Recontextualizing the “silence” of Japanese Canadians : artistic approaches by Cindy Mochizuki and Emma Nishimura
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the context of Japanese Canadian and Japanese American studies, the silence of the Second World War internment survivors is one of the most frequently discussed topics. This thesis explores the significant use of silence by two Japanese Canadian artists, Cindy Mochizuki and Emma Nishimura. With the impactful use of silence, Mochizuki’s Sue Sada Was Here and Nishimura’s An Archive of Rememory successfully interrupt the official narrative told in museums, which often silences the histories of ethnocultural minority groups in Canada. The Japanese Canadian community is not solely responsible for their collective silence. Rather, as Mona Oikawa suggests, social amnesia is actively produced by the nation state and bystanders. Both artists’ works successfully resist social amnesia and the erasure of memory enacted through the official discourse on reparation through their effective use of silence in their works. In Mochizuki’s site-specific single-channeled video installation Sue Sada Was Here, performers’ verbal silence strengthens their power of haunting, backed by the heavily layered sound and speeches of a writer Muriel Kitagawa. Building on Avery F. Gordon’s discussion on ghosts’ haunting, I argue this work successfully haunted the exhibition visitors, who might have felt being questioned their silence as bystanders. Nishimura heeds the silent memories through re-enacting her grandmother’s wartime experience in making An Archive of Rememory. By folding photo-intaglio prints of family photographs into bundle-shaped sculptures, Nishimura rejects the homogenization of Japanese Canadian history and the reasons for their silence. This representation of silent memories achieves what Janet Wolff and Luc Boltanski’s discussed as an adequate emotional proximity, which is required for the represented memory of pain to create a politically productive relationship with its witness. Although scholars often prioritize speech over silence, silence is also an impactful communication tool. Both artists’ own listening to their grandparents’ silence, as well as the silence embodied in their works, demonstrates how the withholding of speech can mobilize the observers. It is more the task of observers to practice their listening and determine how they can ethically react to the silence of others.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".