Registers of Memory and the Child as Critical Witness of War and Defeat

This study explores the life stories of Japanese children repatriated from north-east China after 1945 to explore the complex pressures on memory and personal stories of Japan’s defeat and its consequences. These stories are multi-vocal: while nostalgic tales of settler childhoods in Manchuria, and stories of the child as victim in the postwar, are highly visible in popular culture, recent academic studies have shown that children were purposefully drawn into the cultures of war through education and entertainment. A closer examination of personal stories shows that Japanese children - once loyal supporters of the war effort - might become ambivalent or even critical witnesses to conflict and its aftermath, as their stories were marked by loss and trauma inflicted within the Japanese community as well as by external Others. This study will consider the implications of these differing registers of memory for family history-making as well as for public discourse: while self-narration of the child within the family is central to the making of personal and social identity, self-narration by the child as witness to conflict potentially disrupts everyday and imagined communities alike.