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Japansociety Japan Book Review Editor: Sean Curtin Volume 1 No japansociety Japan Book Review Editor: Sean Curtin Volume 1 No. 5 September 2006 Managing Editor: Clare Barclay Contents eptember 2006 will be remembered as a historic month for Japan (1) Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese with the birth of the first male heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne Student Soldiers Sin 41 years and the election of a new prime minister to replace the (2) The Thought War: Japanese Imperial flamboyant Junichiro Koizumi. The focus of this issue of Japan Book Propaganda Review also has a strong historic flavour with an excellent selection of new (3) Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of reviews. War diaries and memoirs form this issue's main theme, with sev- Ordinary Japanese eral new books offering deep insights into people's wartime thinking and (4) In the Faraway Mountains and Rivers: reasoning while powerfully chronicling the terrible human suffering of More Voices From A Lost Generation of ordinary individuals during the period. We also review two books that Japanese Students analyze the propaganda and philosophy that underpinned the wartime (5) Japanese Telecommunications: Market military regime. As usually, we also have a stimulating selection of reviews and Policy in Transition covering a broad spectrum of topics, this time ranging from Japan's rapid- (6) The Opening of Japan 1853-1855 (7) Rondon nikki, 1936-7 ly expanding telecommunications sector to noteworthy Samurai battles, (8) Frog in the Well: Portraits of Japan by plus our new theatre review feature of major Japanese productions staged Watanabe Kazan 1793-1841 in the UK. All of this is only a fraction of what you will find available on (9)Defending Japan's Pacific War: The Kyoto our website, which contains many more new reviews. School Philosophers and Post-White Power Sean Curtin (10) Japanese Samurai and battles up to 1603 (11) The Chichibu Mikado (12)The Japanese Mission to Europe, 1582- New reviews: www.japansociety.org.uk/reviews.html 1590: The Journey of Four Samurai Boys Archive reviews: http://www.japansociety.org.uk/reviews_archive.html through Portugal, Spain and Italy Kamikaze Diaries: unnecessarily and without delaying Japan's inevitable defeat. They were not as Japanese propagandists would have us Reflections of Japanese believe martyrs for the Emperor and for Japan. Hayashi Student Soldiers, Tadao, one of those whose writings are quoted in this volume in 1945, foresaw what Japan faced. He wrote a poem which reads as follows: by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, The End of Imperial Japan University of Chicago Press, 2006, 246 Ruining and crumbling pages, ISBN 0-226-61950-8 (available Decadence via internet from Blackwells in Oxford Nothing will be left for £16 plus postage). The end of all; All will crumble Japan will meet its finale Review by Sir Hugh Cortazzi That taboo Catastrophe Many myths have grown up about the young Japanese men who were forced to carry out suicidal attacks on allied ships in It is also a myth that these young men were martyrs to be the final stages of the Pacific War. They were for the most part compared with the suicide bombers who attacked the twin not volunteers in the real sense of the word. They were towers and the London underground. They did not become ordered to 'volunteer' and knew that they were in any case kamikaze out of a religious fervour whether for the Emperor destined to die. Many of them, as these diaries reveal were or for Japan. They did not attack civilian targets and were not sensitive and educated young men, who were among the terrorists. brightest of their generation. Their diaries and letters make tragic reading. This book is a reminder not only of the brainwashing of the young carried out by the pre-war Japanese military but also of The nationalists of today, who speak of these youngsters as the brutal treatment of anyone thought to be an intellectual. heroes and quote their sacrifice as beacons for the "Kasuga Takeo never recovered from the innumerable regeneration of modern Japan, and the Yasukuni shrine and beatings he received on the base. His superiors told him that the Yushukan museum, which glory in their deaths, delude corporal punishment would instil a 'soldier's fighting spirit' in themselves and the Japanese people. They died totally japansociety Japan Book Review: September 2006 him. They were supposed to die. From the time they received Thought Warriors, Diarists, and Fallen their assignment they no longer belonged to the world. They could not return even if they could not locate the enemy. If Students they came back safely they were liable to be shot." Death as a (A different version of this article appeared in Monumenta kamikaze was perhaps more bearable than dying from being Nipponica, summer 2006) beaten or shot by superior officers. It is noteworthy that: "When the operation was instituted in October 1944, not a The Pacific War was the most traumatic event in the single officer who had been trained at the military academies modern histories of Japan, China, the United States, and many volunteered to sortie as a pilot; all knew too well that it was a other nations. No wonder that more than sixty years after it meaningless mission ending in death." ended it still attracts attention and stirs debate. In the various writings about the war, the former black and white It is hard to read the accounts of the loneliness and anguish stereotypes have given way to more shaded presentations, in of the final meetings and moments of these young men which heroes and villains are not always distinguishable. The sentenced to die for an Emperor and a country which did not three interesting books under review here open a window know or care about this tragic loss of life. through which we can see how the war was presented and perceived in Japan. Reading them together helps us Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's selections from the diaries and understand the atmosphere in which the Japanese lived in letters of six of the tokkotai pilots, who never came back, give those turbulent years. an interesting picture of education in Japan in the years leading up to Japan's defeat in 1945. Despite the efforts to indoctrinate the young, many managed to read widely, and The Thought War: despite the anti-intellectual ethos of the military and the thought police, these young men tried to think for themselves. Japanese Imperial Understandably they wanted to justify to themselves their Propaganda, deaths. by Barak Kushner, The book also contains some interesting observations on the way Japan's love of nature was turned into a justification for patriotism. The cherry blossom symbol with its brilliant but The University of Hawai'i Press, 2006. short period of flowering and the dissipation of the petals on ix+242 pages. the winds was turned from a representation of the Buddhist concept of the impermanence of all living things into a Review by Ben-Ami Shillony justification for a war which might well have ended in the total destruction of Japan, if the inevitability of defeat had not been Barak Kushner's illuminating finally accepted in August 1945. book examines Japan's wartime propaganda, as it was formed and manipulated by the government and other agencies It is a pity and rather strange that the author of this book working with it. He finds that despite the absence of a single, does not seem to have read (or if she has she does not say so as central organ of information and public guidance, as it existed the book is not mentioned in the bibliography) the essay on in Germany, the wartime propaganda of Japan was very "The Kamikaze fighters" in Ivan Morris's The Nobility of Failure: successful. Kushner rejects the image of the Japanese people Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan published in 1975. Ivan blindly obeying their leaders. As he shows, pronouncements Morris gives a rather different picture. He asserts that "there from above met a willingness from below to listen and seems little doubt that during the early stage of kamikaze comply. The people identified with the war aims and were operations in the Philippines and Taiwan, the pilots were all ready to endure hardships. "To westerners the wartime volunteers in the full meaning of that word." But the evidence Japanese behaved like docile sheep, blindly worshipping the for this statement strikes me as weak. Ivan Morris was a friend emperor, soldiers shouting his name on the battlefield with of the ultra-nationalist Mishima Yukio, who probably believed their dying gasp. In contrast to this image held by the west, the Japanese war-time propaganda and who committed suicide in Japanese… discriminated. They listened to some propaganda a bizarre ultra-nationalist incident. Morris recorded the messages, ignored others" (p. 32). Government controls and ambiguous reaction of the Emperor to hearing that kamikaze restrictions existed, but they were effective because they aircraft had damaged some American escort carriers: "Was it encountered public support. "Censorship and terror alone did necessary to go to this extreme? But they have certainly done not characterize the war years. In actuality the people were not a good job." Morris concluded that the kamkaze strategy by duped, nor were they passive. The masses understood the arousing American fury may well have been a factor behind situation not only because the government explained it, but the decision to launch the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima also because the population itself helped create the and Nagasaki. propaganda environment" (p. 24). Kamikaze Diaries should be read by Japan's nationalist Wartime propaganda reached the people in many ways, politicians, but I fear that they would not get the message that from high-brow culture to low-brow amusements.
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