6. Disaster, WW2 and Art

Disaster, WW2 and Art

Before coming to Japan, I knew shockingly little about Japan's involvement in the Second World War and the extent to which fighting also occurred in East Asia. Since then I've made an effort to educate myself, and changed my itinerary at the last minute to include Hiroshima. I was partially inspired to do so by some of the art I saw at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo which dealt with WW2 and which I found particularly moving. I decided to seek out more art from that time and write a blog post about it.

Renzo Kita, Last Moment of the Admiral, 1943, MOMAT

However, I really struggled to find any more art dealing with WW2 since then. I quickly realised that the subject is a very controversial one in Japan and that I wasn't the only one ignorant about Japan's role in the war. According to an English person I met who was teaching in Japan for a year, Japanese children are barely taught anything about the Second World War in schools and many are even unaware that they lost the war and surrendered. I found a very interesting BBC News article by a Japanese woman describing history lessons in schools. The students cover the entirety of Japanese history in only one year (often not even reaching the 20th century due to lack of time), and only 19 out of 357 pages of the government-approved textbook even discuss the war. Only one sentence describes the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while one-line footnotes mention the 1937 Nanjing massacre in China and the use of comfort women (roughly 200,000 forced prostitutes, mainly Korean) by the Imperial Army of Japan.

The latter two atrocities are two of the principle reasons why there are still tensions between Japan and China and Korea today. The dispute about the comfort women wasn't settled until last December, when Japan and Korea decided to "finally and irreversibly" resolve the issue, including $8 million reparation money going towards support funds for the surviving women and an apology from the current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Many Koreans were angered by this deal and the lack of communication of the Korean government with the victims. Coincidentally, my internship workplace in Berlin was right next to the South Korean embassy and shortly after this deal was made, I saw a protest outside the embassy where a group of women were protesting against the decision. I picked up an information leaflet, and that was the first time I had ever heard of comfort women. 

Unfortunately, there's a significant revisionist movement in Japan headed by Nobukatsu Fujioka who is a professor of education at Tokyo University. He denies that the Nanjing masscare (or Rape of Nanjing) ever happened and insists that the comfort women were paid prostitutes (despite testimonies of surviving soldiers confessing to rape and violence.) These denials make relations with China and Korea increasingly difficult for Japan, and these countries pay close attention to public Japanese statements about the past. Last year, on the 70th anniversary of the end of WW2, Abe failed to apologise for Japanese actions in the war, despite echoing past apologies, angering China who railed against it in their state media. Similarly, visits of government officials to the Yasakuni Shrine in Tokyo, which enshrines the war dead including 14 Class A war criminals, regularly produces outcries in other Asian countries. But the lack of education about the war in Japan means that many Japanese people don't understand why there is still so much hatred directed towards their country from their neighbours.

After I read about these controversies and spoke to other travellers shocked by the lack of awareness they encountered about the Second World War, I tried to remain critical when looking at WW2 art and visiting Hiroshima.

Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, after the bombing
(1945 Picture by AP - 2014 Picture by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images)

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park is beautifully laid out and comprises many memorials, the Peace Memorial Museum, and the Atomic Bomb Dome. The dome, a former trade hall, is one of the few structures that survived the initial atomic bomb explosion and was right under the epicentre. It was kept standing as a memory of the atrocity. The main purpose of the memorial site is to promote peace, and it is part of an initiative to try to make the world atomic-bomb free.

The Atomic Bomb Dome today

Monument to Korean Victims and Survivors

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park was created in 1954 .However, the monument to Korean Victims and Survivors wasn't erected until 1970. Of the 200,000 Hiroshima citizens who died as a result of the atomic bombing (including radiation-related deaths in the aftermath), 10% were Korean. The memorial plaque states that these Koreans were living there as "soldiers, civilian employees of the army, mobilized students and ordinary citizens". This is definitely a white-washing of history - the vast majority of Koreans living in Japan during WW2 were forced labourers. According to Korean historians, approximately 670,000 Koreans were taken to Japan for manual labour. Approximately 60,000 of them died between 1939 and 1945, mostly due to exhaustion and poor working conditions (wikipedia).




The most condemning description I read of Japanese action during the war was at the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims. It was a very effective, beautiful memorial where I watched a couple of moving first-hand accounts of the bombing. However, the sentence "we recall with great sorrow the many lives sacrificed to mistaken national policy" shocked me with its extreme use of euphemism. The word "sacrificed" also made me feel uncomfortable with its associations of martyrdom and patriotism. This sentiment echoed the WW2 art I saw at the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, where the majority of the paintings held a sense of heroic sacrifice.

Ken'ichi Nakamura, 1945, MOMAT

I found Nakamura's 1945 painting Sergeant Nobe's Suicide Attack on Two B-29's Over Kitakyushu visually beautiful, dominated by the impressionistic sky. The top centre shows the explosion, with 3 planes falling to the ground. The scene illustrates the 1944 American attack on the city of Kitakyushu, when two young Japanese men flew their plane into two U.S. B-29s, according to the description a tactic devised by the soldiers themselves. The description and the painting focus on the heroism of the act, the self-sacrifice which brought down the enemy. The distance in the painting removes any reality of the horror and the loss of life entailed in the actual event.

Similarly, the painting Special Attack Corps Setting Out From a Homeland Base II focused on heroism, in this case of a suicide attack unit. The picture was commissioned by the army, so it is no wonder that there is no political criticism in the piece. However, I struggled to find any critical art work from the period at all! The painting is certainly effective. I was moved by the stoicism of the soldiers knowing they were going to die, the calmness of a group in the background praying. I found it subtle- the heroism lies in the expressions and the composure of the soldiers rather than in any kind of pomp or fanfare.

Sentaro Iwata, Special Attack Corps Setting Out From a Homeland Base II, 1945, MOMAT

The gallery dedicated to art from the Second World War at the MOMAT surprised me in its repeated portrayal of heroic sacrifice. I often associate art, especially from the 20th century on-wards, with dissent and social or political criticism and was surprised not to find the same in Japan. This is in tune with Japanese society, where the emphasis lies on maintaining social harmony while their sense of identity is much more tied to community than in our individualistic western culture.

Fumiaki Aono, 2013

While Germany's Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (coming to terms with the past) can't be applied to WW2 in Japan, I did see it in Kanazawa's 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art where the current exhibition focused on nuclear disaster. Japan's 2011 tsunami and ensuing three nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima resulted in almost 16,000 deaths and brought Japan to its knees. Only one piece in the museum was directly inspired by the disaster - Fumiaki Aono's Restoration/ Substitution/ Coalescence/ Connection. Aono walked along a beach after the tsunami and collected items from the debris. He created a sculpture with the things he found, combining a two-part storage unit, a wardrobe, part of a pink tile wall (probably from a public bath), pieces of clothing, cups, slippers and a faucet. The artwork is hopeful, one of restoration and rebuilding rather than destruction. But it is also sad and moving, the objects acting as witnesses to a disaster where the victims cannot, and reminding the viewer of the people they once surrounded and belonged to.


A video installation in a dark room adjacent to the sculpture highlights the inability of humanity to learn from past suffering. The Finnish artist Mika Taanila created the piece entitled The Most Electrified Town in Finland, where three large screens play videos of the construction of the nuclear power plant Olkiluoto 3 in southwestern Finland. These videos are mixed with black and white videos of northern-European nature and colourful scenes of everyday life. There is an overarching sense of doom, with workers moving like ants over the gigantic structure and the empty nature images suggesting a future, total return to nature.

Mika Taanila, The Most Electrified Town in Finland, 2004-2012 (www.tentrotterdam.nl)

The next artpiece was inspired by Chernobyl, framing the video installation with the two worst nuclear disasters in history. The Japanese artist Kenji Yanobe travelled to Chernobyl (where a nuclear reactor accident occurred in 1986) which inspired "rebirth after despair" as a theme in his work. In Kanazawa, he installed the piece Viva Revival Project: Stand-Up, a massive robot modeled on a child. Opposite this robot hangs a fluorescent smiling sun. After it "emits" 20 pulsing radiation exposures, the child slowly stands up. More than this installation, it was the photograph of Yanobe at Chernobyl in a yellow radiation suit surrounded by debris, including a broken piano, dolls and a globe, which really impressed me.

Kenji Yanobe, Viva Revival Project Stand-Up, 2001

Kenji Yanobe in Chernobyl

Coming Up: Japan Highlights - final post!