An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan (1931-1945)

by Shunsuke Tsurumi

  The Folk Art Movement, led by Yanagi Muneyoshi (Yanagi Sōetsu), which based its appreciation of craftsmanship on Buddhist aesthetics, also kept itself free of involvement with the war hysteria.46 The early opposition of the lower classes to the war was also the background to Sōka Gakkai, a Nichiren Buddhist movement led by Makiguchi Tsunesaburō and Toda Jōsei.47 In the countryside, lower class anti-war sentiment also found an outlet in Shinto movements: Ōmoto Kyō, led by Deguchi Wanisaburō, Hitonomichi led by Miki Tokuchika, and Tenri Honmichi led by Ōnishi Aijirō.48 Some members of each of these groups were arrested, and some died in prison. The survivors were released after the war, along with those surviving members of the Japan Communist Party who had continued to refuse tenkō.

  In the period following the surrender, those communists who had refused tenkō were idolized by Communist Party supporters, and came to be considered a manifestation of the Party's infallibility. One of the first to criticize these Communist leaders was Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924- ), who had grown up during the war. In his Treatise on Tenkō’ (1959)49, Yoshimoto argued that these Communists had ignored the contemporary situation, and that their refusal of tenkō was as futile as the action of those who had accepted it. It was simply a mechanical confirmation of principles for their own sake which was of no practical worth in dealing with the contemporary reality.

  This criticism provides a new perspective, but it fails to recognize the fact that the refusal of tenkō is not a state of inaction. Any human choice, including inaction or cessation of action, is a process of irresolution, and in irresolution some kind of fundamental standard of value is necessary. This standard of value may be called ‘religion’, in the original sense of the word. When the dozen or so Communist leaders were released from prison, they restated their views in the language and style of the intellectual radicalism of the New Men of the 1920s, the period prior to their imprisonment - that is, they expressed themselves in words translated from European languages. This language was out of touch with the feelings of ordinary people in post-war Japan. One of these Communists, Nuyama Hiroshi, said, thirty years after their release,

  When the end of the war came, we were exhausted and were almost totally devoid of the ability to think. Then the Occupation authorities came and told us we were to be released. Tokuda Kyūichi, the only one of us who seemed to be physically fit, asked me whether we should accept the Occupation's offer or not. I no longer had the power to think, so I told him he should do as he thought right. At that time I had little foresight. Now, looking back, I think that in this case I should have said that we should wait in prison until the Japanese people come to free us.50

  In contrast to this, Muramoto Kazuo, a Watchtower believer who had also been imprisoned during the war, said thirty years after his release: ‘Now I feel like going to the Imperial Palace and saying Banzai for the emperor.’51 But he would never have done this while a war was being waged against China. Muramoto, a man of common sense like Akashi Junzō, understood that the same act had a different significance in different circumstances. This belief in acting according to the particular circumstances was fundamentally different from the faith in imported ideals, and the blind application of theory to any situation which arose.

  ____________

  * Prime Minister General Tōjō had stated that one hundred million Japanese were now formed into one ball of fire in the total war.

  7 The Korea Within Japan

  An examination of Japanese attitudes towards Korea and Koreans reveals a whole spectrum of beliefs independent of political ideology. I referred earlier to the Japanese Government's attempts to ‘civilize’ - in fact, to Westernize - Korea, even as early as 1875. This approach was taken by both Left and Right. In 1884 the two leaders of the Japanese Popular Rights Movement, Goto Shōjirō and Itagaki Taisuke, made plans for a military coup d’état in Korea which was to overthrow the traditionalists in power there. Goto planned to become Prime Minister of Korea. The idea leaked to the Japanese Government, which promptly adopted it and took action to promote a similar plan, but was prevented by the intervention of Chinese troops. In 1885, Ōi Kentarō, the leader of the left wing of the Popular Rights Movement, led yet another conspiracy to overthrow the traditionalist Korean Government. The Osaka Incident - so called because the headquarters of the conspiracy were in Osaka - was curtailed by the Japanese police just before the plan was carried out.

  Throughout this period the idea of a ‘ladder of civilization’ was an important factor in Japanese political thought. Activists of both the Left and the Right believed on the basis of their political convictions that violence was justified in forcing the Korean Government to climb a step up the ladder. The failure of the Osaka plot did not extinguish the idea of forcing civilization upon Korea, and many continued to plot.

  Tarui Tōkichi advocated the amalgamation of Japan and Korea on an equal basis and the formation of a new country with a new name.52 The idea was finally carried out by the Japanese Government, but not on a basis of equality, when Japan annexed Korea in 1910. Few Japanese foresaw the grave consequences of this act of annexation for both Koreans and Japanese, with the exception of the poet Ishikawa Takuboku (1886-1912), who composed a short poem (tanka) of lament on the day the Korean Government perished. He also wrote an essay, criticizing Japanese naturalist literature for its preoccupation with the details of Japanese private life. He argued that if naturalism had the courage to portray the reality of Japanese life, it would show the stifling of the freedom of the people by the state. Takuboku was shocked by, and criticizes in his diary, the Taigyaku Jiken (the Great Treason Incident) of 1911, when some of the leading intellectuals of the time were falsely accused of plotting to assassinate the Emperor and were executed.

  The justice of Ishikawa Takuboku's criticism of naturalism,53 then the avant-garde Europeanized literature, is borne out by a literary anecdote from the diary of one of the editors of the journal Child Kōron, Kisaki Masaru. Kisaki records the attitudes taken by Tayama Katai (1872-1930), whose short story Futon had begun the naturalist movement in Japan. Following the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923, Koreans were falsely rumoured to have poisoned the neighbourhood wells. With the assistance of gendarmes and local officials, the rumour spread rapidly through Tokyo and Yokohama, and resulted in the massacre of about 6,000 Koreans by self-appointed vigilance committees, soldiers, and police. Only a handful of the executioners were arrested by the Japanese Government and most were released, on the grounds of insufficient evidence, after only cursory investigation. Kisaki records that Tayama, by then a middle-aged, established writer, boasted of his vigour in chasing Koreans during the massacre. There were very few who raised voices in protest. One was Senda Korea (1904- ), the actor and theatre director. At Sendagaya he was mistaken for a Korean by a vigilante who was on the point of slaughtering him when a neighbour happened to pass by and saved his life by identifying him as a Japanese. After this incident, he adopted the pseudonym Senda Korea, ‘a Korean of Sendagaya’, and this became the propelling force for his long life of activity, both political and artistic.

  Reviewing the relationship between Korea and Japan, we find that during the Tokugawa period Korean delegations to Japan were received with courtesy and veneration. Since at this period the mark of cultural refinement in both countries was the ability to write prose and poetry in Chinese characters, the Korean delegates, who surpassed their Japanese counterparts in Chinese culture, were held in high esteem. Towards the end of the Tokugawa era, there was a period of no cultural contact between Japan and Korea, and so we may say that at the time of the Meiji Restoration the attitude towards Koreans was neutral. It was only after the zeal for civilization took possession of the Japanese Government and people that the Japanese began to despise the Koreans.

  The contempt for Koreans developed in the process of Japan's growth into an imperialist power: the annexation of Taiwan after the Sino-Japanese War, the annexation of Sakhalin and the acquisition of railway rights in north China as a r
esult of the Russo-Japanese War, and finally the annexation of Korea. After the annexation, Japanese merchants migrated to Korea and by means of various forms of threat, usury, and fraud gained control of the land. Many now-landless Koreans migrated to Japan looking for work, especially during the period of rapid industrialization which followed World War I. In the ten-year period from 1921 to 1931, about 400,000 Koreans migrated to Japan. Even the massacre of Koreans after the Great Earthquake in 1923 did not stop this massive migration, which sprang from dire necessity.55 The arrival of so many Koreans who would work for low wages and could not speak fluent Japanese deepened the tendency among Japanese to hold Koreans in contempt.

  Social distance surveys conducted by Japanese scholars before and after the Fifteen Years’ War reveal that both then and now the Japanese, when asked to rank the world's peoples, have put the Koreans at the very bottom of the scale. There are many Japanese novels of the post-Meiji period in which non-Japanese characters appear, but very few of the period from the Meiji Restoration to the end of the Fifteen Years’ War in which Koreans play important roles. Since the war, however, Korean characters have appeared in many important novels by major authors, including Matsumoto Seichō, Shiba Ryūtarō, Kaikō Takeshi, Inoue Yasushi, Ōe Kenzaburō, Oda Makoto, Komatsu Sakyō and Inoue Mitsuharu. Somehow, the war has broken down the attitudes towards various ethnic groups held by Japanese novelists since the Meiji Restoration.

  The turning point is illustrated in Tanaka Hidemitsu's Drunken Ship (1948), which is based upon the author's own experiences during the war. The background to this novel was the labour shortage in Japan caused by the undeclared warfare since 1931. In 1939 the Government, with the approval of the Vice-Ministers of Interior Welfare, implemented a plan of forced immigration of 85,000 Korean labourers to Japan. After 1941 there was a still greater need for Korean labour, and the Japanese Government transported yet more workers. The first reliable account of this was Park Kyon Sik's Record of the Forced Transportation of Koreans (1965), and in a later work, The History of the Korean Movement in Japan (1979), he estimates that a total of 1,500,000 Korean labourers were brought to Japan by force. The Government allotted 600,000 to the coal mines, 400,000 to munitions factories, 300,000 to building industries, and 150,000 to metal mines, and employed 50,000 as longshoremen. Another 370,000 Koreans were used as soldiers and civilian employees in the military, and tens of thousands of Korean women were employed as prostitutes for the military. Korean labourers were given the most dangerous work and worked a 12- to 14-hour day, for wages that were half those of Japanese labourers engaged in similar work. Naturally they tried to run away, and police were appointed as supervisors. Park Kyon Sik estimates that from 1940 to 1945 Korean labourers suffered 300,000 casualties, and 60,000 died.56

  These measures were paralleled by linguistic oppression. The first meeting of the Greater East Asia Writers’ Congress in 194257 was conducted in Japanese without any translation. After the annexation of Korea, Japanese was taught in Korean schools, in 1939 all Koreans were ordered to take Japanese names (a law which took effect in 1940), and Korean writers published their works under Japanese names. This literature was written in Japanese according to an ideological stand adopted by the authors as a result of forced tenkō.

  Tanaka Hidemitsu (1913-1949) first became known as a member of the Japanese team in the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1932. While a student of economics at Waseda University he had been active in the Communist Party movement, but had rejected it as the war progressed. He made his debut as a writer with The Fruits of Olympos, a documentary novel of the Olympic Games. He was living in Korea at the time, employed by the Yokohama Rubber Company, and therefore the Government used him to organize the Korean writers for the Greater East Asia Writers’ Congress. His post-war novel The Drunken Ship was the first literary work to portray this Congress.58 The hero of the novel, a fabulous roll of bank notes in his pocket, walks the streets of the Korean metropolis with an old classmate, with whom he had once been engaged in underground activities. He remembers when the two of them, in order to show that even after their tenkō they still had the courage to defy authority, had made a drunken bet and urinated on the seat-cushion of a police box. Recalling this, the hero says to his friend, ‘Oi! I'll bet a coward like you couldn't even shit in the middle of this square.’ Then, in his drunkenness, he climbs the fountain in the middle of the most crowded square in Seoul, straddles the edge, pulls down his pants, and defecates. Half-raising his buttocks he claps them, and shouts, ‘Oi, here's one Japanese! King of Japan, eat my ass!’ Then his drunken courage fades, and he is only a pitiful coward who has submitted to authority, his youthful idealism discarded. Now he is only a middle-aged employee stationed in a colony of Imperialist Japan, wasting his spare time in Korean brothels, carrying the wad of money he has accepted from the Japanese Government for organizing Korean writers.

  There is a bitter contrast between the spirit of this story and that of a certain tale, taught to schoolchildren, of an ancient Japanese warrior who, when captured in the war with Korea and ordered to reveal Japanese military secrets, had instead cried out, ‘King of Korea [actually the text should have said, "King of Shiragi"], eat my ass!’ and was executed. The passage by Tanaka reverses the sense of this story and gives an entirely new meaning to the Japanese literary motif of excrement. The bared buttocks and the excrement of the Japanese intellectual are turned into symbols of the relations between the Japanese and Koreans. The idea of the ladder of civilization, to which both Japanese leftists and rightists adhered, is absent, and thus the old frame of reference is destroyed. A new viewpoint emerges, and the Koreans (and the Japanese) are seen in terms of their suffering. This new frame of reference demands that the Japanese respect the Koreans, who live under a far greater burden than themselves. The distinction between advanced countries and backward countries is removed. This is one example of the influence of the Fifteen Years’ War on some writers in Japan. Tanaka Hidemitsu's unflinching understanding of his own ignominious experience of tenkō allowed him to understand the suffering of Korean writers on whom tenkō was imposed. Tenkō, in this case, gave the opportunity for unity between the writers of the two nations.

  Yanagi Muneyoshi (Yanagi Sōetsu, 1889-1961) was one of the very few conservative writers who expressed open concern when Japan annexed Korea. Yanagi had formed an interest in Korean pottery of the Li Dynasty through the influence of a young English potter who had settled in Japan, Bernard Leach. Korean pottery had been brought to Japan at the time of Toyotcmi Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea 300 years before, and had since been held in very high esteem for use in the tea ceremony. Yanagi was impressed by the fact that the pieces that had become famous for the tea ceremony had been made by anonymous potters for daily use in Korea. Yanagi began a search for similar Japanese craftsmanship which developed into a craft-revival movement called the Folk Art Movement. Yanagi's admiration for Korean craftsmanship led him to protest strongly against the Japanese Government's policy of destroying indigenous culture in Korea. When the Government ruthlessly put down a demonstration by the Korean Independence Movement in 1919, Yanagi wrote a series of essays in protest and, in order to show that there were some Japanese who opposed the Government's policy, raised funds for the collection of Korean works of art dispersed throughout Japan; in 1924 he took them back to Korea and formed of them a Korean National Fine Arts Museum.59 Following the historian Naitō Konan, Yanagi pointed out that many of the works designated National Treasures, which the Japanese Government and ultra-nationalists used as proof of the superiority of Japanese culture, turned out, under proper scrutiny, to be the works of Korean craftsmen who had migrated to Japan. With the upsurge of ultra-nationalism in the 1930s, the theory was propagated that there was a pure, untainted Japanese race, whose ancestors had descended from heaven and who created superb works of art treasures to that very day. Yanagi's findings were an open denial of this ultra-nationalist theory. Yanagi carefully limited his criticism to the field of
crafts and art, seldom writing directly on politics, but in the years following the annexation he unwaveringly termed Japan and Korea These two countries’, a consistency rare in that age of mass tenkō.

  At the time of Japan's surrender on 15 August 1945, there were about two million Koreans in Japan. Edward W. Wagner, who came to Japan with the Occupation forces, reports that the Occupation was given no specific directives concerning Koreans in Japan.60 The Government in Washington had been too preoccupied with the problem of how to treat the Japanese in Japan to address the question of the Koreans in Japan. In the absence of clear instructions, the U.S. Occupation Authorities tried to help Koreans to return to their own country, warned Japanese officials to abide by the principles of democracy and non-discrimination, but, on the whole, left the details to the Japanese officials in charge. The result was that the officials continued to treat Koreans in much the same way as they had before the surrender. The Koreans undoubtedly wished to return to the country of their birth, but that country was now artificially divided between North and South, each part under the domination of a foreign power with a different political ideology. This circumstance prevented the return of many Koreans. In addition, they were forbidden to take more than 1,000 yen out of Japan, and so they would have had to abandon all that they had saved in the years of hard labour and return to Korea almost penniless.