Taking, Keeping, Caring, Stealing: Competing Claims to Ownership of the Dead at a Buddhist Burial Mound

My paper takes up the shifting meanings of Kyoto’s “ear mound” (mimizuka) over the course of the modern and contemporary periods, particularly as it is articulated in relation to other sites of commemoration organized around the entombing of bodily remains. The ear mound is understood to contain not ears but noses, taken from Korean and Chinese soldiers and civilians killed during the failed Japanese invasions of Korea in the late sixteenth century and brought back to Japan as trophies. The burial mound seems to have operated during the early modern period both within a framework of spectacle and one of spirit pacification. In the paper, I explore how ritual pacification becomes connected to post-war rhetorics of “peace.” I am interested especially in how the ear mound and places like it become sites of cathexis for competing national interests and thus sites of contestation.