Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (35 page)

Inherent ambiguity sometimes sharpened the potential double edge of these “educational” games. This is suggested by the famous saying that (since it begins with the syllable
i
) opens many of the earliest sets:
inu mo arukeba b
ō
ni ataru
, or “if even a dog moves around, it will encounter a stick.” What exactly did this mean? Apparently, one thing at one time, another and quite contrary thing at another time. Originally, the saying seems to have been intended as a warning that anyone who got out of line would find trouble (that is, be hit with a stick). The sanguine spin came in thinking of the dog happily finding a stick by wandering around. In this case, going out of bounds might bring good fortune.
⁸
When cartoonists picked up the
iroha karuta
as a vehicle for satire in defeated Japan a century later, they obviously had an established but extremely flexible “tradition” to play with. As we shall see, they even reintroduced their own version of the wandering dog.

In the modern era that followed the Meiji Restoration, the
iroha karuta
spread throughout the country. Sometimes they were even popularly called “dog-stick cards” (
inub
ō
karuta
) from that best-known of opening sayings. In the Meiji and Taish
ō
periods, card sets were sometimes attached to children's books as a merchandising bonus. Pithy phrases were cleaned up and rendered more “wholesome.” By the 1930s, when the cards became vehicles for patriotic exhortation, soldiers (
heitai
) marched in where an earlier generation might have found farts (
he
) more entertaining as an opening syllable. In a typical card set from 1940, for example, the association for
he
was “Playing soldier, don't cry even if you fall” (
heitaigokko korondemo nakuna
).
⁹

The convention of associating
kana
syllables with illustrated graphics had obvious attractions for cartoonists addressing adult audiences. It was natural and easy, that is, to transfer the multiple “card” format to the printed pages of periodicals as an extended sequence of single-panel illustrations with witty
iroha
captions.
Among other things, this provided a clever format through which to kick off each new year with a wry, impressionistic commentary—sometimes by turning old phrases to new uses, sometimes by bending or cleverly altering an old proverb, sometimes by coining a sharp new aphorism or wedding a barbed graphic to a pithy and newly fashionable phrase. For several years following the defeat, such cartoons in the form of “new edition syllable cards” (
shinpan iroha karuta
) provided an ironic magazine commentary on the contemporary scene.

Although these graphic little jokes certainly constitute one of the most modest and ephemeral forms of social commentary and cultural expression imaginable, in retrospect they capture the flavor of the times with remarkable pungency. At the same time, they also convey a sense of grassroots cynicism and iconoclasm that (in one way or another) tells us quite a bit about the transition to “democracy” in postwar Japan. There is even, perhaps, a small sense of coming full circle—in that public discourse was regaining the more detached, ironic, even sacrilegious tone that had been present in earlier times. In a wonderful little example of this reinvented tradition, one of the first postdefeat cartoon adaptions of the syllable card motif opened (almost) with that hoary dog-and-stick proverb. The illustration portrayed a trembling dog
staring at a boiling pot of stew. This was a commentary on the acute food shortage that Japanese in all walks of life confronted in the wake of defeat, and the accompanying revised caption read: “If a dog walks around, it may well become soup” (
inu mo arukeba nabe ni sareru
).
¹⁰

Until 1949, the Japanese media were subjected to formal censorship by the American-led occupation authorities. All media expression thus took place in a box. Although the parameters of permissible expression were much greater than had been the case under the presurrender Japanese regimes, certain logical targets of satire were formally taboo. The victors and their entire early agenda of “demilitarization and democratization” were by and large off-limits to criticism—hardly an elegant or admirable model of democracy in action. As a consequence, the postsurrender cartoonists, like everyone else in the media, practiced self-censorship as a matter of course. During the war years, they had ridiculed and demonized the “devilish Anglo-Americans.” Now they mocked themselves and the sorry plight into which their “holy war” had led them.
¹¹

Such mockery tended to zero in on several targets. The most immediately striking were the folly of the recent war and the deservedly humiliating fall from grace of the country's erstwhile leaders. Yesterday's holy war was now more than just profane. It was a joke, an act of profound stupidity, a stain on the nation's honor. And yesterday's heroes, both military and civilian (but almost always excluding the emperor), had become today's goats. An incisive early example of this new cynicism and ridicule—and, indeed, of the
iroha karuta
as a vehicle for postwar political commentary—is an exuberant sequence of 47 “New Edition Syllable Cards” by Saji Takashi and Terao Yoshitake (see
Fig. 9.1
) that appeared in the 1946 New Year issue of a labor-oriented periodical named
Ky
ō
ryoku shimbun
(Cooperative press). What follows here is a close-up selection of Saji and Terao's vignettes of the new Japan (their
i-ro-ha
panels run top to bottom, right to left):
¹²

Fig. 9-1. “New Edition Syllable Cards for 1946” (Saji Takashi and Terao Yoshitaka, “Shinpan iroha karuta,”
Ky
ō
ryoku shimbun
, New Year issue, 1946).

This cartoon version of the traditional syllable-cards sequence begins at the top right, reads top to bottom, and thus proceeds to the left in vertical rows.

	NI “Despised fellow being kicked out” ( nikumarekko yo o hijikaru ) Graphic: foot stomping a uniformed officer
	HO “Much pain for a lost war” ( hone ori zon no makeikusa ) Graphic: white flag of surrender above a stack of rifles
	HE “Thanks to our fighting men” ( heitaisan no okage desu ) Graphic: distressed faces of a mother, father, and child
	TO “Even old men are breaking out in cold sweat” ( toshiyori mo hiyaase ) Graphic: three trembling men, one in military cap, with one of them thinking “war crimes” 13
	CHI “Vowing to build a new Japan” ( chikatte kinzuku shin Nippon ) Graphic: repratriated soldier holding hands with a smiling woman
	RI “Army general in a cage” ( rikugun taish ō ori no naka ) Graphic: former General and Prime Minister T ō j ō Hideki behind bars
	O “Women entering the election wars” ( onna noridasu senkyosen ) Graphic: newly enfranchised woman campaigning for office
	WA “Me too, me too—black market dealings” ( ware mo ware mo no yami sh ō bai ) Graphic: man with black-market goods
	KA “The Divine Wind didn't blow” ( kamikaze mo fukisokone ) Graphic: crowded houses in flames, with bombs falling on them 14
	YO “Thanks for quitting [the war]” ( yoku koso yamete kudasatta ) Graphic: seven smiling faces of ordinary people
	TA [DA] “Even cabinet ministers do the black market” ( daijin mo yami ) Graphic: elderly official with black-market fish
	RE “Great Asia War that stained history” ( rekishi o kegasu Dai T ō a Sen ) Graphic: military boot stomping on the pages of an open book
	SO “The sky is blue, the ground in ruins” ( sora wa aozora chi haikyo ) Graphic: bombed-out building against the sky