Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

Kike—Wadatsumi no Koe was like a two-way hinge on a door in time, opening onto the past, then swinging toward the future. “Wadatsumi no Koe” associations were formed by relatives of the war dead, and the book remained in print over the decades that followed. The entries, some seventy-five in all, had been selected with great care by a team of liberal and leftist scholars. They were literate, reflective, cultured—and extraordinarily moving, for one read them knowing that these young men would be cut down before fulfilling their obvious promise. Although they wrote under military censorship and accepted, sometimes even embraced, the mission of dying for their country, there was an underlying hunger for life, not death, in what they wrote. The overwhelming tone of the collection was a sense of wasted lives and tragic loss. Listen! was compiled as an antiwar statement, and its impact was greatly enhanced by the fact that it appeared at the same time as the outbreak of the Korean War, the U.S. decision to rearm Japan, and the rise of an anti-American “peace movement” in Japan.