The Dynamics of Shaping War Memory in the Museum

The Second Sino-Japanese War is one of the most painful chapters in history for both – the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Japan. The memory of this war still sparks serious disputes between the two countries and leads to severe conflicts in their bilateral relations. Considering the significant role of mass media in shaping historical memory, it is intriguing to observe how traumatic historical events are portrayed in the media of the countries involved. The purpose of this study is to identify the main discrepancies and features of memory representation related to the Second Sino-Japanese War in the mass media of China and Japan. After comparing the political and social roles of mass media in the two countries and analyzing media publications related to major war anniversaries the author concludes that the memory of the Second Sino-Japanese War is intertwined with a wide range of contemporary political issues, sometimes exacerbating those unrelated to the war. Under current circumstances, the representation of war’s memory in the media is a key factor contributing to mutual negative attitudes, and it is difficult to envision an improvement in the situation unless each of the countries takes its own steps towards reconciliation.

The article is devoted to the study of the role of legislation in the construction of the official historical narrative of the Great Patriotic War, as expressed in memorial legislation. Based on the analysis of the form, content and meaning of normative legal acts dedicated to the memory of the Great Patriotic War, it is concluded that the legitimization of historical memory is associated with the desire of the state to articulate frames of historical memory that explicate social ideas about key individuals, events and symbols that are crucial for ensuring national security and social identification, not only in in historical retrospect, but also in relation to modern social reality. The memory of the Great Patriotic War, consolidating society, is the most important means of social identification and acts as a value standard of citizens' behavior, which has shown its effectiveness in the past. By constructing frames of historical memory, memorial legislation ensures not only the preservation of the image of the Great Patriotic War and its interpretation in accordance with the official historical narrative, but also its transmission to citizens and representation in commemorative practices that explicate the axiological intentionality of Russian politics. This creates a sense of belonging between the state and civil society in the process of perpetuating the memory of the Great Patriotic War. The author emphasizes that memorial legislation is not only a legal, but also a legitimate means of preserving, broadcasting and representing the memory of the war. On the one hand, it explicates the conventional image of the Great Patriotic War, formed in the memory of Russian society. On the other hand, it is intended to broadcast the official historical narrative to the neophytes.

This article focuses on the story ‘Mabuigumi’ (‘Spirit Stuffing,’ 1998) by Medoruma Shun, a contemporary writer of Okinawan descent. The story explicitly depicts the history of the Battle of Okinawa and the people who were traumatized by the war. First, this article demonstrates that landscapes and living things evoke memories of the war and people, and they play a significant role in showing that people’s present lives remain threatened. Second, the article conjectures that an āman (a hermit crab) represents Okinawa, which was traumatized by the mainland, and shows that Uta (the protagonist) is burdened by the guilt of her own survival. In addition, it considers the love of a mother (Omito) and son (Kōtarō) for each other. Third, this article illustrates that the history of the mainland was decentralized through visual expressions of personal memories of war. The history of mainland Japan does not regard the fact that Japanese soldiers killed Okinawans during the Battle of Okinawa. History, as officially narrated by the Okinawans, changes its narrative content depending on the shifting relationship between Okinawa and the mainland. This work relativizes and decentralizes the official historical narratives of the mainland and Okinawa through repressed personal memories of the war.

This chapter offers an exploration of how Holocaust testimony is used within the Imperial War Museum Holocaust exhibition. It considers the role of the survivor within the context of a national museum, how personal testimony is used within a public exhibition space, and how testimony contributes towards the construction of memory in a British context. Exploring the translation of personal recollections of Holocaust survivors into a national museum in Britain, this study is situated at the juncture between history, lived memory, and active cultural memory. The historical narrative of the IWMHE shapes the story presented through the survivors’ memories, and this study aims to illuminate the process by which memories of another time and place become meaningful for the present, and in an entirely new (distant) place. Addressing the construction of Holocaust memory through survivor testimony within the IWMHE, this chapter explores the shaping of survivors’ words within the context of the museum and how survivor voices are used to support a specific version of the Holocaust story.

The paradigmatic case in which an almost permanent impasse exists in coming to terms with a difficult war past and ‘normalizing’ its international relations is that of Japan. Although successive Japanese governments have apologized over the last few decades, these have been countered by periodic episodes within Japan revolving largely around history textbooks, the remembrance of war dead and the quest by nationalists to restore national pride in the past. Regional relations were especially strained during the premiership of Koizumi Juni’chirô and his immediate successor, Abe Shinzô. They improved under Fukuda Yasuo, a moderate on war memory issues, and remained steady under Asô Tarô. Japan’s latest prime minister, Hatoyama Yukio, appears determined to address Japan’s war past more openly and critically than previous LDP figures, no doubt with an eye to improving Japan’s relations with its Asian neighbours. But whatever line he pursues, contestation over war memories will remain an issue. They are driven by deep divisions within Japan at the same time that political leaders seek a more prominent identity for Japan as a ‘normal’ actor in international affairs. This article analyses key aspects of the politics of Japan’s war memories, using insights from collective memory studies and constructivist IR theory. We suggest that the quest for ‘normality’ has generated a set of tensions and contradictions over the issue of war memories, both domestically and internationally, for which there is no resolution in sight.

Recent scholarship on collective memory and nationalism in Latin America argues that – in sharp contrast to Europe – war commemoration has been of little importance to the memory work of states in the region. The article challenges this claim. A comparative‐historical analysis of school textbooks and school ceremonies in twentieth‐century Mexico, Argentina and Peru reveals that the commemoration of major civil and international wars was central to official national narratives in these countries. The article further identifies important qualitative changes in war commemoration over time, especially with respect to how commemorative discourses portrayed agency and assigned responsibility for military victories and losses. These changes are situated within broader transformations of nationalism and new alignments in the politics of nationhood and memory.

Historical memory cannot be reduced exclusively to the 'memory' reconstructed by historical research. Rather, different levels of memory have to be considered when discussing the construction of collective memory. Japan offers a rich body of literary memories of the war written by Japanese soldiers or other individuals directly involved. Ōoka shōhei is one of the leading writers of Japanese literature concerning the war in the Pacific. The field of literature has without doubt contributed a great deal to the construction of Japanese memory of the Pacific War and 'deals with the past' much more emotionally than the official record shaped by historians or government officials and politicians. War literature in Japan seems to be quite advanced and rather critical about the events of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. one establishes a solid foundation for conducting further research on the literary treatment of war themes by Japanese writers. Keywords: Ōoka shōhei; Japanese soldiers; literary memories; pacific war; Sino-Japanese War; war literature

Museum of life

How does sectarianism intersect with war memories to subvert the political balance of power in postwar Lebanon? This article examines this complex dynamic along two levels. On one level, it demonstrates how war memory is deployed selectively from above by members of the political elite to sabotage the national war memory sanctioned officially and corresponding to a particular postwar confessional balance of power. At another level is the confessional or sectarian use of memory to resist this postwar political balance of power perceived as unjustly tipped against the subnational community. The argument advances in two steps. I first examine how war memory is invoked during crucial political battles that impact the postwar confessional balance of power. I take the debate around the promulgation of a new electoral law, and the 2018 parliamentary elections, in the context of the regional repercussions of the explosion of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the spillover effects of the Syrian war on Lebanon, as a case study of how different elites not only invoke war memories to contest or defend the postwar confessional balance of power but also to advance intra-sectarian political prerogatives. I then consider political memory as part of a complex and variegated confessional imaginary that survives at the private level in the form of resistance by substantial sectors of the Christian community to the postwar political balance of power and to the official national narrative of the war, one that refuses to revisit some of its most sordid moments, namely, its massacres. The article closes by underscoring the importance of reconciling dissonant memories of the war as a prerequisite for achieving genuine justice, peace, and reconciliation in postwar Lebanon.

Author(s): Guo, Weiting | Abstract: This article explores the life and images of Huang Bamei (1906–1982)—a female bandit, guerrilla leader, and women’s organization coordinator. During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Huang was involved in smuggling and trade with pro-Japanese forces. The Nationalist authorities recruited her troops and hid her past by portraying her as a wartime heroine and model housewife. Yet, in later times she participated in guerrilla warfare and was portrayed as a pirate queen and a Han traitor, and her roles and images changed dramatically with the wars. Drawing on government archives, newspapers, memoirs, and films, this article examines how Huang developed survival strategies during turbulent times and how competing regimes used her images discursively to promote various social and political agendas and stimulate Chinese patriotism and war commemoration in different historical periods. Through a close reading of the life history of a woman made legendary by the state and the media, the article shows how Huang’s changing roles and competing representations were deeply embedded in the wartime politics of modern China and Taiwan. The author argues that Huang’s guerrilla practices, as well as her involvement in banditry, formed an integral part of not only her survival strategies but also a range of options for achieving legitimization. Keywords: Huang Bamei, pirate queen, female bandit, heroine, Second Sino-Japanese War, Chinese Civil War, Taiwan

This article analyzes the representation of Nieh Hualing’s war memory as a refugee student during the Second Sino-Japanese War in her creative writings, especially Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, in intertextual conversation with her autobiography, Three Lives. By centering the intersectional experience of a female refugee student, the analysis enriches war narratives with a combination of diasporic and feminist perspectives on daily life distinguishing itself from male-dominated battlefields. While her war experience as a refugee student constitutes her “first life” in war-torn mainland China among her “three lives” in mainland China, Taiwan, and the United States, Nieh as a writer constantly negotiates with her Chineseness and inquires about her positionality in the world when moving across cultures. While Nieh as a writer embodies a “Chinese cosmopolitanism,” the female protagonist in Mulberry and Peach uses “hypersexuality” to reject patriarchal society and ethnocentric nationalism and go beyond Chinese cosmopolitanism.

Early-twentieth-century China was a country in turmoil, witnessing such events as the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Sino-Japanese War, and the Chinese Civil War. Of these events, the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), which resulted in the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Northern Shaanxi, has captured the attention and imagination of historians, film makers, and fiction writers.1 In particular, the Rape of Nanjing has become the center of focus in this war, not least because of the atrocities perpetrated by the invading Japanese army against the inhabitants of Nanjing, atrocities that have become the subject of historical scholarship and literary representation. When Chinese immigrants in America describe the Sino-Japanese War, they not only identify a major source of national trauma in twentieth-century Chinese history but also clarify that any sense of Chinese American belonging in the United States can never be free from American political involvement in the Asia-Pacific world.

Given the recent trend toward the instrumentalization of memory of the Great Patriotic War (GPW) in Russian federal memory politics, this article examines regional features of this trend by assessing the transformations that occurred in the monumental GPW commemoration in the post-Soviet Murmansk region. The case study analyzes the process of creating war memorials dedicated to the Battle for Zapoliar’e, a Murmansk regional narrative of the Great Patriotic War, by observing new war memorials and activities of mnemonic actors initiating these memorials. The article sheds light on the vigorous commemorative activism pushed by a set of regional mnemonic actors who, although remaining loyal to the official patriotic state narrative of the Battle, tend to emphasize other aspects, particularly heroic or tragic, depending on their agendas. While veteran organizations and sometimes regional authorities promote the state-centric and triumphalist vision of the Battle, local poiskoviki activists, on the contrary, appeal to its tragic side, pointing out the importance of the personal remembrance of the fallen. The article concludes that, although the centralization and unification trends in Russian memory politics noticeably affect the regional domain, they are unlikely to fully explain the regional dynamics of developing the monumental media of war memory since such dynamics are set primarily by grassroots activists.

“MEMORY WARS” IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE: SERGEI LEBEDEV’S WORKS
 Sergei Lebedev’s tetralogy – Oblivion (2010), The Year of the Comet (2014), People of August (2015), and The Goose Fritz (2018) – is considered a multigenerational novel. This genre of literature can be seen as a medium for collective memory, offering an avenue for reinterpreting the experiences of past generations as an alternative to official historical narratives (referred to as “first memory”). The primary focus of this article centers on Lebedev’s oeuvre in the context of the ongoing “memory wars” within Russian culture. Lebedev’s works are characterized by an intensified historical consciousness that revolves around the key events of the 20th century. However, the objective is not an inquiry into historical truth sensu stricto, but rather an exploration of post-trauma, which is Russians’ unwanted and rejected heritage. Consequently, the past becomes a catalyst for contemplating the current condition of Russian society. Lebedev’s work encourages deeper reflection on the causes of the “memory wars” and the consequences of divisions between individual and collective memory.

The retrieval or reactivation of a memory places it into a labile state, requiring a process of reconsolidation to restabilize it. This retrieval-induced plasticity is a potential mechanism for the modification of the existing memory. Following previous data supportive of a functional role for memory reconsolidation in the modification of memory strength, here I show that hippocampal memory reconsolidation also supports the updating of contextual memory content. Using a procedure that separates the learning of pure context from footshock-motivated contextual fear learning, I demonstrate doubly dissociable hippocampal mechanisms of initial context learning and subsequent updating of the neutral contextual representation to incorporate the footshock. Contextual memory consolidation was dependent upon BDNF expression in the dorsal hippocampus, whereas the footshock modification of the contextual representation required the expression of Zif268. These mechanisms match those previously shown to be selectively involved in hippocampal memory consolidation and reconsolidation, respectively. Moreover, memory reactivation is a necessary step in modifying memory content, as inhibition of hippocampal synaptic protein degradation also prevented the footshock-mediated memory modification. Finally, dorsal hippocampal knockdown of Zif268 impaired the reconsolidation of the pure contextual memory only under conditions of weak context memory training, as well as failing to disrupt contextual freezing when a strong contextual fear memory is reactivated by further conditioning. Therefore, an adaptive function of the reactivation and reconsolidation process is to enable the updating of memory content.