当前位置: X-MOL 学术Theatre Journal › 论文详情
Our official English website, www.x-mol.net, welcomes your feedback! (Note: you will need to create a separate account there.)
Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan by Jessica Nakamura (review)
Theatre Journal Pub Date : 2021-06-26
David Jortner

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

  • Transgenerational Remembrance: Performance and the Asia-Pacific War in Contemporary Japan by Jessica Nakamura
  • David Jortner
TRANSGENERATIONAL REMEMBRANCE: PERFORMANCE AND THE ASIA-PACIFIC WAR IN CONTEMPORARY JAPAN. By Jessica Nakamura. Performance Works series. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 240.

Perhaps no event has affected the twentieth century in Japan more than the fourteen-year Asia-Pacific War during 1931–45. From 1949’s shingeki play The Island (Shima) through the avant-garde angura and shōgekijō movements of the 1960s and ’70s, the war’s causes and effects were a constant source of material for playwrights, directors, and performers. After a lull in the 1980s, another wave of plays and performances emerged in the 1990s and 2000s that examined the ethics and responsibilities associated with wartime actions. These later works are the focus of Jessica Nakamura’s excellent monograph Transgenerational Remembrance. In this fascinating study, she intertwines theories of theatrical and cultural “ghosting” with images, themes, and ideas from the Nō theatre to examine how contemporary Japanese theatre evokes, contradicts, and explores the cultural inheritance of wartime. The result allows for younger generations to see the multiplicity of meanings involved in the history, testimonies, and official narratives of the Pacific War.

Nakamura organizes her study into six chapters, with a brief introduction and conclusion. The first chapter explores multiple performances at Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, the official memorial to Japan’s war dead. Although some Japanese view the shrine as a home to eirei, Japan’s heroic war dead, others see it as a legacy of Japan’s war crimes and colonial-ist history. Nakamura reveals how the geography of the shrine combines with the embodied processional performances of spectators and reenactors surrounding it to reify the imperial narrative about the war. She contrasts this with an examination of Koizumi Meiro’s Melodrama for Men #5: Voice of a Dead Hero (2009), in which Koizumi dresses as a fallen soldier and staggers back to the shrine. This work, Nakamura argues, challenges the spatial and embodied performance of reenactment. Together, these two performances reflect differing attitudes and cultural memories of Yasukuni.

The second chapter examines the history and legacy of the kamikaze pilot as reflected in three works: the film Eien no 0 (The Eternal Zero, 2013), Imai Masayuki’s play The Winds of God (1988), and Koizumi’s performance and video pieces from 2009 to 2014. Nakamura reveals that the underlying ideologies of these works reflect different concerns about the kamikaze figure, with the trope of the “heroic sacrifice” in the film contrasting with the historical interrogations undertaken by Imai and Koizumi. Of particular interest is her analysis of The Winds of God, a long-running two-person performance that has been made into films (in both Japanese and English) and a Japanese television series. In the first major work of English-language scholarship, to my knowledge, on this popular and important work, Nakamura considers the multiple iterations of the play to demonstrate how Imai is able to reinvestigate and reexamine this historical icon over an extended period of time. Nakamura’s excellent analysis of the play will serve as a launching point for future studies of this important though little-studied text.

Chapter 3 looks at another key set of plays from the contemporary Japanese theatre, Hirata Ozira’s series Seoul shimin (Citizens of Seoul). Staged between 1989 and 2011 and covering the evolution of a Japanese family in Korea during 1909–39, Hirata’s plays have been criticized as apolitical. Nakamura argues that they instead employ what philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya calls “response-ability” (ōtō kanōsei), “a dialogic relationship activated when a [End Page 265] person is called to by another” (xvi), as a response to generational difference and an effective method for addressing colonial concerns.

The fourth chapter focuses on Shimida Yoshiko’s durational performance piece Becoming a Statue of a Japanese Comfort Woman (2012–15). Echoing the Peace Monument statue erected in Seoul in 2011, which presents a Korean comfort woman sitting in a chair with an empty chair next to her, Shimida sat in numerous locations, including the Japanese embassy in London and the aforementioned Yasukuni shrine. While both the statue...



中文翻译:

跨代纪念:当代日本的表演与亚太战争 杰西卡·中村(评论)

代替摘要,这里是内容的简短摘录:

审核人:

  • 跨代记忆:当代日本表演与亚太战争杰西卡·中村
  • 大卫·乔特纳
跨代纪念:当代日本的表现与亚太战争。杰西卡中村。表演作品系列。伊利诺伊州埃文斯顿:西北大学出版社,2020 年;第 240 页。

或许没有什么事件比 1931-45 年期间的十四年亚太战争对日本的 20 世纪的影响更大。从 1949 年的新剧《岛(志摩)》到1960 年代和 70 年代的先锋派安古拉shōgekijō运动,战争的原因和影响一直是剧作家、导演和表演者的素材来源。在 1980 年代的平静之后,在 1990 年代和 2000 年代出现了另一波戏剧和表演浪潮,它们研究了与战时行为相关的道德和责任。这些后期作品是中村杰西卡的优秀专着《跨代记忆》的焦点. 在这项引人入胜的研究中,她将戏剧和文化“重影”理论与能剧的图像、主题和思想交织在一起,以研究当代日本戏剧如何唤起、反驳和探索战时的文化传承。结果使年轻一代能够看到太平洋战争的历史、证词和官方叙述所涉及的多重含义。

中村将她的研究分为六章,并附有简要介绍和结论。第一章探讨了东京靖国神社的多场表演,这是日本战争死难者的官方纪念碑。尽管一些日本人将这座神社视为日本英勇战死者永灵的故乡,但其他人则将其视为日本战争罪行和殖民主义历史的遗产。Nakamura 揭示了神社的地理环境如何与周围观众和重演者的具体游行表演相结合,以具体化有关战争的帝国叙事。她将这一点与对小泉明郎的《男人情节剧#5:死去英雄的声音》的考察进行了对比(2009),其中小泉打扮成一个倒下的士兵,蹒跚地回到神社。中村认为,这项工作挑战了重演的空间和具体表现。这两场表演共同反映了靖国神社不同的态度和文化记忆。

第二章考察了神风飞行员的历史和遗产,体现在三部作品中:电影《永园 0》《永恒的零》,2013 年)、今井正幸的戏剧《上帝之风》(1988 年)以及小泉 2009 年的表演和视频作品到 2014 年。中村透露,这些作品的潜在意识形态反映了对神风人物的不同关注,电影中“英雄牺牲”的比喻与今井和小泉进行的历史审讯形成鲜明对比。特别有趣的是她对上帝之风的分析,长期运行的两人表演已被拍成电影(日语和英语)和日本电视连续剧。据我所知,在英语学术的第一部主要作品中,在这部受欢迎且重要的作品中,中村考虑了该剧的多次迭代,以展示今井如何能够在很长一段时间内重新调查和重新审视这个历史偶像。Nakamura 对剧本的出色分析将作为未来研究这个重要但很少研究的文本的起点。

第三章主要是从日本当代戏剧表演的另一个关键集,平田Ozira的系列首尔市民首尔市民)。上演于 1989 年至 2011 年之间,涵盖了 1909 年至 39 年期间韩国日本家庭的演变,平田的戏剧被批评为与政治无关。中村认为,他们转而采用哲学家高桥哲也所说的“反应能力”(ōtō kanōsei),“当一个[End Page 265]人被另一个人召唤时激活的对话关系”(xvi),作为对代际差异的回应以及解决殖民问题的有效方法。

第四章重点介绍 Shimida Yoshiko 的持续表演作品《成为日本慰安妇的雕像》(2012-15)。与2011 年在首尔竖立的和平纪念碑雕像相呼应,该雕像展示了一位韩国慰安妇坐在椅子上,旁边有一把空椅子,Shimida 坐在许多地方,包括日本驻伦敦大使馆和上述靖国神社。虽然这两个雕像...

更新日期:2021-06-28
down
wechat
bug