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Unquiet graves: Katō Norihiro and thepolitics of mourningTessa Morris‐Suzuki a

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Japanese Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1998 21

Unquiet Graves: Katō Norihiro and thePolitics of Mourning

TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI, Australian National University

Katō Norihiro, Haisengoron, Tokyo, Kōdansha, 1997, ¥2500, ISBN 4-06-208699-9

In 1995, when the world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the end of the PacificWar, there was a feeling (at least in Japan) that that year might prove a watershed: amoment of coming to terms, at which accounts would be settled, memories confrontedand ghosts laid to rest. In fact the opposite has happened. The debates on warresponsibility raised by the anniversary have not died away but have intensified, feedinginto widening circles of controversy about the role of history and memory in contem-porary society. These controversies, though particularly impassioned in Japan, haveinternational resonances. They reverberate with questioning about the nature of histori-cal truth and about responsibility for acts of war and colonialism in many parts of theworld. In this sense they seem to be part of a more general 'crisis of history' inducedby the changing role of the nation state, shifting patterns of national and ethnic identity,declining faith in the grand narratives of the past, and even changes in the mediathrough which history is studied and experienced.

The evolving debate over history in Japan has several dimensions. At a relativelypopular level, the battle-lines have been denned by the emergence of FujiokaNobukatsu's Liberal Historiography Research Group \Jiyushugi Shikan Kenkyukai],which argues that the teaching of history in Japan has concentrated too much on anegative 'history of shame' symbolised by subjects such as the Nanjing Massacre, themurderous human experimentation of Unit 731 and the sexual slavery of the so-called'comfort women'. In its place, Fujioka's group offers a history centred around inspira-tional tales of individual courage, leadership and philanthropy: stories which bear analmost uncanny resemblance to the style and content of pre-war Japanese ethicstextbooks.1 The Research Group has also been particularly active in spreading itsmessage to a wide non-specialist audience through the media of public meetings,newsletters and the internet. The public appeal of the revisionist message has beenenhanced by the work of manga writer Kobayashi Yoshinori, whose comic strips,published in the magazine Sapio and elsewhere, offer a sardonic critique of 'intellectualelites' and their demands that Japan apologise to groups such as the 'comfort women'.

Defeat and its Distortions

The reception of Kato Norihiro's Haisengoron needs to be seen in the context of thesecontroversies, for Kato also addresses questions of war responsibility, apologies and

1 See Fujioka Nobukatsu (1996), Ojoku no kingendai shi (Tokyo, Tokuma Shoten); Fujioka Nobukatsuet al. (1996) Kyōkasho ga oshienai rekishi (Tokyo, Sankei Shinbunsha); Fujioka Nobukatsu et al. (1996)Kyōkasho ga oshienai rekishi 2 (Tokyo, Sankei Shinbunsha).

1037-1397/98/010021-10 © 1998 Japanese Studies Association of Australia

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22 T. Morris-Suzuki

(above all) memories of the dead. But this book operates on a different level from thewritings of Fujioka, Kobayashi and others. Kato (whose given name is also sometimesread as 'Tenyo') is an erudite literary critic and social commentator, and hisreflections on post-war Japan take the reader on long and somewhat meanderingjourneys through the political theories of Minobe Tatsukichi, the novels of OokaShohei, Dazai Osamu and J.D. Salinger, and the philosophical writings of YoshimotoRyumei and Hannah Arendt. Besides, his approach to the memory of war is anoblique and complicated one. The title of the book itself is revealing. In place of thenormal, bland 'sengo'—'postwar'—Kato insists on speaking of 'haisengo'—'after de-feat in war'. It is precisely the fact of defeat—the paradox that Japan's post-warfreedom was a product of defeat and occupation—which Kato sees as havingmoulded and distorted the nature of Japanese society in the second half of thetwentieth century.

Haisengoron in fact consists of three essays, the first published in January 1995, thesecond in August 1996 and the last in February 1997. In writing the second and thirdessays, Kato was in part responding to the fierce criticisms provoked by the first. Hisarguments therefore shift subtly in the course of the text as he reflects on and reacts tothe comments of his critics. What makes Kato's work distinctive, and may partly helpto explain the impassioned response which it has generated, is the fact that he does nottake the obvious 'revisionist' position on most of the key questions of war responsibility.He acknowledges that Japan should apologise to other Asian nations for its wartimeaggression; he is an explicit and scathing critic of Emperor Hirohito's refusal to admitresponsibility for the war; and he recognises the potential value of the anti-war clausein Japan's post-war constitution. But at the same time he is profoundly critical of thestance taken by most of Japan's left-wing intellectuals on the issues of the Constitutionand war guilt.

Kato's idiosyncratic approach to the problems of post-war Japan is best explainedby beginning with the Constitution. The irony which Kato highlights is, not simplythat a democratic constitution was imposed upon Japan by foreign occupying powers,but that a peace constitution was imposed by massively armed occupation forces,who used the implicit threat of nuclear annihilation to ensure its acceptance. Theseambivalent origins, he suggests, are something which neither defenders nor critics ofthe constitution have ever had the courage to confront. Supporters of the existingconstitution feel impelled to nurture the myth that it is in effect a home-growndocument: whatever the details of drafting, it is seen as reflecting the true wishes ofthe Japanese people in the immediate aftermath of war. Their opponents, on thecontrary, argue that because it was imposed by the conquerors, the constitution istherefore irrevocably tainted and must be changed. The result is presented as a sterilebattle of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, in which the ideological posturing of one sidemirrors and feeds off the ideological posturing of the other. Neither stance createsspace for the honest acknowledgment that a constitution which was indeed forcedupon a defeated nation by its former enemies may at the same time be a documentworth preserving and reconfirming because of its value for the present day. Thisreaffirmation, Kato suggests, can only be complete when the Japanese people choosedie constitution as their own, with open eyes and without illusions about its historicalorigins.

So far, perhaps, so good (though Kato's rather extreme characterisation of both sidesin the constitutional debate has been criticised by some as unfair). The real controversyarises, however, when Kato expands his analysis of debates about the constitution into

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a wider statement about the nature of post-defeat Japan. The ideological sterilityof the constitutional debate reflects, according to Kato, a profound schizophreniain post-war Japanese society. The imposition of freedom through the process ofdefeat in war produced a 'twisting' or 'distortion' [nejire] of the national psyche whichhas been deepened by the continuing failure of Japanese society to face upto the meaning of defeat. This Jekyll-and-Hyde character (as Kato calls it) is exposedevery time Japan confronts the issue of war apology. No sooner has 'Jekyll'—asrepresented by a figure like former Prime Minister Hosokawa—issued a genuine-sounding apology, than 'Hyde'—as represented by a figure like former Minister ofJustice Nagano—feels impelled to make statements justifying Japan's wartimeexpansionism. It is only through a healing of the fractured national psyche thattrue apology will become possible, and this healing must begin by completingthe business left unfinished by defeat: the mourning of Japan's own war dead.Hence Kato's contentious suggestion that 'by placing the mourning for Japan's threemillion war dead first, and grieving for Asia's twenty million war dead through thisgrief, the way may be opened both to true apology and to a restoration of Japan'ssocial psyche.

Kato is emphatic that 'mourning' is not the same as 'glorification'. On thecontrary, he criticises both Right and Left for their desire to separate 'pure'from 'impure' dead, and to commemorate only the 'pure'. In the case of theRight, this means an exclusive focus on the 'heroic' war dead immortalised in theYasukuni Shrine; in the case of the Left, an exclusive focus on the 'innocent' civilianvictims of atomic and conventional bombing. So the dead, like the living, aresundered by the invisible fault-line in the national psyche. Healing this divisionrequires the acknowledgement that there are no 'pure' dead: that the war dead shouldbe mourned precisely because, in the end, their deaths were impure, unheroic andfutile. Quoting from J.D. Salinger, Kato writes that 'it's time we let the dead die invain'.

Three Dimensions of Responsibility

Here, as at some other points in Haisengoron, Kato's writing is eloquent and suffusedby a ruthless honesty. And yet the book as whole highlights fundamental problemswhich beset debates about memory, guilt and apology. Such debates inevitably operatein several different dimensions. One dimension could be described as the politicaleconomy of historical responsibility. At this level, the issue at stake is the tangible andcontinuing damage inflicted by past events on the social existence of the living: onpeople whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed, whose land was taken away fromunder their feet, whose families were killed, or whose bodies were maimed by torture,rape and other instruments of war. It is here that political entities, usually nation states,confront problems of practical policy, most commonly in the form of demands forreparations from those whose lives still bear the scars of historical violence. A seconddimension could be called the epistemology of historical responsibility. Here the issueis knowledge: what should we, in the present, know about the past? What do we havea responsibility to remember and what (by implication) can we or should we forget?Lastly, there is also something that we could call the psychology of historical responsi-bility. The central concerns here are the inner emotions that influence our responses tomemories of the past, as well as the way in which past events shape the development

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24 T. Morris-Suzuki

of the human psyche. A key problem is therefore the lasting trauma which events likewar inflict on the minds of the victims, and also on the minds of the aggressors.

All three dimensions are integrally connected to one another, and all are equallyessential to any process of dealing with the past. The problem, however, is that thepeople who debate issues of historical responsibility are often operating, as it were,within different dimensions, and their arguments therefore tend to pass each other byrather than producing a meeting of minds. Haisengoron clearly operates pre-eminentlyat the psychological level, drawing on philosophy and literary theory to create anunderstanding of the meaning of defeat for the human personality. So Kato, whilelamenting Japan's psychological failure to grieve for its own war dead, characteristicallymakes no mention of the fact that the Japanese state, at the level of political economy,does acknowledge responsibility for the legacy of war by paying pensions to Japaneseveterans and the families of Japan's fallen soldiers, but refuses to extend the sameacknowledgement of practical responsibility to groups such as the women drafted intoprostitution by the armed forces during the war.

The urge to translate the political and the epistemological into psychology is partic-ularly evident where Kato responds to the views of his critics. The 1995 essay, whichforms the first part of the book, evoked a number of hostile responses, and in thefollowing two essays Kato in particular takes up the criticisms of philosopher TakahashiTetsuya and cultural historian Kawamura Minato. Kato's reaction to these criticisms,perhaps predictably, is not to confront them head-on in the obvious manner, but rather,as it were, to take a long detour through forests of philosophy and literature and creepup on his critics from an entirely unexpected angle. In doing this, he tends not so muchto address the critique as a whole as to seize on certain sentences or phrases and weavethem into his own meditations on the state of the world. This often results in a subtleredefinition of his opponents' arguments in terms of psychology, subjectivity andselfhood.

Kawamura Minato, for example, raises a reasonable question about Kato's censoriousview of post-war moral integrity. It was, after all, one thing for a mid-century writer likeOoka Shohei, whose whole life was profoundly affected by the first-hand experience ofwar, to devote himself to the task of mourning the dead; it is another to expect theJapanese of the 1990s, most of whom (like Kato Norihiro himself) were not even bornwhen Japan surrendered, to share that devotion. Kawamura suggests that Kato's writinglacks the 'non-moral flexibility' which might be seen as one of the positive features ofpost-war Japanese society.2 This comment, which appears in the context of a muchwider critique of Kato's views on the peace constitution, could be interpreted at leastpartly as a social or political one, implying that post-war Japanese society has allowed acertain space for an individual life free from intrusive demands of national morality. Bythe time Kato has finished his circuitous response to Kawamura, however, the words'non-moral' have been transformed into a sweeping description of the post-war psyche:an aimless, disillusioned, nihilistic psyche symbolised by the young male antiheroes offictional works like Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye or Dazai Osamu's short storyTokatonton (translated into English as 'The Sound of Hammering').3

2 Kawamura Minato, 'Wangan sengo no hihyō kūkan', Gunzō (June 1996), pp. 296-315, quotation fromp. 304.3 J.D. Salinger (1958) The Catcher in the Rye (New York, Penguin); Dazai Osamu, 'The Sound of

hammering', in Dazai Osamu (trans. James O'Brien)(1989) Crackling Mountain and Other Stories,pp. 179-198 (Rutland Vt, Charles Tuttle Company).

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Similarly, Takahashi Tetsuya's insistence that apologies to the victims of war shouldcome before mourning of 'our own' dead inspires Kato to embark on a lengthymeditation about the relationship between Self and Other, as reflected particularly inthe philosophy and literary theory of Yoshimoto Ryumei and the fiction of DazaiOsamu. The conclusions of this meditation are somewhat abstruse, but are perhapsbest seen as expressing Kato's intense and rather personal distaste for what he sees assimplistic attempts by many of his contemporaries to take the high moral ground. So,for example, he contrasts the easy morality of recent statements on war-guilt with themore profoundly guilt-laden encounter between the wealthy landlord's son, Dazai, andhis 'other', in the form of poverty and socialism. This encounter, it is implied, was sotormented that Dazai's fiction can ultimately be seen as a multi-volume suicide note.In place of cheap and self-gratifying public statements of guilt for past misdeeds, Katoproposes a more complex dialectic between phenomenology—where self and other aremutually constituted and where the individual struggles to move from intuition tocertainty—and literature—which seeks truth within the midst of daily life by acknowl-edging constant uncertainty: the constant possibility that 'I may be mistaken'.

Not Mourning but Thinking

Absent from this analysis, which fills the first two sections of the book, is any realacknowledgement that there might be a difference between individual psyche andnational identity, or between issues of personal and collective responsibility. It is onlyin the final essay that Kato confronts this problem. Here the starting point of hisreflections is Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, which Takahashi Tetsuya hadbriefly cited in his critique of Kato's first essay.4 Arendt's immensely controversialreport on the Eichmann trial, originally written as a series of articles for the New Yorkermagazine, caused outrage in some circles for several reasons. For one thing, she wasdeeply critical of the political uses to which the trial was put by the Israeli state. Foranother, she made harsh comments about the leadership of European Jewish communi-ties, who in some cases had not only failed to resist annihilation by the Nazis, but hadeven participated in the processes of marshalling deportees and handing over theirproperty to the authorities. Most controversially of all, perhaps, she depicted Eichmannas an embodiment of 'the banality of evil', a phrase which was taken by her critics asimplying a failure to recognise the unique horror of the Holocaust. In retrospect, itseems clear that this last criticism entirely missed the point: it was indeed precisely thebanality of genocide—the fact that such deeds could be perpetrated, not by theobviously wicked, but by the mediocre performing their mundane duties—that Arendtfound almost inexpressibly horrifying.5

Characteristically, Kato Norihiro does not set out to provide a comprehensiveoverview of the Eichmann in Jerusalem controversy, which involved a range of promi-nent figures including Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell and Mary McCarthy. Instead,he chooses to focus particularly on the exchanges between Arendt and the scholar ofJudaism Gershom Scholem, and uses this exchange as a basis for developing his own

4 Takahashi Tetsuya 'Ojoku no kioku o megutte', Gunzō (March 1995), pp. 176-182.5 Hannah Arendt (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Penguin; for

a good account of this controversy, see Jennifer Ring (1997) The Political Consequences of Thinking: Genderand Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (New York, State University of New York Press).

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thoughts on the meaning of Japan's relationship with the memory of war. GershomScholem had criticised Arendt's report above all because she was Jewish and hercriticisms, in his eyes, expressed disloyalty to her own community. Scholem wasparticularly hurt by the tone of Arendt's writing, which he described as 'flippant', orelsewhere as 'heartless, frequently almost sneering and malicious'. Kato's point is thatArendt's reports, and particularly the detached or flippant 'tone' [katariguchi] in whichthey are written, represent her inner struggle as a universalist philosopher to free herselffrom the bonds of an ethnic communalism symbolised by the emotive solemnity ofGershom Scholem reproofs.

This interpretation then becomes a weapon in the polemic that Kato directs at hisown critics, particularly Takahashi Tetsuya. In a critical response to Kato's 1995 essay,Takahashi highlighted the need for Japan, first and foremost, to focus on the questionof guilt towards the women coerced into sexual slavery by the military during the war.He then went on to propose that the process of 'preserving and constantly feelingshame towards this memory' might open up new 'ethical and political possibilities' forJapan and the Japanese people.6 This is a suggestion to which Kato responds withalmost physical revulsion: he repeatedly refers to Takahashi's words as 'giving himgooseflesh'. Yet the confrontation between Kato and Takahashi is interesting because,despite their very different political instincts, there is a certain similarity in theunderlying logic of both protagonists.

Both accept that it is meaningful to make a distinction between 'our' and 'their' dead,although they reach radically different conclusions about the meaning of that distinc-tion. Besides, just as Kato assumes a Japanese national psyche that can be re-united bythe process of grieving, so Takahashi seems to assume a Japanese national psyche whichcan be redeemed by the experience of shame. But although both grief and shame maybe appropriate reactions to the memory of certain historical events, this assumption thata neatly bounded group called 'the Japanese', by sheer virtue of their nationality,possess an equal and exclusive duty of grief or shame for specific historical events raiseslarge conceptual problems. The approaches both of Kato and of Takahashi, in otherwords, pose unanswered problems about the nature and boundaries of the communal'we' which is supposed to experience grief or guilt, and both contain uncomfortableechoes of mid-century communalism: the wartime image of the populace as 'a hundredmillion with a single soul' [ichioku isshin], which was so readily transformed, in the wakeof defeat, into an image of 'a hundred million penitents' [ichioku sozange]. Both seemequally vulnerable to the objections of Kawamura Minato, who questions whetherKato's collective 'we' includes (for example) groups like Ainu and Okinawans.7 Onemight add, did the almost 200,000 Korean residents who have acquired Japanesecitizenship since 1945 take on the national burden of grief and guilt the moment theytook out Japanese nationality? Has my half-Japanese son inherited only a half measureof shame and mourning for the events of the Pacific War, or is he heir to the full weightof responsibility for Japan's history, as well as for the colonial aggression of his Britishancestors and his adopted Australian and American homelands?

In the final essay of the book, Kato tries to distance himself from this communalism.He draws an implicit parallel between (on the one hand) Hannah Arendt's struggle todefend the public [kokyoteki] realm from the pressures of the communal [kyodoteki]

6 Takahashi, 'Ojoku no kioku', p. 177.7 Kawamura, 'Wangan sengo', p. 311.

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and (on the other) his own attempt to re-examine Japan's post-war dilemmas. In theprocess, it is Takahashi, with his calls for continuing national shame, who is presentedas the defender of communalism, and whose sententious tone is contrastedunflatteringly with Arendt's universalistic 'flippancy'. By contrast, Kato defines himself,in calling for a mourning of the 'impure' dead, as seeking to move away from anationalistic, 'communal' relationship—and towards a universalistic and 'public' rela-tionship—between living and dead. But the practical implications of this 'public' or'non-communal' mourning are not well developed and remain (to say the least)obscure. Certainly Kato at this point parts company with Arendt, for whom the publicsphere was a distinct and bounded realm of action which surely did not embrace thedeeply private process of mourning. As Jennifer Ring points out, Arendt sought thesolution to the moral nihilism of the twentieth century world, not in the politics ofmourning, but in the politics of thinking.8

War, Memory and the Kobe Murders

Reading Haisengoron, I found myself puzzling over the appeal of Kato's arguments; forthese three essays, although they have evoked some hostile responses, have also beeninfluential and widely read. There is no denying that Kato offers an original approachto profoundly significant and sensitive subjects. But, all the same, his writing isdemanding, both in the sense that its dense style requires considerable concentration,and in the sense that his arguments make heavy emotional requirements of his readers.He is relentlessly critical of many of his contemporaries; he calls for a brutally frankreassessment of the origins of the post-war political order, for a belated realisation ofthe pain and futility of death in war; and most particularly he demands an experienceof grief at the deaths of those who died more than half a century ago. At first sight, itseems surprising that these demands should find a receptive audience in the Japan ofthe 1990s.

In the end I could not help feeling that the response may have much more to do withthe events of the 1990s than of the 1940s. Japanese society, in other words, is in a moodof crisis, or, more precisely, in a mood of blank anomie very like the post-war emptinesswhich pervaded the soul of Salinger's Holden Caulfield or of the anonymous maincharacter of Dazai's Tokatonton. The traditional ideals of the Left are moribund andeven the long-enduring promise of material progress has faded. For many intellectuals,a potent symbol of this aimlessness seems to have been the Japanese state's confusedand vacillating response to die 1991 Gulf War. It is interesting that this event provides,as it were, the point of departure both for Kato and for revisionist historian FujiokaNobukatsu. Fujioka defines his crusade to revise Japan's history teaching as havingbeen inspired by the shame he experienced during the Gulf War; Kato's first essaystarts with an attack on the 'hypocrisy' of a group of Japanese writers who signed apeace appeal during die 1991 crisis. But the ethical uncertainties of the Gulf crisis areonly one symptom of a wider sense of fin de siecle malaise. The amoral world of thebored and aimless young, vividly evoked in the second of Kato's essays, seems hauntedby unspoken echoes of more recent nightmares: the apparently random murder of twochildren by a Kobe teenager, which has caused such public heart-searching, and die

8 Ring, Political Consequences, chapters 9 and 10.

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wider anxieties over schoolgirl prostitution or juvenile violence, reflected in popularmedia such as Kitano Takeshi's film Kids Return.

It seems reasonable to suggest that the contemporary problems of the Japaneseyoung, or the loss of ideals in Japanese society as a whole, are only in rather smallmeasure a consequence of Japan's defeat in the Pacific War. More immediate causessurely lie in problems of global economic and social change, the rigidities of theJapanese political and bureaucratic system, the entrenched patriarchal structures ofhome and family and the failure to reform a repressive and outmoded educationsystem. But the vision of the post-war world presented in Haisengoron can be read asoffering a kind of national psychotherapy whose appeal lies in its power to trace backall the diffuse and disturbing anxieties of the present to a single unresolved 'childhoodtrauma'. Or, to use a religious metaphor, it offers a vision of the original sin that hastainted the entire course of post-war Japanese history. Whether or not this is what theauthor intends, it is therefore easy to interpret his call for a mourning of the war deadas offering the promise of a ritual of catharsis or purification which may free the nationfrom the incubus of its perplexing contemporary malaise. In this sense, despite Kato'sown complex philosophical position, his central message of mourning has a rathertroubling seductiveness in its potential to reduce the solution to extremely complicatedpolitical, social and epistemological dilemmas into a single act of exorcism.

The Texture of Grief

This is really the nub of the problem. Haisengoron, like other contributions to the debateon war, memory and apology, touches upon the most profound questions ofthe relationship between the search for universal ethics, the definition of nationalhistories, and the personal forces of memory and forgetting. It operates, in other words,along the contentious boundary between those worlds which Arendt sought to dis-tinguish: the public realm of action in the world and the private 'stolen away' world ofbelonging and memory. But since Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem, that always-problematic boundary has become, more than ever, difficult to sustain. The legacy ofthe Pacific War in Japan is just one point at which issues of public political action,group identity and responsibility, and personal memory and emotion meet, and it is alegacy that can only be dealt with by working though the intersection between thesedimensions of human experience. This intersection is fraught with difficulties: problemsof responding to political demands for apologies and compensation, without allowingthe response itself to become a release from the continuing task of remembering;problems of distinguishing the responsibility of citizens to remember national pastsfrom the responsibilities of people to remember the human history of an increasinglyglobalised world; problems of relating historical truth seeking to sentiments of nostal-gia, regret or grief about the past. But having raised and debated the question of thisintersection, Kato with his insistence on a mourning of 'our' dead too easily allows theissue to collapse back into the all-embracing rhetoric of a national psyche.

While I was reading Haisengoron I happened by chance to take part in a particularlymoving ceremony which was held at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Theceremony marked the opening of an exhibition called 'Captive Lives', which concernsthe life and death of an Aboriginal man known only by his nickname, 'Tambo'. In 1883Tambo and a group of seven companions from the area around Palm Island (NorthQueensland) were lured away by an American entrepreneur, R.A. Cunningham,shipped to the United States and put on display in Barnum's circus. They were labelled

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as vicious, semi-human cannibals and exposed to the morbid gaze of a curious publicalongside an assortment of other groups kidnapped from various parts of the world, aswell as people suffering from unusual physical deformities. Carted from place to placeand from one exhibition site to another, they not surprisingly soon became ill and mostdied. Tambo died, probably of pneumonia, in Cleveland, Ohio on 23 February 1884.His young wife tried to reclaim his body so that she could perform the traditional ritesfor the release of his spirit, but her repeated requests were denied, and her husband'sbody was embalmed and sold for display in a local museum. She and two of hersurviving companions died soon after while being exhibited in Germany, and anotherdied in 1885 in Paris. In 1993, Tambo's body was rediscovered in a Clevelandmortuary, and descendants of his family brought him home to Palm Island, where hewas buried. Some of those descendants had come to Canberra for the opening of theexhibition, and after the official speeches two of them commemorated Tambo and hiscompanions by reciting a version of the Lord's Prayer in the local Walguru languageand in English translation.

I had been thinking, as I read Kato Norihiro's book, about the possibility ofmourning the death of people we have never known. It seemed to me that the emotionexperienced by most of the largely white and middle-class audience at the openingceremony for 'Captive Lives' was the emotion of mourning, and that it was both agenuine and an appropriate emotion. But they were able to mourn, I think, becausethey were confronted with individual lives and deaths. The emotion that we feel whenwe contemplate the 20 million Asian dead or the 3 million Japanese dead of the PacificWar, the 6 million Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust or the estimated 300,000Australian Aboriginal victims of European colonisation is shock or numbness ratherthan grief. That is why individuals like Anne Frank, who provide a channel forconverting that numbness into mourning, acquire such historical salience. And it is alsothe reason for the ambivalent power of Tombs of Unknown Soldiers, whose bodiesbridge the gap between the individual and the faceless mass of the national dead. At onelevel, in other words, they stand for the unnamed millions of official history; at another,their very anonymity can, for some people, be made to stand in for a lost husband, sonor brother (though probably not for a lost wife, daughter or sister).

Mourning depends, however, not only on the recognition of an individual face, butalso on the recognition that this face is in some sense connected to ourselves. This isthe source of its power but also its potential danger. Our ability to recognise connec-tions between these others and ourselves is far too complex to be contained by clearboundaries of nationality, ethnicity or gender. And yet this ability is something thatemerges out of personal experience and out of the shaping of our personalities withinsociety, and so it reflects all our semiconscious memories, hopes and fears. This doesnot mean that mourning is an emotion to be suppressed, or even to be banished fromthe realms of action in the public world, but rather that it needs to be subjected toreflection and debate, it needs space to shift and change over time.

It could be argued that the middle-class white Australian audience who grieved forTambo were grieving because they felt guilt or shame: that it was grief for the pure andvictimised 'them' rather than for the impure and victimising 'us'. But I want to suggestsomething slightly different. We are generally assumed to experience guilt or shameabout the wrong that we have caused. But participating the 'Captive Lives' ceremony,I felt that the overwhelming emotion was not quite one of guilt, but rather one ofimplication. In other words, I think we grieved, not because we had caused theharrowing events recorded in the exhibition, but rather because, in some sense, those

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30 T. Morris-Suzuki

events had caused us. Looking at the grotesque images and inhuman descriptions of thecircus posters, many of us recognised images and language with which we had grownup, and which had helped to make us what we are. It is in this sense that, as NormaField has observed, 'apologies are made to the victims of past wrongdoing but for theshared present of victims and apologisers'.9 This consciousness of 'implication' doesnot distinguish in any simple way between 'their' dead and 'ours', or between 'pure'and 'impure', but only responds to the echoes of dead lives in the world we inhabit.Mourning and apology are part of the process by which we struggle against the ghostsof past violence which live on into the present in our own lives.

But if mourning is only evoked by individual lives and deaths, and only by those withwhich we feel some individual connection, then the process of mourning itself willalways be contested, because there will always be certain deaths which mean more tosome individuals or groups than to others. So, although Kato Norihiro may be rightto suggest that 'it's time we let the dead die in vain', it is surely unrealistic to supposethat the process of mourning can unite the national psyche: at the very most, what itmight do is to make the divisions more complex and more flexible. It is the ongoingcontest and interplay amongst those divisions that enable us to reflect on the meaningof our own grief, and make sense of the grief of others. It is the controversy aboutremembrance and responsibility that keeps remembrance and responsibility alive.

US scholar James Young illuminates this point in his book, The Texture of Memory,which deals with the subject of Holocaust monuments. The dilemma that he addressesis the eternal dilemma of memory. The very process of erecting a lasting, visiblememorial to a historical event (or, one might add, of issuing an official apology for ahistorical wrong) risks becoming a settling of past accounts, a final definitive statementwhich in itself becomes the starting point for forgetting. Young therefore exploresvarious possible alternative forms of memorial, including monuments that have unin-tentionally become sources of ongoing controversy, and 'counter-monuments' whichwere intentionally designed to cause controversy and to contradict the normal logic ofcommemoration. These include, for example, the German city of Harburg's 'Memorialagainst Fascism', which both invites defacement by graffiti (thus confronting theviewers with an image of their own prejudices) and is designed to disappear over time.

The logic of these structures, in other words, is that stone and steel cannot preservememory: what preserves memory is the endless, changing, unresolvable debate aboutthe memorial. Young's conclusions seem a fitting commentary on the problems ofmourning, thinking and acting in a world suffused with contested memories of thedead: 'the precise beauty of the counter-monument may not lie merely in its capacityfor change, nor in its capacity to challenge society's reasons for either memory or itsown configuration of memory. For in addition, the counter-monument seeks itsfulfilment in—not at cross-purposes with—historical time. It recognises and affirms thatthe life of memory exists primarily in historical time: in the activity that bringsmonuments into being, in the ongoing exchange between people and historical mark-ers, and finally, in the concrete actions we take in the light of a memorialised past'.10

9 Norma Field 'War and apology: Japan, Asia, the fiftieth and after', Positions 5:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 1-49,quotation from p. 37.10 James E. Young (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven andLondon, Yale University Press), p. 48.

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