Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (38 page)

In a lighter vein, the prevalence of petty theft became a man leaving a public bath house and discovering someone had stolen one of his wooden clogs. Shortage of decent clothing emerged in “Voice of the People” as a woman wearing the
haori
coat worn with kimono along with the decidedly unglamorous
monpe
pantaloons common during the war and, for many poor women, for many years after. Another vignette of daily vexations offered a white-collar worker picking a cigarette butt off the ground. “Not enough tobacco” was the concise legend.

Other illustrators and wordsmiths used the syllable-card format in comparably pointed ways. Thus, the
desirability
of being sent to prison (where one was at least guaranteed food and
lodging) inspired, for the syllable
tsu
, a prisoner singing happily as a policeman led him off to the slammer. The accompanying text read “volunteering to go to prison by committing a crime” (
tsumi o okashite keimusho shigan
). Another card set picked up on the postsurrender efflorescence of messianic new religions, several of which were founded by women who claimed to have had ecstatic visions. The graphic here offered a cross-eyed woman kneeling in front of a Shinto pendant with her hands clasped in prayer and tiny figures prostrating themselves before her. Playing on the syllable
ki
, the caption called less than reverential attention to “new religions where an insane person becomes a deity” (
kichigai ga kamisama ni naru shinsh
Å«
ky
ō
).
¹⁹

	YU “Clog missing at the public bath” ( yuya de geta ga nai ) Graphic: Man leaving a bathhouse and staring at a single wooden clog
	E “Formal coat and pantaloons” ( ebaori ni monpe ) Graphic: Woman wearing a formal overgarment for kimono along with the unglamorous cotton pants worn during the war and often for several years after
	TA “Not enough tobacco” ( tarinai tabako ) Graphic: picking up a discarded cigarette butt

Such barbed observations went on and on. The once prized virtue of frugality was ridiculed with aphorisms (here for the 1947 New Year) to the effect that, in the midst of runaway inflation, it was “foolish to make a plan for the year” (
ichinen no hakarigoto suru dake yabo
). The best one could do was “steal when poor, spend madly when prosperous” (
kasshite wa dorob
ō
, uruoeba ranpi
). It was
a rare cartoonist who could resist a grim (or sick) reference to the prevalence of blindness caused by drinking the cheap methyl alcohol popular among the down-and-out. “Stoned and blind” (
yoi shirete me ga tsubure
) was the blunt association for the syllable
yo
that accompanied a cartoon of a disoriented man with a bottle labeled “methyl” before him. A drawing of a man in the berth of a railway sleeper car was turned into a joke by contrasting his comfortable accommodation with the “fourth class” status to which—in General MacArthur's own humiliating words—Japan had fallen as a nation. A first-class sleeper in a fourth-class country (
yont
ō
koku ni itt
ō
shindai
) was the caption here. Although Emperor Hirohito generally escaped the barbs of the humorists just as he evaded almost every other sort of substantive criticism, his unprecedented post-defeat decision to tour the country and mingle with common people prompted one publication to enlarge a famous old saying. “A crane in the dump” became “crane in the dump, emperor in the crowd” (
hakidame ni tsuru, hitonami ni tenn
ō
).
²⁰

The postwar spread of commercialized sex drew attention with renderings of nude shows and old men reading pornography. “Showing thighs is a business” (
momo o miseru ga sh
ō
bai
) was one dignified new association for mo. The difficulties of true romance during the acute food shortage that lasted for three or four years after the defeat was conveyed in a 1948 graphic of a couple on a park bench trying to have a “rendezvous while carrying sweet potatoes” (
imo motte rendezvous
). The postwar phenomenon of seeking a marriage partner at public meetings devised solely for that purpose was captured in the notion that “the ties that bind come from a group marriage meeting” (
en wa sh
Å«
dan miai
).

Struggling to survive day to day by selling personal possessions such as clothing piece by piece, just as one peeled and ate the edible bamboo shoot, inspired one of the most famous coinages of the postsurrender period—”bamboo-shoot existence.” From this came, in 1948, a predictable cartoon
karuta
depicting a woman standing before an empty bureau, with the caption “already three years of bamboo-shoot existence” (
takenoko gurashi mo sannen
). In
another syllable-card sequence for 1948, hunger for a touch of glamour prompted the observation that “women can be caught by a dress” (
onna wa ish
ō
de tsurareru
). The accompanying illustration clearly slipped by the occupation's American censors: it depicted a young woman reaching for a dress dangled by a male figure with a gigantic nose in silhouette—a decidedly uncomplimentary rendering of the Caucasian conquerors who exchanged luxury gifts for sexual favors.

What the new freedoms associated with “democracy” might mean for old virtues such as filial piety inspired the talented cartoonist Ono Saseo to offer, also in 1948, a drawing of a little boy giving a speech to his trembling father. “Child humbles parent” (
ko wa oya o hekomasu
) was Ono's association for
ko
. In the same issue in which this cartoon appeared, however, Miya Shigeo offered hope that some old customs were still being preserved. His rendering for
re
introduced “a cultured person who knows manners” (
reisetsu o shiru bunkajin
)—but it was not, in fact, intended to put traditionalists' hearts at rest. Miya's “cultured person,” depicted bowing before a Shinto shrine, was a young American GI.

And how did young Japanese emerge in these
iroha
sallies (when not engaged in the black market or in personal and family relationships)? University students worked part-time jobs instead of attending classes or spent their time waving red flags in front of their old professors. Workers celebrated May Day under hammer-and-sickle flags. A young woman with high and “westernized” aspirations was sure to end up an old maid because “her ideals are too high” (this particular graphic offered a kimono-clad woman brushing off men with her elbow while holding a book with the English title “Love Is Best”). Alternatively, young people could enjoy another of democracy's great attractions, the boogie-woogie—or attend auditions held by movie studios looking for “new talent” (here the unkind graphic portrayed a young would-be female star with a nose like a potato).

*  *  *

Much of this was frivolous, of course. While the satirists were poking fun at the postwar confusion, a great many other Japanese were seriously searching for “bridges of language” that would provide them with usable traditions for the present and future. The Sh
ō
wa emperor, guided by advisers like the career diplomat Shigemitsu Mamoru (soon to be indicted as a war criminal) and ever intent on preserving the sanctity of his dynasty, rediscovered the 1868 Charter Oath of the Meiji founding fathers. His mission, like that of his grandfather, the Meiji emperor, he declared on New Year's Day 1946, had always been to throw off the evil customs of the past and seek knowledge throughout the world. (He did not explain how this cosmopolitan search had led to Nazi Germany.)
²¹
Less rhetorically but more dramatically, the emperor's postwar decision to become a “crane in the dump” and mingle with the hoi polloi had its most obvious precedent in the imperial tours his grandfather, the Meiji emperor, had carried out in various parts of the country in the 1880s. On both occasions, these carefully choreographed royal excursions were undertaken to stabilize popular support for the throne at a time of political agitation and uncertainty.

Within days after the emperor announced Japan's capitulation, millennial rhetoric about “changing the world” (
yonaoshi
) that had been popular in the late feudal period was resurrected as an appropriate way of thinking about the challenges now posed by defeat. Closer in time, liberals rediscovered “Taish
ō
democracy.” Progressives and leftists called attention to the aborted ideals of the “freedom and people's rights movement” (
jiy
Å«
minken und
ō
) of the early Meiji period and to the proletarian and labor movements that had emerged (and been crushed) after the turn of the century. The celebration of “May Day” resumed in 1946, after having been suppressed for ten years—the seventeenth such celebration in Japan. Popular protests against the government's woefully inept rationing system, which culminated in a tumultuous “Food May Day” a few weeks later, were in certain ways a striking replication of the most dynamic occasion of popular protest in prewar Japan—the 1918 “rice riots.” In both instances, the impetus to nationwide
demonstrations derived from spontaneous local protests by housewives. The birth of a radical postwar university student movement (beginning with Student May Day in 1946) was explicitly linked to the anniversary of a notorious prewar incident involving suppression of academic freedom (the Takigawa incident of 1933).

Marxists quickly revived the acrimonious but intellectually stimulating
R
ō
n
ō
-k
ō
za
theoretical debates suppressed in the 1930s. Libertines, hedonists, and exhausted escapists resurrected the
eroguro-nansensu
vogue that had embraced the “erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical” in the early 1930s in a thinly sublimated expression of protest against the rising tide of militarism. Scientists talked about returning to “our peaceful research.” Conservative philosophers like K
ō
saka Masaaki criticized the absence of Western-style “objectivity” in Japanese culture but saw hope for the future in the “sacred power” and estimable state-centered and family-centered “morality” that supposedly characterized Japanese culture. Writers as diverse as the austere “Kyoto School” philosopher Tanabe Hajime and the enormously popular writer of historical epics Yoshikawa Eiji turned to the thirteenth-century evangelist Shinran for wisdom concerning both repentance (
zange
) and ecstatic conversion (
ō
s
ō
). Outcast thinkers of “dangerous thoughts” from the war years, such as Kawakami Hajime, Miki Kiyoshi, Ozaki Hotsumi, and Miyamoto Yuriko became postwar (and, for Miki and Ozaki, posthumous) heroes and heroines.

Industrialists and other leaders of big business quickly called attention to the many usable “pasts” on which postwar economic reconstruction could and should be built. Predictably, these included the rehabilitation of a
zaibatsu
-dominated capitalist system and the restoration of intimate commercial and personal ties with the United States and Great Britain. At the same time, business leaders and economic planners also called attention to the dramatic advances in applied science and technology that the long war itself had stimulated. This, they argued—coupled with continued strong state input into economic planning—would provide the foundation for the country's future development as an advanced economic
power. Indeed, in technocratic as well as technological ways, the very mobilization for “total war” that had led to miserable defeat soon proved to be an unexpectedly dynamic and adaptable “past” on which to construct a more democratic and peacefully oriented Japan.
²²