Organizer: Steven L. Riep, Brigham Young University

Chair: Chia-Ning Chang, University of California, Davis

Though the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) ended more than sixty years ago, it still continues to cause conflicts that have soured diplomatic relations between China and Japan. At stake is the way in which the war has been recounted and disseminated in official histories and textbooks. Yet such official versions had already come under the scrutiny of writers in both countries, writers who both supported and critiqued official treatments of the war. Four papers will explore how these personal accounts question the distinction between both perpetrators and victims and collaborators and resistors, as well as the possibility of casting the war in heroic terms.

Colleen Berry examines how Hong Kong writer Lilian Li explores the aftereffects of wartime atrocities on both perpetrators and victims and focuses on how Chinese comfort women become symbols of Japan’s victimization of China in the 1930s and 1940s and China’s continued marginalization of Hong Kong. Jeff Long analyzes the short fiction of war supporter Hayashi Fusao, who writes of the postwar Japanese government’s betrayal of wartime ideals and questions what true commitment to the war effort entailed. Steve Riep shows how writers from Taiwan and China deconstructed the heroic portrayals of the war found in literature and histories promoted in the People’s Republic of China and in Taiwan. Finally, Chia-ning Chang reveals how Kamei Katsuichiro’s autobiographical writings both recount both his own personal political struggles and ideological conversion as well as contemplate the fragility of the human spirit during Japan’s war years.

J. Colleen Berry, University of North Dakota

Hong Kong writer Li Bihua (Lilian Li) has authored a number of works that address the long term psychological effects of the Second Sino-Japanese War and call into question the distinctions between perpetrators of war and their victims. I will examine how both Li’s book, The Red String (Yanhua sanyue), the biography of a Chinese woman forced to serve the Japanese as a comfort woman, explores the effects of wartime atrocities on both Japanese soldiers and their Chinese/Hong Kongese victims and demonstrates how perpetrators become victims of their own acts of atrocity.

As a Hong Kong writer, Li Bihua has a unique perspective for viewing the Second Sino-Japanese War. Other Chinese writers have addressed the dual victimization of comfort women first by Japanese soldiers during the war and later by their fellow Chinese who saw them as corrupted by their intimate contact with the enemy. I suggest The Red String depicts not only the suffering of a particular woman or group of women victimized by the Japanese soldiers under the Japanese occupation, but also offers a metaphor for the victimization of Hong Kong and what Poshek Fu terms a "dual marginalization" by mainland China, which saw Hong Kong as tainted and un-Chinese both by its status as part of a marginal Cantonese south and as a British colony. Like the comfort women Li depicts, Hong Kong came to be viewed as contaminated and complicit with the Japanese occupiers rather than as a victim of war.

Jeff E. Long, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

Hayashi Fusao (1903-1975) emerged as a prominent member of Japan’s literary community in the 1930s and 1940s whose intellectual path was defined by his coerced disavowal of Marxism in 1932. Although ambivalent toward the onset of the Fifteen Years War, Hayashi’s support for the war effort became increasingly evident from 1937 onwards as he moved from expressing his love for the "national land" (kokudo) and for the Japanese "ethnic nation" (minzoku) to writing of his loyalty to the emperor.

Denounced as a "cultural war criminal," and forced into writing for "dreg magazines" in the early postwar years, Hayashi could have followed the official line and repudiated his support of the war. Instead, he not only defended his wartime stance but also continued to use fiction to offer political commentary as he had done in his early Showa-era writing. We see this in his 1949 short story "Yotsu no moji" ("Four Characters"), in which he critiques the postwar Japanese state’s acceptance of SCAP-led attempts to democratize Japanese society. Read autobiographically, Hayashi’s character sketch of a Chinese official working for the Japanese collaborationist government reads as a lament for the lost ideals of loyalty and sacrifice. Yet, in tracing the motives behind the official’s suicide, the narrator of "Four Characters" establishes a subject position that questions the differences between those who "truly" were committed to the war effort in China and those who were not. This position calls into question the argument that the Japanese readily "embraced defeat" in the late 1940s.

Steven L. Riep, Brigham Young University

Heroic accounts of China’s victories in the Second Sino-Japanese War played key roles in Chinese history and literature both during and after the war. During wartime, they stirred patriotic zeal among the Chinese population. After the war, they served as propaganda tools that legitimized the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party in the People’s Republic of China and bolstered the exiled Nationalist Party’s claims to political authority and its calls to militarily retake mainland China. Yet such accounts offered a skewed perspective of the war that failed to account for the losses and costs incurred in military action.

Writers from Taiwan and China have created accounts of the Second Sino-Japanese War that critique the established heroic narratives. In his short story "New Year’s Eve," Pai Hsien-yung questions the Nationalist military victory and postwar calls for militarily retaking Mainland China through his account of an aging army veteran and his failed military career. The poet Ya Hsien questions history of the war by contrasting the wartime past with the quotidian and meaningless detail of the present in his poem, "The Colonel." Finally, the contemporary Chinese writer Yu Hua has decoupled heroic war narratives by casting a class enemy, a landlord’s wastrel son, as hero in his short story "Death of a Landlord." In each case, Pai, Ya, and Yu overturn conventions of the heroic recounting of war by instead focusing on the costs and losses—marked specifically by physically disabling or disfiguring injuries—rather than the victories.

Chia-Ning Chang, University of California at Davis

My paper analyzes Kamei Katsuichiro’s postwar reflections on the Fifteen-year War (1931-45) through a study of his autobiographical work My Spiritual Wanderings (Waga seishin no henreki, 1951), a self-styled "autobiography of sin" and an imaginative reconstruction of his moral and political struggles from the late-1920s to the post WWII era. Kamei chooses to identify himself as a degenerate specimen of the early Showa generation and interprets the war broadly in the cultural context of Japan's troubled modernity stemming from a failed post-Taisho experiment. His "revenge" was directed first and foremost against himself and his own fragility of spirit, a cultural by-product emanating from a false peace and a moral decadence that he felt had plagued Japan since the end of the Meiji era. He speaks repeatedly of the "poisons of modernity" and the self-destruction of the "Japanese spirit" that had resulted from the transition to modern civilization. In the process, he not only furnished a stirring testimony of his own intellectual and spiritual metamorphosis, but also situated his experiences in the tangled rhetoric of war, ideology, Buddhist teachings, and spiritual redemption. His work offers provocative perspectives on current interpretative paradigms of modern Japanese intellectual life, on the dialectic of moral redemption and war responsibility, and on the question of resistance and collaboration under Japanese militarism. His self-examination, interpretation of socialist and political romanticism and subsequent disillusionment with Marxian idealism and war rhetoric in post-1945 Japan all bring notable insights to our understanding of modern Japanese cultural and political history.