An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945)

by Shunsuke Tsurumi

  Victims of the bombings find it difficult to marry, as do their children and relations. They live in constant fear of recurrent sickness and of imposing troubles on ‘healthy’ relatives by transmitting sickness or deformity to their children. Moreover, there is in Japanese society a hidden discrimination against them, which is portrayed in Ibuse Masuji's Black Rain (1966).92

  Tōge Sankichi, the poet, and Ōta Yōko, the novelist, were both atomic bomb victims, and continued to write about the atomic bombs until their death. Ōta Yōko's novel, Streets of Corpses, was completed by the autumn of 1945, but the Occupation did not allow its publication until 1948, and even then only in an expurgated form. She was never able to adjust to post-war Japan. This inability of the victims to adjust is one of the themes developed in her novels, Half-Human (1959) and Human Rags (1951).93

  There are also novels by writers who were not themselves victims, such as Hotta Yoshie's Judgement. This book portrays the atomic bomb from an international perspective, as one incident in contemporary history. The work has two main characters, one a Japanese and one an American protagonist.94 Iida Momo's American Hero is the story of one of the Americans who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. No Japanese character appears in the whole of the long novel, something unprecedented in the history of Japanese literature.95

  12 The End of the War

  On 14 August 1945, at a meeting in the Emperor's presence, the Supreme Council decided upon surrender. The Chiefs of Staff of both Army and Navy argued in favour of continuing the war. The final decision, however, was entrusted to the Emperor, and he accepted the Potsdam Declaration of 26 July. The war which had claimed the lives of so many people of so many countries, including more than three million Japanese and more than ten million Chinese, was over.

  At noon on 15 August 1945, a recorded message from the Emperor was broadcast throughout Japan. Robert Guillain, who was under house arrest in the town of Karuizawa, saw the villagers gathering in a house nearby, the house of the local chief of the Neighbour Association. The people listened with their heads respectfully bowed to the recording of the Emperor's voice, which none of them had ever heard before. They did not seem to understand either his manner of speaking or the content of his words. They did not understand the message of the broadcast until the announcer cut in and explained in ordinary Japanese that the message meant surrender. To Guillain, the Emperor's manner of speaking was reminiscent of a Noh actor, monotonous and devoid of emotion, and the response of the listening crowd was like the stylized movements of classical Japanese theatre. They expressed their surging emotions with a minimum of overt gestures, disguising their innermost feelings with a mask of apathy. After the broadcast, there were only subdued sobs. The villagers retreated to their houses and hid themselves. Absolute silence reigned in the village.

  Guillain was surprised when the seventy-five million Japanese remaining in the homeland, who had readied themselves to choose death rather than surrender, made a complete volte-face, together with their Emperor, and from the very next day greeted Guillain and other Caucasians with cheerful smiles. The records show that 527 military personnel (394 in the Army, 126 in the Navy, three nurses, and four unidentified) committed suicide after the surrender. Thirty-nine civilians committed suicide in Tokyo. They belonged to ultra-nationalist groups, the Army of Justice against Foreign Invaders, the Serenity Society, and the Great East Seminary, and included some youths who joined in a group suicide on the spur of the moment. These suicides all took place before MacArthur's army landed on the main island of Japan on 28 August 1945. By and large, the occupation of Japan by U.S. troops took place quietly, meeting no armed resistance on the part of the Japanese people. This was the manner in which the war which had cost the Japanese more than three million lives came to an end.

  The inhabitants of the four main islands of Japan had been prepared to fight in their homeland in the event of a U.S. landing. This battle on home ground, however, took place not on the four main islands, but only on the islands of Okinawa.

  In 1951, the Japanese Peace Conference, in which China and Soviet Russia did not participate, was held in San Francisco. There Japanese Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru accepted the condition that Allied occupation of Okinawa, in effect an occupation by the U.S.A., should continue. This condition did not greatly concern the rest of the Japanese. The Okinawan archipelago is not only geographically removed from the other Japanese islands, but also differs in terms of cultural heritage.

  According to legend, the Okinawa islands were created by Amamiku, a local god. The Lord of Heaven then sent his son and daughter to the islands, and they founded the first royal dynasty, which continued for twenty-five generations. This legend is quite similar to the founding myth of the main islands. A second dynasty was established after a rebellion against the royal house. Then in 1609 the Satsuma clan of southern Japan invaded and conquered Okinawa. The Satsuma rulers were shrewd enough not to provoke the Government of China, which is not far from Okinawa, and encouraged the Okinawans to preserve their Chinese customs. The Satsuma clan used Okinawa as an entrepot for trade with China and indirectly with Europe and the U.S.A. This strategic base, together with the Okinawan sugar industry, gave the Satsuma clan the wealth and also the foresight and international perspective which later enabled it to play a revolutionary role in the overthrow of the Tokugawa Government.

  In 1879, twelve years after the Meiji Restoration, the central Government of Japan removed the King of Okinawa, who had until then been allowed to retain the position of Governor of the islands, and sent a governor directly from Tokyo. The traditional government of Okinawa was then dissolved. But the cultural character of Okinawa, with its strong influence from China, and, as we shall see below, its preservation of earlier Japanese traditions, remained distinctive from that of the rest of Japan. For this reason the Japanese consented in 1951 to cut off these islands by allowing their continued occupation by the U.S.A.

  The main islands of Japan entered a stage of rapid economic recovery in the 1950s. A testimony to the speed of this recovery is the account of a man named Liu Lian Ren, who escaped from a forced labour camp and hid alone for thirteen years. Liu was one of 38,939 Chinese who had been brought to Japan and put to hard labour according to the Cabinet decision of 27 November 1942. One sixth of these men, 6,872, died within two years. There was an uprising of 850 men in Hanaokayama, Akita Prefecture, of whom 420 were killed. Liu Lian Ren escaped from a camp in Hokkaido on 30 July 1945 and fled to the mountains, where he was found on 9 February 1958. The Prime Minister of Japan at the time was Kishi Nobusuke who, as Minister of Munitions in the Tōjō Cabinet, had been responsible for the transportation of forced labourers from China in 1942. The Kishi Government attempted to charge Liu with illegal residence in Japan but was prevented by the force of public opinion. When asked why he had been in hiding for such a long time, Liu replied that he had sometimes gone out scouting at night, and when he had peeped into villagers’ windows he had seen that they were leading a merry and prosperous life in comparison with the destitution of wartime, and he had assumed that Japan must have won the war.96

  The Japanese of Okinawa, however, did not enjoy such prosperity. In June 1966, a group of representatives from the U.S. anti-Vietnam War movement toured the whole of Japan. Ralph Featherstone, the black civil rights activist who was later killed by a rightist bomb, summed up his impression of Japan with the observation that the Japanese were divided into Okinawans and non-Okinawans. At that time the U.S. military bases in Okinawa were being used for operations against Vietnam, and so feelings about the war were incomparably stronger in Okinawa than elsewhere in Japan.97 Elsewhere, the Peace Constitution forbade either government or people to participate in any kind of warfare, and they had therefore a sense of security, whereas Okinawa was directly entangled in the war, and had therefore a sense of its reality.

  In Okinawa there is a tendency for criticism of the central government which arises from 100 years of rule by conquest, the suffer
ing caused by the Fifteen Years’ War, and the abandonment in 1951 to U.S. occupation in the cause of peace for the rest of Japan. Okinawa could be called the Third World of Japan.

  One of the first to appreciate the culture of this Third World was Yanagi Muneyoshi (Sōetsu). His praise of the folk art of Okinawa inspired artists on the main islands. Yanagi and his colleagues made many journeys to Okinawa, where they came into conflict with the central Government over its policy of forcing the standard dialect of Tokyo on the inhabitants. Yanagi was detained by the police during his trip there in 1940 because of his assertion that the Okinawan language should be preserved, a view which was considered subversive by the wartime Government. At the time he wrote:

  . . . the cultural vitality of a country springs from the vitality of its local culture. When localism becomes thin and weak, the culture of the nation itself becomes characterless. Without learning the language born and bred in each locality, how can a people find a mode of expression appropriate to itself? Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in a local dialect of Italy. People of Okinawa, you should of course learn the standard language of Tokyo, which is the language of public transactions in Japan today. At the same time, please keep your passionate love for the language your ancestors left to you. Please remember that this language once gave birth to the poetry of the great poetess Onna Nabe. Refine your language even more, so that it produces great literature. Then Okinawa will attract the attention of all Japan. And the people of the world will work hard to learn the language of Okinawa in order to translate such literature.98

  This prophetic view of Okinawa was expressed during the Fifteen Years’ War, when culture was a tool of Tokyo government policy. After the war more and more people came to realize the validity of Yanagi's opinion. Yanagi saw local regions, not as the final point of delivery for international ideas imported from overseas by a central agency stationed in a cosmopolitan city such as Tokyo, but as the places where world culture is created. His ideas are one of the principal intellectual legacies of wartime Japan."

  According to folklorist Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962), the original form of Japanese culture in fact came from the south by way of Okinawa. His last book, By Way of the Sea, (1960) is a presentation of this hypothesis as well as the results of his lifelong study of Japanese customs and mores. According to Yanagita, Okinawa preserves an earlier form of Japanese culture, in which many of the traditions used for the glorification of the state on the main islands remain apolitical folk traditions, and other traditions and festivals are more vigorously preserved in Okinawa than on the mainland.100

  In the period immediately after the surrender a common opinion was that myths and legends could now be replaced by science. This cult of science was propagated in one form by the Occupation and in another by the Communist Party, supported by the authority of Soviet Russia, but, although at first it seemed without fault, as the years passed it began to show some signs of weakness. Nowadays, the indigenous culture expressed in folklore and traditional rituals is no longer thought of as something to be discarded. It is now seen that their use as justification for government policies is only one possible interpretation. The lore and rituals of Okinawa have now captured the imagination of the Japanese people, because they offer a clue to the understanding of old Japan which cannot be found in bureaucratic, colony-dependent, modern Japan.

  Since the war it has been realized that in Okinawa we may find clues not only for the reconstruction of past Japan, but also for the construction of future Japan. The culture of Okinawa, where women play a central role in religious rituals and in the formation of basic social values, may contribute to a reformation of the male-centred society of the other islands, which, as we saw above, failed with the loss of the war. Okinawa, in its role as a U.S. base in Asia, and because it shares the hardships of the Third World, serves as a warning to the Japanese of the main islands that, unless some limit is found to the country's economic expansion since 1960, Japan will again find itself infringing on the rights of its Asian neighbours. By learning from the Okinawan experience, the Japanese people could develop a plan for a Japan that is not harmful. The main islands, which ignored Okinawa after the surrender in August 1945, came to desire reunification with Okinawa, a reunification finally realized in 1972. Even today the major part of Okinawan territory is occupied by U.S. military bases, and the inhabitants are thus forced to rely heavily upon the presence of U.S. soldiers for their living. Yet, the island is reunited to the homeland, thereby coming under the prohibition against nuclear weapons which applies to the rest of Japan.* In this there is some realization, if belated and partial, by the central Government of its debt to the Okinawan people, who bore the brunt of the war in its latest stages.

  On 15 August 1945, most Japanese were conscious only of the fact that the war had ended. In the first years after the war, people did not gather to commemorate the anniversary. In later years, gatherings began to be held on that date for the purpose of reflecting on the war. When the U.S. war in Vietnam, in which the Japanese Government was clearly involved, began, these gatherings took on a new significance in relation to this issue. Many Japanese, including rightist groups, saw the similarities between the Vietnam War and the earlier phases of the Fifteen Years’ War, and the memorial meetings of 15 August became a part of the antiwar movement. The date became not just the day on which the war had ended for Japan, but a date in world history, the date World War II ended, a milestone in the series of wars that have made up international history in the past and which may compose the future. The Fifteen Years’ War came to be seen from an international perspective, not as a phenomenon unique to Japan but as one of many other wars waged by other countries.101

  The development of this new consciousness was partly due to the emergence of a new generation, raised during the war, which had watched with a child's perception the older generation undergo tenkō when Japan suffered defeat, surrender, and occupation. The fact that children were raised under the Occupation in a manner unprecedented in Japan is of vital importance.

  In order to understand the effects of their experience we must focus on the evacuation of primary school children during the war. Patricia Thompson, reminiscing about her childhood in wartime Britain, has written: ‘At school I often fell asleep in the classroom after a sleepless night because of air raids. I was never scolded by the teacher. Instead I was carried out of the class into a small room, specially prepared for war-weary kids like myself. I usually felt ashamed but I really couldn't help it!’102* This contrasts sharply with memories published by Thompson's Japanese contemporaries. The militaristic virtues praised and prescribed in the Field Service Code, published by the Ministry of the Army in January 1941, and The Way of Subjects, published by the Ministry of Education in July 1941, set the standards for primary school pupils. The Field Service Code, produced under the supervision of General Tojo, then Minister of the Army, has a quite different tone from the Imperial Instructions to the Soldiers of the early Meiji period. The Code admonishes soldiers to give absolute obedience to the Emperor, to prefer death to capture, and to prepare their families for the possibility that their remains would not be brought back from the battlefield. The military virtues expressed in the Code were enforced in primary schools, which were run like military organizations with the teachers as superior officers. Documents published after the war which describe the evacuation of children from the cities seldom give a picture of kindly teachers.103

  The volte-face by these teachers after 15 August 1945 left an indelible impression on the minds of their pupils. They were now allowed to use their history, geography, and natural science textbooks only after they had brushed black ink over the passages about the sanctity of the national structure. The teachers who had instructed them to prepare for glorious self-destruction in order to defend the sanctity of the national structure and had flogged them when they failed to recite the Imperial edicts perfectly began teaching ‘scientific truths’ based directly on the orders of the Occupation. Th
is generation - those who were about six to fifteen years old at the time of the surrender - is characterized by a distrust of adult leaders, and also of the Occupation Government.

  It was this generation which formed the nucleus of the independent protest groups in the 1960 uprising. On 19 May, Prime Minister Kishi, who had been prominent during the war, and his Liberal-Democratic Party approved a new Mutual Security Treaty with the U.S.A. by majority vote. There had been strong demand from the opposition parties for continued debate, but Kishi had rushed procedures in order to conclude the treaty in time for President Eisenhower's impending visit to Japan. The procedure was legal, but the manner in which it had been forced through the Diet* and Kishi's own past history provoked the anger of an unprecedented range of people. For almost a month, protesters surrounded the Diet, and at the height of the movement, on 4 June, 5,600,000 took part in demonstrations throughout the country. On 18 June, the last day before the law took effect, an unprecedented 330,000 people surrounded the Diet. A few days earlier, on 15 June, student groups broke into the Diet, and one, Kanba Michiko, born in 1937, was killed. Eisenhower, already in the Philippines en route to Japan, cancelled his visit, and Prime Minister Kishi was forced to resign. The New Mutual Security Treaty, however, became established law, and Japan was placed firmly under the nuclear umbrella of the United States. At this time, a peace treaty still had not been concluded between Japan and China, and theoretically the two countries were still at war. Under these circumstances, Okinawa was used as a U.S. base, and thus it seemed to the Okinawans that their island was the military bulwark against China for the whole of Japan. It was the realization of this fact that escalated the protest to such an unprecedented scale.104