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Zainichi Cinema pp 159–187Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Arirang Kamikaze: Screening the Memory Wars

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Abstract

In its depiction of Korean conscripts fleeing the Japanese imperial army, Pacchigi! Love and Peace (Izutsu Kazuyuki, 2007) entered the ‘memory wars’, the ideologically crowded contest over the historical meaning of the war and the imperial project. The film was released within weeks of I Go to Die For You [Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku] (Shinjō Taku, 2007) and was hyped as contesting the latter film’s representation of the war. I Go to Die For You, scripted by the then governor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintarō, also depicted a Korean soldier, a kamikaze pilot based on Tak Kyung Hyun, who is commemorated across a number of media including the war memoirs that Ishihara adapted for the film, kamikaze memorial museums, television documentaries, and a prior film adaptation of the Torihama memoirs, Firefly (Hotaru) (Furuhata Yasuo, 2001). The means by which an economy of memory condenses around figures such as Tak, metonymically making them stand for the entire imperial project, is intimately connected to the melodramatic mode that these films operate in. The fantasy of historical reconciliation presented by Firefly cannot however displace the sense of guilty co-implication conveyed in the testimony of those burdened with the flashbacks in these films.

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  1. London, UK

    Oliver Dew

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Dew, O. (2016). Arirang Kamikaze: Screening the Memory Wars. In: Zainichi Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40877-4_6

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