A Cultural History of Postwar Japan Page 4
Meanwhile, since 1950 the government has come to expect no interference from the U.S.A. in the glorification of the war years for schoolchildren. A textbook compiled by the noted historian Ienaga Sabur (1913–), A New History of Japan, was rejected as unsuitable by the Ministry of Education because it presented a gloomy picture of the war years. Ienaga decided to sue the state and won his case at the local court level in 1970, forcing the ministry’s decision to be retracted. The trials at higher court levels, however, do not offer a sanguine prospect.21
In the wake of the prosperity since 1960 there has been a surge of compassion for the victims of the War Crimes Trials. With this change of atmosphere, Shiroyama Sabur’s well-documented novel, The Sunset Aglow, 1976, was met with wide acclaim and, in the form of a television drama on the national broadcasting station NHK, influenced millions of Japanese. The title of the English version, War Criminal, the Life and Death of Hirota Kki, reveals the content of the novel.22 It traces the development of Hirota’s career as a professional diplomat, and shows that he did not play any decisive role either in Japan’s invasion of China or in Japan’s war with the U.S.A. and Britain. Hirota did not present any defence of himself at the War Crimes Trial and went to the scaffold without leaving a last testament. His wife committed suicide prior to her husband’s hanging so he could meet his death without concern for the bereaved. She believed that if she had not married Hirota, he would not have been singled out as the only civilian given the death sentence in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, since it was through his wife that Hirota was connected and remained in association with the major figures of the Japanese rightist movement. This case was considered one of the most flagrant mistakes of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, about which even the Chief Prosecutor, Keenan, was said to have been sensitive. From the sympathy for Hirota shown through the wide sales of the biographical novel and the popularity of the television drama we may safely infer that the Japanese public in the 1970s and early 1980s greatly distrust the verdicts of the war crimes trials.
An earlier response to the War Crimes Trial was expressed in Luminous Moss, a play by Takeda Taijun (1912–1976), published in 1954, with an English version appearing in 1967.23 The play is about a captain tried for eating the flesh of his crew in order to survive. Asked for his own defence at the trial, the captain only answers in a low voice, ‘I am forbearing, forbearing’. Then for all those who could see, both in the courtroom and in the theatre, a halo appears around the head of the captain standing silent in the witness box. This is a literary output expressing the Buddhist sentiment which is an undercurrent beneath the surface of expediency in the Japanese people.
Kinoshita Junji (1914–) wrote a play called Between God and Man, first staged in 1970 and published in 1972, and in English in 1979.24 The play is composed of two parts, the first being a collage of the proceedings of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial and the second being a series of fictitious scenes in which the wife of Private Kanohara, hanged by the War Crimes Trial on a South Pacific island, meets his prison mates and his secret lover, who had been a vaudeville actress performing Manzai, which may be called the Master and Servant Dialogue.
In the first part, the prosecutor condemns war criminals with all the vehemence and confidence of one who has brought about the unconditional surrender of Japan and who has already achieved an unshakeable civilization in this world.
In the second part, the wife of the executed man listens to the account of the private’s death put together by his prison mates and his secret lover. This presents his execution as an accident brought upon him by the intrigues of his superior officer, who wanted to cover up his own part in the round-up of spies among the natives.
The private tries his best to make clear the injustice, even after the death sentence had been pronounced, by writing English letters to the regional commander. But, when all efforts fail, he remembers how the wife of a native falsely accused of spying and executed by the Japanese Occupation Army had climbed up a tall tree and thrown herself off in front of her young son. The private acquiesces in his own execution with the thought that when such crimes have been committed, someone must atone. Then the vaudevillian, who had been long in the confidence of the private, gives vent to her feelings by coupling the famous last testament of General Tj and the last words uttered by the private before his execution, in an extemporaneous street performance expressing her defiance of the fate of victims of the war.
The last testament of General Tj was a 31-syllable poem entrusted to his priest in accordance with the customs of a warrior:
After tomorrow,
Who is there
To fear?
In the Buddha’s lap
I shall sleep peacefully.25
Whatever his role in the war, Tj fought courageously in the Tokyo War Crimes Trial for his belief that the war was inevitable and just. His last poem expresses his courage and conviction, on the basis of which he could meet his death unburdened by regrets. The vaudevillian couples Tj’s poem with the fragmentary comments of the private on his way to the place of execution:
Where
Does it flow to
This tiny river?26
She repeats these two last testaments in juxtaposition and the curtain falls.
General Tj died a courageous death, without acknowledging to the last the misfortunes he had brought upon millions of Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Burmese, Japanese and other peoples of the world. Private Kanohara in the play dies knowing that his execution is due to a mistake in legal procedure, but he atones for evils committed by his fellow countrymen. He is unsure why this mistake occurred and how his atonement will bear fruit, an uncertainty expressed in his words:
Where
Does it flow to
This tiny river?
In political terms, Tj’s words of conviction may seem significant and the words of the private insignificant and ineffectual. Private Kanohara, however, represents the Japanese popular tradition of little men which was not assimilated into the ideology of universal justice expressed by General Tj and the prosecutors of the War Crimes Trials.
The last words attributed to Private Kanohara in Kinoshita’s play were actually spoken historically by Sergeant Wada Minoru (aged 23 years) from the City of Yawata, Kysh. Wada uttered these words to the chaplain as the two crossed a narrow river on their way to the place of execution. Since he left no other testimony, these words were recorded by the chaplain and sent to Wada’s relatives in Japan. They were included as one of the 701 letters in Last Testaments of the Century, and Kinoshita selected these few words, from the voluminous letters left by the victims, as symbolic of the sentiment of the Japanese without power or position. There was a small foreword to the last words:
I am relieved. I feel my heart is cleansed. I don’t know why, but I feel very happy. I am glad because I now know the joy of living for the first time in my life. But parting from all the people I know makes me sad.
Then Wada added:
Where
Does it flow to
This tiny river?
Somehow I feel with Kinoshita that these lines give expression to the religious tradition of the Japanese people. If we disregard this tradition, there will be no politics built upon the spontaneous thought of the Japanese people.
In the 30 years since the war the Emperor has grown into senility in the atmosphere of economic prosperity. In a press interview on television he openly stated that he was not aware of any such thing as responsibility for war, for he was not well versed in literary matters. So he seems to have sided with the Western ideology of technological expediency, disregarding the sentiment of little people and the victims of war.
If we look at the decision-making process during the Fifteen Years’ War, from 1931 to 1945, we find that the Emperor’s stand was sometimes manifestly against war and sometimes openly in favour of enlarging the war.27 It is not to be doubted that he made the decision to end the war by surrender. At the same time, the people of Japan, including those wh
o perpetrated the crimes of ill-treatment of prisoners and civilians in the occupied territories, took orders from their superiors in the belief that these were orders from the Emperor himself. The system was constructed that way. A close scrutiny of the records of the war does not suggest the conclusion that the Emperor was not responsible for the war of aggression. But was his role such that he was responsible for the atrocities of war? The complexity of the record does not lend itself to this conclusion.
Since the surrender and to this very day, the Japanese have retained affection and respect for the Emperor, as is shown by polls and surveys.28 It was therefore wise of the Occupation to retain the Emperor. But by doing so unconditionally, the Occupation paved the way for the belief that governing individuals need not take responsibility for their decisions. If the Emperor had been allowed or advised to retire at some point in the post-occupation years and to entrust mundane politics to a Prince Regent, the idea of responsible government in Japan would have been better served. As it is, the sentiment of the people with regard to the responsibility of the wartime government is a vague distrust connected with the belief that only the unlucky ones were caught and held responsible.
In the town of Nakanoj in Gunma Prefecture, an association was formed of those who were purged as leaders of militarism. The meeting, called the Azuma (East) Society, was set up with the termination of the Occupation in 1952 and continues to this day. Members talk about the memory of the war and the hardship of the days under the purge. In 1961 (the beginning of the time of prosperity for Japan), they set up a stone monument, 2 metres high and 1 metre wide, on the face of which was engraved The Monument to the Stupid’, intended as a testimony to future generations of the existence of stupid people. This seems to be a truthful expression of the sentiment of local sub-leaders who participated in the Fifteen Years’ War.29
There is an ambiguity in this symbol of stupidity, which cannot be clarified by interviews. Are these people ashamed of their stupidity? Or are they proud of it? Living thought cannot be expressed by propositions of exact meaning. The symbol contains a belief that the War Crimes Trials and the purge conducted during the U.S. Occupation was a process of random sampling which brought down many unfortunate deserving people. The monument symbolizes distrust of the government of Japan, of the U.S.A. and of other governments.
3
Comics in Postwar Japan
How did the genre which began as an imitation of the U.S. comic strip become so different over 60 years? Comic strips with the rendering of stories in pictures as well as words began in the U.S. towards the turn of the century. In 1893, James Swinnerton’s Little Bears made its appearance in the San Frandsco Examiner; in 1895, R.F.Outcoult’s The Yellow Kid appeared in The World. According to Coulton Waugh’s The Comics (1949), on 16 February 1896, The World used yellow ink on the Sunday edition of The Yellow Kid and from this was derived the term ‘yellow journalism’ to refer to sensational reporting.30 From then on comic strips became a major weapon in the competition between the newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer. Newspapers tried to attract new households by catching the interest of children with comic strips. Sometimes comic strips bearing the same titles were serialized by two competing newspapers, as in the case of The Yellow Kid and Katzenjammer Kids.
In 1919, Asahi newspapers sent a reporter by the name of Suzuki Bunshir (1890–1951) to the Peace Conference at Versailles. On the way he travelled through the U.S.A., where his attention was called to the role of comic strips. He came back to Japan with many samples, which he made use of after his appointment to the post of chief editor of the newly created graphic daily news (later changed to weekly), Asahi Graph, in 1923. In this graphic newspaper he began to serialize Bringing Up Father by George McManus, which had been serialized since 2 January 1913 in Hearst’s New York American.31 It was a story of a henpecked husband, which was quite new to the Japan of the 1920s, and it exercised some influence on marital relationships among upper middle-class city-dwellers in Japan. The hero of the story, Jiggs, has climbed high as a successful businessman, but still hankers after corned beef and cabbage, the favourite food of Irish working men. True to their newly won position, Jigg’s wife Maggie will not let him eat corned beef and cabbage, and this proves a source of never-ceasing family conflict. In addition, Jiggs needs contact with his old friends, most of them unsuccessful. The couple have a daughter, Nora, who looks exactly like a Ziegfeld girl, which again set the pattern for beauty in Japan in the 1920s. Mannequins in the department stores showed signs of Westernization just at this period, and this trend, although interrupted by the Fifteen Years’ War, continued, and after the Occupation reached the extreme point, where almost all the mannequins in the major department stores were either blonde or brunette. It was only after the 1960s that the Japanese recovery from a long-abiding inferiority complex began to allow mannequins of all varieties, some with black skin and black hair and some with yellow skin and black hair.
Suzuki Bunshir, the chief editor of the Asahi Graph, serialized the first comic strip in Japan, Shchan and the Squirrel. Suzuki conceived the idea of this comic strip while perusing many samples in his travels to Europe and the U.S.A. After his return, he gave his samples to his staff, explained his idea, and wrote out a plan of the first few instalments. One of his staff, a young viscount by the name of Oda Nobutsune, took on the task of continuing the story, and another, Kabashima Katsuichi, adept at pen drawing, accepted the task of illustration.
Shchan and the Squirrel is the story of a boy named Shchan who goes with his pet squirrel to an underground world, where he finds little mice pestered by goblins. Shchan, a courageous boy, fights many big goblins and becomes a great and respected mayor. The story reflects the dreams of any little boy who feels himself oppressed by adults and wishes for a chance to show his prowess and wisdom. The boy was named Shchan, because Japan was just at that time under the reign of Emperor Taish, and, ‘chan’ being a diminutive, Shchan was a common name for boys born between 1911 and 1925. Shchan made a great hit with city children, and was commercially exploited through the manufacture and sale of a type of cap worn by Shchan in the comic strip. The Osaka headquarters of the Asahi newspaper company held a free party for all Shchans in the vicinity of Osaka, and gave away Shchan caps presented by the hatters’ chain stores.32 A photograph of the party with all the Shchans in ‘Shchan caps’ appeared in both the Asahi newspaper and the Asahi Graph, giving great publicity to the Asahi newspaper and the hatters’ chain.
This episode shows that mass society was already in existence in January 1925, when the party was held. The mass communication media were already well enough developed to spread news instantly to a wide range of people with the income to buy newspapers and comics and Shchan caps, the aim of the enterprise.
The illustrator of Shchan and the Squirrel, Kabashima Katsuichi (1888–1965), learned the art of pen drawing by copying the ink illustrations in the National Geographic Magazine. Thus, Shchan and the Squirrel shows Western influence in both story and illustrations.
Japan, however, had its own long-standing tradition of cartoons and even narrative comics. The medium was not pen, which was a European import, but brush, which had come from China more than 1,000 years before. There is a natural transition from Chinese ideographs written with a brush to pictures. This can be seen from the diary of Niijima J,33 the first samurai to break the law of his feudal lord and the central government and cross the ocean to study in the late Edo period, a man who cannot be said to have had a special aptitude for drawing. Similar instances of this easy transition can be seen in the journal of Kishida Gink,34 written in the early 1860s when he went to Shanghai as an assistant to Dr Hepburn in compiling the first English-Japanese dictionary. Kishida Gink, together with Hamada Hikoz, once a ship-wrecked sailor, was one of the first Japanese to start a newspaper.
The earliest traces of cartoons are found on the back of panels of the Hryji Temple built in the Nara Period, one of the oldest wooden buildings extant in the world.35
In Nara, we find, among the remains of the Buddhist sutras, comic self-portraits drawn by the copyists, who made these self-pursuant quests as relaxation from their tedious task. One cartoon is dated AD745. It is also an example of an easy translation of brushwork from the copying of an ideograph to the spontaneous drawing of a comic figure.
In brushwork also, we have scrolls like the Scroll of Frolicking Animals and the Origin of Shigisan, both reputedly the work of Abbot Toba (AD1053–1140), the first cartoonist in Japan.36 He was born into the aristocracy and went into the priesthood, where he took part in the struggle for power and position, little to do with religion. By the strength of his associations, he was raised to the rank of the Chief Priest of the Tendai Sect, the highest position in the hierarchy of the sect, but quitted this position after occupying it for three days. On his deathbed, his disciples asked him who was going to succeed him as the resident priest of the temple. He answered that it should be decided by wrestling (although the wrestling was to be the arms only style).
The superb Scroll of Frolicking Animals calls to mind Walt Disney’s animated cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, a point made by an American student when Yashiro Yukio, an art historian, lectured at Harvard in the 1930s.37 Perhaps there may have been some influence on Disney. The Origin of Shigisan scroll shows a bird’s-eye view of the hungry people living on the ground from the camera angle of the rice storage flying in the sky to rescue them. In this the scroll can be said to be cinematographic, as well as comical, resembling the comic strips in the present century.
The legend that grew up around the personality of Abbot Toba later gave birth to the school of comic drawing called Toba-e. We will not go into the later development of comic drawing in Japan, except to mention that the great Zen priest Ikky (1394–1481) left a series of cartoons of animated skeletons suggestive of Possada in Mexico and of the later Disney cartoons of skeleton dances.38 Zen Buddhism is compatible with the brewing of comic spirit. Still later, Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) painted the Hokusai cartoons, and the serious administrator, Watanabe Kazan (1793– 1841) painted cartoons of young pupils playing practical jokes in a country school of the late Tokugawa period.