Fidelity to the dead: the question of complicity in Tsushima Yûko’s Wildcat Dome

Abstract

Tsushima Yûko’s 2013 novel, Yamaneko dômu (Wildcat Dome), centers around multiracial orphans who were born to Japanese women during the occupation period and whose fathers were US servicemen. The novel opens in May 2011 and then moves back and forth between moments in time from the past sixty years, revealing the inner thoughts of different characters, both dead and living. The novel’s centrifugal force is the haunting presence of a friend who might have been murdered, and who plagues the main characters for decades because of their fear that they may have been culpable for their friend’s death. This fatal incident serves as a powerful symbolic event, evoking other deaths that remain unaccounted for in Japan, and elsewhere, both during and after the Cold War. I argue that Wildcat Dome calls forth a remembrance of the past in post-disaster Japan that directly engages with the question of complicity posed by the unmourned dead.

Keywords:

• Postwar
• memory
• multiracial orphans
• Cold War
• complicity
• post-3/11 literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All translations of Japanese works are mine unless otherwise noted.

2 A Japanese fishing boat, the Fifth Lucky Dragon, was exposed to nuclear fallout from the hydrogen bomb test conducted by the United States on the Bikini Atoll in the Marshal Islands on 1 March 1954. Its crew members suffered acute radiation syndrome. One crew member died about seven months later (Nakagawa 2004, 1–2).

3 See ‘An Essay on Earthquake Literature’ included in his Koisuru genpatsu (Nuclear Reactor in Love).

4 Other novels include Takahashi Genichirô’s A Nuclear Reactor in Love (2011) and Henmi Yô’s Blue Flowers (2013).

5 See also Konketsuji no sengoshi (Kamita 2018). Tsushima indicated that since she had written about a Japanese woman who worked as a messenger for the Japan Communist Party during the wartime and who, after the war, adopted two multiracial children in her 1998 novel, Mountain of Fire: Account of a Wild Monkey (Hi no yama yamazaruki), she had been planning to write more about this character in another work. In Wildcat Dome she let this character appear as Yae, Mitchi and Kazu’s mother (Karube and Tsushima 2013, 181).

6 It is worth noting here that in her 2011 novel, Ashibune tonda (Reed Boat, Flying), Tsushima wrote about large numbers of abortions forced upon women returning from China and Korea in the wake of war’s end for fear that venereal disease transmitted by a different race was considered a worse strain and therefore could become a national threat (Tsushima Yuko 2011, 424).

7 The neoliberal economic programs were designed and executed by the ‘Chicago Boys,’ young neoliberal technocrats educated in University of Chicago between 1955 and 1963 (Silva 1991, 385–410). For an artistically brilliant engagement with ‘a past that has never been present’ in the context of Chile, I recommend Patricio Guzman’s documentary films, Nostalgia for the Light (2011) and Pearl Button (2015).

8 McCormack characterizes Japan as a state that achieved formal independence in 1952, but has ever since remained intent upon adopting and pursuing policies most often to satisfy US interests (McCormack 2013, 82). In the post-Cold War era, rather than weakening over time, the structure of subordination was further solidified, most prominently under the regimes headed by the recent prime ministers Koizumi Jun’ichirô (in office between 2001–2006) and Abe Shinzō (in office between 2006–2007; 2012–present) with their tight embrace of US neoliberal economic and social policies recommended for Japan (McCormack 2007, 29–54). At this time it is the neo-nationalism, as exhibited by these prime ministers, not high economic growth of preceding decades, that serves to mask the client state status. This is particularly prominent in the latest cabinet of Prime Minister Abe, largely consisting of those who are members of nationalist organizations. Eighty percent of the members of the third Abe Cabinet belong to Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi), the nation’s largest neo-nationalist organization (Sugano 2016, 18–36); see also Matthew Penney, ‘The Abe Cabinet – An Ideological Breakdown’ Japan Focus, http://apjjf.org/-Matthew-Penney/4747/article.html

9 The promise of self-sufficiency in energy had a strong appeal to a resource-scarce Japan. As Morris F. Low and Hitoshi Yoshida maintain, this was an ideology that served to mask political aims ‘(1) the perceived need to possess a domestic nuclear power program to join the ranks of the “Great Powers”; (2) the desire to maintain a healthy U.S.–Japan relationship and to comply with the U.S. global strategy by maintaining U.S.-dependent nuclear development; and (3) in order to ensure the continued existence and growth of the Japanese government–industrial complex, it seemed necessary to invest more and more government funds in the nuclear enterprise’ (Low and Yoshida 1989, 42).

10 See ‘Jesus Condemns the Pharisees’ in the Gospel of Matthew.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yukiko Shigeto

Yukiko Shigeto is Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at Whitman College, WA, USA. Her publications include “Tenkô and Writing: the Case of Nakano Shigeharu” (positions: asia critique 2014), “In Search of History's Flesh Itself: Nakano Shigeharu and Literary Imagination” (Japan Forum 2016), and “Smashing the Great Buddha, Crossing Lines: Tsushima Yûko's Nara Report” (The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 2018). She may be contacted at [email protected]