But this is a staggering amount of information, even for a single second. We had no realistic way to store it, let alone process it in real time. The amount of data gathered for a few minutes would have overwhelmed all the storage servers at Harvard. We could open up a door to the past, but would see nothing in the tsunami of bits that flooded forth.
[Behind Dr. Kirino is a machine that looks like a large clinical MRI scanner. She steps to the side so that the camera can zoom slowly inside the tube of the scanner where the volunteer’s body would go during the process. As the camera moves through the tube, continuing toward the light at the end of the tunnel, her voice continues off camera.]
Perhaps given enough time, we could have come up with a solution that would have allowed the data to be recorded. But Evan believed that we could not afford to wait. The surviving relatives of the victims were aging, dying, and the War was about to fade out of living memory. There was a duty, he felt, to offer the surviving relatives whatever answers we could get.
So I came up with the idea of using the human brain to process the information gathered by the Bohm-Kirino detectors. The brain’s massively parallel processing capabilities, the bedrock of consciousness, proved quite effective at filtering and making sense of the torrent of data from the detectors. The brain could be given the raw electrical signals, throw 99.999 percent of it away, and turn the rest into sight, sound, smell, and make sense of it all and record them as memories.
This really shouldn’t surprise us. After all, this is what our brains do, every second of our lives. The raw signals from our eyes, ears, skin, and tongue would overwhelm any supercomputer, but from second to second, our brain manages to construct the consciousness of our existence from all that noise.
“For our volunteer subjects, the process creates the illusion of experiencing the past, as though they were in that place, at that time,” I wrote in Nature.
How I regret using the word “illusion” now. So much weight ended up being placed on my poor word choice. History is like that: The truly important decisions never seemed important at the time.
Yes, the brain takes the signals and makes a story out of them, but there’s nothing illusory about it, whether in the past or now.
Archibald Ezary, Radhabinod Pal Professor of Law, Codirector of East Asian Studies, Harvard Law School:
[Ezary has a placid face that is belied by the intensity of his gaze. He enjoys giving lectures, not because he likes hearing himself talk, but because he thinks he will learn something new each time he tries to explain.]
The legal debate between China and Japan about Wei’s work, almost twenty years ago, was not really new. Who should have control over the past is a question that has troubled all of us, in various forms, for many years. But the invention of the Kirino Process made this struggle to control the past a literal, rather than merely a metaphorical, issue.
A state has a temporal dimension as well as a spatial one. It grows and shrinks over time, subjugating new peoples and sometimes freeing their descendants. Japan today may be thought of as just the home islands, but back in 1942, at its height, the Japanese Empire ruled Korea, most of China, Taiwan, Sakhalin, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, and large parts of Indonesia, as well as large swaths of the islands in the Pacific. The legacy of that time shapes Asia to this day.
One of the most vexing problems created by the violent and unstable process by which states expand and contract over time is this: As control over a territory shifts between sovereigns over time, which sovereign should have jurisdiction over that territory’s past?
Before Evan Wei’s demonstration, the most that the issue of jurisdiction over the past intruded on real life was an argument over whether Spain or America would have the right to the sovereign’s share of treasure from sunken sixteenth-century Spanish galleons recovered in contemporary American waters, or whether Greece or England should keep the Elgin Marbles. But now the stakes are much higher.
So, is Harbin during the years between 1931 and 1945 Japanese territory, as the Japanese government contends? Or is it Chinese, as the People’s Republic argues? Or perhaps we should treat the past as something held in trust for all of humanity by the United Nations?
The Chinese view would have had the support of most of the Western world—the Japanese position is akin to Germany arguing that attempts to travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1939 and 1945 should be subject to its approval—but for the fact that it is the People’s Republic of China, a Western pariah, which is now making the claim. And so you see how the present and the past will strangle each other to death.
Moreover, behind both the Japanese and the Chinese positions is the unquestioned assumption that if we can resolve whether China or Japan has sovereignty over World War Two–era Harbin, then either the People’s Republic or the present Japanese government would be the right authority to exercise that sovereignty. But this is far from clear. Both sides have problems making the legal case.
First, Japan has always argued, when it comes to Chinese claims for compensation for wartime atrocities, that the present Japan, founded on the Constitution drafted by America, cannot be the responsible party. Japan believes that those claims are against its predecessor government, the Empire of Japan, and all such claims have been resolved by the Treaty of San Francisco and other bilateral treaties. But if that is so, for Japan now to assert sovereignty over that era in Manchuria, when it has previously disavowed all responsibility for it, is more than a little inconsistent.
But the People’s Republic is not home free either. At the time Japanese forces took control of Manchuria in 1932, it was only nominally under the control of the Republic of China, the entity that we think of as the “official” China during the Second World War, and the People’s Republic of China did not even exist. It is true that during the War, armed resistance in Manchuria to the Japanese occupation came almost entirely from the Han Chinese, Manchu, and Korean guerrillas led by Chinese and Korean Communists. But these guerrillas were not under the real direction of the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong and so had little to do with the eventual founding of the People’s Republic.
So why should we think that either the present government of Japan or China has any claim to Harbin during that era? Wouldn’t the Republic of China, which now resides in Taipei and calls itself ??Taiwan, have a more legitimate claim? Or perhaps we should conjure up a “Provisional Historical Manchurian Authority” to assume jurisdiction over it?
Our doctrines concerning the succession of states, developed under the Westphalian framework, simply cannot deal with these questions raised by Dr. Wei’s experiments.
If these debates have a clinical and evasive air to them, that is intentional. “Sovereignty,” ?“jurisdiction,” and similar words have always been mere conveniences to allow people to evade responsibility or to sever inconvenient bonds. “Independence” is declared, and suddenly the past is forgotten; a “revolution” occurs, and suddenly memories and blood debts are wiped clean; a treaty is signed, and suddenly the past is buried and gone. Real life does not work like that.
However you want to parse the robber’s logic that we dignify under the name “international law,” the fact remains that the people who call themselves Japanese today are connected to those who called themselves Japanese in Manchuria in 1937, and the people who call themselves Chinese today are connected to those who called themselves Chinese there and then. These are the messy realities, and we make do with what we are given.
All along, we have made international law work only by assuming that the past would remain silent. But Dr. Wei has given the past a voice and made dead memories come alive. What role, if any, we wish to give the voices of the past in the present is up to us.