Interview with Professor Yonekura Ritsu: Japan’s Self-portrait Reflected in “August Journalism” – Asking Ourselves Why Is This Passed On?

“It is necessary to question what we want to pass on and why before determining how to pass on the memory of war. Both the media and Japanese society are being tested to see how ‘August journalism’ will move forward.”
Photo: hanako2 / PIXTA

In August of each year, reporting on war and peace abounds. Half jokingly called “August journalism,” the c ontent of this reporting has long been said to be stylized. Through an analysis of the vast number of articles and television programs in this genre, media researcher Yonekura Ritsu sees it as a mirror of society. What kind of role should August journalism play as a postwar Japan approaches a time when those who have experienced war have all passed away?

The dominant type of reporting on war and peace

—— The term “August journalism” is used as irony or criticism towards the media, which reports intensively on war related material at this time each year as if it were a yearly event. It has also been pointed out that the content has been stuck in a rut for a while.

Yonekura Ritsu: There are two aspects of “August journalism” discussions in a criti cal context.

As a matter of fact, there are dates in August that the Japanese people can never forget: the Atomic Bomb memorial days on the 6th and 9th, and the anniversary of the end of the Pacific War on the 15th. There are also several memorial days rel ated to the war on July 7 (Marco Polo Bridge Incident, 1937), September 18 (Japanese invasion of Manchuria, 1931), and December 8 (declaration of war; Attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7 [US time], 1941). According to international standards, the end of Wor ld War II occurred on September 2, 1945 when Japan signed the instrument of surrender, and the fact that Japan considers the broadcast of Emperor Hirohito to his subjects on August 15 as the end of the war is very much like Galápagos syndrome. The first as pect is the issue of this blind spot in memorial day reporting and why, out of many memorial days, certain dates are emphasized and other days are forgotten.

The other aspect is in how war is represented in newspaper articles and television shows, or simply put, the issue of bias in the narratives. This has formed the postwar Japanese view of war and historical perceptions, and at the same time it is a product of it. In other words, August journalism is like an “infinity mirror” to postwar Japan, our o wn “self portrait” so to speak.

These two issues are naturally related but I have come to focus on the narratives in particular.

—— It seems you’ve analyzed 1,654 war related television programs aired in the first half of August (1st to 16th) from the sta rt of broadcasts (in 1953) until 2020 in addition to newspaper articles. What kind of a “self portrait” has been drawn?

Yonekura: The reason behind the emphasis on television is that it has had a major effect on the creation of the image of war among Japa nese people as a popular and everyday national form of media, especially since the late 1960s. Various surveys also show that television is still the most common channel for acquiring war related knowledge.

First, we can divide August journalism narratives into three types: narratives of suffering that tell of the experience of harsh injuries from the atomic bomb, air raids, evacuations, and repatriations, as well as the experience of soldiers’ sacrifices represented by special attack squads and gyokusaisen (“suicide battle”); narratives of postwar history offering self assessments of the history of postwar democracy with the end of the war clearly positioned as the boundary between the prewar and the postwar periods; and narratives of pacificism taking pride in the Japanese people for renouncing war as the only country that suffered from a nuclear attack. The narratives of suffering hold an overwhelming dominant position among the others.

In these narratives, invasion, brutality, colonization, and other aggressive elements are completely left in the background. What is depicted is a self portrait of the people who became victims of militarism.

This view of war and history was caused by the particular characteristics of Japan’s postwar clean up during the Cold War. With the emperor being acquitted at the request of the United States and rights of claim for Western countries being renounced, Japan returned to the international community and pushed forward with economic growth without directly facing its own war responsibilities. The myth of the establishment of Japan rising from the ruins and obtaining peace and prosperity based on the ultimate sacrifice have become a part of Japan’s “collective memory” that has gone beyond the boundaries of the right or left.

— In other words, August journalism was formed in the 1950s?

Yonekura: The San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect in 1952, lifting the ban on reporting on the atomic bomb, which had been banned under GHQ (General Headquarters of the Allied Forces) control and self-imposed regulations. One feature of this is that while there were many depictions of the harsh experiences of bomb survivors, there were few explanations of why the bomb was dropped or how the war had begun. 1955, a year when the Movement to Ban Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs gathered strength, marked a decade since the end of the war and reporting notably increased in response to the Daigo Fukuryu Maru incident from the year before (1954). However, the atomic bomb was depicted as a natural disaster without blaming the United States by name, a kind of misfortune that suddenly descended upon its victims. Curiously, even the country that Japan had been at war with had become abstracted.

Parts of the press were active in discussing war responsibility, but general newspapers do not even mention the issue of perpetration. Including so-called “anniversary reporting,” where the amount of reporting increased on 5-year and 10-year anniversaries, this period of reporting became the prototype for August journalism today, especially 1955.

In many countries, the interpretation of the postwar period following WWII ended in the 1950s, with the last countries ceasing to use this interpretation following the Cold War. Only in Japan does reporting continue to refer to the number of years that have passed since the war. This is an indication that the structure of subordination to the United States, which allowed the war to end without being reviewed, as well as the relationship between Japan and China, South Korea, and other Asian countries has remained fundamentally unchanged.

There was a time when narratives of aggression were brought to the foreground

—— Did this trend of a bias towards narratives of suffering change at all after that?

Yonekura: In the 1960s and 1970s, there was an anti-war movement against the Vietnam War, and relations with South Korea and China were restored, shining a light on Japan’s aggression towards Asia. In the 1970s, when the folk song Senso wo Shiranai Kodomotachi (“Children Who Don’t Know War”) was popular, the senmuha (“war-less generation”) grew to nearly half the population of Japan and the issues of the rapid fading of war experiences and the ritualization of war reporting concentrated in August were brought up. However, excluding some exceptions, such as the documentary Wasurerareta Kogun (“Forgotten Soldiers”), which was broadcast by Nippon Television Network Corporation (NTV) in 1963, and Chugoku no Tabi (“Travels in China”), which became a controversy after being serialized in the Asahi shimbun newspaper from 1971, the underlying tone was persistently that of narratives of suffering.

However, there was a brief period in the 1980s and 90s where narratives of aggression were brought to the forefront. In 1995 in particular, the 50th anniversary of the end of the war, there were many articles and television shows that questioned war responsibility and historical perceptions. Rather than arising intrinsically on its own from the media, this period emerged from external pressure in response to history textbook controversies, comfort women lawsuits, corresponding public apologies, demands for compensation from victims of bombs and forced relocation across Asia, and programs produced in response to action such as the Murayama statement, which expressed feelings of deep remorse and sincere apologies over Japan’s colonial occupation. The main narrative remained that of suffering, but even so, it was a time when there was a chance to transform the closed-off August journalism into something more open.

—— Did interest into aggression not continue into this century?

Yonekura: The 1990s were also a time of backlash, when political and ideological positions struggled over historical perceptions and where there were intense reactions from the right against regret over aggression. Conservative journals frequently expanded upon the discourse that Japan liberated Asia from Western colonization, and neo-conservatism and historical revisionism, such as the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, rose suddenly. This trend has grown stronger since the 2000s, and reporting on war and peace quickly reverted to narratives of suffering, perhaps because the stage shrunk in response to objection and criticism towards articles and television shows.

There were 230 August journalism television programs in the 2000s and 237 in the 2010s, a significant decline in volume from the 294 in the 1990s. During his second administration, former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo did not touch on aggression or regret for eight consecutive years at the National Memorial Service for War Dead on the anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, and this is consistent with narratives of aggression being brought to the forefront in the media. In the first half of August 2015, 70 years since the end of the war, there were 45 war-related television shows, and of those, none were on the subject of aggression. NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) in particular has not produced a single documentary taking on the comfort women issue directly since ETV2001 Towareru Senji Sei-boryoku (“ETV2001 Wartime Sexual Violence Questioned”), which became controversial over whether or not the program was altered due to political pressure.

—— Your awareness of the issues with August journalism seemed to have stemmed from your experiences as a director at NHK.

Yonekura: I worked at the NHK Hiroshima Broadcasting Station for the four years leading up to the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. This was also a time of subcritical experiments by the United States, and I produced a number of programs related to the atomic bomb, including an NHK Special examining the reasons behind why the voices of bomb victims were not heard around the world, but in retrospect, I was caught up in the textbook Hiroshima narrative.

Hiraoka Takashi, the Mayor of Hiroshima who began his second term in 1991, mentioned Japan’s responsibility for its aggression for the first time in his Hiroshima Peace Declaration on August 6. Originally a journalist, former Mayor Hiraoka believed that the Hiroshima ideology did not reach the world because of its weakness based only on victim experiences and the emotions of bomb survivors, as well as poor journalism in its coverage. He believed that, rather than raising Hiroshima up as a sacred place, the city would not be elevated to a universal anti-nuclear ideology unless “atomic bomb nationalism,” which is based on the self-consciousness of being the only country in the world to have experienced atomic bombings and that places the bombings in the wider context of Japanese war, could be overcome.

The media, which included myself, failed to fully accept and imprint these heavy questions by former Mayor Hiraoka.

From the end of the 1990s when the wave of backlash grew stronger, the Mayor of Hiroshima stopped mentioning aggression in his Peace Declaration.

To fight against the rut of traditional performing art

—— What direction should August journalism move towards from here?

Yonekura: Through being an annual event, seasonal war reporting has offered the opportunity to remember the usually forgotten victims and to renew our oath of peace. Stories of suffering, as typified by the manga Hadashi no Gen (“Barefoot Gen”), have contributed greatly to the formation of Japan’s unique peaceful anti-war ideology. Rather than “anti-war,” it is more of a thorough attitude of hatred towards war. As long as Japan remains in the “postwar period,” August journalism has a role to play in passing on Japan’s collective memory to the next generation.

Of course, we cannot simply pass this on as is. Trends over the last decade include the colorization of film and data journalism. At the same time, content daring to showcase a brighter perspective to the lives of ordinary people on the home front stands out, such as NHK’s “#Achikochisuzusan (“Here and There, Suzu-san”)”^[1] project that began in 2019 and is based on the anime Kono Sekai no Katasumini (“In This Corner of the World”).

I understand well the goal of reaching the younger generations. But we cannot deny that this content reeks of “putting old wine into new wineskins.” The war depicted here is abstract, lacking historical context and explanations of the whole picture. In other words, this content has unknowingly inherited the tradition of conventional August journalism narratives. Former Prime Minister Abe dropped the word “history” for the National Memorial Service for War Dead in 2020 which he had used up until that point. If we take a harsh view of this, this may even correspond to a new trend of historical forgetfulness.

In that way, the NHK Special, Jugo no Josei-tachi—Senso ni Nomerikonda “Futsu no Hitobito” (“Women After the Gun: ‘Ordinary People’ Immersed in War”), which featured Dai Nippon Kokubo Fujin Kai (“Great Japan National Defense Women’s Association”), showcased perspectives that were not simply narratives of suffering. The leading roles in the production team were women. This is one sign of a fight against August journalism becoming a traditional performing art.

—— With more than 85% of the population born after the war, passing on the memory of war is a major issue. Recently, the foul phrase “new prewar period” has begun to run rampant as well.

Yonekura: It is inevitable that memories of war will fade as those who experienced it pass away. Even so, if we look outward, Japan’s views on war and its historical perceptions continue to be questioned, symbolized by the profound disagreements over atomic bombs between Japan and the United States and the comfort women issue. To transform August journalism from its introspective nature to something interactive, perspectives must become more diverse, and we must continue to work to bring more layers to the narratives. It is also necessary to diversify the production side, bringing in more reporters and directors with foreign backgrounds.

It is necessary to question what we want to pass on and why before determining how to pass on the memory of war. Both the media and Japanese society are being tested to see how August journalism will move forward.

Interviewed by Ishikawa Tomoya

Translated by The Japan Journal, Ltd. This article appeared in the Asahi Shimbun on August 26, 2023 as “Hachigatsu janarizumu ga utsusu Nihon no Jigazo: ‘Naze’ keishosuru noka jimon wo (Interview with Professor Yonekura Ritsu: Japan’s self-portrait as reflected in August journalism—Ask yourself ‘why’ we inherit something).” Reprinted with permission from Professor Yonekura and Asahi Shimbun (article reprint permission number: 23-2577). Please note that reprinting this article without permission from Asahi Shimbun is prohibited.

Keywords

• Yonekura Ritsu
• Department of Journalism
• Nihon University
• NHK
• August journalism
• anniversary reporting
• war history
• bias
• infinity mirror
• self-portrait
• memory of war
• collective memory
• suffering
• victims
• aggression
• pacifism
• Hiraoka Takashi
• atomic bomb nationalism
• #Achikochisuzusan

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