In studying the stakes involved in producing memories about U.S. imperial violence, Lisa Yoneyama has observed that the United States has deployed “an imperialist myth of
‘liberation’ and rehabilitation” to render its violence as justifiable and necessary means for its targeted enemies’ “recovery” (“Traveling Memories” 58-59). She explains that according to this myth, “the enemy population’s liberation from the barbaric and the backward and its successful rehabilitation into an assimilated ally” can be viewed as an anticipated “outcome of the U.S. military interventions” (59). Celebrating the positive outcomes of U.S. military activities, the “imperialist myth of ‘liberation’ and rehabilitation” has at the same time made
8 For an account of the past and ongoing history of U.S. military violence in Okinawa, one of the most militarized sites in the Asia-Pacific region, see Tanji.
the violence and atrocities the United States perpetuated difficult to be addressed and redressed. As Yoneyama makes clear, instead of seeing its military violence, colonial takeover, and occupation as crimes, the United States has chosen to articulate them as its
“gifts for the liberated” (80).9 Here, the tropes of rescue, rehabilitation, as well as debt are useful for the United States to depict itself as a benevolent “liberator” while hailing the peoples injured by its violence as “the liberated” and “the indebted”—people who should be grateful for the help they received. In this sense, Yoneyama argues, “[t]he injured and violated bodies of the liberated do not require redress according to this discourse of indebtedness, for their liberation has already served as payment/reparation that supposedly precedes the U.S. violence inflicted upon them” (81).
Yoneyama’s notion of “the imperialist myth of liberation and rehabilitation” is not only helpful to illustrate how in dominant American war memories, the U.S. war against Japan is remembered as a “good war,” one that has “not only liberated Asians, including Japanese themselves, from Japan’s military fanaticism, but also rehabilitated them into free and prosperous citizens” (59). I would suggest that the myth that Yoneyama conceptualized can also be used to examine how the United States has enunciated the necropolitical
violence of its military regime as “gifts” of prosperity and security to the peoples of Asia and the Pacific. As such, the myth effectively produces a form of forgetfulness that allows the United States to overlook its responsibilities to account for its crimes. To put it
differently, while the U.S. postwar and Cold War establishment of military bases in Asia and the Pacific have exacerbated the unlivable living conditions for some, the assumed deaths and forms of dispossession this establishment has produced, however, have been justified by the United States understood narrowly as a benevolent power trying to maximize access of life and a better future for its selectively liberated or rehabilitated subjects.
9 For a further investigation on how the United States exercises its power and violence upon its subjects, especially the figure of refugees, in the act of gift-giving, see Nguyen.
Resonating with Yoneyama’s discussion of the “imperialist myth” that enables the United States to make sense of its violence, Muto Ichiyo’s critical observations about the formation of “benevolent America” draws attention to the development of nuclear industry in postwar Japan—a historical condition through which the nuclear disaster in Fukushima was made possible. Having witnessed the destructive effects of the nuclear crisis in Japan since 2011, Muto seeks to question what caused Japan—a nation twice devastated by atomic bombs during World War II—to embrace nuclear energy in its postwar era. Importantly, he attempts to foreground a genealogy that maps the interconnections between atomic bombs and nuclear power plants. He does so by drawing attention to the “peaceful use of nuclear power” campaign that the governments of the United States and Japan have mutually pushed forward in the wake of a wave of anti-nuclear protests starting from the 1950s. He observes that in the immediate postwar period when the memories of U.S. violence, aggression, and victimization of the two atomic-bombed cities—Hiroshima and Nagasaki—were still dominantly remembered by the people of Japan, the United States has sought to turn its image from a “victimizer” to that of a “benefactor” (210). One way the United States has chosen to achieve its self-refashioning goal was to “overwhelm Hiroshima” with the
knowledge that “the more murderous the atom as bomb, the more benevolent it should be in its peaceful use” (177). As Muto points out, within the dominant discourse of the “peaceful use of nuclear energy” campaign, the concrete bodily sufferings of hibakusha—victims exposed to the radioactive contamination of the U.S. atomic bombings—need to be
channeled into an abstract idea of “atomic bomb experience” in order to be connected to the equally abstract notion of peace (177). By mobilizing such abstract notions of wartime suffering and peace, the United States, Muto contends, was able to refashion atomic energy as something that could bring about a bright and prosperous future for the war-devastated people of Japan, thereby foreclosing any meaningful discussion of its wartime
responsibilities (178).10
The dominant stories that celebrate the United States as a benevolent power willing to share its nuclear technology to enable the economic growth of postwar Japan have
marginalized, if not effaced, not only the memories of the sufferings of individual hibakusha but also those of other populations exploited by the U.S. nuclear and military activities in Asia and the Pacific. As Yu-fang Cho points out, while “the United States managed
antinuclear protests in Japan […] through the introduction of nuclear energy as a technology of economic development (and thus for ‘life’), turning the necropolitical violence of nuclear bombings into biopolitical regulation,” its nuclear regime has drastically reordered “uneven access to life and death” among differently racialized groups subjected to its imperial
governance (10).11 Following Muto’s focus on the event that brought forward a wave of anti-nuclear protests in Japan during the 1950s—namely, the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident, otherwise known as the Bikini Atoll incident during which a Japanese tuna fishing boat operating in the Pacific was exposed to the nuclear fallout from the United States’ Castle Bravo nuclear testing in the Bikini Atoll—Cho examines how the similarly contaminated bodies of Japanese and Indigenous people of the Marshall Islands have received different treatment from the United States (9). While the United States chose to deploy the “peaceful use of nuclear power” campaign to recast nuclear power as a source of cheap and clean energy that could support the substantial growth of Japan’s postwar economy, the differently racialized Pacific Islanders, by contrast, were excluded from the promises of a better life.
Subjugated to the “necropolitical violence” of U.S. nuclearism across Asia and the Pacific, Indigenous Pacific Islanders were forcefully deprived of their means of living, displaced and relocated from their homeland—which was turned into a site for extensive U.S. nuclear
10 On this point, see also Yoneyama’s Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory for a discussion of how the victims of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki include not only Japanese nationals but also other colonized subjects of the Japanese empire, such as ethnic Koreans (152).
11 On biological and necropolitical violence, see Mbembe.
testing—and subjected to radiation and medical experimentation (10).12
In their introduction to Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama have observed that the “marginality and silence” of certain memories of war are “linked necessarily to the centrality, volume, visibility, and audibility of more dominant stories” and that “in some cases, the dominant stories obtain the force they do in popular imagination precisely because of their ability to simplify and
transform troublesome or dissonant memories” (4). Read within the context of Japan’s 3.11 disasters, Fujitani, White, and Yoneyama’s critical insights shed light on how dominant narratives and imaginings of hope that depict America as a benevolent power gain discursive centrality by simplifying or obfuscating the troublesome memories of U.S. military violence that have been unevenly shared among peoples in Asia and the Pacific. Such an uneven remembrance and forgetfulness of America’s violence, or “popular inattention” towards the violent “scenes of militarized imperial action”—which include, to name but a few, the United States’ ongoing colonial rule of Guam, its militarist pressure over the Philippines and South Korea, and its extensive military presence in Japan—has however, as Cynthia Enloe argues,
“greased” the “wheels of militarization” and made U.S. imperialist activities in Asia, the Pacific, and elsewhere easier to sustain (viii). Against a backdrop where the discursive centrality and marginality of certain stories could possibly affect the speed of U.S. global military expansion, directing our critical attention towards unsettling memories, histories, or bodies of knowledge which might unframe dominant ways of imagining the United States as a non-violent, benevolent, and friendly power is arguably more urgent than ever.