Page 191 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

178 Nightmare Japan

physicians recall the period before the emergence, during the 1990s, of
previously suppressed information pertaining to illegal biological and
chemical testing performed on Chinese civilians by ‘many of [Japan]’s
best and brightest doctors’ (Barenblatt 2005: xxi) during the war in the
Pacific. Like a wilfully overlooked tumour that metastasises into a
malignant mass too conspicuous and dangerous to ignore, information
regarding the Japanese atrocities during World War II streamed steadily
into public discourse, bolstered by the ‘high profile class-action lawsuit
against the government of Japan’ (xvii) recently brought forth by Peize
Xu and 180 relatives of some 2100 murdered Chinese. Contested in court
from 1997 to 2002, the lawsuit concluded in a verdict ‘rejecting
compensation claims or an apology even as the judges readily admitted
that Japan did in fact kill the plaintiff’s family members and enormous
numbers of Chinese with germ weapons’ (xviii). Japan, of course, is far
from exceptional in their perpetration of war time atrocities (as evidenced
by Nazi Germany’s genocidal legacy and the US’s numerous internment
camps, to cite merely two examples). Nevertheless, this recent revelation
of this suppressed monstrous past, a conspiracy of silence partially
enabled, as several history scholars have noted, by the intervention of
Western (primarily US) military ‘advisors’, inevitably affects a
reconsideration of the imagined integrity of the Japanese social body.
Infection’s copious ethical violations and graphic scenes of putrefaction
and corporeal disarticulation thus affords viewers a contemporary lens
through which the spectres of the past may be confronted, acknowleded
and, eventually, exorcised.
Similarly, Tsuruta Norio’s Premonition aspires to far more than
eliciting perfunctory shocks or continuing the creative and intellectual
torpor that has sadly resulted from too many recent attempts at replicating
the formulas that initially inspired the recent, so-called ‘J-horror’ boom.
This is not to suggest that Premonition’s premise is without precedent;
based on the manga, Kyôfu shinbun, by Tsunoda Jirô, and inflected by the
familiar Japanese horror film motif of the curse that can only be deferred
but never truly escaped, Premonition is an emotionally complex and
moving study of a husband and wife struggling to come to terms with the
loss of their child and the dissolution of their marriage. As the film opens,