Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes

328 Pages·2016·2.608 MB·English

by  Lisa Yoneyama

COLD WAR RUINS
Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes
LISA YONEYAMA
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS      DURHAM AND LONDON      2016
© 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Whitman by Westchester Book Group
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Yoneyama, Lisa, [date] author.
Title: Cold War ruins : Transpacific critique of American justice and Japanese war crimes / Lisa Yoneyama.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016002411| ISBN 9780822361503 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780822361695 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
ISBN 9780822374114 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Atrocities—Japan. | Reparations for historical injustices—Japan. |
Cold war. | Nationalism and feminism. | Decolonization. | Transnationalism.
Classification: LCC D804.J3 Y59 2016 | DDC 940.54/050952–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002411
Cover art: Punish the Responsible—For Peace by Kang Duk-Kyoung. This picture is provided by the
House of Sharing and the Museum of Sexual Slavery by Japanese Military.
CONTENTS
Preface
INTRODUCTION
Transpacific Cold War Formations and the Question of (Un)Redressability
PART I SPACE OF OCCUPATION
CHAPTER 1
Liminal Justice: Okinawa
CHAPTER 2
Liberation under Siege: Japanese Women
PART II TRANSNATIONAL MEMORY BORDERS
CHAPTER 3
Sovereignty, Apology, Forgiveness: Revisionisms
CHAPTER 4
Contagious Justice: Asian/America
CHAPTER 5
Complicit Amnesia: For Transformative Knowledge
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
Since the early nineties we have been witnessing renewed calls for historical
justice, which are unparalleled in their intensity and scope.1 In different parts of
Asia, the Pacific Islands, and North America, redress demands at the turn of the
new century have gained increasing visibility and urgency. Primarily if not
exclusively concerned with the losses wrought by Japan’s military and colonial
aggression, this resurgence in calls for historical justice has not only added new
stories to the inventory of wartime suffering. It has revealed that previously
concluded postbelligerency adjudications, war indemnities settlements, and
various state-to-state normalizations have rendered many instances of violence
unredressable, or only incrementally redressed. In others words, the post-1990s
redress efforts have been a major force in illuminating the gross oversights of the
administration of transitional justice in the war’s immediate aftermath. Much of
the pathos uniting the collectivities of redress activism across various borders is
spurred by the sense of belatedness and the indignation it renders. Why so late?
Why after almost half a century? Why failure?
Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese
War Crimes takes on this question of belatedness. It asks, in what ways must we
deem the initial moment of transitional justice a failure, what are the
geohistorical circumstances, international protocols and cultural forces that left
certain injuries to certain bodies unredressed, and what implications might the
belated attempts to address these initial shortcomings have on broader cultural
politics and the production of knowledge? More than an examination of
individual case histories, Cold War Ruins examines the post-1990s redress
pursuits as a culture, that is, a complex social formation that is also embodied, an
ideological matrix of juridico-political processes (which include backlashes,
controversies, and their political unconscious), and powerful historical
imaginaries marshaled across different borders, geographical, social, and
otherwise.
Theories of violence and justice have come under new scrutiny as part of the
broader reorganization of knowledge in the social and human sciences. The
renewal reflects intensifying concerns for coextensive yet seemingly bipolarized
historical developments. On one hand, we have witnessed the rise of new
internationalism and increasing concerns about the human security paradigm.
International feminist jurisprudence and the intensifying quest for redress,
reparations, and reconciliation are both part of that process. On the other hand,
the precariat and other new social movements have regalvanized under
intensifying neoliberalization and in the face of the failing juridico-political
premises of modernity. Paralleling these processes is the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction that have been simultaneously banalized and
(re)spectacularized, the (re)assertion of sovereign power as we have witnessed in
the latest U.S. wars, and the expansion of spaces of social death such as refugee
and migrant camps, prisons and the so-called low-intensity conflict zones. What
this seeming bipolarization shows is the mounting desire to universally condemn
certain kinds of violence through exposure and focalization and, at the same
time, the escalation of violence’s invisibility in a myriad of microspaces. Cold
War Ruins attempts to place the post-1990s redress culture and its genealogy
within the late-capitalist, late-colonial, turn-of-the-century geography to explore
the predicaments and possibilities of historical justice. In this context, the redress
demands addressing Japanese war crimes, in particular, have raised important
questions regarding the legibility of violence, the concept of the human,
sovereignty, the economy of forgiveness, aporia of transnational critique, and
perhaps most significantly, judicialization of the political.
As I hope to show, the post-1990s rearticulation of historical justice—or what
I call “transborder redress culture”—has in one way or another interrogated the
institutional and epistemic structures that have come to take hold of the world
after World War II. It has exposed the scaffolds of transitional justice introduced
at the war’s end, which have long set the parameters of what can be known as
egregious violence, as well as whose violence on which bodies can be addressed
and redressed. Cold War Ruins scrutinizes this critical divide between the
legibility and the illegibility of violence as an integral part of the post–World
War II, Cold War knowledge formation. And this formation, it argues, cannot be
grasped fully without observing the geopolitical shifts and continuities across the
transwar period. This historical conjuncture saw the Allies not only liberating the
areas formerly occupied by and colonized by the Japanese empire, but also the
United States’ ascendance to the military supremacy in what might be termed the
Cold War “empire for liberty.”2 Having liberated much of Asia and the Pacific
Islands from Japanese imperial violence, the United States simultaneously
forged anticommunist networks linking the military-security-academic, free
market client states, especially in North and Southeast Asia.3 The ability to
decisively affect the postbelligerency drawing of lines between the aggrieved
and the aggressors, the redressable and the unredressable, the forgiven and the
unforgiven—this prerogative constituted an integral part of what enabled this
transwar, transpacific development. Transborder redress culture at the turn of the
new century and the politics it has animated, I suggest, should be read as a trace
of the deeply conjoined, enduring interimperial complex of historical violence
that was disavowed in the initial phase of transitional justice, yet which was then
protracted into our late-colonial, late-capitalist world.
How do we reckon with the myriad instances of violence that the two empires
have occluded or made invisible, and hence unredressable? How might we
rethink the idea of “justice” in order to highlight the transwar continuity and the
transferability of violence between the two imperial powers? And most crucially,
what are the transborder agencies, local mediations, and the remainders of
justice within and beyond the U.S.-Japan binary that have animated redress in
the 1990s, and in what ways do they unsettle or not unsettle knowledge
concerning violence and the violence of counterviolence? To begin such
inquiries, Cold War Ruins foregrounds transpacific critique as a critical
methodology with which we might scrutinize the seemingly intractable Cold
War formations and their lasting material and discursive effects.
While there are various contexts in which the idea of the transpacific can be
deployed, I situate Cold War Ruins in the genealogy of transpacific critique that
has emerged at the interstices of Asian studies, American studies, and Asian
American studies—or more broadly, area studies, ethnic studies, and
postcolonial studies. I do so to illuminate the predicaments that such disciplinary
divides have concealed through their management of knowledge.4 The term
“transpacific” and its associations with geopolitics bear imprints of the existing
nexus of knowledge and power. Taken literally, it can suggest mere movements
across the ocean. It may be read as a concept affinal to the “Pacific Rim,” or
more recently the “Transpacific Partnership (TPP),” in the cartography of
transnational capitalism, which has long vacated the people and histories of the
Pacific Islands. The “transpacific” also marks the predicaments of the settler
colonial present that need to be further articulated in the Pacific Islander–Asian
American political and intellectual exchanges.5 Bearing these and other
problematic associations in mind, I propose a dissonant reading of the
transpacific as an alternative to the Cold War geography, which emerged out of
transwar, interimperial, and transnational entanglements. Eschewing reification
of the “Asia-Pacific” as yet another area studies’ militarized geopolitical
category, and pushing against the conventional periodization and perceptions of
violence and justice, the book advances what might be called a conjunctive
cultural critique of the transpacific in order to elucidate the still-present Cold
War frame of knowledge that, despite some adjustments and transvaluations,
continues to stabilize international protocols, cultural assumptions, and
normalized categories associated with our identities, histories, and boundaries.6
At a minimum, such a methodology points to the limits of our political and
positivist certitude and urges us to consider why we need to unlearn some of the
most familiar terms with which we make demands for a just world.
The term “World War II” is used to indicate the historiographical universalism
with which we understand the globalized midcentury belligerencies treated in
this book as a single war fought between the tripartite Axis powers and the
Allied powers. In addition, “the Asia-Pacific War” is used to highlight the
multiple and complex nature of militarized conflicts between 1931 and 1945.7
“The Asia-Pacific War” is a Japanese neologism proposed in the eighties with
the intention of displacing earlier nomenclature and its normative periodization.
The Greater East Asia War, U.S.-Japan War, Pacific War, Second Sino-Japanese
War, and even Fifteen Year War—all fell into a binary discourse of civilization
by casting the war as fought either exclusively between the West and the rest or
among discrete and internally coherent nation-state universals. The periodization
of World War II in the Pacific theater conventionally begins with the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor and ends with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Crucial to the book’s discussion on historical justice, the neologism’s
spatial conjoining of the Pacific theater and the battlefields in Asia was also
intended to shift the meaning of Japan’s defeat: the earlier namings, with the
exception of the Fifteen Year War and the Sino-Japanese War, suggested that
Japan was defeated primarily by American military and technological
supremacy, whereas “the Asia-Pacific War” pronounces an awareness that Japan
lost multiple wars—that is, not only military but, if only briefly, colonial and
capitalist wars—to resistance against Japanese imperial domination at multiple
locations. As well, the new coinage sheds light on Japanese military aggression
not only in mainland China but in such places as Indonesia, which had formerly
been marginalized in World War II historiography due to their complex and not-
so-linear histories of colonial occupation and decolonization.8 While any naming
necessarily demarcates its limits, I have adopted “the Asia-Pacific War” in the
current study, as I did in my previous work, to signal that which has fallen out of
the universalism and binarism of former designations.
The use of uppercase for the term “state,” is meant to highlight its ontology as
a sovereign polity, thus underscoring the entity’s exceptional ability to decide on
behalf of or regardless of the members’ collective will, whether to kill, let live,
apologize or punish. I will use lowercase (e.g., state-to-state agreements) when
referring to countries or existing governments, although in practice, the two are
obviously often indistinguishable.
Finally, I use the term “Cold War” to refer to the U.S.-Soviet confrontation,
its globality, and the term’s universalistic imaginary, as well as the Western
hemispheric periodization of history. In contrast, I use “cold war” to signal the
diverse regional manifestations of the seemingly parallel ideological
confrontations. This differentiation is more than geographical. The use of
uppercase is meant to suggest that while many of the regional cold wars were
fought as hot wars and in other violent forms, their histories have been eclipsed
by the reification of the globality of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. Accordingly, I
use “post–Cold War” or “Cold War hiatus” when referring to the period after the
formal collapse of the Soviet Union and the unification of Germany. While the
prefix, “post,” signifies that the condition it refers to has not concluded but
continues through modification, amendments, and/or intensification, the
lowercase underscores that despite the formal declaration of the end of the Cold
War in the West, and despite its undeniably far-reaching epistemic and
institutional impacts on other parts of the world, such universal periodization
does not automatically apply to the West’s rest.9
Japanese, Korean, and Chinese names are in most cases rendered with
surname first, followed by the given name, when the named individual resides or
has resided primarily in East Asia. Korean proper nouns are written in modified
McCune-Reischauer style. Romanization for Chinese proper nouns follows
modified Pinyin style. Japanese romanization follows modified Hepburn style.
Exceptions are made for proper nouns for which there are standard renderings in
English (e.g., Chiang Kai-shek, Park Chung Hee, Kyoto, Ryukyu), or when the
individual customarily uses another spelling.