The Meaning of Drawing War Experiences
A Consideration Based on the Comparison with Other Genres of War Drawings/Paintings
2020 Volume 70 Issue 3 Pages 74-89
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2020 Volume 70 Issue 3 Pages 74-89
NHK has been conducting the “war experience drawings/paintings” project inviting people with war experience to illustrate their own experience since the 1970s and collected more than 4,900 pictures from a total of six sessions held at four local stations: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Okinawa, and Sapporo. On comparing these works to other pictures using war as a motif, or “war drawings/paintings,” it is found “war experience drawings/paintings” are different from “The Hiroshima Panels”—a notable series of paints depicting the consequences of atomic bombing—in terms that the former's supplemental linguistic information such as dates, places, and explanations of situations point to somewhere specific in the real world. The author also compared them with “war-strategy record pictures” drawn by military-commissioned artists during WWII as well as with animated documentaries reproducing past events in a form of animation, and confirmed a distinction that the “war experience drawings/paintings” were made by the witness of each event. Linguistics has a grammatical category called “evidentiality” that speakers use different expressions depending on whether they actually saw the events or not, and “war experience drawings/paintings” presumably have this evidentiality. And the said four stations have been playing a role of providing supplemental information to those pictures through interviews and investigations. Given that television has been delivering stereotypical images of war by using limited visual materials repeatedly, “war experience drawings/paintings” are valuable as it can visually communicate diverse aspects of war. One of the advantages of drawings and paintings is that they can portray even the subjects that cameras fail to capture because photographers cannot predict and prepare for shooting, and even today, when camera-equipped smartphones are prevalent, this strength serves as an effective tool.
