'Japanese Invasion' As Cultural Memory In Dongwushan Village

The Japanese invasion of China is worth being embalmed by every Chinese people. Since the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, museums have been built and monuments have been erected to show reverence to the heroes died in the Anti-Japanese War, to expose the atrocity of Japanese militarism, and to commemorate the victory of the Chinese Nation. Meanwhile, there appears a great deal of teleplays, movies, and literary works about the Japanese invasion of China. All these serve as good texts for patriotism education. However, few vivid life stories about this period of history are included in these texts. Patriotism education thus becomes univocal and simplified. This paper aims to explore how patriotism can be full of diversity and educational meaning. Therefore, data collected in the research project "Living and Touring the Past:Dongwushan Heritage Village" is selected for a cultural memory study of the Japanese invasion of Dongwushan Village. The selected data include Dongwushan villagers'memory of Japanese invasion and the memory of Japanese invasion in the Shouxiang Hall which is a museum built by the local government. These two kinds of memories are regarded as two different discourses. Narrative inquiry and discourse analysis are employed as theoretical and analytical framework to analyze the above mentioned data. After a four-month ethnographic research in Dongwushan Village, a lot of stories about Japanese invasion were collected from the local villagers. The villagers'stories about Japanese invasion are embedded in the stories about various aspects of their daily lives, such as the landscapes of the village, the houses built by their ancestors, and the temples in their village and so on. This paper also regards Shouxiang Hall as a text and does a critical discourse analysis of it. This paper argues that Shouxiang Hall is mainly a governmental representation of Japanese invasion. The univocal patriotism discourse formed within this representation is constructed through the intertwining of statistical discourse, atrocity discourse and dedication discourse. Hence, this paper concludes that in order to make patriotism education full of diversity, impressive and meaningful, the vivid life stories of the broad masses should be added into the governmental representation of Japanese invasion.