Rumi Sakamotoculturally mediated secondary images can create a form of belated memory via images and emo-
tive responses evoked in association with historical events by later generations. Images, stories,
and spectacles allow us to “relive” history through popular art forms. They not only redefine
the past but intertwine the experience of the past with the experience of the present by forcing
us to engage with the past via affect and visceral sensations. To a degree, the “history war” in
popular culture is a war over such images and the bodily effects they produce.
Inter-asian chain reactions
The role of popular culture in provoking nationalistic sentiment and controversy over historical
memory is not limited to Japan. Lu Chuan, director of the Chinese blockbuster epic film about
the Nanjing Massacre, City of Life and Death (2009), received death threats from angry Chinese
viewers who felt that the film was too sympathetic towards the Japanese. This was because along
with uncompromising depiction of rape, mass killing, and other atrocities, a central character in
the film is a Japanese soldier who, after reflecting on, regretting, and suffering from his actions,
eventually commits suicide. This humanization of a Japanese character led to the criticism that
City of Life and Death looked at the war “through Japanese eyes” and that it was a “Japanese
film shot by a Chinese director” (Bristow 2009). While Chuan maintained that he wanted to
depict Japanese people as “just human beings” and that his film is not anti-Japanese but anti-war
(Chuan 2013), the intended balancing act between showing the cruel reality of the massacre
and showing the humanity of a Japanese soldier seems to have been lost on patriotic viewers.
Just as in Japan, the representation of historical events through the lens of popular culture is
important in China. The same is likely to be the case in other Asian countries that suffered
Japanese aggression.
Can popular culture construct a shared memory of historical atrocities that incorporates
the stories of both victims and perpetrators, or a wider perspective that transcends them both?
City of Life and Death is an attempt to show that we human beings are all capable of horrific
acts as well as remorse. To be sure, Lu Chuan’s (2011) universalistic view (“I think everybody
is the Japanese soldier”) was unacceptable to some Chinese viewers. The film has not yet been
screened in Japanese commercial cinemas, although it has been viewed by many in China and
elsewhere. Above all, City of Life and Death is an endeavor to tell a story of victimization outside
the ever-tightening framework of the victim/victimizer dichotomy that currently defines the
East Asian conflict over history and memory. The manga exhibition at the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial Hall (“My August 15”) that displayed manga depicting Japanese experiences at
the end of the war also comes to mind here (Ishikawa 2010).
Popular culture media such as film and manga are flexible and can effectively present multiple
perspectives. They do not always grant their viewers/readers a stable vantage point; instead, they
often encourage identification with multiple positions by unfolding narratives through multiple
characters with distinctive voices and shifting visual layouts to reflect multivocality. They are thus
well equipped to capture “our” suffering and “their” suffering, the pain of others, the trauma of
perpetrators. They effectively illustrate both individual subjective worlds and larger historical/
structural perspectives without privileging one over the other. Since they can tolerate ambi-
guities and contradictions (it is possible, for example, to juxtapose words and images that tell
different stories from each other), they are capable of producing subtle, complex, and ambivalent
representations. All these could help promote the establishment of a shared sense of suffering,
reconciliation, and healing in East Asia.
Some factors seem to stand in the way of popular culture having this kind of impact. In addi-
tion to the obvious—popular culture’s pursuit of pleasure and commercial value guide it towards