Tomiyama Taeko's Art and Remembrance of the Asia Pacific War (2010)

As pointed out in the recent issue of Education About Asia special section on "the Construction of 'Memory' in Asia"(14.1 spring 2009), war memorials in Japan and China present starkly opposing views of World War II.Yet some East Asian individuals have produced far more nuanced and reflective commentaries.One such individual, Tomiyama Taeko, a Japanese visual artist born in 1921, is changing the way the war is remembered in Japan, Asia, and the world.Her art deals with complicated moral and emotional issues that cannot possibly be summed up in simple slogans, making it compelling for more than just its considerable beauty.Tomiyama is passionate about social justice, and her work has long addressed such themes as unfair imprisonment and violence against women, but since the early 1980s, her signature theme has been the responsibility of ordinary Japanese, as well as the wartime government, for causing great harm to both Japanese citizens and other Asians.Readers can view an interview with Tomiyama in the documentary Women in Japan: Memories of the Past, Dreams for the Future, and see some of her artwork , along with some discussion questions, at a permanent Web site hosted at Northwestern University at http://northwestern.edu/imaginationwithoutbor-ders. 1 Other information is available in the publications cited at the end of this essay.Discussion of Tomiyama's work would fit well in survey courses in Asian and world history, history of art, anthropology/social studies classes, and courses focusing on gender, Asian religions, and the ways that people come to terms with the experience of war and historical remembrance.Tomiyama thinks like a poet-layering meaning on top of meaning, almost always finding a way to combine her ideas in "both/and" rather than "either/or" ways.She is creatively ambiguous about many things-origins, identity, knowledge, legitimacy-while crystal-clear about needless suffering, hypocrisy, misuse of power, sorrow, and empathy.Tomiyama is particularly interested in exploring the complex ways that people can simultaneously be victims and perpetrators, sometimes with the same act.She focuses on remembrance not as trauma but as a moral stance of empathy.In other words, rather than primarily trying to remember what was done to her, she wants to remember what she allowed to be done to others in her name but now regrets.Tomiyama was unable to express this complicated emotion to her own satisfaction until she came up with specific visual images that spoke to both her prewar memories and her postwar sense of outrage.One such image is the fox, the central character in two painting series, Harbin: Requiem for the 20th Century, 1995 and The Fox Story, 2000.Her foxes are at first glance charming or even cute, such as in one large oil painting of a fox wedding where the foxes are dressed like the Japanese of the early 1940s, including a schoolgirl in the sailor-suit uniform of the day.The background shows a village shrine, while chickens and a dog wander about in the foreground.Yet first impressions are misleading, and I wonder how many students would immediately recognize the underlying menace.As in Europe, the East Asian fox is a trickster, able to shape-shift and bewitch humans.Tomiyama, of course, is familiar with the many Chinese and Japanese folktales depicting the fox's devious nature.She also borrows from the long irreverent tradition of satirical animal imagery in Japanese art, much of it explicitly celebrating political dissent.