Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

Japan’s emergence as a modern nation was stunning to behold: swifter, more audacious, more successful, and ultimately more crazed, murderous, and self-destructive than anyone had imagined possible. In retrospect, it seemed almost an illusion—a ninety-three-year dream become nightmare that began and ended with American warships. In 1853, a modest fleet of four vessels, two of them coal-burning “black ships,” had arrived to force the country open. In 1945, a huge, glistening armada came back to close it.

As a line in a popular Japanese song of the 1880s put it, “There is a Law of Nations, it is true, / but when the moment comes, remember, / the Strong eat up the Weak.”

Perry, said the Americans (with their charming habit of neglecting such historical inconveniences as imperialism, colonialism, and the breakdown of the global economy), had let the genie out of the bottle—and that genie had become a blood-soaked monster. From the rape of Nanking in the opening months of the war against China to the rape of Manila in the final stages of the Pacific War, the emperor’s soldiers and sailors left a trail of unspeakable cruelty and rapacity. As it turned out, they also devoured themselves. Japanese died in hopeless suicide charges, starved to death in the field, killed their own wounded rather than let them fall into enemy hands, and murdered their civilian compatriots in places such as Saipan and Okinawa. They watched helplessly as fire bombs destroyed their cities—all the while listening to their leaders natter on about how it might be necessary for the “hundred million” all to die “like shattered jewels.” The most obvious legacy of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was death and destruction. In China alone, perhaps 15 million people died. The Japanese lost nearly 3 million—and their entire empire as well.

the occupation of the defeated nation began in August 1945 and ended in April 1952, six years and eight months later, almost twice as long as the war itself.

World War II did not really end for the Japanese until 1952, and the years of war, defeat, and occupation left an indelible mark on those who lived through them. No matter how affluent the country later became, these remained the touchstone years for thinking about national identity and personal values.

In the immediate wake of defeat, a great many individuals at the highest levels displayed no concern at all for the good of society. They concentrated instead on enriching themselves by the wholesale plunder of military stockpiles and public resources. The mystique of racial and social solidarity that had saturated wartime propaganda and behavior seemed to disappear overnight. Police operatives tore their hair at the spectacle of such rampant personal aggrandizement (when not themselves looting and hoarding), and ordinary men and women expressed disgust at the venality of yesterday’s respected leaders and compatriots. Before the victors ever set foot in Japan, defeat had profoundly altered how people thought and behaved.

One of the most pernicious aspects of the occupation was that the Asian peoples who had suffered most from imperial Japan’s depredations—the Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians, and Filipinos—had no serious role, no influential presence at all in the defeated land.

the man in whose name imperial Japan had conducted foreign and military policy for twenty years was not held accountable for the initiation or conduct of the war, why should anyone expect ordinary people to dwell on such matters, or to think seriously about their own personal responsibility?

Similarly, the preoccupation with their own misery that led most Japanese to ignore the suffering they had inflicted on others helps illuminate the ways in which victim consciousness colors the identities that all groups and peoples construct for themselves.

When repatriated prisoners began returning from the Soviet Union reciting communist propaganda, it was charged that their indoctrination had been designed to create “class hatreds between officers and enlisted men.”39 It had, but many demobilized veterans returned from other places than the U.S.S.R. cynical and contemptuous of the officers who had led them in battle. This was especially true among soldiers who had been ordered to fight to the bitter end in the fanatic and futile final campaigns of the war. The group cohesion and discipline of the military hierarchy had not been built, as its propagandists intoned, on some idealized notion of “loyalty” or “harmony,” but on a structure of authoritarian coercion that transferred oppression downward. Superior officers commonly commanded fear rather than respect even in the best of times, and defeat unleashed deep, hitherto repressed resentments. In extreme cases, such hatred led to the murder of former officers.

For a great many ex-soldiers and sailors, the greatest shock of returning home lay in finding themselves treated, after all their travails, as pariahs in their native land. By 1946, when the tide of repatriates became a flood, those at home were already being exposed to a steady flow of information concerning the shocking range of atrocities committed by the imperial forces in China, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines, as well as against Allied prisoners generally. As a result, many ex-servicemen found themselves regarded not just as men who had failed disastrously to accomplish their mission, but also as individuals who had, it was assumed, participated in unspeakable acts. References to the reproachful glances that acquaintances and strangers alike directed at them became a familiar refrain in veterans’ letters to the press. Some frankly and sincerely expressed regret for their crimes. Others protested their innocence and the injustice of being treated as war criminals. They pleaded that the public had to make distinctions between soldiers or military men (gunjin) and the “military cliques” (gunbatsu) who were ultimately responsible for the war and its conduct.

Many of the most pathetic Japanese war victims now became the country’s new outcasts. Despite a mild Buddhist tradition of care for the weak and infirm, despite Confucian homilies about reciprocal obligations between social superiors and inferiors, and despite imperial platitudes about all Japanese being “one family” under the emperor, Japan was a harsh, inhospitable place for anyone who did not fall into a “proper” social category. There existed no strong tradition of responsibility toward strangers, or of unrequited philanthropy, or of tolerance or even genuine sympathy (as opposed to occasional sentimentality) toward those who suffered misfortune.

One of the most fashionable slogans of the early postsurrender period envisioned Japan becoming a “nation of culture.” In October 1946, Hayashi Fumiko, a well-known fiction writer from an impoverished background herself, argued in a popular magazine that no country so indifferent to the plight of orphans and the homeless could claim to be cultured.48 Over two years later, Osaragi Jirō, a distinguished author respected for his humanism, wrestled frankly with the same issue. A British acquaintance, he wrote, had asked why the Japanese did nothing about their street children. His immediate response was that they lacked the financial resources, but on reflection he realized this was disingenuous. In fact, he concluded, as a people they simply lacked love toward strangers. He himself was no exception. In all honesty, he had to admit that he had no desire to take in these filthy urchins and try to straighten out their characters. Could it be, Osaragi mused, that Japanese were shallower than other peoples when it came to love?49

This was a strikingly ambitious reformist agenda. Outlaw Japan was to be rendered a peaceful, democratic, law-abiding nation by eradicating the very roots of militarism that had led it so recently to war. In the famous opening lines of the “Initial Postsurrender Policy,” the ultimate objectives of the occupation were framed as follows: (a) To insure that Japan will not again become a menace to the United States or to the peace and security of the world. (b) To bring about the eventual establishment of a peaceful and responsible government which will respect the rights of other states and will support the objectives of the United States as reflected in the ideals and principles of the Charter of the United Nations. The United States desires that this government should conform as closely as may be to principles of democratic self-government but it is not the responsibility of the Allied Powers to impose upon Japan any form of government not supported by the freely expressed will of the people.

One week later, the new premier, Shidehara Kijūrō, met MacArthur for the first time and received a succinct order that made the previous directive seem mild. In addition to the “liberalization of the constitution,” the government was commanded to extend the franchise to women, promote labor unionization, open schools to more liberal education, democratize the economy by revising “monopolistic industrial controls,” and in general eliminate all despotic vestiges in society. Suddenly, abstract statements about promoting democracy had become exceedingly specific.

frenetic

milieu,

kyodatsu.

A half-year before his death, a popular magazine featured a short article that concluded that if all black-market regulations were strictly enforced, everyone in the country would have had to go to prison.23 The young judge’s response to this moral dilemma was not to challenge the law, but rather to live by it personally—to perform his duties with a clear conscience, as he told his wife, and at the same time share the suffering of the people. Sometime in 1946, he asked his wife to feed him nothing beyond his rationed allotment, although it was understood that she might buy black-market food for their children and herself. Thereafter, most of the family’s legally obtained food, particularly the rice, went to the children. Yamaguchi’s widow later recalled days when she and her husband consumed nothing more than salted water. Judge Yamaguchi died on October 11, 1947.24

The kasutori shōchū that made the faint hearted bold and the strong hearted wild also apparently made prolific those with countercultural proclivities. It was, in any case, the drink of choice among those artists and writers who made a cult out of degeneracy and nihilism. It was a vile liquor—best downed, it was said, while holding one’s nose—and it gave its name to a chaotic subculture that proved a natural complement to the worlds of the panpan and black marketeers: the “kasutori culture” (kasutori bunka). Kasutori culture flourished into the 1950s and left a gaudy legacy of escapism, titillation, and outright sleaze—a commercial world dominated by sexually oriented entertainments and a veritable cascade of pulp literature. Like the panpan and the black marketeers, however, the denizens of kasutori culture also exhibited an ardor and vitality that conveyed a strong impression of liberation from authority and dogma. This aura of icono-clasm was reinforced by the emergence of a kind of barroom intelligentsia—wittily nicknamed, in the usual hybrid manner, the kasutori-gencha or “kasutori-gentsia”—whose writings purported to impose a semblance of meaning and even quasi-philosophical structure on a wildly degenerate life-style. Thanks to the pulp publications and to more serious writers alike, life on the margins became intertwined with theories of decadence as the only true honesty and authenticity, of the carnal body as the only body worth venerating. In some of these formu...

The sexual fantasies in these publications, read mostly by young men, provided a kind of counterpart to the sexual encounters through which a large part of the occupation army was simultaneously viewing Japan. While hundreds of thousands of young GIs were coming to regard the accommodating panpan as representative of the conquered country, a large audience of Japanese males was being encouraged to think of the West in terms of its women—and these women, in turn, as voluptuous sexual objects. From this time on, the idealized Western female figure, long limbed and amply proportioned, became an object of male lust—and an ideal for young Japanese women to emulate.

“The Pulps”: magazines associated with the counterculture revived a popular craze known in borrowed English as ero-guro-nansensu (“erotic, grotesque, nonsensical”) that had flourished in the 1920s and the early 1930s.

repudiation

metier;

Could we not say that the kamikaze hero was a mere illusion, and that human history begins from the point where he takes to black-marketeering? That the widow as devoted apostle is mere illusion, and that human history begins from the moment when the image of a new face enters her breast? And perhaps the emperor too is no more than illusion, and the emperor’s true history begins from the point where he becomes an ordinary human. . . . Japan was defeated, and the samurai ethic has perished, but humanity has been born from the womb of decadence’s truth. . . . Humans don’t change. We have only returned to being human. Humans become decadent—loyal retainers and saintly women become decadent. It is impossible to halt the process, and impossible to save humanity by halting it. Humans live and humans fall. There is no easy shortcut to the saving of humanity outside this.54

Glorifying nikutai, as Tamura did with spellbinding effectiveness, amounted to a complete repudiation of kokutai, a shocking inversion of the body (tai) to be worshipped. Now the only body deserving of veneration was the “flesh” (niku)—the sensual body—of the individual. The abstract “nation body” or nation state was meaningless, and all patriotic blather about it was duplicitous. What mattered—all that was indisputably real, honest, fundamental—was the solitary physical individual. For a people who had been deformed by a long tradition of so-called spiritual ideas, Tamura explained at one point, the “gate of flesh” was the “gate to modernity.”56

In The Setting Sun, this credo is articulated not by the artistic, suicidal younger brother who so resembled Dazai but by his sister Kazuko. Like her brother, Kazuko refuses to go on living in mindless compliance with what society demands. Unlike him, however, she resolves to live rather than die, accepting the fact that this means she must commit herself to “struggle with the world.” Kazuko expresses this in a famous passage:

Although he had flirted with left-wing activities, Dazai showed no interest either in doctrinaire Marxism or the more liberal agenda of “democratic revolution.” In Ningen Shikkaku (No Longer Human), the novel that followed The Setting Sun, he ridiculed orthodox leftism mercilessly. Economics was hardly sufficient as a causal explanation for human behavior, Dazai’s semi-autobiographical protagonist declared. He simply found the aura of illegitimacy that surrounded the leftists more comfortable than “the world of legitimate gentlemen.”60

Since Dazai had turned his back on both the Marxist and the American versions of radical change, it was entirely in character that the “revolutionary” vision he did offer in The Setting Sun was highly idiosyncratic. In the final analysis, his heroine Kazuko declares in her rambling way, revolution is nothing more than a defiant love that repudiates the “old morality,” a passion beyond understanding, or even the sorrow that comes from such passion. Revolution and love are the same thing. In Kazuko’s case, to be a revolutionary meant to bear and raise the illegitimate child of her disreputable elderly lover. That, she declares in the letter that concludes the novel, “will be the completion of my moral revolution.”62

A bastard and its mother. Nevertheless, we intend to struggle against the old morality to the end, and live like the sun. Please, you too continue to fight your battle. The revolution still hasn’t taken place to the slightest degree. Many, many more precious, noble victims seem to be necessary. In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim.63

redolent

A mainstream reconsideration of sexuality in conjugal relations led not to ridicule of “wholesomeness,” as in kasutori culture, but rather to reconsideration of what a healthy sensuality between marriage partners might involve. Ancient Japanese poetry and prose had embraced an ideal of reciprocal love in which men and women shared sexual pleasure. In medieval times, however, the feudal elites had drawn an increasingly strict distinction between love and marriage, and certainly between sensual pleasure and marriage. “Good” women were taught that they were inherently inferior to men; that their entire lives were to be subordinated to the patriarchy of three generations of males (father, husband, and, in old age, son); that although men might find it natural to indulge in erotic lovemaking, such desires and behavior were utterly improper for a well-bred woman.

Not surprisingly, to esteem genuine reciprocity in the conjugal relationship, including not only “love” but also mutual sexual gratification, became one way of defying authority and elevating the primacy of individual feelings and private worlds.

Kanzen naru Kekkon (The Complete Marriage), this surprising publishing phenomenon was a translation of a clinical manual originally published in German in 1926 by the Dutch obstetrician T. H. Van de Velde. A portion of Van de Velde’s long opus had actually been translated into Japanese in 1930 under the title Kanzen naru Fūfu (The Complete Couple).

hackneyed

beseechments

The hunger for words in print is vividly captured in this July 1947 scene of customers sleeping outside the Iwanami bookstore in Tokyo’s Kanda district, waiting to buy a new edition of the collected works of the philosopher Nishida Kitarō. The queue began three days before the announced date of publication and grew to some two hundred persons over the next two days.

By the time Sekai appeared on the scene, U.S. occupation ideals had been clearly articulated. The editors summarized these as democracy, respect for individuality, freedom of speech and religion, and world peace—and then took care to emphasize that these ideals were to be pursued not because the victors had ordered this to be done, but “because they are based on the demands of human nature and universal justice.”

Miserable defeat brought with it a cultural crisis of a very specific nature: the old, nationalistic heroes had been toppled, but who would take their place? Textbooks had to be rewritten. Postage stamps had to be redesigned. Publishers had to come up with exemplary new native sons. In the last case, the best-selling writings of Kawakami, Miki, and Ozaki helped meet this need. The three men shared much in common. They were associated with Marxism and communism, although their intellectual horizons were not bound by either. Each had been imprisoned for political reasons. They were all principled individuals who embodied qualities of independent thought and personal autonomy that appeared rare and admirable in a country where most people had caved in completely, in many cases enthusiastically, to the authoritarian state.

Before his death from radiation sickness in 1951, the Catholic scientist Nagai Takashi had become idolized as “the saint of Nagasaki” for his prolific writings on the meaning of the nuclear age. Nagai’s wife had been killed in the Nagasaki blast, and he was often photographed with his young son and daughter by him as he lay on his sickbed.

In 1950, Japanese readers got their first unvarnished view of the Pacific War from the perspective of the American fighting man when the translation of Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead appeared and quickly became a bestseller. As an enduring impression, however, Mailer’s gritty novel paled before a selection of letters and other writings by university students killed in the war. Edited by progressive intellectuals and evocatively titled Kike—Wadatsumi no Koe (Listen! The Voices of the Ocean), this extraordinary exercise in transforming war words into peace words was inspired by the belief that these intimate communications from the very maw of the war itself would be read as an eloquent cry for peace. The letters rocketed to the top ranks of bestsellers and almost immediately became the basis for a movie of the same name.

grandiloquent

hoi polloi,

Beyond doubt, many of the conquerors conveyed an impressive idealism and generosity of spirit. GIs became famous for their offhand friendliness and spontaneous distribution of chocolates and chewing gum. Individual Americans demonstrated serious interest in aspects of Japanese culture and a sense of bearing responsibility toward strangers that was unfamiliar and attractive (or sometimes just bizarre) to their Japanese neighbors. They took people unknown to them to hospitals and did favors without expecting repayment. They practiced simple charity in uncalculating, matter-of-fact ways.6 The conquerors also bestowed significant practical gifts upon their new subjects: penicillin, streptomycin, blood banks, and genuinely public libraries, for example, as well as tutoring in such technological practices as statistical quality control, which would be of immense value in the country’s eventual economic reconstruction. Close personal relationships based on mutual respect were forged between individual Americans and their Japanese counterparts in a variety of settings; but when all was said and done, such relationships were impressive, in part, precisely because they defied the inevitable inequalities of binational relations under a military occupation. And even such intimate personal relationships usually rested on the assumed superiority of American culture. With very few exceptions, all relationships were defined and conducted in the conqueror’s tongue.

The sexual opportunities enjoyed by men affiliated with the occupation forces, including foreign journalists—with their gifts of tinned goods, chocolates, nylon stockings, cigarettes, and liquor—humiliated and infuriated Japanese males. GIs regarded themselves as experts on “Babysan’s world” and, in a racial idiom they found amusing, joked that this gave them a unique “slant” on Japan.

In On to Tokyo, an instructional film produced by the War Department after Germany had been defeated and the Nazi concentration camps exposed, General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army, took care to emphasize that the “barbarism” of the Japanese “has even exceeded that of the Germans.” In the War Department’s Know Your Enemy—Japan, which was released only weeks before surrender, the Japanese were relentlessly depicted as a people devoid of individuality, as alike as “photographic prints off the same negative.”17

All this seemed to have been borne out by the American experience with POWs. Many of these prisoners had been captured against their will, unconscious or severely injured and so unable either to fight to the bitter end or to take their own lives. As prisoners, however, they quickly proved docile and obedient to their captors, even to the point of assisting in drafting surrender appeals to their erstwhile comrades. This experience gave analysts further grounds for believing that, by an adroit combination of authority, example, and symbolic manipulation, the victors could provide a “democratic” model, however modest, that postwar Japanese might seek to imitate and emulate.

When Kobayashi Masaki was finally repatriated after being detained for a year by the U.S. military to perform labor services in Okinawa, he was astonished at the political scene that greeted him. “Japan had become extremely democratic,” he recalled. “Everyone was moving in that direction. Everyone was racing off in the direction of a democratic kind of humanist freedom and union activity.” Kobayashi, who went on to become a distinguished director of antiwar and humanistic films, had grave misgivings about this sudden enthusiastic embrace of democracy. “The conformism seemed just the same as before the war, only then everyone had jumped on the militarist band wagon,” he observed. “I don’t mean that the change of consciousness was necessarily wrong, it’s just in the way it happened.”1

The neocolonial revolution did force the ruling structure to introduce and institutionalize progressive reforms that would not otherwise have been undertaken; and despite the doubts of conservatives and progressives alike, the popular forces released by these policies often proved to be vigorous, diverse, resilient, even radical.

When General MacArthur’s name was raised as a possible Republican candidate for president in 1948, many Japanese, including the proprietor of this optimistically named “instant construction company,” took the occasion to express their admiration of the supreme commander and his policies.