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

  The case of Ōkōchi Kazuo (1905-1984) was fundamentally different, although he was concerned with economics, as was Yamakawa. Ōkochi was a technocrat during the war years, recognizing the militarist Government's role in promoting efficiency and criticizing it where it lacked efficiency. Because he was useful to the Government in this role, Okōchi never lost his position at Tokyo Imperial University, and in the 1960s, during the period of high economic growth, he became the university's President. Ōkōchi was one of the most brilliant exponents of what is called ‘Production Theory’, a school of thought which greatly influenced the Government in the war years. Many ex-Marxists took refuge in this theory after their tenkō from communism. Production Theory advocates the rational reconstruction of the social structure in such a way as best to serve the aim of the development of production in a given country, and suggests concrete plans for state intervention in various areas.68 Ōkōchi says that he arrived at this theory in a treatise entitled ‘Social Policy Change Considered in the Light of Concept Formation’, produced in 1931 when he was a twenty-six-year-old assistant in the Economics Department of Tokyo Imperial University. Two years later he wrote another treatise entitled ‘On the Theory of Legislation for the Protection of Labour’. In these two papers, Ōkōchi claimed that in capitalist countries social policies are shaped according to the interests of capital. In the earliest stage of capitalism, exploitation in the interests of capital brings about a weakening of the labour force. Realizing this drawback, capital must then adopt legislation to protect the labour force. At a still later stage, capital tries to ensure the supply of labour by partially satisfying the demands of the labour movement. At this stage, social policy aims at social insurance and industrial peace. These policies are against the interests of capital in its specific, individual manifestation, but reflect the interests of the capitalist economy as a whole, which interests prevail in the face of resistance by individual enterprise.

  This theory was the basis of criticism of the wartime Government by Ōkōchi and the Production Theorists. Often employed on Government committees, they saw how the war destroyed traditional social customs and rationalized social policy. Their analysis and advice constituted the rationalist element in the Imperial Rule Assistance Organization, the organization which promoted the invasion of China and, later, the fatal collision with the superior military power of the United States and Britain.

  When Ōkochi was still an assistant at Tokyo Imperial University, the professor of his department, Kawai Eijirō, came under severe pressure from the Government for adhering to his old liberalist position, and was forced to resign his post. Ōkochi, together with several colleagues, tendered but then withdrew their resignations. As a result, Okōchi was called a traitor by the followers of Kawai. Kawai was brought to trial for his statements, and fought bravely until he died of malnutrition and Basedow's disease. In abandoning his professor and benefactor in order to keep his position, Ōkōchi revealed a moral system in direct contrast to that of the ‘samuraized’ post-Meiji Japanese intellectuals, and in this he resembled Yamakawa Hitoshi. He took a careful stand from which, without deviating from his rationalist position, he could covertly criticize the wartime Government while still avoiding any open clash such as that in which his professor, Kawai Eijirō, engaged. He thus followed the path of camouflaged resistance. This resistance, however, became in effect collaboration; in the process of concealment the camouflage was transformed into actual tenkō. The disguise gradually became the reality.69

  At the end of the war, 6,600,000 Japanese were stationed abroad. Repatriation from territories occupied by the United States, Britain, and Holland - Korea, Taiwan, the South Sea islands, and China - was completed by 1947. About 600,000 men who were supposed to be still in Russian territory did not return for a long time. The loss of these 600,000, together with the Red phobia which had been spread by the pre-war Government, caused great unrest. The bitter social feeling of the period between 1947 and 1950 is revealed by the death of a certain philosophy student.70 The circumstances of this were as follows. A rumour was spread that the Chairman of the Japan Communist Party, Tokuda Kyūichi, had requested the Soviet Government not to return the Japanese soldiers detained in Siberia unless they professed belief in communism. On 1 March 1950, the British representative to the Far East Commission, Hodgson, stated that if the rumour were true Tokuda was a traitor to his country and had committed a grave crime. He added that General Mac Arthur should take severe action against Tokuda. These words set the Japanese Diet in motion, and special committees were set up by Parliament to investigate whether the so-called Tokuda Request had really been made. An interpreter who was alleged to have transmitted the message to the Japanese prisoners in the Siberian camp was brought to the hearing. Kan Sueharu, then thirty-three years old, was a student of philosophy at Tokyo Education University and Kyoto Imperial University. He gave the following answer to the questions put to him by the Upper House committee:

  Of course, I am not able to say anything about the general question of whether the Tokuda Request was made or not. I will speak only of the facts I came to know in relation to my work as an interpreter at the time.

  The time was September 15 1949, the place the 9th Karaganda Camp. . . . The question was when we would be returned to Japan, and whether the Soviet government's statement that the Japanese would be returned by November applied to us. Until then all our questions had been answered by Camp Commander Shafeef, but he did not answer this one, but instead made a gesture with his jaw to the political officer sitting next to him, as if to say ‘you answer’. Then the political officer, First Lieutenant Elmaraev, stood up and answered. This is how I remember his answer: [Russian omitted] Well, since in my experience as a translator I have always believed that a direct translation is the best, I remember translating it as follows:

  ‘When you can go home depends on you. Work here conscientiously, become good democrats, and you can return home. Japan Communist Party General Secretary Tokuda expects you to return not as reactionary elements but as well-prepared democrats.’

  In the above I have stated only what occurred at that place and time.

  Kan gave the same testimony to the Lower House committee. The committees of both Houses were dissatisfied with Kan's answer, which was not enough to incriminate Tokuda. They interrogated him further, accusing him of deliberately softening the original word from ‘request’ to ‘expect’ because he was a Communist Party member and a supporter of Tokuda. The newspapers published exaggerated reports on the hearings, and Kan received threatening letters from anonymous rightists all around the country. On 6 April he committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a train. In his pocket there was a small copy of The Apology of Socrates by Plato. After his death his numerous manuscripts were published in the form of two books, The Logic of Life and The Logic of Philosophy. It is now obvious, with the objectivity of hindsight, that an interpreter in a prisoner-of-war camp, far from the capitals of both Japan and the U.S.S.R., could not have given decisive evidence on whether there had been a request by the Chairman of the Japan Communist Party to Stalin. He only interpreted the words spoken by an officer of the Soviet Army, a subordinate in the Soviet power system. The question of whether Kan had used the word ‘expect’ or ‘request’ was irrelevant to the enquiry. Kan, rather than adjusting his testimony to suit his ideological position, had simply continued to recount the factual details, regardless of their ideological consequences. But he had put too much faith in the belief that truth would transcend ideological conflict and be accepted, and his testimony was rejected by the committee. These events and Kan Sueharu's suicide illustrate well the tension in Japan in 1950 over Soviet Russia's attitude to the 600,000 Japanese prisoners.

  Among these 600,000, there were a certain number of writers sympathetic to Marxism. Among these were Takasugi Ichiro (1908- ), who wrote In the Shadow of Aurora, and Hasegawa Shirō (1909- ), who wrote Siberian Story and The Crane. In these books, which were widely read
in post-war Japan, Takasugi and Hasegawa showed the reality of life in Soviet Russia,71 something no pre-war leftist writer in Japan had been able to do. The prisons of a society reveal the fundamental nature of that society, stripped of the veneer laid over it by grandiose government proclamations. Takasugi portrays the pettiness of the officers who supervised the allotment of tasks to the prisoners, and the contrasting and reckless generosity of the Russian prisoners. Beneath the surface of rigid bureaucracy lay the Russian people and their unchanged way of life. When his turn came to return to his home-country, Takasugi told his fellow-prisoners that he would remember with nostalgia the long meal queues which the prisoners used to form without orders, because they exemplified the spirit of equality which he considered was still lacking in Japanese society. He saw this spirit of equality as the foundation of Russian social life and believed it to be a product of the Revolution.

  Hasegawa also provides a telling portrait of a Japanese ex-officer who collaborated with the Soviet Government in the ‘democratization’ of the prisoners. He stood in front of the assembled prisoners, including some who had been under his command, tore off the decorations he had received from the Emperor and trampled on them, as a symbol of his disgust with the reactionary era. Hasegawa discovered later that the ex-officer had preserved the decorations and carefully hidden them at the bottom of his luggage. This incident exemplifies the superficiality of the Marxism-Leninism manufactured in the prison camps, which evaporated with the return of the prisoners to Japan. Japan Communist Party General Secretary Tokuda's expectation or request, whichever it was, proved futile.

  Ishiwara Yoshiro (1915-1977), one of the most remarkable poets of post-war Japan, suffered a longer imprisonment because he knew the Russian language and for this reason was labelled a spy and a war criminal. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court. The judge, an old colonel, read the sentence and then leaped up from his chair, picked up a paper bag, and left the courtroom precipitously. Ishiwara was left with the impression that the old man had been instructed by his wife to go to the market on the way home and buy something for dinner, and that his mind had been elsewhere as he was reading the sentence. Ishiwara was sentenced without cause and also released without cause, in the late 1950s, after the death of Stalin. He returned to a Japan which had already recovered from the shock of defeat, and which was now progressing towards an unprecedented prosperity. Japan was already forgetting the war. Ishiwara's parents had died while he was in Siberia, but he expected a welcome from his siblings, kin, and fellow-countrymen. He expected them to understand that he and the 600,000 others who had been punished had been chosen at random as scapegoats for the whole of the Japanese people who had undertaken the needless war. Instead of receiving a welcome, he was greeted by the head of the family, who represented the rest, with the words, ‘If you are a communist, we will not let you into the house’. The gulf between the unjust hardship of his years in Siberia and the complacency of the Japanese people, now cushioned in undreamed-of prosperity, made a poet of Ishiwara. The impetus came from hearing, after so many years, people conversing in Japanese, and from speaking Japanese himself. Ishiwara's long essay, The Force of Routine, gives a clear picture of the symbiotic relationship which developed among the prisoners, who were strangers and yet closely bound by the common struggle to stay alive. The book portrays the prisoners’ resentment towards the prison officials and their consideration for one another. This experience was shared by 600,000 Japanese prisoners who were detained in Siberia, 55,000 of whom died.

  Apart from such works, written by intellectuals, there are the records left by a great variety of other former prisoners. One example is the book by Itō Toshio, a company employee from Aomori, called White Angara River - A Record of the First Irkutsk Prison Camp. He and his fellow former prisoners of the First Irkutsk Prisoners Camp formed a group called The Angara Society’ (Angara being the name of the river that flowed by the camp), which met once a year. Ito's book records the common memories of these ex-prisoners, which were revived in the annual reunions. Itō’s conclusion and that of his colleagues was that the Red Country was not evil, as their Government had claimed, but also that it was not a very pleasant place to live in.72 This appears to have been the general opinion of those non-leftists who experienced life in the U.S.S.R. They observed that not only the Japanese prisoners but also the Russian people in general suffered from a shortage of food. They saw, for instance, women eating hard and tasteless cabbage hearts. They also observed that the detainment of 600,000 soldiers after the ceasefire and the use of their physical labour was as clever as it was unscrupulous. Itō even suggests that the 55,000 deaths were caused by Japanese susceptibility to the cold of the Siberian winter, rather than Russian ill-treatment. In fact, little resentment against the Soviet Government, and still less against the people, is expressed in such accounts. This is probably representative of the feelings of most Japanese with no particular political ideology. This lack of ill-feeling is the background to Japan's failure to press the claim to two islands in the Kuriles, Etorofu and Kunashiri, which had been recognized by the Russians as Japanese territory before the Revolution.73 Current opinion in Japan seems to be that as long as Japan is under the U.S. nuclear umbrella it should not antagonize its neighbour, the opposing super-power.

  ____________

  * The word ‘lynch’ is used here to designate cases in which a political group takes it upon itself to judge and administer physical punishment, usually a beating, to one or more persons, whether or not the punishment results in death.

  9 The Philosophy of Glorious Self-destruction*

  A volume of short stories written by novelists in Taiwan was recently translated and published in Japan.74 In the title story, ‘Sayonara, Tsai Cheng’, seven important Japanese businessmen travel to Taiwan to visit a certain company. The protagonist, a Taiwanese employee of the company, is given the task of entertaining the visitors with a night spent at a resort near the capital in the company of some Taiwanese women. It so happens that the resort is the hero's own home town, and he is forced to select girls to entertain the visitors from among his old playmates. After a difficult night, the hero and the Japanese return to the capital, and are joined on the train by some university students. The students ask the hero to interpret so that they can converse with the Japanese men. Wishing to make a good impression, they ask him to say that they are about to graduate and intend to travel to Japan to study Chinese literature. Instead, the interpreter says, These Taiwanese students want to know whether you were in the war.’ The reply is ‘yes’, and the hero translates the next remark of the students as, These Taiwanese students want to know where you went.’ To this the businessmen answer, ‘China’, and the interpreter continues, These students want to know what you did when you were soldiers in China.’ As the conversation progresses, the businessmen become more and more uncomfortable, and finally they remark that the Taiwanese students seem to be very studious and they would be greatly welcomed in Japan. The interpreter translates this to the students as The businessmen want to know why you choose Japan to study Chinese literature’. Then the students begin to feel uncomfortable. In parting at the station, the directors say to the students, Tsai Cheng’ (good-bye), apparently the only Chinese they can remember from their days in China. From this comes the title of the story, ‘Sayonnara, Tsai Cheng’.

  The story portrays the discomfort of the older generation of Japanese with the memory of the war. They are reluctant to confront the memory directly but prefer to bury it deep down. Although members of the younger generation are curious about their fathers’ role in the war, their parents are often reluctant to discuss it. There is thus a division between the generations in this regard. The investigation of how Japanese remember, interpret, express, and distort the events of the war can be a clue to the nature of Japanese culture. With this in mind, I will detail the principal military events of the Fifteen Years’ War.

  On 19 September 1931, a few staff offic
ers of the Japanese Army stationed in Manchuria, in north-eastern China, placed 3. bomb on the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railroad, three miles north of Mukden. The action was taken without previously informing the Commander-in-Chief or the Chief-of-Staff. The mastermind of the bombing was Lieutenant-Colonel Ishiwara Kanji, an Army officer in Manchuria, who believed that Japan needed to build a military bulwark in Manchuria in preparation for a final world war to be fought between Japan and the Western countries. The bomb was actually exploded by Lieutenant Kawamoto Suemori and a few soldiers under his command, but the incident was blamed on the Chinese by Army Headquarters and the Japanese papers adopted this explanation. The Japanese Army acted quickly to ‘avenge’ the bombing. Thus began the fighting which, in the absence of a declaration of war, came to be called The Manchurian Incident’.

  Staff officers of the Japanese Army conspired further to make the deposed Emperor of China emperor of a new state, called Manchukuo, in 1932. In defence of this internationally condemned action, Japan seceded from the League of Nations. This sequence of annexing territory by military force, forcing acceptance of the fait accompli, establishing a puppet government, and seceding from the League of Nations in the face of its refusal to recognize the new state was a pattern later to be followed by Italy and Germany. The Manchurian Incident was the overture to World War II, and, for Japan, was the beginning of the Fifteen Years’ War.75 Although it was the deliberate policy of the government of the time to conceal the continuity of this warfare, a true historical perspective can only be gained by linking the war with China and the war with the United States and Britain.76