Session 31: The Sacred and the Dead: Japanese World War II Casualties in Body and Spirit

Organizer: Lee Pennington, Columbia University

Chair: Gerald A. Figal, Vanderbilt University

Discussant: Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University

Keywords: Japan, World War II, casualties of war, war memory, Tokyo.

Japan sustained over 2.5 million military and civilian deaths between July 1937 and August 1945, to say nothing of countless persons injured or stricken ill during the course of the war. Previous scholarship on Japanese war losses has largely focused on exceptional fatalities—kamikaze pilots and atomic bomb victims—with scant attention directed towards more commonplace casualties (including the war wounded). Surveying a diversity of imperial subjects that ranges from conscripted servicemen to metropolitan housewives, this panel adopts a multidisciplinary approach in order to examine the conspicuous presence of Japanese casualties during and after wartime.

The authors of these three papers reveal the complexities involved in profiling both the wounded and the dead, situating their analyses within overlapping frameworks of cultural, social, and geographic space. James Dorsey examines how nine average mothers were transformed into living national memorials to their sons, namely, the "war god" submariners of the Imperial Navy who died at Pearl Harbor. Lee Pennington investigates disabled veterans on the homefront, focusing on their vital role as a strategic social constituency featured in national mobilization campaigns. Cary Karacas charts contestations played out in present-day Japan between groups that respectively seek to remember and forget civilian casualties of the Tokyo air raids. Taken together, these papers illuminate changes wrought in modern Japanese society through military conflict and push the discussion of Japanese casualties of war beyond the range of its past obsessions.

Co-opting Casualties in the Discourse of Heroes: "The Mother of a War God Never Weeps"

James Dorsey, Dartmouth College

None of the five midget submarines deployed at Pearl Harbor returned to the awaiting fleet. Details of the mission were kept secret until 6 March 1942, when Captain Hiraide Hideo’s press release sparked a media frenzy, within which the fallen submariners came to be referred to as the "Nine Gods of War" (kugunshin). An integral figure in this discourse was the self-sacrificing mother, whose example forged the character of a "war god." Captain Hiraide himself had claimed that the submariners’ accomplishment was due "largely to the influence of exceptional mothers. . . . In short, these ego-less mothers who live on through their children are indeed mothers who live for the nation itself." The mothers, of course, did not "live on through their children" for the very death of these children was the culmination of her duties. Using a novel, film, songs, and two biographical studies inspired by the Nine Gods of War, this paper examines the discursive system whereby a potential subjectivity of victimhood was co-opted and undermined by narratives of heroism. Caught between the heroic tales that deified their sons and the moving stories of domestic fortitude that praised women, mothers of the war dead were rendered living memorials to their sons, unable to grieve without compromising the reputation of their "heroic" offspring. The discourse positioned them such that they could do nothing but follow the dictum included in the 1942 song about war god Iwasa Naoji: "the mother of a war god never weeps!"

Bodies, Names, and the Confusion of Tragedies: Memorializing the Tokyo Air Raids

Cary Karacas, University of California, Berkeley

While the urban topography of Japan’s capital is dotted with "rhetorical topoi"—physical memory sites such as monuments, memorials, and museums—that speak to a particular experience of war, until quite recently Tokyo was bereft of any public memorial for the over 100,000 civilians killed in the air raids that destroyed much of the metropolis. In 2001, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government constructed such a monument, which, according to its dedication plaque, is meant to "promote the pursuit of peace by acting as a permanent reminder of the tragedy that occurred." In this paper, I examine two inseparable aspects of the monument: the process whereby it was created and the produced space itself. In so doing, I uncover a decades-long struggle among various actors over how the history of the Tokyo air raids and memory of the people killed in them ought to be inscribed upon the city’s social and physical landscape, and call into question the ability of the existing memorial to achieve the goals assigned to it.

Protecting the Wounded: Japanese Disabled Veterans on the Homefront, 1937–1945

Lee Pennington, Columbia University

Falling wounded at the front marked the beginning of new lives for hundreds of thousands of Imperial Japanese Army soldiers. Although families were happy to see loved ones return home, war-wounded men occupied murky spaces within popular understandings of patriotic loyalty because wartime rhetoric celebrated battlefield death. The Military Protection Association, which was established in July 1939 as part of the new Ministry of Welfare, directed the transformation of wounded soldiers and disabled veterans into "heroes in white" (hakui yûshi), casting them as both icons of imperial sacrifice and symbols of the therapeutic power of the emerging social welfare system. Their presence was encouraged at patriotic events and public rallies—often in attempts to exploit their suffering—but such sideshow sentiments evaporated once civilians joined the ranks of the war wounded as air raid victims. Referencing state-directed mobilization campaigns, visual and aural wartime culture, and writings by and about the military wounded, this paper examines multiple embodiments of disabled veterans that appeared during the war years. In the process, it reexamines the trope of selflessly "dying for the emperor" and recalibrates our understanding of wartime Japanese society.