Dialogues with Shadows: Reflections on Identity, History and Travel

Abstract

After the end of my solo journey in Southeast Asia, I felt shadows from the trip were following me. It took me some time before I began reflecting on the shadows. My reflections attempt to merge the academic and the personal, and bring my motivation and observations into scrutiny. This reflective exercise begins with my motivation for the journey, and moves to a few individuals and their personal life histories. The reflections made me aware of the naivety and shortcomings in my approach to identity, and the need for continuing dialogues with the shadows.

Keywords:

• historical memory
• identity
• travel
• Southeast Asia

Acknowledgements

Part of the research towards this reflection was conducted at VALDES (Department of Value and Decision Science), Graduate School of Decision Science and Technology at Tokyo Institute of Technology, in May to June, 2012. I am indebted to VALDES for awarding me a visiting researcher fellowship. However, all the shortcomings in the article are my own.

Notes

[1] The Meiji period lasted from 1868–1912. It was this period in which Japan set about becoming an imperial nation. The works by Goto-Jones and Gordon are a few of the most accessible accounts of this period.

[2] The names of individuals I met during my travel have been altered.

[3] The postfix ‘san’ in Japanese shows respect to the addressee, similar to, but not identical to ‘Mr.’ and ‘Ms.’ in English and Hindi ‘ji’.

[4] The very appellation of the railway seems more than symbolic. In Japanese, the railway is known as the ‘Thai-Burma Railway’. This is more euphemistic than the more common Australian (or English) version, which is the ‘Death Railway’. The difference is indicative of the very different perceptions of the railway and its history.

[5] Historians Michiko Nakahara and E. Bruce Reynolds separately note that the Japanese used over 60,000 Allied POWs and 200,000 Asian labourers under exacting conditions. The construction of the 415-kilometre railway was completed in October 1943, just over a year after the constructions began. Nearly 12,000 POWs and around 24,000 out of 73,000 Malay labourers died during the construction (Nakahara 251 and 262; Reynolds 329).

[6] The websites by the Department of Veterans' Affairs are well-researched with bibliographical data. The authors rely on the works by Gavan McCormack ‘Apportioning the Blame: Australian Trials for Railway Crimes’ and Yi Hak Nae ‘The Man Between: A Korean Guard Looks Back’, in Hank Nelson and Gavin McCormack (eds.), The Burma–Thailand Railway: Memory and History (St Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 1993), 85–119 and 120–126, respectively.