Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (16 page)

Much the same soft realism characterizes the most interesting Japanese film about the Home Front produced during the Asia-Pacific War: Kurosawa Akira's
Ichiban Utsukushiku
(The Most Beautiful). Released by T
ō
h
ō
in 1944, this film focuses on very young female factory workers recruited from the countryside to produce sophisticated optical lenses for the air force. (Grinding and testing the lenses constitutes the modern machinery here.) Unlike the pretty and peppy wives, girlfriends, nurses, and the like in Hollywood war films, these young women are beautiful by virtue of their innocence and purity. The key word in the film—said, at the end, about the female protagonist—is
yasashii
, gentle. It is a quality the heroine only obtained after transcending mere dedication and discipline. It is, indeed, the same quality that made Nishizumi a figure to be venerated. As much or even more than fervid nationalism or emperor worship, it was this ethos of gentleness wedded to selfless sacrifice that pervaded the visual
propaganda of the war years and made it so persuasive to so many Japanese.
²¹

In the wake of Japan's defeat, American occupation authorities ordered the destruction of 236 feature films deemed “feudal and militaristic” (they were usually torched in bonfires). A less draconian fate befell the scores of war-related paintings done by artists working in both Japanese and Western styles. Most major Japanese painters, including the esteemed Paris-trained Fujita Tsuguharu, were commissioned to produce such works, and their collective contribution provides an extraordinary window on how worldly Japanese visualized the war in the Chinese, Southeast Asian, and Pacific theaters. Like many of the feature films, the paintings stand the test of time as something more than undiluted propaganda. One finds “pure” heroes here (the
Nihonga
, or Japanese-style paintings, lend themselves particularly readily to this)—but one also encounters sorrow, mourning, even intimations of the humanism and antimilitary sentiments that animated so much of the spirit of Taish
ō
Democracy. Much of this serious artwork was confiscated by the victors and held in Washington until the 1960s, when it was returned to Japan. Some of it is exhibited there piecemeal now. Unlike the feature films, these paintings were not destroyed—but most of them, again, remain inaccessible and little known (
Fig. 3-17
).
²²

This is the milieu in which the remarkable textiles that appear in this catalog were produced and worn—and subsequently withdrawn from view and all but forgotten. They have no real counterpart on the Home Fronts of other combatants in World War II. The fifteen-year span of Japan's war witnessed an evolutionary refinement of martial designs and themes not seen in other countries, where those war-related textiles that were produced tended toward “sound-bite” jingoism (often, indeed, relying on words) or allusion to specific events. No one else beautified war with such panache or wore the war so literally.

Obviously, we must turn—in part—to old-fashioned notions of “culture” and “tradition” to help account for this. Traditional Japanese apparel lent itself particularly well to intricate and flamboyant design, and artists of genuine distinction did not hesitate to devote themselves to producing such artwork—even to hand-painting it on the fabric. Ever since late feudal times, people in all walks of life had wrapped themselves in statements and signs, always with an artist's touch. The wartime textiles, it can be said, just carried this one step further.

Fig. 3-17. Ezaki K
ō
hei,
Capture of Guam
. Japan, 1941. Color on paper, 76 ¼'' x 105
⅝
''. Collection National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

The tradition of Japanese-style painting (
Nihonga
), with its delicate washes and flat, stylized renderings, proved particularly adaptable to propaganda suggesting the purity and discipline of Japan's mission as “the Light of Asia.”

In a subtle and unarticulated and surely unplanned way, these garments also served to replicate a peculiarly Japanese practice of symbolically linking the Home Front to the battlefield in the most intimate, tactile manner imaginable. Most Japanese men went to war with a “thousand-stitch belly warmer” (
senninbari
) given them upon departure by their local community. This practical gift took its name from the fact that, at least in theory, every stitch—done
with red thread, and each individually tied off—had been sewn by a different girl or woman. However far away Japan might be, the fighting man was figuratively and almost literally in touch with his home folk. (In a wry scene in
The Story of Tank Commander Nishizumi
, a soldier whiling away time in a barracks on the China front counts the stitches in his
senninbari
and mutters that he has been shortchanged.) Turned about, people wrapping themselves in war patterns on the Home Front could imagine a comparable sort of intimacy.

When all was said and done, however, such propagandistic artistry was far from traditional in any old-fashioned sense. The patterns were bold and chic in the way recent fashions and commercial design had become bold and chic. The airplanes and battleships and tanks depicted were state of the art. The cause—the holy mission—was the creation of a prosperous new era in Asia. It was all a beautiful expression of Japan's complex—and, at this particular moment, truly terrible—modernity.

It is fashionable among foreigners to say that “the Japanese” have sanitized the past and failed to acknowledge their wartime aggression and atrocities. And at the government level as well as in conservative and right-wing circles, it is not difficult to compile a damning record supporting this. A parade of officials associated with the Liberal Democratic Party that dominated politics from the 1950s into the twenty-first century routinely took turns—almost by appointment, it sometimes seemed—denying atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking. Beginning with Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro in the mid-1980s, conservative leaders began visiting Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of Japan's war dead, including World War II leaders, are enshrined. A long-running legal case extending from 1965 to 1997 (the Ienaga Sabur
ō
textbook case) that challenged the guidelines by which the Ministry of Education approved history textbooks helped sustain critical attention to such official whitewashing as reluctance to characterize Japan's invasion of China in 1937 as a “war of aggression.” When the issue of Korean and other non-Japanese women being forced to serve as sexual “comfort women
” (ianfu)
for the imperial forces in Asia was uncovered (by Japanese researchers) in the 1990s, the government resisted acknowledging official responsibility for this, either then or now, in the form of redress. The list easily can be extended
.

At a more general, nongovernmental level, a pervasive sense of victim consciousness
(higaisha ishiki)
has characterized much popular recollection of the Asia-Pacific War that extended from 1937 to 1945. Some 3 million Japanese fighting men and civilians died in that conflict, and sixty-six cities were devastated in the U.S. air raids of 1945 that culminated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over the decades that followed, the scores of millions of Japanese who survived naturally carried this suffering and destruction as an intimate memory. Japan's most famous museum associated with World War II is the Peace Memorial Museum in Hiroshima, where the overwhelming impression is the horrendous effects of the atomic bomb. The multistory National Sh
ō
wa Memorial Museum (Sh
ō
wakan) in Tokyo, which opened in 1999, features largely benign exhibits of everyday artifacts and lifestyles during the hard times of the war and early postwar years
.

Victim consciousness is hardly peculiar to Japan and the Japanese, however; and the number of private Japanese “peace” museums, exhibitions, and—most notably—publications devoted to imperial Japan's atrocities and war responsibility is in fact very large. Most major bookstores in Japan carry a shelf or so of publications, including illustrated books and magazines, dealing with Japanese atrocities such as Nanking, the
ianfu,
the murderous scientific experiments conducted on prisoners by the Imperial Army's Unit 731 in Manchuria, and Japanese depredations throughout East and Southeast Asia. A major scholarly quarterly titled
Sens
ō
Sekinin Kenky
Å«
, which carries the English subtitle “A Report on Japan's War Responsibility,” dates from 1993 and features annotated research articles by meticulous scholars. To an American who came of age during the Vietnam War and has witnessed the official and popular whitewashing of this carnage in the United States in the decades since, the finger-pointing penchant for calling attention to historical sanitization in Japan is not only misleading but also hypocritical
.

The following essay, addressing the kaleidoscope of war memory in Japan, appeared in a 2002 book devoted to war crimes and denial in the twentieth century
.

*
*
*

I
n mid-June 1945, as World War II was reaching its denouement in Asia, a Japanese scholar of French literature named Watanabe Kazuo mused about Germany and Japan in his diary. While bombs fell on Tokyo, Watanabe, in his early forties at the time, was reading Romain Rolland's 1915 account of writings taken from the corpses of German soldiers in World War I. He was particularly struck by the observation of a Prussian officer that the Germans had an aptitude for being unloved. Was this not true, Watanabe wrote, of his own country and compatriots as well?

Watanabe, later esteemed as one of postwar Japan's most engaging “progressive intellectuals,” deplored the war. His “diary of defeat,” which begins in March 1945 and ends the following November (but was not published until fifty years later), is one of the more intimate and evocative lamentations about the insanity of their “holy war” that has come down to us from the Japanese side. Obviously, the murderous behavior of the odd couple of the Axis Alliance helped prompt Watanabe's observation of shared unlovable national personalities. In his view, however, there was more behind this than just militarism and atrocity. The Japanese, he feared, alienated others because they had difficulty thinking in terms of equality, and lacked any true sense of “responsibility.” In January 1946, five months after the war ended, Watanabe devoted a short essay to this aptitude for being unloved, specifically relating it to the issue of “repentance” and his fear that Japanese comprehension of such matters remained superficial.
¹

Would Watanabe draw such an analogy about Germany and Japan today? Would we ourselves do so? Over half a century has passed since World War II ended, and it is surely fair to say that the former Axis partners have developed in ways that most of their non-Communist adversaries in 1945 only hoped and dreamed might be possible.
²
They have become fundamentally democratic societies. They have brought prosperity to a majority of their peoples. Although both have reemerged as great economic workshops, neither has menaced the peace of its neighbors.

And yet, where war and memory are concerned, it also seems
fair to say that, in the eyes of most outsiders, Germany and Japan have gone separate ways. Deservedly or not, “the Germans” have been generally praised for confronting their Nazi past. “The Japanese,” by contrast, are more usually castigated—not only by Americans and Europeans, but by Asian commentators as well—for sanitizing the war they waged in the emperor's name so many decades ago. Indeed, it is a commonplace of contemporary polemics to compare the Japanese unfavorably to the Germans when it comes to confronting war responsibility. On this particular issue, the Japanese aptitude for being mistrusted and unloved is truly singular.

There are easy explanations for this. For all practical purposes, the Japanese cabinet and Diet (parliament) have been dominated by the same conservative political lineage since 1949 (it took the name Liberal Democratic Party in 1955). The electoral base of the conservatives lies in a constituency that still feels an intimate sense of bereavement for the 2 million Japanese soldiers and sailors who died in World War II. Such a constituency is, unsurprisingly, hostile to any blanket condemnation of Japanese war crimes that denies honor and respect to those who died for their country.

This electorate, rather than outsiders, is the audience the conservatives most care about. This helps explain, at least in part, why official statements of war responsibility, repentance, and apology so often seem lukewarm to non-Japanese.
³
At the same time, the ranks of the conservatives do indeed include many die-hard nationalists who still subscribe to some of the propaganda under which imperial Japan was mobilized for war. In one form or another, they would argue that their country was engaged in a legitimate war of self-defense against the “Red Peril” of Communism and the “White Peril” of European and American imperialism and colonialism in Asia. Japan's war may have been ill advised, in this view, but neither in motive nor in conduct can it be fairly deemed to have been peculiarly criminal.