Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. viii, 331 pp. (B&W photos.) US$58.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5151-4.
This edited volume seeks to provide a variety of perspectives on how the wars that took place in East Asia between the 1930s and 1950s have been represented in films and other screen technologies across East Asia. It contains an introduction and eleven empirical case studies. This review first briefly summarizes the individual chapters and then discusses the volume’s contributions.
The introduction contextualizes and summarizes the individual chapters that then follow. In chapter 1, Yingjin Zhang shows that except for a short interlude of reflexive anti-war films from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, emphasis on heroism, nationalism, and patriotism has largely dominated in Chinese war films. Some of the anti-war films were banned in China, apparently due to a fear that they would undermine the dominant, state-sanctioned heroic narratives. Chapter 2 by Wen-chi Lin shows that a similar emphasis on patriotism and national heroism was prominent in Taiwanese films on the war against Japan from the 1950s to the 1970s.
During the first decades following the Korean War, Hyangjin Lee argues in chapter 3, the South Korean authoritarian government exercised censorship of films dealing with the war and national division to make sure they contained no social criticism, such as portrayals of the plight of the working class that might inspire identification with North Korea. While democratization made possible such previously censored criticism, in more recent films emotional nationalism that treats the Korean nation as a family has been common.
Chapters 4 and 5, which both focus on Japan—the former on ordinary films and the latter on anime and manga, adopt critical perspectives that reveal the subtle biases of even the more progressive Japanese narratives about the Asia-Pacific War.
According to Robert Toplin (chapter 6), wartime Hollywood productions depicted Japanese stereotypically as aggressive and treacherous, but have subsequently started portraying them more positively. Chinese, by contrast, were generally represented positively during the war, but negatively during the Cold War.
Exploring Chinese-language cinema portrayals of so-called comfort women through an analysis of the film Bamboo House of Dolls (1973) and the television miniseries Imperial Comfort Women (1995), Lily Wong in chapter 7 reveals that these productions are concerned not only with highlighting the trauma of the victimized women, but also with pleasing viewers’ sexual desires.
While most Chinese films and television series on the Nanjing massacre have taken a realistic approach, in chapter 8 Michael Berry focuses on the television series Scarlet Rose (2007), which breaks with realistic convention as it reimagines the atrocity as a story about five female vigilantes who avenge the victims in the massacre, thereby reversing the roles and reclaiming Chinese agency.
In one of the volume’s strongest chapters, Aaron Gerow demonstrates that rather than being unabashedly nationalistic, recent Japanese war films navigate nervously between different domestic positions on the controversial topic of war memory. These films avoid the postwar period’s inequalities and controversies to “establish the illusion of a more unified present” (198). They do this through implicit comparison with wartime Japan: “by evading the postwar and dwelling in the military past, such films create a more perfect image of the postwar” (202). This perceptive analysis is interesting considering how Japanese prime ministers and other political actors have discursively constructed postwar Japan’s identity as peaceful, in contrast to wartime Japan, and demanded that others recognize this identity (Karl Gustafsson, “Identity and recognition: Remembering and forgetting the post-war in Sino-Japanese relations,” The Pacific Review 28, no. 1 (2015): 117–138).
Adopting a broader perspective than the other contributions, chapter 10 by Chiho Sawada critically addresses the proposition that pop culture might enable more amicable Japan-South Korea relations. It discusses two Korean-Japanese co-productions, the television series Friends and the film 2009 Lost Memories. Though these commercial productions were meant to promote bilateral understanding, Sawada argues that they largely failed in that effort due to their mixed messages—Friends contains ethnic stereotypes, while 2009 Lost Memories gradually becomes a nationalistic celebration of “Greater Korea” (237).
Chapter 11 by Eric Hayot deals not with films or television series, but video games. It illustrates how different genres of games allow players to do different things in relation to the history the game is concerned with. Some games allow players to radically change history, for instance by turning the defeated into victors, whereas others merely permit them to carry out specific missions while the historical story, for example one where the player is a national hero, is set in stone and told in interludes during which the player is passive. This has implications for the extent to which games can be used for nationalistic propaganda purposes. Through this interesting illustration, the chapter suggests that the medium and genre in which historical narratives appear always influence their content.
In accordance with its stated aims, this volume provides a variety of perspectives on how the wars that occurred in East Asia between the 1930s and 1950s have been portrayed in screen technologies in several East Asian countries. However, for a volume whose title suggests that it is concerned with memory, many of the individual chapters make scant reference to memory, collective or otherwise. Readers interested not only in how war is represented in films and other screen technologies, but in how such representations relate to collective memory and/or memory politics might find this to be a limitation of the volume. The volume would have been stronger had it addressed questions such as the following in greater detail: How do films, television series, and video games differ from other technologies of memory, such as museums, textbooks, and so on? How do the representations analyzed relate to and influence collective memory more broadly? How are these representations reacted to by politicians and other political actors? What are the implications of the volume’s findings for theories about and the study of collective memory? While some chapters touch on such questions, a more comprehensive discussion, preferably in a concluding chapter, would have strengthened the volume. Such a concluding chapter would have been useful for drawing conclusions about such issues based on the empirically rich individual contributions and for pointing out similarities and differences between the national contexts and cases.
Karl Gustafsson
Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm, Sweden