[Feature: Passing Down the Memory of War] Roundtable Discussion: What and How to Communicate 80 Years After the War

This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the war. Keio University is a university that suffered significant damage during the war, and it also holds war remains such as the underground bunkers of the Combined Fleet Headquarters in Hiyoshi. Given the reality that almost all direct witnesses of the war are gone, I have asked you all to gather here today to consider how we can pass on the story of the war through the remaining testimonies and artifacts. We have a particularly large number of participants from the younger generation this time.

Regarding the phrase "passing on the war" in the special feature title, I would like to use it in a fairly broad sense in this roundtable discussion. In other words, I do not want to limit it to the meaning of simply inheriting the memories and written records of those who experienced the war as they are.

For example, it means first accepting the various discourses related to the Asia-Pacific War that have been generated through academic research results and the activities of post-war generation citizens as "narratives."

I believe that you all receive such narratives and, from your respective positions at that point in time, transmit your own narratives. I want to include the practice of receiving such narratives and continuing to transmit them in the phrase "passing on the war." Perhaps we could call it connecting the stories of the war.

First, I would like everyone to introduce themselves and talk about what triggered them to start their efforts to "pass on the war," or what they have been talking about. Since I am the oldest among us, I would like to start by introducing my own efforts.

My specialties are archaeology and museology, and until the beginning of the 21st century, I was researching the Yayoi period. How I became involved with the Asia-Pacific War was triggered by the discovery of the entrance to the Imperial Navy's underground bunker during the construction of the Mamushidani Gymnasium on the Hiyoshi Campus, which was built for the 150th anniversary project of the Juku in 2008. I was the one who investigated it.

That was the first time I encountered the world of Asia-Pacific War narratives. In Yayoi period research, "academic narrative" is overwhelmingly strong. In other words, the history told by researchers becomes history for the general public as well. In contrast, in the world of "war narratives," the presence of people outside of academia is very large. I noticed this, was shocked, and came to deeply reflect on the nature of my own narratives.

From there, while thinking about what can be told archaeologically about war remains, centered on the Hiyoshi bunkers, I have been working to connect the diverse narratives of people from various positions and create a space for dialogue.

At first it was only Hiyoshi, but since the operations commanded by the Combined Fleet Headquarters in Hiyoshi naturally covered a wide area, I have been practicing connecting narratives by linking it to places like Kanoya City in Kagoshima Prefecture, which was the center of aerial suicide attack operations, Okinawa, where suicide attack units departed for, and more recently, the Taisha Base in Izumo City, Shimane Prefecture, a large-scale naval base built at the end of the war.

Also, as I carry out these practices, I inevitably have to face the issue of preserving war remains, so I am also researching the problems surrounding the preservation and utilization of war remains.

Next, I'd like to ask Ms. Okawa, who is participating online today.

After graduation, I moved to the Marshall Islands and worked there for three years. After returning to Japan, I made a documentary film called "Tarinae" about Japanese soldiers who starved to death on those islands, and I edited a book on historical practice regarding the diaries of Japanese soldiers that form the core of the film ("Marshall, My Father's Battlefield").

The reason I became conscious of the war myself might be the existence of my grandfather. My grandfather was 17 years old when the war ended. He said he felt deeply that "what the school or the country says is not necessarily correct" through the experience of his teacher apologizing that what they had been teaching at school until yesterday was wrong, and his values being flipped upside down. When I was about a preschooler, he would often tell me stories from that time whenever we met.

When I was 17, it was the 60th anniversary of the end of the war. Even then, there were discussions in the media and elsewhere about what to do as the war witnesses were disappearing. As a generation with no experience of war, while I was thinking about how to live without contributing to or being caught up in war, I learned that high school students in Nagasaki were regularly conducting signature campaigns calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, there are American high school students who grow up receiving an education that says "it was good to drop the atomic bomb." Imagining what kind of dialogue I could have when I meet them in the future, I received signature sheets from high school students in Nagasaki, recruited friends in Tokyo, and collected signatures on the street. A momentary encounter with passersby through signatures—I was interested in how the voice saying "for a world without nuclear weapons," which suddenly appears in everyday scenery like commuting routes, would resonate in Japan 60 years after the war. The reactions were varied, but I also felt a large temperature difference between Nagasaki, the site of the atomic bombing, and Tokyo.

For me, "thinking about war" is connected to remembering the words whispered by people I passed on the street while they signed, the gazes that made me feel certain that their thoughts were entrusted to me even in silence, and the memory of watching the backs of those who walked away saying they couldn't sign. Later, I arrived at the tool of film as a form of expression and dialogue, but I think the starting point of my practice of "passing on the war" lies in the signature campaign on the street.

I am a reporter in my fifth year and have little experience, but I was born in Koto Ward and attended an elementary school near the Sumida River, which was damaged in the Great Tokyo Air Raid. At school, there were opportunities for an elderly man from a local shop to tell us stories about the war. I heard stories about how the area turned completely white at night due to the dropping of incendiary bombs, and how the bodies of people who jumped into the river were floating, and they were buried by digging into the embankment and pushing them in.

There was an air raid memorial on my school route, and it was a shocking formative experience to learn that the places I passed by casually left scars of war and were scenes of unimaginable hardship.

I have a brother three years younger than me, but in his time, it seems the opportunity to hear those stories had disappeared. Even though the age difference was small, I felt a sense of crisis even as a child that the war was no longer being talked about. Because of this experience, I wanted to be involved in the narrative of the war in some way.

As a reporter, I was first assigned to Oita Prefecture. I covered stories about the Naval Air Corps in Usa City, where there was a suicide attack base, and the air raid at an elementary school on Hotojima Island in Tsukumi City where 127 children died.

In my current assignment in Miyagi Prefecture, I am covering stories about the air raid on Onagawa Town and the B-29 crash in the mountains of Zao where 34 crew members died, and the local people continue to hold memorials for them.

War is a phenomenon where human "life and death" appear in a concentrated form. That is probably why it becomes various stories, including fiction, but I have been interested in how experiences and history are passed on. Controversies are common in war exhibitions against a backdrop of sharp conflicts of values, but 12 years ago, to write my sociology graduation thesis, I went to investigate the "Yokaren Peace Memorial Museum," a museum for youth naval aviators that had just been built on the shores of Lake Kasumigaura in Ibaraki Prefecture.

There I met an elderly man who had been a boy soldier, and I visited him for about a year to hear his stories and wrote my graduation thesis on the storyteller. I think that was my formative experience.

That man was 17 at the end of the war and did not go into actual combat on a plane. In terms of telling stories about the training he directly experienced, he is half a witness, but when he talks about suicide attack members based on their last letters, he is also in the position of a non-witness. It made me think that the boundary between witnesses and non-witnesses might actually be ambiguous.

In graduate school, I researched the experiences of war and bases of people from diverse positions who lived in that region. Since then, I have continued to write books with an interest in how I, as an outsider, can convey history to local people.

After arriving at the Shonan Fujisawa Campus (SFC), I was surprised to learn that the history of war and bases is buried even in the Shonan coast and Fujisawa City, which have a scenic image, and I am proceeding with investigations.

I also heard stories of my grandparents' war experiences when I was young, but what led me to become seriously involved in historical research on the war was being included in a joint research project called "The Pacific War and Keio University" in the seminar of Professor Atsushi Shirai of the Faculty of Economics, who passed away in March. There, I was trained by sending questionnaires to Keio University alumni of the war-experienced generation, tabulating them, conducting interviews, and receiving various materials.

After that, I went to graduate school and was included in a joint research project on the history of the South Manchuria Railway by Keio's Faculty of Economics and the Jilin Provincial Academy of Social Sciences in China, and I earned my degree in South Manchuria Railway history research. There are various narratives in Manchuria as well.

Another thing is that when Professor Tokura at the Fukuzawa Memorial Center for Modern Japanese Studies launched the "Keio University and War Project," he reached out to me, and I have been providing modest help with symposiums and the creation of databases.

I would like to hear more in detail about what each of you has been doing. Ms. Okumura, could you speak a bit more specifically about last year's survey on the remaining status of war remains?

In a survey of modern remains conducted by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 1998 with a view toward designating them as cultural properties, we sent a questionnaire to 216 municipalities about the status of 642 remains that had been reported by municipalities as "remains related to the military." As a result, about 30% had disappeared or no longer retained their original form.

Some remains have completely disappeared, while others have only one gatepost left. I take it as a shocking result that disappearances are occurring one after another after more than 25 years of being left unattended.

I think war remains will become very important places as sites where not only witnesses but also individual memories, records of archaeological investigations, and narratives about the war are linked, and where dialogue is induced.

On the other hand, the preservation and utilization of war remains are not progressing. There are various problems here, such as the difficulty of designating them as cultural properties, but in the meantime, I learned from Ms. Okumura's survey the shocking fact that about 30% have disappeared.

It is not just that the witnesses are disappearing; there is also the fact that the physical traces linked to the narratives of the war will also disappear if left alone.

I am involved in the historical compilation of Ami Town in Ibaraki Prefecture, and I am currently investigating war remains in the town. When I look around the places that were once written about in reports, I find that weathering is indeed severe, or things that should be there have disappeared.

However, on the other hand, I think quite a few new things are being found. Just today, at the Keio History Museum, I saw a special exhibition ("The Modern Era and War of a Certain Family") about the family of Ryoji Uehara, a student soldier known for his last letter in "Listen to the Voices from the Sea," and I was amazed that so many materials had been kept at his home. It is not just about things being lost over time. I feel we must not give up on the effort to find things that have been hidden.

That's true. There is no doubt that we need to turn our eyes to things that are new, or rather, things we have overlooked, things we haven't seen, and things we haven't noticed until now.

What I think while listening to the stories is that before those 642 remaining remains, there were things that did not remain, and if you pull that toward the side of telling, there are "things that were told" and "things that were not told." In terms of what Mr. Shimizu said, it means there are "things that were newly discovered" and "things that have not yet been discovered."

The first time I saw Ryoji Uehara's handwritten last letter was around 1994, during an exhibition for "The Pacific War and Keio University." He is a very famous person because of "Listen to the Voices from the Sea," but I was overwhelmed by the handwriting and stopped there, and I didn't see the "Uehara family" at all.

I think Professor Tokura's current research is part of a large new trend of going beyond that and connecting various things to look even at "daily life." By making things visible that were not visible before, telling and thinking about the war from the perspective of "daily life" makes it so that various people think of it not as "someone else's business" but as "their own business." In that sense, I think it is an important breakthrough or angle.

On the other hand, since I am working on Manchuria, naturally that research also connects with China and its surrounding countries. I think it will also be necessary to think about so-called global history and world history in a way that relativizes nationalism.

History that starts from an individual or a family and spreads out might be a framework like microhistory or microstoria in historical terms, but there is also history from a different global perspective. These are not contradictory, and I think the search for how to connect them is very important.

Ms. Okawa, I believe you are active in exactly those kinds of global areas.

One of the reasons I am fascinated by the Marshall Islands and continue to visit them even now is that by tracing the history of the people I meet in the Marshalls, I can touch upon unknown connections with Japan. There were people who crossed the sea and nurtured deep personal relationships during the era when it was called the Marshall Islands of the Great Japanese Empire, but after the war, the Marshalls became completely invisible in Japan. The "80 years since the end of the war" is an era in which Japan forgot the Marshalls so that it could forget the memories of the war.

However, even now when I visit the Marshalls, I constantly feel that "the war has not ended." In the war remains of the former Japanese military left abandoned next to private houses, in people's names, and in language and songs derived from Japanese, memories of deep involvement with Japan are engraved and alive in daily life. The people of the Marshalls remember in various forms what we have forgotten. I hope to bridge the gap by passing on even a small part of that memory gap.

The other day, I went to Kwajalein Atoll, an island that was a site of fierce fighting during the war (now a US military missile test site). On a small remote island within the atoll, I was told "there are Japanese things here too" and shown around, and inside a thicket that had turned into a jungle, a thick liquid was covering part of the ground surface.

I was told "this is oil," and when I put my nose close to smell it, there was a strong smell of gasoline. Large drums were in a decayed state surrounding that area, and on the ground, gasoline brought in by Japan 100 years ago was shining like pine resin.

When I talked to the landowner of the island, he said that the island might have functioned as a gasoline station, a relay point for supply ships and the like. Hearing that story was the first time I could imagine countless warships stopping by this island for supplies, but if I hadn't gone to that island, I wouldn't have known that this small island was an important base during the war. I still don't know so many things, and every time I go to the Marshalls, the people I meet teach me.

I think this overlaps with what Professor Ando said about the diversity of narratives, but one of the reasons I continue to go to the Marshalls is because "I don't know anything at all."

There are indeed many things you can't understand unless you go to that place. Encounters are very significant in the practice of telling the story of the war. I am currently focusing on communicating to the public rather than academia, and at those times, it's a problem if people think "he knows everything because it's academic."

I say, "You all know more, so let's do it together." The Asia-Pacific War is such a massive phenomenon that no one can tell the whole picture. Since even the most brilliant researcher can only tell a part and only from a biased perspective, I think it becomes very important to meet various people and connect the narratives that are generated there.

Ms. Okawa's book, "Marshall, My Father's Battlefield," deciphers the diary of a Japanese soldier who starved to death in the Marshalls with the help of researchers from diverse specialized fields, and it was edited with the involvement of a truly wide variety of people other than researchers, such as bereaved families and writers. It is probably an example where collaboration was realized very successfully. I still think it is a miraculous thing that Ms. Okawa was able to do that.

I think so too. It is a wonderful piece of work that makes me feel jealous.

That was entirely due to the encounter with Rintaro Okada, an editor who left the publishing house he was working for at the time and started an independent publishing house called Mizuki Shorin in order to make it a book that would reach far. He put all his effort into re-capturing the war in the Marshalls, which is still rarely talked about, by placing imagination at the center so that it could be felt closely.

I was also shocked by the diary of Tomigoro Sato in "Marshall, My Father's Battlefield." Until now, the history told at the Combined Fleet Headquarters underground bunkers has almost never been connected to the fact that Japanese soldiers left in the Marshall Islands starved to death.

But they are parallel in time, and the fact that the Combined Fleet Headquarters became so weakened that it had to hole up in an underground bunker led to the tragedy in the Marshalls. I strongly felt that we must connect this more to the history told at the Combined Fleet Headquarters. There are always "unseen" parts like this, so noticing and connecting them is very important.

The commander of Tomigoro Sato's unit was Shinichi Yoshimi, who entered Keio's School of Medicine in his 50s after the war and became a doctor, right?

Yes, Shinichi Yoshimi was the last commander of the Navy's 64th Guard Unit, to which Tomigoro Sato belonged. Of the approximately 3,500 garrison members sent to Wotje Island, more than 2,700 died, many of them from hunger.

At the time of the defeat, Mr. Yoshimi was 51 years old. He studied hard for entrance exams starting in 1946, shortly after the war, and successfully passed into Keio's School of Medicine. For 33 years until the age of 91, he walked a "second life" as a pediatrician. I want to connect such post-war ways of living as stories for passing on the war.

It's irrational, but I think there's a sense of guilt if you don't chant sutras. We have that in our place too, but in front of the furnace, even a long sutra chanting is 5 minutes. You bring a temporary mortuary tablet with a posthumous name, and that's the end of it.

The form of funerals is changing rapidly. In the past, for example, the first seven-day memorial was something done after the cremation was finished, but now the first seven-day memorial is done before the coffin leaves. Even the monks who were strict about form and said "that's no good" have eventually accepted it now. Therefore, the form of rituals is decided by everyone who receives them and the values of society, rather than by things like Buddhist legitimacy. I think Buddhism adapts to that.

We have been told for a long time that eventually the war witnesses will be gone. How do you receive this fact that "war witnesses are disappearing," and what are you thinking about for the time after that? On the other hand, what is the meaning of having war witnesses present, what is lost when they are gone, and what must we do in response?

From the perspective of remains, I think that when people are gone, objects lose their meaning. I mentioned my elementary school days earlier; sometimes you don't know what a monument there means unless there is someone who knows the background. In my coverage of war remains last year, there was a case where a huge air-raid shelter in Sendai, whose location was unknown despite having records, was identified by relying on the story of a war witness who happened to come to an exhibition.

I feel that "people being there" is important for understanding the importance of objects and for finding new objects.

That certainly happens. On the other hand, how do things that have been recorded—that is, things that have become "information"—differ from the testimonies and memories told by witnesses?

These 80 years after the war have been an era in which information technology has diversified dramatically and the war has been recorded in various media. A massive amount of text, photos, and videos remain.

The elderly storyteller I mentioned earlier also tried to pass it on to future generations by burning his lecture videos onto DVDs during his lifetime, anticipating his own death. Even now that he has passed away, you can see his lecture videos and such if you search for the name Reiki Tobari.

One could conversely take the view that we are surrounded by so much history that we cannot see it all, as we have developed technologies to record, replicate, and transmit on information media without relying solely on raw personal narratives in person. While this opens up possibilities for excavating and utilizing them, it becomes even more important to critically examine the process by which records have been left. Generally, when experiences become information, they are neatly edited, and many elements fall away.

That said, it's not a simple matter of just going back to testimonies. In an era when it has become difficult to interview those who went to the battlefield, if you only listen to the voices of the people in front of you, it will be biased toward specific generations, such as those who were children during the war.

That bias has already reached its limit, and we are being asked how to think about a situation where the utilization of archives is indispensable. And how do we face the existence of the many who left this world without saying or writing anything? Mr. Hirayama, what do you think about that?

In the Shirai seminar at that time, we sent questionnaires to over 7,000 Keio University alumni, and when they came back, one of the things that became a point of discussion was that "the war dead cannot answer."

We hear stories from people who had various experiences, and while they themselves have a sense of guilt, they do tell us. In that sense, "narratives" are inherently biased to begin with. And those with battlefield experience are dying off first, and we have reached a stage where we only hear stories from those who have no memory of the air raids but were being carried on someone's back while fleeing, and now, finally, it is becoming zero.

On the other hand, in relation to databases, the institute of technology I belong to has a curriculum that incorporates data science and information engineering, and the hot word is "generative AI."

When doing research such as oral history, I wonder what would happen if we put all the narratives related to the Asia-Pacific War into generative AI. I also think we might be at a stage where the destination for passing things on, or the destination for leaving and accumulating them as memories and records, has progressed that far.

If that happens, the "specialized knowledge" held by researchers might be "released" from a certain kind of ascetic position, and there is a possibility that stories that no one has listened to until now will come in. I think it is already decisive that we cannot read all of the narratives, so I think we should consider how to connect such things.

Certainly, when trying to analyze vast amounts of information and derive some kind of pattern or trend from it, there is a limit to the amount a human can read, so I think using AI will become absolutely necessary from now on.

Also, regarding Mr. Shimizu's point, if we assume that we cannot understand the war unless we hear the stories of witnesses, we might conversely lose sight of the vast number of memories and testimonies that have been recorded since during the war, including the diaries of suicide attack members. This is something that people like Yoshiaki Fukuma have also pointed out. On the other hand, even without using AI, I think it is possible to expand from each individual word, just as Ms. Okawa became deeply immersed in Tomigoro Sato's diary.

I think AI is something that could collect everything, including the impressions of those who heard the testimonies, criticisms of the storytellers, and impressions of the things exhibited. There is no need to limit it to narratives in Japanese.

The other day, NHK broadcast a documentary that used AI to analyze private footage of Eva, who became Hitler's wife. One point of emphasis was to reveal who was in the footage through facial recognition, but another was that since it is silent footage, they had deaf people in Germany use lip-reading to transcribe what they were talking about.

Using the "skills" of such people, research is progressing in Japan to use AI to transcribe what people are saying in silent footage as "narratives," and including such things, I think we are entering a stage where narratives are being gathered more widely. I have an image of AI as a kind of non-predetermined database where they all come together across positions.

As those with direct experience disappear, I find myself questioning attempts to collect countless narratives through generative AI and pass down a "war experience" based on the greatest common denominator. A "narrative" is something individual and specific—an experience that could only happen because that person was in that place. I think it is difficult to imagine, through narratives where an AI instantly summarizes specific examples with one click to convey them clearly, that actual survivors' narratives involve hesitation, getting choked up, and changes depending on the listener or the speaker's condition that day. AI requires careful annotations for reference only, and media literacy on the part of the receiver is also necessary.

While I have those fears, it might sound contradictory, but my first encounter with the Marshall Islands was through Google's search engine. It was right around the time search engines first appeared, and when I searched using the words "nuclear" for nuclear weapons, "environment" for environmental issues, and "development," a study tour to the Marshall Islands came up.

While benefiting from the development of information and technology, "war"—something I had never consciously searched for—began to flow into me more and more after visiting the Marshalls. Without thinking about war, I couldn't think about nuclear issues, the environment, or regional development. As I confronted and reacted to each thing I encountered, I felt I had to start by studying the war.

In my case, I came to want to know about the war by going outside of Japan, but I think the timing of when that switch of interest is flipped varies from person to person. In exchange for convenience, I strongly feel that the direction of people's interests and their selection of information are being controlled by technology, acting in a way that could unconsciously create new divisions or lead toward war. I believe we must become increasingly cautious about how we use technology in the future.

It is extremely important that Mr. Tomigoro Sato's diary was written by hand. If it had been composed using a mobile phone or a computer, I don't think I would have read it over and over like this.

As the diary ends—as his death approaches—his handwriting becomes increasingly erratic. Until the very end, Mr. Tomigoro wrote in very fine characters, and tracing those strokes allowed me to imagine his personality, thinking, "He must have been a very serious and meticulous person." To those of us who never met him and do not know war, a diary written in longhand teaches us many things.

When trying to pass down the story of the war, no matter how much technology develops, I believe there will be no change in the need to return to analog objects where one can feel the human warmth and texture that cannot be fully conveyed through digital information.

Ms. Okawa's attitude of facing the diary sincerely and throwing her whole self into it is a very important part of the practice of narrating the war. I feel it also connects to the "humility toward history" advocated by Mr. Shimizu.

To add a little more, while AI is currently popular for "standardized" use in business, I want to support the possibility of it entering more "unknown" zones for research purposes. Since we cannot read everything, and if things that should have existed are going to disappear, I think the point to consider is first accumulating them as data and then figuring out how to extract them.

For example, if you "search" the accumulated narratives by "date" and "place name," narratives about a certain place at a certain point in time come flooding in. Previously, you couldn't reach them without carefully reading separate items one by one, but if they are kept in a digitized form, it can become a database that always possesses novelty, allowing us to connect narratives that were previously unconnected. I think there is also the possibility of "visualizing" the position that a narrative about a certain place at a certain time occupies within the "entirety of narratives."

Watching "Tarinae," I can see that Ms. Okawa's work is very close to that of a historical researcher, working from primary sources, and I felt a sense of "empathy." The excitement of seeing primary sources is something historical researchers cannot suppress.

On the other hand, since it is difficult for everyone to do the same, I see potential in the use of AI in that accumulation through digital technology might bring new possibilities and realizations to many people.

The framework that starts from a single small encounter and expands from contact with people, and the framework that analyzes large amounts of information, might be close to the contrast between microhistory and global history.

That said, in the practice of narrating the war, it seems many people are committed to proceeding from a single small point.

In terms of research, I am also on that side.

Ultimately, we are drawn in by meeting a single, specific individual. There are accidental and fateful encounters, including objects like cenotaphs and diaries, and that individuality becomes the entrance and the catalyst for history.

On the other hand, database-like things that provide a broad bird's-eye view also serve as a means to understand more deeply what kind of position each of those individuals occupied. While Ms. Okawa's "countless individuals" are specific and unique, realizing that there were many others who lived similarly helps support the process of broadening one's perspective.

In newspaper investigative reports, we show eye-catching overall figures on the front page, like "30% of War Sites Disappeared," and then on the inside pages, we depict the reality of the disappearing sites or the experiences of survivors as related articles. Individual narratives are indispensable to convey the meaning of numbers persuasively.

Newspaper readership is also declining significantly, but I write with the hope that these words will catch the attention of even one of the few remaining readers. Listening to this talk, I felt that we must not give up on finding and recording people who can speak while many are passing away, in order to spark interest through accidental encounters with articles.

Building up from individual data is what is called "name identification." The ideal is to connect all kinds of information by each person's name and build up from there to form an "overall picture," which might allow someone to understand that their own relative or acquaintance was doing such-and-such.

Due to privacy issues, individual names are often removed in quantitative analysis, but it is quite difficult to accept those results as a "personal matter." While protecting the effectiveness of analysis results in explaining the whole, I want to value the kind of "intensity" that comes with using "real names" when building up from individuals.

The most frequent item among many collected doesn't necessarily resonate the most with the heart. I think it's okay to have a "bias" in the form of the experiences of a minority. If real names are used, I feel that bias won't become one-sided. I believe there are discussions where a biased part strikes a chord with someone and expands from there.

That's true. It would be dangerous in a world where bias is amplified in one direction, but if everyone is biased and the result is balanced, there might not be a major problem.

Before I knew it, I've been involved in war narratives for nearly 20 years, and looking back, I've become somewhat curious about the changes in students' awareness of war during that time.

How do you all feel about the current state of awareness, interest, and indifference toward war? Ms. Okawa, you started from a point where there was no interest at all in the Marshall Islands from Japan—what do you think about this shift in interest?

The film "Tarinae" was released in 2018, and seven years have passed since then. During that time, new wars have unfortunately broken out in the world, so I feel that for today's elementary, junior high, and high school students, war has become something that is not distant.

In 2018, at the time of release, war was a distant thing. Recently, there has been an increase in comments from viewers saying they watched it with a strong sense of crisis that Japan might participate in or get caught up in a war in the future. Now, war is not a distant story; it is narrated and viewed in comparison with ongoing wars.

A nine-year-old boy once asked a very simple question: "Why don't they clean up the cannons and other things the Japanese military brought to the Marshall Islands instead of leaving them there?" Unraveling the complexities of war from such straightforward questions is a valuable part of the dialogue time after a screening.

Reactions vary slightly depending on where it is screened, but I learn every time I show it that the way the film is viewed changes each time depending on the timing of the viewing and the current global situation—that a film is a living thing.

What do the rest of you think about the idea that war has come to a place that is not far from us?

I am sometimes struck by the words of survivors who speak while overlapping their own experiences with what is happening in Ukraine or Gaza. I think, "Is this the scenery they saw 80 years ago?" I feel the sense of proximity is increasing. On the other hand, some people worry that when they tell elementary school students about the tragedies as they were, the students don't find them realistic, saying it's "like a game." I feel we must continue to convey it by being creative with our approach.

Among the members of my research group, only one student chose the war of 80 years ago as their theme. I could lament that the current generation of students (born in the 2000s) has no interest, but conversely, I think it's only natural that indifference is the default. Even in my generation (born in the 1990s), I think I was considered an oddball for being interested in the war.

My research group doesn't fly a banner like "Passing Down War Experiences"; instead, we use fieldwork as our theme and walk through the Tsujido district of Fujisawa City. When I researched after taking my post, I found there was the Fujisawa Naval Air Group, which trained teenage soldiers for the Yokaren (Naval Preparatory Flight Advisory Group). The vast training grounds of the former Imperial Japanese Navy on the Chigasaki and Tsujido coasts became a US military training ground after the war, and there is a history of movements for its return. There is a large shopping mall on the north side of Tsujido Station, but that large site was a factory, and if you trace it back, it was a munitions factory built during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The munitions factory was bombed at the end of the war, and an ammunition explosion accident occurred at Tsujido Station during the US occupation, resulting in deaths.

No traces remain in the form of ruins anymore, but we can unearth the memories buried in the land and imagine the things that once existed here. As we walk through the town and delve into the origins of how the casual everyday landscape was formed, the war often peeks out.

In terms of our immediate daily lives, we can also think about the war within the campus, like in Hiyoshi. Reading the archaeological excavation reports for SFC, I found that nine bunkers were dug within the campus during the war.

That is the interface of the individual, specific accidental encounters I mentioned earlier. By walking without explicitly calling it a war heritage program from the start, it becomes an encounter accompanied by a bit of surprise.

If we start from war sites, we touch some trace of the war there, or feel that we are in a space where a war once took place. When some information about the war is linked to this actual sensation, it becomes an experience beyond just hearing it with one's ears, and I think one can feel connected to the war. I believe that is one power and meaning of objects and places.

For Ms. Okawa, I imagine the feeling of being immersed in the Marshalls holds very significant meaning.

My starting point was the desire to talk about the Marshall Islands in Japan, so I chose film as my method. In the Marshalls, I encounter many things that cannot be easily summed up or simplified. I wanted to value emotions and fluctuations that come before words—such as the feeling of guilt for not knowing, or the inner turmoil of not knowing how to react—so I chose film as an expression that leaves polysemic information to the receiver.

Also, this is one of the reasons I continue to visit the Marshall Islands: in the Marshalls, schools have only recently begun teaching the history of the hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, and many people have never heard direct accounts from their parents or grandparents. Regarding stories of the war, they are considerate toward me as someone from Japan, trying not to say things that might make me feel uncomfortable. Rather, unless I tell them I want to know anything and everything, the people of the Marshalls are very thoughtful and try to build a good relationship.

No matter how much technology advances, there are things between humans that can only be understood by meeting face-to-face. Especially on islands where layers of time can be felt, there are still people and places I cannot encounter and stories I cannot hear unless I take the time to meet again and again and build relationships, so I continue to visit.

Building rapport is the most important part; things only open up once you enter among the people. It inevitably takes time. In any case, it is certainly true that there are many things that can only be seen by immersing oneself in a place, creating connections with people, and having various experiences.

On the other hand, some students have an allergy to Japan being criticized from abroad for what it did during the war. Since students speak freely in active learning classes, there is a risk of things like hate speech emerging in response to such criticism.

If I, as a teacher, unilaterally impose a "correct answer," it ceases to be an active learning class. I am trying various things, but I facilitate so that the discussion is not a linear one toward a conclusion, but rather a roundabout discussion.

What I tell students is: the fact that we are still told about what was done in that war is, conversely, a reflection of the fact that we haven't done such things since then. Isn't it the flip side of the "value" of Japan not having started a war for these 80 years? If we had been at war with some country 10 years ago, wouldn't they be talking about that first? I do this hoping they will re-examine the issue of aggression and the post-war period with the "sense of time" of a historical researcher.

With international students from various countries present, I do this while thinking that such roundabout discussions might lead to peace.

War is a massive phenomenon consisting of relationships between enemies and allies, killing and being killed, so it is inevitable that narratives will become diverse depending on which standpoint and which scope one narrates from.

It is a very large and difficult problem, but it might be better not to think of the rejection of critical views toward Japan by the younger generation as a judgment based merely on superficial knowledge.

Yes, it's not that I don't understand the feeling of not wanting to be told that emotionally. However, one must still think from the other person's perspective about why they are saying that. What does it mean that "we aren't being told about things from 10 years ago"? It's not good to be unaware that it's because we have been at peace.

I am being made to realize that I need to become more aware of the "sensitivity" and "unconscious" that support the opinions of the younger generation, separate from the content of historical knowledge or SNS-like emotions.

I believe that not rejecting or excluding such opinions will be a challenge for passing down the story of the war from now on. If we dismiss them out of hand as being academically wrong, biased, or superficial, the dialogue ends there.

Since everyone is biased in some way, I think that by connecting different directions of bias through dialogue, extreme biases will gradually be corrected.

Exactly, because each other's biases bring realizations. We mustn't dismiss things out of hand or say yes or no based only on an academic standpoint.

Trying to understand by standing in the perspective of people who think differently from yourself is different from agreeing with them. Realizing that "it looks that way to those people" is the basis of fieldwork and interview research. I think the logic that researchers should not make categorical assertions is similar. If understanding and agreeing become stuck together, there is no room to listen to opposing opinions, and I think that is where division deepens.

Aren't there many moments where you strongly feel that kind of bias, such as in opinions sent to the newspaper?

It's hard for opinions on newspapers to reach a news agency, but even if it's an opposing opinion, there is meaning in interest being shown, and it becomes a catalyst for me to re-learn things myself. So I hope to gain deeper knowledge through criticism.

That said, there are also accusations based on clear misunderstanding, so in those cases, I supplement the next piece with knowledge or background. I want to avoid having the brunt of criticism directed unintentionally at the people who cooperated with the interview.

If the academic side takes an attitude like "this result is the correct one," it ultimately ends the dialogue there. In fact, what people who engage in hate speech are doing is the same—they are cutting off dialogue themselves. That is why I believe the academic side must not discard opinions as meaningless, no matter how much they differ from academic views, but must connect them to dialogue. Actually, that might be the thing academia is worst at.

I have something I'd like to ask everyone at the end. I've been wondering, what is the "purpose of narrating"? I'd like to hear what you envision or aim for.

I feel that putting effort into opening up spaces for narration—where people around them, rather than the parties involved, ask to hear voices that are difficult to speak—is connected to honing the skills to live without war.

I don't want to let go of the effort to make the world we live in now even a little bit better. If I just wish for that, I tend to fall into despair easily on my own, so if I can foster relationships where we listen to each other's narratives with someone other than myself, it becomes a safety net for mutual support, even if it's only within a very small radius. That is not the purpose of narrating, but perhaps it is the light that narration brings.

I think there is a danger in fixing the purpose. When the purpose is decided and programmed, it becomes a pre-established harmony. The pre-established harmony accumulated over the 80 years since the war has been unconsciously incorporated into the practice of passing things down. For example, no matter what is narrated, the sharp reality of individuality is dissolved into a correct but abstract and grand narrative like "I learned that peace is important."

However, in war narratives, there are many parts where we cannot understand what is being told. After all, we haven't experienced war, and even if we had, we probably wouldn't understand what those who died experienced.

That is the opposite of pre-established harmony, and in a positive sense, it should be okay to have a frank reaction like, "No, I really didn't understand." To borrow the words of historian Minoru Hokari, that encourages "standing before the gap." So, making the closing of the gap the purpose itself might be a trap.

The other day, I spoke with a 90-year-old woman who was born and raised in Tsujido. I was listening to her memories of life in Tsujido rather than stories of the war, but at the end, the topic of military land came up, and she told me, "When my brother, who was two years older, was playing with bullets he found at the training ground, an unexploded shell went off, and he lost his left hand."

That episode certainly shook me and the students. The brother who lived with a prosthetic hand because of the unexploded shell has already passed away and cannot speak, but his younger sister, now 90, suddenly thought to tell us, who were born 60 or 70 years later. The motivation for telling it and the details of the event are still full of unknowns. But a heavy impact remains. That's what raw narratives of war are like.

I don't know if this is a good way to put it, but I think narrating the war is the "branding" of a country that hasn't started a war for 80 years. I want people to value the fact that the meaning is clear even without putting "post-war" in quotation marks.

On the other hand, as a historical researcher, I want to narrate in order to excavate new historical materials, discover new facts, and enrich the context. Those are the two, if you ask for a purpose.

Thank you all very much.

I have come to wonder whether we can truly narrate such a massive and complex event as the Asia-Pacific War.

Do you mean whether it can be fully narrated so that it is conveyed correctly to the listener?

Yes. From there, conversely, I've come to think we need to look at the fact itself that humans caused something that cannot be understood even after all this time.

We might also have to consider whether the Asia-Pacific War, which is full of unknowns and can be narrated in any way depending on one's standpoint, will ever be narrated as history, or if it will fit into the framework of history.

Listening to everyone's stories, I thought that such incomprehensibility of history—the parts that can never be fully narrated—might, in a sense, be the meaning of us passing down the story of the war.

Thank you very much for your time today.