Popular culture and historical memories of war in Asiasupporters both engaged with the authenticity and accuracy of the manga’s images and
narratives—in particular, the authenticity of the photographs and an ex-soldier’s testimony that
the author, Hiroshi Motomiya, used as his sources—and accused each other of distorting history.
Popular culture as a site of the East asian memory war
Also targeted by rightist protesters since the 1990s were several films and documentaries that
were labeled as “anti-Japanese.” In 1998, a right-wing activist slashed the cinema screen at a
showing of Nanking 1937 (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, 1995). The premiere of the Korean
documentary on the former “comfort women,” The Murmuring (1995), was interrupted by a
protester who sprayed the screen with a fire extinguisher. Another documentary made by a
Chinese director living in Japan, Yasukuni (2008), was pulled from cinemas following right-
wing threats and the matter was raised in the Diet, where questions were asked concerning
government funding for the film from the Agency of Cultural Affairs. In each case, the rightist–
revisionist intervention was heavily criticized by the news media, and liberal-left groups worked
to raise awareness and make the films more widely available to the public.
Worries over rightist threats have meant that none of the films about the Nanjing Massacre
made outside Japan around the 70th anniversary of the massacre were shown in Japanese com-
mercial cinemas. These include: Iris Chang: the Rape of Nanking (Canada, 2007); The Children of
Huang Shi (Australia, China, Germany, 2008); The City of Life and Death (China, 2009); John Rabe
(Germany, China, France, 2009); Nanking (United States, 2007); The Flowers of War (China, 2011).
These films failed to find distributors in Japan, even though some of them received international
awards and starred well-known Japanese actors. Again, citizen groups became active, organizing
independent screenings, symposia, panel discussions, and so forth in a bid to defend the “truth
of history” and pass it on to postwar generations.
In all of these cases we are witnessing the increasingly visible profile of popular culture and
media in the politics of memory. Revisionists and their critics are each committed and pas-
sionate about their respective views of history, and both feel it is important to either prevent or
promote specific popular cultural representations of the past. This increasing focus on popular
representations of history is partly due to the accessibility and visibility of popular culture itself,
and partly due to the relative decline of the state as the producer and gatekeeper of official insti-
tutional memory. Also relevant is the unique capacity of popular media to influence. Things like
manga and film are clearly affective media that make us feel as well as think. The combination of
graphic images and compelling narrative promote identification and emotional investment. The
affective power of popular media is highly relevant to the creation of “second-order” memories
for postwar generations.
Memory is much more than just factual knowledge of the past because it is affective and
personal; it is embodied knowledge. We remember through images and bodily impressions.
Memory entails a sense that the past event has somehow formed part of who one is and who
we are. In other words, memory—including the transmitted “second-order” memory—creates
identity via affect. What Aleida Assmann has called an “intimate alliance between affect, memory
and identity” (2002, 18) also applies to national collective memory, which creates a sharp divi-
sion between those who belong and those who do not.
For postwar generations far removed from imperialism and war, any “memories” they have
of these events would inevitably be mediated—through historical records, school textbooks, and
intergenerational communications, but also through imagination and artistic creations that have
personal, emotive, and immediate effects. Perhaps this is why popular culture and its secondary
and fictional images have come to matter so much today. As living memory is fast disappearing,