A sense of a memory: prosthetic war memories among the Japanese cinema audience

Engaging with the cinema has shaped many individuals’ understandings of Japan’s war history, demonstrating the major role that popular culture can play in evoking, embedding, and rearranging memories. This chapter explores how repeated engagements with film texts and cinema spaces can build prosthetic war memory among elderly audience members in Japan today. In the ethnographic materials analysed in this chapter, a sense of having war memories emerges from affectively charged recollections of going to the cinema, engaging with film culture, and sharing film spaces with others. While the basis of these perceived memories in fact (or otherwise) is hard to prove or disprove, cinema is discussed as evoking a closeness to wartime and to the generations who experienced Japan’s wars before 1945. This chapter approaches postwar cinema culture as “enabler of ‘prosthetic memory’” (Keene in PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 7: 1–18, 2010, 2; Landsberg in Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, New York, 2004). Alison Landsberg coined the term “prosthetic memory” to describe “a new form of public cultural memory” located “at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or a museum” (Landsberg in Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, New York, 2004, 2). In such encounters, Landsberg suggests that “the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live” (Landsberg in Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, New York, 2004, 2). Exploring narratives about cinema-going in the early postwar period, this chapter posits engaging with war narratives on film as a means of bringing the cinema-goer closer to an understanding of Japan’s war history, in light of the “enabling modalities” offered by cinema culture (Keene in PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 7: 1–18, 2010, 10). As such, this chapter does not deal with the narrative contents of war films themselves, but instead approaches the medium of film through ethnography and participant observation of viewership practices among elderly Japanese audience members.