An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945)

by Shunsuke Tsurumi

  As a result of the competitive examination system, young men who passed the entrance examination for the government high schools, which were the stage preliminary to entrance into the Imperial universities, felt that they had already been chosen as the future leaders of Japan, even though they were as yet only eighteen years of age. The fiercest of the competition was now behind them, and they now faced seven years of school during which they would draw up blueprints for the future of Japan. This was the environment which bred the Association of New Men, which I am about to discuss.

  The Russian Revolution of 1917 had a great influence on Japanese university students. In addition, in the following year, on 23 July, the Japanese Rice Riots began. These riots, in protest against the soaring price of rice caused by post-war inflation, began in a peripheral district and spread to the major cities spontaneously, without any plan or political leadership. The Rice Riots were seen as a manifestation of the people's power, and this marked the beginning of a new era in Japan. Both the Russian Revolution and these riots set fire to the imagination of the young university students.

  It was just at this historical moment that Yoshino Sakuzō, a professor of Political Science in the Law Department of Tokyo Imperial University who had been advocating democracy for Japan, was challenged to speak in a joint forum with the leaders of the rightist movement. The personal safety of Yoshino was threatened, but on the day of the forum the audience, mostly composed of students, was so obviously in sympathy with Yoshino that the assailants could not molest him. Yoshino's students felt that there was a new tide rising in Japan. In December 1918, exactly a month after this successful forum, and one year and a month after the October Revolution in Russia, three students of the Law Department at Tokyo Imperial University, Akamatsu Katsumaro, Miyazaki Ryūsuke, and Ishiwata Haruo, founded the Association of New Men. Its programme, drawn up by Akamatsu, states:

  1. We will cooperate with and seek to accelerate the new tide which is moving toward the liberation of Man, which is the prevailing tendency of world culture.

  2. We will join the movement for the rational reconstruction of contemporary Japan.

  The movement spread from Tokyo Imperial University to other universities, and even to high schools.6

  This student movement soon went beyond the moderate democratic principles which the master had advocated. Yoshino conceived democratic principles as an ethos contained in all cultures and customs, and therefore operating everywhere in the world, not only in so-called civilized countries but also in so-called uncivilized countries. Yoshino worked for the abolition both of the House of Peers and of the prerogative of the supreme command. If he had succeeded, this would have precluded the possibility of the undeclared war which was begun by Army officers stationed in a colony and supported by unelected members of the Diet. These moderate, practicable aims, however, were unacceptable to the student movement. The members of the Association of New Men affiliated themselves with the socialist parties and the labour unions. Some of them later became members of the Communist Party. They were not concerned with organizing a common front to work against the rise of militarism in the 1920s. Yoshino, in contrast, after relinquishing his professorship at Tokyo Imperial University, organized a research group to reproduce memorable documents relating to the formation of Meiji culture.

  Meanwhile, the co-founders and original members of the New Men moved away from the socialist movement towards national socialism. Akamatsu, for example, joined the Japan Communist Party in 1922, but left the Party in 1930 to become the General Secretary of the Social Democratic Party. At this point he emphasized the role of the Emperor in protecting the interests of the nation. Thus he defended the Manchurian Incident and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. He sought a democratization and socialization compatible with the already established invasion of China. Miyazaki Ryūsuke, another of the founders of the Association of New Men, was a secret emissary of Prince Konoye and played a hidden role in trying to convince the Chinese Kuomintan Party to cooperate with the Japanese Government and accept terms of appeasement in the years preceding the Pacific War. Aso Hisashi, one of the original members of the New Men, was an influential figure in the Socialist Party in the 1930s, and acted as a mediator between the labour union leaders and the young military officers who leaned towards state socialism.

  Sano Manabu was also important. He had joined the New Men as a young graduate of Tokyo Imperial University when he was twenty-seven. In 1933, when he was chairman of the Japan Communist Party and led the campaign against the Communist Trials from his prison cell, Sano issued a joint statement with Nabeyama Sadachika, a man of working-class origins, who was also a member of the Central Committee. In this statement they announced their defection (tenkō) from the Japan Communist Party.7 They withdrew their former insistence on the abolition of the emperor system and the right of self-rule of all nations including colonized nations, and, consequently, withdrew their opposition to the Government's policy on Manchuria. They stated that they would now free themselves of the yoke of Soviet Russia and strive to develop socialism in one country with proper respect for the Emperor and for the cultural values which he represented. The effect of their joint statement was instantaneous. It was published on 10 June 1933, and within a month, 30 per cent of the unconvicted detainees (415 out of 1,370) and 34 per cent of the convicts (133 out of 393) had defected.8 By the end of three years, 74 percent (324 out of 438) of the convicts had defected.9

  An important point regarding this joint statement is that Sano Manabu repudiated his position as the chairman of the Japan Communist Party without relinquishing party membership. In the tumult which followed the publication of the joint statement, this received little notice. However, it is an example of the mentality of the Association of the New Men, the creation of eighteen-year-old boys who had just succeeded in the hardest of their entrance examinations and felt themselves chosen by democratic and fair means to be the leaders of the people. This feeling of being selected as leaders remained, regardless of the political views they held. The response of their followers indicates that in practice they accepted this tacit assumption.

  After Sano and Nabeyama's joint statement, tenkō became the catchword of the day, and it has since been incorporated into everyday vocabulary. The word had, however, a history before it became generally used. In August 1922, Yamakawa Hitoshi, one of the surviving Meiji socialists, published an article entitled The Change of Direction of the Proletarian Movement’, in which he argued that the radical elements should turn their attention back to the masses. They must, Yamakawa wrote, be more concerned with both the partially formulated and the specific daily needs of the masses. Fukumoto Kazuo, who had recently returned from Germany where he had observed the Marxist-Leninist movement, criticized Yamakawa's approach for being eclectic, and claimed that the reform which Yamakawa advocated itself needed to be reformed. Fukumoto argued that the Communist must grasp the pattern of his own thinking and then convert (tenkō) so as to apply this thinking to the society of his own day. Yamakawa's ‘hōkōtenkan’ (reform) gave birth to the abbreviation ‘tenkō’, the act of understanding one's own thought processes and giving them a new direction in accordance with one's ideological beliefs. Thus thought prior to tenkō was seen as thought which followed the path of existing custom.10

  ‘Tenkō’ in this sense became a fashionable word among students, and was taken up by the Thought Police who investigated subversive activities under the Maintenance of Public Order Act of 1928. The Thought Police devised techniques for persuading the radical students to change their views, and published technical guides on how to bring about tenkō. It was not by imprisonment and torture alone that tenkō could be effected. According to a textbook written by the prosecutor Ikeda Katsumi, the police stationmaster should have a prisoner brought from the cell to the stationmaster's room, should sit him down in the stationmaster's chair and from his own pocket buy him a bowl of oyako donburi (chicken and eggs on rice). The name of this dis
h means, literally, ‘parent-child bowl’, and was intended to remind the prisoner of the parent-child relationship. The policeman should say nothing about ideology, but only ‘Your mother is worried about you’. He should not mention the father, as this might encourage the student's defiance of authority. The technical guide continues with further instructions, and concludes that in the end the young man, who until then had adhered to Fukumoto's notion of tenkō and had seen himself as the embodiment of an ideology, would feel his ideological superstructure melt away.11

  According to police statistics of 1942, published in a secret internal document in 1943, the motives for tenkō expressed by percentage of prisoners were:

  Reasons for religious faith

  2.21

  The discovery of inconsistency

  11.68

  Contrition due to detention

  14.41

  Regard for family

  26.92

  Consciousness of membership in the Japanese nation 31.9013

  Other reasons

  12.88

  Another factor which effected tenkō was the enthusiastic popular response to the Manchurian Incident. Here the people, for whom the students had been working with great self-sacrifice, were supporting a cause diametrically opposed to theirs. The resulting sense of isolation from the people, from their neighbours, and from their families contributed to the decision of many students to ‘convert’ their thoughts.12

  This, briefly, is the history of the word ‘tenkō’ as it was popularly used after the 1930s. It may be defined as ‘a conversion which occurs under the pressure of state power’. Thus the phenomenon has two aspects: the compulsion exercised by the state, and the response chosen by the individual or group. The use of force and the existence of spontaneity are the two essential elements. With this definition as a guideline, we may describe tenkō in Japan between 1931 and 1945 in a way which is as free as possible from value judgement.14

  The concept must be distinguished from certain other related concepts, as follows:

  conversion (kaishin): a change in thinking made by individual choice and decision, without force exercised by the state.

  ideological conversion: a voluntary change in ideology.

  defection (ridatsu): A voluntary change in political party affiliation. This may exclude the type of personal change - say, from moderate liberalism to ardent fascism - which, in my view, is important to the study of Japanese wartime thought and to an understanding of tenkō. The examples of people associated with the Communist Party which I cited earlier, for example, are useful for the elucidation of this concept. I will discuss examples of tenkō in other areas of thought below.

  betrayal (uragiri): this word has a distinctly derogatory connotation. To be a secret informer and turn one's former comrades over to the police can be called an act of betrayal, but if we thus label and therefore reject the entire phenomenon of tenko in Japan from 1931 to 1945, we ignore the lesson to be learnt from our mistakes. I believe the study of tenkō to be important because truth reached at the expense of errors in the past is fundamental and practical truth on which it is possible to base present thought and actions.

  What factors prompted those who experienced tenkō during the war period? How did they justify it? How did they think about it after the war was ended? Is there anyone who does not experience tenkō at some stage in his life?

  These are questions of primary importance to the study of Japan between 1931 and 1945.

  ____________

  * Japanese personal names are printed according to the Japanese usage, that is, the family name first and the given name second.

  3 Insularity and National Isolation

  I recently bought a map of Canada which is published by Geographic International and easy to obtain anywhere in the country. It surprised me in its contrast with the map of Japan to which I am accustomed, although I suppose it would not surprise a Canadian. I was first struck by the fact that the map did not show all the Canadian territory, but omitted the far north. Perhaps Canada is too big to be shown completely in a portable map, but if the map had been published by someone with a Japanese mentality he would have chosen to scale it down. Secondly, I was struck by the distinctness with which Canada's southern border was marked. Japan lacks this kind of inland border, and very few Japanese have the experience of actually crossing a border.

  The Japanese feel that they live in a territory which has always been theirs by right. Within this undisputed territory, they are free from any fear of sudden invasion by foreigners over the border. This is a hidden feature of Japanese experience, an unexpressed postulate of Japanese thinking. We will call this aspect of Japanese thinking ‘insularity’.

  Together with this sense of territorial right, the Japanese have had a sense of their country being far away from more advanced and more universal cultures of the world. This has implanted a deep but unconscious sense of inferiority, which accounts for the development of a strong curiosity and ability to learn and an eagerness to absorb anything new from the outside world among the Japanese people.

  Japan is located on the periphery of the more universal culture of China, which was first transmitted to the Japanese people via Korea. Another universal culture, that of India, travelled to Japan via China. Finally, a further universal culture, that of Europe, arrived in the year 1542, when shipwrecked Portuguese brought guns to Japan.

  This situation is reflected in the street arts. During the Heian period there was a tradition of song, dance, and dialogue presented by a team of tayū and saizō (master and servant).* Such teams used to visit the court at the beginning of each year and prophesy the good things that the new year would bring. The team would then proceed, on invitation, to various houses and repeat the same performance. It took on a comic style in later years and is still performed in this way today. Since the end of the Russo-Japanese War, which marked the beginning of mass society and mass culture in Japan, this master-servant team has appeared on the stage, on records, on radio, and on television and is the most popular form of entertainment today. It can be seen as a dialogue carried on between the master and the servant for a thousand years.

  Its origin can be traced to prehistoric times. According to the folklore studies of Origuchi Shinobu, the oldest form of theatrical art in Japan is an entertainment originally given at a banquet to honour a high-ranking guest.15 The entertainment consists of an encounter between a high-ranking guest god from afar and a local god who is devoid of cultural refinement and quite uncouth. The antagonism between them usually ends with the guest god prevailing over the local god. This plot reflects ancient relations between the central government and the local clan: officials sent by the central government were generally learned in the art of writing in Chinese and well versed in Chinese classics, and the dialogue thus reflects the encounter between the imported, central culture and the indigenous, local culture. The voluble character, who is a handsome figure in courtly attire and who speaks fluently, represents the imported culture. The other character, incoherent, dressed in local attire and with a grimacing mask, is the representative of the indigenous culture.

  The elite culture of Japan has invariably been an imported one, and the mass culture, indigenous. One who is able to persuade through logical argument generally speaks in the context of the imported culture. One who seeks to appeal to gut feelings generally speaks in the context of the indigenous culture. Roughly speaking, this dichotomy runs through more than a thousand years of the intellectual and cultural history of Japan. I will trace its presence in the intellectual history of wartime Japan.

  Itō Sei was a writer of acute intellectual power, who was known in the 1930s as a poet, novelist, and critic of the modernist school. He went to the same school as Kobayashi Takiji, who wrote proletarian novels and who was arrested and tortured to death. Itō himself was cautious enough not to meddle in leftist politics, but wrote neo-psychological consciousness novels under the influence of James Joyce and Marcel Proust, an experim
ent he continued during the war with China. However, in December 1941, at the start of the war with the United States, he published in a newspaper an essay entitled The Japanese Intellectuals - Lest This Emotion Wither’; and in the following year he published a newspaper review called The Literature of War’.16 In the former, Itō gave vent to the pent-up feelings of inferiority which arose from his occupation as a teacher of English, continually imitating the English and Americans, in Japan. Now at least, he writes, he can throw off this sense of inferiority. In the latter essay he asserts that there is no such thing as Man. There are only Japanese and Americans. Literature should portray people as Japanese or Americans, as citizens of one or the other of these two states.

  After the war, Itō gradually recovered from depression caused by the defeat, recognized the folly of his wartime writings, and produced a series of masterpieces. In Flood, his chef d'oeuvre of 1958, he portrays the change in the hero's thinking as he rises in social position. This can be seen as a kind of post-war tenkō novel. After the war, Itō also translated Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence and was tried for and convicted of the publication of obscene literature. During the court struggle he developed a method for criticizing the existing order in a way acceptable to the people of the time. He developed a formula for analysing the ecology of literature which was based on the antagonism between life, which aspires to anarchic growth, versus organization, which aspires to subordinate all members of society to a central planning body. With this formula in mind, he began a lengthy history of literary circles in Japan from the beginning of the Meiji period, which he did not live to finish.17 In the life and work of Itō Sei, we see an instance of the tenkō of liberalism, and in his recovery in the post-war period we see a resurrection of the street art tradition of a dialogue between the natural and the imposed structure. This example provides a brief picture of the effects of the Japanese sense of cultural inferiority, sometimes fruitful and sometimes fruitless.