The first, formal reactions of the Japanese on learning of defeat were couched in a rhetoric that could have been uttered in ancient Greece or China. Editorialists wrote of “the autumn of the hundred million weeping together,” poets about a “silent wailing” throughout the land. Hearts were burned by painful fury, eaten away by tears. A general attached to Yasukuni Shrine, the final resting place of the souls of the war dead, spoke of swords broken and arrows exhausted, a traditional trope for defeat (and, indeed, emasculation), and described the tears of the deceased falling all about him, their faces pressing on his back.1
A week before the first occupation forces arrived, the novelist Osaragi Jirō addressed the dead more intimately in an “apology to departed heroes” in the daily Asahi, recounting his sleepless night in the wake of the emperor’s broadcast. The faces of acquaintances killed in the war had passed before him: a friend in publishing, an occasional drinking companion, the taciturn chef at a favorite restaurant, a man he saw only at college baseball games, a doctor skilled in writing waka poems. He spoke of them as stars fading away with the whitening sky of dawn, imagined them alongside an endless procession of shadows on the horizon, and asked them a question that would not leave the minds of many Japanese in the years to come: “What can we do to ease your souls?” The answer seemed clear enough to Osaragi at that moment. All one could do was rely on the emperor’s decision and look forward to the dawn of a day when, “shaking off old filth,” a new Japan would be built. Only then, when humiliation had been overcome, would it be possible to “dedicate a requiem” to the spirits of the dead. Only then, perhaps, would it be possible for the dead to “smile and rest in peace.”2
What do you tell the dead when you lose? It was this question, rather than the moral or legal perspectives of the victors, that preoccupied most Japanese as they tried to absorb the issues of war responsibility, guilt, repentance, and atonement. This was only natural—not because of cultural differences, but because the world is different when you lose. Where the victors asked who was responsible for Japanese aggression and the atrocities committed by the imperial forces, the more pressing question on the Japanese side was: who was responsible for defeat? And where the victors focused on Japan’s guilt vis-à-vis other countries and peoples, the Japanese were overwhelmed by grief and guilt toward their own dead countrymen. The victors could comfort the souls of their dead, and console themselves, by reporting that the outcome of the war had been great and good. Just as every fighting man on the winning side became a hero, so no supreme sacrifice in the victorious struggle had been in vain. Triumph gave a measure of closure to grief. Defeat left the meaning of these war deaths—of kin, acquaintances, one’s compatriots in general—raw and open.
The Japanese—certainly most Japanese men—did not arrive at war’s end without some knowledge of the depredations and atrocities of the imperial forces. Millions had served abroad and witnessed or heard about such war crimes, even if they did not necessarily behave atrociously themselves. For those unaware of such brutal behavior—or at least of its scale and enormity—the victors’ propaganda machinery soon provided grim, concrete evidence. If this was difficult to listen to, it proved even harder to absorb. As Osaragi observed in his tormented essay, for each ghostly figure in the endless procession of the Japanese dead, “there is a father, a sister, a brother.” One might come to curse repatriated servicemen or treat them with contempt, but the Japanese dead still cried out for some kind of requiem. The millions of deaths inflicted by the emperor’s soldiers and sailors, on the other hand, remained difficult to imagine as humans rather than just abstract numbers. The non-Japanese dead remained faceless. There were no familiar figures among them.3
In the eyes of the victors, Japan had no “departed heroes.” The Tokyo tribunal made explicitly clear that this very notion was obscene for a nation whose every military action since 1928 had been an act of aggression and, ipso facto, “murder”; and whose cruelty toward both prisoners and civilians had been so widespread as to seem almost an expression of national character. One could hold memorial services for the military and civilian war dead after the defeat, but not praise them for their sacrifices. As the censorship of Yoshida Mitsuru’s invocation of the last moments of the battleship Yamato indicated, there could be no ringing elegies to the bravery and glory of those who died fighting for their country. Yet it was impossible for Yoshida, or Osaragi, or the angry young ex-sailor Watanabe Kiyoshi, even as he cast off the last vestiges of emperor worship, to regard their dead compatriots as other than fundamentally good men. Millions of ordinary people, who similarly comprehended their country’s lost war in terms of family, friends, neighbors, and passing acquaintances, shared this heartache.
As individuals such as Osaragi and Watanabe became more knowledgeable, they did not hesitate to criticize the war or Japanese society more generally. The transparent venality, corruption, and incompetence of the postsurrender elites were sufficient in themselves to undermine respect for authority—and, with this, belief in the old “holy war” myths. Much of the victors’ propaganda and “reeducation,” moreover, including testimony at the Tokyo tribunal, rested on previously suppressed information about systematic Japanese depredations abroad that could not be dismissed. Although many individuals came to acknowledge that the war had been wrong and involved criminal acts, however, this did not dampen a desperate need to accommodate their own dead in a positive manner in any collective acts of repentance and atonement. Osaragi’s essay pointed to a common response to this dilemma: the sacrifices of the Japanese dead might be made meaningful by sloughing off “old filth” and creating a new society and culture. As it turned out, these new paths to and from the house of the dead would prove to be winding and twisted.
Nanbara Shigeru, a Christian educator who became president of Tokyo Imperial University shortly after the war ended, was typical of many respected figures in the complex way he evoked his country’s war dead. Like most educators, Nanbara bore a heavy burden of personal guilt for having encouraged his students to support the wartime mission of “our glorious nation,” and his transmutation into a leading war critic and apostle for peace involved more than a small leap of logic and faith. It amounted, as was often the case, to a conversion experience. The passion and sincerity of his new-found vision found compelling expression as early as September 1, 1945 in an essay in his university’s newspaper. Since the recent conflict had exposed the cruelty and inhumanity of war in unprecedented ways, he began, the great task confronting education was to realize the fundamental “ideals of humanity” (ningensei no risō, for which he also gave the German term Humanitätsideal), which essentially corresponded to the universal principles of world religions. This involved a “new battle” in which the souls of students who had been killed would be present:
In due time, our “colleagues” will return from the continent and from the southern islands. And the day is not far off when they will again fill the lecture halls and devote themselves to learning, burning with ideals and passion for the reconstruction of the ancestral land. I feel boundless sadness, however, thinking of the many great talents who will never return. All of them fought and died courageously as warriors. But even while being warriors, to the very last day they maintained their pride as students. They must have believed firmly, without any doubts, that in the end what upholds the country is truth and justice. Today, already, their souls have returned and are with us, I believe, and will bless and guide you from now on in your new battle.
To the departed souls themselves, Nanbara solemnly reported that the university had managed to preserve important scholarly materials through the war. They would, he was confident, be relieved to hear this.4
In November, Nanbara had occasion to address a gathering of returned students. He told them frankly that the real victors in the war were “reason and truth” and that the United States and Britain, not Japan, had been the bearers of these great ideals. This was a victory to be celebrated, and both defeat and the supreme sacrifice of those who had died should be seen from this perspective. Out of tragedy a new national life would be born, although not without struggle. Quoting Kierkegaard, he referred to a new “war of peace” in which the antagonist would be oneself and the great challenge was to develop in democratic directions and contribute to universal freedom. He concluded dramatically by welcoming back not only those present before him, but also their “comrades in battle” who had perished. From this time forward, those who had survived the war would be engaged in a new “war of truth” together with these departed comrades whose images remained in their hearts.5
In March 1946 it fell to Nanbara to conduct a memorial service for students and staff killed in the war. The text of the service was published by the popular monthly Bungei Shunjū under the title “A Report to Students Who Fell in Battle.” The memorial ceremony, he pointed out, was meant to evoke the memory of dead countrymen—and the problems of guilt, repentance, and atonement—in an essentially secular “spiritual” way. He did speak, like the emperor, of enduring—and, like the Christian he was, of bearing a cross. He told the dead bluntly that Japan had been led into war by ignorant, reckless militarists and ultranationalists; that people, including those from the university, had followed along believing that they were fighting for truth and justice; that, unfortunately, truth and justice had been on the side of the United States and Britain. On all this, the judgment of history and reason was clear. This was not the same as saying, he pointed out, that the victors were necessarily just.
The dead, he continued, had been spared from witnessing the day of defeat and the hardship and spiritual pain that had followed. They should know, however, that the grievances the Japanese now felt were not against the wartime enemy, but against themselves. Political, social, and spiritual reforms unprecedented in Japanese history were now taking place and the construction of a “true and just” country was a real possibility. Lamenting the many brilliant students who had died, he spoke of them as being “a sacrifice of atonement for the crimes of the people.”6
There were many things Nanbara did not address in these early presentations. He did not speak of the victims of Japanese aggression, did not mention other Asians at all; nor did he dwell on his own university’s active complicity in promoting the militarism and ultranationalism he now condemned. There was, moreover, a danger of elitism as well as romanticization in such eulogies to “brilliant” students, as if the war’s victims could and should be calibrated on some kind of sliding scale of social worth. Such limitations notwithstanding, Nanbara helped show one way in which an unjust war could be condemned while the war dead might still be honored and reassured (or, at least, those who survived them reassured) that they had not died in vain. This was a great moral and psychological dilemma that the victors did not have to confront, and for which they had little patience or tolerance. In one form or another, Nanbara’s formula became a secular litany for great numbers of Japanese. Repentance and atonement were possible only for those who devoted themselves to constructing a new Japan devoted to peace and justice; and to pursue such ideals was to honor the dead, for they were what the dead believed they had been fighting for.
Nanbara’s conversion rested on the belief that he, like the truth-seeking students he conjured up and mourned, had been misled by Japan’s leaders. In this, he was perfectly in tune with popular sentiment, for the most ubiquitous passive verb after the surrender was surely damasareta, “to have been deceived.” Even the most flagrant wartime propagandists seized upon such slippery language as a detergent to wash away their personal responsibility. Kondō Hidezō, the talented political cartoonist who rode the military horse right up to the gates of doom with gay abandon and then just as gaily satirized Tōjō behind bars, was unexceptional in this regard. Life had been good before the war started, Kondō wrote early in 1946, and whenever he thought of this he felt “hate for those Class-A war criminals. All of us people were deceived and used by them, and cooperated in the war without knowing the true facts. Looking back now, this was because of ignorance and being deceived.”7 The well-known writer Kikuchi Kan, who played a leading role in mobilizing the literary world behind the war, similarly tried to cleanse himself of the taint of collaboration by arguing (in an essay aptly titled “Wastebasket Talk”) that the miserable defeat was brought about by foolhardy leaders who suppressed free expression.8
From this perspective, the people as a whole, and not just their “departed heroes,” were war victims. An elaboration of this thesis was already a media sensation before the Tokyo tribunal convened, in the form of a “secret history” rushed into print by a team of journalists under the title The Twenty-Year Typhoon: Exposing the Inside Story of the Shōwa Period. The first volume of this bestseller, covering the years from 1926 to 1936, appeared on December 15, 1945. Some one hundred thousand copies were sold in the first week, sparking stories about small mountains of the volume being piled up in bookstores as queues of eager buyers waited outside for the store doors to open. The second volume, which took the war to its conclusion, was published on March 1, 1946 and quickly sold 700,000 to 800,000 copies. A slightly revised, consolidated edition was issued later that year. In one form or another, The Twenty-Year Typhoon remained on the “top ten” bestseller list through 1947, providing a nice send-off for the “Class A” war crimes tribunal with its own home-bred conspiracy thesis.9
The book was the brainchild of Masunaga Zenkichi, the head of an obscure publishing house in Tokyo, who heard the emperor’s August 15 broadcast while on a trip to the countryside and was struck by the commercial potential in this tragic turn of events as he rode the train back to the capital that same day. (The phenomenally best-selling “Japanese-English Conversation Manual” had been conceived in almost identical circumstances.) Masunaga quickly recruited a small group of reporters from the Mainichi newspaper, most of them in the paper’s East Asia bureau, who churned out their “inside story,” primarily on the basis of the newspaper’s files plus their own as well as their colleagues’ personal knowledge. Their approach was lively and unimpeded by deep reflection. They were not particularly interested in exposing the nature of Japan’s aggression or its victimization of others (the Rape of Nanking was not even mentioned) or in exploring broader issues of “war responsibility.” The fact that the journalists were able to produce an instant “expose” based primarily on existing files and their personal and previously undisclosed knowledge did not prompt them to engage in serious self-reflection on the complicity of the media in the war they were now righteously condemning. The Mainichi team was intent only on pointing fingers at those leaders who were primarily responsible for the great “crime” of bringing about “miserable defeat.”10
They rounded up the usual suspects: the “military clique,” mostly associated with the army rather than the navy and operating in concert with certain right-wing thugs and academic ideologues, plus a few industrialists and politicians.11 Following the fashion in these months, they singled out Tōjō as archvillain. The former army minister and prime minister was virtually irresistible as a scapegoat, for he had not exactly enhanced his reputation by his behavior in the wake of defeat. Ordered arrested on September 11, he had shot himself in the chest four times; was propped up in a chair by American newsmen, who placed the pistol back in his hand, said “Hold it, Tōjō,” and took his photo; delivered his “final words” to a reporter while awaiting an ambulance; and then was saved by American medical personnel, thanks to a blood transfusion from some anonymous GI. In the military hospital to which he was rushed, Tōjō was so impressed by the solicitude and efficiency of the personnel who treated him that he delivered a small speech in praise of “the strength of American democracy” to Foreign Ministry officials who visited him. Shortly after these misadventures, he presented General Robert Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army, with a valuable sword; and then, having mended nicely, went on to plead his innocence at the Tokyo tribunal.
It had been widely assumed that Tōjō should and would take his own life without delay. After all, it had been under his prime-ministerial aegis that, in 1941, the army issued its famous field code in which fighting men were admonished to “not live to incur the shame of becoming a prisoner.” Tōjō received letters urging him to “commit suicide quickly,” and someone reportedly sent him a coffin. When he belatedly summoned the will to die, chose the foreigner’s way of the bullet rather than the samurai’s way of the sword, and then botched even this, it was more than aggrieved patriots could bear. The writer Takami Jun captured this disgust succinctly in his diary: “Cowardly living on, and then using a pistol like a foreigner, failing to die. Japanese cannot help but smile bitterly. Why did General Tōjō not die right away as Army Minister Anami did? Why did General Tōjō not use a Japanese sword as Army Minister Anami did?” On the other hand, the French literature scholar Watanabe Kazuo, who had greeted the end of the war with immense relief, found this vaudeville amusing and took pleasure in recording in his diary how the hapless general had now “become mixed blood.”12 Whatever one might make of it, Tōjō’s spectacular transformation from prime minister to prime culprit and scapegoat helped ensure a receptive audience for The Twenty-Year Typhoon.
The journalists’ conspiracy theory rested less on a portrait of diabolically evil schemers, however, than on what amounted to a diagnosis of collective dementia among the nation’s leaders. Here, in potboiler prose, was a seductive variation of Nanbara’s argument that ordinary people had been deceived by ignorant militarists devoid of “reason and truth.” As The Twenty-Year Typhoon would have it, “an irrational and unreasonable mentality that bordered on illness” had permeated every level of the imperial forces by the mid-1930s, so divorcing them from reality that their planning capability became a joke. Such irrationality “revealed itself conspicuously in the extremely unscientific way the Great East Asia War was conducted.” The entire military command, it now could be said, probably should have been committed to a mental hospital.13 Tōjō, it turned out, had been the captain of a huge ship of fools.
The thesis of collective irrationality carried with it a technological corollary of compelling attraction, namely, that the ultimate proof of the leaders’ incompetence lay in their failure to comprehend Japan’s backwardness in science and applied technology. By the time The Twenty-Year Typhoon arrived in the bookstores, this connection between science and the “responsibility for defeat” had become an idee fixe—commonly linked, in the broadest symbolic manner, to the dropping of the atomic bombs. Between August 8, when the destruction of Hiroshima by a “new weapon” was first reported, and mid-September, when occupation authorities prohibited almost all mention of nuclear devastation, few days passed when the single-sheet daily newspapers did not include at least passing reference to the mounting horror in both cities. The first detailed survey, summarized for the public before the occupation forces arrived, pronounced Hiroshima and Nagasaki a “living hell.” The macabre effects of radiation sickness—apparent survivors suddenly perishing, while the estimated death toll doubled in a mere two weeks—were described as an “evil spirit” possessing Hiroshima.14 There was a widespread sense of having experienced a forbidding, surreal new dimension of existence which no other people could hope to comprehend. Such consciousness of nuclear destruction became an integral even if not always evident part of all subsequent attempts to come to terms with the war’s meaning. It reinforced a pervasive sense of powerlessness and lent an eerie kind of specialness to what might otherwise have felt like a pointless defeat.
In the final hours of the war, Kiyose Ichirō, who would emerge as a major defense attorney in the Tokyo war crimes trial, speculated publicly that racist contempt for Japanese “monkeys” explained why the Americans used the atomic bombs against Japan but not Germany.15 Despite widespread denunciation of the “cruel” and “inhuman” American bombings, however, no abiding strain of virulent anti-American hatred carried over into the postwar period. Even before censorship was imposed, the tone of most commentary about the nuclear devastation had turned philosophical. The weapon itself, rather than those who deployed it, largely absorbed the characteristics of being cruel and inhuman; and from this, what came to be indicted was the cruelty of war in general. Defeat, victimization, an overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of undreamed-of weapons of destruction soon coalesced to become the basis of a new kind of anti-military nationalism.16
The idea that Japan could partially atone for past failures (or crimes, or evils, or sins) by drawing on its atomic bomb experience to become a champion of a nonmilitarized, nonnuclearized world would eventually become a cardinal tenet of the peace movement; but such an idea, explicitly expressed in the language of zange or repentance, emerged even before the occupation began. On August 27, the head of the central government’s Information Bureau issued instructions to the public on how to respond to foreign occupation. War was a relative matter, he observed, and it was invariably the losers rather than victors who engaged in serious self-reflection. This was necessary and desirable. “The ‘repentance’ of the hundred million people” should be done thoroughly, and perhaps by taking a leading role in prohibiting the future use of nuclear weapons, the Japanese could turn themselves from the “losers of war” into the “winners of peace.”17
The terrible power of nuclear weaponry proved as mesmerizing as it was terrifying, however, for nothing better exemplified America’s superior scientific, technological, and organizational capabilities. And so, in its peculiar way, the bomb became simultaneously a warning about future wars and a beacon illuminating a path to future Japanese empowerment. On August 16, on being named prime minister, Prince Higashikuni explained that the biggest shortcoming of the war had been “science and technology.” The next day, the outgoing minister of education thanked schoolchildren for their wartime efforts and told them that henceforth their task was to elevate the nation’s “science power and spiritual power” to the highest level. Two days later, headlines trumpeted that under the new minister of education, Maeda Tamon, there would be “emphasis on basic science” in the postwar school system. “We lost to the enemy’s science,” an article in the Asahi declared bluntly on August 20; “This was made clear by a single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” The article, headlined “Toward a Country Built on Science,” took care to emphasize that “science” had to be understood in its broadest sense as involving “reason” and “rationalization” in all spheres of organization and at all levels of society—the very idea that Nanbara Shigeru and countless others would seize on and develop. A few days later, the Asahi reemphasized how irrationality and nonscientific attitudes had spread throughout the political, economic, and social spheres and had guaranteed defeat.’18
“Science” soon became almost everyone’s favorite concept for explaining both why the war was lost and where the future lay. Baron Wakatsuki Reijirō, a former prime minister, urged his countrymen to have courage and then proceeded to offer a depressing catalog of why they would need it: because the former enemy possessed superior wealth, machinery, and industrial skills, besides being more advanced in applied science, as witness the horrifying bombs. Two days after the surrender in Tokyo Bay, the Ministry of Education announced that it was establishing a new bureau of scientific education. In a speech to young people, Education Minister Maeda explained that “the cultivation of scientific thinking ability” was key to “the construction of a Japan of culture.” Revised textbooks, it was announced, would emphasize science. The government soon made known that 500 million yen was being diverted from former military funds to promote science in everyday life.19 General Yamashita Tomoyuki, about to go on trial in the Philippines, reiterated the familiar refrain with no frills. In an article translated from an American publication, the general was asked what he regarded to be the fundamental cause of Japan’s defeat, and responded with the only English word he used in the entire interview. “Science,” he said.20
Beyond doubt, this pragmatic fixation on “responsibility for defeat” was inherently conservative and self-serving. It was, however, like the loose thread that can unravel a tapestry—in this case, the fabric of the imperial state. The primary victimizers of the people were no longer the demonic Allied powers, but irresponsible leaders operating out of inherently backward, irrational, and repressive institutional structures. Thus, both the consciousness of having been victimized and the question of “responsibility for defeat” led inexorably to a commitment by many people to a more pluralistic, egalitarian, democratic, accountable, rational society—essentially what the occupation reformers were hoping to put in place. It was in this light that President Truman also found a receptive audience in Japan when he declared that the invention of the atomic bomb reflected what could be accomplished by a free society. Science could flourish only under a “spirit of freedom.”21
Japanese scientists, many of them trained in Europe and the United States, applauded this new commitment. One of the first contingents of American scientists to arrive in Japan encountered a wonderful expression of these sentiments in the form of this makeshift notice, handwritten in English on brown wrapping paper and affixed to the front door of a major oceanographic institute outside of Tokyo:
This is a marine biological station with her history of over sixty years.
If you are from the Eastern Coast, some of you might know Woods Hole or Mt. Desert or Tortugas.
If you are from the West Coast, you may know Pacific Grove or Puget Sound Biological Station.
This place is a place like one of these.
Take care of this place and protect the possibility for the continuation of our peaceful research.
You can destroy the weapons and the war instruments
But save the civil equipments for Japanese students
When you are through with your job here
Notify to the University and let us come back to our scientific home
The notice was signed “The last one to go.”22
The concept of “repentance” was placed at the center of public debate on August 28, the day the first advance contingent of Americans arrived at the Atsugi air base. Asked by Japanese journalists about the “cause of defeat,” Prime Minister Higashikuni carefully explained that many factors had contributed, including restrictive laws, errors by military and governmental authorities, and a decline in popular morals as evidenced, for example, in black market activities. Then, borrowing a phrase from the statement by the head of the Information Bureau the previous day, he declared that “the military, civilian officials, and the people as a whole must thoroughly self-reflect and repent. I believe that the collective repentance of the hundred million (ichioku sōzange) is the first step in the resurrection of our country, the first step in bringing unity to our country.”23
Since military and civilian officials had spent the previous two weeks destroying incriminating documents, there was a certain perverse truth to the notion that “responsibility” was, at that very moment, being leveled and collectivized. No one wanted it, no one claimed it. A few years later, the political scientist Maruyama Masao cleverly compared the government’s “collective repentance” campaign to the cloud of black ink a squid squirts out in its desperate attempt to escape a threatening situation.24 Although some individuals and groups did take the issue of personal responsibility seriously and engage in harsh self-criticism, the official version of collective repentance—the squid’s ink, as it were—essentially faded away. Few individuals really believed that ordinary people bore responsibility for the war equal to that of the military and civilian groups. “This war was begun while we farmers knew nothing about it,” one irate rural man exclaimed, “and ended in defeat while we believed we were winning. There is no need to do repentance for something we weren’t in on. Repentance is necessary for those who betrayed and deceived the people.” Another member of the hundred million was even terser. “If collective repentance of the hundred million means those in charge of the war are now trying to distribute responsibility among the people,” he wrote to a newspaper, “then it’s sneaky.”25
While the government was promoting its version of collective repentance, Tanabe Hajime, one of the country’s most influential philosophers, was completing a book-length manuscript on the same subject. Tanabe’s treatise amounted to an intensely personal confession of doubt, spiritual crisis, and conversion by an intellectual whose austerity and aloofness were legendary, and whose aura of certitude had long seemed unreachable. Despite a convoluted style that reflected his training in German philosophy, his text was an often ecstatic expression of faith in the redemptive wisdom of a thirteenth-century Japanese thinker, the Buddhist evangelist Shinran, whose prophetic language—resonating with suffering and emptiness, despair and negation, conversion and rebirth—seemed uncannily in tune with the ambiance of the defeated country.
One could hardly imagine a sharper contrast than that between Tanabe’s densely reasoned disquisition on zange, or repentance, and the government’s bromides on the same issue—with the exception of the fact that Tanabe’s “repentance,” too, was intensely nationalistic. His passionate reworking of Shinran’s vision emphasized not just self-criticism or criticism of Japan, but criticism of all contemporary nations and cultures. Tanabe accepted defeat, acknowledged wrongdoing and despair, demanded repentance, envisioned rebirth—and did all this in a way that emphasized the unique, even superior, traditional wisdom of Japan. He claimed to be illuminating a singular Japanese path to redemption, a transcendent wisdom greater than anything Western thought had produced. For many thoughtful and tormented patriots, here was a sophisticated philosophy of contrition that snatched a kind of moral victory from the jaws of defeat. In the ruins of the most destructive war the world had ever known, for which Japan admittedly bore great responsibility, the path to redemption—and to global salvation as well—lay in the words of a Japanese prophet.
Tanabe did not develop these thoughts in reaction to the surrender. His “way of repentance” grew out of his experiences in the final months of 1944, when he was preparing his valedictory lectures on retiring from the prestigious chair in philosophy at Kyoto Imperial University. Long an ardent nationalist, whose “nonpolitical” philosophical theories neatly buttressed the militarists’ racial and state-centered ideology, the rigidly disciplined Tanabe unexpectedly found himself falling to pieces. The country faced ruin and dishonor, and the death of a number of his students caused him to acknowledge his personal responsibility and, indeed, his sinfulness. “Weak-willed as I was,” he confessed years later, “I found myself unable to resist [wartime thought control] and could not but yield to some degree to the prevalent mood, which is a shame deeper than I can bear. The already blind militarism had led so many of our graduates precipitously to the battlefields; among the fallen were more than ten from philosophy, for which I feel the height of personal responsibility and remorse. I can only lower my head and earnestly lament my sin.”26
Tanabe withdrew into almost complete seclusion in February 1945; wrote furiously during the cataclysmic months of collapse; and saw his opus published in April 1946, just before the Tokyo tribunal convened. Its title was Zangedō to shite no Tetsugaku, “Philosophy as the Way of Repentance”—or, in more philosophical terms, “Philosophy as Metanoetics.”27 In his preface (dated October 1945), Tanabe described his state of mind as the war ended in terms familiar to students of both clinical psychology and religious conversion. He spoke of a deepening anxiety, suffering, and torment; of sorrow and pain, indecision and despair, an overwhelming sense of disgrace and failure; of reaching an intellectual impasse and being “driven to the point of exhaustion.” In the opening pages of the treatise itself, he indulged in a paroxysm of self-denigration—characterizing himself as “evil and untruthful by nature,” insincere, impure, vain, foolish, perverse, wicked, dishonest, and shameless.28
The most charismatic exemplar of such self-flagellation in the native tradition was Shinran, a master of self-loathing and ecstatic proselytizing who had founded the True Pure Land Sect, Japan’s most popular Buddhist denomination. Tanabe’s denunciation of his evil self actually read a bit like a crib from the master, for Shinran had aimed much the same abusive lexicon at himself. What Shinran offered beyond self-hatred was a language of transcendence that seemed to address the crisis of 1944–1945 with all the force it had possessed in the prophet’s own day. The brilliant medieval evangelist offered the momentarily disoriented contemporary philosopher an embracing vision of negation, transcendence through conversion (ōsō), and affirmative return to the world (gensō) that restored his confidence and brought him surprising joy. Tanabe felt himself reborn and regained his old dogmatic self-assurance. But he now saw the world anew. There could be no repentance without pain, he wrote, but the heart of zange “is the experience of conversion or transformation: sorrow and lament are turned into joy, shame and disgrace into gratitude. Hence when I say that our nation has no way to walk but the way of zange . . . I do not mean that we should sink into despair and stop there, but that we can hope to be transformed through resurrection and regeneration.”29
For readers in occupied Japan, many of the Buddhist allusions in Tanabe’s treatise undoubtedly carried double meanings, whether intended or not. He spoke of “self-surrender,” of power and powerlessness, of Other Power (tariki) as opposed to Self Power (jiriki)—all fundamental to Shinran’s strain of Buddhism, but also echoing with the idea of America-as-Other-Power. He spoke of transcending the false teachings and “evil institutions of the past,” vintage Shinran-isms that rang as if they had been forged in the furnace of yesterday’s defeat.
What made Tanabe’s “way of repentance” even more striking was the knowledge that he had previously been known as a major interpreter of Kantian and Hegelian philosophy. He had studied in Germany with Heidegger among others, and his reputation had rested primarily on his identification with European thought. Tanabe was reputed never to have smiled, never to have made casual conversation, never to have left his house for frivolous purposes, never to have gone sight-seeing in his beautiful native city of Kyoto, never to have deigned to travel even to neighboring Osaka—and, despite his nationalism and some prior engagement with Buddhist thought, never to have rebelled against his European philosophical gods. Now, at the moment of gravest crisis and humiliation in his country’s history, he used his new-found theory of repentance to declare the inferiority of the Western philosophical tradition.
On this critical issue, Tanabe departed dramatically from intellectuals such as Nanbara who equated repentance with embracing the “reason and truth” that were to be found in Western thought. Just as Shinran had showed him the way through his personal crisis, he wrote, the great teacher could show Japan the way out of its vale of doubt and tears. For Shinran’s wisdom transcended Kant’s, Hegel’s, or Kierkegaard’s—transcended, indeed, anything Western philosophy or religion had to offer. The evangelist’s writings offered “a positive principle . . . not readily seen in any of the systems of Western philosophy.” They made it possible “to develop a social doctrine inaccessible by way of Western philosophy alone.” Indeed, showed the way to “the final culmination of the Kantian critique of reason.”30
While so many others were extolling “science” and “rationality” as the keys to national redemption, Tanabe argued that Western reason had become trapped and “shredded” in antinomy, implacable contradiction. It had reached a dead end. It was a flower that blooms seven times only to wilt each time. That final wilting or negation, however, could be the last death before a Shinran-esque resurrection into a world beyond the impasse of Western logic. Tanabe took pains to underscore that Shinran’s teachings did not offer only the ecstatic negation and transcendence (ōsō) of the conversion experience. They also emphasized a “returning to this world” (gensō) as a transformed individual capable of showing others the path of wisdom and compassion. Just as the born-again medieval convert to Shinran’s “True Pure Land” teachings continued to participate in the mundane world, albeit now with an awakened heart and mind, so the Japanese penitent of 1946 likewise could turn to pressing social and political tasks with new vigor and insight. It was Tanabe’s fervent hope that “in the current face-off between democracy and Marxist socialism,” his own experience and logic could “offer a middle way from a standpoint that transcends them both.”31
With this intellectual declaration of independence, Tanabe affirmed that there was a Japanese tradition not only capable of redeeming Japan after its wartime folly, but pregnant with the potential for saving the world. Through the very experience of defeat and repentance, Japan might be in a position to show the victors, already divided into capitalist and socialist camps, a proper middle path to a saner planet. Tanabe frequently strangled words, but he did not mince them, and his criticism of the victors was remarkably frank. “There can be no doubt that democracy and liberalism are producing the inequality of today’s capitalist societies,” he declared. “Socialism, meanwhile, sets up equality as its goal, but there is no disputing the fact that the socialist system invariably limits freedom and in that sense negates it.” Shinran’s “return to this world” provided the basis for formulating a new social ideal in which “people should be bound together by a brotherhood . . . that synthesizes the freedom of capitalistic society and the equality of the socialist state.” To show the world “some concrete principle that will enable us to overcome the dichotomy of conflicting principles represented by the United States and the Soviet Union” was nothing less than “the historical mission that fate has accorded our country of Japan.”32
This was an audacious use of old religious teachings for new ideological purposes. Tanabe turned Shinran’s “unity of freedom and equality” into a point of departure for defending the creation of “social democracy,” a theme he developed in other writings as well. In a similar manner, he turned the Buddhist critique of egoism into a standpoint from which to attack the “individualistic hedonism” of advanced capitalism, and fused Shinran’s vision of “transindividual” love with another of the transcendent goals of this moment of defeat: “absolute peace.”33 He offered his many readers a way of criticizing their country from within, a “way of repentance” that escaped the hegemony of “Western” thought and cast critical light on other countries and peoples. He even managed to smuggle into his treatise disdainful comments about the conqueror’s faith in imposing fundamental reform from above, observing that “a liberalism imposed from the outside is both nonsensical and contradictory.”34 Despite his previously fawning veneration of the throne, moreover, his new stance led him to a position entirely antithetical to the government’s “repentance of the hundred million” campaign with its promotion of a sense of collective guilt toward the emperor for defeat. In Tanabe’s view, the emperor above all others had an obligation to demonstrate repentance and assume responsibility for the war vis-à-vis both other countries and his own people, a position far more critical of his sovereign than that of the occupation authorities—and vastly more critical than the victors, with their rigid notion of the national mindset, ever acknowledged possible for Japanese. Tanabe even urged that the immense wealth of the imperial household be confiscated and turned over to the poor.35
Tanabe was regarded by contemporaries to be the most influential Japanese philosopher of the early postwar years, and the source of his appeal is not hard to discern. His tone was confessional yet formal. He preached repentance and rebirth, and resurrected an indigenous culture hero. While the victorious Allies were denouncing his country as a failed culture and archcriminal aggressor state, he accepted Japan’s wrongdoing and guilt but denied their uniqueness, rejecting also the idea that traditional culture had nothing to offer. “Surely our own misguided nationalism stands in need of metanoesis,” he wrote, “but at the same time so do the nationalistic perversions that infect democratic and socialist states alike.” The defiant closing lines of his 1946 opus made the same point: “Obviously we are not the only country that needs zange. Other nations, too, should undertake its practice in a spirit of sincerity and humility, each acknowledging its own contradictions and faults, its own evil and sin. Zange is a task that world history imposes on all peoples in our times.”36
The ways of thinking about repentance and atonement that prominent intellectuals like Nanbara and Tanabe offered had enduring legacies. Between late 1947 and 1950—as the Tokyo tribunal drew to a close, censorship tapered off, and an indigenous peace movement began to coalesce in opposition to Cold War militarization—the elite student war dead whom Nanbara had eulogized and Tanabe had mourned were resurrected through their own poignant wartime letters. December 1947 saw the publication of In Distant Mountains and Rivers, the controversial collection of writings by students from Tokyo Imperial University who were killed in the war. Two years later, Listen—Voices from the Deep appeared, containing wartime letters, poems, and diary entries from seventy-five student war dead affiliated with Tokyo and other universities. The editors of this best-selling collection acknowledged that they had taken care to exclude more nationalistic writings in favor of intimate words by the doubters and dreamers. The endpapers of their volume reproduced sketches from the notebook of a student conscript who had starved to death on a Pacific island, and its emotional preface and postscript addressed fears that these texts might be misused “by those who once again plot war.”
The pessimism of the time lay heavy on this collection, in sharp contrast to the dreams of a bright, peaceful future that had accompanied such evocations of dead students shortly after the defeat. In his brief preface, Professor Watanabe Kazuo of Tokyo University asked readers to imagine a field of white wooden crosses, steeped in blood, and exclaimed that “such crosses must never be erected again. Not even one.” The postscript by Odagiri Hideo of Tokyo University painted a bleak picture of a Japan in which genuine democratic revolution had already been thwarted and the acrid smell of war again floated in the air. As the poignant wartime writings in Listen—Voices from the Deep indicated, Odagiri explained, the demands of humanity and reason had to be upheld by defending peace at all costs. “The blood that was shed,” his appeal concluded, “can never be atoned for except by ensuring that such blood is never shed again.” By this date, there could be little doubt that it was primarily the Americans whom the compilers had in mind when they spoke of “those who once again plot war.” Essentially, the pure and noble dead were being recruited anew to stand against America.37
Other writings that appeared around the time the Tokyo trial ended reinforced such reconstructions of the war’s meaning. One of the most famous of these was Takeyama Michio’s Harp of Burma (Biruma no Tategoto), an enormously popular novel (soon made, like Listen—Voices of the Ocean, into a movie). Takeyama attempted to do through fiction what Tanabe Hajime had ventured through philosophy: to convey the meaning of the war—the themes of suffering, guilt, and atonement in particular—by way of Buddhism. The book’s protagonist, a former soldier named Mizushima Yasuhiko, became the great fictive consoler of the souls of the country’s war dead. His response to the horrors he witnessed in the final, hopeless stages of the war in Burma was to refuse repatriation and become a priest, wandering the jungles to search out and bury the remains of soldiers who had starved to death or been annihilated in combat. Possessed of a beautiful singing voice with which he had entertained his comrades, the gentle Mizushima often accompanied himself on the hand-held stringed instrument of the novel’s title. Here, in another guise, was the Japanese soldier as near-saint. In a letter at the end of the novel, Mizushima explained his actions this way:
I want to learn the Buddhist teachings, to think and make them my own. Truly, we, our countrymen, suffered. Many innocent people became meaningless sacrifices. People who were like young trees, pure and clean,38 parted from home, left their places of work, went out from their schools, and ended up leaving their bones in distant foreign lands. The more I think about it, the more unbearably regrettable it is.
Tormented by the question, so central to Buddhism, of why there is so much suffering and misery in the world, Mizushima concludes that humans will never understand perfectly. Still, Japan had brought its recent suffering upon itself.
Our country waged war, was defeated, and now suffers. That is because our desires got out of hand. It is because we were conceited and forgot what is most important in being human. Because the civilization we held up was extremely shallow in some respects.
These are human problems, not just Japan’s alone, Mizushima observes. For himself, he intends to devote his life to studying and thinking carefully about such matters, to serving others and trying to act as one who can bring salvation.
Although Harp of Burma was a serious work of literature, it almost immediately was included in a popular series of books for children (which offered phonetic readings alongside the more difficult ideographs). Takeyama appended a brief postscript to this young people’s edition, in which he referred to In Distant Mountains and Rivers and expressed hope that his own book might, like the student letters, make some of the war dead live again.39 In Distant Mountains and Rivers itself was brought back into print shortly after the appearance of Listen—Voices from the Deep, with Nanbara Shigeru’s March 1946 “report” to students who had fallen in battle now included as a preface.40 In this way, various texts and presentations about war and redemption reinforced each other and survived as minor classics of the popular culture. In time a distinctive genre of “victim” literature arose, including the recollections of atomic-bomb survivors and offered not only in the name of antimilitarism and peace, but of repentance and atonement as well.
In 1950, the top ten bestseller list included the translation of Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead. Generally regarded as the finest American literary portrayal of the Pacific War, Mailer’s reconstruction of one brutal island campaign confirmed the impression of war in general as an act of senseless and unspeakable cruelty—and of the Americans as capable of their own kinds of atrocities. As the novelist Shiina Rinzō observed after the Hollywood version of The Naked and the Dead had been screened in Japan, Mailer’s depiction made clear that even Christians could not squarely confront the problem of guilt that arose in connection with killing in war.41 Several eminent Japanese literary figures drew similarly on their personal military experiences to produce distinguished antiwar novels. Noma Hiroshi’s Zone of Emptiness (Shinkū Chitai), published in 1952, shocked readers with its portrayal of degradation and brutality in the imperial army and was widely praised as an immediate classic. Ōoka Shōhei’s brilliant Fires on the Plain (Nobi), about a straggler in the Philippines who encounters cannibalism by fellow Japanese and ultimately descends into madness, appeared the same year.42
People in all cultures and times have mythologized their own war dead, while soon forgetting their victims—if, in fact, they ever even give much thought to them. Many Japanese were sensitive to the dangers of such a myopic fixation even as they eulogized their dead compatriots as tragic victims of forces beyond their control. When liberal and left-wing intellectuals began to organize a formal peace movement in 1948, they acknowledged this to be a problem but nonetheless concluded that victim consciousness was the only foundation on which a more universal peace consciousness could eventually be built. Psychologically and ideologically, the argument went, the surest way to mobilize antimilitary sentiment was to keep alive the recollection of intimate loss and suffering. The image was one of gradually expanding concentric circles of antiwar consciousness: from personal to national to international. Transcending national and racial introversion, it was argued, would take time.43
In fact, victim consciousness never was transcended and the outer ring of these imagined circles never came to be sharply defined. Still, the stance of the “innocent bystander” that so many individuals adopted came under attack from various directions. Sometimes such criticism became highly theoretical, as in the intense debates among intellectuals concerning the weakness of a “subjective” consciousness of personal responsibility in Japanese culture.44 On occasion, the critique was plain spoken. In mid-1946, the conservative educator Tsuda Sōkichi acknowledged that the people had been deceived by a combination of legal oppression and military propaganda; but he went on to call attention to the fact that Japan had had an elected parliament all through this period. “The people” themselves bore responsibility, he concluded, for “the fact that their intellectual ability was so weak as to be deceived, and they lacked the fortitude to repel or fight against oppression.”45 The critic Abe Shinnosuke, responding to the conclusion of the Tokyo war-crimes trial, similarly observed that “the majority of Japanese,” having been deceived by the military leaders, “must bear responsibility for having been stupid.”46
Most leftists evaded the issue of the responsibility of “the people.” The more doctrinaire among them were intent on portraying the masses as victims of exploitation by the state and its oppressive ruling elites; some progressives also argued that dwelling on the criminal complicity of ordinary individuals could too easily be confused with both the self-serving “collective repentance” ideology associated with the government and the evocations of racial homogeneity that presurrender leaders had so assiduously cultivated.47 More than a few ordinary people, however, spoke with feeling about such matters. In the publication of a local youth association, a young woman in Nagano prefecture observed that “after the defeat, newspapers wrote in unison that this was the crime of the military. . . . Naturally the government that deceived us is bad, but are we people who were deceived without crime? That stupidity, I think, is also a kind of crime.”48 As the Tokyo trial drew to a close, a farmer wrote the press that this was an occasion when all Japanese should reflect on their own thoughts and behavior during the war, and not simply look as a third party on the trials. “We must be aware that we, who were too weak and blind to authority, also are being judged,” he observed. When the seven defendants sentenced to capital punishment were executed, a professor at a teachers’ college in Osaka similarly urged his compatriots to recognize that this by no means brought the issue of war responsibility to an end. “The leaders alone could not have fought such a large-scale war,” he pointed out. “We people were manipulated, and went along into a wrongful war of aggression, and invited miserable defeat. The crime is not that of the leaders alone, but rather all of us must bear responsibility.” Henceforth, he went on, the people had to sit in judgment on themselves, and self-reflection on their war responsibility should continue forever. To this end, he proposed making the day of execution a day of national self-reflection.49
Such commonplace observations were sometimes coupled with an acknowledgment of Japanese atrocities. While a massive and prolonged act of barbarism such as the Rape of Nanking had been witnessed by the Japanese press corps and publicized internationally, it was not disclosed in Japan. As the Asahi’s daily Tensei Jingo column contritely observed when the massacre came up at the start of the Tokyo trials, “it is shameful that not one line of truth was reported in the papers.”50 Other mass murders, extending to the Rape of Manila in early 1945, were also suppressed. The first detailed reports of atrocities, which focused on the Philippines and China, shocked the Japanese greatly—so greatly that other atrocities paled by comparison (with the possible exception of accounts of cannibalism by Japanese soldiers that emerged in the course of the Tokyo trial). Conventional war crimes against Caucasians were nowhere near as unsettling, no doubt at least partly because the massive presence of victorious white men in occupied Japan made it impossible to visualize them as victims. Crimes against Koreans and Formosans, Japan’s former colonial subjects, were of comparatively slight interest to either the victors or the vanquished. The huge number of Indonesian “laborers” who were worked to death by the imperial forces hardly seems to have registered at all.51
Between September 1945 and the end of the Tokyo trial, in any case, atrocities were well publicized and more than a few people responded with genuine horror. When the slaughter of civilians in Manila was made known, the mother of a soldier wrote an astonishing letter to the national press declaring that “even if such an atrocious soldier were my son, I could not accept him back home. Let him be shot to death there.” A young woman, infusing the government’s self-serving “collective repentance” campaign with personal meaning, responded to these same revelations with a letter declaring that “I understood the meaning of collective repentance for the first time when I heard about this.” Some soldiers repatriated from the Philippines publicly expressed regret for their crimes, even while recalling the hellish deaths of their own comrades there.52 Feminist reformers such as Hani Setsuko used the revelation of the Manila atrocities to emphasize that this was by no means an aberration. War reflected the cultural level of a nation in every respect, Hani observed, and she had been aware of comparable atrocities from the time she ran a school in Peking. As she saw it, these atrocities toward civilians revealed the low position of women in Japanese male psychology, as well as the general disregard Japanese held toward other people’s children.53
Such perceptions carried the issue of “war responsibility” to the heart of cultural considerations. In an article titled “Is the Morality of the People Low?” the left-wing magazine Taihei suggested that insensitivity to atrocious behavior toward other peoples was rooted in the absence of “a morality of common life” grounded in subjectively free and equal individuals.54 The political scientist Maruyama Masao attributed such behavior to a predictable “transfer of oppression” in an inequitable, highly stratified society. The Asahi’s editorialists and columnists saw a social pathology here that reflected not merely racial arrogance, but also fundamental weaknesses in education and morality—possibly even a lacuna at the core of Japanese religious beliefs, which lacked a strict code of moral behavior.55 For Marxists such as Nakanishi Kō, the barbaric behavior toward oppressed Asian peoples revealed a “feudalistic capitalistic exclusionism and selfishness rooted at the bottom of our hearts.”56
Others responded less analytically to revelations of atrocity. In a bitter pun based on same-sounding ideographs, a contributor to a petroleum-industry publication observed immediately after the Tokyo trials began that the Imperial Army (Kōgun) had shown itself to be an “army of locusts” (kōgun). “Responsibility for this war,” the writer continued, “truly lies with the people as a whole.”57 Another writer, responding to revelations about the Rape of Nanking, wrote that “in every bit of food we ate, every piece of clothing we wore, a drop of the Chinese people’s blood had seeped in. This is our people’s crime, and responsibility must be borne by the people as a whole.”58 Ordinary people unaccustomed to writing for the public, such as housewives and farmers, wrote letters apologizing to the Chinese people and asking how the Japanese could make amends for such terrible behavior.59 Kamei Fumio’s sensitive treatment of China’s sorrow in the opening minutes of his 1947 film Between War and Peace was the cinematic counterpart to such expressions of guilt. Such sensitivity was exceptional, but no one found it odd or out of place.
Some men and women turned to traditional short verse forms to express their feelings upon learning of their countrymen’s atrocities. A poetry magazine published after the Tokyo tribunal ended included this evocation of popular responses:
Vividly, the traces
of the Japanese Army’s atrocities are shown.
Suddenly, a sharp gasp.
A village poetry magazine published this waka in early 1947:
The crimes of Japanese soldiers
who committed unspeakable atrocities
in Nanking and Manila
must be atoned for.
Saeki Jinzaburō, a poet of some repute, wrote two poems on the subject. One dealt with his immediate response to learning of the atrocities in China:
So full of grief is this day
that it made me forget
the vexation of the day
we lost the war.
The second went:
Seizing married women,
raping mothers in front of their children—
this is the Imperial Army.
As it happened, the Japanese public never saw the first of these verses. The poem was suppressed by GHQ, obviously because the censors remained hypersensitive to any overt expression whatever of Japanese regret at losing the war.60 This was unfortunate, for Saeki was of course not lamenting defeat here, but rather conveying, honestly and effectively, how his eyes had been opened and his conscience shocked by the revelation of his countrymen’s crimes. His was one of the rare voices; and in the years that followed, as the Cold War intensified and the occupiers came to identify newly communist China as the archenemy, it became an integral part of American policy itself to discourage recollection of Japan’s atrocities. These sensitive responses to revelation of the hands-on horrors perpetuated by the emperor’s men, fragile and fragmented to begin with, never developed into a truly widespread popular acknowledgment of Japan as victimizer rather than victim.
In December 1947, almost a full year before the Tokyo tribunal handed down its judgments, the magazine Van offered a caustic observation about the fickleness of public opinion. “When those war advocates now called ‘war criminals’ first appeared on the stage, we welcomed them with loud applause,” the popular monthly lamented. “When they fell, we followed along and spat on them. And now we have virtually forgotten about them.” The magazine condemned this “laziness towards war criminals,” as did other publications. To the editors of the intellectual journal Sekai, indifference to the trials extended right up to the sentencing and could only be regarded as one more distressing example of “the people’s decadence,” a fashionable term of cultural criticism at the time. From a somewhat different perspective, the Mainichi newspaper lamented the popular detachment that developed as the tribunal dragged on, but suggested that much the same sort of indifference could also be seen in German responses to the Nuremberg trial.61
As the Tokyo tribunal came to a close, the media assessed its meaning in the by now talismanic language of peace and democracy. The Mainichi warned that punishing war leaders did not mean that the people as a whole had been “washed and cleansed” of responsibility for crimes against peace. Nikon Keizai Shimbun, which catered to the business community, called for “self-reflection” and emphasized the responsibility people now bore to make sure they held their leaders to the principles of peace and democracy. The Asahi expressed regret that the people had not resisted dictatorial control more actively, and personal shame that the paper itself had caved in to the militarists. The task was to learn from such past failures, and on the basis of such self-knowledge resolve “to construct a peaceful democratic nation.” The Nikkeiren Taimusu, the organ of a leading big-business association, editorialized that “all Japanese must believe in and uphold democracy, fully understand the meaning of ‘crimes against peace,’ and live as active peace-loving people.”62
There was no great sense of justice having been truly carried out, however. Although some commentators sincerely welcomed the legal concept of “crimes against peace,” establishing such a precedent by singling out a “representative” group of wartime leaders and executing a few of them did not impress many people by this date. Even the Marxist critic Hani Gorō responded to the capital punishments as a “grave sacrifice” that must not be wasted.63
The ambivalence embedded in such reactions—a strange compound of wishfulness and fatalism—was reflected in some of the waka poems that appeared in small publications in response to the trial’s sentences and executions. An occasional verse spoke of the judgment as bringing a sense of relief, even a renewed commitment to creating a new country. A local monthly in Shizuoka, for example, carried this poem in early 1949:
Since hearing the news of the execution
of the seven war criminals,
from deep within comes a power for reconstructing
Japan.64
More representative, however, was a feeling of resignation and uncertainty, nicely captured in a woman’s contribution to one of the country’s innumerable poetry magazines:
Accepting the severity
of the judgment for now,
still there is a small feeling of hesitation65
Other poems spoke of hearing the news of the hangings and returning to one’s inn in silence, or chewing one’s tasteless food, or observing one’s wife troubled by the inclusion of former foreign minister and prime minister Hirota among those executed.66
A waka by a resident of Sapporo, published in May 1949 as GHQ censorship was lapsing, suggested the sympathy that even the archvillain of the “Class A” drama, Tōjō, was then capable of eliciting:
I agree and disagree
with my elder brother,
who murmurs that Tōjō is great after all.67
Tōjō’s relative ascension in public esteem could be taken as a small barometer to the mood of the times, registering not nostalgia for the war years but an implicit critique of Allied double standards. There appears to have been a further dimension to Tōjō’s little comeback, however, subterranean and ironic in the extreme. In the captive world of being occupied, he was the most prominent Japanese who openly disagreed with the Americans. Here was another surreal touch in the marathon dance of victor and vanquished. Under the “supreme command” of the Allied powers, and the Americans particularly, no public figure could openly express disagreement with occupation policy. In this situation, the freest men in the land could be said to be the accused war criminals who pleaded not guilty in the Tokyo trial. They, at least, were allowed to disagree openly with the victors. Outside the tribunal, every other public figure had to bite his tongue. Everyone else, in essence, played the sycophant.68
Like the sovereign to whom he was so loyal, Tōjō was a barometer in other ways as well. By singling him out as the preeminent symbol of aggression and defeat, Americans and Japanese alike made the central dimension of the war in Asia the conflict between the United States and Japan. Although Tōjō came out of the Kwantung Army and had played a major role in prosecuting the war in Asia, his identity as the “leader of the conspiracy” lay primarily in his association with the policies that culminated in war with the United States and the European powers. During the Tokyo trial, GHQ’s censors had suppressed criticism that Tōjō’s role had been overemphasized and that the real heart of “the problem of war responsibility” lay in aggression against China. Even after the trial ended, this critical observation remained taboo. Thus, an article by the legal scholar Kainō Michitaka that advanced this argument and was to appear in the June 1949 issue of a scholarly journal was suppressed in toto.69
By late 1948, when Tōjō and others were executed, the Americans and their anticommunist supporters in Japanese ruling circles had new reasons for downplaying China’s suffering: China was “going communist” and replacing Japan in American eyes as the major enemy in Asia. By the fall of 1949, it was reliably reported that some five hundred former Japanese pilots were being recruited with SCAP’s support by the ousted Chinese Nationalist regime in Taiwan for possible assistance in retaking the mainland.70 As such clandestine recruitment revealed, the obverse side of forgetting China’s ravishment was remembering how formidable and disciplined Japanese fighting men had been, how vigorously they had been indoctrinated in anticommunism—indeed, how much they knew at first hand about fighting on the Asian continent. General Robert Eichelberger, commander of the Eighth Army, expressed this publicly while the Tokyo trial was still in session when he observed that Japanese were the sort of soldiers whom officers dream of having under their command—an appalling comment.71 Predictably, Tōjō’s final written words before he went to the gallows also emphasized anticommunism. He exited an up-to-date man.
Some of Tōjō’s more fortunate, unindicted fellow inmates at Sugamo Prison had the opportunity to remount the wave of anticommunism almost immediately after the trials ended and war crimes charges against them were dropped. Both Sasagawa Ryōichi and Kodama Yoshio, the right-wing godfathers who were released from prison the day after Tōjō and his six convicted colleagues were hanged, gave the impression of having proceeded directly from the prison gate to their literary agents to capitalize on the celebrity status their prison sojourns had conferred. Sasagawa’s reminiscences were published in May 1949 under the title Faces of Sugamo: Secret Stories of Imprisoned War Criminals (Sugamo no Hyōjō: Senpan Gokuchū Hiwa). Kodama’s memoirs, titled Gate of Fate (Unmei no Mon) and featuring a photograph of Sugamo on the jacket, followed in October 1950.72
One Japanese war criminal, former colonel Tsuji Masanobu, made the transition from notoriety to celebrity status and commercial success without even making an interim stop at Sugamo. A fanatical ideologue and pathologically brutal staff officer, Tsuji bore heavy responsibility for massacres in both Singapore and the Philippines (including the Bataan death march) and was also implicated in isolated atrocities extending to an act of cannibalism following his execution of an American prisoner. Nominally one of Japan’s most notorious fugitive war criminals, he had in fact enjoyed the protection of first the Chinese, and then the Americans, before reemerging in the public eye in 1950. Following the surrender, Tsuji escaped arrest by the British and made his way from Southeast Asia to China, where his knowledge of military intelligence and his virulent anti-communism made him useful to the Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek. In mid-1946, he secretly returned to Japan (disguised as a Chinese professor) and lived in concealment with the full knowledge of General Willoughby and the support of former army colleagues whom Willoughby was gathering under his aegis as the anticipated core of a future anticommunist Japanese military. This clandestine existence came to an end when the United States lifted Tsuji’s designation as a wanted war criminal on New Year’s Day of 1950; and, in that same year, the fruits of his undercover life materialized in the form of not one but two best-sellers—one purportedly recounting his “underground escape,” the other dealing with the battle of Guadalcanal. Early in 1952, a third volume, on the struggle for Singapore, emerged from the old murderer’s hand—and that same year, in the immediate wake of the occupation, he was elected to the House of Representatives from Ishikawa, his home prefecture.73
December 26, 1949: Relatives of war criminals pardoned in a Christmas amnesty by General MacArthur await their release in the snow outside the barbed wire surrounding Sugamo Prison.
Tsuji’s dark charisma as a flamboyant militarist who had outfoxed the victors, vanished like a ghost, and never spent a day in jail surely accounted for much of the popularity of his books. After four years of knuckling under to American rule, with no end to the occupation yet in sight, defiant figures such as Tsuji, Sasagawa, Kodama, and Tōjō could exercise a certain crude appeal even to people who did not share their politics. Their politics were actually part of the joke. The former Japanese and American antagonists, war criminals and their judges, were now more or less on the same side. Yet while the lifting of censorship enabled apologists for Japan’s holy war such as these to speak openly, theirs were marginal voices. As an ordinary company employee observed on the fourth anniversary of Japan’s capitulation, he was aware of almost no one who still truly grieved over the defeat. This was true not merely of what was said in public, but also what he heard in private conversations among close acquaintances. Such a response to a national disaster was “truly astonishing,” he thought, and reflected a general awareness that war, more than anything else, crushes the dignity of the individual.74 Virtually no one in Japan still dreamed Tsuji’s old dreams of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—but, by much the same token, few cared to be reminded any more about what the imperial “army of locusts” had actually done in that short-lived sphere of conquest.
In this milieu of willful forgetting, the years that followed witnessed the almost wholesale rehabilitation of “B/C” as well as “Class A” war criminals in popular consciousness. Defendants who had been convicted and sentenced to imprisonment became openly regarded as victims rather than victimizers, their prison stays within Japan made as pleasant and entertaining as possible. Those who had been executed, often in far-away lands, were resurrected through their own parting words. One remembered the criminals, while forgetting their crimes.
The treatment of inmates in Sugamo Prison provided the most blatant early example of this. In a total prisoner population of around four thousand, the several hundred convicted war criminals were accorded many amenities. From an early date, they were allowed to publish their own newspaper, the Sugamo Shimbun, and as time passed they were afforded what can only be described as prime access to live entertainment. A small theater that became known as “Sugamo Hall” was rehabilitated for their convenience. Beginning with a November 1950 performance by the Ishii ballet company, a literal parade of stars crossed its stage. There was a certain aura of the command performance in these presentations, as entertainers from the outside world lined up to perform for what amounted to a celebrity audience.
These programs continued for several years after the occupation ended, and were neither clandestine nor furtive. Entertainers happily posed for photos—a favorite background setting being Sugamo’s distinctive wall and watch tower—and both the number of visitors and variety of their talents were impressive. By one account, at least 114 performances were offered inmates in 1952 alone, involving close to 2,900 entertainers. The well-known comedians Entatsu and Kingorō both played Sugamo Hall. So did the violinist Suwa Nejiko and some of the country’s most celebrated popular singers, including the child star Misora Hibari, Kasagi Shizuko (of boogie-woogie fame), Haida Katsuhiko, Akasaka Koume, and Fujiyama Ichirō. The famous Nichigeki dance troupe entertained the convicted war criminals, as did little-known groups of geisha, prefectural folk dancers, and the like. Old-fashioned sword-fighting dramas were presented. To judge from the photographic record, the inmates also had the pleasure of being entertained by young women who displayed more naked flesh in more bizarre postures than these once dour militarists had permitted in public when they were still the arbiters of Imperial Way morality. Some prison entertainment took place outside Sugamo Hall. The Yomiuri Giants and the Mainichi Orions, professional baseball teams, helped the inmates celebrate the imminent end of the occupation with an exhibition game on March 28, 1952. The Sugamo playing field was also graced by teams from the “Japan Women’s Baseball League,” and by Western-style wrestlers. Equestrian teams performed and then lined up like soldiers before the crowd for a commemorative photo. Female gymnasts in shorts smiled for the Sugamo audience and for the camera.75
In the summer of 1952, the image of convicted war criminals as war victims reached new heights thanks to a maudlin song written by two men who had been sentenced to death for war crimes in the Philippines. Neither Daida Gintaro, the lyricist, nor Itō Masayasu, who composed the music, was actually executed. Daida claimed he had been framed and wrote his tearful lyrics early in 1952 after many of his fellow inmates at the Monten Lupa prison in the Philippines had been executed. The song’s title—”Ah, the Night Is Deep in Monten Lupa“—revealed a perfect feel for the hot buttons of Japanese sentimentality, and the tune was said to be so appealing that even Filipino prison guards found themselves singing it.
The song was introduced at the prison on April 29 (the first day after Japan had regained its independence) in a performance that also included singing Kimigayo, the national anthem, and bowing as a group in the direction of the imperial palace in far-away Tokyo, a homage routinely performed by the imperial forces during their rampage through Asia. Through their Japanese prison chaplain, Daida and Itō succeeded in having a famous female singer, Watanabe Hamako, introduce the song in Japan, where it became a sensation.
The lyrics began by evoking the “inconsolable thoughts” that beset each prisoner in the depths of night as he recalled his “home far away.” Looking at the moon, blurred by tears, each dreamed “of a gentle mother”—saw her agonizing over when her “beloved child” would return; imagined her heart flying “straight toward the southern sky,” plaintively crying like a cuckoo seeking its lost offspring. And when morning finally came to Monten Lupa, the final stanza of the song exclaimed, the sun also rose in each prisoner’s heart, giving all of them the hope and courage to “live strong . . . until we step again onto the soil of Japan.”
There could be no more pristine rendering of “rising sun” nationalism and nostalgia than this; and, soon afterward, the desperate hopes of the condemned war criminals in Monten Lupa became reality. In July 1953, all of these prisoners were repatriated to Japan, where some went free while others were transferred to Sugamo Prison. Around twenty-eight thousand people met their ship to welcome them home. No one in the crowd breathed a word, as far as can be told, about all the mothers and children and prisoners of war whom the emperor’s soldiers and sailors had murdered in the Philippines.76
While surviving war criminals were being pampered, projects were also under way to honor the memories of those who had been executed and restore to them a modicum of the individuality that had been stripped away when they were given the blanket label “war criminal.” In a remarkably effective conservative publishing endeavor, the last written testaments of these men, their final letters to their families, their death poems and parting words were collected and made public. Between 1950 and 1954, more than fifteen edited books of this nature were published. Their compatriots were giving these men the last word in the most effective manner possible, by letting them speak as if from the grave.77
The most comprehensive and famous of these publications was a massive collection (741 triple-column pages) published in December 1953 under the title Testaments of the Century (Seiki no Isho). In it, some 692 executed war criminals were given voice, and the variety of their personalities and opinions was impressive. The appeal of such writings was all the more compelling because—like the writings of student conscripts, the musings of Nagai Takashi in Nagasaki, or even Dazai Osamu’s sensational novel The Setting Sun—these words reflected the thoughts and emotions of men looking death in the eye.78
Famous or notorious men passed judgment on their trials here. Tōjō’s last words found a permanent place among these testaments, apologizing to the people and the emperor for defeat while reaffirming his innocence of international crimes. The Tokyo tribunal had been a political trial, he stated, and the Americans and British had made three grave mistakes. They had destroyed Japan as a bulwark against communism, allowed Manchuria (his old Kwantung Army base) to become Red, and divided Korea in two, guaranteeing trouble for the future (a prophetic observation a year and a half before the Korean War broke out). To end war forever, Tōjō observed—much like Takeyama Michio’s fictional priest in Harp of Burma—required ending human desire and greed. Unlike that hopeful mendicant, however, Tōjō believed changing human nature to be impossible, and so assumed World War III was inevitable. He asked the Americans not to let Japan turn Red, and concluded his parting testament by apologizing for “mistakes” the military may have made but also asking the United States to reflect on the atomic bombs and their bombing campaign against civilians.79
The last letters to his family of General Homma Masaharu, who had been found guilty of “command responsibility” for the Bataan death march, spoke similarly of victor’s justice. “To say that the United States is a fair country is a bald lie,” he declared. Mentioning the hundreds of thousands of Japanese killed in air raids and by the atomic bombs, he morosely observed that “there is no such thing as justice in international relations in this universe.”80 Some condemned men accepted responsibility for the acts of which they were accused, but the more common response was that their trials had been essentially an exercise in revenge and double standards, with little care taken to ensure genuinely fair hearings. Several condemned men, Homma among them, quoted a cynical saying from the time of the Meiji Restoration: “Win and you are the official army, lose and you are the rebels” (kateba kangun, makereba zokugun).81
The final words of these convicted men almost invariably revealed deep concern for the families they were leaving behind and the need to erase from the minds of loved ones as well as society at large the impression that they were really “criminals” in any ordinary sense, rather than simply victims of a tragic losing war. It would be difficult to overestimate the weight of this consideration in these final “private” epistles. Sons had to assure their parents—and husbands their wives, and fathers their children—that they were not murderers, not beasts; that there was an explanation for whatever it was they had been convicted of doing; that their loved ones could still hold up their heads. That a great many of these writings were intensely private communications did not necessarily guarantee their truthfulness, as the compilers of such materials would have had readers believe. But where dissembling began or ended was often impossible to say, sometimes undoubtedly for the writers themselves.
Of all the familial ties cherished in Japanese culture, the wettest and most sentimental surely is that between son and mother. The syrupy popularity of “Ah, the Night Is Deep in Monten Lupa” was testimony to this, and a good number of the writings in Testaments of the Century similarly revealed the deep attachment of these condemned men to their mothers. In this regard, several of the writings quoted a celebrated death poem by Yoshida Shōin, one of the most charismatic of the young samurai who mobilized to overthrow the feudal regime in the name of the emperor in the mid-nineteenth century. Yoshida was executed in 1859 at the age of twenty-nine for having attempted to assassinate an emissary of the shogun, and his poem was written on the day of his beheading:
A parent’s feelings surpass
even our own feelings toward our parents.
I wonder how she will hear today’s news.82
The “rebel” and “criminal” Yoshida was apotheosized soon afterward as one of the heroes of modern Japan, a perfect symbol of purity of purpose and tragic sacrifice. To these condemned men less than a century later, about to die as apparent failures, even as monsters, his posthumous vindication could only have been a source of hope and consolation. That Yoshida also had been an outspoken critic of the imperialistic encroachment of the Western “barbarians” did not exactly lessen his appeal. His farewell poem was cherished, however, primarily because it revealed that even as fate swept him away, his final thoughts and concerns lay with his mother. He became, by this, intensely humanized. He was made gentle.
References to being a “sacrifice” (gisei) appeared frequently in the writings of the men condemned to death in the lower-level trials. Such a man might see himself as “a noble sacrifice for the country,” or a sacrifice for the nation “paid in blood,” or a sacrifice “for defeat” or “for the reconstruction of Japan” or “for the race,” or more hopefully yet for “world peace.”83 There was no single, agreed-on agent of their victimization. To some, it was clearly and plainly the victorious Allies. A condemned officer in Singapore characterized himself as simply “a victim of British revenge.”84 Many others, however, portrayed themselves as victims of their own superiors, who had forced them to perform acts now judged criminal and then, in the familiar logic of irresponsibility, denied this afterwards.85 Others saw themselves as little more than the casual victims of war itself. A Kempeitai officer executed in Burma in 1946 devoted his last words to a philosophical rumination on duty and individual responsibility, and concluded that he and others like him were simply “vague sacrifices that accompany war.”86
Like most of the other collections of writings by such men, the vigilant conservatism of Testaments of the Century was reflected in the cryptic biographies that accompanied each entry, which simply mentioned where the writers were executed but not why. In fact, many men did discuss the crimes they were accused of, sometimes in considerable detail. Essentially, however, these publications were designed to humanize men who had died in apparent disgrace and to absolve them—or at least absolve many of them—of war crimes. In a curious way, such forgiveness was a natural, almost mirrorlike counterpart to the treatment the emperor had received from the Americans. Just as Hirohito had been absolved of wrongdoing or war responsibility, so now accused war criminals were implicitly forgiven—by those, of course, who had not felt the impact of their acts—for whatever they might have done in the cauldron of war. Their gentle words were quoted, while their actual deeds went all but ignored. They were presented as having lacked any real control over the events in which they participated. The emperor’s celebrated “declaration of humanness” had been a step down. He was descending from “manifest deity,” whatever exactly that meant, to human status. These men, on the other hand, were in the process of being escorted upwards from demonized realms into the same world of humanity. But whether it was the living god or the executed war criminals who were being humanized, the final impression conveyed was that no one, from the top to the bottom of the old imperium, was truly responsible for the terrible war and the atrocious acts that had accompanied it everywhere.
Such refashioning of history and memory, such a restoration of a human face to the entire imperial army and navy, was part of a national process of psychological mending. If even these most miserable of military men could be shown to be complex and sensitive human beings, however flawed, then the stigma of having been little more than a rapacious army of locusts might be lessened if not altogether removed. The reactionary potential of such publications was thus considerable, for these last testaments could easily be read as but another sub genre in the literature of Japanese victimization. They could also be seen, at least in part, as antiCaucasian texts; for although these condemned men protested their innocence in every theater where war-crimes trials were held, expressions of bitterness were especially keen concerning the harshness and double standards of Dutch, British, and American captors.87 Only in isolated cases, however, did such testaments serve as reminders of how grievously and casually the Japanese had sacrificed other Asians.
Notwithstanding this, the overall impression of collections of posthumous writings such as Testaments of the Century was not so much anger or even apologia, but rather of an overwhelming feeling of waste, regret, and sorrow. The final words of the war criminals were not so different as might be imagined from those of the student conscripts killed in the war that were collected and published by liberal and left-wing academics. Indeed, one of the most moving testaments of the dead that appeared in Listen—Voices from the Deep was written by a student of economics from Kyoto Imperial University named Kimura Hisao, who was executed as a war criminal in Singapore in May 1946 for abuse of prisoners. A biography of Kimura was published in November 1948, and his remarkable last testament, scribbled in the margins of one of Tanabe Hajime’s books of philosophy, was reproduced in the student anthology along with poems he had written in jail. Kimura’s entry in Testaments of the Century consisted of a final note to his father, together with most of these same poems.88 One of the two death verses Kimura composed on the day before he was hanged conveyed a sense of having come to terms with dying at the age of twenty-six:
The wind has quieted down,
the rain has ceased.
Fresh in the morning sun,
I shall depart tomorrow.
The other poem would have reminded any Japanese reader of Yoshida Shōin:
Without fear or sorrow,
I shall go to the gallows
cherishing my mother’s face.
With but a few exceptions, the last testaments of the executed war criminals were not written for publication. They were collected and published after exhaustive appeals to family and friends of the deceased, and their public impact was contradictory—for even as they weakened consciousness of war responsibility, they intensified recollection of the terrible human costs of militarism and war. Like the writings of dead students and the memoirs of atomic-bomb victims, these last words became part of a public portfolio of intensely personalized portraits of individual Japanese whose lives were destroyed by war. They were usually beautified self-portraits, and in a strange or at least unanticipated way they helped make up what Osaragi Jirō, years earlier, had spoken of as a “requiem” to the Japanese war dead. The language of many of these last testaments was elegiac. These men may have been executed as “conventional” war criminals, but a great many of them wrote uncommonly well. The usual style and format of publication, moreover, almost always highlighted the elegiac tone.
Testaments of the Century, for example, was prefaced with a photograph of a bronze statue of Kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy and compassion. Entries were grouped according to the places where the Allied war-crimes trials had been held, and each section was titled with an evocative phrase taken from one of the personal texts that followed. “The Bond between Japan and China” was the subtitle for entries by individuals condemned to death in China; “Fate” for those tried by the British in Burma; “Welcoming Spring” for Hong Kong. The section by condemned men held in Sugamo Prison was titled “Purple Violet”; for the writings of those in Guam, simply “Humans.”
Each individual entry also was given a title derived from the text by the editors and these, too, conveyed the generally sorrowful, reflective, humanistic tone that those who promoted such literature sought to convey. From the China trials, for example, came such headings as these: “From the Dark World,” “Tears of Chinese Soldiers,” “Beloved Japan,” “Nothingness and Forgetting,” “Every Day a Good Day.” From the Dutch East Indies: “Margins of Life,” “Friendship Extending to the Other Shore,” “A Hundred Faces.” From Australia: “Good and Evil.” From Malaya and North Borneo: “Notice to Britain,” “Returning to Mother” (the writer’s mother was deceased). From Burma: “To Haruko” (a letter to a young daughter, written entirely without ideographs in the cursive syllabary). From Indochina: “Various People.” From Guam: “Thoughts of a Scientist.” From Sugamo Prison: “Coming Alone, Leaving Alone,” “Bearing a Cross” (the writer had learned Christian hymns), “Wailing Wall,” “White Cloud,” “External Peace,” “Farewell.”89 Monstrous criminals to their enemies, they now became philosophers and poets to many of their countryfolk.
A short preface to a selection of entries from Testaments of the Century excerpted in a monthly magazine spoke of these writings as “a great bible” that could inspire the entire Japanese race and help all humankind cleanse itself. The editors exhorted their readers to take heart in remembering that the darkest hour comes before the dawn—Akebono, the name of the magazine itself, meant “Dawn”—and to devote themselves to establishing everlasting peace.90 This was the rhetoric of purity and peace so often heard in the war years. It was a nationalistic plea to forgive the dishonored dead. It was a smoke screen obscuring the horrendous reality of Japanese war crimes and atrocities. But it was also, in this extraordinarily introverted world, an antiwar statement. Many of the writings by the condemned war criminals reinforced this in ways that moved readers deeply. The last letter to his young daughter from an army medical doctor was representative in this regard. He told her to try to make her way through life without ever killing a living thing, not even a dragonfly.
He had been executed after being convicted of maltreating Allied prisoners.91
