Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan traces the “Manchuria of memory,” a map of Japanese and Chinese recollections about the colonization and decolonization of Manchuria, the geographic area in Northeast China that the Japanese ruled between 1931 and 1945 (p. 3). Today, Manchuria stands as what Pierre Nora would term a “site of memory,” a lieux de mémoire. In place of geopolitical history, Mariko Asano Tamanoi presents collective—and at times contested—Japanese and Chinese memories of empire.
These memories come to life through accounts of the colonial period and the collapse of the Japanese empire from an array of communities, each affected in some way by the arrival of some 322,000 agrarian colonists sent by Japan to Manchuria between 1932 and 1945. Among them, there are Japanese agrarian settlers repatriated from Manchuria between 1946 and 1949, Japanese children who were either abandoned or orphaned after the war and raised by Chinese families until many chose to “return” to Japan in the mid-1970s, Chinese parents who adopted Japanese children, and Chinese people who more generally speaking experienced and lived through Japanese colonial rule. A sociocultural anthropologist, Tamanoi's analysis explores the complex relationship between history and memory, aiming to understand how colonial articulations of power in Manchuria during the age of empire have informed the Japanese postwar up to the present day.
By “memory map,” Tamanoi does not mean visualizations of former communities and sites as they used to exist, but rather a complex web of popular memories represented in written and oral sources such as testimony, memoirs, autobiographies, interviews, and recollections published by women's groups and school associations. Relying on many sources published by small, local presses and not widely circulated, Tamanoi is able to share a variety of voices reflecting colonialism's culture and legacies in postwar China and Japan.
The concept of the memory map also functions as an organizational device. The book's four core chapters explore distinct yet overlapping memory maps related to Manchuria: oral histories, repatriate memoirs, orphans’ memories, and Chinese people's memories. The first memory map (chapter 2) is about Japanese agrarian farmers from Nagano who settled in Manchuria. This chapter is based on oral histories that Tamanoi conducted over the span of nearly a decade (1988–96), as well as those carried out by historian Yamada Shôji in the early 1970s. The second memory map recounts former farmers' experiences being repatriated to Japan between 1946 and 1949. The third memory map is about children born to Japanese settlers in the 1930s and 1940s who were abandoned or orphaned in China in the aftermath of the war. The fourth and final memory map offers a counterpart to Japanese memories by exploring Chinese reminisces, especially those of the couples who adopted abandoned Japanese children.
Tamanoi is concerned with how Japanese, Chinese, and Japanese-Chinese (the Japanese children adopted by Chinese) narrate their past experiences during and after the colonial period from their standpoint in the present. She relates how mass media such as Japanese television news programs, interest and aid organizations such as the Japan-China Friendship Association, and the state (Japan, China, and the United States) alter such memories according to their own interests, playing a role in what is “remembered” and what is forgotten. For instance, Tamanoi illustrates in “Chinese People's Memories” (chapter 5) how Chinese state-sponsored compilations of reminisces transcribed in the 1980s and 1990s are influenced and framed by post-1949 Chinese communist credo. The narratives about colonial Manchuria tend to accentuate such themes as exploitation and class difference. Examples such as this buttress Tamanoi's argument that memories are “constructions of (and often for) the present” (p. 5).
Tamanoi connects the past to the present in other interesting ways as well, suggesting that the modern-day tourist business and so-called memory industry (kioku sangyô) of the 1980s beckoning Japanese to revisit the former empire as participants in package tours is not altogether unlike the state-sponsored immigration apparatus that exhorted groups to emigrate to Manchuria en masse in the 1930s. The notion of nostalgia that is associated with such tours is of particular interest to Tamanoi, who aims to understand what drives some to feel so nostalgic for a time and place that caused great suffering.
Tamanoi's ethnographic research and use of oral history are the book's strongest selling points. Particularly arresting are the stories of Japanese “orphans” left behind in Manchuria in the aftermath of war. In some cases, desperate parents resorted to tying their babies and toddlers to trees and scattering crackers around them in hope that their children would be sustained long enough until a local Chinese came along to rescue them. A fortunate few were adopted by Chinese couples who raised them as their own. Such stories underscore the painful familial divisions produced by the collapse and dismantling of empire, but also point to some interesting unions that took place as well—the adoption of Japanese children by Chinese parents and the marriage of young Japanese women separated from their parents to local Chinese, for instance. The story of division is much stronger, of course, and Tamanoi's discussion of Japanese “orphans” who elected to leave their Chinese adoptive parents in the 1970s to find blood relatives and permanently settle in Japan reflects a lifetime of hardship and rupture. Statistics from 2006 indicate that 60 percent of “returnees” to Japan were dependant on welfare (p. 131). Their aging adoptive parents back in China continue to struggle as well.
Although Tamanoi recognizes that her story is far from complete—that her memory map must be expanded to include more Chinese and Korean perspectives—she succeeds in weaving together a tapestry of voices that relate the devastating human effects of empire, as well as ways in which power relations in the colonial past continue to inform history and society in the present.
