Organizer: David Rosenfeld, University of Michigan
Chair: Heather Bowen-Struyk, University of Michigan
Discussant: J. Victor Koschmann, Cornell University
"When Japan was fighting the Pacific War, I pretended that I had never once been a liberal individualist," reflects Narumi Senkichi, the eponymous protagonist of Itô Sei’s satirical portrait of a postwar Japanese intellectual, "and in postwar liberal society I now pretend that I never fell in line with the militarists."1 It was difficult for an artist or intellectual to avoid participating in the ideological campaigns of Japan’s wartime state. Not only did the military authorities control what was published, but many public figures—writers, artists, scholars—were encouraged to visit occupied areas and battle fronts and report on what they saw for the edification and exhortation of the public at home The few that refrained from participation, whether through withdrawal from public life or explicit resistance to the government, were lionized after the war. Most others sought to explain, deny, or conceal their complicity, while a few mavericks defiantly defended their wartime activities.
This panel will explore the strategies deployed by several writers to resituate their own wartime texts in the radically different postwar ideological environment. Changes in the texts themselves and in the commentaries the writers produced on them emphasize the historical contingency of both the production and the consumption of texts, and shed light on the way postwar narratives of the war experience were being constructed in Japan.
1. Quoted in Jay Rubin, "From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the Allied Occupation," Journal of Japanese Studies, Winter 1985, 96.
Yasui Kaoru: The Liberal Academic and His Past as War Collaborator
James J. Orr, Bucknell University
As the leader of Japan’s ban-the-bomb movement in the 1950s and 1960s, liberal academic activist Yasui Kaoru achieved stature among the political Left for his promotion of grassroots pacifism. Yet in the 1930s and 1940s, Yasui called on intellectuals to support the wartime government, and wrote apologist essays that justified Japanese military aggression as a "dynamic" force for the liberation of Asia.
Yasui was purged from Tokyo University soon after defeat, but he did not leave willingly He regarded his dismissal in 1948 the equivalent of the late 1930s purges of liberal academics, equally repugnant and fundamentally an infringement of academic freedom. How did Yasui, who later became such an important leader of the generally leftist peace movement, resolve the apparent contradiction between his wartime support of the war and his postwar career as pacifist? This paper addresses these questions of continuity and self-representation in Yasui’s career through an examination of his writings, especially a collaborationist 1938 essay that Yasui later claimed he wrote to cast doubt on militarist policies.
Although he came to regret his naivete in collaborating with the wartime government, Yasui never foreswore the sincerity of his wartime activities. He always worked to unify national sentiment and consistently believed that scholars should engage the social realities of the day. Yasui maintained he did his best in a wartime Japan that was militarist and elitist. In the pacifist, democratic postwar years, Yasui could dedicate himself to a pacifist national project involving the democratic mobilization of the Japanese masses.
The Tenkô of a Text: Hayashi Fusao’s Seinen
Jeff E. Long, University of Hawaii, Manoa
The collapse of the Imperial system after the war gave those intellectuals who had relinquished their ties to the left wing a chance to renew those ties in a move that is often referred to as "postwar tenkô." Some intellectuals, however, had moved so far to the right that they found it difficult to even consider a return to the left. Hayashi Fusao was one of those intellectuals. A writer and literary critic in the Proletarian Literature Movement, Hayashi became a well-known proponent of the Imperial system during the wartime years. In the postwar era Hayashi continued his support of right-wing Japanese nationalism.
Hayashi’s tenkô in the prewar period and his defense of his tenkô in the postwar years is well illustrated in the revisions he made to one of his most popular historical novels, Seinen (Youth). Hayashi serialized the novel in Chûô Kôron and Bungakukai from 1932 to 1934. He first made changes in the novel when Chûô Kôronsha published the articles in book form in March 1934, but he then revised the novel twice more, once in 1942 and again in 1947. In each revision Hayashi attempted to shift his methodology away from Mama socialist realism to a method more suited to the subject matter of the novel, anti-foreignism in the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration. Each move represented not only a change in the novel but also a change in Hayashi Fusao.
Rewriting Socialist Realism: Miyamoto Yuriko’s "The Family of Koiwai"
Heather Bowen Struyk, University of Michigan
Postwar Japanese Communists disagreed about Miyamoto Yuriko: was she a martyr to the cause or just another bourgeois intellectual "whose hands were stained with the blood of imperialism"? She was one of the few Communists who refused to commit tenkô, and yet even she and her wartime writings were scrutinized after the war for evidence of infidelities. Her wartime comrades came to her defense, and Sata Ineko cites "The Family of Koiwai" ("Koiwai no ikka") and another story as evidence that Yuriko was progressive, not bourgeois.
Miyamoto rewrote "The Family of Koiwai" after the war—purportedly because the original pre-censored manuscript was no longer extant—and had it published in several places. The half-dozen versions available in print during the war were censored for objectionable material. Some ten were excised from the 1934 version, including a whole paragraph, while a 1940 version was even more severely censored. When her zenshû (complete works) was compiled after her death, however the pre-publication manuscript resurfaced, and was used as the base-text. Subsequent anthologies all follow suit in preferring the manuscript submitted for the 1934 publication as the base-text.
By thinking about the textual condition of "The Family of Koiwai," we can begin to untangle the web of resistance, complicity, and compromise elided by postwar zenshû editions, and finally, come to ask what the zenshû would have us forget: how and why did the paragon of wartime resistance reposition her texts after the war?
War of Afterwords: Hino Ashihei’s Paratextual Battles
David Rosenfeld, University of Michigan
Hino Ashihei (1907–60) was perhaps the most famous writer in Japan during the war for his works chronicling the lives of the heitai, the common soldiers, on the battlefield in China, the Philippines, Burma, and elsewhere. His most famous book, Mugi to heitai (Wheat and Soldiers, 1938), sold a phenomenal 1.2 million copies during the war. After Japan’s surrender, unsurprisingly, Hino was the object of harsh criticism for his wartime activities, culminating in his purge as a "cultural war criminal" (bunka senpan) by the Occupation administration in 1948. His purge status was lifted in 1950, but in essays and prose fiction Hino, continued to argue his own case, criticizing what he saw as the postwar persecution of innocent and patriotic heitai, and by extension of himself.
In this paper, I examine Hino’s commentary on his own texts and his attempts to influence their reception in the forewords and afterwords he appended to succeeding editions of Mugi to heitai. Attention to such examples of what Gerard Genette has defined as "paratext" are vital to the practice of literary history since they can locate multiple incarnations of a text in their particular historical moments. I explain how Hino used this paratextual space to make claims of authenticity for his texts during the war, and to distance himself after the war from charges of propagandizing.