The Japanese government claims (widely criticized - see here) that the Fukushima reactors have been stabilized and the threat of further hydrogen explosions removed, but now the Japanese public faces a new source of concern.

Meat from more than 500 cattle fed with irradiated straw from the area around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has been sold to Japanese consumers. The beef was tainted with radioactive Cesium released from Fukushima Daiichi and contaminating straw by up to 500 times standard levels. With beef prices in the vicinity of Fukushima plummeting, farmers raced to market their cattle in the months following the nuclear meltdown. Previous findings of radioactive contamination were reported for spinach, milk, fish and tea leaves.

Government officials, caught unprepared by the beef contamination findings, are racing to ascertain the extent of the problem and threat to public health. It is now known that beef with three to six times the standard radiation safety level has made it onto the plates of consumers and it is also being reported that contaminated meat has been sold in 43 of Japan's 47 prefectures, including by Aeon, the nation's largest retailer.

Recommended citation: Asia-Pacific Journal Feature, "Japan's Irradiated Beef Scandal," The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 30 No 5, July 25, 2011.

Although international consensus has it that the Japanese people are unusually reluctant to face their own wartime past, this generalization has never been entirely true, as regular readers of The Asia Pacific Journal already know.  Like human beings everywhere, since 1945 Japanese have debated the lessons of war and disagreed about its meaning among themselves.  And, also like people everywhere, many Japanese regret both official policies and widespread individual behaviors of the past. They not only desire reconciliation with Koreans, Chinese, and other Asians, but also recognize that, as Japanese, they cannot dictate its terms. Some have already entered into cross-national dialogue about the war and the colonial violence that reached its crescendo during the war years.  Moreover, precisely because reflection on such issues is uncomfortable, they struggle over how to do so, often turning to oblique or refracted approaches, what Dora Apel calls "the sideways glance," such as through literary or artistic expression. Both this ambivalence and these strategies are human rather than Japanese traits.   

Visual artists, filmmakers, and fiction writers have far more experience expressing complex and contradictory emotions than do historians, so their prominent role in memory studies globally is not surprising.² They show us how to convey the complex and sometimes messy individuality of actors.   When we appreciate the ways that people are simultaneously well-meaning, bigoted, intelligent, obtuse, flawed, internally contradictory, and/or troubled human beings, it is easier to recognize the individuality of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, while still acknowledging the actions that divided them as groups.   Artistic work also directs our attention to the processes of imagination and to affective linking, explaining why some acts of historical imagination feel so much more satisfying than do others.  Finally, identifying these contradictory qualities helps indicate a standpoint that can make reconciliation possible.

Rebecca Jennison is a professor at Kyoto Seika University in the Department of Humanities, Division of Culture and Arts, and an Asia Pacific Journal.  She is active in a variety of feminist and peace networks. She recently curated with Fran Lloyd  (Kingston University London) The Art of Intervention Now - London & Kyoto at the Fleur Gallery, Kyoto Seika University.   Her most recent publications include, with Laura Hein, Imagination Without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility, Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2010.

Laura Hein is a professor of Japanese history at Northwestern University in Chicago and an Asia Pacific Journal coordinator.  Her most recent publications, in addition to the book edited with Rebecca Jennison mentioned above and its companion website, include "Reckoning with War in the Museum: Hijikata Teiichi at the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art" Critical Asian Studies, 43.1 Winter 2011, pp. 93-110 and "Japan, the Vulnerable, and All of Us" foreword to Dreams of Repair, Eleanor Rubin Milan: Charta, 2010.

Recommended citation: Rebecca Jennison and Laura Hein, Against Forgetting: Three Generations of Artists in Japan in Dialogue about the Legacies of World War II, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 30 No 1, July 25, 2011.