Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (14 page)

This love affair with the machinery of war was as conspicuous in Japan as it was in wartime America. In retrospect, it is easy and natural to dismiss Japan's war against China and the Allied Powers as hubristic and atrocious. Certainly the attack on the United States was foolhardy to an extreme. Scant forethought was given to the psychological impact the surprise attack would have on Americans; no one really anticipated the rage and thirst for revenge that Pearl Harbor triggered. Astonishingly, almost no serious systematic attention was given to the enormous industrial resources the United States would be able to mobilize in retaliation. Still, until it was no longer possible to deny inevitable defeat, the Japanese were able to take pride in their military machine (Figs. 3-10, 3-12, and 3-13).

Fig. 3-10.
Furoshiki
(wrapping cloth), “Mitsubishi Bomber.” Japan 1930s.
Y
Å«
zen-
dyed artificial silk; 29 ¼'' x 29¼''. Collection Tanaka Yoku, Tokyo. Courtesy of Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture; New York. Photographer: Nakagawa Tadaaki/Artec Studio.

The Mitsubishi Army Heavy Bomber Type (Ki-1-II) depicted on this
furoshiki
was produced between 1933 and 1936 and was subsequently superseded by a lighter and faster model. This is one of the most striking graphics to be found among wartime textiles, setting the sleek power of the war machine against a simple but captivating expanse of blue.

Fig. 3-11. Artist unknown,
Graduating Students Depart for the Front
. Japan, c. 1944–45. 50'' x 74
''. Collection National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

After the China War escalated into the larger Asia-Pacific War, the draft was extended to university students. Beginning in October 1944, many of these young men were assigned to pilot suicide missions against the advancing American forces. The veneration and heroic send-off they received is conveyed here, where the young recruit, still wearing his university uniform, has draped the Japanese flag around his neck.

At their peak of conquest in 1942, the emperor's soldiers and sailors controlled a vast area extending from deep in China on the
west to far into the Pacific on the east, and from the Aleutians on the north to the Philippines, Dutch East Indies, and British Burma in the south. The Japanese deployed advanced new tanks in the China war, as well as sophisticated long-range bombers and (from 1940) the best fighter plane in the world—the Mitsubishi Zero, which was also used to great advantage against the Americans and British in the early stages of the Pacific War. Honed and hardened by the combat in China, Japanese pilots were as good as any in the world until their ranks were decimated. They stood as idols to uncounted numbers of boys and young men.

Fig. 3-12. Unsold
omiyamairi
, “Battleships.” Japan late 1930s.
Y
Å«
zen
-dyed silk with embroidery (silk and metallic threads); 40 ½'' x 37”. Collection Alan Marcuson and Diane Hall, Belgium. Courtesy of Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture; New York. Photographer: Nakagawa Tadaaki/Artec Studio.

This dramatic rendering of a battleship, intended for use as a boy's shrine-visiting kimono, was never sold. The piece still carries its price tag, and the three places meant to depict a family crest are covered with protective white paper.

In the 1930s the Japanese navy developed a formidable armada
of advanced cruisers, destroyers, carriers, and submarines. In 1937 they began secret construction of the largest battleships ever seen—the ultimately ill-fated
Musashi
and
Yamato
. The attack on Pearl Harbor was an astounding tactical success, not simply because of its boldness but also because of the great armada of
modern warships and airplanes assembled for the attack and the use of cutting-edge torpedoes launched from the carrier-based planes. When Japanese aircraft sank the British battleship
Prince of Wales
and the cruiser
Repulse
off the coast of Malaya in the opening days of the Pacific War, they stunned the world and rang the death knell for the vaunted British empire on which the sun, it had been presumed, would never set.
¹¹
(The Japanese had no monopoly on hubris.)

More than old-fashioned samurai or piquant cherry blossoms, it was images of heroic fighting men and their stupendous modern machines that dominated the graphic propaganda of the war years. And it was this same sort of imagery that civilians wore when they literally wrapped themselves in war.

The sumptuous textile designs that graced patriotic kimono and a range of children's clothing over the course of Japan's fifteen-year war have no real counterpart outside Japan. No other nation's civilians, young and old alike, draped themselves so elegantly with images of holy war. No one else produced so many ingenious and individual designs—clothing that frequently blurred the line between fashion and original art.

In part, of course, this clothing reflected deep aesthetic traditions: the distinctive cut of kimono and
haori
coats and other traditional garments; the flamboyant designs that appeared on not only elite costume but also commoner clothing in the cities of the late feudal era; and a general tradition of artistic creativity that drew no clear line between so-called high art and the production of beautiful everyday artifacts. But the patriotic textiles with which the Japanese beautified war in the 1930s and early 1940s reflected more than just this deeply rooted aesthetic tradition. Like the war itself, they were, and consciously so, a reflection of Japan's modernity. There was nothing anachronistic about them.

In postwar scholarship about imperial Japan's road to war, it is possible to speak (oversimply) of two antithetical lines of analysis. The
more traditional approach stresses Japan's relative backwardness vis-à-vis the United States and great European powers—the persistence of “feudal remnants”; the failure to establish strong democratic institutions; the pathologies of power in a non-Western nation hell-bent on catching up to the West. More recent approaches tend to lay greater stress not only on the international milieu in which Japan went to war (imperialism, colonialism, global depression, spiraling arms races, rising nationalisms, virulent new ideologies, etc.), but also on the many manifestations of “modernism” and “modernity” that were beginning to flourish in Japan from the 1910s on.

This latter perspective has drawn renewed attention to the phenomenon known as Taish
ō
Democracy. The term derives from the reign name (
neng
ō
) during which Emperor Hirohito's father, the Taish
ō
emperor, reigned (1912–26), but its thrust is both broader than that short interlude and indifferent to the phenomenon of imperial rule per se. Taish
ō
Democracy is a rhetorical umbrella that covers an enormous range of dynamic and non-militaristic developments. Politically it refers to the strengthening of parliamentary politics, the appearance of cabinets headed by political parties and strongly backed by big-business interests, and the emergence of opposition movements involving labor activists, feminists, socialists, Communists, and a new intelligentsia strongly influenced by Marxist as well as liberal ideas. The reason that government watchdogs labored so zealously to purge Japanese heads of Anglo-American thought in the 1930s was that such influences were becoming widespread.

Socially and culturally, Taish
ō
Democracy was more amorphous but equally dynamic—a seemingly inexhaustible treasure house today for the historian drawn to developments such as urbanization, consumerism, entertainment, publishing for mass audiences, the fashions and frills and exuberant humor of an emergent bourgeois culture in general. The 1920s, for example, witnessed an ebullient vogue centering on the modern girl (
moga
) and modern boy (
mobo
)—sometimes alternatively referred to,
through Hollywood's mirror, as the “Clara Bow girl” and “Valentino boy.”
¹²
In the more rarefied ether of this new modernity, the Iwanami publishing house became associated with a cosmopolitan “Iwanami culture” featuring translation of European classics that included the liberal and left-wing canon. At the same time, the giant publisher K
ō
dansha promoted a less highbrow “K
ō
dansha culture” of lively publications aimed at a mass audience, including magazines that targeted housewives, young boys, and young girls. Almost overnight, a vibrant new children's culture of periodicals, books, comic strips, toys, games, and clothing began to be marketed.
¹³

Much of this popular culture found expression through music. Radios and phonographs appeared on the scene, and spirited, sentimental, lachrymose tunes filled the air like birdsong. Certain composers, lyricists, and singers were accorded celebrity status. The most immediate and overwhelming impression of a new era, however, was visual. Illustrators of children's books became household names, right through the war years. Youngsters, and not a few adults as well, became devoted fans of serialized comics such as “Norakuro,” which debuted in 1931 featuring a feisty black stray dog
who mobilized all the white dogs in the neighborhood. A talented cadre of serious cartoonists emerged to puncture the foibles of political and social trends (led by Kitagawa Rakuten from the turn of the century, and by Kond
ō
Hidez
ō
from the 1920s). The dreamy painter Takehisa Yumeji attracted an adoring audience with his renderings of fragile and melancholy young women who seemed suspended between the curtained world of traditional shops and restaurants and the splashy café society of the modern girl.