Ghostly Remains and Converging Memories: Yūshūkan and the Australian War Memorial Exhibit the Pacific War

Abstract

Focusing on the Yūshūkan museum in Tokyo, and the Australian War Memorial Museum in Canberra, this article engages how pain and sacrifice in the Pacific War are represented through the characters of kamikaze and prisoners of war respectively. Despite the inimical historical, political and moral orientations, these institutions’ presentations of memory of war display some interesting overlaps. After establishing that historical, cultural and political contexts are significant in assessing how and why pain and sacrifice in the war are engaged by each institution, I examine the Japanese midget submarine attack on Sydney in 1942, which effectively bridges both institutions. By assessing the emotive nature of the exhibitions it becomes apparent that while the framing of this single act of violence is culturally esoteric, themes of bravery, heroism, loyalty and sacrifice cross cultures.

Keywords:

• memory
• war
• museums
• Japan
• Australia
• kamikaze
• POWs
• Yūshūkan
• Australian War Memorial

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Cairns Institute at James Cook University for its support. I would also like to thank the readers for their very helpful comments and questions, and Rumi Sakamoto for her always intelligent suggestions on drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Okazaki Hisohiko, cited in Kingston (2007, p. 302).

2. In 1945 SCAP, the Allies’ governmental body in Occupied Japan, decreed that the Japanese nation should look at its imperial past critically, and that the Shinto religion should be disaggregated from the state and become a private institution. The imperial past was not to be glorified (SCAPIN 448, 1945/15/12, CIE R2).

3. In the Okinawa Heiwa Kinenkan in Okinawa, the Heiwa no ishiji lists every person known to have died in the Battle of Okinawa, regardless of nationality, so it can be argued that they are memorialised here in this way too.

4. The Anzac tradition is based on the dramatic failure of the Australia-New Zealand Armed Corps at Gallipoli in Turkey in April 1915, when the combined Commonwealth and French forces were sent to fight a futile battle against Turks to take Istanbul. Many Australians died in this action, and it is perceived as the “birth of the nation” or the “nation’s coming of age” by historians such as Inglis (1998) and Serle (1965). Based on the mythology that revolved around the actions of Australians on the battlefield, the nation embraced the following values as symbolic of the Anzac spirit: mateship, resourcefulness, candour, devotion, curiosity and independence. These are still regarded as foundational in terms of building the Australian character. Recent writing by Lake and Reynolds (2010) has challenged the legitimacy of the use of such symbolism.

5. See in particular Geoffrey White’s piece on emotional memory and national monuments in the US for an insightful account of the role of emotions in constructing national memories of war (2000).

6. This is a significant omission found in most museums of war globally, but assessment of this issue lies beyond the scope of this paper. Hirsch has discussed in her well-cited paper the concept of “postmemory”, and in this has engaged the idea of how “others’ pain” is presented in sites of postmemory (Hirsch, 2008).

7. See Breen’s account of the Yasukuni controversy and how Yūshūkan fits within this context (2008). See also Deans (2007, p. 269), Kingston (2007), Okuyama (2009), Shibuichi (2005) and Ryu (2007).

8. Breen (2008). See also the afterword in Record in Pictures of Yūshūkan, which acknowledges Breen as the supervisor of the project.

9. Reported to the author in an interview with “M”-san, a curator at Yūshūkan, Tokyo, Japan, March 2013.

10. That the “NZ” has been largely removed from the production of the legend is noteworthy – where are the New Zealanders? – but irrelevant in this celebration of Australian-ness.

11. These romantic, highly aestheticised terms are presented as evocative of the brief and beautiful manner of the deaths of the pilots.

12. Of the more than 4,000 sorties from Kagoshima and Okinawa, fewer than 50 per cent of the aircraft actually made it to the battlefront and a total of fewer than 30 per cent were able to actually complete their missions, according to Kawatoko, an archivist of kamikaze history and employee of the Chiran Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots. See Kawatoko (2012).

13. The other is the Chiran Kamikaze Museum in Kagoshima Prefecture, which has a very similar orientation to that of Yūshūkan, and employs a similar system of display, though more high tech, with audiovisual files available for some of the pilots’ biographies.

14. It is important to note that although I am using these two specific museums as comparisons, in both Australia and Japan there are multiple and competing views of both nations’ involvement in the Pacific War.

15. The use of the word “ghost” in this essay is as metaphor, rather than being either literal or culturally prescribed.

16. Christina Twomey has deconstructed the image of the POW in a number of useful frameworks of reference. Among the readings she employs is the perception that the half-naked emaciated POWs reference the body of Christ (2007).

17. For detailed writing on the Sandakan Death March, see Ham (2012) and Wall (1988), for example.

18. The Sandakan Death March was initiated as a response by the Japanese to the threat of the Allied forces’ inevitable advance, and in the resulting reassessment of the logistics of the prison camps it was decided that the prisoners would be removed from the camps and marched “to death”.

19. AWM signage, recorded November 2011.

20. Japan, meanwhile, remained the categorical “other” for Australians. Its soldiers were both sub and super-human; they were devious, cruel, cunning, capable, arrogant and merciless. And Japan was the “anti-Australia” in terms of culture, race, language, military tactics, ethics and social practices. But arguably it was due to the racism of Australians of the time that many saw the “Asian-ness” of Japan as intensely threatening, even intimidating. As Sobocinska (2010) argues persuasively, many Australians feared that the established colonial (and racial) world order was overturned by the Japanese invasion of Asia, and the captured Australians and other Europeans put on public display by this usurping enemy symbolised the establishment of a post-colonial world where Whites were not necessarily in control.

21. C.E.W. Bean, Australia’s preeminent commentator on Australians at war, coined these terms when reporting on Australians in World War I.

22. See, for example, Rivett’s Behind Bamboo (1946), which has been reprinted many times.

23. Sir Edward (Weary) Dunlop was a medical doctor taken captive in the early stages of the war in Southeast Asia. His autobiography – The War Diaries of Weary Dunlop – was a bestseller when it was released in 1986, and no doubt contributed to raising the profile of POWs in the Australian consciousness. Other well-known authors published on similar topics: McCormack and Nelson for example (1993).

24. See, for example, Nelson (2001) and Beaumont (1988).

25. In the Yūshūkan there are two references to Russians capturing and imprisoning Japanese soldiers, but no other mention of POWs.

26. In the AWM there is an exhibit titled “Sydney Under Attack”, which is discussed in a later section of this paper.

27. This statue was sponsored by the influential Izoku-kai (The Bereaved Families’ Association).

28. Yūshūkan signage, noted March 2012.

29. See, for example, Dunlop’s (1986) account and Beaumont’s (1988) account for two of the better-known and more authoritative accounts of Australian prisoners of war.

30. That is, it was not until the end of the war when many in the defeated Japanese expedition were imprisoned in Russia.

31. The Cowra breakout in August 1944 is a vivid manifestation of how the internalised tensions of Japanese prisoners – mostly driven by shame because they had survived while their comrades had died – led to the biggest attempted prison break in Australian history. Around 20 per cent of those 234 Japanese prisoners who died that night committed suicide. See, in particular, Carr-Gregg (1978, p. 26, pp. 56–79) and Gordon (1994) for compelling accounts of the reasons for the attempted escape.

32. In no museum in Japan, including the recently re-opened Rekihaku (National Museum of Japan) and the Shōkeikan (Museum of Wounded Soldiers) are Japanese POWs recognised. Rekihaku is shorthand for Kokuritsu Rekishi Hakubutsukan, the National Museum of Japanese History, a government-sponsored institution that was opened in 1983, focusing on the history of everyday life in Japan. It became the National Museum of Japanese History and the National Institute for the Humanities, Inter-University Research Institute Corporation in 2004.

33. At Yūshūkan and at the Chiran Kamikaze Museum are displayed a number of letters written by the families of fallen kamikaze pilots.

34. In a response to the absence of those whose voices are often silenced in the public arena, the Shōkeikan, funded by the Japanese state as part of a special project to acknowledge the role of those who were wounded or became ill in war, opened in 2007. Using dioramas, film and audio recordings it presents stories of those who returned crippled, injured or ill from war to a society that largely shunned them.

35. “Eirei” literally means “souls of the heroes”, and there is little sense that these souls are literal “ghosts” of the dead. Rather, they are powerful affective monuments to the sacrifices made by imperial service-people.

36. Interview with Yūshūkan curator, March 2013. Of course such a response is to be expected from the curators of this museum. The curator went to great lengths to explain that the museum was “not interested in approaching controversial topics” (!). This attitude perhaps was emblematic of the public face of Yūshūkan in 2013 – that is, attempting to become more “mainstream”.

37. The AWM also exhibits two of the photographs of kamikaze aircraft attacking Allied naval ships displayed at Yūshūkan. The signage at the AWM expresses the fear generated by the suicide attacks.

38. Heterotopia is used here to denote the Foucauldian reading; that they are institutions with many discursive, political and cultural boundaries and internal rules, and that they produce their own contexts in which to locate items/narratives.

39. In contrast to these similar representations of Japanese attacks on Australian sovereign territory is the depiction of the Pearl Harbor attack, which is memorialised in the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument at Pearl Harbor. The approach here, which attempts to be “even-handed” in its presentation of the reasons that Japan attacked the United States, has little interest in the Japanese individuals who flew in the raid.

40. Following this raid, the Japanese submarine fleet began a campaign to disrupt Australian merchant shipping off the east coast. The combined efforts of the fleet saw around 30 ships attacked, of which half were sunk, with the loss of more than 600 Allied merchant seamen. See Noble (2005).

41. The reconstructed submarine was taken on a public tour around the southeastern coastal cities of Australia to reinforce the immediacy of the Japanese threat, to encourage citizens to enlist in military, government and voluntary organisations, and to raise funds for a naval charity. Parts from the submarine were sold to the public to raise funds (see photographic displays AWM-P0045.002, P0045.003 and P0045.002 for images of the submarine on tour in Melbourne in November 1942).

42. Signage on the display.

43. The speech is presented in its entirety within the display, and was in fact a transcript of a radio interview with Muirhead-Gould who was attempting to justify the awarding of full military honours to the Japanese seamen.

44. This is in stark contrast to other museums that focus on the Pacific War in Japan, such as the Hiroshima Peace Museum, which emphasises the need for peace, and “our” pain, the Okinawa Peace Park and Museum, which also emphasises Okinawans’ pain, while calling for world peace, and the Showakan in Tokyo, which emphasises the difficulties of life for Japanese living through war, with a powerful subtext of “peace” permeating the institution.

45. While the AWM exhibits memorabilia and stories from all wars Australians were involved in, the Japan exhibit is one of the more significant.

46. See footnote 32 for more information on Rekihaku.