An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945) Read online

  Alongside these private or community black markets there existed another, controlled by financially shrewd speculators who hoarded necessities and waited for the price to increase. According to Nagai Kafū, a novelist who kept a diary all through the war years, the price of rice on the commercial black market in Tokyo was 4 yen per shō (half gallon) in 1943 and 10 to 15 yen the following year. In one year, the price of rice had gone up by 150 to 300 per cent.82

  Under these circumstances, housewives had to be alert for any scraps of information, careful in judgement, and sensitive to all changes in the situation. They had to allocate their scant resources so as to preserve the lives of their family, cultivate new acquaintances, find some way to travel to the food sources in the country, and stand in queues to get what they could in the way of clothing and food at cheaper government prices. Further, they had to attend meetings to settle local community problems, dig air raid shelters in their gardens, and participate in air raid drills, which included training in forming bucket brigades and in beating out fires with brooms, both quite useless once the waves of bombings began in the final stage of the war. Most of the physically fit men had been either mobilized or commandeered for munitions factories. By February 1944 four million, 10 per cent of the total male population, had been conscripted, and by August 1945 the number had increased to 7,190,000, about 20 per cent of the total male population including children, the old, the sick, and the disabled.

  Housewives were thus forced to manage all aspects of their households. They responded by resurrecting the pre-Meiji traditions of the peasant, fisherman and merchant classes. Women of these classes, which had formed the overwhelming majority of the population, had had greater liberty of conduct than wives of samurai. While the male-centred Japanese empire failed in the war, and the men returned defeated, women continued to support themselves, their children, and their husbands, and gained a new authority. ‘When I was most beautiful’, a poem by Ibaragi Noriko (1926- ), who was nineteen years old at the time of the surrender, expresses the inspired and self-confident mood of many women in the period immediately following the war.83 No women had been responsible for the declaration of war. No woman had been a leader in the Army or Navy. They had no vote. To obtain food during wartime, they had often had to break the law, or they and their families would surely have starved. In operating and cooperating within the communal black market, the women, although they avoided direct confrontation with the state, had acted according to rules and morals which transcended it. They were not accustomed to using the political vocabulary with which the war had been justified. Their thinking was not circumscribed by the grandiose political terminology of the time, and thus they were able to survive the surrender and the aftermath of the war. During the Occupation, Japanese women were granted the right to vote for the first time, and in the first post-war election, thirty-nine out of the 464 representatives elected to the Diet were women. Women's political activity was spectacular in the period immediately following the war. But, because their thinking was not bound by any political ideology, women gradually faded into the background with the end to the post-war confusion and the return to normality, and interest in female delegates in Parliament subsided.

  Kutsumi Fusako (1890-1980)84 is a remarkable figure in the history of tenkō. She withstood the wartime tendency towards witch-hunting, discussed below, and although she underwent tenkō she continued to participate in anti-government and anti-war activities and suffered the consequences. Her tenkō was one of appearance merely, and she continued to resist militarism.

  Kutsumi was born in Okayama Prefecture, in Central Japan. She married an independent religionist by the name of Takada Shūzō and bore two children, but later divorced him. She was one of the founders of Sekiran Kai, a society for socialist women formed in 1921. In the same year, she married Mitamura Shirō, then a prominent leader in the Communist Party, and she was active in the labour movement of the printing factories. In 1928 she was arrested and imprisoned for five years. She underwent tenkō in the group redirection of 1933, and then left the Communist Party and began to work for those one-state socialists who were still in prison, including Sano Manabu, Nabeyama Sadachika, and her husband Mitamura Shirō. Kutsumi herself was uneducated and formed no theory to justify her tenkō. She was one of the rare Japanese radicals of the war period who underwent tenkō on paper but not in practice, instead of conforming to the typical pattern of devotion to the Communist International replaced by devotion to ultra-nationalism. While her husband, Mitamura Shirō, became notorious for his defection from the Communist Party, she nevertheless joined the Ozaki-Sorge group and worked to avoid a confrontation between Japan and Soviet Russia. For this she was arrested in June 1941 and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. She was freed from prison only in October 1945, by MacArthur's directive. After the war, the Japan Communist Party urged Kutsumi to stand for the Diet in the first election which followed the surrender, but she declined. Her husband Mitamura became an anti-communist leader, organizing the breaking of strikes, but she did not share his political beliefs, and in 1960 participated anonymously in the demonstration against the military treaty with the United States concluded by the government of Prime Minister Kishi, a former leader in the war. Kitsumi is unique in the history of tenkō for her independence and resilience, qualities rare in her male counterparts.

  Another difference between wartime Japan and wartime Britain was the operation in Japan of local Neighbour Associations. These were set up on the advice, which was in reality an order, of the Government. The Government foresaw the need to pave the way for rationing by education at an early stage of the war with China. A section chief in the Tokyo Municipal Government, Tanikawa Noboru, suggested resurrecting the old local organizations of the Tokugawa period under the new name of Neighbour Associations, and using these groups to prepare the Japanese for rationing and teach them to form queues, to be thrifty in the use of scarce food and clothing, and so on. The Mayor favoured this proposal, and it was put into practice in the Tokyo City Announcement of 19 May 1938.

  Tanikawa was inspired by the Tokugawa organization of the Five Family Group* and also by the intellectual tradition of Ninomiya Sontoku (1787-1856), who had conceived a notion of neighbourhood mutual aid associations. This ideal of spontaneous mutual aid, however, was not fulfilled by the Neighbour Associations, which existed from 1938 till 1947 when they were abolished. Instead, they were used merely to implement government policies, and did not fulfil their potential for transmitting the common man's opinion to high officials. Such a result would, indeed, have amounted to a cultural revolution. Something similar was in fact planned by the Imperial Rule Assistance Association conceived by the brains trust of Prince Konoye, which included ex-radicals and ex-liberals. It was in the hope of such a communication of their opinions to the Government that so many supported the Neighbour Associations at first, but the organization was soon taken over by officials and Army officers and became an instrument for extensive interference in the daily lives of citizens. Thus the simple idea of a municipal official became another means of control by the militarist Government.

  I have discussed in chapter 3 Morita Shirō’s account, in The Japanese Village, of the old village tradition in Japan that no member of the community should be killed for ideological or religious reasons. As has been noted, this seems not to have applied to someone not of the community, who came from outside the village. This accounts for the treatment of Ozaki Hozumi, his family, and his relatives after his connection with Soviet agent Richard Sorge had been revealed. The label of ‘traitor’ attracted a hatred and persecution of anyone not of the community akin to the European and American witch-hunts or the McCarthyism of the post-war United States, which brought about the suicide of E. H. Norman, Canadian Ambassador to Egypt and one of the greatest historians of modern times.

  The propaganda against ‘traitors to Japan’ influenced the entire nation, including even the Neighbour Associations, so that these small units no
longer functioned in accordance with the old village tradition of toleration of all members of the community. Rather, they sought to eliminate any traces of ‘foreign style’ and convert waverers into ‘true patriots awakened to the sanctity of the national structure’.

  Many were arrested, detained, convicted, and persecuted on the flimsiest of grounds. The most notable example is the Yokohama Incident of 1944, the arrest and imprisonment by the Thought Police of employees of the Asahi Newspapers, Jiji News Agency, and such major publishing companies as Nihon Hyōron, Tōyō Keizai, Iwanami, Chūō Kōron and Kaizō. The publications of the latter two, Child Kōron and Kaizō, both exponents of social democracy in the Taishō period before the era of militarism, were forced to close down. The police arrested employees of the two companies in January 1944, and on 10 July the companies were ordered by the Bureau of Information to close down ‘voluntarily’; their dissolution was completed by the end of July.

  The first arrest was made on 11 September 1942. The victims were Kawada Hisashi (1905-1978) and his wife Sadako (1909- ). The arrest was based on the testimony of another man who was himself a political prisoner. On 20 August 1940 a group of 1,500 prisoners was sent from the U.S.A. to be repatriated, and a random sample was arrested by the Japanese police on the suspicion that they might be spies sent by the U.S. Government. Those who had any police record of leftist activities in Japan before leaving for the U.S.A. were the object of special scrutiny. It was one of these prisoners who, probably in order to avoid further torture, informed the police of the existence of a man more important than himself, who had already returned to Japan from the United States, by the name of Kawada.

  Kawada Hisashi came of a Quaker family and had attended Keiō University, where he had participated in fund-raising activities for the Japan Communist Party and in this cause had been arrested several times. Later he went to the U.S.A., where he worked and studied. He worked as a labor organizer in the era of the New Deal, but did not register as a member of the U.S. Communist Party, as alleged by the Japanese Thought Police. He and his wife returned to Japan in February 1941, ten months before the outbreak of the war with the U.S.A., and he took up a position as the chief of the Documents Section in the Institute of World Economy.

  Although Kawada, his wife, and some of their friends were tortured, police could find no evidence that they had participated in any leftist activity after their return to Japan, and released them after three years. Just before their release a nominal trial was held, in which Kawada Hisashi was sentenced to three years in prison with a four-year stay of execution, and Kawada Sadako to one year in prison with a three-year stay of execution. In their indictment, there was no mention of the crimes of which they had originally been accused, that is, of attempting to reconstruct the Japan Communist Party or engaging in espionage. The only crime attributed to them was their leftist activity in the United States, which was considered to be a breach of the Japanese Maintenance of Public Order Act.

  His friend Takahashi Yoshio was arrested for his association with Kawada Hisashi, and Hiradate Toshio and Nishizawa Tomio of the Research Institute of the Southern Manchurian Railway for their association with Takahashi. The ‘evidence’ for a plot to revive the Japan Communist Party was a photograph of an innocent gathering of these friends at the town of Tomari. The meeting had been planned by the economist Hosokawa Karoku (1888-1962), author of Trends in World History and Japan’ in the Kaizō magazine in 1942, to celebrate the 16,000 yen he had just received as royalties from his History of the Colonies. This was a considerable sum for him, the son of a simple fisherman in Tomari. The innocence of the gathering is now established beyond doubt. After the war Hosokawa became a Communist Party M.P. and Nishizawa a member of the Party Central Committee, but neither tried to glorify his past by claiming to have made a courageous attempt to revive the Party during the war. The Thought Police, however, entitled this fictional Commmunist plot ‘the Tomari Hotsprings Conference’ - although there are in fact no hot springs at Tomari - in imitation of the famous ‘Goshiki Hotsprings Conference’ which had marked the original founding of the Japan Communist Party. On the basis of this supposed ‘Tomari Hot-springs Conference’, sixty-two editors and writers were arrested, of whom four died in prison.

  After the war the Kawadas, together with other victims of the frame-up, sued the members of the Thought Police. In a written indictment they described in detail the torture to which they had been subjected. The implements of torture had included bamboo swords, a bamboo panel, a five-foot cudgel, a rope for whipping, the point of an umbrella for spiking, a fire poker, and shoes for trampling. Kawada Sadako had been stripped from the waist down, after which the police inspector thrust his cudgel into her. After describing their own torture, they noted that the torture inflicted upon a certain couple named Ōkōchi was the most inhuman. This description is contained in a new addition to the book, The People Involved in the Yokohama Incident, by Nakamura Tomoko published in 1979.85

  Ōkōchi's personal story is of interest here, and so I will digress a little in order to relate it. I first heard stories of this man, who was a legend among American Japanese, during my internment after 1942. Ōkōchi had worked for Ringlifig Brothers and Barnum's Circus, ‘the greatest show on earth’, performing in a judo stunt with a sumo wrestler named Otagawa and Otagawa's wife. The story was related to me as follows. The ring is darkened. A woman in a kimono, with an oiled paper umbrella hiding her face, walks elegantly on to the stage. This is Otagawa's wife. An enormous villain (Otagawa) pounces upon the elegant lady to rob her. The lady very gently takes the arm of the villain and throws him to the ground with a judo technique. Then another villain (Ōkōchi) comes to the rescue of his boss and tries to shoot her with a pistol. He is also easily thrown, and the two robbers run away. The stunt was simple, but remained popular for some time, probably as a result of the curiosity about Japanese culture which followed the Russo-Japanese War.

  Another tale I was told of Ōkōchi concerns his departure from Japan for the U.S.A. Ōkōchi was the son of a viscount, and was therefore sent to the Peers’ School. There he happened to take a liking to a certain younger pupil who looked somewhat forlorn, and gave him one of the cheap candies he had bought on the street. The child turned out to be the son of the Crown Prince, the present Emperor. This incident was considered a great scandal, and the Principal, General Nogi, sent for Ōkōchi's parents. They withdrew their son from the school in distress, and finally sent him to the U.S.A., where he joined the circus.

  I met the hero of these legends in the prisoner-of-war camp at Fort Meade, Maryland. We were repatriated to Japan on the same boat, and during the long journey this frank and friendly man told me many more stories of his life. In 1945 I met his wife by chance, and renewed his acquaintance. They had just been released from prison, where they had been battered almost to death, but they still did not know the reason for their imprisonment. They thought that Ōkōchi, still a man who did not hide his opinions, must have said to somebody in the neighbourhood that Japan could not win the war. It was only on reading the Kawadas’ indictment and the police documents in the recently expanded version of Nakamura's book that I realized that the Ōkōchis had been arrested and tortured in connection with the Yokohama Incident.

  There are three points of interest in Ōkōchi's story. Firstly, the man who had taken a personal liking to and expressed pity for the Emperor when he was a child was arrested and tortured in the Emperor's name. Secondly, upon his return to Japan he was treated as an outsider by his Neighbour Association because of the influence of so many years in the U.S.A. on his behaviour. This foreign influence was spurned by his neighbours, and when he outspokenly expressed opinions on the war contrary to those of the majority they informed on him. His rank did not serve him, rather, the need for uniformity of opinion involved a form of democratic feeling. Thirdly, Ōkōchi never understood his arrest. I believe that he never even heard the expression ‘Yokohama Incident’.

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  * Gonin-gumi, literally ‘Five Person Group’, was actually a Five Family Group, since the ‘Person’ referred to was a family head. It was a unit of group responsibility, in which each member was held accountable for crimes committed by any other member.

  11 As Victims of Atomic Bombs

  Warring states have a way of cooperating in concealing things from their people, a cooperation arising not from any consultation but from the very nature of the state as an institution. If we examine this phenomenon, we expose the true nature of the state. The atomic bombs of 1945 are one example. On this subject there was a kind of tacit alliance between the enemy governments, which still exists even today, in peacetime.

  On 6 August 1945 a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb of the uranium 235 type on the city of Hiroshima; on 9 August another B-29 dropped an atomic bomb of the plutonium 239 type on the city of Nagasaki. The newspapers informed the Japanese that Japan had been attacked with bombs of a new type. They advised readers to protect themselves from the effects of this new type of bomb by wearing white rather than black garments, implying that this would be an effective safeguard. The Supreme Command and the newspapers said virtually nothing about the devastating effects of the bombs.