Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

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...