An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945)

by Shunsuke Tsurumi

  What kind of people took part in this protest? In 1960, the great majority of Japanese remembered the end of the war, and this memory had been aroused. The students and citizens who participated did not do so in response to a call from the leftist parties of the Diet. Even the most radical group of students, the Communist League, was independent and in fact critical of the Japan Communist Party. Both the Communist Party and the Socialist Party had little influence in the uprising.

  Protest subsided when Kishi was replaced by Ikeda Hayato, a politician known for keeping a low profile and for concentrating on an economic programme of doubling the income of the Japanese citizen. The fact that the protest ended in this way shows that it was not ideological in character. It was a protest against a Prime Minister who had shared the responsibility for the Fifteen Years’ War. The protest was prompted also by a sense of guilt towards the Chinese people, still a potential enemy.

  The young woman who became the symbol of the protest movement was Kanba Michiko, the graduate student in Japanese history at Tokyo University who was killed at the age of twenty-two.105 She had been seven years old, a first-grader in primary school, when the war ended.

  Another representative of the radical students was Shibata Michiko (1934-1975), a member of the Communist League.106 She had been eleven years old when the war ended, and she wrote her first novel on the evacuation of primary school pupils, From the Bottom of a Valley (1959). A letter from a reader of this novel brought Shibata into contact with the buraku people, who have long suffered social discrimination in Japan. She collected many of their stories, and from this material wrote the Tradition and Life of the Socially Oppressed Buraku (1972). She also organized the defence of a young man of buraku origins who was accused in the Sayama rape-murder case. Unlike most of those who had participated in the 1960 uprising, who returned to normal life and enjoyed the seemingly prosperous times, Shibata continued to protest, adopting the cause of this minority group. She died of an asthmatic attack in 1975.

  The actions of both Kanba and Shibata were characterized by freedom from subordination to male leadership, both within their own radical group and with regard to the older leaders of post-war Japan.

  Those who were children during the war will continue to mistrust the leadership of their elders, whether they are conservative or radical. They will also continue to play an important role in Japanese society for some years to come. Today, however, there exists also a still younger generation which grew up after the war, a generation with no memory of Japan's surrender and of the textbooks painted over with ink.107 According to Ōno Tsutomu, a former labour organizer, those who fled the massive air raids on the cities fall into two types. There are those who were impressed by the inhumanity of the war and in the post-war period took an ethical stance against war; then there are those who were impressed by the ease with which their houses were burnt and decided to develop the technology to build houses which would not be so easily burnt down.108 The younger generation raised after the war seem to be closer to the latter type.

  In 1977, a critic, Etō Jun (1933- ), developed the thesis that the surrender on 15 August 1945 had not been unconditional. The Japanese Government had accepted the conditions of the Potsdam Declaration, and therefore its decision was for conditional surrender. He concluded that mainstream post-war Japanese literature, being based on the assumption of unconditional surrender, is valueless in the light of the facts we now have at our disposal.109 Etō’s main target was the literary stream represented by the journal Gendai Bungaku, and he has a great appeal for the younger generation of those born after the war who have spent their lives in the assured atmosphere of economic prosperity following the 1960s. His chief adversary is Honda Shūgo (1908- ), author of The Literature of Tenkō (1956), and A Narrative History of Postwar Literature in Japan (1966).

  Etō sheds light on certain details which the critics of the period directly following the war failed to take into account. The terms set by the Potsdam Declaration certainly guided both victor and vanquished. However, as Takano Yūichi, scholar of international law, has pointed out, the conditions of the Potsdam Declaration, which required the democratization of Japan, were imposed on Japan by the Allies without discussion and were not the product of consultation between the two sides.110 The fact remains that Japan simply accepted the conditions for surrender laid down by the Potsdam Declaration, and moreover agreed to the unconditional surrender of its Army and Navy. Further, both the Allies and the Japanese Government considered that the surrender was unconditional. This is clearly indicated by the Japanese journals and newspapers from August 1945 to 1946. The expression ‘unconditional surrender’ is used continually, and there is no contradiction of this by the Occupation Authorities. The insistence on unconditional surrender, and the increased sacrifice of lives which this required, are the central points of the conclusion to Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War. He writes in the last paragraph of the book:

  Thus ‘the unnecessary war’ was unnecessarily prolonged, and millions more lives needlessly sacrificed, while the ultimate peace merely produced a fresh menace and the looming fear of another war. For the unnecessary prolongation of the Second World War, in pursuit of the opponents’ ‘unconditional surrender’, proved of profit only to Stalin - by opening the way for Communist domination of Central Europe’.

  The purpose of Etō’s polemic was to persuade the new generation of readers, who have no memory of the war, to give a greater respect to the legacy of post-Meiji Japan than the post-war critics had disposed them to do. Detailed analysis of the events of the war years reveals the failings of the Meiji tradition. Etō’s denial of the unconditional surrender is a polemic against just this kind of critique, and his argument will surely be part of the dialogue between generations in the future. I have stated my position here.

  ____________

  * Many Okinawans believe that, despite this agreement, the U.S.A. still keeps nuclear weapons secretly on Okinawa.

  * From a Story of England at War’, The Gazette, 10 November 1979. 110

  * The opposition Socialist Party Diet members had attempted to prevent the session from opening by surrounding the chairman's podium. The LDP Government had had them dragged out by police, and voted the bill through in their absence.

  13 Looking Back

  I have approached the intellectual history of wartime Japan by focusing on the phenomenon of tenkō. Some forty years ago a scholar satirized excessive academic analysis by pretending to advocate a new science of ‘umbrellology’, the elaborate analysis and classification of various types of umbrellas. Perhaps I may be accused of a similarly absurd ‘tenkology’. But in studying tenkō I have been able to analyze myself and my intellectual milieu, and wartime and post-war Japan. I have also been able to understand the relationship between events and cultural trends outside Japan. Tenkology can become comparative tenkology. Wherever there is individual spontaneity and state use of coercive power, the interplay between these two forces will produce tenkō of various kinds, for better or for worse. I have tried, sometimes without success, to limit my study of tenkō to a description of the course taken by the state on the one hand and of individual choices on the other. Such case studies can help us forecast and illuminate our own problems.

  I have referred, for the most part, only to instances in Japan, but a similar method can be applied to other countries. I remember when a classmate of mine came to Japan during the Occupation, as a physician in the U.S. Navy. He told me that the U.S.A. was on the brink of a dark age. For the first time in its history, the United States was to have its own Imperial Rule Assistance Association. When that happened, he said with great foresight, they should learn from the experience of Japan. So-called Japanology, which by then was already developing in the U.S.A., had not produced such a clear perception of the situation. Lillian Hellman's Scoundrel Time, first published in 1976, is an account of Senator McCarthy's witch hunts in post-war U.S.A.111 In 1952, Lillian Hellman was called to a
ppear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Another of those subpoenaed was the playwright Clifford Odets. Odets was a leftist writer of the 1930s, well-known as the author of the play Awake and Sing, and as the husband of Louise Rainer, the Austrian film actress. Later he wrote Golden Boy, which was made into a famous film starring William Holden.112 Odets invited Hellman to dine at Barbetta's and said to her over dinner, ‘Well, I can tell you what I am going to do before those bastards on the Committee. I am going to show them the face of a radical man and tell them to go fuck themselves.’ But when he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, one day before Lillian Hellman, Odets apologized for his mistaken beliefs and identified many of his old friends as Communist Party members. Hellman writes about this incident:

  Therefore I don't understand that conversation in Barbetta's. It is possible that on that night he believed what he told me. One can only guess that a few weeks later, faced with the ruin of a Hollywood career, he changed his mind. The old cliches were now increasingly true; the loss of a swimming pool, a tennis court, a picture collection, future deprivation, were powerful threats to many people, and the heads of studios knew it and played heavy with it.

  A few weeks later Elia Kazan told Hellman that he would be ‘a friendly witness’ at the House Un-American Activities Committee, for otherwise he would never be able to make another movie in Hollywood.

  Lillian Hellman appeared before the Committee on the morning of 21 May 1952. She steadfastly replied to any questions regarding herself and kept silent on questions that concerned others. Hellman was the first person in the history of McCarthyism who replied to questioning but refused to incriminate others. After Hellman, others, such as Arthur Miller, took a similar stand,113 or refused to cooperate, as did Dalton Trumbo, who was forced to write scenarios under pseudonyms because under his own name they would not be accepted by the magnates of Hollywood.114 But it is significant that the first person who withstood McCarthyism was a woman. After the testimony, Hellman suffered personal and financial losses. She had to sell her farm, and, deprived of revenue and past middle age, had to work at a department store. She had been living with Dashiell Hammett, the author of detective stories such as the Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man.115 He refused to give the names of the contributors to the bail bond fund of the Civil Rights Congress and was imprisoned.

  Looking back over her experience in the years of McCarthyism, Hellman says:

  But the mishmash of those years, beginning before any congressional debut and for years after, took a heavy penalty. My belief in liberalism was mostly gone. I think I have substituted for it something private called, for want of something that should be more accurate, decency.

  She states that in some countries this kind of witch hunt did not occur. But she was thinking primarily of Britain; it is certain that she was not thinking of Japan. Lillian Hellman's first major play, The Children's Hour, dealt with the theme of decency just as the author herself was to display it in her own life. In the play, a private school run by two former schoolmates is forced to close because of a rumour that the two teachers are lesbians. One of the teachers commits suicide, after confessing to her friend that she had in fact experienced homosexual feelings. At the funeral the estranged fiance of the remaining teacher tries to console her by saying that the rumour has now been disproved. The teacher turns her back on her fiance and walks away. The fiance allowed himself to be influenced by the rumour and thus failed to show decency. The concept of decency developed here is a reflection of the philosophy to which the playwright herself adhered in her life in the era of McCarthyism.

  In Canada, E. H. Norman (1909-1957) was also a victim of McCarthyism. Charles Taylor, in Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern (1977), offers a penetrating analysis of this man's life.116 Norman was born in rural Japan, the son of a Canadian missionary. He went to Cambridge University in the 1930s, where he was a member of a Communist Party study group during the Spanish Civil War. At that time he was of the belief that communism was the only defence against fascism. After studying at Cambridge he went to Harvard and studied for his Ph.D., and his doctoral thesis, The Emergence of Japan as a Modern State, was published as a part of the monograph series of the Institute of Pacific Relations. In this period he changed his stand from communism to a kind of militant liberalism. It was during this stage of his political thought that he entered the diplomatic service in Canada. After Japan's surrender, he was summoned to Japan to assist the Occupation, and undertook the task of interviewing the detained Communist Party members who had steadfastly refused tenkō throughout the Fifteen Years’ War. It was upon the advice of Norman that MacArthur opposed the policy of the Japanese Cabinet and issued an order for the release of all political prisoners detained before the surrender. At this early stage of the Occupation, Norman exercised a great influence because he was one of the very few Allied officials with a command of the Japanese language and thus of the documents necessary to decision-making. Not all of his advice was followed by MacArthur, however. For example, Norman opposed the use of the death penalty by the Tokyo Military Tribunal, on the grounds that banishment was the severest possible penalty for those responsible for the reckless war. This somewhat poetic conception of justice was characteristic of Norman.

  Norman's great influence during the Occupation worked against him in the following years. He became the subject of rumours concerning leftist elements at work within the Occupation Authorities, and was interrogated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He was cleared, however, and was later appointed as High Commissioner in New Zealand, and in 1956 as Canadian Ambassador to Egypt. In that role Norman was influential in persuading President Nasser to accept a United Nations peace-keeping force to moderate British and French belligerence over the control of the Suez Canal. This was the first time Canada had played a decisive role in world diplomacy. But the incident led to a rekindling of the old rumour in McCarthyist circles, and to a series of hearings in the U.S. Senate's Internal Security Sub-Committee. The suspicion was raised that Norman's visits to the imprisoned Japan Communist Party leaders during the Occupation were instances of collaboration with Soviet Russia. His old acquaintances were called before the committee, and their testimony revealed his past associations and friendships, information which was used to make it appear that he was an agent in a sinister Soviet plot. The accusations threatened to discredit Norman's efforts in Egypt, and in the early morning of 4 April 1957, Norman threw himself from the flat roof of a nine-storey apartment building in Cairo. In a letter left to his brother Howard, Norman wrote,

  I am overwhelmed by circumstances and have lived under illusions too long. I realize that Christianity is the only true way. Forgive me because things are not as bad as they appear. God knows they are terrible enough. But I have never betrayed my oath of secrecy. But guilt by association as now developed has crushed me. I have prayed for God's forgiveness if it is not too late.

  In a second note, addressed to Howard and his wife Gwen, he again stated his innocence, adding, ‘My Christian faith, never strong enough, I fear, has helped to sustain me in these last days.’

  The cases of Lillian Hellman and E. H. Norman show that the process of tenkō was not confined to wartime Japan. Nor has it been confined to capitalist countries, as can be seen from the cases of Bukharin, Solzhenitzyn, and Lao She. Such international comparisons can prove fruitful. The history of tenkō in post-war Japan, for example, parallels that of French and Italian communism in the 1930s rather than that of German communism of the same period. Following the system of classification devised by Gabriel Almond in his The Appeals of Communism117’, we may say that in post-war Japan radical students no longer move from one extremist position to another. This is due to the fact that the Japanese social structure has undergone a fundamental change since the surrender. It has softened, and there is less ostracism of those who once radically opposed the existing order.

  There are various ways of viewing the phenomenon of tenkō. The Jap
an Communist Party has regarded the tenkō of some of its own members as defection, treachery, and failure to understand the contemporary situation in a ‘scientific’ way. The Japan Communist Party sees tenkō as a phenomenon limited to the 1930s which resulted from the struggle between the ‘absolutist, semi-feudal, capitalist emperor system’ and the Communist Party radicals. They therefore define tenkō as the mistaken thinking of those radicals who failed to have a ‘scientific’ understanding of the situation of Japan in the 1930s, and as a defection from the proletarian perspective clearly imposed by the Party's directives.

  Yoshimoto Takaaki presents an alternative view of the phenomenon of tenkō. He defines tenkō as a shift in the viewpoint of intellectuals which occurs as a result of their lack of contact with life and thought of the masses in contemporary Japan. Yoshimoto is thus able to include cases outside the confines of the 1930s. Thus defined, ‘tenkō’ means all ineffectual thought. Therefore the term may in fact be applied to the refusal of tenkō by the communists imprisoned during the war.

  My own definition of tenkō is: a change in the way of thinking of individuals or groups which is brought about by state compulsion. This definition allows the inclusion of various instances occurring in various circumstances. In analysing a particular example, we can examine the character of the state power, the means of compulsion used, and the changes in the way of thinking of the individual in response to compulsion. This definition does not imply any judgement as to whether tenkō is intrinsically good or bad. In my description of tenkō in wartime Japan, I have attempted to point to the fruitful aspects of the ways of thinking which arose from tenkō, in accordance with Confucius’ axiom, ‘We can learn the virtues of individuals through examining their errors.’