving to achieve them. Only out of the interest which the subject at present acting has in the pattern of the future, does the observation of the past become possible.

(Mannheim 1952: 276–320)

Each new generation, therefore, forges a past compatible with its present situation. For example, Fujiwara Kiichi (2005) connects the past to the future from today’s prism, as he states:

I use the word ‘remember,’ but actually, when people think of any conflict, they do not remember it as such, but rather reconstitute the past in a way that suits our needs today. We imagine the future in a way that suits our known experiences, so we remember the past, but we are not really interested in objectively studying the past. Rather, we extract useful bits of the past in order to prove in the present that something ‘actually’ happened before. Thus, we imagine the past and remember the future.

(Fujiwara Kiichi 2005: 53)

The statements made by Mannheim and Kiichi make sense to the presentists because it roots understandings of the past in new social realities, denying the existence of an objective benchmark for assessing different versions of the past (Shils 1981 [2006]).⁴

Since any version of the past articulates conditions of the present, there is no reason to revere or otherwise rely on it as a source of instruction, benefit or harm (see Halbwachs 1926; [1950] [1980]; Hobsbawm 1983; Bodnar 1992; Gillis 1994; Zerubavel 2003). As proclaimed by Ricoeur (2004: 3), ‘to remember (se souvenir de) something is at the same time to remember oneself (se souvenir de soi).’ The act of remembering is to remember self by resisting forgetting. The issue, then, is why do the Japanese and Koreans remember their tragic past of state violence in different ways? This chapter traces the cultural roots of remembering acts by examining the commemorative dynamics of the Hiroshima Peace Museum and the Kwangju May 18 Cemetery. In doing so, it applies Japan’s cultural ethos of ‘hollow centre’ and Korea’s ‘Han-resistance’ sentiment to commemorative praxis.

Japan’s Ethos of ‘Hollow Centre’

Kumakura (2007) writes:

The psychologist Kawai Hayao has proposed the concept of the ‘hollow centre’ as the key to the Japanese mind. Beginning with Japanese mythology, he claims that the structure of Japanese culture, society and human relations are [sic] characterised by the emptiness at the centre. When forces confront one another on either side of this empty centre, the emptiness serves as a buffer zone that prevents the confrontation from growing too intense.

(Kumakura 2007: 59)

Kawai (1995) grounds his theorem in popular fairy tales (e.g., the great Goddess of the Sun, Amaterasu) and a mythologised historical text, the Kojiki, of the eighth century. Similarly, Ishida (1984) describes ‘empty state of mind’ resonating with Buddhist teachings. Ishida’s ‘empty state’ is about equanimity, indiscriminate flexibility, non-judgementalism and a thoughtless and morally indifferent bliss. The empty state, asserts Ishida, allows a situational logic for conflict avoidance, not necessarily conflict resolution. The end result is temporary pacification, not permanent reconciliation of conflict (Sugiyama-Lebra 1995). Since aesthetic aspirations take priority over moral principles (Kawai 2006: 3–11), tension is mitigated between tatemae-honne (appropriate front vs. honest inner feelings) and omote-ura (visible vs. hidden layers of self). In terms of Kawai and Ishida’s mental topography, conflict is mediated at the vacuous centre which filters out moralistic sentiments. The Japanese can put on contextually appropriate performance being divorced from heartfelt feelings, and that is culturally acceptable.

The avoidance of confrontation at the ‘empty centre’ provides an explanation for the Japanese ambivalence towards state violence. The negative memory is better avoided than directly confronted, and that creates a precarious undercurrent for commemoration.

‘Hollow centre,’ on the other hand, allows for flexibility in making compromises. Situation, not moral principles, dictates the appropriateness of an act and the range of permissibility. The war was fought to win, not to respect human life. Therefore, if sacrifice of the citizens served the purpose, it should be acceptable, according to the cultural frame. Situation dictates a selective application of useful logic lacking the unshakeable moral core such as respect for human life.

Korea’s Ethos of ‘Han-Resistance’

‘Han,’ a Korean cultural sentiment, is resentment towards inflicted injustice. The Korean mind as construed by Han is acutely aware of power relations between self and other, and it holds the self-accountable for a slight in its honour at the hands of the more powerful. Han entails subjective judgement of other’s perception of the self, and harbours resentment towards the perpetrator while being conscious of its own weakness.

Han, a most persuasive explanation of the Korean mind so far, is not free from criticisms. As the concept was strongly advocated by the Japanese academic circles during the colonial era (Seongnae Kim 1993; Kwang-uok Kim 1998), it was delivered with political implications. Han portrayed Koreans as being sentimental, passive, fateful and inward-looking. It became a tool to explain away the harsh reality of the subjugated people: Colonised Korea was due to its own weakness, and Koreans had no one else but themselves to blame for their pitiful fate. Han was a powerful frame in justifying the colonial reality: Koreans were the victims of their own shortcomings.

The colonisers could not predict the mass revolts (e.g., the March 1st Independence Movement in 1910) and the lingering spirit of resistance. Should Han instil passivity and submissiveness on the weak, the concept calls for further investigation: Something else was making up the Korean mind. Facing continuous resistance, the colonisers began using alternative vocabulary such as ‘mass psychology,’ ‘shifting moods’ and ‘unruliness’ to describe the Korean mind. Resistance is the missing component serving as an action schema of the hanfully oppressed.

I argue that Han and resistance complement each other. While Han describes the mind map, resistance is an action schema. One problem in coalescing Han and resistance in the Korean cultural ethos lies with the assumed linearity between the two. Hanful sentiment can be erroneously equated with submissive behaviour, and resistance can be interpreted as a lack of self-reflexivity. The relationship is far more complicated than often asserted. Giddens’s (1982) discernment of ‘discursive consciousness’ from ‘practical consciousness’ comes to our assistance at this point. ‘Discursive consciousness’ is a semeiotic articulation of narrative frame. It, therefore, is a function of inductive reasoning because it draws on articulated words in explicating the motives behind an expressed action (i.e., meaning-giving and meaning-seeking activity). It is useful to place Han and resistance on the same plane, but, of course, in different dimensions. The cultural frame of Han is about ‘discursive consciousness.’ It is because the ‘practical consciousness’ is deductive in its working suggesting unarticulated reasons for an action. It regards actions taken, not words spoken. It goes beyond semiotic confinement because action in and of itself is sufficient enough to illuminate the mental frame. Resistance is a manifestation of ‘practical consciousness.’ Han and resistance work as opposite sides of the same coin.

In Japan and Korea, the ‘hollow centre’ and ‘Han-resistance’ as cultural frames stand pretty much alone.⁵ In the following section, this chapter links the cultural frames to commemorative practices in Japan’s Hiroshima and Korea’s Kwangju.

Sites of State Violence: Japan’s Hiroshima and Korea’s Kwangju

State violence inflicted on Hiroshima is unprecedented. Humanity woke up to the reality of self-annihilation at the advent of the atomic age. As of 1950, more than 200,000 civilians died from radiation exposure to the atomic bomb and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Editor’s Note
• Struggling to Remember: Memory, Representation and Contention
• 1 Cultural Memories of State Violence: A Comparative Study of Kwangju and Hiroshima
• 2 The Making of Tiananmen Square as a Realm of Contested Memories: National Salvation, Revolutionary Tradition and Political Modernity in Twentieth-Century China
• 3 From Dictator to Hero: Marcos, Heroes Cemeteries, and Sites of Cultural Memory
• 4 The Praxis of Memory: The Royal Statue of King Prajadhipok
• 5 Reshuffling History: From Mengkerang to Party, Image (Film) and Its Overflowing History/Time Index System
• 6 (Un-)Representability of History and Visualisation of Memory: Examples from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong
• 7 ‘Exorcising Memory through Cold Confessions?’: Testimonial Literature and the Problem of Ethics in Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible
• 8 The Politics and Promise of Memory: The White Terror in Taiwan as Example
• Index