Organizer and Chair: David C. Stahl, State University of New York, Binghamton
Discussant: Mark Williams, University of Leeds
A striking number of important Japanese novels and films draw meaningful attention
to the origins, motivations, consequences, and possible means of avoiding the
psychological compulsion to physically repeat historical trauma. According to
Freud, “The patient doesn’t remember anything of what he has forgotten
and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action;
he repeats it without of course knowing he is repeating it. . . . in the end
we understand that this is his way of remembering.” The papers of this
panel examine representative works of postwar and contemporary Japanese literature
and film with an eye to articulating the significance of this widespread phenomenon.
In so doing, they attempt to answer some of the following questions: What kinds
of repressed experience bring about repetition compulsion? What effects does
traumatic reenactment have on those who engage in it? What are the ethical and
moral ramifications of this “traumatic memory”? What are the outcomes
of such unconsciously motivated behavior? How can an individual or collectivity
become aware of and thus be able to counter or bring an end to destructive patterns
of behavior? How, in other words, can the unconscious urge to physically repeat
trauma be replaced with deliberate acts of remembering and working through?
Finally, what can examinations of individual cases tell us about collective
responses to historical trauma? Can tendencies toward compulsive repetition
still be insidiously at work behind contemporary individual and national actions?
David C. Stahl, State University of New York, Binghamton
Released in 1979, Imamura Shôhei’s challenging film Vengeance is
Mine retells the story of Nishiguchi Akira, an infamous real-life serial killer.
After exhaustively researching the case and discovering important details that
did not appear in police reports or Saki Ryûzô’s novelization,
Imamura visualized his own understanding of “Enokizu Iwao’s” life
and crimes. Imamura’s primary concern in the film is to expose the unconscious
motivations behind this remorseless killer’s repetitive acts. Enokizu’s
traumatic childhood experience of witnessing his father’s humiliating
public submission to an Imperial naval officer’s violent demands in 1938
that he “joyously offer up his village’s fishing boats to the august
emperor” eventually takes the form of repetition compulsion. Enokizu’s
father fails to “stand up to” the naval officer, who is himself
a stand-in for the emperor, or “father of the nation.” As an adult,
Enokizu can’t confront his own father regarding his wartime and postwar
behavior, and instead violently displaces his anger, resentment, hatred, and
sense of betrayal onto a succession of surrogate father figures. The allegorical
implication of this father-son story is that during and after the war the Japanese
people failed to stand up to and challenge the emperor concerning the devastating “holy
war” waged in his name. And judging from Imamura’s treatment of
Iwao’s trauma and actions, until repressed war experience is honestly
remembered, squarely faced, and thoroughly worked through, the nation will
continue to be in danger of being motivated, in one way or another, to repeat
the catastrophic failures of the belligerent past.
William Ashbaugh, State University of New York, Oneonta
Television and movie versions of the anime Super Dimensional Fortress Macross
(Chôjikû yôsai Macross,1982-1984), display a repeating series
of catastrophes and recovery. First the city around the repaired alien spaceship
Macross is mistakenly transported into outer space with the human-crewed
ship. After the city is repaired and placed inside the 1.5 km long ship, the
rescued city repeatedly faces major damage from enemy attacks and even self-inflicted
destruction; the damaged ship has to transform into a humanoid configuration
in order to fire its main laser cannon. Eventually alien vessels orbiting
the Earth destroy life on the planet. These cataclysmic events all occur in
a space opera serving as a backdrop to a love triangle. The full story, however,
is critical, both for allowing the creators to tell the larger tale and to sell
more transformable toys. And transformation plays a pivotal role in analyzing
Macross, both the series and the film. The constant transformation, destruction,
and reconstruction enabled the postwar generation of writers, animators,
and directors to express their views on the tumultuous changes they experienced
as children and young adults. The rebuilding and modernization of cities
and fear of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, with
Japan suffering in the middle, all make their appearance in disguised form throughout
Macross. In fact, the repetitive transformations of destroyed urban centers
into reconstructed ones, jets into robots, and ships into humanoid forms
all describe the ongoing transfiguration of Japan from militarist to postwar
capitalist state.
Patricia Welch, Hofstra University
Murakami Haruki’s peculiar use of landscape is arguably unparalleled in
Japanese literature: odd towns, underground worlds, strange hotels, and moribund
towns abound. Even prosaic suburban bedroom communities hide secrets. Whether
real or imagined, landscapes play significant roles in Murakami’s literary
corpus. They are sites of contestation, and arenas for challenging individual,
regional, and national identity on multiple levels. In Kafka no umibe (2002),
as in Sekai no Owari to Haadoboirudo Wandaarando (1985), Murakami uses landscape
in alternating worlds as dreamscapes to be pondered. Here, psychic dreamscapes
are physically mapped onto the topography of Japan as the novel’s heroes
independently pursue quests of enlightenment with their guides. Both heroes
have experienced life-changing traumatic events. Nakata is a middle-aged man,
a “holy fool” and rescuer of lost cats, who lost his memory and
higher cognitive ability as a consequence of the “Rice Bowl Incident” of
1944. Yet he lives contentedly until he encounters Johnny Walker, cat killer.
Tamura Kafka is a boy who runs away from home on his fifteenth birthday, perhaps
to find his mother, perhaps so as not to kill his hated father. Even so, his
quest turns Oedipal in a metaphysical way. This paper examines how the novel
deploys actual, imagined, and remembered landscapes to present critical insights
into the individual and contemporary Japan. By retracing the steps of things
forgotten—or never consciously known—Kafka and Tamura activate the
possibility of creating a new engagement with their respective foundational
traumas and their aftermath.
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