The Never-Ending Pacific War: Imamura Shohei on the Ruse of Memory

Abstract

This article focuses on three documentaries made by the acclaimed director Imamura Shōhei (1926–2006) for Tokyo Channel 12 between 1971 and 1973. The three documentaries – In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia (1971), In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Thailand (1971); and Outlaw Matsu Returns (1973) – challenge contemporary accounts that valorise the Japanese state as the ultimate political agent of progress. Imamura presents his documentaries as exposés into the actual operations of collusion between the Japanese ruling elite and business, and the ongoing linkages between militarism, autocracy and Japanese prosperity. Each of the three documentaries interrogates how Japan's relations with other Asian nations are deformed by the ruse of memory, by focusing on Japanese war responsibility and the unfinished history of the Pacific War: a war that is not a problem of yesterday but of the today. In his documentaries, Imamura investigates how the spectre of the war lies heavy on the present, not only for the Japanese people, but also for the peoples who inhabited the regions occupied by Japan that became the bloody battlefields of the Pacific War.