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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
This essay introduces three different generations of artists whose works deal with experience, memory, and trauma derived from World War II. The first generation refers to artists who experienced the war: they are harsh critics of the wartime government for the victimization of both Japanese and non-Japanese citizens, such as Koreans. The second generation of artists were born in the 1940s and 50s. These artists do not have direct memories of the war, yet they challenge less-explored issues in relation to the time period, such as women's participation in the war effort. The third generation can be characterized by their desire to participate intergenerational and transnational dialogues with the older generations and with other artists and social-justice activists. The authors explain how these artists engage with viewers about the importance of remembering the war. Some older artists incorporate their direct war experience as a way to redress the atrocities imposed on their people while others reflect on family histories that were largely shaped by Japanese imperialism and war. Although they use different media and explore various issues, what binds them together is a message to the younger generation “not to forget” the brutality of war, and to critically reflect on their identity in relation to history. The essay also provides a number of images of relevant artworks with informative descriptions.
1 Dora Apel. Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. 2002, p. 3.
2 Examples include Jay Winter and Emanuel Sivan, War and Remembrance in the 20th century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lisa Saltzman. Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006.
3 For example, Franziska Seraphim, War memory and social politics in Japan, 1945-2005, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006; Beatrice Trefalt, Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950-1975, London : New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
4 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Free Speech - Silenced Voices: The Japanese Media, the Comfort Women Tribunal, and the NHK Affair,” Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, March 8, 2007. Link. Also see proceedings of “Building Peace with a Gender Perspective in the Era of Backlash—On the 10th Anniversary of the International Women's War Tribunal” Dec. 19, 2010, a symposium sponsored by the International Institute of Language and Culture Studies, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto.
5 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Post-memory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. She had dropped the hyphen in “postmemory” by 2008.
6 Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, NY: Pantheon Books, 1973, vol. 1, p. 6.
7 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, 1997, p.22.
8 Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory” Poetics Today, 29.1 (Spring 2008): 103128.
9 Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” p. 111.
10 Apel, p. 6, 20-22.
11 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History,, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1996; Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1995.
12 Apel, p. 6
13 Richard H. Minear, Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010; and Nakazawa Keiji and Richard H. Minear, “Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 39-1-10, September 27, 2010. Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓, Hotaru no Haka) 1967. The DVD was brought out in 2002 subtitled in English by Central Park Media Corporation.
14 Minear, Hiroshima, p. 152.
15 Hiroshima no pika & Hellfire: a journey from Hiroshima; Noriaki Tsuchimoto, director; John Junkerman, writer, director. First Run Features, 2005/1986, DVD. See also John W. Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays, New York: The New Press, 1995.
16 Ann Sherif, “Art as Activism: Tomiyama Taeko and the Marukis,” in Laura Hein and Rebecca Jennison, eds., Imagination Without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility, Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2010, pp. 29-50.
17 Tomiyama comments in “Talking Across the World: A Discussion Between Tomiyama Taeko and Eleanor Rubin,” in Hein and Jennison, pp. 107-127, quote p. 127.
18 ‘Asia eno Shiza to Hyogen’ Organizing Committee, Silenced by History: Tomiyama Taeko's Work, Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu, 1995. Images of Tomiyama's most recent exhibit, “Looking at Asia—On the 100th Anniversary of Japan's Annexation of Korea” can be viewed here.
19 For a photograph of part of this series in progress, see Laura Hein andNobuko TANAKA, “Brushing With Authority: The Life and Art of Tomiyama Taeko,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 133-10, March 29, 2010.
20 See Kobayashi Hiromichi, “Slides and Collages” in Tomiyama Taeko and Takahashi Yūji, Hiruko and the Puppeteers, A Tale of Sea Wanderers, Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu, 2009, bilingual book and DVD, ISBN 978-4-7738-0908-4
21 The Kamakura exhibit was a retrospective of fifty years of prizewinning art by local painters. Miyazaki also published a memoir about his years as a POW in 1998. 『宮崎進画集 私のシベリア 森と大地の記憶』 文藝春秋 1998.11. Miyazaki Shin, Gaka watashi no shiberiamori to taichi no kioku, Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū Press, 1998.
22 Shin Miyazaki and Tsutomu Mizusawa, “Hanging ‘myself’ on the wall: A Dialogue with Shin Miyazaki,” pp. 53-61 in Tsutomu Mizusawa, “Voices of Siberia: On the Current Work of Shin Miyazaki,” Shin Miyazaki, Vozes da Siberia/Voices of Siberia, Tokyo: The Japan Foundation, 2004, quote from p. 53.
23 Mizusawa, “Voices of Siberia,” p.16.
24 Mizusawa, “Voices of Siberia,” p. 20.
25 While our focus here is artists, this generalization holds true for others who have shaped the postwar history of the war years as well. See, for example, Yoshiko Nozaki, War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Postwar Japan, 1945-2007, London and New York: Routledge Contemporary Japan Series, 2008.
26 Quote from Nancy Shalala, “Artist reveals a “Past Imperfect,” The Japan Times, October 3, 1993.
27 Shimada Yoshiko, “Japanese Women and the War, 1930-40,” Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Asahi Shinbunsha, eds., Gender Beyond Memory: The Works of Contemporary Women Artists, Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, 1996, pp. 104116, quote p. 104.
28 Shimada in Jennifer Chan, Another Japan is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship Education, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. 242-246, quote, p. 244.
29 Hagiwara Hiroko, “Comfort Women/Women of Conformity: the Work of Shimada Yoshiko,” in Generations and Geographies, ed. by Griselda Pollock, Routledge, 1996, pp. 253-265.
30 Kasahara Michiko, “Gender Beyond Memory,” in Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Asahi Shinbunsha, eds., Gender Beyond Memory: The Works of Contemporary Women Artists, Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, 1996, pp.159168, quote p. 163.
31 Shimada was thus part of a broader trend in public art that foregrounded audience participation in enacting social memories. See Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory, London: I. B. Tauris, 2009, chapter 5.
32 Kasahara, pp.167 and 163.
33 Ōgoshi Aiko, “Gender's Pitfall -From Feminism's Changing Viewpoint,” in Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Asahi Shinbunsha, eds., Gender Beyond Memory: The Works of Contemporary Women Artists, Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, 1996, pp. 155-158, quote from p. 158.
34 “Art Activism and Korean Minority Rights,” Hwangbo Kangja in Jennifer Chan, ed. Another Japan is Possible: New Social Movements and Global Citizenship Education, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 281-283. Hwangbo curated an exhibit “Family Photographs” in Toyonaka City in January, 2011.
35 For an on-line site with photographs and information about the earthquake, see this link.
36 This work was first shown in, “Borderline Cases: Co-responses on the Borderlines” (2004), an exhibition that brought together artists, curators and scholars working in Korea and Japan. It was also shown in Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Denmark, Great Britain, and Shanghai. See Rebecca Jennison, “Borderline Cases—Co-responses on the Borderlines,” n.paradoxa, (2004)
37 Rebecca Jennison, “Yoshiko Shimada—Silence, Secrets and Sex in the Gallery,” C-ARTS, Vol. 9, July-August, 2009 pp. 34-36 (Singapore).
38 See Zanshō no Oto (Sounds of Lingering Wounds), ed. by Lee Chongwha, Iwanami Shoten, 2009. This volume includes 12 essays by participants in the project and a DVD of interviews and works of seven artists produced by another participating artist, Soni Kum. Selected articles in the volume are now being translated into English.
39 Another transnational project concerning Asian war art and remembrance that involves young scholars and curators is led by Ming Tiempo, a Chinese-Canadian art historian based in Tokyo, Asato Ikeda, a Japanese scholar based in Canada, and American professor Louisa MacDonald. Louisa MacDonald, Asato Ikeda, and Ming Tiempo, eds., provisionally titled The Dark Valley: Japanese Art and World War II, Leiden: Brill, in press.
40 “Oh/Okamura Haji,” in Unbound—Gender in Asia, Kyoto Journal, No. 64, Oct. 2006. Also see articles by Kim Hyeshin and Rebecca Jennison in Zanshō no Oto, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo.(2009).
41 Yamashiro is introduced briefly in ANPO: Art X War The Art of Resistance, directed by Linda Hoaglund, Videorecording New Day Films, 2010.
42 Yamashiro Chikako, “Anata no koe wa watashi no nodo wo tota” (Your voice came out through my throat), Video work, Artist's Statement, Exhibit at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2009.
43 Yamashiro Chikako, Interview with Soni Kum, Zanshō no oto II, DVD (The Sound of Lingering Wounds II, DVD), Iwanami Shoten, 2009.
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