Nibutani Project/Ainu --Mikako Tomotari

by Tomotari Mikako, Sculptor, Kyushu Institute of Design

---translated from Japanese by Brett de Bary Back

"Recollection-Nibutani Dam", Sculpture in Black Marble

"When I first confronted the Nibutani Dam, I was transfixed. I stood there unable to think. I had not even a fragment with which to recollect the life that had taken place on this site. It was as if I were performing a rite of memorial, but with the sadness of one who has nothing to forget.

The meanings and memories that criss-crossed this dam: how could they be enuciated? Through facts? Through words? Facing layers of sediment, that which had seeped away made itself known to me only in flickers. How could I give meaning to what had accumulated here, or interpret it? I would never be able to produce a work that did more than express my personal experience of it, a futile exercise in self-discovery. Rather than trying to make a thing visible, I let its fissures penetrate my body. For me, this is the process of sculpting.

Fully aware that any knowledge or action of mine could never come into contact with memories of this land, I was nevertheless led on by my awareness of the reality I saw in flickers. In my creative work I sought to fix on one solid point from which to release energy into those elusive gaps and rifts, but everything that seemed like a certainty would shatter and move. The sculpture people now see is just the after-image of the fragments that I assembled and reassembled, again and again.

Now the course of the Saru River has been transformed. But is there any way the thoughts and memories brought to this place could cease to flow? I wanted to make my creative work a process of making connections among those memories, even if they were only fragments. Perhaps it was because I harbored a fear that I myself had no connection with my past, that I had come from nowhere.

It was not my intention to make the "Nibutani Project" into some kind of art or political movement. If I were forced to state the purpose of my work, I would say it was simply to become a device for making each viewer look intently, and to provoke the viewer to keep thinking without being limited by a notion of fixed meaning. My work is neither revolutionary nor an act of struggle. Rather, it exists first and foremost to capture peopleﾕs attentions through their sensations of it. Whatever the thoughts or relationships I take up in my work, they represent just one small cross-section of reality."

Different Aspects of the "Nibutani Project":
"I felt it was important to breathe the air of that land to learn by glimpsing things, as it were, in the interstices of everyday life. I tried to bring many people to Nibutani to assist in constructing the base for my sculpture. I began my work in August, 1998, living in a shed on the Kaizawa family farm. I helped on the farm, while getting my project set up. From this site, I put up a home page on the Web, which I maintained daily: http://www.kyushu-id.ac.jp/~tomotari/nibutaniwork.html

Images 3, 4, 5.
"Long ago indigenous Ainu people lived on this rich land. This is a fact that can never be changed. Together with Kaizawa Koichi, I offer this scupture to those who sought to protect the culture they inherited." (Inscription on base of sculpture.)

Image 6. Kaizawa-san makes an offering of water from the Saru River.
Image 7. Nibutani Dam, with the sculpture in front of it.
Images 8, 9, 10. 11.
"In 1997 I had invited members of the Kaizawa Family to visit the Kyushu Institute of design to teach wood-carving and embroidery at a workshop we held on Ainu culture. In October of the same year I invited Keira Mitsu, author of the book Modernization and Structures of Discrimination Against Ainu (Kindaika no naka no Ainu sabetsu no kouzou, Akashi Shoten, 1996 ), and his wife, to join me for a panel discussion. We discussed issues such as tourism, discrimination, and the restoration of Ainu culture.

We stressed that the situation of the Ainu will not improve until the attitude of Japanese, who create stereotypes about the Ainu, have been transformed and deepened. People make a show of having "correct" attitudes, without engaging the real problems. I also learned that good will and a sense of joy (so often undervalued) can generate the strength to follow through where difficult matters are concerned. We have to realize that the actions of actually meeting Ainu people and listening to what they have to say constitute a form of understanding. The sensations generated by interaction, and a sense of inevitability, are necessary if we are to keep our dialogue from beginning and ending on a superficial level. If we see people through pre-established categories, we may not be seeing them at all.

Our actions should not be a matter of 'applying' theory from a book. In my own work I do not seek to attain any final conclusion---but simply respond to things in a flexible way, by meeting people, making observations, and not fearing change. I recognize that to leave meanings and conclusions unresolved involves maintaining a kind of open-endedness that is difficult to sustain. Still, I have the sense that each person I become involved with requires a unique responseﾉthis is what I make my starting point. Perhaps I behave this way because my work is to make things.

For me, to think is to stand still. It takes time and effort to let the resistance I experience when standing still diffuse itself throughout my being. Although I have finished work on the Nibutani Project, I will continue to search for fragments, refining them and reworking them, spinning them into threads. By storing these things in my mind, I will go on trying to connect the different relationships that have criss-crossed my life. I am convinced something will emerge from the knots and joints I create.

I would also like to be able to convey to others the story of the Kaizawa familyﾕs struggle to halt the building of the Nibutani Dam.Yet I am hesitant about causing further upheaval in their lives. The most I can do is treasure what I have learned from them, and try to be of help if there is anything I can do."

What does it mean for people to come together in time and space and within that shared time and space to encounter language, indeed, the language of the Other?
We experienced something like this in Fukuoka, in Kyushu, over a two-day period this past December. "In Fukuoka, in Kyushu?" What could such words, almost too self-evident in a Japanese linguistic context, mean to someone existing apart from it? "Kyushu? What's Kyushu?" As I address those living outside a Japanese language context, those reading my writing in a langue which is not Japanese, perhaps I must rewrite those self-evident words. "In Kyushu, " I might write, "a southwestern island in the Japanese archipelago, in a city called ﾔFukuokaﾕ..." But even then, is what I have written so clear?
This was, in fact, my first visit to the city of Fukuoka. In this, I imagine I was no different from the majority of people who had come, from Japan and elsewhere, to the TRACES Fukuoka Conference. To Fukuoka, which we think of as the westernmost city of Japan. But when I looked at an unusual map of the region, in which the Tsushima Straits occupied the dead center (I had discovered this map at an exhibit of East Asian art featured at the Fukuoka Museum of Fine Arts, where our conference was held), I could see how much closer to the Asian mainland, to the Korean peninsula, Fukuoka was than Tokyo, the national capital. On this map, Korea, China, and Kyushu constituted a world encircling a small ocean, while somewhere off to the east in the outskirts, at the edge of an island that looked like a crooked, narrow extension of a promontory off that ocean, was Tokyo. Looking at this map I felt as if my center of gravity had been shifted, center and periphery reversed, and, momentarily, the ground on which I stood seemed unsteady.
Living in Tokyo as I have for the past ten years, I have always thought of Tokyo as the center of my world, the center of Japan. Often, for me, Tokyo and Japan seem interchangeable: to talk about Tokyo is to talk about Japan, and vice-versa. But as my eyes traversed this map, on which my own existence had been peripheralized and relegated to the margins, my own world view, centered on Tokyo as the capital city of Japan, seemed to go up in smoke, and I experienced some ever so slightly new sensation. My worldview, I realized, reflected nothing other than the hegemonic geopolitics of the Japanese modern nation state---indeed, by having internalized such a worldview I became a participant in it.
I was situated, then, not in Fukuoka, the regional city located on the margins, the western rim, of Japan but in a topos called Fukuoka, an East Asian city where I could temporarily dislocate the national identity I had come to embody. We spent two days in a museum in that city, in a windowless auditorium several floors above ground level, illuminated by spotlights with their characteristic, artificial glare. Despite the glare (even, perhaps, because of it), one could clearly sense the different shades in the particles of darkness that filled the air---particles of light and particles of darkness seemed to fuse in the space which was like a womb, like sea-depths, like a prison-cell, and or like that medieval European monastery where layers of memory since classical times had been compressed, in Eccoﾕs Name of the Roseﾉ.We were in a space where memories, densely folded in upon one another, were evoked and testified to: imperial memory, national memory, group memory, and a kind of memory intricately bound up with national memory that we nevertheless think of as "personal."
And what does it mean---in an age where global sharing of information on the internet is a matter of seconds---for people from different countries to commit themselves to assembling in a specific place at considerable expenditure of time and money? Indeed, to commit themselves to spending two days in that oppressive darkness, like fetal existences or deep-sea fish?
For one person to share time and space with anotherﾉNo doubt, it is this very coming together with others in time and space that makes the act of "testimony" possible. Or, perhaps one should say that this sharing of space with others is what makes a "telling" into a "testimony," an event. In the infinite expanse of our universe, and in the endless continuum of time into eternity, coming together in time and space constitutes a singular event---thus "testimony," too, must always be singular.
"Testimony"---language is summoned up that we may share memories with others...Indeed, what linked those of differing backgrounds, nationalities, ethnicities, and linguistic orientations gathered together in that deep sea-like space, was precisely the unity of time and space, and language, the languages of others. For me, spending those two days in the sea-depths, or in womb-like darkness, was an experience of being continuously exposed to the language of the Other.
To listen to testimony, to partake in the memory of the Other or the experience of the Other, is not to have language communicate meaning, as is commonly thought. Rather, it seems to me impossible to even talk about testimony except as an occasion for grasping language as that through which Otherness is exposed, as that which occludes the communication of meaning.
Within the context of Japanese society since 1990, the words "testimony" and "sharing the memory of the Other" inevitably have certain implications. But I need perhaps to reiterate the events to which they allude---indirectly but certainlyﾑhere. In 1990, beginning with Kim Hak Sunﾕs announcement that she had been used as a "sex slave" by the Japanese Army during the Asia Pacific War, women in countries throughout Asia began to offer testimony about the unspeakable suffering they had experienced as former "comfort women." Provoked by these womenﾕs demands that the Japanese government punish those responsible for their mistreatment, and offer a formal apology and compensation, two groups emerged in Japan. One group sought to take this up as an issue of war responsibility--- by taking part in the womenﾕs remembrance of the "events" they had experienced. Others sought to deny the events themselves, arguing that "comfort women" had not been coerced but were involved in a "commercial transaction." Indeed, beginning in 1990, Japan entered into a state that might be described as a civil war over memory. (This is a situation European societies had experienced 10 years earlier with the appearance of what was called "historical revisionism." ) In this state we have had to ask ourselves very fundamental questions about "testimony" and "giving testimony" ----what does it really mean to listen to the testimony of the Other, to take it seriously, to share memories with another?
In the East Asian city of Fukuoka, as I participated in the "events" of narrating and listening, for example, to the memories that had been erased from the history of the Japanese nation state (in Tomotari Mikakoﾕs presentation) or to the story of imperialist massacre of minority peoples in China (as in Jacqueline Armijo-Husseinﾕs presentation) I seemed simultaneously to hear, as in a basso continuo, reverberations of the processes of "testimony" and "sharing of memory" we had recently experienced in relation to the former "comfort women."
Against this background, let me offer some comments on Tomotari Mikakoﾕs "speech"----if indeed it can be called a "speech." Perhaps it might be better to describe Tomotari-san as engaging in a "process" of narrating personal memories, where what was at stake was her ability to share the remembrances of the Other. In other words, what she offered us was a "work" which attempted to suggest what the project of "testimony" means through its own multilayered performativity. Hers was a work of rare beauty which was also filled with pain and sadness. And this "work" was performed only once.
In trying to discuss this layered, polyphonic performance in words, then, I can only grope for a point of entry. "How can I ever describe this to my readers, who were not in that space at that timeﾉit is utterly impossible," I found myself writing, only to be caught short by an observation. When someone has given testimony to a memory, the one who listens to it and tries to convey that "event" to another becomes, in turn, a new witness, a new bearer of testimony. Who was the philosopher who detected the word le tiers ("third party") in the word t士oin (to "give testimony to")? Now I, too, found myself experiencing the difficulty inherent in the process of testimony. Suddenly I understood,, in however small a way, the burdens Tomotari-san had taken upon herself when she tried to address an unknown audience. By building into her "speech" the impossibility of being summarized retrospectively, she ensured that this particular process of bearing testimonyﾑfor both narrator and listener---would be experienced as a singular "event."
Still I must try to offer some kind of summary here. I must attempt a clumsy translation of Tomotari-sanﾕs multi-level, polyphonic work into the essentially linear medium of language, reconstituting it as a fragmentary monody. ..
As an artist, Tomotari Mikako has spent time on Japanﾕs northern island of Hokkaido living with the indigenous people who were forcibly assimilated into the project of building the modern Japanese nation state. At the very site where state violence is still being deployed against these people, she attempted to create a work of sculpture which would stand as a figure of memory--- the memory of their community that now exists only in memory, the memory of how that community had been violently expropriated and destroyed, as well as the memory of the violence that had been visited upon Tomotari-sanﾕs own community. Memory, in all these cases, was synonymous with pain., From the perspective of the Ainu among whom she worked, however, Tomotari-san , as an ethnic Japanese, could only be seen as a member of the group of people who had colonized, invaded, and destroyed. Yet while appearing as an Other to the Ainu, she herself was descended from yamabushi people (itinerant shamans called "mountain priestswhose practices were banned by the modern Japanese state shortly after the Meiji Restoration of 1868). Just like the Ainu, the yamabushi had had their communities destroyed and had been forcibly assimilated into the modern Japanese nation state. (That the yamabushi had been the object of such state policies was something I learned for the first time hearing her speak.) The reason she could be especially sensitive to the sufferings of the Ainu was that she, too, had to live with the painful memories of such state violence whenever she reflected on her own identity. For Tomotari-san, I speculated. such painful memories must be constantly reawakened by daily, inescapable encounters with the ways in which the violence of forced assimilation---the violence of state formation itself ---continues to be repeated in relation to Ainu, resident foreigners in Japan, and other discriminated-against groups. What must prompt such a strong awareness of being a descendant of yamabushi in Tomotari-san is not so much ressentiment or nostalgie but the reality of the repeated violence of the Japanese nation state.
During her "speech", Tomotari-san noted that , insofar as communities of yamabushi were linked not by land or "blood" ties but by commonly shared life-ways, they were similar to the Ainu. In other words, for both groups it was shared life-ways that constituted the identity of the community. Ironically enough, however, it was because she was descended from people not related by "blood" to the Ainu, that Tomotari-san was rejected by them and treated as an "outsider" or an "other." In her presentation, the painfulness of remembering the past, and the loneliness of the present, were expressed through the overlapping of visual (computer-generated images) and aural (narration in her own voice) media. Yet her images themselves were further doubled: on the screen she projected both photographs and printed words. While the photographs were of Ainu people, and the lands and scenery they live among, they were accompanied by Tomotari-sanﾕs feelings expressed in English sentences that flickered on and off the screen---albeit in an English so broken one could hardly call it a langue. Furthermore, in a voice that seemed to envelope all these images, Tomotari-san narrated the memory of the yamabushi , her extremely personal narrative as a descendent of yamabushi.
Speech disassociated from visionﾉ..What Tomotari-sanﾕs images conveyed to us was a quiet indictment of the succession of coercive policies that inflicted the violences of colonialism, of assimilation, and of an assault on their natural environment, upon the Ainu people. Hers was also a documentary about the way she had attempted to involve herself with these issues as an artist. At the same time, what her voice told us about was a thoroughly personal remembrance, that of an individual who lived with the pain of having had her ancestral community annihilated through processes of state-building and assimilation, and was thus forcibly assigned a "Japanese" identity. Tomotari-sanﾕs images, then, told the story of a self that had been othered as a Japanese or "Yamato person" by the Ainu, of the self who was an artist. Her voice told us of a self living in a present that repeated the violence of the past, of a self thatﾑhad Japanese modern history been otherwiseﾑmight have encountered the Ainu as a member of one, among many, collectivities premised on the holding of life-ways in common.
Were the multiple identities Tomotari-san superimposed on this fissure of image and sound, in the final analysis, linked in purely coincidental ways? We might begin to think about this question by considering her proper name. Surely not a single speaker of the Japanese language would read the three characters of her name with the pronunciation "tomotari"! Tomotari-sanﾕs name itself is disloyal to the Japanese language, to the nation state. Although written with three characters that could be pronounced, respectively, tomo, tari, and in, this name that violates the rules of our langue is read as if the third character (in) were missing. According to Tomotari-san, this suffix was banned from use by all but aristocrats or those related to the imperial family by the Meiji government, and therefore removed from her familyﾕs name at that time. The memory of state violence is thus deeply inscribed in her name itself. It has only been recently that she has restored the suffix (and this in response to the suggestion of an Ainu person whose friendship she had gained.) She has added simply the character-suffix, which she never pronounces when her name is read. In this way she hopes to etch the memory of her ancestors into her name, and to bear testimony to her own connection to the yamabushi community. She has done this so that each time her name is written or uttered, memory of the state violence inflicted upon the community she would have belonged to, had things been otherwise, is recalled. It is that memory that emerges out of the double structure of her name, out of the unbridgeable gulf between her name as written and her name as pronounced. Indeed, as I type this article and sound out, in my head, the name "Tomotari" each time I enter the phonetic syllables that might be converted into her three-character name , I cannot avoid being reminded of that violence---moreover, of the relationship between state violence and naming in general . (But, I ask myself once again, however familiar those within a Japanese language context might be with that double structure, with the fracture between the character as visualized and the character as pronunced, would those who speak English, French, or Chinese understand what I am alluding to? And how might I convey this to them?)
Let us define the identity of yamabushi as a that "body" of people who lived in the mountains and had specific life-ways and values in common. If such is the case, regardless of whether or not Tomotari-san can use her name as descendant of such people (whose community has already been destroyed and who have come out of the mountains), she can never identify herself as a yamabushi. In her speech, she used the phrase "we yamabushi." But she also said, "In the eyes of the Ainu, I was a Japanese." Thus, as a yamabushi, she had to speak as "we", but as a Japanese, she was "I." For her to use the phrases, "I am a yamabushi" or "we, Japanese" was not possible. Confronted with the actuality of this person who could never speak of being Japanese except in the first person, I had the same vertigenous sensation I experienced looking at the map of Kyushu. It was the sensation---as Genet once said of his meeting with Palestinians---of having the rug swept out from under oneﾕs feet. Faced with Tomotari-san, I had to ask myself, what was I? All that was clear to me was that she and I did not constitute "we Japanese." Even if she was Japanese and I was also Japanese. By producing a gap, or discordance, in her modes of first person utterance (between "we yamabushi" and "I, as a Japaneseﾉ."), Tomotari-san was making "us" (that is, Tomotari-san and myself) ask what kind of "we" we could possibly be. I was reminded that for me to exist as a "Japanese" is an "event" that I can only and always experience in the first person singular. And at the same moment I was also reminded that I, too, was an embodied subject of the violence of the nation state, that I had been subjected to the violence of being made "Japanese." Tomotari-sanﾕs words, in which the phrase "we Japanese" never once occurred, summoned us to be mindful of that forgotten violence of "being made subjects" that is visited, not only on non-"ethnic" Japanese but, indeed, on "ethnic" Japanese themselves.
For me, then, Tomotari-sanﾕs "speech" was an occasion for a negotiation between her identity and mine, which opened up the possibility for a reconstruction, and rearticulation. But, nevertheless, I am left with the conundrum of figuring out how to speak about this to readers for whom the word "yamabushi" is completely unfamiliar, who exist at a distance from Japanﾕs modern history, and who regard my "culture" and "langue"---so different from their own---with a benign curiosity. More than the "meaning" she attempted to convey in her "speech," it was Tomotari-sanﾕs language itself---full of hesitation, delivered in a nervous voice, marked by stalls, advances, returns, and sudden shifts from English to Japanese and back again----that conveyed her anxiety, hesitancy, uncertainy, and confusion. The language of her "speech", in fact, functioned in a manner similar to the English statements she projected on the screen as a part of her "work"---statements in broken English which, while they failed to communicate her intended meaning, nevertheless communicated something else.
I like to think that it was through this specific form that Tomotari-san expressed something about what the project of bearing testimony is. The memory of an "event"ﾉwhen we try to narrate our chaotic memories, like Tomotari-san, we do not know where to start, and we veer back and forth grasping at shreds of words. No, there is more to it than that. Is there not the constant fear that "you", you who are before my eyes, will not really understand, and that the "event" that is so important for me will not be received as such by you? Such waves of anxiety make one stammer, repeat oneself, and fall into silence. And while one seeks with almost pathetic desperation for some sign of trustworthiness in the gaze of the listener, one is simultaneously fearful of meeting that gaze which may carry rejection and denial. Surely the language of the one bearing witness must at times run away with itself, far off from the witnessﾕ thoughts.
To offer testimony is to speak of pain. But pain, by definition, is that which cannot be put into words---it can only be spoken about figuratively. Following this logic, if to offer testimony is the kind of event taking place in time and space that I have just described, then to listen to testimony is also not simply to grasp the meaning of what can be conveyed in language, but to experience as bodily sensations the floating, incoherent, and fragmentary thoughts that fill that time and space. Wasnﾕt it for this reason that, even in their confusing form, the sentences that vaguely approximated English, that Tomotari-san projected on the screen, managed to express something?
I must admit that on the day that I heard Tomotari-san speak, I was convinced that as a native speaker of Japanese (although what I was seeing performed painfully before me demonstrated that the existence of our common "mother tongue" could hardly be innocently taken for granted), I was in the privileged position of being better able to understand her words and the subtle nuances that evaded English translation than those in the room whose culture and langue were different from mine. In fact, I felt a kind of impatience with the interpreterﾕs efforts to translate faithfullyﾑor, to put it more accurately, to pick out from her speech those words that could be translated and that might produce a coherent meaning. I couldnﾕt refrain from being a busybody, unceremoniously stepping in to call attention to the fact that Tomotari-sanﾕs Japanese was subtle and could not be translated, that it was precisely all those elements that could not be reduced to "meaning" that were the most important part of what she said. Yet when I reflect on it it was I myself, while insisting that the core of Tomotari-sanﾕs testimony lay in a realm other than that of "shared meaning," who was fixated on being in the privileged position of "understanding" her langue. It was a conceit not dissimilar from that of the sighted, who believe they grasp the world better than the blind, or those who can hear and believe their reality is superior to that of the deaf. Just as the perceptions of the sighted are, in fact, greatly limited by the fact that they are sighted (and the same is true of those who can hear), my ability to pick up what was suggested by Tomotari-sanﾕs speech and images, the pitch and tone of her voice, and her silences, was no doubt limited by contrast to those who did not share the same langue, for whom her language did not necessarily convey meaning, and for whom her words were not inevitably laced with definitions. Who is to say that those whose langues differ, and for whom meaning is not readily accessible through language, understand each other less well than those whose langue is the same?
What you hear, and what I hear, situated in the same time and space, overlap, yet differ. This is because you and I are not the same. The process of listening to testimony becomes as many events as there are listeners, reflecting the multiple singularities that these listeners constitute. To say this, however, is not simply to advance a "relativized notion of truth." It is simply to say that the possibility of bearing testimony---the possibility of sharing memory with another---is an event that hinges on the unique relationship of one to one: the singularity that is my existence, listening to your words.
If it is shared life-patterns that make yamabushi yamabushi, those who do not share them are not yamabushi. When Tomotari-san used the words "we yamabushi,ﾕ however, she was not referring to her family lineage as a daughter of yamabushi, but rather speaking as one who had made the memory of the state violence against the yamabushi community her own personal memory. In this instance, the identity of the yamabushi is not at all the same as the identity of a former ethnic community (with shared life-ways). It is the identity of those from whom the state wrested away existence as yamabushi, whose lifeways the state destroyed, and who were forced to assimilate. Insofar as yamabushi must now construct an identity out of the shared memory of state violence, their situation is comparable to that of the Jewish people dealing with the memory of the Holocaust.
For example, the privileged form of memory that sustains the state of Israel is that of the genocide waged against the Jewish race by Nazi Germany. This was experienced by European Jews, but can be shared by a "we" that includes even those of Arab Muslim background who have converted to Judaism. Experiences of persecution that took place in North Africa, as well as Europe, in differing historical contexts, are now being reconstructed into something that is remembered as a singular, yet universal, experience of "we Jews." A new "we", a new collective identity, is being born. (In Tunisia, Jewish followers of Tunisian descent remember their experiences of anti-Semitism at the time of Tunisian Independence as "another Holocaust," thus making it an example of a universal anti-Semitism historically experienced by "we Jews." At the same time, can we not see the experience of Tunisian Jews as an example of state violence, of the exclusion of others that always accompanies the formation of the nation state?) On the other hand, in Israel we can also see how memories of an Arab culture once shared by Jews, together with Arab Muslims and Arab Christians, is now being labeled "their" culture, the culture of the Other, in such a way that Palestinian Arabs who were once part of a "we" for Palestinian Jews have now been completely excluded from the nation state of Israel, and are discriminated against. We might say that in the moment when a new collective identity is created, based on the shared memory of experiencing violence in the past, the question of how to share that memory without privileging the community and excluding others comes to the fore.
What deeply interested me in Tomotari-sanﾕs presentation was her ability to talk about a yamabushi identity based on a shared memory of violence, without privileging the yamabushi experience as that of an ethnic group. Her words did not attempt to draw a definitive boundary between those ethnic Japanese who exercised violence against yamabushi (that is, those who were not yamabushi ) and those against whom violence was exercised (those who were yamabushi ), but rather incited ethnic Japanese toward (and even seemed like a prayer for) sharing of the yamabushi experience as "ours" rather than "theirs." At least, this is how I understood it.
Later, in Jacqueline Armijo-Husseinﾕs presentation, we learned that the memory of the massacre of a Muslim community by the Ching government is still being talked about in China, and a collective identity being reproduced. Armijo-Husseinﾕs testimony---necessarily, and meaningfully--- evoked associations with the "event" of the recurring massacres of Muslims all over the world in places such as Lebanon, Bosnia, and Kosovo. But is it possible to make the memory of these "events", originally experienced by embodied Muslim subjects, "our" memory rather than "their" memory, in such a way that we do not establish a rigid boundary between "Muslims who are all victims" and "non-Muslims who are all persecutors and slaughterers"? Is there a way to make the event of the Holocaust---without relativizing it in any way---something that could be "our" memory, rather than only the privileged memory of the Jewish people? Could the Holocaust become a memory of all peoples (including Palestinians)who have been violently excluded from the nation state because they do not share the memory of the ethnos, and could it become "our" memory for all those who wish for the dismantling of the nation state as a mechanism inevitably producing others who must be expelled? Or, to put it the other way around, through constructing memories in such a form, might it be possible for us to produce a new "we"? In the same sense that Genet wrote, "The Palestinian revolution is my revolutionﾉ."
A possibility---to use the process of "bearing testimony" to share the memory of others and make them "our" memories, or to create a "we" that regards the memories of others as "ours." We may hope for such a possibility but, for example, we cannot forget about situations such as that of the East Asian nation partitioned into North and South, in which women from the South who go to the North in an attempt to elicit narratives and fashion a common memory with their sisters, have been subject to arrest as spies or on other charges. In our last minutes of those days, in that space, in Fukuoka, we heard about this reality.
For us to dream of the path that leads to the sharing of the experience and memory of the Other, and by so doing to create a new "we"---even to dream of it is an important matter. Nor is it misguided for us to seek to make more sophisticated those well-intentioned gestures by which we attempt to decipher even the silence and inexpressible pain that is part of the memory of the Other. However, in a case like that of South Korean women who found that visiting their sisters and compatriots to hear their testimonies---indeed, that the very act of listening to those testimonies itself---constituted a severe crime against the state (and who therefore found their efforts physically impeded by an exercise of state violence) we are brought up short by a reality that rebuffs us. Indeed, in East Asia we inhabit a harsh world where coming together in time and space to share the memories of others and to build a new "we", as we have tried to do in this conference, can only be seen as a kind of privileged, utopianism (in every sense of the word). Such a serene spot, where one could truly strain oneﾕs ears lest the slightest breath or trembling of the voice eluded oneﾕs notice, has yet to exist in our world. And it was of this harsh reality that we learned, in the seemingly harsh form of words uttered by one participant to another: "You and I speak completely different languages." In their own way, these words, too, were a kind of testimony, the appeal of one living in East Asia and tenaciously seeking to share the memory of the Other---uttered with a kind of desperation, and just once. They were words of testimony that perhaps could only have been spoken in that space like ocean depths, in the East Asian city of Fukuoka.
"Completely different languages"? What was at issue in this exchange was not a matter of langue. It was not a matter of Japanese and English, French and Korean. Had it been a matter of langue, translation or interpretation would have been called for. But what, then, might it mean for two peopleﾕs languages to differ if it was not on the level of langue. What kind of difference was at stake, and how might it be bridged? This leads me to a final consideration.
When we are able to decipher even the silences and hesitations of one who is telling of a memory difficult to reveal, is it not because from the start---prior even to the attempt to narrate the memory of the eventﾑwe share some kind of narrative in common. Is it not because the language of the testimony---no matter what it might be---can be accommodated within a narrative framework we can agree upon, and that we can understand? Isnﾕt this why we can wait silently? Until the witnessﾕ mouth begins to open with great difficulty, narrating a memory that seems to be reeled out of the depths, as, quietly and gently, words begin to flow? Is it not because we already know what that silence is, because no matter what the nature of the words that follow upon the silence, we know their content and can anticipate it? Is this not why we wait, and why we strain our ears to hear? But, then, how could we know anotherﾕs language even before the story is told? When we use the words "experience of the Other", is it really "the Otherﾕ" we are talking about? Are we awaiting the arrival of that which is truly Other?
The testimony of the women of South Korea who had been former "sex slaves" of the Japanese army was offered after years of oppressive silence. The director Pyon Yonjuﾕs documentary film about the present-day lives of these women, The Nanumu Family, offers a visual commentary on their acts of narration in its final scene . In this concluding scene, he makes visible for us, for the first time, on screen, the ugly scars where the trace of the violence she had suffered was deeply etched on the abdomen of a former "sex slave". He shows her baring the scar in utter silence, as if to reveal her secret. His work seems to quietly ask, at the end, if we could ever really share these womenﾕs memories of unspeakable violence, experiences which they will never be able to fully capture in words.
At the same time, when I attended a symposium two years ago, a woman who had seen another video, documenting the experiences of former "sex slaves" now living in North Korea, described their very different approach to the process of testimony. These women began to talk about their former victimization without hesitation or silences and with what might almost be called "matter-of-factness." She asked members of the symposium how we might understand and account for this difference between the women of the north and the south, and between their different styles of narration.
This raises a final question. Perhaps what is truly beyond the limits of our mental vision, what really plunges us into incomprehension, is to confront the fact that for some women the narration of their memory of a violence unimaginable by us, and therefore of an experience extraordinarily difficult to verbalize (thus, we expect, one that requires us to listen with the utmost sensitivity and attention to silence and hesitation), can simply be talked about in a straightforward way. As if there were nothing secret, nothing that could not be talked about or translated into wordsﾉ.
In this instance, too, what eludes us is not a matter of langue. If it were a matter of langue, their testimony of sexual victimization by the Japanese Army would be 100% intelligible and translatable. No, it is the very apparent translatability of the experience that is problematic. It is the fact that their testimony makes it seems as if no differences in langue, no slippage between event and narration, no gap between the experience of violence and its telling exist.. We are left to wonder what constitutes the conditions of possibility for this narrative told by women of North Korea: how could they tell their stories in that manner---or rather, what was the story they told? Even if we posit that their narratives were implicated in some way or another with the very different arrangements of power on North Korean society, what exactly that implicatedness consists of would be extremely difficult for us to know. In a sense we could say that the very matter-of-factness of the narratives of North Korean women---their clarity and their presumption that they would be fully understood--- presents us with something truly unfamiliar that plunges us into incomprehension. But is this not what it means to encounter the Other? Is this not truly the language of the Other?
Perhaps it is what we can just barely glimpse in the outlines of this event that constitutes "speaking different languages." Langue is that which can be translated without omission or residue. But a story may be narrated in a langue from which, for example, the words "I cannot understand you," can surely be accurately translated into any language, yet nevertheless what makes it possible for this to be a story can elude us. This is what is meant by the observation that, in offering their testimonies, the women of North Korea and South Korea "speak two different languages." This is, I repeat, not a matter of differing langues. Moreover, for women of the South to go to the North in an attempt to negotiate these differences is prohibited, in many different ways.
Our conference left us facing such questions. It was a conference committed to a principle of "multilingualism" which, despite the efforts which left the translators exhausted, brought us face to face with the problem of "speaking different languages" or "the language of the Other" in such a way that differences in langue, slippages in translation, and the like, seemed to pale into insignificance---to be, indeed, merely the "play of signifiers."
We were left ask what it really means to "speak different languages" or even to "speak the same language". And what it could mean to share the experiences of the Other.