An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945)

by Shunsuke Tsurumi

  By 1 December 1946, the official programme of aiding Koreans to return to their home country was ended, although it was resumed in later years. Today, about 600,000 Koreans remain in Japan. The majority belong to the second and third generation born and raised in Japan and brought up to speak the Japanese language. The Japanese, however, have retained their prejudice against Koreans living in Japan, as has been shown in many social distance surveys. The chances of employment of Koreans by Japanese companies are limited by this discrimination, and their chances of marriage with Japanese are also hampered. Japanese Koreans, in their awareness of this situation, have developed a highly critical attitude to Japan. Although their number is comparatively small, they have already made a great contribution to Japanese literature - or, rather, to literature written in the Japanese language - in terms of both quality and range of subject matter. Kim Si-chong has published two books of long poems. One is entitled Niigata, the name of the port from which Koreans were repatriated, leaving behind relatives who remained in Japan. The other is entitled Ikaino Poems, Ikaino being a Japanese-Korean district.61 These are virtually the only successful long poems in Japanese produced in the 110 years since the Meiji Restoration which have stood the test of time. The influence of Korean ballads on Japanese-Korean poetry may be an important factor. There is no native Japanese ballad tradition. In the Meiji period, Naka Kansuke, a noted writer of the Meiji period, tried his hand at long poems but decided that it was impossible to write them in Japanese, and turned to writing fables. Senke Motomaro, under the influence of Pushkin, wrote a long poem entitled The Old House, reminiscing about the house in which he was born, but this interesting work, which exactly captures the atmosphere of the Meiji period, is unfinished.

  It appears that while Japanese residents in Japan are apt to be absorbed by the details of social life, Koreans, who live in isolation from Japanese society, can see the Japanese social structure as a whole. In order to understand their own presence in Japan and the discrimination against them they must understand the history of the past century, and thus they learn to view the present with the perspective of history.

  In 1958 Kim Talsu wrote The Trial of Park Tal, the story of a labourer in South Korea who puts up posters which criticize the autocratic government and, when arrested, repents and weeps, promising never to commit such a crime again.62 Upon his release, he continues to do the same thing and is again arrested, and again weeps and repents and is released. He repeats the same series of actions over and over again, and thus incurs the contempt of the police, and because of this contempt he is able to continue his subversive activities. The story is in effect a critique of the inflexibility of the thinking of Japanese intellectuals with regard to tenkō. This inflexibility was, in Kim Talsu's view, an unhappy legacy of samurai culture, and he believed that post-Meiji culture deprived the Japanese people of their dynamic vitality by imposing the moral code of the samurai class on the whole of the nation. When one is not afraid of scorn, Kim Talsu suggests, one can go further. Kim Talsu's own life lends plausibility to this assertion, since he supported his family by working as a rag-and-bone man when he was a child at primary school, having come to Japan at the age of eight.

  Ko Sa-Myong, another Korean novelist, who was born in Japan of parents who had migrated from Korea, in 1975 wrote an autobiographical essay called The Meaning of Life.63 In this he recounts how in primary school he used a Japanese name which his elder brother had thought up for him. Thus in the process of learning to read and write he became Japanese, and gradually came to think in accord with the Japanese Government, so that when Japan surrendered he felt that he had lost himself. After this experience he saw a new significance in the way in which his father had lived. His father had been a longshoreman who worked among other Koreans. He did not need Japanese for his work, and at home he spoke nothing but Korean. He cooked Korean food, since as his wife was dead he cared for the house and his sons himself. When they began school, they were humiliated by taunts that they stank of garlic (a typical Japanese prejudice against Koreans), but when they asked their father to put less garlic in the food, he was angry, and said, ‘What's wrong with Koreans eating Korean food?’ Their father paid no attention to the Japanese names which his sons had adopted, and he knew nothing about the Japanese law which required Koreans to adopt Japanese names. Among his Korean fellow-workers and his sons he lived in the Korean way. All his life he called his second son, the author of this book, ‘Chom San’. Chom San, or Ko Sa-myong, came to understand all this in the confusion which followed the war: the hardships of his father's life, and the message contained in his obstinacy in calling his son ‘Chom San’. The simple name ‘Chom San’ symbolized an attitude and a point of view which the Japanese Government could not destroy even with the militarism of the period of the Fifteen Years’ War. Ko Sa-myong's book throws light on the situation of Korean workers in Japan, and on a form of refusing tenkō which was rooted in their class and in their nationality.

  8 Germs of Anti-Stalinism

  The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia exercised a great influence on the minds of intellectuals in Japan, an influence intensified by the idea of a ladder of civilization. Through the Association of New Men this influence was spread all over Japan among both intellectuals and young men aspiring to intellectu-alism. The Comintern, established in 1919, made contact with the leftist movement in Japan in 1920. The Japan Communist Party was formed in 1922 by socialists of a variety of persuasions, including some who had been engaged in anti-war activities during the Russo-Japanese War, and others who were survivors of the Grand Treason Incident. But their eclectic socialist theories and their ‘rules of thumb’ drawn from their own experience were disdained by the younger men, who were proponents of new ideas and theories imported directly from what they now saw as the Western country most advanced in ‘civilization’, socialist Russia. These young intellectuals saw the contemporary situation in Soviet Russia in terms of pure theory, and thus viewed the country as necessarily an impeccable society, the only fatherland of the working classes of the world. All the later trials of the original revolutionary leaders - Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Radek, and Zinoviev - were given a justification, and not a particle of doubt was expressed by these socialist theorists.

  At the earliest stage of the formation of the Communist Party, Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880-1960), a survivor of the Grand Treason Incident, advised the leftist intellectuals to concern themselves with the daily struggles for food of the working class and to make that the basis of their bond with them. This view was contested by the then rising scholar Fukumoto Kazuo (1894-1984), who had just returned from studying in Germany where he had read communist theory in the original. Fukumoto, who advocated his own brand of Leninism, wrote that the radical intellectuals had first to separate themselves from the masses and then to arm themselves theoretically before they could be reunited with the leftist movement of the masses. Fukumoto's ‘Separation-Reunification’ theory prevailed, and he became the reigning theorist of the Communist Party in its earliest period. Later, the Party leaders, including Fukumoto, were called to Moscow, and Fukumoto's theory was repudiated by the Moscow authorities, who, in turn, handed the Japan Communist Party the 1927 Theses. The theses asserted that Japan was under the absolutist, semi-feudal rule of an emperor, with a semi-feudal landlord-tenant relationship remaining in the rural areas. The time was not ripe for direct socialist revolution. Firstly, a bourgeois democratic revolution, with industrial labourers and farmers as the nucleus, was necessary. Such a revolution would sweep away the emperor system and the feudal system of landholding. These ideas were further clarified in the Theses of 1932. These guidelines, drawn up in Moscow, formed the basis of the activities of the Japan Communist Party, and its faithful struggle for the complete and unequivocal abolition of the emperor system led to its virtual extinction by 1935.

  Many dedicated young men worked selflessly to carry out these guidelines for a revolution, in spite of intimidation by police, and the
re were many who died for the cause. But in 1933, two years after the beginning of Japan's invasion of China, there was a mass tenkō of Communist Party sympathizers, and to continue to uphold the banner of the Party required great courage and resistance. By the end of the war, fewer than fifteen members survived, after long imprisonment, having preserved their faith in the scientific validity of the theses drawn up by the Comintern in spite of militaristic government propaganda. For these men there was no question of doubting or criticizing the directives of the Party in Soviet Russia. But for those who defected from the Party, at least at the moment of their tenkō, their recognition of the inadequacy of the directives of the Comintern played an important part. Sano Manabu (1892-1953), a former Chairman of the Communist Party, in his tenkō declaration of 19 June 1933, rejected the blind obedience of the Party to the Comintern, and called for the formation of a new party to work for one-country socialism under the Emperor. In Italy and France, the socialism which developed independently of the directives of Soviet Russia continued to oppose fascism and militarism. In Japan, however, Sano's ‘socialism in one country’, theoretically similar to Stalin's ‘socialism in one country’, was a call not only to break with the Comintern but also to end criticism of the policies of the Emperor's Government. Sano and his party did not, after 1933, take a stand independent of the judgements of Soviet Russia against the upsurge of militarism in Japan.

  Haniya Yutaka (1910- ) was raised to leadership in the Communist Party at a little over twenty years of age when the older leaders, such as Sano, were arrested and imprisoned. In his case, tenkō gave birth to a line of thinking diametrically opposed to that of Sano. Haniya underwent tenkō in prison in 1933. When he watched the prosecutor compile the documents of the investigation, Haniya saw his words and thoughts distorted into a different form before his eyes. He felt that he was lost in a chasm between the official history of Japanese politics which was being compiled by the Public Prosecutor and the official history of the Communist Party which was being compiled by its remaining unimprisoned members. He realized that others must have been lost in the same way, and died without recognition. Would it not be possible to write with this in mind? This became his one ambition, to which he clung all through the war years while he made his living as the editor of a small magazine on economics and as a translator of miscellaneous articles. While he lived as did the average Japanese during the war, Haniya struggled to keep a part of himself as it had been in the moment of his tenkō so that he would not lose sight of his revelation. Immediately after the surrender in 1945, Haniya, together with six others whom he had found trustworthy in the years of betrayal, founded the magazine Kindai Bungaku (Modern Literature) which had a great influence in the shaping of post-war mentality.64

  During the war, Haniya, aside from translations, published only two small pieces, one fantasy story entitled A Cave in 1939, and a collection of aphorisms entitled Credo Quia Absurdum. In these works he hints ambiguously at the theme of his later long novel Dead Spirit, which he had already planned as his life work.65 Dead Spirit began to appear in serial form in 1946 and has not yet been completed. According to the author it probably never will be. The characters are fictional, and it is set in no specific place. Haniya's method, which he devised in prison, is to depict fantasy as fantasy, making no attempt to present his thoughts as being concerned with social philosophy or contemporary history. At the same time, the book, conceived in the 1930s, is nevertheless an unflinching critique of the Japan Communist Party and Stalin's Russia, from the viewpoint of an imprisoned man. Although the novel, if it can be called such, contains no obvious reference to any historical event or person, one can see in it the reflection of a lynching* incident in 1934, in which the Chairman of the Japan Communist Party acted as prosecutor of two central committee members who had been exposed as spies.66 One died of nervous shock during the interrogation. The other, who, as we now know from his own confession, was in fact a spy of the Japanese Thought Police who had infiltrated the Japan Communist Party, escaped in the commotion caused by the death of the other suspect. The newspapers and the police at the time made good use of this incident as proof of the inhumanity of communism. This type of propaganda continues even today. In 1977 the Democratic Socialist Party demanded in the Diet that the Chairman of the Japan Communist Party, who had a part in the lynching of 1934, should be deprived of his seat.

  Haniya's perspective on the incident is quite different. He presents it from the point of view of the victim who was locked up in a room and driven to death by interrogation, and from the point of view of the woman who had been allotted to the police spy. She later committed suicide, having written of her shame at having been the lover of a secret agent. The central motif of Haniya's novel is a telephone box in which these victims’ voices reverberate. Through this the hero, who had been present at the lynching and is on the verge of death, converses with the spirit of the murdered traitor, and, at the same time, with the ultimate entity which exists at the outermost boundary of the cosmos. With that perspective, the Party's struggle appears as just one transitional episode. From that viewpoint all is finished, the Communist Party is dead, its leadership, which prided itself on its infallibility, is dead. The essence of political activity, including that of the Communist Party, can be expressed in the simple slogan:

  He is an enemy.

  Overthrow the enemy.

  One who worked in accordance with this slogan for the realization of a communist society would be aware of the possibility of the future death of the Communist Party as such. If he were the leader of the Party, he would in fact work for the extinction of leadership and of himself as leader, seeing this destruction as inevitable in order to escape the consequences expressed in Lord Acton's dictum Tower tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely’.

  Very few shared this outlook during the war years. Most of the leftist leaders who, following the lead of Sano Manabu, underwent tenkō turned from faith in Stalin to faith in the reigning Emperor and in the holy war against China, the United States, and Britain. After Japan's surrender, the Communists who had refused tenkō became heroes with unlimited power over the young students and leftists, and passed on to them their belief in the infallibility of the Communist International under Stalin's leadership. With the death of Stalin in 1953 and Khrushchev's exposure of the purges, Haniya's views, hitherto virtually ignored, were taken up by many young people who were disillusioned with the Old Left. Haniya's writings became even more popular after 1960 when the non-Communist Party Left took the lead in the massive protest against the new military treaty between the United States and Japan. Japan was then under the leadership of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, a prominent figure in the war years and one of the officials responsible for the forced immigration of Korean labourers discussed above. Haniya, along with Yoshimoto Takaaki, came to be seen as a forerunner of the New Left in Japan.

  Haniya's thought was strongly influenced by Buddhism and Jainism as well as Marxism. It can be considered a type of nihilism. The philosophy of nothingness is also present in the works of Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945). Nishida is sometimes said to have been the first philosopher in modern Japan to develop an original philosophical system, but politically Nishida's philosophy developed into a eulogy of the Emperor as the locus of nothingness, and during the war Nishida was a firm supporter of emperor worship. He even wrote on the philosophy of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in relation to Japan's war aims. Haniya's nihilism, in contrast, entailed neither emperor worship nor the worship of Stalin. Haniya did not even join in the post-war worship of the Communists who had refused tenkō. Although he continued to support the Communists and the Old Left, he never lost his awareness of the many victims of mistaken judgements by the Party leaders. He took the side of the rank and file Party members, and, even more, of the masses for whom they were working, and he firmly believed that it was necessary to generate a new leadership to replace the old. This view had great appeal for young student rad
icals in the 1960s and 1970s.

  During the war years there existed the Labour-Farmer Party, within which were many scholars and organizers who did not fully believe in the infallibility of the Comintern. Among them was Yamakawa Hitoshi (1880-1960), who consistently criticized growing militarism. Although he soon left the Japan Communist Party because he disagreed with Fukumoto's Separation-Reunification theory, he preserved his critical position and, even after most of the Communist leaders were either imprisoned or had been converted to ultra-nationalism, he tried to organize a popular front against militarism by calling on all the sects and schools of thought which were critical of the existing Government. For this he was arrested, together with many other scholars and labour-organizers, in 1937.

  At various times during his long life, Yamakawa earned his living by commerce, by running a photo studio, a dairy farm, an advertisement agency, a nursery, a chicken farm, and by working as an apothecary and as a scribe. He once even made plans, which never materialized, for a printing shop. In this he was very different from the majority of the leftist leaders of the generation of the New Men. According to the ethnologist Yanagita Kunio, in the Meiji period the Japanese people were induced to adopt the life-style of the samurai class which before the Meiji Restoration had been limited to only a small percentage of the nation. This ‘samuraization’ affected other leftist leaders, but does not seem to have affected Yamakawa at all. He lived by commerce all his life, and is said to have scolded his son, later a professor at Tokyo University, for not understanding business when he tried to help his father to sell eggs.67 As can be seen from the title of his autobiography, the Autobiography of Yamakawa Hitoshi, The Record of a Common Man (1951), Yamakawa thought of himself as an ordinary person and developed his socialism from this point of view.