Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (45 page)

25
. Minear,
Hiroshima
, 305. Hara's “Summer Flowers” and T
ō
ge's “Poems of the Atomic Bomb” both are translated in full by Minear, along with another early classic of atomic-bomb literature,
Ō
ta Y
ō
ko's 1950 narrative “City of Corpses.” In his commentary, Minear calls attention to the implicit anti-Americanism in many of T
ō
ge's poems; 295–97.

26
.
Asahi Shimbun
, August 23, 1945.

27
. For the English version of this stunning collection, see Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), comp.,
Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors
(Pantheon, 1977).

28
. The nonlethal consequences of the “black rain” are noted in Yamazaki with Fleming,
Children of the Atomic Bomb
, and attributed to the relatively high altitude at which the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs
were detonated. This is in contrast to the conspicuously lethal fallout from the 1954 U.S. hydrogen-bomb test in the Marshall Islands.

29
. For a broad annotated discussion of Cold War struggles within Japan in general, see chapter 8 in this present volume. By far the most influential collection of student-conscript letters was Nihon Senbotsu Gakusei Shuki Hensh
Å«
Iinkai, ed.,
Kike—Wadatsumi no Koe: Nihon Senbotsu Gokusei no Shuki
(Listen—the voice of the ocean: Testimonies of conscripted Japanese students) (Tokyo, 1949). Like Nagai Takashi's
Bells of Nagasaki
, this also was quickly refashioned as a popular movie. This collection of student letters tapped not only an earlier postwar collection of wartime letters by Tokyo Imperial University conscripts but also a wartime series of such letters published in the Tokyo Imperial University student newspaper—a striking example indeed of war words becoming peace words. After Japan's defeat, such wartime writings often were reinterpreted as evidence of peaceful, idealistic, and even antiwar sentiments—as well, of course, as intimate examples of the tragic loss of talented and attractive young men in a foolhardy and misguided war.

30
. The appeal is reproduced in Nihon Jy
ā
narizumu Kenky
Å«
kai, ed.,
Sh
ō
wa ‘Hatsugen' no Kiroku
(A record of Sh
ō
wa pronouncements) (Tokyo, 1989), 138–39.

31
. Gensuiky
ō
, short for Gensuibaku Kinshi Nihon Ky
ō
gikai (Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs) was founded in September 1955. Its domination by the Japan Communist Party led to the splintering off of rival organizations in the 1960s. In 1961, the centrist Democratic Socialist Party and conservative Liberal Democratic Party formed the National Council for Peace and Against Nuclear Weapons (Kakukin Kaigi, short for Kakuheiki Kinshi Heiwa Kansetsu Kokumin Kaigi), and in 1965 the Japan Socialist Party formed the Japan Congress Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikin, short for Gensuibaku Kinshi Nihon Kokumin Kaigi). Factionalism on the left has continually plagued the antinuclear movement.

32
. For an English translation of
Ō
e's early essays, which originally appeared in the monthly
Sekai
, see his
Hiroshima Notes
, trans. Toshi Yonezawa and ed. David L. Swain (YMCA Press, 1981).

33
. For an English translation, see Masuji Ibuse,
Black Rain
, trans. John Bester (Kodansha, 1969). This is without question the classic Japanese literary reconstruction of the atomic-bomb experience. The Japanese film version of
Black Rain
, directed by Imamura Sh
ō
hei, did not appear until 1988.

34
. Three volumes from the
Barefoot Gen
series (originally published in Japanese by Sh
ō
bunsha, Tokyo) are available in English translation from New Society Publishers, Philadelphia.

35
. See note 27 above for an English rendering of NHK's edited collection of
hibakusha
drawings.

36
. These later developments in demographic, medical, and linguistic understandings are scattered throughout the chaotic but invaluable
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(note 2 above).

37
. Sodei Rinjir
ō
,
Watakushitachi wa Teki Datta no ka: Zaibei Hibakusha no Mokushiroku
(Were we the enemy?—A record of
hibakusha
in the United States) (Tokyo, 1978).

38
.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
, 471, 474. Korean groups place the figures of Korean casualties much higher; see ibid., 468. See also Kurt W. Tong, “Korea's Forgotten Atomic Bomb Victims,”
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
23 (January–March 1991): 31–37. Apart from the previously mentioned American POWs killed in Hiroshima, the atomic bombs also killed small numbers of Chinese, Southeast Asian, and European individuals.

39
. This reencounter with China, and with Japanese war atrocities there, began with nongovernmental contacts in the mid-1960s, before the formal restoration of relations in 1972. The key Japanese writer in bringing the Rape of Nanking to public attention was the well-known progressive journalist Honda Katsuichi, whose influential writings from China were published in newspapers and magazines in 1971 and subsequently collected in a volume entitled
Ch
Å«
goku no Tabi
(Travels in China) (Tokyo, 1972). The ensuing contentious debates on this topic in Japan are concisely summarized in Daqing Yang, “A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity as History,”
Sino-Japanese Studies
3 (November 1990): 14–35.

40
. In 1994, in anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs, officials associated with the memorial museum in Hiroshima announced that they would expand their exhibitions beyond depictions of Japanese victimization to include reference to Hiroshima's military role since the Meiji period, Japanese aggression and atrocities in World War II, and the presence of Korean and Chinese forced laborers in Hiroshima at the time of the bombs.

41
. Convenient compilations of Nagano's statements appear in
Asahi Shimbun
, May 7 and 19, 1994. Although the government officially repudiated Nagano's comments, his remarks accurately reflect a mainline conservative view in Japan.

42
.
Asahi Shimbun
, May 20, 1994. There were other arguments against the state visits as well, including the liberal and left-wing criticism that it would involve repoliticizing the role of the emperor in significant ways. The nuances of these acts of symbolic politics are subtle and convoluted.

43
. In the realm of popular symbolic “equations,” the most extreme expression of Japanese victimization involves pairing the Holocaust in Europe and “nuclear holocaust” of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. In the more specifically Asian context, the most familiar equation pairs the Rape of Nanking and the nuclear destruction of the two Japanese cities. Americans are most likely to conjoin Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki, but this is a view that has little credence in Japan. Here again, the issue is a contentious one. Whereas the U.S.-dominated Tokyo war-crimes trials portrayed Pearl Harbor as a deep-seated “conspiracy” against peace, the more persuasive view in Japan is that the attack was an ill-conceived response to a collapsing world order—and best comprehended in the capitalistic, imperialistic, and colonial terms of the time. The Japanese also tend to place greater emphasis than Americans do on the fact that the imperial government had intended to break off formal relations with the United States at the eleventh hour, minutes prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, and only failed to do so because of a clerical breakdown in the Japanese embassy in Washington. In this construction, Pearl Harbor emerges more as a tactical and technical blunder than as a treacherous and atrocious act.

1
. Hirano Kenichir
ō
, “Sengo Nihon gaik
ō
ni okeru ‘bunka,'” in Watanabe Akio, ed.,
Sengo Nihon no taigai seisaku
(Y
Å«
hikaku, 1985), 343–45.

2
. I have discussed the “reverse course” in some detail in
Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954
(Cambridge: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1979), 305–68, and in “Occupied Japan and the Cold War in Asia,” in Michael J. Lacey, ed.,
The Truman Presidency
(Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Cambridge University Press, 1989), 366–409; see also Dower,
Japan in War and Peace
, 155–207. For a criticism of the reverse-course argument by a former American participant in the occupation,
see Justin Williams Sr., “American Democratization Policy for Occupied Japan: Correcting the Revisionist Version,”
Pacific Historical Review
57, no. 2 (May 1988): 179–202, and rejoinders by John W. Dower (202–9) and Howard Schonberger (209–18).

The “1955 System” designation appears to have been introduced to intellectual circles in an article published by Masumi Junnosuke in the June 1964 issue of
Shis
ō
. See Masumi,
Postwar Politics in Japan, 1945–1955
, Japanese Research Monograph 6 (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1985), 329–42; see also Masumi, “The 1955 System in Japan and Its Subsequent Development,”
Asian Survey
28, no. 3 (March 1988): 286–306. The rise and fall of the 1955 System was the subject of the 1977 annual publication of the Japanese Political Science Association: Nihon Seijigakkai, ed., “Goj
Å«
go-nen taisei no keisei to h
ō
kai,”
Seijigaku nenp
ō
1977
(Nihon Seijigakkai, 1979). For a broad, annotated overview of Japanese academic analysis of the 1955 System, see Miyake Ichir
ō
, Yamaguchi Yasushi, Muramatsu Michio, and Shind
ō
Eiichi, “Goj
Å«
go-nen taisei' no seiritsu to tenkai,” in
Nihon seiji no zahy
ō
: Sengo 40-nen no ayumi
(Y
Å«
hikaku, 1985), 83–116. Like any political or socioeconomic “system,” the 1955 System was dynamic, and the so-called conservative hegemony from the outset was internally competitive and riven with tensions. For an analysis in English of the unraveling of the system, see T.J. Pempel, “The Unbundling of ‘Japan, Inc.': The Changing Dynamics of Japanese Policy Formation,” in Kenneth B. Pyle, ed.,
The Trade Crisis: How Will Japan Respond
? (University of Washington Society for Japanese Studies, 1987), 117–52.

3
.
Kanp
ō
g
ō
gai—sh
Å«
giin
, 7th Diet sess., January 28, 1950, 200;
Official Gazette Extra—House of Representatives
, 7th sess., January 28, 1950, 15. For an extended treatment of Yoshida's interpretation of Article 9, see Dower,
Empire and Aftermath
, 378–82, 397–99.

4
. The basic inside source on Japanese military and strategic projections between surrender and restoration of sovereignty is Nishimura Kumao,
San Furanshisuko heiwa j
ō
yaku
, vol. 27 of
Nihon gaik
ō
shi
, ed. Kajima Heiwa Kenky
Å«
jo (Kajima Kenky
Å«
jo, 1971). The Socialists, as represented in the Katayama Tetsu cabinet of May 1947 to March 1948, shared these views.

5
. Nishimura,
San Furanshisuko heiwa j
ō
yaku
; Dower,
Empire and Aftermath
, 369–414; Frederick S. Dunn,
Peace-making and the Settlement with Japan
(Princeton University Press, 1963); Michael Yoshitsu,
Japan and the San Francisco Peace Settlement
(Columbia University Press, 1982).

6
. I have summarized the official U.S. record in some detail in “Occupied Japan and the Cold War in Asia.”

7
. John Welfield,
An Empire in Eclipse: Japan in the Postwar American Alliance System
(Athlone Press, 1988), 250. This is the most detailed and useful source in English on Japan within the San Francisco System.

8
. “Sengo heiwaron no genry
Å«
: Heiwa Mondai Danwakai o ch
Å«
shin ni,”
Sekai
, July 1985, 150–51. This special issue commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II contains the basic texts of the Heiwa Mondai Danwakai. A partial translation of the December 1950 statement appears in
Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan
1, no. 1 (April 1963): 13–19 (see also the critique of the progressive intellectuals by the editor, 2–13). For an overview of opinion on the original Security Treaty, see George R. Packard III,
Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960
(Princeton University Press, 1966), 3–32.

9
.
Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan
1, no. 1 (April 1963): 13.

10
. Fujiyama and Reischauer are quoted in Welfield,
Empire in Eclipse
, 147, 224. The American acknowledgment of the grossly inequitable nature of the 1951 treaty emerged strongly in later congressional hearings concerning revision; see U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations,
Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with Japan
, 86th Cong., 2d sess., June 7, 1960. Yoshida's comments appear in Yoshida Shigeru,
Sekai to Nihon
(Bancho Sh
ō
b
ō
, 1962), 186–87. Japan also was “divided” by Soviet acquisition of four small and virtually unpopulated islands north of Hokkaido, an emotional issue that remained unresolved when the Sh
ō
wa period ended.