Implicated Photographs: Wartime Postmemory and the Photographic Unconsciousness in the Heisei Era

Ayelet Zohar considers the photographic images that stage and reenact specific moments representing the Asia-Pacific War and their contemporary importance in Heisei Japan. Relying on Walter Benjamin's discussion of the optical unconsciousness, and Michael Rothberg's idea of the implicated subject, Zohar argues that implicated photographs bring to the fore the unconscious aspect of war memory, the entanglement of perpetrator's guilt and victim's consciousness through images that were neglected and pushed into oblivion. The 50th anniversary of the war in 1995, just five years after the start of the Heisei era, was also the moment when many of these suppressed memories and painful recollections surfaced again. Through performances for the camera and photographic reenactments of suppressed memories of the Asia-Pacific War, these images came to occupy centre stage, bringing the Asia-Pacific War era back to attention. These moments include: documentary photography in the Pacific Region (Enari Tsuneo); Recollections of Japan's colonialism in Taiwan through nationalist and militaristic Japanese songs memorized by the elderly since their childhood days (Dokuyama Bontarō); A narrative of drafted Taiwanese youth during the war years, compared with contemporary experiences of immigrants' assimilation in Japan (Fujii Hikaru); The taboo on emperor Shōwa representations (Ōura Nobuyuki); and the reenactment of the Battle of Okinawa and the Ryūkyū history, on a long photographic scroll (Ishikawa Mao)