In/visible Public Secrecy：Necro-Representations of Japanese War Orphans in Tracing Her Shadow.

This article examines the (in)visibility of zanryū koji—Japanese orphans abandoned in China after World War II—through Peng Fei’s Sino-Japanese co-production Tracing Her Shadow (2020). The analysis focuses on three dimensions：necro-representation, the necroscape, and the politics of voice. The film develops a distinctive strategy of negational representation by refusing direct depiction and instead constructing the image of the orphans through radical absence, secondary media, and deferred testimony. In doing so, it reveals the impossibility of representing this historically traumatized group within dominant narratives and public memory. As a co-production, the film transforms Nara into a peculiar necroscape, in which the protagonists’ quest positions them as non-immersive flâneurs. At the same time, although the zanryū koji inhabit the same spaces as their Japanese neighbors, their existence remains largely invisible. Furthermore, accent functions as an auditory “skin tone.” Caught between postcolonial legacy and the neoliberal labor market, the zanryū koji are forced into a state of silent, quasi-invisible life and labor. Finally, the film confronts a profound representational dilemma as it enters public circulation： the critical historical memory embedded within it is easily stripped of its political context and repackaged through neoliberal tourist consumption, thus reducing historical trauma to a consumable local spectacle.