H199 Changing Lives Ch. 1 Shinya Eiko Notes

Like Okabe and Yoshitake, Shinya was raised to be a loyal imperial daughter believing fully in the correctness and the righteousness of the war right up until the moment it ended. And what a shock! A 180 degree turnabout.

A member of a woman's auxiliary unit, her Lieutenant had to clarify for her what the Emperor's Address had said: Japan had lost the war.

Impossible! But true. He threw his sword down and declared:

"Japan has lost! Beginning today, it is our World!"

Shinya was unprepared for this. Like so many, she could not really understand what the emperor was saying in his halting, high-pitched voice, and stilted formal language. She assumed he was going on air to order his subjects to fight on, to die in the way a jewel might be smashed into 100 million pieces.

But, no. He was saying Japan was accepting the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.

Her Lieutenant had been secretly listening to a shortwave radio so he had some idea what was coming. He was more prepared than Shinya and he, too, it would seem, was a closet leftist, a Marxist, who would encourage her to become active in some way after the war.

She was smitten with the Leftwing Heroes like Tokuda and Shiga but became disillusioned after the cancellation of the General Strike. What was the point of this kind of activism? It wasn't going anywhere!

Shinya Eiko wanted to discover how to "become ordinary" once again. No, maybe she had never been ordinary for she had grown up knowing only war and the preparations for war--all the sacrifices and suffering.

But she, too, developed a mantra for going forward. Her was "War is Unacceptable," but also, it is time for all of us to:

"See with out own eyes, and speak from our own hearts."

How to do this? How to promote this way of seeing and being in the world?

For her, the answer came in Performance Art, in Theatre, and especially, her one-woman productions telling the stories of minorities in Japan like Zainichi Japanese-Korean women, Korean A-Bomb Victim, and buraku or "outcaste" women, those with the lowest possible status in Japanese society.

For 30 years and over 2,000 productions, she portrayed an older Japanese-Korean woman in Shinse Taryon. To prepare, she read books, she read stories, she met with people from the Zainichi Community and received their blessing to tell their stories. What began as a 28-minute show evolved over the decades to an hour and twenty minutes. She performed it in mostly small venues but many came to share the evening with her and with the words of the women she represented.

What a striking collection of stories she elected to portray on the stage. An elderly Korean-Japanese woman whose life has been excruciatingly hard.

And the unrecognized, overlooked Korean-Japanese victime of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Who would look out for them or even care about them?

And to portray to elderly buraku woman, Himiko, who finds in the pouch for an amulet left to her by her father, a copy of the Declaration of Buraku Liberation.

The power Shinya felt reading those words aloud on the stage. "Somehow, this body of mine," she declasres, "knows deep down what is right and wrong." Yes, her whole body has absorbed the experiences she had lived through: the 1920s, then the 1930s and War, and then Japan's rise gain economically in the 1960s aqnd 1970s. She has lived through it ll but there she sits on a park bench, the place where she sweeps and cleans the park for everyone's use. She has embodied all that History and made it into "Herstory."

Everyday, Shinya reminds herself and holds herself accountable for having fallen under the spell of those who would make war. Unaccaeptable. Everything has to start with that.

The genesis of all my performance art is the notion that war is wrong. I had experienced directly with my own physical being the fact that war crushes human beings and destroys their spirit. I came to where I am today through theater, and I will continue the journey. I may perform in a wide variety of dramas, but always at the core of my being will be the idea that war is unacceptable. (31)

Acting is what brings her mind, body and voice together to yield a new awareness, a new consciousness. Perhaps not yet a "female consciousness," but close to it. She wants to create a space for all the former imperial subjects who were stripped of their identity and their agency, their subjectivity, because of the prewar regime and its thought system. Her route to "becoming ordinary" is not an easy one. It, too, is a "steep path" as Nogoe told Yukie theirs would be. But it entails seeing with one's own eyes, and speaking from one's own heart.