20.12.2014

 

Poklosie

 

Recently, I had a chance to watch a Polish film called Poklosie (Aftermath in English, dir. Władysław Pasikowski, 2012）. The film is a fiction based on a massacre of Jews in Jedwabne in 1941, a town in northeastern Poland. More than three million Jews lived in Poland before the Second World War. Most of them perished in the Holocaust. Non-Jewish Poles also suffered heavy losses under Hitler’s occupation. The Polish deaths amounted to two to three million (1).

 

In Jedwabne, it was the Poles who slaughtered the Jews. The massacre had long been attributed to the Nazis. Many Poles were shocked, even outraged when Polish-American historian Jan Gross published its account (Neighbours, Penguin Books, 2002 ). An official investigation led the Polish President to offer an apology. The Jews were slaughtered with clubs and machetes. Those who escaped were burned to death inside a barn which was torched from the outside.

 

Set in a fictional location, the film focuses on the tension between the protagonists, two brothers who are determined to find the truth of the matter, and the villagers who would rather assign the whole incident to oblivion. In the process, the protagonists learn that the farmland they work on today were expropriated from the murdered Jews, and that their own father was one of the ringleaders of the massacre.

 

It does not seem right to compare Poland, victimized by the Nazi Germany, with Japan, which victimized the rest of Asia. But the subject of the film, the selective erasure of the past in the construction of a nationalist narrative, has particular resonance in Japan today. Intentional forgetting of Orwellian type may be commonplace world over. It must not be tolerated, however, precisely because there are so many instances of it.

 

Benign efforts to remember the past, too, sometimes produce adverse effects. In August this year, Japan’s largest daily, the Asahi Shimbun, admitted that the paper knowingly published articles about the Japanese military sex slaves euphemistically called “comfort women”, based on a false testimony. The report that the army rounded up girls on Cheju Island in Korea turned out to be a lie told by a megalomaniac.

 

There is no way that the Asahi Shimbun can evade moral responsibilities. But the accusations aimed at the paper seem somehow gotten out of hand. The worrying trend is that people here want to believe that the Japanese army committed no wrongdoings, that there were no women who were forced into sex slavery. It begins to sound like that the Japanese army was righteous, that there were no massacres anywhere, not even in Nanjing, and there were no medical experimentations carried out on the living bodies of the Chinese POWs. This is to deny Japan’s criminality in toto.

 

Another worrisome trend is the glorification of the suicide mission. It is easy to sympathize with young innocent men who sacrificed their lives to defend the nation. Such glorification, however, does not call into question the process in which innocence had been forged by the state ideological apparatus. Forgotten are tens of millions of “others” whose lives were deprived of.

 

Many of the so-called “peace museums” founded and run by local prefectures and municipalities in Japan foreground victimization of civilians, such as those who died in indiscriminate carpet bombing of the Americans. Showa-kan museum, built by the state government in the capital, Tokyo, purports to display only the “hardships” endured by the Japanese nationals, such as food shortage and conscripted labour in arms factories. Such displays are misleading in the construction of an ethnocentric history. Obliterated are the suffering and the loss of the others, as if to tell that their suffering is irrelevant to public museums.

 

The Japanese living today, are not, like the protagonists of the film Poklosie, were not, perpetrators. They did not commit criminal acts at first hand. It must, however, be noted and remembered, that the erasure of criminal acts from social memory, also constitutes a criminal act.

 

(Note) Auschwitz Peace Museum in Fukushima, Japan, not too far from the nuclear power plant severely damaged by the tsunami in 2011, displays watercolours painted by Polish children right after the Second World War (wojina w oczach dziecka). They convey to the visitors a sense of deep psychological wounds that Nazi atrocities inflicted on them. Despite the enormity of their suffering, under Hitler’s and Stalin’s regime, Poles are sometimes portrayed as cynical bystanders, as in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shore (1985).

 

 

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