Symposium: Between War and Media

[Aaron Gerow]

Apologies for cross-posting

	We would like to announce that an international symposium entitled 
"Between War and Media" will be held at the Maison Franco-Japonaise in 
Tokyo for three days between March 25 and 27, 2002, with support from the 
Tokyo University Institute of Socio-information and Communication Studies 
and the Japan Foundation. Discussions will range from the historical 
relationships between war and media in the twentieth century to the 
issues raised about media after the September 11th attacks, so we 
encourage a wide variety of participants. Papers will be presented in 
English, Japanese or French, with simultaneous translation.

Inquiries:
	Maison Franco-Japonaise: Hayashi Haruo (Tel: 03-5421-7641; e-mail: 
h.hayashi at mfj.gr.jp)
	Tokyo University Institute of Socio-information and Communication 
Studies: Yamamoto Takuji (c/o Yoshimi Shunya office) (Tel: 03-5841-5920, 
fax: 03-3811-5970, e-mail: taku at isics.u-tokyo.ac.jp)

BETWEEN WAR AND MEDIA: International Symposium 2002

March 25-27, 2002
Maison Franco-Japonaise Hall

Hosted by the Maison Franco-Japonaise
Co-sponsored by the Tokyo University Institute of Socio-information and 
Communication Studies
With support from the Japan Foundation

Aim of the Symposium
	The twentieth century was a century of wars.  From two world wars to the 
Vietnam and Gulf wars at the end of the century, armed conflict has 
tended to frame the twentieth century.  The desires, consciousness, and 
memory of wars in this age have also been deeply entwined with the 
period's media, from cinema to radio, from posters and photojournalism to 
television, from recent satellite communications and the internet to the 
thorough manipulation of information during the Gulf War. At the same 
time, war has offered revolutionary opportunities for the development of 
the media in the twentieth century.  One can think of the twentieth 
century as a media century, and as a century of war, with both aspects 
indivisibly interrelated.
	Recalling this history, one can say that the twentieth century first 
opened with World War I, a total war that overturned the nineteenth 
century model of limited war. Total war, as a form of conflict, caused 
fundamental transformations in the social organization of the nation 
state. Then World War II and its holocaust, exercised in total accordance 
with the system of total war, sparked a level of self-destruction unseen 
since the dawn of humanity, one that threated to upset even the basic 
conviction in civilization.
	War has continued to grow in the half century since the end of World War 
II, from the nuclear balance of the Cold War, which multiplied the 
possibilities for "overkill" of the entire human race, and the 
innumerable irregular guerrilla wars in the postcolonial situation, to 
the Gulf War, which reduced death to the elimination of blips on a 
screen, and the bombing of Kosovo, which was discussed as if it was the 
first realization of the concept of "pure" war.  The media have been 
deeply involved in each of these processes, just as they have 
proliferated under the decisive regulation of war's metamorphoses.  
	Now, we are at present witnessing the ultimate combination of war and 
media at the entrance to the twenty-first century. In fact, we are 
possibly already "living in wartime." With the incidents on September 11, 
2001, the vast majority of people are learning of developments in 
America's "strike back against Afghanistan" by means of transnational 
satellite media such as CNN and Al-Jazeera; at the same time, through 
such media, they are able to represent this "war" for the first time.  
Not only that, but it is clear that the events of September 11 were, in 
the first place, planned and "performed" from the beginning with the 
assumption they would be captured by television cameras. As all was being 
media-ted, nearly 4000 people lost their lives in an instant.
	The trends of the war that has just started are as yet unclear. Yet 
there is no doubt that media will become an essential condition for 
structuring our perception of the world, even if this war becomes one 
fought on a global scale, or even if it presents new aspects never 
conceived before. War, as a perpetually uncanny event, will drag us 
towards a new horizon of perception and cognition. And media, one must 
add, is steadily becoming unavoidably involved with this horizon of 
perception itself.
	That is not all. After the attack on the World Trade Center, a certain 
funerary condition began to disseminate, centered on the mountain of 
rubble that remained. Manhatten suddenly started to be described as a 
"warzone," and those that died there were decorated with numerous 
American flags as America's innocent dead, as heroic victims of war.  The 
image of airplanes slamming into high-rise buildings, like the scenes of 
Kennedy assassination or the Challenger disaster--perhaps with a tension 
far surpassing these--have become national images, America's memory.  
This "memory of terrorism" or "memory of war" has come into being, been 
manipulated, and started taking root as a new collective memory.  The 
genuine sorrow of people who lost relatives and loved ones has come into 
conflict with actions that are trying to channel these feelings towards 
techniques of national memorialization.  In that, the public memory of 
the incident is being created.  However, one wonders how attuned people 
can be to the fact that this form of mourning can also become a form of 
deep cultural forgetting with regard to another set of dead.

	With this conception of the issues, we plan to hold an international 
symposium entitled "Between War and Media" at the Maison Franco-Japonaise 
for three days between March 25 and 27, 2002, in hopes of elucidating the 
historical, perceptual, critical and contemporary relationship between 
war and media.
	At the symposium, participants will re-address the relation between war 
and media in the twentieth century from a standpoint grounded in the 
conditions following the events of September 11, 2001.  As a starting 
point, Carol Gluck, the historian from Columbia University, will commence 
the three days of discussion with a keynote address.
	Next, we have organized four sessions. The first, "Images of Wars/Wars 
of Images," will reinvestigate from a historical perspective the 
complicated relationship between the apparatus of image media and the 
event of war.  Session two, "Media of Memory: Narrating the Battle 
Front," will focus on war and collective memory, as well as on media as 
their mediative force.  In the third session, entitled "From Media Crisis 
to Counter Media," participants will measure the depth of the crisis in 
today's media, where globalization and nationalism, war and military 
conflict intermix, and try to conceive what hope lays within such 
conditions.  Finally, session four, "Between War and Media," will look 
back to trace how the questions posed in the keynote address were 
clarified in each of the sessions, and attempt to offer some preliminary 
answers. In general, after the keynote speech on the first day, the two 
sessions on day two will reconsider war and media in the twentieth 
century from a historical viewpoint, while the last sessions on day three 
will try to develop these issues from a contemporary perspective.
	In the breaks between our discussions, we plan to present film works 
with a deep relation to the symposium's topic, as well as display wartime 
propaganda materials from the collection of the Tokyo University 
Institute of Socio-information and Communication Studies.


PROGRAM

Day One: Monday, March 25, 2002

18:00-20:30
Place: Maison Franco-Japonaise Hall (same below)

Keynote Address: What's Wrong with This Picture?: War and Media in the 
20th and 21st Centuries
	Carol Gluck (Columbia University)
	MC: Pierre Souyri, Director, Maison Franco-Japonaise


Day Two: Tuesday, March 26, 2002

10:00-13:00
Session 1: "Images of Wars/Wars of Images"
	Presenter 1: Aaron Gerow (Yokohama National University)
		Fighting for Viewers: Wartime Japanese Film and the Asian Audience 
	Presenter 2: Ikui Eikoh (Kyoritsu Women's University)
		Imagining Infamy: Photographic Traumatization and the "Act of War"
	Presenter 3: Helene Puiseux (Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes)
		From Everyday Televisual Images to the Construction of Imaginaries 
through Two Examples: the Gulf War and the Post 9/ll Conflict
	Chair: Narita Ryuichi (Nihon Women's University)

Outline
If the twentieth century was a visual age, its wars were fought as much 
with images as with guns.  From the cinematic propaganda machine to 
military controls on television news reporting, what was shown and how it 
was shown was an essential part of the war to "win hearts and minds" both 
within the nation and without, to construct citizens and soldiers as well 
as allies and enemies.  Not only were the events of September 11, 2001, 
shaped by the technology covering them live, those pursuing the ensuing 
war were as much concerned with Al-Jazeera as with the visualization of 
Afghan targets. Yet modern image media like photography, cinema, and 
television were not simply new tools for effecting the same propaganda 
purposes as previous media; as Paul Virilio argues, in their apparatus 
they manifested the changing logistics of the perception of space and 
time in alignment with new kinds of war.  This session will thus not only 
consider how war and its violence have been represented in images, but 
ask historically how the twentieth century media that served as the 
foundation for the condition of September 11, in the articulation of 
their apparatuses, have changed the manner in which wars are fought and 
their images produced, distributed, and consumed. 

15:00-18:00
Session 2: "Media of Memory: Narrating the Battle Front"
	Presenter 1: Kinoshita Naoyuki (University of Tokyo)
		The Memory of Yet Another "Previous War" within the "Previous War"
	Presenter 2: Beatrice Fleury-Vilatte (University of Nancy)
		French Television and the Memory of the Algerian War 
	Presenter 3: Jacques Walter (University of Metz)
		Photographic Testimonies of the Nazi Concentration and Extermination 
Camps: The Stakes of Current Debates
	Presenter 4: Marita Sturken (USC)
		Memories of Terror: American Memorializing in Oklahoma City and New York
	Chair: Iwasaki Minoru (Tokyo University of Foreign Languages)

Outline
This session will shed light on what has never been easy to interpret: 
the memory of war. The memory of hate and of pain that war has created 
and has frozen, over the years begins to warp and become twisted and 
repressed, turning into a blank or a scar seemingly impossible to put 
into words, one that takes possession of people's temporality.  Of the 
three presentations, first Kinoshita Naoyuki of the University of Tokyo 
will turn the clock back and clarify historically how memories of the 
Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the wars that led off the 
twentieth century, were shaped and applied. Then Beatrice Fleury-Villatte 
of the University of Nice will argue how, in the case of the Algerian 
War, the memory of the violence of colonialism and the war for liberation 
were molded by later media. Finally, using these first two cases as a 
background, Marita Sturken of the University of Southern California will 
take up the problem of unearthing the mechanisms of collective memory in 
media, especially in light of the circumstances after September 11.


Day Three: Wednesday, March 27, 2002

10:00-13:00

Session 3: "From Media Crisis to Counter Media"
	Presenter 1: Yoneyama Lisa (University of California San Diego)
		Americanization of Japanese Crimes Against Humanity at the End of 
Post-Cold War
	Presenter 2: Tessa Morris-Suzuki (Australia National University)
		The Missle and the Mouse- Virtual Peace Movements in an Age of Terror
	Presenter 3: Kitahara Megumi (Konan University)
		War and the Imperial Family on Media
	Chair: Yoshimi Shunya (University of Tokyo)

The discussions on the first two days of the symposium will have shown 
how war has always been accompanied by and represented through media 
during the twentieth century.  In that era, media did not simply record 
and cover war from without, but rather become a part of war, defining it, 
representing it, and mediating its memory and various reenactments.  In 
this session, we will intersect the historical perspectives offered on 
the previous day with a contemporary viewpoint and consider the problem 
of the representation of war in today's media and forms of expression 
through such issues as sexual violence and the comfort women, the 
emperor's war responsibility, gender and imperialism/colonialism in 
representations of war, terrorism and the globalization of media, the 
crisis and possibility of the media, and media and the war of revenge 
against Afghanistan.


15:00-18:00
Session 4: Summary Discussion: "Between War and Media"
	Chairs: Iwasaki Minoru, Yoshimi Shunya
	Panelists:	Sebastian Conrad (Free University of Berlin)
			Carol Gluck
			Beatrice Fleury-Villatte
			Tessa Morris Suzuki 
			Marita Sturken 
			Narita Ryuichi
			Aaron Gerow
			Kang Sang-jung (University of Tokyo)
			Others

Outline
In this session we will offer a general debate about the issues raised 
during the three days. First, Sebastian Conrad of the Free University of 
Berlin will take up the task of organizing the points of argument 
developed in each of the sessions. On the basis of that, the keynote 
speaker and representatives from each of the first three sessions will 
again attempt to develop and generalize these problems. Through this, we 
hope to offer preliminary conclusions about issues such as: 1) 
appropriately positioning the specifities of such media as propaganda, 
cinema, memory, and memorials, in both Asian and Western contexts, amidst 
the complex interelationship between the twentieth century as a media 
century and as a century of war; 2) correctly positioning from a 
post-Cold War perspective the Japanese army's invasion of Asia, the 
comfort women issue, the Emperor Hirohito's war responsibility, as well 
as other related problems involved in the narration of war within Asia 
and under American control, from the Korean to the Vietnam War; 3) 
accurately presenting, given a consciousness of circumstances after the 
attacks of September 11, a critical perspective on what is the present 
stage of the relationship between war and media and what kind of escape, 
resistance, and opposition is possible.


Aaron Gerow
Associate Professor
International Student Center
Yokohama National University
79-1 Tokiwadai
Hodogaya-ku, Yokohama 240-8501
JAPAN
E-mail: gerow at ynu.ac.jp
Phone: 81-45-339-3170
Fax: 81-45-339-3171