visas & virtue

[Aaron Gerow]

Discussions have gotten a bit heated on this issue, so I do remind people 
to contain themselves.  And while the issue is very important, also try 
to keep it close to the subject of the list: Japanese moving image 
culture.

In order to do the latter, I would like to revive a few important points 
that seem to have gotten lost in the discussion.

1) Why is NHK reporting this and in what way is it doing so?  While I do 
think the story of Sugihara is important, I can't help but think that 
current media coverage of it becomes inevitably linked to the discourse 
of Fujioka Nobukatsu and other neonationalists who want to create new 
"Japanese heros" on which to rebuild national pride.  The filmmaker's 
intention in making his film was clearly to create a locus for building 
Japanese-American identity, but we have the problem here when a text 
crosses the boundaries of discursive fields and is now going to be used 
to construct Japanese national identities.  What are the problems/changes 
involved in that?

2) Most of the discussion so far has focussed on the issue of 
"concentration camp" vs. "internment camp."  This is an important issue 
for those in the U.S. and elsewhere, but I would ask what it means in 
Japan?  Birgit's initial post implied that NHK was not innocent in 
connecting the Sugihara/concentration camp issue to the Japanese-American 
internment issue.  We can argue about how to link the two phenomena 
historically/politically/culturally, but I think one question that 
remains is again how the Japanese-American internment issue is being 
articulated in terms of the contemporary Japanese identity politics.  
That is, perhaps there is something about the structure of NHK discourse 
(it is, of course, a "public network") which made it less interested in 
developing the Nazi concentration camp issue in relation to the film, 
than the Japanese-American internment issue.

Again, just a few questions related to the image issue.

Aaron Gerow
KineJapan owner