Encountering Loss: An Ethnographic Account of Chinese War Survivors’ Pursuits of Redress in the Fin-de-siècle Japanese Law Courts

In the early 1990s, as many parts of the post-Cold War world went through a resurgence of WWII memories, numerous Chinese victims of the Japanese invasion and occupation between 1931 and 1945 began to seek individual redress for their wartime suffering. Some of their grievances, by gaining support from Japanese progressive lawyers and activists, reached the Japanese civil law courts as a series of compensation claims. This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical exploration, and in part, an attempt at philosophical elucidation, of what we are left with after the Japanese judiciary’s dismissals of these numerous lawsuits; namely, a pile of documents produced through and around the litigation. Whereas a few other anthropologists of East Asia, by studying various failed pursuits of legal redress concerning Japanese-inflicted atrocities, have astutely observed law’s failures and limits of institutional justice, I propose to take an ethnographic return to the testimonial weight of those pursuits. How did the series of litigation serve as a (limited) medium through which to encounter the plaintiffs’ wartime losses and wounds? Now that most of these war victims have passed away, can we still hear their voices by reading the testimonial documents left behind? With these questions, I aim to move away from a “what happened” kind of inquiry to “how” we can(not) encounter the pain of others, and thereby explore the limits of our empathy. To pursue this objective, I engage in discourse analyses combined with field observations and interview research, examining the said series of litigation as an analytical space in which global, national, and local discourses intersected with one another. Without relying on a dichotomized view on global humanitarianism vs. national sentiments, I carefully sort out the multiple levels and directions of inter-discursive translation — and the limits of such translation — occurring in this space, and illustrate how the Chinese war survivors’ memories traveled across space and time through such translation. I demonstrate this point by closely studying two specific cases chosen from the series of litigation: the Pingdingshan Massacre (1932) in the territory of Manchukuo; and wartime sexual slavery in a rural area of Shanxi Province. At the same time, these ethnographic case studies highlight my own troubled efforts to encounter the pains of the Chinese litigators. To reflect upon this issue, the last chapter examines the concept of trauma by engaging in an anthropological reading of philosophical and psychoanalytical texts. I argue that the concept of trauma enables us to grasp how our inextricable relationship to the loss experienced by the vanquished is effected, sustained, and at the same time alienated by the work of language