Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

Emperor Hirohito’s intimate thoughts about the new constitution are unknown, but Colonel Kades and several members of his staff were royally thanked. Each received a small silver cup, embossed in gold with the sixteen-petal imperial chrysanthemum crest and engraved with a notation that this gift commemorated the introduction of the new constitution.75

English-language Nippon Times, read in part as follows: If the conception that government is something imposed upon the people by an outstanding god, great man, or leader is not rectified, democratic government is likely to be wrecked. We fear, the day after MacArthur’s withdrawal, that some living god might be searched out to bring the sort of dictatorship that made the Pacific War. . . . The way to express the gratitude of the Japanese people toward General MacArthur for the wisdom with which he is managing postwar Japan and for his efforts to democratize the nation is not to worship him as a god but to cast away the servile spirit and gain the self-respect that would not bow its head to anybody.

Censored materials included foreign as well as Japanese writings, meaning that the vanquished were not allowed to read everything the victors read. Both Associated Press and United Press wire-service dispatches were sometimes vetted before being deemed safe for consumption in translation; syndicated columnists such as Walter Lippman encountered similar obstacles crossing the Pacific. The overall censorship operation eventually came to entail extensive checklists for taboo subjects, and in the best Orwellian manner these taboos included any public acknowledgment of the existence of censorship. Editors and publishers all received such confidential notifications as the following as soon as censorship was established: 1. The purpose of this memorandum is to make certain that all publishers in the jurisdiction of this censorship office understand fully that no publicity regarding censorship procedure is desired. 2. While it is assumed that all publishers understand that in the make-up of their publications no physical indication of censorship (such as blackened-out print, blank spaces, pasted-over areas, incomplete sentences, OO’s XX’s, etc.) may appear, there are some points which may not be understood clearly. 3. No write-ups concerning personnel or activities of any censorship group should be printed. This pertains not only to press censorship personnel and activities, but also to those of radio, motion-picture and theatrical censorship. 4. Notations such as “Passed by cen...

The visual record of nuclear destruction was even more thoroughly suppressed. Documentary footage filmed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki between August and December 1945 by a team of some thirty Japanese cameramen was confiscated by the Americans in February 1946 and sent to Washington, with orders that not a single copy was to remain in Japan.19 The first graphic representations of the human effects of the bombs did not appear until 1950, when the married artists Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi published a small book of drawings of scenes they had witnessed or heard about in Hiroshima (entitled Pika-don, a term specific to the atomic bombs that literally means “flash-bang”). That same year the Marukis were also permitted to exhibit a stark painting entitled Procession of Ghosts, which became the first of a series of powerful collaborative murals depicting atomic-bomb victims. As Maruki Iri later explained, the couple was motivated to do such paintings because they feared that there might otherwise never be an indigenous visual record of the horrors of nuclear destruction.20 It was not until after the occupation, on the seventh anniversary of the bombings in August 1952, that the public was afforded a serious presentation of photographs from the two stricken cities. The residents of the only country to experience atomic warfare thus spent the early years of the nuclear age more ignorant of the effects of the bombs, and less free to publicly discuss and debate their implications, tha...

Yoshida’s Senkan Yamato no Saigo (The End of the Battleship Yamato) now is recognized as one of the few important literary memoirs to emerge from Japan’s war. Censors at the time acknowledged its impressive qualities, but also feared that this intimate evocation of the “Japanese militaristic spirit” might promote feelings of both regret and revenge among readers. As a consequence, it was suppressed in 1946 and again in 1948, published only in abridged form in mid-1949, and not made available in full until after the occupation ended.

a poem titled “History,” unpunctuated in the original, which they translated as follows: The flag falls to the ground and from a radio box comes the voice of a god— hollow, trembling, sorrowful. This moment must be recorded in history. Falsely created pages of myth are closed on this day. People’s eyes are newly opened and gaze at the reality around them. Appallingly ruined streets, corpses already removed without a trace, only resentment remains. Harboring the resentment of those who perished in the conflagration, weeds spread over the ruins. August 15 piles upon August 15. Between those who destroyed the country and those who would rebuild the country, a year of vehement battle. A history of 365 days pours into tomorrow’s time. Let us fill tomorrow’s 24 hours as historic hours.

“Let Us Shake Hands,” by the gifted woman poet Kurihara Sadako: “Hello, American soldiers,” call out little militarists, throwing away their toy guns. They were busy with their game of war until only yesterday. “Hello, American soldiers,” they call. In their little hearts spring out longings toward people of unfamiliar race. “Hello, American soldiers! Was it you who fought our fathers until only yesterday? But you smile at us brightly: You are not the beast that grown-ups had made us believe.” We want to touch your big hands, We want to shake hands with you.27

sardonic

The censors translated and then marked “Suppress” the following poem scheduled for the February 1948 issue of Kaizō: Whenever the time comes, “The meal is ready, grandfather, The meal is ready, grandmother,” we say: And a stale meal is carried to grandfather and grandmother, Consisting only of “haikyu” [rations]. When anything is said against it, They’re told to keep their mouths shut and eat it. In this way, Their existence is just like that of the nation. The nation is feasting on freedom, And is feasting as though it is trying to see How long it can live no matter how it lives. That is “haikyu.” One morning, It was still too early to eat. The peaches were blooming in the garden When grandfather and grandmother went down to the garden; They were stretching their bent backs And were yawning toward Heaven.32

To Kurosawa, GHQ’s controls were trivial compared with those imposed by wartime censors, whom he regarded as idiots perverted by, among other things, emperor worship and repressed sexual fantasies. Kurosawa had made his directorial debut during the war, and all four of his wartime films—Sugata Sanshirō (the name of the film’s hero) and its sequel; Ichiban Utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful); and the incomplete Tora no O o Fumu Otokotachi (Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail)—were included among a total of 236 “feudal and militaristic” films that SCAP ordered destroyed in November 1945.49 This did not prevent Kurosawa from quickly emerging as the most influential cinematic innovator of the new Japan. Between 1946 and 1952 he produced eight films, beginning with the naively idealistic “democracy film” Waga Seishun ni Kuinashi (No Regrets for Our Youth, 1946), which was followed by a meandering tale of romance and mishap amid the ruins entitled Subarashiki Nichiyōbi (One Wonderful Sunday, 1947).

By far the most memorable scene in Kamei’s documentary (one that Capra surely would have applauded) was a dissolve in which Emperor Hirohito was transformed before the viewer’s eyes from the nation’s rigid, uniformed commander into a benign, slightly stooping civilian figure, modestly garbed in necktie, overcoat, and soft felt hat. The major studios Tōhō, Shōchiku, and Nikkatsu all refused to show the documentary in their theaters, apparently more for financial than ideological considerations, and Kamei later recalled how at early screenings some viewers hooted and one threw a wooden clog at the screen. This was a marginal film, but one just beginning to attract curious audiences—about twenty-five hundred people a day—when it was abruptly banned by GHQ in mid-August 1946.

A leftist but non-Communist film maker, Kamei had studied documentary techniques in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s. His was a unique experience of having films suppressed by both the imperial army and General MacArthur’s command.

This easing of formal controls was misleading, however, for censorship assumed new forms after 1947 and did not end in 1949. CCD’s sprawling bureaucracy actually peaked numerically in 1948, well after the U.S. State Department had complained that the censorship operation had “the effect of continuing the authoritarian tradition in Japan.” As liberal officers increasingly left GHQ and were replaced by more conservative technocrats, censorship became more stringent, arbitrary, and unpredictable.

Suspension of the left-wing press was accompanied by expansion of the Red purge in the public sector and its extension into the private sector. The primary thrust of these firings was to undermine left-wing influence in organized labor, but the witch-hunts also altered what was read, heard, and seen in the mass media. Over 700 individuals were removed from journalistic circles, between 104 and 119 from broadcasting (the tally sheets vary), and 137 from the film industry. Most of these individuals had been summarily dismissed by September. Whereas the initial GHQ suspensions had targeted “ultra-leftist” publications, many with small circulations, the Red purges struck at the mainstream.

When Japan surrendered, the major statement of Allied policy regarding Japanese war crimes remained what had been set forth in the Potsdam Proclamation: There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world. . . . We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners.

Although Japanese leaders understood that they would be held accountable for war crimes, they had no way of anticipating the ambitions of the Allies in this regard. Nothing in the Potsdam Proclamation indicated that the victors would put forward new norms of international law. In this regard, the Tokyo trial initially seemed to resemble the reformist occupation as a whole, being cut of new cloth and without historical precedent. Even General MacArthur was taken by surprise by the scope and innovation of this legal project—and deemed it excessive. He privately indicated that he thought justice could have been served by brief military proceedings focusing on the treacherous attack on Pearl Harbor.20

the Tokyo charter, the critical definition of the tribunal’s jurisdiction was set forth as follows in Article 5: The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility: a. Crimes against Peace: Namely, the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a declared or undeclared war of aggression, or a war in violation of international law, treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing; b. Conventional War Crimes: Namely, violations of the laws or customs of war; c. Crimes against Humanity: Namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed before or during the war, or persecutions on political or racial grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such a plan.

Justice Bernard found the proceedings so unfair and technically flawed that he deemed it impossible to pass any judgment whatever. He deplored the “abominable crimes” committed by the Japanese and acknowledged that at least some of the defendants bore heavy responsibility for those transgressions. The absence of the emperor, however, struck him as so glaring an inequity that condemning the defendants was impossible. Japan’s crimes against peace “had a principal author who escaped all prosecution and of whom in any case the present Defendants could only be considered as accomplices.” Measuring the emperor “by a different standard” not only prejudiced the case against them, but also undermined the cause of international justice.32

Like Nuremberg, the Tokyo trial was law, politics, and theater all in one. Unlike Nuremberg, it “was very much an American performance,” as Justice Röling put it many years later. “It was like a huge-scale theatrical production,” the Dutch jurist observed. “I didn’t see that at the time, and I didn’t see that there were more ‘Hollywoodesque’ things around than there should have been.”37

The Soviet judge, formerly a commissioner of justice under Lenin, had participated in the Stalinist mock trials of the mid-1930s. He spoke neither of the basic languages of the tribunal (his only two words of English, it was said, were “Bottoms up!”). The French judge had spent the interwar years in colonial service in West Africa, and according to Röling also did not speak English. The Chinese justice, educated in the United States, had published books on constitutional law but had no prior experience as a judge. The Filipino justice was a survivor of the Bataan death march, which in a normal court would have led to his immediate disqualification. The president of the tribunal had previously been involved in prosecuting Japanese for war crimes in Australian military tribunals in New Guinea.

In fact, the defendants’ loyalist mission was not yet complete. Defense and prosecution alike labored to keep the emperor invisible for the next several years. On the part of the defendants, this vigilance faltered on only one occasion—December 31, 1947—when Tōjō frankly testified that it was inconceivable for him or any subject to have taken action contrary to the emperor’s wishes. In response to this unintentionally candid and damaging observation, Keenan immediately arranged, through the emperor’s own close advisers, that Kido be contacted in prison and urged to tell his fellow defendant to rectify his potentially incriminating comment as soon as possible. Other intermediaries were used as well. Tōjō was happy to comply, and the opportunity to do so arose in the courtroom a week later. On January 6, in the course of an exchange with Keenan, Tōjō retracted his earlier statement.62

The plight of the Koreans was, in its way, emblematic of the larger anomaly of victor’s justice as practiced in Tokyo. It called attention to the fact that the recent war in Asia had taken place not among free and independent nations, but rather on a map overwhelmingly demarcated by the colors of colonialism. Colonialism, and imperialism more generally, defined the twentieth-century Asian world in which Japan was accused of having conspired to wage aggressive war. Japan’s colonial and neocolonial domain (Formosa, Korea, and Manchuria) existed alongside the Asian overseas possessions of four of the powers that now sat in judgment: Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States. China itself, nominally sovereign, had been a congeries of Japanese, European, and American “special rights and interests” and was not even formally freed from its “unequal treaties” with the United States until the war was almost over. The tribunal essentially resolved the contradiction between the world of colonialism and imperialism and the righteous ideals of crimes against peace and humanity by ignoring it.

The Indian justice took palpable pleasure in suggesting the hypocrisy of the victors’ case. He quoted England’s prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs at some length, for example, on how the Japanese had followed the precedents of European imperialism, sometimes “with almost pedantic exactitude.” Similarly, in discussing the “Amau Doctrine” of 1934, in which Japan had enunciated its special rights and interests in China, Pal observed that this definition of national interest “finds obvious precedent in the conduct of the United States in pursuance of the Monroe Doctrine.”69 The prosecution’s attempt to condemn the Japanese for conspiring to promote feelings of “racial superiority” through their educational system did not exactly impress him—as it had the prosecutors—as something for which the Japanese could be uniquely condemned. On this issue, he was more rueful than bitter. He quoted the historian Arnold Toynbee on how “race-feeling” had been fundamental to modern Western society, and pointed to the discrimination that Japanese and other Asians had endured in recent times at the hands of the dominant white powers. Ultimately, though, he saw the inculcation of feelings of racial superiority as “a dangerous weapon in the hands of . . . designing people from the earliest days of human history.”70

From the Japanese perspective, the Soviet presence on the tribunal constituted a particularly egregious aspect of victor’s justice. The Soviet Union, after all, had not exactly been an exemplary model of peace and justice (although many leftists believed otherwise). Closer to the bone, the Soviets were guilty of the crudest sort of hypocrisy. Japan was being accused of having violated sacred treaty obligations, but the U.S.S.R. had qualified to sit in judgment in Tokyo only by ignoring its bilateral neutrality pact with Japan in the final week of the war. And although the most harrowing revelations of the Tokyo trial involved Japanese atrocities against civilians and prisoners, it was known that the Red Army had engaged in widespread abuses of civilians in Manchuria. Throughout the duration of the trial, moreover, hundreds of thousands of Japanese prisoners remained in Soviet hands, their circumstances unknown. As it turned out, the number of Japanese prisoners who would die in Soviet hands was much larger than the number of American and British Commonwealth prisoners who perished so miserably as prisoners of the Japanese.

The Japanese themselves were one of the Asian peoples excluded from participating in the prosecution of war criminals. Allied logic here was clear: the accused should have no right to judge themselves, only to marshal a defense. The assumption, of course, was that virtually all Japanese bore some measure of responsibility for the war, and so none could be trusted to pursue the issue of war responsibility impartially where their compatriots were concerned.

A week before the first occupation forces arrived, the novelist Osaragi Jirō addressed the dead more intimately in an “apology to departed heroes” in the daily Asahi, recounting his sleepless night in the wake of the emperor’s broadcast. The faces of acquaintances killed in the war had passed before him: a friend in publishing, an occasional drinking companion, the taciturn chef at a favorite restaurant, a man he saw only at college baseball games, a doctor skilled in writing waka poems. He spoke of them as stars fading away with the whitening sky of dawn, imagined them alongside an endless procession of shadows on the horizon, and asked them a question that would not leave the minds of many Japanese in the years to come: “What can we do to ease your souls?” The answer seemed clear enough to Osaragi at that moment. All one could do was rely on the emperor’s decision and look forward to the dawn of a day when, “shaking off old filth,” a new Japan would be built. Only then, when humiliation had been overcome, would it be possible to “dedicate a requiem” to the spirits of the dead. Only then, perhaps, would it be possible for the dead to “smile and rest in peace.”2

What do you tell the dead when you lose?

Where the victors asked who was responsible for Japanese aggression and the atrocities committed by the imperial forces, the more pressing question on the Japanese side was: who was responsible for defeat? And where the victors focused on Japan’s guilt vis-à-vis other countries and peoples, the Japanese were overwhelmed by grief and guilt toward their own dead countrymen. The victors could comfort the souls of their dead, and console themselves, by reporting that the outcome of the war had been great and good. Just as every fighting man on the winning side became a hero, so no supreme sacrifice in the victorious struggle had been in vain. Triumph gave a measure of closure to grief. Defeat left the meaning of these war deaths—of kin, acquaintances, one’s compatriots in general—raw and open.

Even the most flagrant wartime propagandists seized upon such slippery language as a detergent to wash away their personal responsibility. Kondō Hidezō, the talented political cartoonist who rode the military horse right up to the gates of doom with gay abandon and then just as gaily satirized Tōjō behind bars, was unexceptional in this regard.

Japanese scientists, many of them trained in Europe and the United States, applauded this new commitment. One of the first contingents of American scientists to arrive in Japan encountered a wonderful expression of these sentiments in the form of this makeshift notice, handwritten in English on brown wrapping paper and affixed to the front door of a major oceanographic institute outside of Tokyo: This is a marine biological station with her history of over sixty years. If you are from the Eastern Coast, some of you might know Woods Hole or Mt. Desert or Tortugas. If you are from the West Coast, you may know Pacific Grove or Puget Sound Biological Station. This place is a place like one of these. Take care of this place and protect the possibility for the continuation of our peaceful research. You can destroy the weapons and the war instruments But save the civil equipments for Japanese students When you are through with your job here Notify to the University and let us come back to our scientific home

Few individuals really believed that ordinary people bore responsibility for the war equal to that of the military and civilian groups. “This war was begun while we farmers knew nothing about it,” one irate rural man exclaimed, “and ended in defeat while we believed we were winning. There is no need to do repentance for something we weren’t in on. Repentance is necessary for those who betrayed and deceived the people.” Another member of the hundred million was even terser. “If collective repentance of the hundred million means those in charge of the war are now trying to distribute responsibility among the people,” he wrote to a newspaper, “then it’s sneaky.”25

With this intellectual declaration of independence, Tanabe affirmed that there was a Japanese tradition not only capable of redeeming Japan after its wartime folly, but pregnant with the potential for saving the world. Through the very experience of defeat and repentance, Japan might be in a position to show the victors, already divided into capitalist and socialist camps, a proper middle path to a saner planet.

“Socialism, meanwhile, sets up equality as its goal, but there is no disputing the fact that the socialist system invariably limits freedom and in that sense negates it.”

Tanabe was regarded by contemporaries to be the most influential Japanese philosopher of the early postwar years, and the source of his appeal is not hard to discern. His tone was confessional yet formal. He preached repentance and rebirth, and resurrected an indigenous culture hero. While the victorious Allies were denouncing his country as a failed culture and archcriminal aggressor state, he accepted Japan’s wrongdoing and guilt but denied their uniqueness, rejecting also the idea that traditional culture had nothing to offer. “Surely our own misguided nationalism stands in need of metanoesis,” he wrote, “but at the same time so do the nationalistic perversions that infect democratic and socialist states alike.” The defiant closing lines of his 1946 opus made the same point: “Obviously we are not the only country that needs zange. Other nations, too, should undertake its practice in a spirit of sincerity and humility, each acknowledging its own contradictions and faults, its own evil and sin. Zange is a task that world history imposes on all peoples in our times.”36

December 1947 saw the publication of In Distant Mountains and Rivers, the controversial collection of writings by students from Tokyo Imperial University who were killed in the war. Two years later, Listen—Voices from the Deep appeared, containing wartime letters, poems, and diary entries from seventy-five student war dead affiliated with Tokyo and other universities. The editors of this best-selling collection acknowledged that they had taken care to exclude more nationalistic writings in favor of intimate words by the doubters and dreamers. The endpapers of their volume reproduced sketches from the notebook of a student conscript who had starved to death on a Pacific island, and its emotional preface and postscript addressed fears that these texts might be misused “by those who once again plot war.”

Other writings that appeared around the time the Tokyo trial ended reinforced such reconstructions of the war’s meaning. One of the most famous of these was Takeyama Michio’s Harp of Burma (Biruma no Tategoto), an enormously popular novel (soon made, like Listen—Voices of the Ocean, into a movie). Takeyama attempted to do through fiction what Tanabe Hajime had ventured through philosophy: to convey the meaning of the war—the themes of suffering, guilt, and atonement in particular—by way of Buddhism.

Distant Mountains and Rivers

Listen—Voices from the Deep,

Noma Hiroshi’s Zone of Emptiness (Shinkū Chitai),

Ōoka Shōhei’s brilliant Fires on the Plain (Nobi),

Between September 1945 and the end of the Tokyo trial, in any case, atrocities were well publicized and more than a few people responded with genuine horror. When the slaughter of civilians in Manila was made known, the mother of a soldier wrote an astonishing letter to the national press declaring that “even if such an atrocious soldier were my son, I could not accept him back home. Let him be shot to death there.”

Some men and women turned to traditional short verse forms to express their feelings upon learning of their countrymen’s atrocities. A poetry magazine published after the Tokyo tribunal ended included this evocation of popular responses: Vividly, the traces of the Japanese Army’s atrocities are shown. Suddenly, a sharp gasp. A village poetry magazine published this waka in early 1947: The crimes of Japanese soldiers who committed unspeakable atrocities in Nanking and Manila must be atoned for. Saeki Jinzaburō, a poet of some repute, wrote two poems on the subject. One dealt with his immediate response to learning of the atrocities in China: So full of grief is this day that it made me forget the vexation of the day we lost the war. The second went: Seizing married women, raping mothers in front of their children— this is the Imperial Army.

Japanese war criminal, former colonel Tsuji Masanobu,

The former Japanese and American antagonists, war criminals and their judges, were now more or less on the same side. Yet while the lifting of censorship enabled apologists for Japan’s holy war such as these to speak openly, theirs were marginal voices.

“Ah, the Night Is Deep in Monten Lupa”

The wind has quieted down, the rain has ceased. Fresh in the morning sun, I shall depart tomorrow.

Without fear or sorrow, I shall go to the gallows cherishing my mother’s face.

Testaments of the Century

The last letter to his young daughter from an army medical doctor was representative in this regard. He told her to try to make her way through life without ever killing a living thing, not even a dragonfly. He had been executed after being convicted of maltreating Allied prisoners.91

In September 1950, a reckless young couple gave the mass media a terser phrase and a more sensational incident to consider when a young man employed as a chauffeur at Nihon University was arrested for stealing university funds and spending them on a spree with his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, the daughter of a professor. When apprehended, he responded with what quickly became one of the most famous English phrases of the occupation: “Oh, mistake!” The thief and his paramour, it turned out, were devotees of Hollywood gangster films, conversed in a curious polyglot of Japanese and broken English, had no apparent interests beyond material consumption and sexual pleasure, and felt no remorse at all for their casual crime.