Articles
Kyoto’s Imperial Modernity: Erasure and Preservation
Between Foe and Friend: The Commemoration of Nikkei Veterans from Hawai‘i at Kyoto’s Ryōzen Kannon
Between Foe and Friend: The Commemoration of Nikkei Veterans from Hawai‘i at Kyoto’s Ryōzen Kannon
Abstract
Tourist media often presents Kyoto as ancient and tranquil, and thus as distanced from modern war and international politics. However, postwar Kyoto has had a clear diplomatic role, including as a home to international war memorials. This article examines one of these memorials—Ryōzen Kannon, a Buddhist site built in the 1950s to commemorate Japanese and foreign war dead. Its primary focus is a 1962 tour to Ryōzen Kannon by veterans of the 100th Battalion, a famed U.S. Army unit composed primarily of soldiers of Japanese descent from Hawai‘i. The article begins by exploring how Ryōzen Kannon’s founder, Ishikawa Hirosuke, attempted to mesh Ryōzen Kannon into Kyoto’s established memorial and tourist landscape while creating a unique new site of national war memorialization. It then looks at his transformation of Ryōzen Kannon, initially into a war memorial focused on the U.S.-Japan Alliance, and then as a place of transpacific war memorialization for the 100th Battalion. The article argues that in the ceremony commemorating the battalion’s war dead, Kyoto was employed to symbolize Japan prior to the diaspora and Asia-Pacific War, allowing both guests and hosts to put aside wartime divisions and focus on building transnational and bilateral links in the present.