Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

Many American goods also made their way onto the market, often arriving by way of panpan who received them from their patrons. Vendors also struck private deals with occupation personnel. The Ueno outdoor market even featured an “America Lane” specializing in such goods.

Territorial conflicts were seriously exacerbated, moreover, by racial tensions. Like the world of prostitution, the black market had a large representation of “third-country people” who had chosen not to be repatriated to their native lands. Well-organized Korean and Formosan gangs vied with Japanese gangs, and in July these simmering tensions erupted in spectacular violence. A fight involving hundreds of Formosan vendors and over a thousand Matsuda-gumi toughs spilled over into the neighboring Shibuya district, culminating in a gun-fight outside the Shibuya police station that left seven Formosans dead and thirty-four injured.

The hostility that already existed between the police and the Formosan and Korean communities was rubbed rawer. Prejudice against “third-country people” increased, and much of the public’s anger against both black-market abuses and the rising crime rate came to fall on non-Japanese Asians.

The other side of greed and decadence was a brazen vitality. Toughs flaunted their defiance of “good” society by attiring themselves in what became known as their “three sacred regalia,” an irreverent takeoff on the sanctified regalia of the emperor. In place of the imperial mirror, sword, and jewel, they were identified by their predilection for aloha shirts, nylon belts, and rubber-soled shoes.

Despite its pervasive tensions and outright eruptions of violence, the black market was also one of the few arenas where interactions between the Japanese and other Asians took place on a regular and more or less equitable basis. In the view of more romantic Japanese historians, poor Japanese, Koreans, and Formosans came together here in unprecedented ways.

When the victors arrived in Japan, they encountered a country with few privately owned vehicles. Of those, moreover, a great many were powered by charcoal rather than gasoline. This taxi driver, caught by the camera in October 1945, is stoking up his charcoal-driven car.

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.

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.

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.

Borrowed and bastardized English titles included Ōru Romansu (All Romance), Madamu (Madam), Kyabaree (Cabaret), Guno (Grotesque), G-men (G-Men), Chi to Daiyamondo (Blood and Diamonds), Buinasu (Venus), Suriru (Thrill), Hū Danitto (Who Dunnit), Neo-riberaru (Neoliberal), Pinappu (Pinup), Saron (Salon), and Nanbā Wan (Number One).

A study based on some sixteen hundred issues of kasutori magazines found that the “symbolic images” that tended to dominate the genre included kissing, strip shows, underpants, panpan and “leisurely women,” chastity, incest, masturbation, and lonely widows. This was not edifying, but it was undeniably a far cry from the mystique of living and dying for the emperor that had governed life until just recently.

Despite its obvious borrowings from the West, however, the kasutori counterculture remained fundamentally indigenous. Like the black market, this was a world the conqueror could never really enter—an environment as colorful as the gaudy covers of its pulp magazines and as gritty as the black-and-white photographs that record its bars, dance halls, and hole-in-the-wall eateries, its narrow, crooked streets and cluttered backstage dressing rooms. The conqueror’s ideas had only negligible impact on this world, which seemed so awash in the glitter of American popular culture. Apart perhaps from Hollywood and popular music, “America” often tended to signify little more than an amorphous alien army of occupation, vaguely present, that in and of itself was the ultimate symbol of Japan’s degradation. Similarly, although the barroom intelligentsia often delighted in dropping names and terms from the European intellectual tradition, more often than not these were just set adrift like exotic flotsam and jetsam on a sea of self-indulgence.

While these literary engagements with love and sexuality resonated with the lubricious eroticism of kasutori culture, three younger writers—Sakaguchi Ango, Tamura Taijirō, and Dazai Osamu—dramatically linked degeneracy and carnal behavior to authenticity and individuality.

Sakaguchi Ango’s 1946 essay “On Decadence” is often cited as the most succinct expression of the repudiation of traditional values that many writers and intellectuals espoused in the wake of defeat.

It was in “On Decadence” that Sakaguchi observed how former kamikaze pilots who had intended to die like scattered cherry blossoms were now working the black market, while wives who heroically saw their husbands off to battle and then knelt in prayer before their memorial tablets had already begun casting around for other men. “The look of the nation since defeat is one of pure and simple decadence,” he declared—and in this lay the beginning of truth, of the return to a genuine humanity:

Japan was defeated, and the samurai ethic has perished, but humanity has been born from the womb of decadence’s truth. .

Ever since the late nineteenth century, all Japanese had been indoctrinated to believe that the supreme object of veneration was the kokutai, or emperor-centered “national entity”—a misty concept written with two ideographs meaning literally “country” and “body.” From the mid-1920s on, criticism of the kokutai was a major criminal offense. 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.

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.”

The Setting Sun was a flawed and uneven novel. It frequently fell into maudlin romanticism and suffered from the familiar “kasutori-gentsia” habit of scattering vacuous European terms and references about like confetti. Nonetheless, its almost immediate status as a classic came from more than just the morbid conjunction of the decadence and suicide it depicted with the decadence and suicide of the author. No other work captured the despondency and dreams of the times so poignantly. Whatever he may have lacked, Dazai was not lacking in a self-pity that resonated strongly with the deep strain of victim consciousness then pervading society. At the same time, he found beauty in decay and intimated, however feebly, that it might be possible to transcend despair through love.

I had never longed for revolution and had not even known love. Until now, the grownups around us taught that revolution and love were the most foolish and despicable things, and before and during the war we believed that to be the case. But after the defeat we became distrustful of the grownups around us and came to feel that the true way of living existed in the opposite of whatever they said. We came to believe that revolution and love in fact are the best and most delicious things in this life, and it is precisely because they are such good things that grownups perversely lied that they were sour grapes. I want to believe firmly. Humans were born for love and revolution.59

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.”

Whatever their literary stature, however, the writers of escapist stories and carnal literature, the apostles of “decadence” and philosophers of the flesh, the sodden romanticizers of love and revolution, the après-guerre existentialists and nihilists all roiled popular consciousness and called doctrinaire modes of thinking into question in ways their intellectual critics rarely succeeded in doing. They were spirited, iconoclastic, and influential to a degree the academic elites were loath to acknowledge. They might not have constituted the basis for a genuinely revolutionary transformation of Japan, but their challenge to old verities proved unforgettable.

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. The ideologues of the modern state carefully reformulated these feudal prescriptions as a code of behavior for “modern” married couples. In their hierarchical subjugation of private worlds, women bore by far the heavier burden. A woman’s destiny was to become ryōsai kenbo, a “good wife and wise mother.” Her overriding duty was to serve the male-dominated family—and the duty of the family, in turn, was to serve the imperial state. 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. In the wake of the defeat, such sentiments emerged in many guises, including a variety of popular publications emphasizing not only the appropriateness of enjoyable sex in ma...

Although a substantial portion of its articles were devoted to explicit discussions of sexual techniques, it differed from its pulp predecessors in a fundamental way. By linking sex to marriage, Fūfu Seikatsu made sex a legitimate rather than a furtive activity—and turned sexual reciprocity and mutual pleasure into symbols of gender equality.68

The blurred boundary between escapism and engagement with serious issues was typical of kasutori culture as a whole, and some critics, particularly on the political left, offered a Machiavellian interpretation of such developments. In their view, sex was part of a broader “three-S” policy encouraged by occupation authorities and conservative politicians to divert popular energies and resentments away from genuinely radical politics and protest movements—the other two “S’s” being sports and “screen,” that is, both domestic and imported movies of an escapist nature.

A more enduring comment on kasutori culture could be found in a posed photograph taken by Hayashi Tadahiko in 1947, depicting a model in a white two-piece bathing suit lying on a filthy balustrade high above the grimy train tracks and smutty city streets. The hardship of those days is readily apparent, but so also is the esprit of hardship and a humorous, even defiant elan. The photo is witty and sad, naturalistic and contrived, erotic and strangely innocent. Decades later, it remains an icon of the cultures of defeat as memorable for what it excludes as for what it depicts. We see no Americans here, no politicians preaching democracy, no figures in military uniform, no hints of nostalgia for the past, no vestiges of the state—just the bittersweet ambiance of life on the margins in a defeated land.71

Optics technicians who until recently had been engaged in producing lenses for military use emerged with a “Baby Pearl” camera aimed at GI buyers. Former designers of fighter planes for Nakajima Aircraft (now renamed Fuji Industry) came up with the “Rabbit,” a motor scooter based on a U.S. military model and made from tail parts for the Ginga bomber.

Indigenous liquor manufacturers, who only a few years earlier had been toasting Japan’s spectacular initial victories against the “devilish Anglo-Americans,” quickly came to market with a smooth intoxicant (so the story goes) bearing the friendly and reassuring label “Special Six-Year-Old Brandy, Brewed Especially for the Occupation Forces.”

In mid 1946, as rice rations disappeared, it was announced that “the era of flour has arrived.” An Osaka electric company responded to the challenge with an immensely popular device known as the Hōmu Beikā, Japanese-English for “Home Baker.” This consisted of a crude wooden box lined with metal sheets connected to an electric cord. One poured in batter or corn meal (a new taste sensation, courtesy of food imports from America), and that was it—although the Home Baker also emitted an unintended blue sparkle that was regarded as aesthetically pleasing. The earliest advertisements proclaimed this to be “The First Step in Kitchen Culture—A Bread Maker That Does Not Need Charcoal, Gas or an Electric Burner.”2

Western-style dressmaking quickly emerged not only as an attractive practical skill, but as a symbol of liberation from the drab poverty and anti-westernism of the war years. Dressmaking schools, fashion magazines, and a variety of style books all blossomed amid the ruin.

Military uniforms (heitai fuku), worn by men even years after the surrender, were rechristened “defeat suits” (haisen fuku). Similarly, military footwear became “defeat shoes.” By October 1945, brass Japanese-style pipes for smoking tobacco were already available on the black market. Sometimes said to be Japan’s first postwar manufacture, the pipes, about 10 centimeters long with a very small bowl, were made from the casings of machine gun cartridges and antiaircraft-gun shells. Their popular name? “Defeat pipes,” of course.

In an unusually grim application of new meanings to old sayings, the pictorial weekly Asahi Gurafu (Asahi Graphic) ran a photo of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima in its 1946 New Year issue, accompanied by the old-saw caption “Truth that emerged out of lies.”

Indeed, an emphasis on “brightness” and “newness” became the ubiquitous rhetorical antidote to all that was dark and despairing. While the purveyors and consumers of kasutori culture spoke of finding authenticity through degeneracy, others repudiated the recent past by emphasizing the bright, pure, liberating prospects of “the new Japan.”

Postwar publishers generally took care to offer upbeat and entertaining fare to their readers. Films and serious prose often moved, stylistically, from darkness to light. Even practical undertakings such as teaching English were carefully wedded to an explicit philosophy of accentuating the positive. “Come Come English” (Kamu Kamu Eigo), an enormously popular daily radio program that premiered on February 1, 1946, became famous not only for its conversation lessons, but also for its cheery theme song.

By all accounts, “Come Come English” lived up to Hirakawa’s expectations. The program remained on the air for seven years, and was regularly listened to in an estimated 5.7 million households. Half a million textbooks were published in conjunction with the program, and half a million fan letters were received between 1946 and 1952. Hirakawa himself became a greatly respected celebrity.9

One of the pithier slogans of 1943 called on the Japanese to “Extinguish America and Britain and Make a Bright World Map.” Slogan after slogan sought to instill bright attitudes and confidence on both the battlefield and the home front—and also to project Japan as the radiant hope of all Asia. (“Light of Asia” was one of the propaganda names the Japanese used in Southeast Asia.)

The Japanese did not march off to war shouting “Long Live Militarism and Aggression!” They declared that they were fighting for peace and security, coexistence and co-prosperity, a bright future for their nation and all of Asia. All lies, declared the victorious Allies, the kasutori-gentsia, the political left in general. A more ordinary response, however, was to say: wartime rhetoric reflected decent, even noble ideals, but we were disastrously deceived and misled by our leaders in our pursuit of them. From this perspective, it became possible to imagine that the ideals for which so many had been willing to die might also aid in the creation of a new, prosperous, and peaceful nation.

The carry-over of catch phrases, images, even whole texts from the war years was in itself neither progressive nor reactionary. Invariably, however, this continuum of familiar language conveyed a sense of stability, and so functioned as psychological balm at a time of acute stress and unusually drastic change.

The two most familiar slogans of the early postwar period—”Construct a Nation of Peace” (Heiwa Kokka Kensetsu) and “Construct a Nation of Culture” (Bunka Kokka Kensetsu)—resurrected two key themes of wartime propaganda, construction and culture, and turned them into rallying cries for the creation of a nation resting on democratic, antimilitaristic principles.

“Rising-Sun Land, Superior Culture” was a typical slogan from the China War. After Pearl Harbor, the propagandists were even more explicit in emphasizing that culture, dynamic and regenerative, emanated from Japan. “Imperial Culture Is the Light of Asia” was a rallying cry from 1942. As another slogan of that year expressed it, Japan was in the process of creating “A New Culture Tied to a Radiant Past.”

The cult of the new was omnipresent. In the publishing world alone, well over one hundred magazines that appeared during the first three years after the war used the ideograph for “new” in their name, either in compound words (read shin) or in its adjectival form (read atarashii). A number of magazines even used the English for new (nyū) in their titles. The areas of interest in which these magazines specialized reveal how avidly the blessing of newness was dispensed. Among other things, readers could embrace a new age, new culture, new democracy, new education, new geography, new history, new hope, new labor, new life, new movies, new salaried man, new school, new poetry, new sports, new way, new women, new world, newborn democratic Buddhism, new literature, new haiku, new marriage, new self-government, new era, new freedom, new free people, new society, new science, new farmer, new farm village, new youth, new police, new family, new beauty care, and even a new happy star.16

From the Japanese perspective, the war years were an attempt to throw off the status quo—to transcend the global depression and to catch up with the more advanced industrial economies of the West.

When the war ended in disaster and utter defeat, it was obvious that the “New Order” and the “New Structure” had been miserably conceived. It seemed no less self-evident that the quest for a new domestic structure and a new place in the global political economy had to go on.

For almost a century, the Japanese had been socialized to anticipate and accommodate themselves to drastic change. When World War II ended, they were well prepared—not merely by the horrors and manifest failures of the war, but also by the socialization of the past and even the psychic thrust of wartime indoctrination—to carry on the quest for a “new” Japan.

Conservative and liberal antimilitarists could, for instance, point to a number of “democratic” precedents in the prewar period: the “Charter Oath” of 1868, in which the new government pledged to overthrow the “evil practices” of the feudal past; the Western-inspired ideals of “civilization and enlightenment” and “liberty and people’s rights” that had flourished in the 1870s and 1880s; the practice of parliamentary government under a constitutional monarchy initiated as early as 1890; and the emergence of greater political pluralism in the 1910s and 1920s (a promising development known as “Taishō democracy,” in reference to the reign years of Emperor Hirohito’s father).

“People are suffering in this ruined land,” its editors declared, “but for the first time in history they are also liberated from oppression. Great sacrifices were made, but if for the first time Japanese history is being transferred to the people’s hands, then all was worth it.” The Allied blow to the ruling classes was described as “a valuable gift from the world to the peace-loving, democratic Japanese people.”

The magazine commented editorially that although it was natural for people to view their own country’s actions as just, from an objective perspective it was apparent that Japan’s past attitudes and actions had been “a dark mass of ambition,” especially where China was concerned.30

Iwanami was to serious intellectual publishing what Kōdansha was to books and magazines aimed at mass consumption. Indeed, “Iwanami culture” and “Kōdansha culture” were already familiar catchphrases for the separate worlds of elite and popular publishing.

Surrender, the new journal observed, was unprecedented and humiliating, and darkness, chaos, and suffering clearly lay ahead. At the same time, defeat had exposed the “unreasonableness, fraud, bluff, and injustice” of the war years, and opened the possibility of the Japanese people’s making a new start based on realistically facing up to the truth.

of human nature and universal justice.” The list of tasks to be accomplished was endless, but central to all endeavors was the creation of a society based on social justice and responsive to the will of the people. Only that kind of society would prevent tyranny and dictatorship from arising ever again in Japan.