Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (41 page)

3. “Japan's Beautiful Modern War” appeared in a lavishly illustrated exhibition catalog edited by Jacqueline M. Atkins under the title
Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States, 1931–1945
(Yale University Press, for The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture, 2005), 93–113.

4. “‘An Aptitude for Being Unloved': War and Memory in Japan” appeared in Omer Bartov, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Nolan, eds.,
Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century
(The New Press, 2002), 217–41, 313–21.

5. “The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory” originally appeared in a symposium published in
Diplomatic History
19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 275–95. The symposium was subsequently reprinted as a book edited by Michael J. Hogan under the title
Hiroshima in History and Memory
(Cambridge University Press, 1996), 116–42.

6. “A Doctor's Diary of Hiroshima, Fifty Years Later” was written as a foreword to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Michihiko Hachiya,
Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6–September 30, 1945: Fifty Years Later
(University of North Carolina Press, 1995), v–xvii.

7. “How a Genuine Democracy Should Celebrate Its Past” appeared as an op-ed in the
Chronicle of Higher Education
, June 16, 1995.

8. “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems: External Policy and Internal Conflict” appeared in Andrew Gordon, ed.,
Postwar Japan as History
(University of California Press, 1993), 3–33.

9. “Mocking Misery: Grassroots Satire in Defeated Japan” appeared in Gail Lee Bernstein, Andrew Gordon, and Kate Wildman Nakai, eds.,
Public Spheres, Private Lives in Modern Japan, 1600–1950
(Harvard University Asia Center, 2005), 345–74. This volume was a Festschrift in honor of Professor Albert M. Craig.

10. “Lessons from Japan about War's Aftermath” appeared as an op-ed in the
New York Times
, October 27, 2002.

11. “The Other Japanese Occupation” was published in
The Nation
, July 7, 2003. A revised excerpt from this, focusing on imperial Japan's grand policy in China including Manchuria, was published in Stephen R. MacKinnon, Diana Lary, and Ezra F. Vogel, eds.,
China at War: Regions of China, 1937–1945
(Stanford University Press, 2007), 17–21.

NOTES

1
. James Morley, “Introduction,” in James Morley, ed.,
Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan
(Princeton University Press, 1972).

2
. Shlomo Avineri,
Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx
(Cambridge University Press, 1971), 65.

3
. Cf. Morley,
Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan
, 12.

This chapter summarizes some of the themes developed at length in my
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
(Pantheon Books, 1986), where extensive annotations can be found. Here I have focused in particular on racial language in comparative perspective.

1
. “Answer to Japan,” 20. This report appears in several archival collections at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Cf. “Bonner Frank Fellers Collection,” boxes 1 and 15; also “U.S. Army Forces in the Pacific, Psychological Warfare Branch,” box l.

2
. From Hino's 1942 book
B
ā
t
ā
n Hant
ō
K
ō
j
ō
ki
, as quoted in Haruko Taya Cook, “Voices from the Front: Japanese War Literature, 1937–1945” (M.A. thesis in Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1984), 59–60.

3
. I have addressed these themes in contemporary U.S.-Japan relations in greater detail in
Japan in War and Peace
(The New Press, 1993), 279–335.

1
. Some of the themes concerning Japanese, American and British attitudes during the war that are touched on in this essay were introduced in John W. Dower,
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
(Pantheon Books, 1986), and are reprised in chapter 2 in this present volume. Academic and polemical writings on the Rape of Nanking have proliferated in recent years. For a balanced overview of Chinese, Japanese, and English-language writings, see Daqing Yang, “Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing,”
American Historical Review
(June 1999): 842–65. See also Joshua A. Fogel, ed.,
The Nanking Massacre in History and Historiography
(University of California Press, 2000), which also includes an essay by Yang.

2
. For general fatality estimates, see Dower,
War Without Mercy
, 293–300. The Japanese figures would include more than 100,000 killed in successive air raids on Tokyo, beginning with the great attack of March 9–10, 1945; another 200,000 to 300,000 killed in the conventional firebombing of over 63 other Japanese cities that followed the first Tokyo air raid; more than 200,000 killed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (an estimated 140,000 dead) and Nagasaki (an estimated 75,000 dead); some 100,000 to 150,000 civilians killed in the Battle of Okinawa that ended in June 1945; and perhaps 100,000 civilians who perished attempting to return from Manchuria in the wake of Japan's defeat.

3
. For an extended analysis of the cherry-blossom imagery, see Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney,
Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalism: The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History
(University of Chicago Press, 2002). The following song, popular among naval cadets and titled “Cherry Blossoms of the Same Class,” is quoted in ibid., 141: “You and I are two cherry blossoms. We bloom in the shadow of a pile of sand bags; / Since we are flowers, we are doomed to fall. Let us fall magnificently for the country. . . . / You and I are two cherry blossoms. Even if we fall separately, / the capital of flowers is Yasukuni Shrine. We meet each other in the treetops in the spring.”

4
. The full imperial rescripts announcing both the initiation and end of the war are reprinted in numerous sources. See, for example, the appendices in Edwin P. Hoyt,
Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict, 1853–1952
(Da Capo Press, 1986). Hoyt notes that the 1941 rescript was reprinted every month.

5
. For the full 1937 tract, see Japan Ministry of Education, “
Kokutai no Hongi”: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan
, trans. John O. Gauntlett and ed. Robert K. Hall (Harvard University Press, 1949). The 1940 “Way of the Subject” appears as an appendix in Otto D. Tolischus,
Tokyo Record
(Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943), 405–27. Also of interest in this regard is Robert K. Hall,
Sh
Å«
shin: The Ethics of a Defeated Nation
(Columbia University Press, 1949). The Japanese cartoon is reproduced in Dower,
War Without Mercy
, 191.

6
. For a very explicit expression of this, see Nyozekan Hasegawa, “Beautifying War,” in the English-language magazine
Nippon
16 (1938): 18ff. Hasegawa was a well-known Japanese cultural commentator.

7
. The Kyoto School of philosophers, which took its name from Kyoto Imperial University and was associated with the particularly influential ideas of Nishida Kitar
ō
, has attracted close scrutiny (and considerable controversy) in recent years concerning its intellectual contributions to the rise of nationalism and militarism in Japan. See James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, eds.,
Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism
(University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994).

8
. See Tetsuo Najita and H.D. Harootunian, “Japanese Revolt against the West: Political and Cultural Criticism in the Twentieth Century,” in Peter Duus, ed.,
The Cambridge History of Japan: Volume 6—The Twentieth Century
(Cambridge University Press, 1988), 711–74. This volume includes survey articles by leading Japanese and non-Japanese scholars.

9
. On the modernity of Manchuria and Japan's accelerated overseas expansion in the 1930s, see Louise Young,
Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism
(University of California Press, 1998); also Bill Sewell, “Reconsidering the Modern in Japanese History: Modernity in the Service of the Prewar Japanese Empire,”
Japan Review
16 (2004): 213–58; this “Journal of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies” is published by Nichibunken (Kyoto).

10
. For a standard periodization of Japan's modern economic growth that calls attention to the “second industrial revolution,”
see Kazushi Ohkawa and Henry Rosovsky, “A Century of Japanese Economic Growth,” in William W. Lockwood, ed.,
The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan
(Princeton University Press, 1965), 47–92.

11
. For concise general discussions of Japan at war, see Ronald H. Spector,
Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan
(New York: Vintage Books, 1985), especially chapter 2 on Japanese states of mind prior to Pearl Harbor; also Gordon W. Prange, with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon,
Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History
(McGraw Hill, 1986), especially chaps. 29–31. The most accessible critical work by a Japanese scholar, drawing on voluminous Japanese-language resources is Sabur
ō
Ienaga,
The Pacific War, 1931–1945
(New York: Pantheon, 1978; originally published in Japanese in 1968).

12
. The modern girl persona emerges vividly in Tanizaki Jun'ichir
ō
's novel
Chijin no Ai
(A Fool's Love) serialized in 1924–25 and translated by Anthony Chambers as
Naomi
(Vintage, 2001). For a recent scholarly study, see Barbara Sato,
The New Japanese Woman: Modernity, Media and Women in Interwar Japan
(Duke University Press, 2003). In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the modern girl and modern boy vogue morphed into a more twisted popular trend identified as
ero-guro-nansensu
—borrowed English for the erotic, grotesque, and nonsensical. Here, the rise of militarism and intensification of domestic repression were accompanied by decadent, perverted, and manic behavior and expression comparable to that taking place in Germany at the same time.

13
. The sumptuously illustrated magazine
Taiy
ō
has devoted a number of special issues (
Bessatsu Taiy
ō
) to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children's culture in Japan. See, for example,
Kodomo Asobish
ō
(Spring 1985, on toys, games, and the like);
Kodomo no Sh
ō
wa shi, 1935–1945
(August 1986); and
Ehon
and
Ehon II
(Spring 1984 and Autumn 1984, on illustrated books).

14
. For an outstanding collection of poster art from 1860 to 1956, see Japan Art Directors Group, ed.,
Nihon no k
ō
koku bijutsu—Meiji, Taish
ō
, Sh
ō
wa
(Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1967).

15
. The classic Japanese survey of prewar Japanese photography is Nihon Shashinka Ky
ō
kai (Japan Photographers Association), ed.,
Nihon shashin shi, 1840–1945
(Heibonsha, 1971); for an English adaptation with an introduction and bibliography on the visual history of modern Japan by John W. Dower, see
A Century of Japanese Photography
(Pantheon, 1980). For a broad recent survey, see Anne Wilkes Tucker et al.,
A History of Japanese Photography
, the catalogue for a major exhibition at the
Houston Museum of Fine Arts (Yale University Press, 2003). Iwanami's
Nihon no shashinka
(Photographers of Japan) series consists of forty slim, elegant volumes, the first of which appeared in 1998.

16
. Modern Japanese art is reproduced in numerous Japanese publications. For an excellent exhibition catalogue in English, focusing on Western-influenced oil painting, see Sh
Å«
ji Takashina and J. Thomas Rimer, with Gerald D. Bolas,
Paris in Japan: The Japanese Encounter with European Painting
(The Japan Foundation and Washington University, 1987).

17
. On the “war responsibility” debates in Japan, see Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds.,
Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States
(M.E. Sharpe, 2000), especially the contribution by Gavan McCormack; also John W. Dower, “‘An Aptitude for Being Unloved': War and Memory in Japan,” reprinted in chapter 4 in this present volume.

18
. The more intriguing wartime propaganda campaign in China, still largely withheld from scholarly or popular scrutiny, would be the films, posters, and general sloganeering the Japanese directed, with Chinese collaboration, at the Chinese audience.

19
. Capra is quoted in “Japan at War: Rare Films from World War II,” the informative program that accompanied a 1987 presentation by the Japan Society of New York of twenty-seven Japanese films made between 1937 and 1947. The films, all subtitled for this retrospective, were subsequently returned to the National Archives (most of them had been seized at the outset of World War II)—a treasure trove essentially rendered inaccessible again to the general English-speaking public. An analysis of Japanese war films based on this series is given in “Japanese Cinema Goes to War,” in Dower,
Japan in War and Peace
, 33–54.

20
. See, for example, the Hollywood formulas delineated in Jeanine Basinger,
The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre
(Columbia University Press, 1986), and “The Beast in the Jungle,” chapter 9 in Clayton R. Koopes and Gregory D. Black,
Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies
(The Free Press, 1987).