So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish

Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers

Donald Keene

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780231522724
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

The attack on Pearl Harbor, which precipitated the Greater East Asia War and its initial triumphs, aroused pride and a host of other emotions among the Japanese people. Yet the single year in which Japanese forces occupied territory from Alaska to Indonesia was followed by three years of terrible defeat. Nevertheless, until the shattering end of the war, many Japanese continued to believe in the invincibility of their country. But in the diaries of well-known writers—including Nagai Kafu, Takami Jun, Yamada Futaru, and Hirabayashi Taiko—and the scholar Watanabe Kazuo, varying doubts were vividly, though privately, expressed.

Donald Keene, renowned scholar of Japan, selects from these diaries, some written by authors he knew well. Their revelations were sometimes poignant, sometimes shocking to Keene. Ito Sei's fervent patriotism and even claims of racial superiority stand in stark contrast to the soft-spoken, kindly man Keene knew. Weaving archival materials with personal recollections and the intimate accounts themselves, Keene reproduces the passions aroused during the war and the sharply contrasting reactions in the year following Japan's surrender. Whether detailed or fragmentary, these entries communicate the reality of false victory and all-too-real defeat.

1

THE DAY THE WAR BEGAN

MANY JAPANESE, including some who had never kept a diary, started one on December 8, 1941, the day that war broke out with Britain and America.¹ Sure that the war would rank as a major event of Japanese history, they painstakingly noted each development reported in the press, hoping that their diaries would help to preserve the events of a glorious era. Of the innumerable diaries kept throughout the country, those of persons who were or later became professional writers are probably the most interesting. The coming of the war moved many of them to intense enthusiasm, regardless of their previous political stance. Aono Suekichi (1890–1961), a leading left-wing literary critic who had been imprisoned for his views, wrote in his diary on learning of the outbreak of war that the time had come for him, as a subject of His Majesty, to render thanks to his country by offering up his life. On January 1, 1942, he wrote, “A day so pellucidly clear it makes one want to say, ‘The waves of the four seas are at peace.’ Heaven and Earth seem to acclaim this New Year of victories. The feeling is strong that Japan is the Land of the Gods.”²

The doubts that many men, especially those who disliked the military leaders, had entertained about the wisdom of taking on such powerful adversaries as America and Britain were swept away in a surge of patriotism. Every fresh victory scored by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy during the first year of the war intensified this emotion. Few diarists resisted the nationwide euphoria created by the flood of triumphs. Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) was perhaps the least moved. He wrote on December 8:

While still in bed, I started writing the first chapter of Fuchin [Sinking or Swimming]. In the evening went to Doshūbashi. A newspaper extra reporting the commencement of hostilities between Japan and America was being hawked. On the way back home, I stopped at a Ginza restaurant. While I was eating, blackout controls went into effect, and the lights in shops along the street were gradually extinguished; but the streetcars and cars did not switch off their lights. When I boarded the Roppongi streetcar, there was, in the midst of the mob of passengers, a patriot who delivered an oration in an earsplitting voice.³

Four days later, Kafū wrote,

On the heels of the declaration of war, posters have been put up along the streets, in streetcars and restaurants, and everywhere else. They say “Slaughter them! The English and Americans are our enemies! Advance like a hundred million balls of fire!” People today have a habit of supposing that ending sentences with da gives them force. This is a case of inept sentiments in inept language.⁴

Kafū continued throughout the war to express disdain for each manifestation of patriotism he observed. His diary describes the military in terms that grew ever harsher as the war went on. He was especially irritated by the crudity of patriotic slogans.

The years Kafū had spent in America and France and his special devotion to French literature may have made him less susceptible to propaganda than most Japanese intellectuals. But, in fact, there was surprisingly little relation between a writer’s experiences abroad and his approval or disapproval of the war. Takamura Kōtarō (1883–1956), one of the most impassioned supporters of the war, had studied sculpture in both the United States and France, but the mood of his poem “Jūnigatsu yōka,” celebrating the attack on Pearl Harbor, has none of Kafū’s haughty indifference. It opens

Remember December eighth!
On this day the history of the world was changed.
The Anglo-Saxon powers
On this day were driven back on East Asian land and sea,
It was their Japan that drove them back,
A tiny country in the Eastern Sea,
Nippon, the Land of the Gods
Ruled over by a living god.⁵

Takamura’s hostility to the “Anglo-Saxons” has been traced to the racial discrimination he encountered while studying in New York. He resented being called a “Jap” and hearing his country referred to as Japan instead of Nippon. Such experiences may explain Takamura’s resentment, though not the vehemence.

The poet Noguchi Yonejirō (1875–1947), unlike Takamura, had little cause for complaint about the treatment he had received abroad. He traveled to America when he was eighteen and met the then well-known poet Joaquin Miller, who not only persuaded him to become a poet but introduced him to the circle of San Francisco poets. Before long, Noguchi, under the name Yone Noguchi, was taken up by the Imagists, who found his charming poems written in English strikingly close to their own. Noguchi also wrote fiction in English, including Letters of a Japanese Parlor-Maid (1906). He married an American⁶ and had numerous American and British friends. His poems in Japanese, less accomplished than those in English, struck readers as being somehow foreign. His best-known collection of poetry in Japanese, published in 1921, was called Poems by a Man with Dual Nationality. Yet this man of two nationalities would express unusual hostility to the West in the poems he composed during the war. One poem, published in 1944, bears the title “Slaughter Them! The Americans and British Are Our Enemies.” It opens

The town overflows with the cry,

“Slaughter them! The Americans and British are our enemies.”

I too shout it. I shout till my voice is hoarse. I shout in tears.

These were the countries that nurtured me for twelve years when I was young.

Even an act of ingratitude cannot be measured against a nation’s fate;

The ties of the past are a dream.

America and England in the old days were for me countries of justice:

America was the country of Whitman,

England the country of Browning;

But now they are dissolute countries fallen into the pit of wealth,

Immoral countries, craving after unpardonable dreams.⁷

The poem goes on to suggest that if his old friends in America and England were to meet him now, they would probably say, “This is a war between country and country. Our friendship is too sacred to be destroyed.” In the last line of the poem, Noguchi gave his reply to their plea: “We’ll show you how decisively we slaughter you and your friendship.”

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Blame for starting the war, regardless of which side fired the first shots, was placed by the poets on dissolute, materialistic countries like Britain and America that had fallen into “a pit of wealth.” The poet Kawada Jun (1882–1956) composed a tanka asserting that on December 8 the English and Americans had revealed their true ferocity:

tsui ni sono	At last, they have
kamen nugisute	Discarded their masks
kiba wo muku	And bared their fangs:
igirisu yakko	The English villains,
amerika yakko	The American villains.^8

It is rather strange that the English and Americans, rather than the Japanese, were accused of starting the war; patriotism took precedence over facts.

Novelists revealed sentiments that were quite as bellicose as those of the poets Takamura and Noguchi. Itō Sei (1905–1969), in both his diary and his essays, expressed delight over the commencement of the war and the anticipated destruction of the Anglo-Saxons, though his first reactions on learning of the attack on Pearl Harbor were surprisingly moderate. He noted in his diary that nobody he saw on the streets or in the buses seemed to be concerned about the war; pedestrians even looked rather glum. But Itō was exhilarated by news that American warships had been sunk during the raid on Pearl Harbor: “The Japanese way of doing things recalls the Russo-Japanese War. It is wonderful.”⁹ Itō was apparently referring to the Japanese attack without prior declaration of war on Russian warships in 1904. The surprise assaults that had caught the enemy unawares at Port Arthur and, thirtyseven years later, at Pearl Harbor were certainly effective, but they aroused outrage abroad over what were deemed violations of international conventions on the conduct of war.

Itō felt no need to justify his jubilation, though we might expect that his close connections with the English language, as both a teacher and a translator, would have given him pause. On December 8, he wrote in his diary,

Our destiny is such that we cannot realize our qualifications as first-class people of the world unless we have fought with the topranking white men.

I have come to understand for the first time as a reality—and with boundless affection—the meaning of each and every aspect of Japan and the Japanese.

An article Itō published on December 9 was even more outspoken:

Yesterday Japan’s war with Britain and America began. We do not know how long this war, the greatest in the history of the Yamato race, will last....

When I saw the headline “Great, Death-Defying Air Attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii,” my whole body became rigid and my eyes danced so much I couldn’t read....

Then, while leaning against the white wall of the basement, I had a feeling of awakening as if water had suddenly been poured over my entire body. Yes, the vindication of our sense of superiority of the race is driving us forward. This is an absolute act, I thought. This war is not an extension of politics or another face of politics. It is a war we had to fight at some stage in order for us to believe firmly, from the depths of our hearts, that the Yamato race is the most superior on the globe.

I, like most other Japanese intellectuals, began the study of English at the age of thirteen, and it brought me in contact with the world. This, of course, was because the races who use English possess the finest culture, the greatest strength and riches of any country in the world. In this sense, up to now they had been the supreme rulers of the world. This awareness had seeped into our guts. And as long as such an awareness was within us, it could not but prevent us from being convinced that the Yamato race was the most superior in the world....

I believe that Japanese intellectuals, as members of the Yamato race, are sure that fighting this war to the finish is absolutely indispensable. We are the so-called “yellow race.” We are fighting to determine the superiority of a race that has been discriminated against. Our war is not the same as Germany’s. Their war is a struggle among similar countries for advantage. Our war is a struggle for a predestined confidence.¹⁰

In these writings, Itō repeatedly used the word minzoku (race) not in speaking of the major segment of humanity that includes not only Japanese but Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians, but in referring specifically to the Yamato race: the Japanese.¹¹ Itō was told on December 16 that he should not use the words “yellow” and “white” when writing about the antagonists and was directed to say instead “the Anglo-Saxons” or “Britain and America.”¹² It is not clear who issued this directive. Perhaps the military, more conscious than Itō that Japan was the ally of two “white” countries, Germany and Italy, were anxious not to give Japan’s war the character of a struggle between races. Later on, when the liberation of Greater East Asia was officially proclaimed as the ultimate goal of the war, the objections to expressing prejudices against non-Asians were forgotten.

Itō predicted that after the war ended, there would be a splendid flowering of literature and that it would be quite different from the literature of the early Shōwa period. He was right in this prediction, but he did not foresee the nature of the changes that occurred. Nor could he have foreseen that the greatest fame he would enjoy in his lifetime was (in the postwar years) as the translator of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel by an Anglo-Saxon.

Itō had a shock on December 12, as he recorded in his diary. On that day, Takasu Yoshijirō (1888–1948), a senior teacher at the school where Itō taught, denounced liberalism in literature. This made Itō think that “it would be necessary, with a view to the future of ten or twenty years from now, to take this opportunity to reconstruct the content of my ideology. I must, in my own way, quickly make my awareness as a Japanese more systematic.”¹³

Itō, whose struggles with the English language had culminated in the translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, seems to have realized at this point that he would have to give up the liberalism implicit in translating such works, but he could not do it immediately. He needed the income from translations and had promised a publisher to translate D. H. Lawrence’s Mexican Morning. He did not feel that translating a work by an enemy author constituted proof that he recognized the writer’s superiority.

As the war progressed, Itō lost some of the fire of his convictions about the Yamato race. It is true that he took to reading the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters, 712), the bible of Shintoism, and considered comparing it with accounts of the Greater East Asia War, but he reported in his diary entry for March 3, 1942: “On looking through this month’s literary magazines and coterie magazines, it is apparent that the hot-headed Nippon shugi [Japanism] of the beginning of the war has been relaxed, and writers are basing their writings on a kind of literary spirit of humanism.”¹⁴ But Itō never doubted the goals of the war or the certainty of a Japanese victory. He wrote on March 12: “I opened a map of the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• 1 - THE DAY THE WAR BEGAN
• 2 - THE BIRTH OF “GREATER EAST ASIA”
• 3 - FALSE VICTORIES AND REAL DEFEATS
• 4 - A DISMAL NEW YEAR
• 5 - ON THE EVE
• 6 - THE JADE VOICE
• 7 - THE DAYS AFTER
• 8 - THE REVIVAL OF LITERATURE
• 9 - REJECTION OF THE WAR
• 10 - UNDER THE OCCUPATION
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• Copyright Page