The Art of Defeat

For my presentation about human storytelling in the aftermath of war, I will make short clips from my film, ANPO: Art X War, that tells the story of the organized resistance to the American military presence in Japan that proliferated in the 1950s and culminated in a national democratic uprising. In order to make the film, I excavated hundreds of artworks that had been hidden away in museum storage vaults and personal archives throughout Japan for nearly half a century. As the dormant art comes back to life on screen, it provides a portal into the subjective experience of millions of Japanese through the artists’ original pictorial and artistic strategies they invented to represent their struggle to make sense of their lives.

The paintings Nakamura Hiroshi, for instance, exemplify the singular power of art war that art to represent war in its aftermath. Nakamura was 12 years old when he watched his native city Hamamatsu incinerated overnight. He acknowledges that he was traumatized by the war and the fear, which infected his imagination. In the early 1960s, he created a series of large paintings suffused with fantastical crimson clouds and landscapes—communiqués from
the terrorized firebombing survivor’s post-traumatic heart.

Japanese contemporary art, including films, is widely respected throughout the world, yet very little of the work directly addressing Japanese memories of war and resistance to U.S. military bases has been seen outside of Japan. As a filmmaker, my intention is to introduce this buried cultural legacy much as historians work with texts and oral histories to assert their interpretations. I will also present the two resulting units (including art by the above painters), in Visualizing Cultures, the image-driven scholarship and learning website created by Dr. John Dower, which provide unique educational resources to teach this neglected era of Japanese history.