“Army Messenger” and Trauma Theories
Medoruma’s depiction of how the Battle of Okinawa has affected first- and second-generation war survivor characters in “Army Messenger” substantiates elements of the existing body of trauma theory' regarding first- and second-generation trauma. The first-generation war survivor, Tomori’s father, displays elements of traumatic dissociation, repression, and reenactment of his war experience related to the violent death of his friend Iju. For the second-generation war-survivor characters Kinjo and Tomori, their encounters with the ghost of the headless army messenger exemplify Marianne Hirsch’s notions of affiliative postmemory, for the character Kinjo, and familial postmemory for the character Tomori.4 Both Kinjo and Tomori’s sightings correspond to Gabriele Schwab’s articulation of hauntings as manifestations of unresolved trauma of the previous generation (Schwab 2010).
Tomori’s father’s shift from being a reliable and stable family man to a neglectful tavern owner and husband obsessed with trying to find the ghost of Iju corresponds with psychoanalysis and trauma theory elaborations on how the mind responds to a traumatic experience via dissociation, repression, and reenactment.5 Before Tomori’s father noticed the headless army messenger in the photograph, he was described as very honest and upright, avoiding alcohol and gambling, and indulging only in benign hobbies like bonsai, fishing, and photography. His shift, however, after seeing Iju’s image, to repeated and increasingly dangerous excursions into the night streets of Koza that adversely affects both his personal and professional lives, suggests that the initial stability was enabled by some level of dissociation and repression of his war experiences on the battlefield. In order to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the horror, pain, and guilt of Iju’s violent death, Tomori’s father has managed to avoid thinking about it. Additionally, his failure to see Iju’s ghost when he took the photograph that captured it, suggests the relegation of Iju to his subconscious. Once Iju has been brought to his conscious mind via the photograph, Tomori’s father begins re-enacting his initial search for Iju during the war and his excursion into the night of the Koza riots. These repeated reenactments indicate trauma that has yet to be, or is in the process of, being worked through.
“Army Messenger” also deals with second-generation trauma, portraying how war trauma can affect the children of war survivors and other members of a community born after the war. Second-generation Holocaust survivor Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” refers to the knowledge, imaginings, and understandings that the children of survivors of a collective atrocity have concerning the traumatic experience of their parents. Unlike memories of a lived experience, “postmemory” is primarily mediated through images, stories, attitudes, and other expressions, while also informed by the intimate understanding of how the atrocity has psychologically affected one’s parents (Hirsch 1997, 22). Hirsch later makes a further distinction between postmemory that is familial, or absorbed through an intimate family connection, and that which is affiliative, or acquired by people whose parents did not directly experience the atrocity in question (Hirsch 2008). In “Army Messenger,” Kinjo’s sighting of the headless army messenger is an example of affiliative postmemory, while Tomori’s sighting corresponds to familial postmemory. Kinjo’s affiliative knowledge of the Battle of Okinawa has made him aware that the land he lives on was a battle field in which many lives were lost, but he has no conscious family connections to the area and has no knowledge of Iju. While his subconscious mind may have registered the image of the headless army messenger from the photograph displayed in the cocktail bar, he had no knowledge of Iju’s story. Tomori’s encounter with the headless army messenger, in contrast, holds more meaning for him due to his knowledge of his father’s war experience, and Tomori’s own witnessing of how his father was affected by Iju’s death. While both forms of postmemory are filled with unanswered questions and uncertainty, Tomori’s familial connection invests Iju’s ghost with more intense emotional resonance and meaning for him.
Ghosts within “Army Messenger” can be explained through theories about transgenerational trauma. Gabriele Schwab, for example, interprets “haunting” and ghosts as forms of the subconscious remnant of trauma from a previous generation:
Traumatic historical legacies may be transmitted individually via unconscious fantasies of parents and grandparents as well as collectively through the cultural unconscious. Psychoanalysts have theorized such transmission as a form of psychic haunting, arguing that both children of victims and children of perpetrators unwittingly live the ghostly legacies and secrets of their parents and the parental generation.
(Schwab 2010, 77)
The ghostly hauntings of Koza that manifest as the headless army messenger in Medoruma’s story are directly connected to the war experience of the previous generation. Although Tomori and Kinjo never lived through the Battle of Okinawa, Tomori would have been exposed to the unconscious trauma of his parents, and both would have absorbed psychic remnants of trauma via the collective cultural unconscious. Tomori’s rebellious middle-school and high-school years, which correspond to his father’s period of obsession and neglect, can be interpreted as a response to his father’s traumatic reenactments and repressed experiences. Although Kinjo appears to have no direct connection to a former Blood and Iron Corps student soldier, his Okinawan name and familiarity with the Koza area indicate that he is likely Okinawan, and would have grown up not only hearing stories about the Battle of Okinawa and student soldiers on a regular basis, but would have sensed the psychological anxiety connected to the
Transgenerational Hauntings in the Landscape of Okinawa, Japan 165 unspeakable horrors of the war. As second-generation Holocaust survivor Eva Hoffman observes, children of survivors of atrocity can sense, even on a subliminal level, the psychic pain of their parent’s traumatic experiences (Hoffman 2004, 60). Within the context of growing up in Okinawa and living near the site of the army messenger’s decapitation, the ghostly sighting of the army messenger by the generation born after the war suggests some form of transmitted trauma among those both with and without parental, or direct familial, connections to the war.
Haunted Landscapes and Transgenerational Trauma in
“Army Messenger”
“Army Messenger” not only substantiates existing theories of trauma, but also challenges and extends contemporary understandings of them. Medoruma’s story’ reveals the importance of landscape and sites of atrocity for trauma and transgenerational hauntings, aspects of trauma that have been largely overlooked within Schwab’s theorization of haunting legacies which does not consider the role of place. Spectrality studies scholars such as Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, meanwhile, regard phantoms and ghosts as rooted in particular places, although not necessarily as manifestations of unresolved transgenerational trauma (Blanco and Peeren 2010, xvii). The ghostly presence in “Army Messenger” inhabits a particular location, demonstrating spectrality studies’ understanding and awareness that ghosts are deeply connected to places. Combining Schwab’s notion of ghostly hauntings as transgenerational trauma with Blanco and Peeren’s understanding of the intimate connection between hauntings and place, the following analysis seeks to tease out the role of landscape and place in relation to transgenerational trauma. I argue that the landscape in “Army Messenger” contains visible markers of the ongoing military domination of Okinawa by the United States as well as constitutes the hidden sites of wartime atrocity and violent death. Furthermore, “Army Messenger” expands understandings of transgenerational trauma’s connection to the landscape by depicting how hauntings are intimately connected to and conditioned by ongoing and unresolved legacies of the Battle of Okinawa and Okinawa’s neocolonial relationships with the United States and Japan. As I will demonstrate, in the story the various structures and buildings on the streets of Koza which reflect the city’s base-town economy, not only physically manifest the conditions of US military occupation, but also magnify feelings of anxiety and awaken subconscious fears connected to sites of past atrocities in the wake of contemporary acts of violence. Finally, I argue, “Army Messenger” challenges a therapeutic reading of traumatic hauntings in Okinawa by suggesting the dilemma of reconciling a violent loss within the conditions of neocolonial and military' occupation and oppression.
For Okinawan war survivors, living in the very' sites of war atrocity, death, and mass violence of war constitutes the material as well as psychic sites of the traumatic past. For the children of survivors and generations born after the war, growing up in and near the sites of incidents of atrocity and violent death involves witnessing how the landscape mediates trauma for the survivor generation. Accordingly, such witnessing cultivates second-generation sensitivity to the affective meanings inscribed within sites of atrocity and the traumatic landscape, conditioning what I have called geographically proximate postmemory (Ikeda 2012). This stands in contrast to Marianne Hirsch’s articulation of postmemory, which is primarily based on second-generation Holocaust survivor experiences of exile and dislocation. Hirsch’s parents, as well as an overwhelming majority of Holocaust survivors, left the locations where the Holocaust occurred, relocating to the United States or Israel. Accordingly, the role the landscape and sites of the traumatic past play in relation to traumatic memories were not directly felt or witnessed by the children of Holocaust survivors during their formative years of childhood if their parents had relocated to distant lands and foreign countries. As Michelle Balaev, a critic of dominant models of trauma theory, has asserted, the nearly ubiquitous application of Holocaust trauma theory in the analysis of other forms of trauma has resulted in an excessive emphasis on the “talking cure” at the expense of examining the role of the landscape for the process of working through trauma (Balaev 2012, 28-29). Schwab’s prescribed solution for “ghostly hauntings” follows in the vein of the “talking cure,” invoking the breaking of silence:
Only a process of breaking traumatic silence and revealing a buried secret can help to exorcise its ghostly alien presence from the inner world. Such a process entails one’s taking responsibility for one’s actions, working through guilt and shame, and mourning unbearable loss.
(Schwab 2010, 80)
Schwab’s notion of hauntings not only focuses on the importance of breaking silence, it also locates the phantom in the psyche, the “inner world” of those who have received the cryptic traumas of the previous generation. Schwab’s focus on the inner world and the centrality of breaking silence, however, does not take into consideration the impact of sites of trauma and traumatic landscape on survivors of atrocity and their children. The actual sites, locations, and physical spaces in which acts of atrocity and violence occurred, the very places where trauma originated, although briefly mentioned, are under-examined in Schwab’s analysis of transgenerational hauntings.6
Within scholarship in speciality studies, however, hauntings and ghosts have been understood as deeply connected to places. As Ruth Heholt discusses in the introduction to Haunted Landscapes, “[gjhosts do not merely belong to the past; they are current, present entities that exist, or at least manifest (in whatever manner), somewhere" (Heholt 2016, 5; emphasis in the original). Whereas Schwab locates such phantoms solely in the psyche, Blanco and Peeren argue for understanding ghosts “in spatial terms, as a physical occupation of everyday sites that emphasizes the materiality of the ghost and defines its agency as grounded in a particular locale -in a disturbance of space as much as of time” (Blanco and Peeren 2010, xvii). Adding these insights and assertions by Blanco, Peeren, and Heholt regarding the importance of place in relation to hauntings, specters, and ghosts to Schwab’s articulation of hauntings as unresolved inherited trauma that
Transgenerational Hauntings in the Landscape of Okinawa, Japan 167 does not discuss place, I propose to examine the role of the landscape, sites, and specific locations within “Army Messenger” in relation to hauntings as the manifestations of unresolved trauma from the previous generation.
