The Visible and the Invisible: Contested Evidence, Photography, and the Politics of Remembering Japanese Atrocities in Asia

From 1931 to 1945, Japanese wartime photography was determined by a censorship system that shaped what could and could not be seen. The survival of the Mainichi Shimbun’s wartime negatives, hidden in an underground temple vault at the end of the war despite official orders to destroy them, offers rare material traces of this censorship process. This article examines how claims about photographic evidence framed as authenticity, veracity, and proof have been mobilized in debates over Japanese wartime imagery by analyzing two highly contested images from 1937 published in the Mainichi newspaper and the international press: H.S. Wong’s widely circulated “Bloody Saturday” photograph of a wounded infant in Shanghai and Satō Shinju’s portrait of two officers celebrated in the fabricated “Hundred-Man Killing Contest.” Both illuminate instances of how wartime photographs function simultaneously as representations of fact, propaganda, and sites of denial. While the photograph of an injured baby in Shanghai became well known internationally, prompting fierce disputes over its representation of the event, the “Killing Contest” photograph represented a staged domestic fiction that made it possible to imagine a violence not visible in the mass press due to censorship. Publications and investigative reporting in the 1970s reignited debates over these images, exposing how photography continues to structure memory, forgetting, and denial of Japanese atrocities. By interrogating how censorship, mediation, and circulation shaped these photographs’ afterlives, this article frames them as unstable yet indispensable tools for reckoning with the past.