The thesis would be divided into three chapters. The first chapter discusses how the natural life is politicized and exposed to sovereign violence. Exploring the timeline from Japan’s establishment of Manchukuo in 1932 to its defeat in 1945, I discuss how the sovereign power intervenes and abandons the Japanese in Manchuria.
While Louise Young considers the “migration machine” which propels the movement of Manchurian migration from the view of pull and push factors, I consider the
population transfer with Foucault’s observation of the new technique of
governmentality. Foucault’s idea of biopolitics helps to clarify the power structure under the regime of Manchukuo. Falling into the cat-and-mouse-game, the surplus, over-populated Japanese are strategically removed to Manchuria yet still
well-managed by the strict discipline and additional laws.
To illustrate the exercise of biopower, I mainly focus on the techniques of population and health check. As for the management of population, the ambiguity of freedom within governmentality becomes an effective element in biopolitics. The act of pursuing desires, for instance, marks the individual autonomy as well as the governability. In the field of governmentality, the endless desire means endless labor.
Thus, for the Japanese government, desire (for money, lands or values such as honor, etc) guarantees the sustenance of production in Manchukuo. The other potential element helping to exercise biopower on population is the visual media. I take the poster as an example to explain how the government propagandizes a better way of life to pursue and, at the same time, successfully deploys the needed human resources along the border with the political enemy, the Soviet Union. The Manchurian settlers thus become biopolitical carriers to fulfill the sovereign decision. As for the regulation
of public health, I analyze the “Healthy Manchuria Policy.”2 With strong enthusiasm for preventing disease and weakness, the policy practices strategic programs of immunization, which guarantees the circulation of people. The gymnastic festivals, related facilities and public health advocacies not only ensure an endless supply of labor, but also imply a political objective to render people governable.
The governmentality of Manchukuo demonstrates the power over life by making live, with a good function of apparatuses of security. But the extreme situations in the wake of Japan’s surrender remind us the power of making die. The Manchukuo remnants (such as the children deprived the right to live under mass suicide, the POWs taken to the Siberian camps, the “non-men” at the corner of unventilated cabin, the humiliated prisoners under the Cultural Revolution, etc) present the political determination of life worth living. I apply Agamben’s theory of biopolitics to discuss the ambiguous condition of stateless Manchukuo remnants, and comb out the relation between the production of biopolitical body and sovereign power.
In Chapter Two, I choose Yamasaki’s Child of the Continent as the text to portray the remnants “abandoned” by the biopolitical power. Although categorized into the genre of novel, Child of the Continent comprises Yamasaki’s effort of
“literary witness.” Starting from Agamben’s discussion of witness in Remnants of
Auschwitz, I consider the subject of testimony and the (im)possibility of witness. The
subject of testimony in Child of the Continent can be several (the survivors she has interviewed, Yamasaki herself, the protagonist Matsumoto) or “none.” Inspired by Agamben’s discussion of witness in Remnants of Auschwitz, I suppose that the subject of testimony has become a lacuna, since the true witness, the primordial subject of
2 The “Healthy Manchurian Policy” is a generic term used to describe a series of health-related activities and systems in Manchuria. In Chapter Seven of his The Visual Media in Manchuria, Kishi uses the term to highlight the “health fever” in Manchukuo. The Sports Federation of Manchukuo following the foundation of the state and the health services mushrooming along the railways exhibit that “health” has become a vital wheel to set administration in motion.
testimony is the one “who had seen the Gorgon.” The fictitious Matsumoto, namely, child of the continent, symbolizes such a lacuna, where the testimony takes place. To bear witness to the inhuman violence, Yamasaki’s writing displays a process which involves both desubjectification and subjectification. In this way, I regard Child of the
Continent as a dedication to the historical witness, instead of being merely a fiction.
The text not only reflects historical realities, but summons readers to actively engage with the Manchukuo remnants. I make a comparison between literature and testimony. With examples excerpted from the novel, I suggest that the performance of literature enacts the process of witnessing. In addition, the remnants such as political prisoners in the novel generally experience the shame, so I won’t overlook the
discussion of shame, which serves the biopolitical power to produce “bare life.” Apart from discussing the experiences of shame, I explore traumas, nightmares and
amnesias, from which we can discern that the government has hidden backwards the screen, leaving the remnants alone to bear the moral struggles. While the main characters such as Matsumoto or Atsuko can speak the traumatic experiences,
Yamasaki depicts the speechless living dead in her novel. The chapter titled “Daddy”, in particular, portrays the Muselmann-like refugees, the “staggering corpse,”
“mummy-men” trapped in the no-man’s land caused by the forces of Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CPC). The no-man’s land represents the Agambenian “state of exception” and threshold between the human and the inhuman.
Through the novel, Yamasaki presents how profoundly the politics manages lives, yet she does not depict life of remnants as totally hopeless or overwhelmed. From the bleeding wounds, remnants deliver a power of life to sustain and continue to convey inhuman tortures and political violence. Literature summons readers to “see” the wounds, not for healing, but for sustaining the wounds. The unresting wounds resist against oblivion of historical violence, and remind people of a “duty toward the
Other” in the process of awareness.
In Chapter Three, I discuss the “duty toward the Other” by referring to Yamasaki’s philosophical meditation in the novel. Yamasaki contemplates on two kinds of community: one based on the construction of nationality with the value judgment of honor, moral citizens; the other founded on the relation of being with the Other through sharing and love. From protagonist Matsumoto’s experience of
salvation and his final decision, Yamasaki delivers her insight that a true “community”
provides a space without walls or compartments to identify itself as a totality.
Consequently, she urges the Japanese government to return to the active human consideration instead of practicing more juridical judgment, since those who are inapplicable to the statutes or unable to provide substantial evidence for proving their Japaneseness are excluded from the process of demanding compensation and apology.
Above all, the Japanese government and “innocent” generations should reconsider the reasons for remnants’ losing citizenship and lacking of Japanese language.
In addition, since contemporary media plays a vital role in witnessing and
memory retrieving, we cannot overlook the consequent ethical problems. First of all, I discuss the reasons for the oblivion of Manchukuo remnants from the dimension of media work in China, Japan and Taiwan. While each nation commemorates its collective memory in an epic scale, the memory of Manchukuo tragedy becomes a negligible ditty or even a political taboo that people avoid discussing. Although the phenomenon of cannibalization and the labeling seem to be inevitable, I do not think we can shrug off the duty toward Manchukuo remnants by imputing all failures to the media work. If we do not try to recognize how media shapes our memories and how it keeps disconnecting us from the Other, we may fall into the narcissistic culture of our own nation. Furthermore, oblivion of the historical violence appears dangerous, for this makes a tacit approval of historical violence, without demanding justice and war
responsibility of the government. For the remnants, oblivion equals to killing them again. Therefore, I suppose that we develop a self-imposed duty to access the Other who are absent from commonsensical information or political discourse.
The postwar generation cannot claim to be “innocent,” the oblivion and silence of remnants reveal our deficient recognition of the duty toward the Other. Without the consideration of the Other, numerous listeners and interviewers tend to present life stories of Manchukuo remnants as sensational events or useful information for the TV programs, and viewers sympathize with victims but just let them go, without further understanding of their context. To avoid the objectifying of Manchukuo remnants, the listeners must decentralize their positions, and become themselves as the addressable Other, so that the speakers can impart stories without reservation. When Yamasaki interviews the survivors, she senses a duty which does not generate from the side of remnants to provide evidence or truth, but from the side of herself to continue the discussion of Manchukuo tragedy. As for readers, the discussion of remnants has shifted from the biopolitical concern towards an ethical consideration of how to live with the Other. Having understood how the biopolitical power constitutes remnants, we realize our possibilities to move beyond the biopolitical domination of life and traditional debate on the enmity between China and Japan.