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Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student the Broader Question the Book Raises Is to What Ex- Soldiers 774 American Anthropologist • Vol. 109, No. 4 • December 2007 Although Miller is brave to put her body in the hands The seven soldiers whose writings are translated in the of quack practitioners, at times I felt that I wanted to hear book were student soldiers, three of whom were in the “Spe- more how “believers” in the beauty work experienced the cial Attack Forces” (tokubetsu kougeki tai). Most attended products and services. Also, for some of her sources, she re- Japan’s highest-ranking public or private universities and lies on surveys conducted in popular magazines. A discus- came from families of considerable learning and privilege. sion of their reliability—or, perhaps, of their complicity— (Of the approximately 4,000 young men recruited into the in the pushing of trends or conceptualizations of the body special forces, 1,000 were university students, graduated would have been quite useful to better understand Miller’s early so they could be drafted.) data and analysis. Finally, it would have been interesting The writings offer compelling reading, both for stu- had there been a discussion of the counter-globalization dents who may harbor stereotypical images of sword- of Japanese beauty ideas and products. Japanese cos- wielding samurai and resolute pilots, and for those metic companies and fashion designers, forms of “soft interested in prewar intellectual history. The students’ en- power,” are increasingly powerful players on the world gagement with thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Natsume market. Suseki opens a window into not only the ideas available to In conclusion, Beauty Up is well-written, accessible, and intellectual citizens in the years surrounding Japan’s mili- an excellent contribution to the recent discussions on glob- tary ambition but also into how these ideas were embraced. alization and identity. It should be of great interest to In that we cannot help admire the young men’s reflective scholars and provoke interesting classroom discussions in capacities, their willingness to wrestle with contradictions, courses on East Asia, gender, the body, globalization, and and their frank skepticism, Ohnuki-Tierney has accom- transnationalism. plished part of her mission. The waste of lives and minds is palpable. Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student The broader question the book raises is to what ex- Soldiers. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. Chicago: University of tent the writings of these seven young men shed light on Chicago Press, 2006. 227 pp. the ideological climate in Japan more broadly during these AMY BOROVOY years. Ohnuki-Tierney’s mandate to focus on the human Princeton University voices and feelings of the pilots and to “set aside national- ist myths that governments on both sides of the war have The Japanese kamikaze pilots of World War II, along with constructed” (p. xvii) is compelling, and yet the division be- the suicide bombers of contemporary Arab and Islamic tween the “private” world of family and emotion and the groups, have occupied a large, perhaps disproportional, “public” world of citizenship, community, and nation was space in the U.S. imagination of the Other. To knowingly remarkably porous in prewar and wartime Japan. The Meiji and voluntarily sacrifice one’s life for the sake of a perceived government had institutionalized the family as the founda- greater good challenges the sanctity of individual choice tional unit of the nation-state, and the notion of a holistic and right to self-determination deeply cherished in liberal, “community” (kyod¯ otai)¯ or “national family” (kazoku kokka), Enlightenment social thought. The present book seeks to accepted by local and national elites, extended the filial sen- disrupt the notion of the kamikaze pilots as “fanatics” (“the timents of love and respect for one’s parents to the em- utmost other” p. 35), eager to die for their honor, by reveal- peror. Loyalty to him was a “natural” manifestation of love ing “the human beings . behind the caricature” (p. xvii), of family, and loyalty to the country (kuni) was imagined by highlighting the coercive measures imposed to recruit in a multitude of more local and intimate ways, such as and discipline the pilots, and by analogizing the plight of love of mother, home, or hometown. The eminent prewar the pilots to other acts of unintended sacrifice, including philosopher, Watsuji Tetsur¯o, described the family as the the plight of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam (p. 23). “full realization of . the fusion of self and other,” writ- Above all, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney emphasizes the pi- ing, “the most striking feature of Japanese history is this lots’ cosmopolitanism. The analogies made in the wake readiness to stake one’s life for the sake of parent or child” of September 11, 2001, between the Japanese bombing (1961:143). of Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center attacks dis- Although the cosmopolitan pilots represented here, turbed the author. In addition to calling attention to the not surprisingly, were skeptical of official dogma, some of important structural differences between the two attacks the most engaging moments in their writings reveal them (the former being carried out in the context of world wrestling with elements of national ideology that appear war, between states, and directed toward a military target), to them as acceptable and compelling. Sasaki Hachir¯o, for she also implicitly distinguishes the suicide bombers (pre- example, who cites Watsuji Tetsur¯o, affirms his belief in sumably poor, disenfranchised, undereducated, and com- the emperor’s grace (ko’on,¯ p. 58) and in a utopian Japan mitted to religious fundamentalism) from the Japanese that transcends the “egotism” born of Western liberalism pilots she showcases, who were deeply immersed in en- and capitalism (p. 53), while simultaneously criticizing lightenment humanistic thought and who mulled over the wastes of war, the forced nature of national dogma, their imminent deaths, interrogating their legitimacy and and the foolish mismanagement of the military (Gunbu no purpose. obakayar¯ o!,¯ p. 57). Single Reviews 775 Ohnuki-Tierney’s Kamikaze Diaries, along with the re- Malaysia, and parts of the Island Southeast Asia were con- cent World War II film Letters from Iwo Jima, raises an impor- nected to the Asian continent. Christy Turner and James tant question: How can we portray the humanity of those Eder (ch. 7) also consider this hypothesis, and Hanihara who were (in hindsight) persuaded to betray good judg- even suggests that the Jamon, Ainu, early Southeast Asians, ment? Perhaps the answer lies not in singling out those few and North Americans could share a common Upper Pale- who managed to transcend dominant ideologies, nor in de- olithic ancestor in the eastern Asian region. This adds to monizing those who did not. Rather, the most revealing the set of hypothesized dispersals shaping Southeast Asia moments in both texts explore how such ideas were en- populations, from the spread of Homo erectus (∼ 2 m.y.a.) to forced, how they could be seen as compatible with broader, agricultural expansion from north and east Asia (after 3,000 dominant belief systems, and how thoughtful social actors B.C.E.). grapple with cultural contradictions. Part 2, on skeletal evidence regarding human health and well being, adds a social dimension. As Oxenham et al. REFERENCE CITED discuss in chapter 11, rice agriculture did not bring the same Watsuji, Tetsur¯o changes in dental pathology to Southeast Asia that arrived 1961[1935] A Climate. Geoffrey Bownas, trans. Tokyo: Ministry with the Neolithic elsewhere in the world. This partly re- of Education. flects rice being kinder to oral health than other Old World The Bioarchaeology of Southeast Asia. Marc Oxenham grains but also social aspects, particularly relations between and Nancy Tayles, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University females and males. Christopher King and Lynette Norr (ch. Press, 2006. 360 pp. 10) find isotopic evidence that males and females at Ban Chiang had different access to meat and plant foods, and ALEX BENTLEY Michele Douglas (ch. 9) finds that only female dental health Durham University declined with the intensification of rice agriculture at Non Nok Tha after 1500 B.C.E. Douglas suggests that females Bioarchaeology—the biologically informed study of archae- adopted more agricultural activities (and diet) than males. ological skeletons—provides evidence on prehistoric hu- In fact, if nonintensive horticulture was the norm for early man demography, health, and well-being on an individ- agricultural Southeast Asia, then probably many commu- ual scale that the genetics of modern regional populations nities were matrilineal and matrilocal, with women as the cannot resolve. In their aim to “spark wider interest in main producers (cf. Martin and Voorhies 1975). This is sup- the bioarchaeology of Southeast Asia,” Marc Oxenham and ported by archaeology (Higham and Thosarat 1994), genet- Nancy Tayles succeed: this volume is replete with fasci- ics (e.g., Hamilton et al. 2005), and isotopic analysis (e.g., nating, even startling, insights about human prehistory in Bentley et al. 2005). the region, all derived primarily from physical study of the By assemblage of related evidence, Bioarchaeology in skeletons. Southeast Asia suggests a model more complex than sim- Part 1 concerns human dispersal, interpreted through ple migration versus adoption models, yet one that is still multivariate statistical analyses of skeletal measurements. comprehensible. As David Bulbeck and Adam Lauer (ch. 6) The samples mostly represent mainland Southeast Asia point out, indigenous foragers and migrant farmers could from the last 10,000 years, with a particular focus on have engaged in substantial, long-term interaction, includ- the effect of the spread of agriculture from North and ing sex-specific intermarriage (cf. Zvelebil 2006). This situa- East Asia, and the degree of its adoption by indigenous tion would vary considerably with regional geography and Australo-Melanesians versus migration (demic diffusion) of historical contingency, inviting multiple and complex pos- intrusive farming populations.
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