Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War

The Yakeato Generation

Roman Rosenbaum, Yasuko Claremont, Roman Rosenbaum, Yasuko Claremont

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136936210
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

When we look in detail at the various peripheral groups of disenfranchised people emerging from the aftermath of the Asia–Pacific War the list is startling: Koreans in Japan (migrants or forced labourers), Burakumin, Hibakusha, Okinawans, Asian minorities, comfort women and many others. Many of these groups have been discussed in a large corpus of what we may call 'disenfranchised literature', and the research presented in this book intends to add an additional and particularly controversial example to the long list of the voice- and powerless. The presence of members of what is known as the yakeato sedai or the generation of people who experienced the fire-bombings of the Asia–Pacific War is conspicuous in all areas of contemporary Japan. From literature to the visual arts, from music to theatre, from architecture to politics, their influence and in many cases guiding principles is evident everywhere and in many cases forms the keystone of modern Japanese society and culture.

The contributors to this book explore the impact of the yakeato generation - and their literary, creative and cultural and works - on the postwar period by drawing out the importance of the legacy of those people who truly survived the darkest hour of the twentieth century and re-evaluate the ramifications of their experiences in contemporary Japanese society and culture. As such this book will be of huge interest to those studying Japanese history, literature, poetry and cultural studies.

Part I

Setting the stage for the yakeato generation

1 Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War

The yakeato (the burnt-out ruins) generation

Roman Rosenbaum

Right before his eyes the burnt-out ruins stretched as far as he could see. There was nothing standing to obstruct the view from the tramway all the way to the sea. The city where not even a drop of water was leaking out of the fire engine was completely burnt to the ground.¹

Introduction

The city in question is wartime Kobe and the description of the yakeato vista applied equally to all major cities in Japan during the end of the Asia-Pacific conflict. The observation about the burnt-out Kobe is made by the protagonist Hajime or simply Shōnen H (A Boy Called H), as he is referred to in the eponymous novel by Senoo Kappa. Perhaps one of the most esteemed accounts of a child’s experience of growing up during the final stages of the Asia-Pacific War and the battle on the home front in Japan, Senoo describes his life growing up in the port city of Kobe, Japan, from the 1930s until a few years after the end of World War II. Told through the eyes of a young boy, the coming-of-age story in a society at war unexpectedly became a runaway bestseller as late as in 1997 with 1.6 million hardcover copies sold, and signified the renewed interest in Japan’s wartime memory. In a chapter entitled ‘yakeato’ the author describes the burnt-out cityscapes through the eyes of the adolescent narrator:

The ground was dotted with traces where the incendiary shells had dug in. I thought ‘Look how many have dropped.’ When ‘H’ trudged wearily towards his house he could see a fluttering dance of white butterflies ahead of him above the burnt-out ruins. The white butterflies ceaselessly took off from the ground and rose in a dance. ‘H’ ran to the spot because it happened to be where his house used to be. What he saw as a white butterfly was in fact the burnt pages of an Iwanami paperback book left after the fire and stirred up by the wind. Amidst the burnt-out fields of monochrome black the scene of small white butterflies dancing in the wind was just like a dream.²

‘H’ sees this image when he returns to the still-smouldering ruins to salvage something useful out of the ashes. In this vivid metaphor of the devastation the yakeato quite literally comes to life and heralds the later image of the phoenix rising from the ashes. The child narrator notices that ‘the only thing left standing amidst the burnt-out ruins was the erect and grotesque scorched remains of the telegraph poles’ and in an allegorical reference to war-torn Japan’s position in the world realizes how small and insignificant Japan looks amidst the ruins. The boy’s adolescent imagination transforms the burnt-out ruins into a lifelike creature and when he tries to touch some of the objects buried in the still-hot ashes of the fire, they singe his hand and leave a mark on his skin; yet another metaphor for how the burnt-out cityscapes left indelible marks on the psyche of Japan’s youth, even some 50 years after the event. It would be simplistic to pigeonhole this generation as ‘victim’ writers simply because their acerbic and corrosive style refuses to fall into prefabricated categories. Senoo’s ‘H’, for example, ‘hates the guys who continue to deceive the citizens by telling lies and not telling the truth more than he despises the enemy’, and he quite frankly admits that they were ‘the government, military and newspaper corporations’.³

Surprisingly, there are quite a few post-war works like Senoo Kappa’s Shōnen H that attempt to come to terms with the memory and experience of the generation that came of age during the Asia-Pacific War. ‘If we wish for peace, we must prepare for war’ goes the popular cliché but behind this casual phrase a thousand disparate voices of disenfranchised groups concealed in the shadow of ‘official’ history vie for recognition. Carol Gluck has written illuminatingly about the Japanese predilection for ‘amnesiac history’ and the notion that for the total wars fought in Germany and Japan a level of involvement right down to the participation of the individual is essential.⁴ Holding all aspects of society, from the emperor to the individual, accountable for war further adds to the frustration of individual groups who actively resisted the war effort and were persecuted as a result.

It is to the memory of these groups of people left in the penumbra of official history that this book is dedicated. When we look in detail at the various peripheral groups of disenfranchised people emerging from the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, the list is startling: Koreans in Japan (migrants or forced labourers), Burakumin, Hibakusha, Okinawans, Asian minorities, comfort women and many others too numerous to mention here. Many of these groups have been discussed in a large corpus of what we may call ‘disenfranchised literature’,⁵ and the research presented in this book intends to add an additional and particularly controversial example to the long list of the voice- and powerless. The presence of members of what is known as the yakeato sedai or the generation of people who experienced the fire-bombings of the Asia-Pacific War is conspicuous in all areas of contemporary Japan and is usually referred to as a distinct group. From literature to the visual arts, from music to theatre, from architecture to politics, their influence and in many cases guiding principles is evident everywhere and in many cases forms the keystone of modern Japanese society and culture. Tsurumi Shunsuke has observed about this generation that they developed a new social consciousness which developed out of seeing their elders undergo tenkō or ideological conversion when American democracy replaced military expansionism.⁶ This led to the emergence of a suspicious pacifist group of post-war artists that continued to question authority, hegemony and the legacy of the Asia-Pacific War in direct opposition to what Carol Gluck has referred to as ‘history in the passive voice’ or victims’ history.⁷

As a result of the young age of the members of the yakeato generation some escaped conscription but were used as forced labourers in ammunition factories and other war-related industries.⁸ Yet it was precisely their supposed innocence, which is comparable in ambiguity to the youngest members of the Hitler Youth in Germany, that makes them a suitable subject for investigation in regards to the psychological ramifications of the crucible of conflict. In fact, German, Korean and Vietnamese societies experienced similar indiscriminate fire-bombings of civilian populations by American planes and the latest book by Tanaka Toshiyuki of the Hiroshima Peace Institute – Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History – investigates the similar cross-cultural experiences of these societies. In post-war Germany in particular, the generation of children born to the soldiers of World War II were stunned by the silence of their parents and started to create a literary phenomenon known as the Väterliteratur,⁹ which questioned the morality of what their fathers were doing during the war and how they could go on living with the memory of war atrocities, crimes and the Holocaust. Victor’s justice, it seems, erases memory but victim’s justice leads to a much deeper, often artistic expression of self-interrogation.

Thus, to what extent can or should this generation of children be held accountable for a war they did not comprehend and, more importantly, how did they think about the war and express its psychological impact on themselves in the latter part of their lives?

Josphine Hendin has observed about post-war American literature and culture that it illustrates the prominence of an ever-greater diversity of voices and perspectives,¹⁰ which is equally true for post-war Japanese society. The conception of this book pays homage to this increase in diversity from the perspectives of the marginalized voices of war orphans and disenfranchised child soldiers¹¹ who continued to shape the discourse of post-war Japan. Upon close inspection, the pretermitted influence of this generation has been touched upon by many researchers, yet arguably never before has a single study connected all the strands of influence from this generation which transcend all aspects of post-war Japanese artistic production – from drama, theatre, movies, literature, poetry, women’s studies and manga. What follows is a brief discussion of the existing major academic contributions to the study of the yakeato generation.

Yakeato research

As we have seen from the discussion of Shōnen H above, spontaneous interest in the legacy of the yakeato generation can resurface at any historical point in time, even some 65 years after the war ended. As a counterpoint to the more recent accounts of the yakeato generation’s legacy stand the firmly established ‘classical’ narratives. One of the most important reference points in this respect is Takeyama Michio’s Biruma no tategoe, first published in 1946 in the then leading juvenile magazine Akatonbo (Red Dragonfly).¹² Although not dealing directly with the yakeato generation, this early post-war narrative deals with young students who are sent to the front in Burma and survive the war through music. It became famous in part because Ichikawa Kon produced two movie adaptations, the first in 1955 and the second in 1985. Takeyama’s story transcends stereotypical good versus evil depictions of the Asia-Pacific War.¹³ Arguably the most comprehensive analysis of the ramifications of the Asia-Pacific War as far as post-war Japanese social history is concerned is presented in John W. Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, which was followed by Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. In many ways, Dower’s work served as an inspiration to pursue the artistic creation of the yakeato generation as a project in itself because of the detailed numerical data he provides. For example, in War Without Mercy, he wrote that the exact number of civilians killed by both incendiaries and the atomic bombs is uncertain, but probably was close to 400,000.¹⁴ This and many other references, like the chapter ‘Kyodatsu: Exhaustion and Despair’ in Embracing Defeat, where he discusses the hardship of the civilian population alongside the military, led to the observation that if ‘ordinary Japanese citizens’ struggled, how much worse off were disenfranchised native Japanese groups? And by extension, how was their traumatic experience of one of the most devastating conflicts of the twentieth century expressed in the relative prosperity of the later post-war years?

This study of selected disenfranchised groups in relation to mainstream Japanese society has also been assisted by Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook’s Japan at War: An Oral History, in which is collected and transcribed arguably the first English-language account of the war experience of ordinary Japanese citizens. From the startling revelations of hardship amounting to a victim consciousness of Japanese civilians, it is only a short leap of the imagination towards an inquiry into how the yakeato generation expressed their childhood experience through a variety of media in the post-war period of relative prosperity. Those experiences of devastation and starvation are corroborated by a volume of letters entitled From a Ruined Empire: Letters – Japan, China, Korea 1945–46 compiled from the eyewitness accounts of nine youthful servicemen, including such luminaries as Donald Keene, who recorded their observations.

Comprehensive cultural and social histories like Andrew Gordon’s A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present also mention the controversial implications of the war for children from various Japanese generations. If we juxtapose, for example, his observation that ‘the average height and weight of elementary school children decreased until 1948’ because of the war, with the new wave of ‘revisionist’ historians of the 1990s that condemned a ‘masochist’ historical consciousness and refused to teach children about such subjects as the comfort women or massacres of civilians, we can easily conceptualize the pivotal role of childhood experience in Japanese social consciousness.¹⁵ Throughout Japan’s long post-war period, the publication of war-related childhood memoirs, diaries and recollections all point to a sense of incompleteness and a desire to overcome the traumatic childhood experiences of an entire generation. It is the investigation of these raw expressions of war experience engendered in the literature of the very same children who experienced it first-hand that is the focal point of this collaboration.

Although quite a number of academic inquiries have investigated the discourse of disenfranchised children emerging from the ruins of the Asia-Pacific War, very few distinguish their voices from the mainstream suffering of the Japanese population. Two conspicuous examples – Thomas Haven’s Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two and an excellent chapter entitled ‘The Yakeato Jidai’ in Owen Griffith’s PhD dissertation (‘The Reconstruction of Self and Society in Early Postwar Japan 1945–49’, 1999) – stand out for appositely naming the generation as a distinct and important entity in considering post-war society and culture.

Finally, the generational memory of the yakeato generation is dealt with specifically in Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White and Lisa Yoneyama’s Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), Marc Gallicchio’s The Unpredictability of the Past as well as Yoshikuni Igarashi’s Bodies of Memory, which all in their own inimitable ways investigate the construction of memories surrounding the Asia-Pacific War.

Yakeato problematic: victim versus victimizer dichotomy

Most of the studies mentioned above acknowledge a particular aspect of the yakeato generation in relation to overarching topics of history, memory, war and socio-cultural Japanese history and it is the subject of this book to draw the various strands together into a holistic investigation of the nature of the yakeato generation and its contemporary significance. Most commonly this generation is referred to as yakeato sedai or the ‘generation of the burnt-out ruins’ but there are several pertinent metaphors like the image of traumatized ‘eyes which saw the discoloured vista’ (akachaketa menseki o mita me) and the symbolic ‘burnt-out fields’ (yakenohara) of Japan’s apocalyptic landscape that also accurately convey its intrinsic significance for the common people. The aim of this book is thus to set the record straight and to elucidate a generation whose membership is rapidly declining but whose legacy has not yet been fully explored. The chapters in this collection offer a multi-disciplinary examination of the yakeato generation, whose impact on pos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Setting the stage for the yakeato generation
• Part II: Pre-yakeato: provenance of a generation to come
• Part III: The yakeato cohort: offspring of war
• Part IV: Post-yakeato: the heritage of a generation
• Yakeato research bibliography
• Index