Project Design: Mapping Chinese Sorrows of War
The focus of my research in the fall of 2007 would be the contending and the relatively obscure Chinese narratives from the Asia Pacific War, 1937-1945. The research would parallel the study I completed in spring 2006 in Tokyo, “Mapping the Sorrows of War,” which builds on the universal appeal of sorrows as an approach to healing the wounds of war. In that study I focused on Japanese visual narratives (four artists), which along with an otherwise impressive academic and journalistic Japanese literature on war responsibility, have also been obscured by the nationalistic narratives implicit in Japanese textbook publishing and made more explicit recently in Japanese politics. The confusion and lack of awareness among Japanese young people—and even more so among American young people—about the unhealed wounds of war and their impact on international relations was confirmed in my classroom teaching in Tokyo. The less well known Japanese narratives in my study recognize the Chinese sorrows and sufferings from the war. They stand out in striking contrast to the more familiar master narratives of Japanese peace museums which until recently have been largely narratives of victimization, focused on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I would like to know if there are significant Chinese narratives that qualify and counter the familiar theme of victimization, which on the face of it makes sense when one considers the massive suffering represented by the fourteen million military and civilian Chinese deaths from the war—four possibly five times the number of Japanese deaths. In this narrative the Nanjing Massacre is both metaphor and reality. I would also like to know if there are Chinese narratives that are less triumphalist in nature—heroic and self-glorifying—and capable of recognizing the suffering and sorrow of all people caught up in the war. More specifically my hope is to find narratives that recognize the sorrows—the anguish, the ambivalence, and the sufferings—of the millions of Japanese soldiers fighting in the war and civilians working for the Japanese occupation in China. More challenging, given the nature of war stories in all cultures, is to find narratives that describe the sorrows and struggles of the millions of Chinese who experienced the war firsthand and who after the war risked being labeled collaborators, if only in their own minds.
How well the proposed study succeeds will depend on finding a balance, both in concept and resources, between the growing openness in China today on sensitive issues such as war memory and the continuing role that political correctness plays in investigative research on the memories of war. My previous work on the human dimensions of the Korean War which began at the Hopkins Nanjing Center in 1991 encourages me to think that it will be possible to find and articulate a complexity of Chinese voices that are broadly empathetic and can contribute, however small the effect, to healing the wounds of the Asia Pacific war.
Because of its ability to provoke a rich array of emotions, the concept of sorrows, used as a heuristic device, offers imaginative ways to think about and remember war. Its appeal is broad and universal. Sorrows are the pain and grief that all human beings feel over the loss of their sons, husbands, children and other loved ones—millions of them—on all sides of the war, military and civilian. It is an emotion that captures the imagination even of those who are removed by generations from the experience of war itself. Sorrows is the many knots that get tied up in the hearts of soldiers. Sorrows puts a different face on the courage, bravery, and sacrifice for which they are universally admired. Sorrows is the story of all who are affected by war as it unfolds in its many horrors, in its unexpected consequences, in the fighting stories that fail to resolve, and in the wounds that refuse to heal. The feelings of sorrow are also the more subtle emotions of anxiety, regrets, misplaced hopes, and wrestling down the unanswerable questions of war. The range of sorrows, conceived more as spaces within a circle than as points on a spectrum, also include humor, beauty, and even hope. As musical narrative, for example, I find inspiration again and again in the Italian Tremo e T’amo (in English, I tremble and I Love You) as performed by Andrea Bocelli. It is as breath-takingly beautiful as it is unimaginably sorrowful. As a lens to understanding the human dimensions of war, sorrows inspires a particular kind of imagination that transcends the self-pity (victimization) or the self-glory (triumphalism) that are the familiar hallmarks of Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and American narratives of the war. As an approach to the study of war, sorrows is a line thrown to the other side, nudging propaganda and national myths aside and planting seeds of empathy for the humanity of the enemy who is as human as we are. It offers an alternative to the political wrangling and diplomatic abstractions that have come to dominate war narratives throughout the Asia Pacific region.
One can hardly overstate the importance of the experience of war in modern Chinese history and China’s relations with the outside world. The impact of the conflicting and unresolved narratives of the Asia Pacific War has become so large and intractable that all high level diplomatic contacts between China and Japan had been put on hold for five years, from 2001 to 2006. The impressive increases in trade and the forces of globalization can mask these unresolved conflicts, and yet the fighting stories and the bitterness of war have long shelf lives. If not the elephant in the room, they are the snake, even caged, whose presence hovers over the dialogue not only among East Asian countries but also between the people of East Asia and the United States.
Among the many questions on war memory that inform the vast literatures of military, diplomatic, and cross-cultural histories, there are two that stand out in framing the proposed study. The first is the role in the post war period of civil society and non governmental organizations in facilitating reconciliation. One frequently encounters the notion that the differences between the striking lack of reconciliation among the countries in the Pacific theater of the war and the relative success of countries in the European theater can be explained by differences in civil society and in the number and effectiveness of non-government organizations whose activities serve to heal the wounds of war. As the key variable in explaining differences between Germany’s relative success and Japan’s relative failure in this regard, the role of NGOs and civil society makes sense because both were the aggressors and then the defeated at the end of the war. Less studied is comparisons and parallels between the clear victims during the war who ended up as victors on the Allied side. Polish, Czech, French, and even Israeli war narratives, including the writing of textbooks, have been created in collaboration and at the initiative of German writers. In these narratives one finds a kind of common denominator that transcends the otherwise widely different and contending stories between victims and victimizers. This shared narrative builds on the hundreds of grassroots programs in Europe that have flourished among former enemies since the end of the war, some preceding and others following government initiative.
Clearly civil society, as defined in Western thought, is relatively undeveloped in both Japan and China. Nor are there as many NGOs in Japan and China whose purposes include reading across the battle lines of war and the boundaries of politics and culture in the spirit reconciliation, whether as victim or victimizer. One might expect to see clearer indications of Western-style civil society in Japan and also more active NGOs involved in the process of reconciliation, given the far-reaching changes in Japanese politics and society carried out under the American occupation. Indeed over the years one finds acts of reconciliation among the activities of the Japan Socialist Party and in the narratives of Japanese veterans and prisoners of war from the China theater and more recently of well known Japanese manga artists who experienced the war as children primarily in Manchuria. I have written about the latter two groups. But these narratives are relatively unknown and have become obscured more recently by revivalist nationalism in Japan.
Given the dramatic changes in politics and China’s opening widely to the outside, which explain much of the Chinese economic miracle over the past quarter century, one might expect to see a greater degree of Western-style civil society and the emergence of more grassroots movements and NGO activity engaged in promoting cross-cultural understanding and by extension healing the wounds of war. Indeed, open exchange, thanks in part to the internet, now takes place in China in ways unimagined just a decade or two before. In this exciting development, the Hopkins Nanjing Center serves as one of the more inspiring examples. In 2006 14,000 Chinese students were studying in Japan, while Chinese tourism to Japan increases several fold each year. Notwithstanding its quasi NGO identity the Chinese Association for Promoting Friendship with Foreign Countries acknowledges the small acts of forgiveness and humanity as seen in the quick release by the Nationalist government of Japanese prisoners of war (in stark contrast to the Soviet treatment of Japanese POWs) and in the adoption by Chinese families (including that of General Nie Rongzhen) of Japanese orphans after the war and supporting, years later, the wishes of some to return and live out their last years and die in Japan. Even within the constraints of political correctness and the tides of anti-Japanese sentiment in recent years, these buds of civil society that nourish the wish for reconciliation continue to grow. My task will be to find them and link them to my research.
Useful as civil society can be in explaining differing levels of war reconciliation activity, it is important to avoid the presumption that the exercise of Western style civil society is the necessary precondition to war reconciliation. Reconciliation also depends on the political will of leaders in both government and NGOs. Just as we speak of capitalism and democracy with Chinese characteristics, those of us who aspire to even-handedness must do the same with civil society. As much as anywhere in the world, civil society flourishes in American society. And yet in healing the wounds of America’s wars in the 20th century American popular and master narratives, with the exception of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, are conspicuous for their lack of curiosity about, not to mention empathy for, the Asian sorrows and sufferings from the Asia Pacific War.
A second issue framing the study is the way changing politics and diplomacies affect the narratives of war, described by Carol Gluck as the chrono-politics of memory. All narratives, official, popular, and individual, are created and read in political contexts which change over time and which seems to be particularly true in the case of Japan and China. Well known is the censoring by the American occupation immediately after the war of candid, even confessional, war narratives in Japanese newspapers, publications, and films. The relative openness of the 50s, following the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, was blunted in the 1960s by the crisis over renegotiating the U.S. Japan Security Treaty in 1959. The continued reaffirmation of that treaty and the cold war within which it was conceived do much to explain Japan’s continued orientation to the United States, militarily and diplomatically, but culturally as well. It is an orientation that has come at the expense of facing China politically and culturally. The effect on Japanese memories of the war, notwithstanding in recent years the vast increases in Japanese investments and trade with China, has been to create a kind of historical amnesia about the war. The patterns of denial of war responsibility and revitalized nationalism, came to a head in 2001 with Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s repeated and highly controversial visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, surely a major, though not only, explanation for the growth of anti-Japanese feeling in China. The recent publication of the comprehensive and in some ways unprecedented study, Who Was Responsible (now available in English translation), by the conservative Yomiuri Shimbun, owned by the equally conservative Watanabe Tsuneo, marks another turning point in the chrono-politics of Japanese memories of the war. The quick and positive Chinese response to Koizumi’s resignation and to Watanabe’s publication strengthens the prospects for the feasibility of the proposed study.
No less important is an appreciation for the chrono-politics of Chinese narratives of the war and the prospects of finding narratives that differ in tone and substance from official party lines. Notwithstanding the mono-thematic and persistent nature of angry and furious anti-Japanese themes in Chinese master narratives of the war, it must be remembered that the restoration of Sino-Japanese diplomatic relations occurred in 1972 at the peak of the Cultural Revolution and was followed by massive Japanese loans to China. In addition to its strictly economic significance, this aid may be seen as symbolic gestures of war compensation, although such was never requested by Mao Zedong or Zhou Enlai, nor was it phrased as such by Japanese leaders. The shifts in tone and substance of Beijing’s policies and relations over Taiwan also hover over Chinese narratives of the war. Since the mid 1990s, after decades of discrediting the legitimacy of the Nationalist Party on all fronts, Chinese museums and textbooks now recognize, as peaceful gestures to balance the on-going military threat to liberate Taiwan, the sacrifice of the Nationalist armies in fighting Japan. Strident anti-Japanese feelings in China over the years have been tempered, furthermore, by the fact, and tacit recognition, that the years of suffering and struggle against Japanese soldiers in fighting the war did much to mobilize patriotic support for the Communist movement. The flexibility, if not simply the mercurial nature, of the chrono-politics of Chinese memory, can also be seen in the way Chinese narratives of the Korean War have changed in gradually abandoning in the 1990s their prominence in patriotic stories. Before then most Chinese publications assigned the name Oppose America Aid Korea War (KangMei yuanChao), but now it is often referred to simply as the Korean War. The wider context has been growing trade with the United States, the awkwardness of the long-standing alliance with North Korea, and China’s appreciation for the role that South Korea could play not only economically but also strategically in offsetting the reconfirmed U.S. Japan Security Treaty, in whose language China has now reappeared as a “threat.” My hope is that these political shifts in the post cold war era may offer new opportunities to find more nuanced, and till now relatively obscure, Chinese narratives that soften the familiar stridence of victimization and that recognize, however small the impact, the sorrows and human dimensions of Japanese experiences in the war.
One place to start my research is inviting Chinese artists, writers, veterans, scholars, and yes students, in structured venues, to respond to the graphic on deaths for the whole of World War II which I have used to good effect with Japanese colleagues and is attached at the end of the statement. Even a quick glance at the widely different numbers of deaths graphically displayed, both military and civilian, triggers surprising and thoughtful responses on the sorrows of war. Following the success of using this graphic in Japan, my hope would be to find Chinese artists who experienced the war firsthand, either as soldiers or civilians, and whose works would suggest some appreciation for the sorrows of Japanese soldiers and their families living, fighting, and surrendering in China. Because of Manchuria’s pivotal location for the experiences of both Japanese and Chinese throughout the war, including the capture of hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers before their exile into Siberia and the repatriation of millions of Japanese civilians back to Japan, I would like to interview Chinese artists or writers either in Changchun or Shenyang. One possible lead might be through Northeastern University, Dongbei daxue, which I recall was an important place for recruiting students at the Center. Another lead is to invite two of the Japanese figures with whom I worked in Tokyo to introduce me to their colleagues in the Northeast. One of them is the popular manga writer, Morita Kenji, and the other is the historian of Japanese manga, Ishiko Jun, both of whom were born and raised in Shenyang and are co-editors of published manga reflections on the war that are at once humorous and empathic towards China. Both Morita and Ishiko visited Shenyang last June as guests of Chinese manga artists who know of them through their exhibits and publications.
Although my focus will be Chinese visual narratives of the war, I will also be interested in seeing how useful it will be to draw comparisons if not parallels between Chinese museums in Nanjing and the peace museums in Japan, an analysis of which is included in my study of Japanese sorrows of war. My plan is to complete research sufficient to write and publish a major article in English that might be of interest to colleagues in Japan and to colleagues I hope to find in China. These forays into Japanese and Chinese narratives on the sorrows of war serve as the backdrop for my relentless hammering away on the crying need for an American awareness and understanding of Asian perspectives in this otherwise “good war.”
My research should converge nicely with the mission and program of the Hoopkins Nanjing Center. I notice that the Center offers three courses in related areas—China U.S. Relations, Negotiations and Conflict Resolution, and Topics in International Politics. Although I have not approached him yet I would welcome the chance to work with Ren Donglai with whom I co-taught a seminar on Chinese-American relations in spring 1991 and who patiently served as my tutor in Chinese as I was doing research on Chinese perspectives in the Korean War. I am able to get by in general conversation and to read slowly in Chinese, and I welcome the chance to immerse myself in and improve my use of Chinese yet this spring and while in Nanjing. Still, my skills are not sufficient to rely on myself alone for translation and serious interview research. If awarded the grant I will approach Professor Ren to seek his guidance, once again. If there were other Chinese faculty or students at the Center interested in my research, I would welcome their help.
One very encouraging development is securing the help of Shao Jinlin, Center librarian. Now nearly seventeen years ago she helped me locate resources, including the vast archives of the Jiangsu Provincial Library where she had previously worked, for my study then on Chinese perspectives on the Korean War. More recently I have contacted her by email and by phone and told her of my plans for the semester at HNC. Once again she has graciously agreed to help me in locating materials and opening doors for interview research. The Center’s library is of course a most friendly place for background research, but other materials will also be useful, such as catalogues of art exhibitions, museum catalogues, published memoirs and possibly oral histories. Although the narratives I am interested in finding may be nationwide in scope, it would be sufficient to locate primarily in Nanjing and then plan on a visit to Shenyang and/or Changchun.
I have already been granted a sabbatical leave from the University of Montana for fall semester with salary support. But with two children in college, I must also request support for living expenses, travel to, from and within China, and general research, as is indicated in the description for Scholars in Residence at the Institute for International Research. From this distance I hesitate to put a dollar figure on the amount requested but would be happy to work with the committee in arriving at an appropriate figure.
Lily Gardner Feldman, “Germany’s External Reconciliation as a Defining Feature of Foreign Policy: Lessons for Japan?,” American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, April 27, 2006. Andrew Horvat and Gebhard Hielscher, eds., Sharing the Burden of the Past: Legacies of War in Europe, America, and Asia, The Asia Foundation, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Tokyo, 2003.
