Description
Assuming that nationalism is constitutively affective, this paper explores the memorialization of the war-dead at the controversial Yasukuni Shrine with its adjacent Yūshūkan War Memorial Museum in Tokyo as a love trope. War memorialization, the practice of assigning history the task of coping with societal problems, idealizes gender as a means to invoke certain agendas. It works by socializing pupils into patriotism through museum exhibitions. Meanwhile, the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace, also in Tokyo, displays testimonies that were given by so-called ‘comfort women’, who also served as parts of the war machinery and died in large numbers. Comfort women are, however, absent at the Yasukuni and the Yūshūkan. While the love trope organizes the only available mode of critique as a juxtaposition against the allegedly voluntary self-sacrifice that was made by individual soldiers and nurses as a questioning of their unconditional love, comfort women are, against their will, not only inscribed to having participated in the war machinery voluntarily, but are also dismissed from history and war memory based on that alleged voluntarism. The paper explores possibilities of feminist critique against the memorialization of some, at the expense of other, war-dead.
