War in Japanese Popular Culture
Matthew Penney
Asia-Pacific Journal:
Japan Focus
Course Reader no. 3
2012War in Japanese Popular Culture

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VOLUME EDITORS
MATTHEW PENNEY
Concordia University

SERIES EDITORLAURA HEIN
Northwestern University

EDITORIAL BOARD
Mark Caprio
Lonny Carlile
Parks Coble
Sabine Frühstück
Tom Grunfeld
Laura HeinJames Huffman
Jeffrey Kingston
Susan Long
Laura Miller
Mark Ravina
Mark Selden
Stephen Vlastos

War in Japanese Popular Culture2

The copyright of all material in this course reader is held by the respective authors, except whereotherwise noted.

The volume editor can be contacted at penneym@hotmail.com.

War in Japanese Popular Culture3

War in Japanese Popular Culture
Introduction

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Matthew Penney

15

Matthew Penney, “War and Japan: The Non-Fiction Manga of Mizuki
Shigeru,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, September 21, 2008.
ISHIKAWA Yoshimi

22

Ishikawa Yoshimi, “Healing Old Wounds with Manga Diplomacy: Japan’s
Wartime Manga Displayed at China’s Nanjing Massacre Memorial
Museum,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10-10-1, March 8, 2010.
Rumi SAKAMOTO

32

Rumi Sakamoto, “‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’
Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron,” The AsiaPacific Journal, January 14, 2008.
Philip Seaton

52

Philip Seaton, “Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism: Testimony
in Sensōron, Sensōron as Testimony,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 10-32-3,
August 9, 2010.
NAKAZAWA Keiji and Richard H. Minear

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NAKAZAWA Keiji and Richard H. Minear, “Hiroshima: The Autobiographyof Barefoot Gen,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 10-39-1, September 27, 2010.
Michele Mason
Michele Mason, “Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century: A
New Generation of Historical Manga,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 9-47-5,
November 23, 2009.

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War in Japanese Popular Culture
Aaron Gerow

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103

Aaron Gerow, “War and Nationalism in Yamato: Trauma and Forgetting
the Postwar,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, 9-24-1, June 13, 2011.
Susan J. Napier

114

Susan J. Napier, “World War II as Trauma, Memory and Fantasy inJapanese Animation,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, May 31, 2005.
Recommended for Further Reading122

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Introduction
Since 1995, two sides of Japan’s cultural landscape have grabbed international
attention. The first is tension with neighbors China and Korea over the history and legacies
of World War II in the Pacific, Japan’s “Asia-Pacific War.” The second is the explosion in
popularity and international reach of Japanese pop culture products including anime,
manga, J-pop, and TV dramas. This reader brings together eight articles that describe thediverse, and often divergent, ways in which Japanese popular culture has represented thecountry’s wars of the 1930s and 1940s.
Background: Modern Japan and the Asia-Pacific War
Between 1600 and 1868 (the Edo Period), the Japanese archipelago was home to anadvanced early modern society. From the beginning of the 17th century the Shoguns of theruling Tokugawa family launched a slate of reforms designed to promote stability after
more than a century of civil war. Society was divided into four hereditary classes—
samurai (the ruling warrior class), peasants, artisans, and merchants—and a draconian
legal system put into place to control the populace. Hundreds of feudal lords continued torule over semi-autonomous domains, but the Tokugawa had the final say in areas liketaxation and law. From the 1630s, the Tokugawa also enacted the sakoku (closed country)
policy which prevented outsiders, apart from a small number of officially sanctioned
Korean, Chinese, and Dutch traders, from visiting Japan. Japanese were also barred fromventuring overseas. For nearly 250 years, Japan had limited contact with the outside world.
Tokugawa leaders believed that these reforms would ensure their continued hegemony.
In 1853, American Commodore Matthew Perry sailed to Japan with a fleet ofwarships and a mandate to open the country by negotiation or by force. American
politicians, eyeing increased trade with China and lucrative Pacific whaling, and with thesettlement of California in mind, wished to use Japanese ports as a trans-Pacific base toexpand the country’s influence overseas. Edo Period Japan had developed a complex
economy, sophisticated urban planning, and had literacy rates which arguably exceeded
those of Europe or America. During its isolation, however, Japanese military technology
stagnated, and the Tokugawa had no choice but to sign “unequal treaties” with America andother world powers such as Britain and France. Foreign powers gained access to ports,
control over tariffs, and extraterritoriality, meaning that their nationals would not be
subject to Japanese law. These concessions were considered an insult by many samurai
and capitulation to outside demands eroded confidence in Tokugawa rule. Samurai fromthe feudal domains of Satsuma and Choshu used the emperor Meiji, head of a line that had
not held real political power for about 1000 years, as a rallying point and defeated the
Tokugawa in the Meiji Restoration of 1868.
The Meiji government was an oligarchy made up mostly of the samurai who had
played key roles in overthrowing the Tokugawa. Emperor Meiji reigned as a figurehead
and new nationalist symbol. Leaders immediately launched a series of reforms designed tostrengthen Japan and control the population. The class system was abolished and a
conscription system became the backbone of modern military forces in 1873. Meiji policy
was guided by two broad goals—protecting Japan from Western imperialism and pressing
for revision of the “unequal treaties.” To accomplish these goals, technology and systems of

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governmentality were imported in an ambitious reform program that “modernized”
Japanese society while crushing local autonomy and diversity.
As Japanese leaders were becoming more aware of the community of nations andinternational system of the 1870s, European powers controlled virtually the entire globe.
India was a British colony considered “the brightest jewel in the crown.” The so-called“scramble for Africa” saw the continent (save Liberia and Ethopia) divided up underEuropean rulers. China was subjected to treaty arrangements even more humiliating thanJapan’s “unequal treaties.” Japanese leaders decided that the best way to prevent Japan
from becoming a victim of imperialism was to become an imperialist power.
Japanese leaders expanded their sphere of influence, first forcibly assimilating the
Ainu and Okinawan people in the north and south of the Japanese islands, and then fighting
wars with neighbors China and Russia in a drive for expansion. After defeating China in
1894-95, Japan took Taiwan as a colonial possession and established political andeconomic hegemony over Korea. Japan then defeated Russia in 1904-05, secured its powerover the Korean peninsula, which it annexed in 1910, and gained control over railway lines
and other concessions in the northern Chinese region of Manchuria. In all areas, colonial
police and the Imperial Japanese Army crushed local resistance. The United States, GreatBritain, and France had overseas colonies during this time and they saw Japan’s moves as
legitimate. Having improved its power position in East Asia, Japan was welcomed into theinternational alliance system hitherto dominated by Europe and America. The “unequal
treaties” of the 1850s were finally done away with, Japan entered into an equal alliancewith England in 1902, and went on to side with England, France, and eventually the UnitedStates in World War I, seizing German territories in the Far East and sending material aid
and naval support to Europe.
During the 1919 Paris Peace Conference which followed the end of World War I,
contradictions in Japan’s global position and role as a colonizer became clear. Japan
attempted to have a “racial equality clause” written into the Covenant of the League of
Nations, a new international body much like the later United Nations. The proposal wasstrongly opposed by Australia. American President Woodrow Wilson was also opposed
because he relied on the support of pro-segregation Southerners. At the same time thatJapan was pushing for equality on the international stage, however, Japanese colonial
forces responded to the March First Movement for independence in Korea with a brutal
crackdown. In addition, through the 1910s, Japanese elites moved to increase their powerin China, pushing for more “unequal treaty” privileges of their own.
During Japan’s version of the “Roaring 20s,” liberal reforms saw the introduction ofuniversal male suffrage at home and Japan’s entry into arms limitation treaties abroad. In
addition, a cosmopolitan consumer culture took root in Japanese cities. In 1931, however,the national direction changed dramatically after Japanese forces based in the northernChinese region of Manchuria bombed the railway lines that they were ostensibly there toprotect. Acting without the knowledge of the civilian government in Tokyo, the troops,
known as the Kantogun or Kwantung Army, placed the blame on “terrorists” and used thisas an excuse to seize control of Manchuria. The Japanese government supported thesemoves after the fact and from this point on, the Japanese military greatly increased its
influence on the country’s direction.
In 1932, Japan turned Manchuria into a puppet state called Manchukuo. This movewas condemned by the League of Nations, and Japan responded by withdrawing from theWar in Japanese Popular Culture

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League in 1933. Japan became increasingly isolated internationally. At home, authorities
relied on the “Special Higher Police,” a network of thought police, to enforce ideologicalorthodoxy. Communists, social democrats, union organizers, feminists, pacifists, andothers who resisted the shift in national direction were arrested and held without charge.
Many were tortured; this state violence meant that resistance to militarism in Japan was all
but silenced.
More and more, Japanese elites viewed Britain and the United States as imperial
rivals. They believed that the Monroe Doctrine—which stipulated that any attempt by aEuropean or Asian power to encroach on the US sphere of economic and political influencein Latin America would be considered an act of aggression—was hypocritical, given that
America insisted on an “Open Door” policy in China, meaning equal exploitation by all
powers. Japanese politicians, military leaders, and ideologues believed that Japan had
special interests in neighboring East Asian regions and resented the imperial presence ofdistant Euro-American powers. In addition, racist immigration policies enacted in Englishspeaking countries like the United States, Canada, and Australia, combined with rhetoric by
populists in areas like California and British Columbia that attacked Japanese immigrants inracist terms as dirty, disease-ridden, and dishonest, made Japan’s leaders feel that thecountry was being singled out and had little hope of being treated as an equal ininternational affairs.
These feelings of discontent with the prevailing international order were heightenedby the Great Depression. The New York stock market crash in 1929 initially had little effecton Japan, but economic hardship in America and other countries eroded consumer
economies and with them, markets for Japanese exports such as silk and tea. Japanese
farmers relied on this trade for their livelihoods, and the decline caused a considerable
increase in rural poverty.
Japanese leaders took from the Great Depression two ideas that—to them—justified
imperial expansion. The first was that Japan needed more overseas territory where poor
farmers could settle. The second was that international trade was no guarantee of Japaneseprosperity and that stable growth could only be achieved if Japan had its own sphere of
influence—exclusive access to massive markets like China’s to sell Japanese manufactured
goods and unfettered access to raw materials like Manchurian coal and steel to powerindustry. These ideas were often couched in terms of salvation for impoverished Japaneseand mutually beneficial development across Asia, but while these feelings may have been
genuine in some cases, the military elites saw an opportunity to increase their power,prestige, and share of the national budget, while big business, particularly the big industrial
combines, called zaibatsu, supported imperialist expansion as a way to increase profits.
Liberals who favored a more conciliatory approach in international affairs were sidelined.
Japan increased its troop presence on the continent through the 1930s, and things
came to a head when Japanese and Chinese troops exchanged fire near Beijing in July 1937.
Called the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, this clash sparked the beginning of what historians
refer to as the Japan-China War. War was never formally declared and Japanese leadersreferred to the conflict as “The China Incident,” even as they poured millions of troops into
the fighting.
Japan’s forces conquered China’s coastal regions in rapid succession but were forced
into a stalemate in the interior. The United States and Great Britain condemned Japan’s
actions in China, and these tensions led Japan to sign the Axis Pact with Nazi Germany andWar in Japanese Popular Culture

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fascist Italy in 1940. Japan’s attack on China was poorly planned. Not only were there noclear war aims and thus no way to secure victory save a total domination of the huge
expanse of Chinese territory and its massive population, but Japan also relied on imports ofstrategic material such as oil and steel from the United States, one of the sternest critics ofJapanese aggression. Tensions soared through 1940 and 1941 as America launched a tradeembargo against Japan and issued an ultimatum, demanding that Japan withdraw its troops
from China. Seeing war as inevitable, the Japanese leadership launched a surprise attack
against the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor and coordinated strikes on American,
British, and Dutch territories across the Asia-Pacific region in December 1941. By mid1942, Japan had captured the Philippines, an American colony; British-held Malaysia,
Singapore, and Burma; the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia); and innumerable Pacific islands.
Japan organized its empire into the so-called “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”
By mid-1943, the Japanese advance had been turned back by a string of American
victories, and the American Navy’s “island hopping campaign” began in earnest. The
Philippines was invaded in 1944 and Japanese surface and air forces were all but wiped out.
In the first part of 1945, American troops took Okinawa, the southernmost of the Japaneseislands, and began an intense campaign of aerial bombardment of Japanese cities. An
atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on August 6. On August 9, a second
bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and America’s Soviet allies invaded Manchuria, breaking
Japan’s last defensive bulwark on the continent. Japan surrendered unconditionally on
August 15 and was occupied by multinational forces dominated by the United States.
Violence and War Experience
A basic account of the events leading up to a conflict on the scale of the Asia-Pacific
War cannot do justice to the experiences of violence, terror, and loss of millions of victims.
In the following four sections victimizers, victims, varied positions, and heroes, I will
outline the basic thematic categories through which Japanese have understood wartime
violence. Each of these has played a significant role in Japanese representations of the
Asia-Pacific War in postwar popular culture.
Victimizers
Since the 1990s, Japanese war crimes of the 1930s and 1940s have garnered
increasing global attention. Japanese atrocities against American POWs had been wellknown since early in the war, but it is only in recent decades that there has emerged abroader awareness of the extent of Japanese military and imperial violence against Asian
victims.
The Nanking Massacre took place in late 1937, in the early months of the JapanChina War. After the fall of the Chinese capital of Nanking and the flight of Chiang Kaishek’s government to the interior, Japanese soldiers looted towns and burned buildings,
raped women and girls, and killed tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of
unarmed prisoners of war and civilians in a series of atrocities that have become
emblematic of Japanese wartime violence.
While the Nanking Massacre has been the major focus, bloodshed did not stop after
the fall of the Chinese capital. Japanese armies on the continent were always poorly
supplied and expected to find food as they marched. This meant attacks on ChineseWar in Japanese Popular Culture9

peasant villages, innumerable killings, and forced dislocations. Similar acts of violenceagainst civilians characterised Japanese military behavior through the entire war. In 1944
and 1945, for example, Japanese forces in the Philippines killed tens of thousands ofcivilians during the American invasion to retake the islands.
Japanese military and imperial brutality extended to the management of the war
economy. In many cases, populations in territories captured by Japan and existing colonies
like Korea were treated as expendable resources. Hundreds of thousands were kidnappedand forced to labor in mines or construct roads and railways. Many did not survive. Late in
the war, Japanese troops seized the entire rice harvest in Vietnam, leading to the starvationof hundreds of thousands.
“Comfort Women” was the name given to women, mostly from Korea, who were
forcibly kept in Japanese military brothels. Survivors have described horrific conditions.
Girls in their early teens were raped dozens of times in a single day. Any resistance or
attempt to escape could be met with violence by soldiers or the Korean and Japanesegangsters who organized many of the camps. Ostensibly a means of directing the sexual
energy of Japanese soldiers away from civilians like the women victimized after the fall of
Nanking, the Comfort Women system stands out as one of the most notorious examples of
the Japanese military’s official disregard for human rights and the dignity of civilians underempire.
Medical unit 731 is notorious for its terrible callousness toward human life,
although the death toll is low compared to other patterns of Japanese military violence.
Japanese military doctors in Manchuria and northern China carried out a program of
biological warfare and human experimentation. Plague infected fleas were used to spreaddisease through strongholds of Chinese resistance. Prisoners were injected with plague,and doctors studied the progress of the disease as they wasted and died. Unnecessary, fatal
surgeries were performed on healthy patients to gather medical research data. Scholars
now believe that Unit 731 doctors gained immunity from prosecution by the United States
after the war in exchange for their research results.
For many, these and other atrocities have defined Japan’s Asia-Pacific War.
Victims
Until late 1944, most of the hardship suffered by Japanese civilians came in the formof material shortages as well as the deaths of sons, husbands, and fathers killed in thefighting overseas. All of this changed when the United States captured island bases that put
the Japanese home islands within bombing range.
American air raids took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians,
many of them women and children. On the night of March 9-10, 1945 alone, over 100,000
civilians were killed in the firebombing of Tokyo. Millions more across Japan saw theirhouses burned and were thrown into homelessness and poverty. In the article “A
Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and theAmerican Way of War from World War II to Iraq,” Mark Selden describes the ideologicalshift in America from harshly condemning Japanese bombing of Chinese civilians in the late
1930s to embracing the practice in America’s own war against Japan. Selden argues thatthrough the Korean and Vietnam Wars and beyond, aerial bombardment of cities became
the representative “American way of war” beginning in 1945.

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In War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, John Dower has describedactions by American soldiers identical to acts for which Japanese were tried as war
criminals, including the mistreatment and executions of prisoners of war. In addition,
during the fighting in 1945 and the occupation of Japan, many women were raped byAmerican soldiers. In Japan’s Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution during WorldWar II and the US Occupation, Yuki Tanaka describes in detail some of these atrocities,
seldom discussed in postwar America. Many rapes took place throughout the occupation,
but two mass attacks happened in a single week: On April 4, 1946 fifty GIs broke into a
hospital and raped seventy-seven women. One victim had just given birth and soldierskilled her two-day-old baby by tossing it to the floor. On April 11, forty U.S. soldiers cut thephone lines of one of Nagoya’s city blocks and stormed houses, “raping many girls andwoman between the ages of 10 and 55 years.” In Okinawa, which remained under
American control after Japan regained its independence in 1952, activists stress thatthousands of women were raped and brutalized by American troops, while few
perpetrators were ever brought to justice.
Indeed, few parts of Japan’s civilian population suffered as much as the people of
Okinawa. American forces indiscriminately shelled and bombed the Okinawan islands inwhat locals have come to call the “Typhoon of Steel.” One third of the Okinawan populationof 300,000 lost their lives in the fighting.
The atomic bombs remain the most forceful images of the wartime victimization ofJapanese civilians. More than 250,000 are believed to have died in the bombings within thefirst few months after detonation alone, with cancer and radiation-related symptoms
plaguing survivors for the rest of their lives. Japanese leaders had made several surrender
overtures before the bombs were dropped. In Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan,
Herbert Bix outlines how the only major surrender condition sought by Japan, that
Emperor Hirohito be spared prosecution and allowed to remain on the throne, became theofficial US occupation position anyway.
Varied Positions
ODA Makoto (1932-2007), one of the leading Japanese anti-war activists of the
postwar era, was a staunch critic of American actions in the Vietnam War. Despite his hardanti-war stance, however, he was hesitant to condemn ordinary American soldiers or pilots
engaged in bombing raids like the one he survived as a youngster in Osaka in 1945, “I had
enormous sympathy with American soldiers who got drafted against their own will. They
had to go to Vietnam to shoot people. This was the same situation as Japanese soldiers
fighting in China [in WWII]. They were drafted, so they had to go there to fight with and toshoot Chinese. We have to get rid of this kind of vicious cycle….”1
For Oda, the direct acts by perpetrators of military violence needs to be placed in
the context of draft systems, propaganda, and military indoctrination. Militarism meantthat the victimizers in war were themselves victims.
Not all Japanese troops were involved in war crimes but all were subjected to brutal
totalitarian military discipline. Beatings for trivial offenses were common. To hesitate
when ordered to take a civilian’s life made one a target. To refuse an order could mean1

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/03/14/18076761.php

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death. Conscientious objectors existed, but most were jailed and tortured as peace activism
was criminalized. “Cowards” on the battlefield or resisters at home knew that theirfamilies could be targeted, ostracized, or denied rations. Likewise, civilians who had
doubts about Japan’s wars of aggression were bullied or brutalized into silence. Japaneseon the home front were never given a realistic account of the war situation. Atrocities werecovered up and Japanese at home were told that Asians welcomed them with open arms.
Retreats became “strategic repositioning.” After the war, many Japanese were shocked by
the extent of misinformation used to win support for the war effort and to this day,
Daihonei happyo (Imperial General Headquarters Report) is an idiom meaning“propaganda and lies.”
The environment of casual violence that typified the Japanese military only became
worse as the war against America and its allies turned against Japan. Mass starvation took
the lives of countless Japanese soldiers across the Asia-Pacific region. Instead of medicine
or treatment, sick or wounded soldiers were given hand grenades to take their own lives.
Poorly equipped troops were ordered to charge at American machine gun positions or
clutch powder charges and throw themselves under the treads of approaching tanks. Evenon hopeless battlefields, Japanese soldiers were ordered to die to the last man. The
kamikaze suicide attacks—which included not only the piloting of explosive-laden aircraftat American ships but such desperate measures as manned “suicide torpedoes” and divers
armed with mines—were born from this milieu.
The Okinawan people were “Japanese” by nationality, but were often treated as
ethnic or cultural others. During the Battle of Okinawa, Japanese officers executed some
civilians simply for speaking their local dialect, accused of spying for the United States.
Since 1945, Okinawans have asserted that the Japanese army, far from defending thecivilian population, simply became another enemy. Okinawan civilians were pressed at
gunpoint into hopeless suicide attacks against American troops. Others were driven to taketheir own lives by an Imperial Army ideologically drilled to consider surrender to be atraitorous act. Nevertheless, many Okinawans, like mainland Japanese, voiced passionate
support for Japanese empire and militarism, and Okinawans drafted into the Japanesemilitary participated in bloodshed elsewhere. Did they, like many others in Japan, have any
choice given the surveillance state and violent controls in place? Okinawans cannot beeasily categorized as “victims” or “victimizers” in war, and their historical experience
shows us the fundamental ambiguity of those types of absolute categories.
HeroesAlongside representations of Japanese as victims, victimizers, or occupying a greyzone between those categories, are more controversial postwar images of military men as
tragic or even glorious heroes. While most Japanese welcomed peace after the country’s1945 surrender, the old discourses of military valor persisted and were incorporated into
entertainment culture. Japanese fighter aces like Sakai Saburo (1916-2000) publishedbestselling autobiographies which skirted larger questions of war responsibility andviolence in favor of simple stories of exciting sky battles against American pilots andpaeans for the shattered Japanese air forces. Films like Taiheiyo no arashi (Storm over the
Pacific, 1960) and Daikusen (Great Battle in the Sky, 1966) took up this narrative of a heroic
struggle to defend the Japanese homeland, coupling special effects with the teary

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melodrama of military sacrifice. While now less common, Japanese war films featuringpilots and sailors as tragic heroes have appeared periodically over the years. Famous boy
band SMAP even starred in an air war film of their own, the sappy Kimi wo wasurenai (I’llNever Forget You) in 1995. These popular works typically do not demonize the UnitedStates and are similar in tone to America-Japan co-productions like Tora! Tora! Tora!
(1970) and the later Letters from Iwo-jima (2006). War is decried, peace praised, but there
is also a soft spot—a mix of melodrama and nostalgia—for the men who gave their lives
defending Japan. From other viewpoints, however, these individuals can be seen as either apart of Japan’s brutal military machine or helpless draftees sent to their deaths by unfeelingplanners. Each of these positions has had an important place in Japanese popular culture.
Far more problematic than “tragic heroes” is a trend that began in earnest in the
1990s to redeem Japan’s wars of the 1930s and 1940s. This mode of representation istypically referred to as neo-nationalism or historical revisionism. Proponents of thisview of history, which include some prominent conservative politicians, have argued thatJapan’s wars were part self-defence against aggression by America and its allies and partrighteous quest to free Asia from Western colonial rule. This framing borrows directlyfrom the rhetoric of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” of the war period. Japan’s
wartime violence is denied, whitewashed, or simply explained away as chastisement of
guerillas who contravened the laws of war. Right-wing pundits have written a string ofbooks on these themes, and revisionists have attempted to introduce their “positive” storyof Japanese history into middle schools in the form of the Atarashii rekishi kyokasho (NewHistory Textbook). Japanese school boards can choose from a number of government
approved books, and the revisionist one has only been adopted by a tiny number, but its
description of empire in more positive terms and the fact that it has received official
certification sparked controversy in Japan and neighboring countries several times since
the first version of the book appeared in 2001.
While it is true that Japanese Empire did bring industrialization and population
growth to areas like Taiwan and Korea, neo-nationalists and revisionists ignore theviolence of empire, even going so far as to claim that events like the Nanking Massacre andthe suffering of Comfort Women were fabricated as part of an “anti-Japanese conspiracy.”
Using extreme rhetoric, these ideologues condemn Japanese who research or write about
Japanese war crimes as “anti-Japanese Japanese.” These viewpoints are tied very closely topolitical conservatives who wish to overturn Article 9 of the Japanese constitution which
declares that “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, theJapanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or
use of force as means of settling international disputes.” The desire for a more glorious,
heroic story of the Asia-Pacific War is tied closely to a wish to expand Japan’s military roleat present and shed what are seen as the fetters of postwar pacifism. While neonationalists and revisionists have been extremely vocal and produced some notable worksof popular culture, a majority of Japanese support Article 9 and express contrition for past
war crimes and atrocities. The “culture war” between neo-nationalist deniers andprogressive writers and educators, however, continues unabated.

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War Memory and Popular Culture
Since the 1980s, “memory” has evolved into a key academic topic. Between 1984
and 1992, French historian Pierre Nora headed the “Realms of Memory” (Les Lieux deMémoire) project. He wished to tell “a history in multiple voices… less interested in causes
than in effects… less interested in 'what actually happened' than in its perpetual re-use andmisuse, its influence on successive presents; less interested in traditions than in the way inwhich traditions are constituted and passed on.”2“History” is understood in diverse ways and studies of memory seek to elucidate theways in which events have come to be remembered and represented and the stakes thatthey can have in society sometimes long after those involved have passed from the scene.
The history of slavery has a different set of meanings in the United States today than it did
in 1950 or 1850. Likewise, the “War on Terror” will mean something very different in fifty
or a hundred years than it does at present.
Pierre Nora’s work focused largely on government projects. When we consider
monuments, museums, approved textbooks, and presentations by presidents and heads ofstate, it is evident that governments often set the tone for national memory cultures. In the
1990s, however, other scholars helped to introduce a very different approach. John
Bodnar’s Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the
Twentieth Century (1992) and Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (1994), along withother contemporary works, opened up discussion of what can be referred to as “vernacular”
or “popular” memory. Large groups of people obviously do not “remember” events as one.
What they do, however, is discuss, consume, commemorate, debate, form narratives andcounter-narratives in fiction, non-fiction, and hybrid media, and in doing so, establish
widely shared notions of why certain events are important and how they are relevant to
the present. It is crucial to note that which historical events are considered to be important
and why change dramatically over time. For example, in The Holocaust in American Life
(2000), historian Peter Novick argues that the Holocaust, something now considered anessential part of history education, was all but ignored in the United States for decades.
Novick’s arguments about the political uses of the Holocaust are controversial, but his
assertions about a lack of public discussion or representation of the Holocaust in the
United States is supported by other scholars such as Henry Greenspan, a psychologist who
was one of the first to conduct in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors who later
moved to the United States.
Since the mid-1990s, the study of memory in academia has further diversified. In
Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Michael
Rothberg argues that focusing on memories surrounding a single event or series of eventsis too limited and that memory is in fact “multi-directional”—understandings of a past
conflict can be radically shaped by a present one, other subsequent historical events, or
dialogues between different groups. This is true even when a country, group, or subculture
is not directly involved. For example, Japanese memories of WWII were influenced by thesubsequent American war in Vietnam in a number of ways—America’s bombing campaign
evoked memories of the bombings of Japanese cities and violence against Vietnamese
civilians sparked debate about Japanese war crimes in China decades earlier. Honda
2(Nora, Realms of Memory, 1: xxiv)

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Katsuichi, the Japanese journalist who travelled to China to collect testimony about
Japanese violence against civilian populations in Nanking and elsewhere, was inspired to
do so by the bloody quagmire in Vietnam. Rather than referring to “Japanese memory” as if
it is a single, homogeneous thing, it is best to consider “cultures” of memory in Japan, taking
up different Japanese understandings of war in complex dialogue with understandings
prevalent elsewhere.
Popular culture can be one of the best resources for gauging the tone of publicmemory as well as shifts in what is valued or controversial. The eight articles that make up
this collection show the diversity of points of view on the wars of the 1930s and 1940s thatexist in Japanese popular culture, as well as problems and prospects for reconciliation.

Penney: War and Japan

15“War and Japan: The Non-Fiction Manga of Mizuki Shigeru”
Matthew Penney
September 21, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Matthew-Penney/2905
Relatively few creators of Japanese popular culture works about the Asia-Pacific
War are military veterans. More Japanese experienced the bombings of Japanese cities andaccompanying hardship than fought overseas and survived to return to Japan. Japanese
who experienced traumatic events such as the atomic bombings or the destruction ofTokyo and Osaka through firebombing used popular media such as anime, manga, and film
to come to terms with their experiences. Typically they have not dwelt only on thatexperience.
Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989), the famed creator of Astro Boy and Jungle Emperor andknown in Japan as the “God of Comics,” lived through the bombing of Osaka in March 1945
and was nearly killed by incendiaries dropped by American bombers. In the 1970s, hewrote about his experience in the manga Kami no toride (Fortress of Paper). Even earlier,Tezuka drew on his war experience frequently in his manga and consistently condemnedorganized violence of all kinds. In 1967 he sent Astro Boy to battle American bombers overVietnam. He also illustrated the Japanese Army’s brutality against civilians in China in his
epic history manga Adolf ni tsugu (‘To Adolf,’ 1983-85, or just Adolf in its English release).
Chiba Tetsuya (1939-), who drew the boxing manga series Ashita no Jo (Tomorrow’sJoe, 1967-73), one of the most popular sports comics of all time, was born in Tokyo but
settled in Manchuria with his family at age two. Some of his most vivid early memories areof fleeing before the advancing Soviet Red Army in 1945. Chiba has penned several
autobiographical sketches about his experience in Manchuria that combine text and manga
images. He also created the popular war manga Shidenkai no taka (Hawk of the Shidenkai,
1963-65). Like Tezuka, Chiba did not focus only on Japanese wartime suffering. Shidenkaino taka shows the Pearl Harbor attack from the point of view of American civilian victims
gunned down by Japanese planes and also features a story arc in which the protagonist
bonds with an American prisoner of war, only to see his friend cruelly murdered by his
superiors.
Mizuki Shigeru (1922- ), creator of the Kitaro ghost story manga series and known
for bringing yokai (traditional ghosts and goblins) back into wide public awareness after
they fell by the cultural wayside during Japan’s rapid urbanization in the 1950s and 1960s,
stands with Tezuka and Chiba as one of the pioneering manga artists who built up the
medium and expanded its narrative possibilities in the first postwar decades. He is also
one of the few veterans of the Asia-Pacific War to make it big in the manga industry. Barely
making ends meet as a poverty-stricken freelancer, Mizuki rocketed to fame when GeGeGeno Kitaro became a hit in the late 1960s. Financial stability and mass market popularity
gave Mizuki the opportunity to take risks, and he began to draw a series of award-winning
manga based on his war experiences such as Soin gyokusai seyo! (1973), released in English
by Drawn and Quarterly as Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths.
Mizuki experienced the horrors of war firsthand. During the fighting in New Britain
in the South Pacific, he was injured in an American air attack and his left arm wasamputated without anesthesia. In Mizuki’s manga, the real “enemy” is Japanese militarism,and he has borne a lifelong hatred for the army that sent him to fight without adequate

War in Japanese Popular Culture

16

equipment or supplies and forbade surrender. Translated here is Senso to Nihon (War andJapan) a short manga that effectively brings out the varied positions in Japanese war
memory, with an emphasis on the image of Japanese as victimizers of others, evoking boththe suffering of the author and other ordinary Japanese draftees under militarism as well as
the violence of Japanese forces across the Asia-Pacific.

Penney: War and Japan17

War and Japan: The Non-Fiction Manga of Mizuki Shigeru
Matthew Penney
Many Japanese neonationalists contend that it is “masochistic” to look critically at the nation’swars of the 1930s and 1940s. They assume that criticism of Japanese militarism and love of thecountry and its traditions are somehow mutually exclusive. In place of an honest look at pastcrimes, revisionists present Japan as a victim, originally of Western imperialism, and now of aconspiracy of defamation by its neighbors.
Manga artist Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922), creator of the famous supernatural series GeGeGe no
Kitaro, is one individual who could not be blamed for feeling like a victim. A veteran of thefighting in the South Pacific, Mizuki was felled by malaria and lost his left arm in an American
air raid. He suffered life-long health effects from the abuse he endured as a new recruit. Mizuki,
however, has not slipped into a comfortable “victim’s view” of the war. Through non-fiction
manga, Mizuki has explored the full range of Japanese war experience, seeking to reconcile
images of Japanese as victims of their own elites and victimizers of others.

Mizuki in front of drawings of some of his most famous characters

Mizuki is also one of postwar Japan’s most prolific and influential interpreters of traditional
ghost stories and folklore. He wrote that he wanted Japanese ghosts, previously thought of as
grotesque or the products of an undignified plebian tradition, “… to be loved like fairies.” [1] His
work has contributed to an enduring boom in interest in Japanese folktales. Mizuki, who unlike
most prominent revisionists actually experienced the horrors of war firsthand, sees nocontradiction between a love for Japan and its traditions, and a willingness to look honestly at thenation’s war history. His war stories contain many shocking images, but he still reflects, “… onthe way back to Japan from Rabaul, the moment that I saw Mount Fuji from the sea, I thought,‘I’m back’, and I felt, ‘I’m Japanese’.” [2]Mizuki is also one of Japan’s most honored manga artists. His home town, Sakaiminato inWar in Japanese Popular Culture

18

Tottori prefecture, is home to the Mizuki Shigeru Museum. In addition to the Mizuki Shigeru
Road in Sakaiminato – a major tourist spot lined with bronze sculptures of his most famous
characters – a Mizuki Shigeru Road was named in Rabaul in 2003.
Mizuki is a difficult author to classify ideologically. For example, unlike many otherprogressives who consider the “Imperial System” to be an invented tradition, Mizuki describes it
as central to Japan’s history and culture, “From ancient times … Japan has had gods like ike nonushi (master of the pond) and mori no nushi (master of the wood) so I think that it is safe to saythat the Japanese people like this nushi idea. In a similar way, Japan’s oldest family – theImperial Family – has watched over the people of Japan with kindness as the kuni no nushi(master of the country) and I don’t think that it is a bad system at all.”[3] He is, however, criticalof the Imperial System in wartime, “… the senso-chu no nushi (master in wartime), wasterrifying to me.”[4] He contextualizes this with reference to his personal suffering, “When I
went to the front lines in the South Pacific, I was beaten half to death for dropping the ‘rifle
gifted by his highness’.”[5] Mizuki’s historical perspectives, informed by his own experience ofviolence and the excesses of Japan’s wartime regime, do not fit comfortably with stereotypical“rightwing” or “leftwing” positions. Sharing elements of both, but with a strong progressive bent
in the area of war responsibility, Mizuki has crafted a series of unforgettable war stories.
Mizuki has long played up anti-war themes in his work. In the 1960s, he railed against theAmerican military’s practice of bombing civilian targets in the supernatural series Akuma-kun(Lil’ Devil, 1966-1967), a hit that helped to propel him from artistic journeyman – he got his
start painting kami-shibai (‘paper plays’ – alternating pictures narrated by itinerant performers) –to a leader in the industry.[6]Akuma-kun
Buoyed by this success, he was also one of the handful of creators who experimented with thepotential for serious non-fiction manga with Hitler (1971), a critical biography that turns ahistory of Nazi atrocities into a forceful anti-war parable for Japanese readers.[7] From the 1970s

Penney: War and Japan19

he began to win critical acclaim with a series of autobiographical war stories such as Soin
Gyokusai Seyo! (Death to the Last!, 1973), focusing on the abusive treatment of Japanese
recruits and the cavalier attitude of their officers toward human life.[8] He has also consistently
put forward positive images of South-Pacific Islanders, contrasting their charity and humanitywith the brutality of the Japanese forces.
In the late 1980s, Mizuki’s war manga took a different direction as he attempted to synthesize his
own personal experiences with the grand narrative of Japan’s modern history in Showa-shi(History of Showa).[9] This series, despite (or perhaps because of, given a spike of interest in thewar period) graphic images of the Nanking Massacre, descriptions of forced labor, and otherJapanese war crimes, became a bestseller and was awarded the Kodansha Manga Prize, one of
the industry’s highest accolades.[10] A critical view of Japan’s wartime past was no impedimentto success. Not only has Mizuki avoided significant criticism by the rightwing, possibly due tohis iconic status and personal war experience, but he has also been the recipient of some of theJapanese government’s most prestigious awards – the Shiju Hosho (Purple Ribbon Medal) in
1991 and the Kyokujitsu Sho (Order of the Rising Sun) in 2003.

Mizuki's collection Air War
Below is a translation of Mizuki’s “War and Japan”, a short work in the style of Showa-shi,
originally published in 1991 in Shogaku rokunen-sei (Sixth Grader), a leading edutainment
magazine for young readers. The difficulty of the material presented raises a number ofimportant issues. Japanese children are not passive receptacles of government-sponsorednarratives. The varied perspectives in popular culture are also important. Many of Japan’s mostWar in Japanese Popular Culture

20

famous manga creators, including Mizuki, Tezuka Osamu, Nakazawa Keiji and Ishinomori
Shotaro, have penned honest and challenging war stories. These serve as a powerful counterpoint
to revisionist manga like Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron (On War) that have grabbed attention
in the English-speaking world.[11] Several neo-nationalist manga have sold well, but a wide
variety of progressive titles have also been successful. Importantly, anti-war themes introduced
into the medium by Mizuki and others have helped to shape the trajectory of postwar manga.
Explicitly apologist and pro-war titles like Sensoron may be shocking, but their success isdwarfed by that of anti-war visions like Arakawa Hiromu’s current hit Hagane no renkinjutsushi (Full Metal Alchemist) which uses a science fiction setting to interrogate organized violence
and atrocities.[12]Order the Japanese original of Mizuki's war memoir manga Aa Gyokusai here.

Arakawa’s Hagane no renkinjutsu-shi
Specific criticisms of Japan’s wartime order are also prolific as in Senso no shinjitsu (The Truthof War), an August 2008 anthology that uses the visual grammar of shojo (girl’s) manga to lookat war from a variety of angles, including atrocities committed by Japanese forces.[13] Mizuki’s“War and Japan”, however, is unique in its simple, accessible diction, and thoughtful,autobiographical conclusion. Describing his motives for turning his war memories into manga,
Mizuki writes, “I saw too many comrades die. Even now, I sometimes catch a glimpse of theshades of dead friends standing at my bedside… When I think of those who, now without voice,died pitifully in war, I am overcome with anger.”[14] Mizuki thinks first of the deaths of those
close to him, but he never allows this to settle into a simple “Japanese as victims” theme. As“War and Japan” demonstrates, the anger that he feels extends to those responsible for all victims

Penney: War and Japan

21

of Japan’s wars.
Notes[1] Mizuki Shigeru, Honjitsu no Mizuki-san (Today’s Mr. Mizuki), Tokyo: Soshisha, 2005, p. 98.
[2] Ibid., p. 39.
[3] Ibid., p. 39.
[4] Ibid., p. 39.
[5] Ibid., p. 135.
[6] Mizuki Shigeru, Akuma-kun, Tokyo: Kodansha, 2008.
[7] Mizuki Shigeru, Hitler, Tokyo: Chikuma Shoten, 1990.
[8] Mizuki Shigeru, “Soin Gyokusai seyo!” in Aa Gyokusai (Ah, Death to the Last), Tokyo:
Ozora Shuppan, 2007.
[9] Mizuki Shigeru, Showa-shi, Vol. 1, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1989.
[10] Shimura Kunihiro, Mizuki Shigeru no miryoku (The Charm of Mizuki Shigeru), Tokyo:
Bensei Shuppan, 2002, p. 43.
[11] Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensoron, Tokyo: Gentosha, 1998. See also Rumi Sakamoto, “Willyou go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?” Nationalism and History in Kobayashi
Yoshinori’s Sensoron”[12] Arakawa Hiromu, Hagane no renkinjutsu-shi, Vol. 1, Tokyo: Square Enix, 2002.
[13] Ichikawa Miu, et al., Senso no shinjitsu, Tokyo: Bunkasha, 2008.
[14] Mizuki Shigeru, “Naki senyu ga egakaseta senki manga” (War Manga that My Dead
Comrades Made Me Draw) in Aa gyokusai, Tokyo: Azora Shuppan, 2007, pp., 185-186.
Matthew Penney is Assistant Professor at Concordia University and a Japan Focus associate.
He is currently conducting research on popular representations of war in Japan.
He wrote and translated this article for Japan Focus. Posted on September 21, 2008.
NOTE: This article originally included several pages of Manga, which for copyrightreasons could not be reproduced in this reader. The Manga can be viewed at the end of theonline version of this article: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Matthew-Penney/2905

War in Japanese Popular Culture

22“Healing Old Wounds with Manga Diplomacy: Japan’s Wartime Manga Displayed at
China’s Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum”
ISHIKAWA Yoshimi and KONO Michikazu
March 8, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Kono-Michikazu/3315
In 2009 China became Japan’s biggest trading partner, taking over the top spot fromthe United States. Japan is a popular destination for big-spending Chinese tourists, cited bysome Japanese retailers as “salvation” in a time of economic downturn. On the flipside, thecontinent has only increased its allure for Japanese travellers, with tourists now more
likely to hit Hong Kong than Hawaii. The number of Japanese and Chinese studying atuniversities and language schools in the other country continues to rise unabated.
Japanese popular culture is also big business all over East Asia. Cartoon characterslike Dorameon and Shin-chan are as recognizable in China as in Japan itself. Cultural
cooperation is also widespread. Kaneshiro Takeshi, a Japanese actor born in Taipei, hasstarred in hit Chinese films such as Red Cliff (2008) and House of Flying Daggers (2004),
which have rivalled the success of Hollywood blockbusters in Japan and across Asia.
Chinese star Zhang Ziyi is big in Japan where she has been featured on talk shows and in aslate of TV commercials.
Despite these close economic and cultural ties, however, history continues to cast adark shadow over Sino-Japanese relations. According to a 2012 survey, the first thing thatnearly half of young Chinese think of when they hear “Japan” is “The Nanking Massacre.”
Violent protests over the lack of attention to historical crimes in Japanese middle school
textbooks and visits to Yasukuni— Tokyo shrine which glorifies Japanese militarism andrepresents the war dead as heroes—by KOIZUMI Junichiro, Prime Minister between 2001
and 2006, rocked Chinese cities in 2005 and show the intensity of negative feelings toward
Japan. Meanwhile, critics in Japan have condemned China’s human rights record in regions
like Tibet and call on China to allow free discussion of its own bloody history. A territorial
dispute over southern islands called Senkaku in Japanese and Diaoyutai in Chinese has alsostrained ties.
If there is to be stable reconciliation on historical issues between Japan and China, it
is necessary for Japan to confront neo-nationalist and revisionist positions in its publicsphere and promote more education about Japanese war crimes in textbooks and venues
such as state-run museums. China, in turn, should ease censorship of debate on
controversial historical issues and promote awareness of the work of not only manga
artists like Mizuki Shigeru, but the countless Japanese academics and peace activists who
have stressed contrition concerning Japan’s war record. The Nanjing (also spelled
Nanking) Massacre Memorial Museum is the epicenter for education about Japanese war
crimes in China, and the 2009 manga exhibit at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum
detailed in this article shows a potential way forward. Popular culture can show gaps in
the understandings of history in different national contexts, but it can also be a bridge tomore empathy and understanding. By presenting varied positions on the Asia-Pacific War
to Chinese museum goers, the Nanking Massacre Memorial Museum took a notable step
toward reconciliation.

Ishikawa and Kono: Healing Old Wounds with Manga Diplomacy

23

Healing Old Wounds with Manga Diplomacy: Japan’s Wartime Manga Displayed at
China’s Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum
Ishikawa Yoshimi, interviewed by Kono Michikazu
KONO MICHIKAZU This year I was in Nanjing on August 15, the anniversary of Japan’ssurrender in World War II. I was with you, in fact, attending the opening of an exhibit that was
the product of three years of effort on your part: "My August 15," an exhibition by Japanesemanga artists at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. One should probably note here that acontentious debate continues to rage between Japan and China, and among Japanese scholars as
well, over the facts of the so-called Nanjing Massacre,* including the number of victims and theauthenticity of certain documents. And the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, which has"300,000 Victims" engraved in large letters near the main entrance, is regarded by many in Japanas a kind of rallying point for anti-Japanese sentiment in China. What a bold, pathbreaking idea,
to choose this memorial hall, and the symbolic date of August 15, to exhibit cartoons describing
the wartime suffering of the Japanese, whom the Chinese have tended to view solely as
aggressors!
I’d like to hear something about the origins and history of the exhibition. I understand that inAugust 2000 you led the Japan-China Manga Friendship Tour, which brought a group of fifteen
manga artists to China—cartoonists like Chiba Tetsuya, Matsumoto Reiji, and Morita Kenji.
Was that how it all began?
Touring China With A Busload Of Clowns
ISHIKAWA YOSHIMI Yes, that’s right. I happened to have gotten acquainted with several of
the chief officers of the publisher of Renmin Ribao [People’s Daily] over the years, and I wasaware that for thirty years that organization had also put out a weekly cartoon newspaper called
Fengci yu Youmo [Satire and Humor], one of the only publications of its type in the world. I
found it fascinating that the organization responsible for the official news organ of theCommunist Party of China put out a paper like this as well. And I found myself wondering if itwould be possible to create some opportunity for Japanese manga artists to visit China and rub
shoulders with Chinese cartoonists, and perhaps even compile and publish a book together. That
plan came to fruition in August 2000. My contacts at the People’s Daily put me in touch with acompany that published the book, and the reception surpassed all expectations. There’s been
considerable cultural exchange between Chinese and Japanese economists, writers, musicians,
and so forth, but this was the first attempt to bring Chinese and Japanese cartoonists together.

War in Japanese Popular Culture24KŌNO Who was your point man among themanga artists?

The opening of the manga exhibit in Nanjing on
August 15, 2009, the anniversary of Japan’ssurrender

ISHIKAWA Morita Kenji. As a child, Morita
lived through the traumatic evacuation andrepatriation of Japanese settlers in Manchuria
following World War II, as did Chiba Tetsuya
and the late Akatsuka Fujio. He’s also a very
well liked and respected figure and a director of
the Japan Cartoonists Association. Cartoonists
tend to be mavericks; it would have been
impossible to get them organized without thehelp of someone like Morita. He persuaded
others to take part so that the project could move
forward.

KŌNO I’ve heard you say that for a trip to China, there are no more entertaining travelcompanions than cartoonists. In what way were they entertaining?
ISHIKAWA Well, in the first place these are people who make a living by thinking up nutty
jokes and antics. Their behavior is no different from their comics. To put it another way, there’s
nobody less suited than they are to going about as a group. They’re undisciplined. They’re slobs.
You can’t do a thing with them. Turn your back on one of them for an instant, and before you
know it he’s approached some woman and is drawing a caricature of her while a whole crowd ofchildren gathers around. That sort of thing happens constantly, wherever you go, so as tour guide,
I’m on pins and needles the whole time. Once we were supposed to meet with some VIPs, but
one of the group hadn’t shown up. Suddenly we heard a commotion. I ran out to see what wasgoing on, and there he was, dressed sloppily, arguing with the doorman. He’d been stopped at theentrance because they couldn’t believe someone who looked like that was on his way to meetwith VIPs. You have grown men clowning the whole time and quoting that line from Akatsuka
Fujio’s manga—"Everything’s okay!" You couldn’t find a more entertaining group.
KŌNO I heard that on the first trip one of them was dressed up as a samurai the whole time.
ISHIKAWA That’s right. And someone always goes missing. It happened this time in Nanjing,
too—I won’t say who. We tell everyone to please get on this boat, but someone decides he wants
to get on that one instead. They don’t care what anyone says. I guess if they weren’t that way,
they wouldn’t be able to draw such funny cartoons.
Getting Past The CensorsKŌNO How popular were Japanese manga in China at the time of the 2000 tour?
ISHIKAWA Oh, they were tremendously popular. When the government began to allow
television stations to air Japanese programs, anime series like Tetsuwan Atomu [Astro Boy] andIkkyū-san became an overnight sensation. All the children we met knew about them. Soon pirate
editions of manga like Doraemon and Meitantei Konan [Detective Conan] were pouring onto themarket, triggering a huge manga boom.

Ishikawa and Kono: Healing Old Wounds with Manga Diplomacy

25KŌNO And it seems you were quick to recognize the potential of manga. In the autumn of 2000,
you stated that the time was approaching when manga would be Japan’s most potent medium ofinternational exchange.
ISHIKAWA Over the past ten years I’ve been involved in a variety of activities to promoteexchange between Japan and China, sitting on the planning committee for programs
commemorating the thirtieth and thirty-fifth anniversaries of the normalization of diplomatic
relations, for example. I’ve discussed bilateral relations with China’s political leaders, scholars,
and others. And I’ve concluded that in the final analysis, the problems that continue to divide
Japan and China all boil down to people’s perception of the events of the 1930s and 1940s. The
Chinese people remain very bitter about the war that raged on Chinese soil for fifteen years,
beginning with the Manchurian Incident of 1931. Their feelings about this go far, far deeper thanmost Japanese people imagine. Unless we can overcome that somehow, there’s always going to
be bad blood between our two nations. On the other hand, the Chinese are almost completely
unaware of the suffering endured by the Japanese people during World War II. That’s because
they’ve been taught since childhood that the Chinese people were the victims, that they stood up
to the Japanese aggressors, resisted them valiantly, and ultimately prevailed. They’ve nevergiven any thought to what sort of experience World War II was for the Japanese people.
I came to the conclusion that unless we could bridge this vast perception gap, the problem would
simmer indefinitely, flaring up again each time someone in Japan said something that rubbed theChinese the wrong way. I wondered if there wasn’t some way at least to get the Chinese andJapanese people looking at things from a shared perspective. I began to think about what one
could do to make the Chinese aware that the Japanese had theirown painful memories of the war.
Just around that time, Morita had brought together a group of
cartoonists, primarily people who had been involved in theevacuation from Manchuria, for his "My August 15" project. In
2003 he had the artists submit cartoons and short essays
describing where they were and what they were doing on the day
Japan surrendered. They held an exhibition of those works in theform of illustrated letters, and the following year they publisheda book.*When I saw the book, it was like a bolt of lightning. I felt
intuitively that we could make use of it to communicate theJapanese experience to the Chinese people. First of all, I wanted
to translate it and get it published in China. Everyone in theJapanese Foreign Ministry and every China expert I talked tosaid it couldn’t be done, but I figured nothing ventured, nothing
gained. I inquired at four top publishing companies in China, butthey all turned me down. "The Party will never allow it," they
The Red sky and crows
said. "Even if we published it, no one would buy it." Of course, I© Akatsuka Fujio
had never thought of it as something with real market potential. I
just thought if we could only get a Chinese edition out in book form, somebody was bound toread it, and that could set something in motion.

War in Japanese Popular Culture

26

Finally I decided to take it to the People’s Daily. Xu Pengfei, the editor in chief of Satire andHumor, is a friend of mine, so I decided to ask him what he thought. He was enthusiastic about
the cartoons, but he thought the text would probably run into trouble with the Party censors. So, I
got the best translator I could find, had all the problematic parts translated with great care, andtook the text to the top brass at the People’s Daily. They knew me already, so they read it
carefully, but their reaction was, "This is going to be a problem." I asked, "Which parts?" Andthey showed me in great detail everything that was wrong. I think they figured we’d give up atthat point. But instead we reworded all those passages without changing the basic meaning, and I
took it to them again. We repeated this process several times. The artists had agreed to leave all
the negotiations to me on the understanding that I wouldn’t compromise their work. It was
looking like we were close to clearing the final hurdle when the publisher told me to bring in the
cartoons. For the first time, I gave them the manuscript complete with the pictures.
Three months passed with no word. I was beginning to think that it wasn’t going to happen after
all, when I received a communication asking that I come to Beijing. I figured I had no choice, so
I went again, and this is basically what they told me: "We agree that these are highly artistic
works that aptly convey the feelings of the Japanese people. But there’s a danger that thesepictures will inadvertently awaken memories among the Chinese people and stir up trouble.
We’re concerned that the reaction could snowball far beyond anything the artists intended. Thatwould destroy the purpose of your project. So, we were wondering if you would mind cuttingthese five pictures." Finally we’re getting somewhere, I thought.
Well, to make a long story short, in the end two of the fivepictures were cut, two were slightly revised by the artists, andone made it into the publication just as it was. I knew from the
beginning that we were involved in something akin to
diplomatic negotiations and that we weren’t going to geteverything we wanted. The censors had to save face, after all. So,
I was prepared to give way wherever it was possible tocompromise. But there was one cartoon that I fought hard topreserve intact. In the end we were able to resolve the impasse
thanks to Xu Pengfei, who is also chairman of the China Artists
Association Cartoon Committee, which promotes exchange
between Chinese and Japanese cartoonists. He said, "The artist
who drew this is a friend of mine, and I’m going to make surethat it stays in no matter what."
Last year, after many months of this, we achieved our objectivewith the publication of the Chinese edition by the People’s Daily.
This was huge. After all, the People’s Daily is directly under the
CPC Central Committee’s Publicity Department, so the fact that they published it means that itcleared China’s toughest censors. Everyone was amazed to hear that the People’s Daily was
publishing it. The whole process had taken about a year and a half. The book was distributed toschool libraries and all kinds of institutions in China, and it elicited some amazing reactions.
Children who had never heard about the US firebombing of Japanese cities shed tears before myvery eyes, saying they had never seen such sad cartoons.

Ishikawa and Kono: Healing Old Wounds with Manga Diplomacy

27

A Risky Undertaking
Meanwhile, though, I was beginning to feel that
it would be a shame to stop at publishing a book.
I was wondering if it would be possible toexhibit the original artwork. People around me
said, "Just be satisfied that you got the bookpublished!" And when they heard that I wanted
to hold the exhibition at the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial Hall, they dismissed the possibility outof hand. But I was betting it could happen. I had
no rational reason for hope, yet I felt oddly
confident.
Bucket relay fire drill© Kitami Ken’ichi

An opportunity presented itself by chance lastNovember, after I was back in Japan. I happened
to be looking over a list of people visiting Japan from China, and I noticed that the group
included Zhu Chengshan, chief curator of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall. With the help ofan acquaintance of mine in the Chinese embassy, I was able to set up an appointment. I went by
myself, met him for the first time, and explained what I had in mind. I won’t reveal the details of
our conversation, but suffice it to say that Zhu expressed his openness to the idea on the spot. "I
don’t see why not," he said. "I’ll give it serious consideration."
Immediately after the winter holiday, I traveled to Nanjing and started lobbying hard to let themknow I was serious. Zhu responded very positively, saying, "By all means, let’s do it." He said
there would probably be some backlash in China, but reading the book, he had been impressedby the illustrations and the way the letters conveyed the feelings of the Japanese people at thetime of Japan’s surrender. He said, "This memorial hall wasn’t built to fan anti-Japanesesentiment. Its purpose is to help ensure that our memories of the war don’t fade, not to condemn
the Japanese people." He said he was determined to be the first to mount an exhibition in China
describing the wartime experiences of the Japanese.
I had some idea of the dangers involved in holding such an exhibition in China, and I was moved
by Zhu’s courage. It was a risky undertaking that could have ended in disaster if things went
wrong. But Zhu said, "It’s worth doing here precisely because it’s risky." I was deeply affectedby that. Zhu is a really decent and courageous individual. So many people in Japan had told methat he was as anti-Japanese as they come, and I had to wonder if they were talking about thesame person.
KŌNO Was it your idea to have the opening on August 15?
ISHIKAWA No. I said that it would take about five months to finish all the preparations, so theexhibition could probably open in June. Zhu said, "Since the title specifically mentions August
15 as an important day to the Japanese people, why not have the opening on August 15?"
Nanjing would be at its hottest, but Zhu felt that it was the job of the memorial hall to convey
what August 15 meant to the Japanese people, and he wanted to be true to that concept. He also
said that his plan was to keep the exhibition open there for three months and then, if possible,
have it travel to the Marco Polo Bridge Memorial Hall. After that, he wanted to install it as apermanent exhibit at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.

War in Japanese Popular Culture28

I went back to Japan all fired up, and two months later I returned to Nanjing by myself with 162
pictures for exhibition. We had talked about ways of attracting more visitors, such as a side
exhibit of forty original drawings by famous manga artists and a display of bound Japanesemanga, and we followed through on that. My feeling was that we needed to make the exhibit
welcoming, accessible, and attractive to kids.
KŌNO Still, I imagine you had reason to worry right up
until the opening.
ISHIKAWA You bet I did. This was the equivalent ofexhibiting pictures of the wartime experiences of theChinese at Yasukuni Shrine. That’s how risky it was.
And with all the activity on the Internet now, there wasno telling what kind of flame wars might break out
online. I did my best to appear unconcerned, but inside I
was very uneasy. In China you can never be sure that a
particular controversy won’t ignite a wildfire of protest. I
know for a fact that there were a lot of high-level
discussions within the Chinese government before theexhibition opened, and the greatest precautions were taken on the day of the opening.
Fortunately, when I contacted the Memorial Hall a few
days after the opening, I was told that there had been
only two complaints lodged, and apart from that thereaction was largely favorable. Of course, there werepeople who commented that the Japanese had started thewar, after all, so they were just reaping what they had
sowed. But I was hoping people would express a varietyof opinions, that the pictures and text would give rise to
discussion, because I think it’s important that we enter
into a constructive dialogue concerning World War II.
Soon after the opening, museums in places like Harbin
and Tianjin were expressing an interest in hosting the exhibition. I want it to receive as wide
exposure as possible because, after all, it’s a country of 1.3 billion people.
Finding Common GroundKŌNO I also met Zhu Chengshan, and the first thingthat struck me about him was his youth. He’s in his late
fifties, and that’s surprisingly young considering thathe’s held the post of chief curator for eighteen years ofthe memorial’s twenty-four-year existence. Also, I had
assumed he was of the prewar generation because I had
heard he was an extreme hard-liner in terms of his
historical perspective on Japan. In any case, Zhu said he
had never met a Japanese like you before.
ISHIKAWA He told me that he had visited Japan about
forty times and had met with any number of Japanese politicians, scholars, and others, yet he had

Ishikawa and Kono: Healing Old Wounds with Manga Diplomacy

29

the feeling he had only met two basic types. On the one hand were the apologetic ones, who wereconstantly expressing their guilt over the brutal behavior of the Japanese in China. And on theother hand were those who focused solely on the casualty count of the Nanjing Massacre, taking
issue with the Chinese position that the victims numbered three hundred thousand—or in somecases saying that the name of the memorial should be changed or a certain photograph removed
from the exhibits. But according to Zhu, I didn’t fall into either of those categories.
KŌNO Yet I understand that you suggested some changes in the memorial.
ISHIKAWA What I pointed out was that people from countries all over the world—regardless of
their role in World War II—visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to pay their respects tothe victims of the atomic bomb. But it’s still very difficult for Japanese tourists to visit the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, notwithstanding all the efforts of those responsible for it, and I
don’t think that’s because the Japanese are cowards. It’s because the entire memorial is devoted
to the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese. The memorial may have been established to prevent
people from forgetting about the war, but I think it has veered in a slightly different direction.
That’s what I said. Then I showed him the book of pictures by Japanese cartoonists and proposed
an exhibition. It would attract Japanese visitors to the memorial, and the Chinese would learnsomething about the Japanese people. I suggested that this kind of sharing of war memories wasconsistent with the fundamental purpose of the memorial, which was originally intended as amemorial to war and peace, not a monument to hatred of
the Japanese. And Zhu agreed.
KŌNO The memorial gets a huge number of visitors, asmany as six million a year. I understand that ethnic
Chinese in other countries usually make it part of theiritinerary when they visit Nanjing, China’s old capital.
Since the exhibition coincided with summer vacation, I
saw a lot of Chinese families, too, but I was also
surprised by the number of visitors speaking English.
They said twenty thousand visitors were admitted to theexhibition on the opening day.
ISHIKAWA Before the establishment of the People’s
Republic of China in 1949, large numbers of Chinese,particularly those loyal to the defeated Kuomintang [Nationalist Party], fled from the mainland to
Taiwan, and many emigrated from there to North America and elsewhere. For two or three
generations these émigrés have passed down the story of the horrors that occurred when theJapanese army overran China’s beautiful ancient capital. These overseas Chinese communities
have produced people like Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking [1997]. The first place
many of these second- and third-generation ethnic Chinese want to go when they visit China is
Nanjing. They visit the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and go home deeply shocked. The hall
has undergone two major expansions, resulting in the large modern structure you see now, with asite area of seventy-four thousand square meters, and most of the funding for that was donatedby overseas Chinese. From the beginning the memorial was built with contributions fromordinary people, not government funding, but we need to understand that today it’s thesepassionate overseas supporters who are sustaining the memorial. These are the same people
whose vigorous lobbying pushed the US Congress to pass a resolution that severely condemned

War in Japanese Popular Culture

30

Japan for the Imperial Army’s use of "comfort women" in the 1930s and 1940s. That’s why it’s
so very important for these second- and third-generation overseas Chinese to see and respond toworks by the creators of Doraemon and Anpanman.
Leveraging Our Cultural AssetsKŌNO The Japanese were among the first to emphasize the concept of "soft power," and for awhile we were feeling pretty good about our cultural impact, what with the overseas media
praising Japan’s "gross national cool" and so forth. But the government never pursued the idea
wholeheartedly. It seems to me that South Korea and China have thought more seriously about
the possibilities and taken concrete measures to realize them. For example, General Secretary Hu
Jintao’s report to the Seventeenth National Congress of the CPC talked about the need to"enhance culture as part of the soft power of our country."
ISHIKAWA Japan doesn’t understand how to capitalize on its cultural assets. You might say welack capable producers. Former Prime Minister Asō Tarō talked about the power of manga, andin a way he was right. But we don’t have a clue how to use it. I think that’s because we don’t
really understand what’s so special about Japanese manga.
Of all the people in the world, children are the most exacting and truthful critics. And Japanesemanga have totally captivated these most exacting of critics. These are people who judge purely
on the basis of what they like, regardless of nationality or race or language. Conversely, once
children decide they don’t like something, nothing their parents say or do will make them like it.
But one thing that entrances children all over the world is Japanese manga. I was sure the CPC
would realize this. And adults can’t say no to the things their children love. I was confident onthat score.
Every time we do a demonstration of manga in China, we get the same question: Why are
Japanese manga so popular? I answer this way. Where do Japanese cartoonists start when theydraw a face? Generally speaking, they start with the eyes. There’s no hard and fast rule, but
that’s how most of them go about it. That’s because the eyes are the crucial element. The eyes ofJapanese cartoon characters appeal to children the world over. Children judge people almost
solely by their eyes—whether they’re friendly eyes, angry eyes, or what. Think about whoseeyes are the most appealing from a child’s viewpoint. The eyes that Japanese cartoonists draw
are so kind and gentle—huge, sweet eyes without a hint of malice. Children the world over areenchanted by those eyes.
What we need is producers with ideas about how and where to leverage the power of Japanesemanga. And the same is true for Japanese cuisine and every other aspect of Japanese culture.
Japan has plenty of great material, but we’re lacking in people with the ability to translate all that
into soft power. That’s our biggest obstacle.
KŌNO Well, it’s clear to me you’ve breached that barrier with the soft-power triumph of "MyAugust 15," and I feel lucky to have caught a glimpse of that triumph. Unfortunately, we had tocatch a plane back to Japan the morning after the opening, but I was touched that Zhu Chengshan
got up early on his day off to see us off at the airport.
I hope your exhibition will go on to even greater success.

Ishikawa and Kono: Healing Old Wounds with Manga Diplomacy

31

Ishikawa Yoshimi, interviewed by Konō Michikazu, "Healing Old Wounds with Manga
Diplomacy," was published in Japan Echo, Vol. 36 No. 6, pp. 52-56. Reproduced by permissionof the publisher.
Translated from an original interview in Japanese. Interviewer Kōno Michikazu is former editor
in chief of Chūō Kōron. The Japanese original, published by JB Press, is available here.
The critic and non-fiction author Ishikawa Yoshimi (1947-) is therecipient of the 1989 Ōya
Sōichi non-fiction prize for Sutoroberi rōdo (Strawberry Road, 1988). President of Akita
Prefectural Junior College of Arts and Industrial Arts between 2001 and 2007, he serves on the
Shin Chūnichi Yūkō 21-seiki Iinkai (Committee on China-Japan Friendship in the 21st Century).
He is the author of, among others, Igi ari: ugokanu Nihon wo ugokasu tame ni (Objection! In
Order to Move Japan that Does Not Move, 1998) and Rokujū-nendai-tte nani? (What’s the
Sixties?, 2006).
Manga illustrations included here are from Boku no Manshū: mangaka-tachi no haisen taiken.
Chūoku Hikiage Mangaka no Kai (ed.) Aki Shobō, (1995) 2005.
*The Nanjing Massacre (also called the "Rape of Nanking") refers to the outbreak of atrocities
by Japanese soldiers against Chinese citizens in Nanjing (Nanking) in the months after the city
was taken by Japanese forces near the end of 1937.—Ed.
*The book, Watashi no 8 gatsu 15 nichi (My August 15), is available for purchase here. (site inJapanese only).

War in Japanese Popular Culture

32“‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’ Nationalism and History in
Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron”
Rumi SAKAMOTO
January 14, 2008
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Rumi-SAKAMOTO/2632
From the Japanese point of view, the 1990s and 2000s are characterised by two
broad historical shifts. The first is globalization. The word has many nuances but is mostoften taken to mean the expansion of economic interconnectivity between countries. In
1970 just under a million Japanese went overseas; by 2000 that number had risen to nearly
18 million. Likewise, in the 1970s, China was relatively isolated, its foreign trade a mere 20
billion USD in 1978. Now it is the axis of production on which the world economy turns,
with about 3 trillion dollars in total imports and exports. Globalization also signifies themore rapid movement of people, information, ideas, and cultural forms across borders. In
1986 Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro made the shocking comment that “Sohigh is the level of education in our country that Japan's is an intelligent society. Our
average score is much higher than those of countries like the U.S. There are many blacks,
Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in America. In consequence the average score over there isexceedingly low.” Why did he say what he was thinking? Perhaps he lacked awareness thatsomething said in Japanese at a press conference in Japan would be picked up by the world
outside Japan’s borders. Japanese politicians are still gaffe-prone, but now all know theircomments may be tweeted around the globe in seconds. Importantly, Japanese, Chinese,
South Koreans, and others now have quick access to information about historicalnarratives prevalent in other societies.
The second major shift is the relative decline of Japan’s economic strength. In 1979
American academic Ezra Vogel published Japan as Number One: Lessons for America. It was
widely believed that Japan would unseat the United States as the world’s number one
economic power. Between 1989 and 1991, however, Japan went through a stock market
and property crash that has some disturbing parallels to the American subprime mortgage
fiasco of 2008. The Japanese economy entered a period of low growth at precisely the timethat China’s economy began to really take off. In 2010 the Chinese economy passed Japan’sin overall size, and former colony and electronics industry rival South Korea looks to be on
track to pass Japan in Gross Domestic Product per capita terms in the next decade.
Economic hardship in Japan has been tied to a dramatic rise in the suicide rate fromaround 20,000 per year in the 1980s to over 30,000 in the recessionary 1990s. Large-scale
restructuring and job losses at major Japanese companies, poor prospects for new
graduates, a slip from economic primacy in East Asia, a failure to find an answer to Apple’s
blend of hardware and software, and other factors have undermined economic-based
nationalism. Japan has had 15 Prime Ministers since the economy was shaken in the early
1990s, a sign of political instability and a lack of confidence in the country’s politicaldirection. With Japan’s overall fortunes looking dim, some embraced neo-nationalist
views which paint Japan’s wars of the 1930s and 1940s as heroic. In this world view, theneo-nationalists blame Japan’s downturn on a lack of nationalist pride, the so-called“masochistic” historical views which have represented the Asia-Pacific War as a campaign
of aggression characterized by horrific violence. If this could be done away with andreplaced by a heroic narrative, neo-nationalists argue, Japan’s fortunes could rise again.

Sakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’

33

Countries like China and South Korea have not only become more wealthy relative
to Japan, they have also become more confident and assertive on issues such as apology
and recompense for Japanese war crimes and colonial atrocities in the first half of the 20th
century. Contrary to popular opinion in those two countries, Japan has apologised to bothSouth Korea and China many times. The Wikipedia article that includes the texts of major
apologies is over 6000 words long.3
Japan paid a diverse compensation package to South Korea in the late 1960s. China
gave up the right to reparations for war damages in the 1972 Treaty of Peace andFriendship. In lieu of reparations, Japan paid billions in development aid to China. Japan
has been widely criticised, however, for not living up to German attempts to deal with war
legacies which have included ambitious museums, comprehensive education on German
war crimes, and more strongly worded apologies. Importantly, while Germany has paid amassive amount to individual victims of Nazi atrocities, Japanese politicians continue toinsist that agreements with the Chinese and South Korean governments have settled allissues of war responsibility. The South Korean government, an American-backed
totalitarian dictatorship at the time of reparations payments in the 1960s, was supposed touse a large part of the funds received from Japan to pay compensation to individual victimsof Japanese colonial violence. It did not, and Japan has been criticised for not offering otherforms of compensation after South Korea’s dictatorship was replaced by popular
democracy in the 1990s.
In Japan, conservatives kept detailed discussion of the darker side of Japan’s
wartime history out of textbooks until the 1980s, and progressive teachers could only
respond by using their own educational materials. At present, all Japanese history texts
from the middle school level mention war crimes, but these descriptions are often very
brief or vague. While Japan has a number of museums and educational institutes devoted
to studying and raising awareness of Japanese war crimes, they are all run by private
educational institutions or citizen’s groups. The Japanese government supports museums
and efforts to commemorate Japan’s war dead, but there is no central museum or even an
official monument that commemorates the millions of Asian victims of Japanese Empire.
Neo-nationalists and historical revisionists work to block any formal admission ofJapanese guilt.
The official assertions on history by the Chinese and South Korea governments are
not without problems. Few historians in English-speaking countries accept the Chinese
government’s claim that over 300,000 civilians were massacred at Nanking in 1937,
although virtually all agree that war crimes were widespread. The South Korean
government is right to condemn Japan’s system of wartime brothels and argue that thesuffering of the Comfort Women represents a crime against humanity. As C. Sarah Sohargues in The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan,
however, South Korean politicians have condemned Japanese military prostitution, buthave been hesitant to acknowledge that most of the Korean Comfort Women on whose
testimony historians have relied were kidnapped and forced to work by other Koreans.
The use of Comfort Women for Korean and American troops continued uninterrupted after
Japan’s surrender, and widespread human trafficking in Korea continued. By making the3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan, last accessed September 2012

War in Japanese Popular Culture34

history of the Comfort Women into a simplified story of the victimization of one country /ethnic group by another, the lived experience of the survivors has been obscured.
Neo-nationalism is not, however, a simple search for “historical truth.”
Conservative politicians and ideologues began to attack China and South Korea using terms
that had seldom been aired publically since the end of WWII. For example, Nishio Kanji,
who became a leading conservative opinion maker in the 1990s and was one of theindividuals who spearheaded a drive to eliminate so-called “masochistic” views of history
from Japanese schools, described Japanese imperialism and the invasion of China as analtruistic mission to bring order to China’s culture of chaos. He wrote in a newspaper
editorial in Japan’s conservative daily Sankei Shimbun: “It is really difficult to assert thattoday's China is the successor of the classical Chinese Empire. The true face of Chinese
history is blood-splattered civil strife and the barren ruins left in the wake of destruction.”
On top of representing Japan’s neighbors as untruthful and corrupt, authors like
Nishio placed blame for Japan’s economic downturn, not on the conservatives who had
governed Japan uninterrupted through the postwar decades, but rather on Japanese young
people who were depicted as lazy and aimless hedonists whose supposed selfish lack ofpatriotism and unwillingness to work for the public good had dragged Japan down. Vicious,
denigrating rhetoric toward Japan’s neighbors, a desire to exclude “negative” points fromthe national narrative of Japanese history, and the idea that older conservatives needed to“fix” Japan’s youth, combined at their most bellicose in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s bestselling
manga Sensoron (On War), one of the most important works of 1990s neo-nationalism
and historical revisionism.

Sakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’

35“Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?” Nationalism and History in
Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron
Rumi SAKAMOTO
As a study of the influence and nature of popular nationalism in Japan, this article examines therelationship between nationalism and history in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s best-selling manga comic,
Sensoron (On War, 1998). Sensoron heralded the recent trend of nationalistic manga targeted atyounger generations [1] and has been instrumental in popularizing the ideas of new-generationrightists and historical revisionists over the last decade. Kobayashi explains his strategy as “using
the language of daily life in order to discuss politics and ideas” [2], adding that he createdSensoron as “something that intellectuals cannot write - something that young people findpleasure to read and get completely absorbed in, and yet is not light but deep”. [3] He alsoemphasizes that what he writes is based on the “common sense of common folks (shomin no
joshiki)”. Such an anti-elitist strategy, along with constant caricaturizing of academics,
journalists, political activists and politicians as “uncool old men (dasai oyaji)” as well as his
well-constructed and marketed charismatic personality, has proved very successful. Indeed, via
the popular medium of manga, Kobayashi has ostensibly “created a discourse that is more
influential than that of any other “theorist” in the 1990s”. [4]Sensoron

Kobayashi’s practice of using a popular cultural product for disseminating nationalistic
perspectives about Japanese modern history is important as it potentially links the “naïve” or“pop” nationalism with more political forms of nationalism. On the one hand, there is aconsiderable distance between “pop” and political nationalisms. Those who wave rising-sun
flags at the World Cup do not necessarily support Japan’s recent political moves towards theamendment of the peace constitution, the PKO (Peacekeeping Operations), or former Prime
Minister Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shirine. On the other hand, popular and political

War in Japanese Popular Culture36

nationalisms are not completely isolated from each other. Popular nationalism as a socio-culturaland symbolic phenomenon may inform, support, or influence the decision-making process ofpolitical elites and contribute to the formulation of the more overtly political environment. The
nature of the relationship between popular and more political strains of nationalism, therefore,
needs to be carefully examined rather than simply assumed. And Kobayashi’s manga, which
weaves a nationalistic interpretation of history around controversial issues such as the Nanjing
Massacre, the “comfort women” and the Yasukuni Shrine, is a useful site for examining thisinterface.
Popular nationalism in contemporary Japan
Recent works on nationalism in Japan point out the ahistorical and apolitical nature ofcontemporary popular nationalism. Kayama Rika coined the term “petit nationalism” referring to
the “pop” and “innocent/naïve (mujaki-na)” patriotism among Japanese youths (“I love Japan!”)seen in such phenomena as the enthusiastic national football-team supporters and “Japaneselanguage boom”. [5] Iida Yumiko has examined a new type of nationalism, in which
identification with the “pop and imaginary national community” is achieved via consumption ofnational icons, such as rising-sun face-painting as pleasurable and fetishized symbols that arevoid of memories of the past and the war. [6] From a slightly different angle, Kitada Akihiro hasargued that post-1980s nationalism is characterized by post-postmodern “romantic cynicism”,
the product of a complicit relationship between an extreme preoccupation with “form” without
historical consciousness on the one hand and desire for connection and emotional attachment on
the other. [7]These studies suggest that the new “pop” nationalism in contemporary Japan has little to do withpeople’s serious belief in nationalism as an ideology or with their identification with the state asa political and historical entity. Rather, it involves a naïve, almost unthinking (in Kitada’s case“cynical”) acceptance of the proposition “I love Japan because I am Japanese” and the desire toconnect with others here and now via some de-historicized, empty symbols (“forms” for Kitada).
[8] This popular appetite for national pride and enjoyment in contemporary Japan is often
associated with the loss of meaning and identity in advanced capitalist/consumer societies andalso the high level of uncertainty that has characterized Japan’s post-bubble economy.
Consuming the “nation” as a depoliticized icon alleviates the pain of oppression in a highly“managed” society, compensates for the uncertain sense of self, and creates an imaginaryconnection with the other atomized individuals in the urban, often dehumanized, life-worlds oftoday’s generations. Oguma and Ueno’s term “nationalism as ‘healing’” [9] captures this aspect
well.
The lack of identification with the state suggests that unlike the wartime ultra-nationalism, inwhich the state subsumed individual consciousness and mobilized people towards the goals of
the state under the emperor, [10] today’s popular nationalism does not necessarily lead tomilitaristic, expansionist forms of nationalism. Although the possibility and danger of naïve/pop
nationalism being mobilized by the state does exist, the majority of Japanese today, as Asabaargues, would not put the state before their own private lives and security. Ordinary people’s
desire for a sense of national pride is sufficiently fulfilled by, for example, the international
success of Japanese athletes and artists. [11] And unless the security of individual life isSakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’37(perceived to be) threatened by an external enemy, [12] this kind of “pop” and “petit”
nationalism may remain largely unconnected to more political forms of nationalism.

Kobayashi Yoshinori

The popular expressions of nationalism circulating in today’s Japan, however, are not entirely
free from political implications or the memory of the past and the war. With the bursting ofJapan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s and the subsequent economic recession, post-1980s
Japan has seen the rise of a new-generation of rightists embracing a brand of historicalrevisionism that attempts to establish national pride not on claims of Japan’s culturally based
economic success and advantages – as had been the case during the 1970s and 1980s with theconcept of nihonjinron (the discourse of Japanese uniqueness) – but by reinterpreting Japan’s
modern history, and this has found some expressions within popular culture.
The views emanating from this reassessment of Japan’s past and its role as a source of national
pride and identity became widely available and popularized by the late-1990s and can besummarized as follows: i) it is natural and healthy to love one’s country, and Japanese people
should be proud of Japan; ii) post-war Japanese public discourse had been dominated by the left,
which has presented a “distorted” and “masochistic” history to the public and children inparticular;

Kobayashi denounces the brain-washing of children at peace museumsiii) Japan need not apologize (or has apologized enough) over its war-time deeds; iv) China andKorea’s anti-Japanese sentiments and actions are unreasonable and irrational; and v) China andKorea are using history as a diplomatic card. Indeed, within the realm of popular culture,“history” itself – and here “history” largely means the history of the Asia-Pacific War - hasjoined an already popular array of dehistoricized signs and symbols that encourage consumers toWar in Japanese Popular Culture38

see themselves as national subjects. [13]So, what role do history and images of the past play in Kobayashi’s construction ofcontemporary popular nationalism? In the following sections, I will examine Sensoron in moredetail and analyze the relationship between nationalism and history he presents in this text.
Examining Kobayashi’s manga will shed light on the “popular” dimensions of contemporary
Japanese nationalism and historical revisionism and also the extent to which the effective use of
popular media has contributed to its increasing presence over the last decade. [14]Examining popular discourse is important because much of the so-called “debate” on contentious
issues of memory and history (such as the Nanjing Massacre, the “comfort women” and the
Yasukuni Shrine) is disseminated through popular media; there is a vast amount of popular
writing on these topics in books, newspapers, general-interest magazines and very importantly on
the web. Many scholarly works on these issues exist, but are yet to filter through into the public
discourse or consciousness. Popular media material and its influence on perceptions needs to betaken into account in order to understand the current controversy over history and memory not
only within Japan but also between Japan and China/Korea.
History as a place where boys can be heroes again
Kobayashi is a well-known manga artist, who is associated with the nationalist-revisionist
movement that appeared in the 1990s. He is an honorary director of the New History Textbook
Group, and has also been linked with Fujioka Nobukatsu’s Liberal History Group. [15] As well
as authoring numerous manga and publishing a number of books both on his own and with someacademics, Kobayashi edits Washizumu (Me-ism), a glossy “intellectual entertainment magazinethat unites Japan” (according to the blurb on the front cover of the magazine), which he started in
2002. Since Sensoron, his first work to tackle historical issues in any detail, he has been
consistently and energetically disseminating his perspectives on Japan’s modern history, themeaning of the Asia-Pacific War, and the importance of patriotism in contemorary Japan.
Sensoron is a thick volume that appeared alongside his long-running series Gomanizumu sengen(proclamations of arrogance) [16] where Kobayashi offered his personal, and often provocative,
opinions on various social issues. [17] The proportion of written text is very high, making thismanga more like heavily illustrated political essays. It presents the Liberal History Group’s viewthat Japan fought a war of justice, aiming to liberate Asia from Western, “white” imperialism,
and that today’s Japanese, who denigrate the war heroes as war criminals, are a product of US
brainwashing since the occupation. In each chapter, Kobayashi appears as the protagonist,
presenting opinions on such issues as the “comfort women”, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Abombs, and, of course, the Nanjing Massacre.
The cover of Sensoron carries a provocative question: “Will you go to war, or will you stop
being Japanese?” and tells readers, “You can now understand Japan; Japan is going to change!”
Sensoron has become a truly social phenomenon, selling more than 650,000 copies. It provokedwide public responses, including a number of serious (and often angry) criticisms by wellestablished academics; [18] one book-length critique by a left-wing academic even provoked alawsuit, making Kobayashi and his manga even more newsworthy. [19] Sensoron also attracted

Sakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’

39

wide overseas attention, and even rated mention in the new edition of Sources of JapaneseTradition, an authoritative collection of primary texts published from the Columbia University
Press. [20]Patriotism for Kobayashi clearly is a given. He maintains that he is merely “trying to wake up
patriotism that exists in ordinary people, rather than trying to force upon them something that
does not exist”. [21] Historical images, therefore, are invoked in his attempt to remind ordinary
people of their “unconscious patriotism (mujikaku-na aikokushin)”. One way in which Sensoron
attempts this is by illustrating the war-time heroism of “dying for the nation” with the poignant
and powerful image of kamikaze soldiers, glorifying the idea of their self-sacrifice for somethinglarger; something that is beyond mere individuals. This “something larger” is defined variously
throughout the text as “loved ones”, “homeland”, “birth-town”, “family”, “the emperor”,“national future”, “history and geography [of Japan]” and “the public”, but “not ... the statesystem”. [22]In other words, this intangible “something” emanates from what Benedict Anderson called “thebeauty of gemeinschaft”, found in the unchosen “natural tie” between the individual and thenation as an imagined community. Dying for something that one has no choice over, asAnderson suggests, signifies a “disinterested love and solidarity” and is an ultimate act, puresacrifice. [23] It also fits the cultural codes of bushido, the aesthetics of honourable death. It isprecisely this kind of profoundly self-sacrificing love and loyalty that Sensoron plays up via theimage of kamikaze soldiers for the purpose of “waking up” ordinary people’s patriotism.

Kamikaze pilot Hoshikawa Hachiro

In Sensoron Japanese soldiers are said to be “heroes (eiyu)” but not in the sense of specifically
named individuals whose unique character, courage, intelligence, and so on lead the country toWar in Japanese Popular Culture40

victory; rather, the essence of kamikaze is found in the anonymity of its heroes and theirembodiment of Japanese aesthetics of honourable death. They were ordinary people who
believed in the cause of the “justice in war” and gave up their own lives in order to protect their
loved ones and homeland. Their anonymity and ordinariness can powerfully represent a whole
nation precisely because of the lack of individuality, which allows them to represent any and all.
This representation of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in a fictionalized past has botha nostalgic and utopian function as Kobayashi counterposes the heroism and self-sacrifice of the
war-time soldiers with today’s youths, who, according to him, only care about themselves. The
opening scene of Sensoron comments on contemporary Japan’s “sickening peace” [24] and its
detrimental effect on people’s morality. He says that today’s youths are mere consumers; they
are materialistic, egotistic and selfish individuals, who do not have a true sense of the self, letalone the willingness to die for the nation. He contrasts the image of today’s youths who “havebeen living in a wealthy society without any inconvenience, isolated from the community andhistory that support their individuality” [25] with the image of war-time Japanese whose highly
developed self-discipline and sense of community enabled them to sacrifice their personal
feelings and even their lives for the public good. War-time Japanese had something to believe in;today’s Japanese are apathetic relativists and nihilists. War-time Japanese felt and accepted astrong connection with their birth-place, family, history and community; today’s Japanese ignore
and even reject such connections, floating around without any solid sense of belonging. What isexpressed here, then, is an anxiety over the growing effect of modernization, urbanization, andglobalization in Japan. With many references to youth violence, cult religion, lack of order andsecurity in contemporary civil life scattered through its text, Sensoron effectively speaks to andexploits the generalized sense of anxiety in contemporary Japanese society and nostalgicallyconstructs war-time Japan as the good old days.
But while Sensoron utilizes history as a nostalgic projection against which Kobayashi’s disdain
for today’s society are contrasted, it has little to do with the reality of war-time Japan. He
overemphasizes the glory and honour, paying little attention to the cruelty, misery, and hardshipof the war. Kobayashi never questions the education and training aimed at creating the“emperor’s subject” and the act of self-sacrifice. Neither does he mention that Japanese soldiers
were aggressors and colonizers in Asia. Providing an accurate depiction of Japan’s war-time
history, however, is not the point here. What is important for Kobayashi is the representation ofhistory and its effect, namely telling his readers that those kamikaze soldiers had something thattoday’s youths do not but should have, and that the solutions for today’s chaotic and amoral
society, therefore, lie in the past. The image of heroic death in the past is a fiction that serves thispurpose.
In addition to its function as a lost utopia, history in Sensoron also serves as a background forentertainment through the exploration of human dramas and intense emotion, which, of course, isthe business of popular culture such as manga. Sensoron associates Japan’s war with neither
atrocity nor victimhood but rather with drama, romance and excitement as indicated in therepeated use of such words as “love”, “courage”, “thrilling (tsukai),” “moving/touching (kando)”,and “emotion/human feelings (jo)”. It is full of masculinized heroism based on discipline, honourand courage (“a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do”; “can you die for the one you love?”).
[26] Operating within popular cultural conventions, Sensoron explores a heightened sense of

Sakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’41

connection with others, the painful awareness of human mortality, and the exhilaration of
temporarily losing oneself in something beyond life, time, and space vis-a-vis the image of akamikaze boy soldier visiting his family for the last time or friendship between two men who aredestined to die together. As entertainment and consumer products, history manga (as well as
historical novels and films) have long been exploiting history as a background for fictionalized
tales, intended primarily to entertain without any pretense to historical accuracy.
Using history as the backdrop for idealized narratives intended to entertain is, by and large,
neither new nor particularly problematic. In Sensoron, however, Kobayashi employs both his
critique of today’s Japan and the popular cultural function of entertaining by appealing toemotion to construct national subjects in contemporary Japan. His call for public morality,
intimate relationships, community, independent thinking, romance and meanings, in themselves,
are hardly extraordinary. But as soon as he chooses the idealized “national” past (which heclaims to be the “truth of history”) as a means for critiquing today’s Japan, problems arise. The
aesthetics of willing sacrifice of oneself, most symbolically in the forms of gyokusai (honourable
death) and kamikaze attack, are defined as quintessentially Japanese, Thus Kobayashi’spresentation of human drama in an idealized historical setting also primarily functions tointerpellate the readers into national subjects. Readers, addressed directly by the protagonist
Kobayashi, are made to feel proud of being Japanese and experience intense emotions via theiridentification with the characters “as Japanese”. Since the appeal to emotion, not logic, is central
to the success of nationalism, popular culture’s familiarity with modes for manipulating emotion
is particularly useful for advocating nationalism.
“Our granddads” discourse
Kobayashi nevertheless does not tell his readers to die for the nation here and now. Such ademand is not (and cannot be) part of the structure of his nationalist discourse. He sees today’s
Japan as corrupted by selfish individuals and rampant consumerism; as far as Kobayashi isconcerned, there is no longer a Japan that is worth dying for. The heroism of kamikaze soldiers,
the beauty of protecting the nation by sacrificing the self, the nation that is worth giving up one’s
life for, the aesthetics of self-discipline, and the strong sense of the “public” are all things thatcan exist only in the past he reconstructs, a past that is glorious and that one can be proud of.
Sensoron instead offers its readers the possibility of a different kind of heroism from that of their
grandfathers, namely the heroism of fighting against the dominant post-war discourse on Japan’s
war of aggression and of “protecting” “our granddads” from contempt and the stigma of war
criminals. Kobayashi argues that in the post-war hegemonic discourse of pacifism, the former
soldiers – read “our granddads” – have been labelled as “militarists” and shunned by society.
Referring to his own grandfather who was first “left behind in New Guinea during the war by the
military elite, and then in the masochistic nation, Japan, by the antiwar pacifists ... and yet diedwithout complaining once”, [27] he sets up a dichotomy between “our granddads” who “foughtfor the country ... to fulfil the obligation as members of the nation and responded to the
expectation of the nation” [28] and those in post-war government, intelligentsia, and media, who
marginalized and cut off “our granddads” as something “dirty” and “evil”.
Kobayashi’s enemies in this symbolic war are thus largely domestic ones, namely, JapaneseWar in Japanese Popular Culture

42

politicians, academics, bureaucrats, journalists, and the “lefties” who he says have beenbrainwashed by the US since the occupation in the immediate postwar period. Set against adomestic backdrop of strong anti-war sentiments and widespread condemnation of Japan’s
Pacific war, Sensoron’s message seems to be that by fighting a discursive/symbolic war over themeaning of the past in order to protect “our granddads”, “we” can be heroes again, here and now.
Readers are invited to join the brave Kobayashi, who declares: “I will protect our granddads,
even if it means that others may call me a bad guy.” [29]Kobayashi’s agenda is to tell and revive in contemporary Japan what he calls the “granddads’
story” - a story of a “just war” that protected Japan and liberated the “coloured race” from the“white race” - against the dominant narrative of the “mistaken war” in which Japan is anaggressor. While the rhetoric of just war had existed throughout the post-war period within themarginalized rightist discourse, Kobayashi, by heavily relying on the imagery of “our granddads”
as voiceless victims (of the government, media, academics – in short, the elite), shifts such arhetoric from freakish and anachronistic ultranationalism to a common sense stand by a silent
majority wrongly suppressed in the hegemonic discourse of postwar Japan. The discursive
structure of “recovering the voice and story of the victims” was a familiar one to the Japanesepeople in the 1990s because of the redress movements for the “comfort women” and othervictims of Japanese war-time actions. Kobayashi uses the same logic in representing theJapanese soldiers as the silenced victims whose story now needs to be told in the public domain.
In Kobayashi’s telling of the “granddads’ story”, individual and national stories are merged witheach other. Rejecting the view that Japanese soldiers went to war either forced against their willor brainwashed, Kobayashi insists that each soldier chose to believe, as a conscious agent, thesubjective truth of a just war as well as the aesthetics of self-sacrificing, insisting also that thisprovided some meaning in their lives. [30] He neglects the well-documented practice ofideological education and training as well as the culture of absolute obedience within theJapanese military. Still, in so far as this remains an issue of the subjective belief of someindividuals, one can readily agree with him that it is possible that believing in the cause of the
war lessened the sense of wasted life and suffering for some individuals. In his text, however, theabove point regarding individual belief, slips into another argument that those who died for thenation have “protected the pride of Japan”, [31] that they died for the “future of the country, forus”, [32] and that “they believed it, and we can believe it now too”. [33] In this discursive move,a statement concerning individual and subjective belief in the past slips into one concerning acollective narrative today based on an objective truth. Past glory becomes a basis for today’s
proud identity. [34] The symbol of “our granddad” in Sensoron, thus, sutures the gap between
the heroic past and the corrupt present, presenting an unbroken narrative of the nation, as well as
offering today’s Japanese a chance to be heroic again by choosing to honour “our granddads” byfighting against the dominant narrative of postwar Japan regarding its past aggression.
History as a site of the “information war”: Kobayashi on the Nanjing Massacre as a“fabrication”
The theme of symbolic war over history dominates Kobayashi’s treatment of the Nanjing
Massacre. The 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which Japanese soldiers killed, raped, and assaulted
large numbers of Chinese soldiers and civilians (estimates vary, but at least tens of thousands),

Sakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’43

has been well-documented by historians, although important differences remain over the
temporal and geographic scope of the massacre and the numbers killed. However, the Nanjing
Massacre is a highly controversial political issue that continues to affect China-Japan relations.
In both countries, the incident carries huge symbolic and emotional importance and has been
avidly taken up in the context of contemporary national identity formation and reformation.
In Japan, around the time of the publication of Sensoron, the Nanjing Massacre left the confined
debate among historians and entered the public discourse and imagination. As the sudden
increase in the number of Japanese publications questioning the Nanjing Massacre attests, [35] ithas become one of the key issues in the politics of memory and representation in the revisionist
re-interpretation of Japan’s history. In China, on the other hand, the Nanjing Massacre is
emerging as a foundation stone of the Chinese national identity built upon the notion of
victimhood and collective suffering. [36] It is also offering a new point of identification for the
Chinese of the diaspora. Joshua Fogel has observed that “many Chinese in the Diaspora withconsiderably less knowledge of their own traditions and history than their forebears have seizedon the Nanjing Massacre as their own”. [37]Although the relevance of the Nanjing Massacre (and indeed many other issues of history andcollective memory that Japan now faces) extends far beyond Japanese national history,
Kobayashi attempts to confine it within a strictly domestic narrative primarily designed toprotect national pride. Claiming that there is an “information war (joho-sen)” going on between
Japan and China, he makes a vow to clear Japan’s name by disclosing the error of “thestupendous idea that Nanjing was a Holocaust - a misunderstanding that is spreading through theworld”. [38] The exaggerated statement that the Nanjing Massacre-Holocaust equation is“spreading through the world” constructs Japan as a victim of international misunderstanding
and attack, fitting well with his overall strategy of fostering nationalism by using enemy-figuresthat undermine Japanese national pride. For Kobayashi, the commonly held view that the
Nanjing Massacre demonstrates the Japanese Imperial Army’s cruelty is a prime example of how
internal enemies are collaborating with Japan’s external enemies to undermine Japanese prideand self respect.
In addition to identifying the various domestic enemies (e.g., elite, media, bureaucrats,
communists, citizens groups, the “lefties”) and the US as the origin of Japan’s “masochistic
history”, Sensoron introduces another enemy figure: China. In Sensoron, the Chinese at the timeof the Nanjing Massacre appear as uncivilized (“hodgepodge military which cannot be
understood within the concept of the modern military ... the common sense of modern war does
not apply ... [Chinese troops] ignore all the rules”). [39] Cannibalism and other supposedly
characteristically Chinese forms of cruelty are also invoked with details and illustrations. These
representations operate within the codes of civilization versus barbarism that have circulated inJapan since the nineteenth century.
Kobayashi’s description of the Chinese is reminiscent, for example, of the Meiji enlightenment
intellectual Fukuzawa Yukichi’s 1883 comment that if China waged a war and Japan lost, theChinese, not knowing a “war of civilization”, would “loot private and official properties, rape
women and children, steal gold and money, kill the old and infants, and set fire to the houses.”[40] Fukuzawa also tells an anecdote of a Chinese man who killed a French woman and stole herWar in Japanese Popular Culture

44

jewellery with her severed ears and fingers still attached. [41] Indeed, this long-standing themeof China’s barbarism, which emerged as Japan adopted the discourse of civilization and progressalong with the Western racialist-Orientalist image of the primitive and wild “Other”, is precisely
what Kobayashi is anchoring his historical narrative upon. [42]If the Chinese at the time of the Nanjing Massacre are represented as uncivilized and cruel,today’s China and Chinese are represented in terms of “non-democratic government” and“childish/immature nationalism”. [43] In fact this is an increasingly common rhetorical response
within Japanese political circles to the rising tension between Japan and China. For example,
Yamauchi Masayuki, a member of the prime minister’s advisory group on foreign affairs, hasargued that the “intensity of [Chinese] nationalism and patriotism go way beyond anything seenin Japan”. He has contrasted the “excessive” and possibly “damaging” nationalism arising out of
the Chinese Communist Party’s official interpretation of national history with Japan’s, where
historians are free to develop their own views without having to function politically in deference
to national unity. [44] Similarly, an article written by the Minister of Public Affairs for theJapanese Embassy in Washington in the International Herald Tribune (January 2006) juxtaposes
Japan’s “mature democracy”, which does not need nationalism to supply legitimacy of rule, with
“non-democratic states with no freedom of expression” where “rulers tend to resort to[“dangerous”] nationalism in order to strengthen their authority”. [45] Needless to say, thecontrast between Japan’s “mature democracy” and “healthy nationalism” versus China’s “lack of
democracy” and “childish nationalism” is a version of the old contrast between civilized/modern
Japan versus uncivilized/backward China.
Although Sensoron contains clearly negative images of China and the Chinese, overall it is not
an outright anti-China book. The first and foremost enemy of the nation in this text is the West
and America along with Japanese intellectuals and leftist media as their domestic sympathizers.
Reflecting the position that Japan fought for Asia as the representative of the “coloured race”,
Kobayashi’s perspective towards China is often more patronizing than hostile. In problematizing
the Nanjing Massacre, his main targets are firstly America, as he argues that the Nanjing
Massacre was fabricated during the US-led Tokyo Tribunal where victor’s justice prevailed, andsecondly “the world” that believes Japanese atrocities were on a par with the Holocaust. [46] The
main function of his discussion of the Nanjing Massacre is to create a sense of threat andconspiracy in order to construct Japan (a maligned nation of “ordinary people and their “granddads”) as a victim of misunderstanding and injustice that are the products of a conspiracy
between the external enemy, America, and internal enemies, the intellectuals and media.
In terms of the Nanjing Massacre itself, his main points are as follows: i) since Nanjing’s
population was only 200,000, it is impossible that 300,000 Chinese were killed (300,000 being
the “official” Chinese figure); ii) no journalist in Nanjing witnessed the Massacre; iii) only 49
murders were reported by the International Safety Zone Committee in Nanjing; iv) KMTguerrillas inside the International Safety Zone carried out robbery and rapes while disguisingthemselves as Japanese soldiers; and v) most photographs of the Nanjing Massacre are fake.
Largely speaking, he presents a simplistic and extreme view by putting together selectively
chosen materials from works of conservative historians and journalists, and adds his alarmist
warning that Japan is a victim of international conspiracy and brainwashing.

Sakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’

45This is not to say, however, that what Kobayashi presents is not based on “facts” or “research”.
Far from it, Sensoron frequently uses quotations and references as well as detailed analysis ofwhat he calls “primary sources”, which add an air of credibility to his manga. The chapter whichquestions the validity of some Nanjing photographs is a case in point; the photograph circulated
by peace activists and left-wing publishers in Japan with the caption, “an execution with aJapanese sword” cannot, according to Kobayashi, be from Nanjing because of the summer
clothing the soldier and the victim are wearing - the Nanjing Massacre took place in winter. On
another photograph titled “dead bodies discarded in Yangtze River”, he points out that the
military uniform of the soldier is different from those actually worn by the Japanese soldiers, anddemonstrates the differences with detailed illustrations.
However, inconsistencies and errors among a few photographs do not challenge the status of theatrocity as an historical event of large significance; on the contrary, Kobayashi’s assertion that
the Nanjing Massacre is nothing but “fabrication” is obviously fraudulent. But via the function ofmetonymy, this kind of warped history building develops an alternative narrative for the Nanjing
Massacre as an historical incident. In general, as with the above examples, there are some truths
in what he says, especially if we focus on details such as the exact number of the victims or theaccuracy of the caption of specific photographs. But he uses his materials selectively, ignores
what contradicts his point, blows data out of proportion and rips it out of context, and generally
jumps to unwarranted conclusions.
Using manga as a mixed media of visual and written texts, Kobayashi effectively blurs theboundaries between fact and fiction, history and ideology, past and present. As the protagonist,
Kobayashi freely goes back and forth between the past and the present, reality and fiction,
sometimes appearing even as one of the soldiers. Photographs appear alongside his illustrations,the latter challenging the former. Quotations from other sources are also accompanied with his
illustrations of, for example, deformed and evil-looking Chinese, Japanese boy-soldiers withshining eyes, and an intelligent and serious looking Kobayashi warning the reader not to accept
the “distorted” history that has been “forced” on the Japanese (with bold Gothic letters foremphasis). [47]Uninformed readers can easily be persuaded of Kobayashi’s authority as they, page after page,see Kobayashi the protagonist reading published works on the Nanjing Massacre, commenting
on them, refuting their points with his “evidence” and urging them to: “Learn the facts that havebeen hidden from the Japanese! We cannot talk about history while averting our eyes from thefacts!” [48] Kobayashi creates a sense that there is some sort of conspiracy against Japan goingon, and that he, the hero-protagonist, is unveiling the “truth” before the reader’s eyes, exposing
the lies of mainstream academia and journalism. What the reader cannot see, however, isKobayashi’s selective use of the “facts”. For example, when Kobayashi presents a 1937 Japanesenewspaper cutting with a photograph of a peaceful Nanjing city - thanks to the Japanese troops he does not mention the severe censorship that Japanese media was placed under at the time.
Elsewhere Kobayashi says that he is teaching his readers the “media literacy” [49] needed for the“information war over the Nanjing Incident”. [50] Ironically, it is publications like Sensoron,
with its seductive blend of carefully selected facts and emotional appeal, which provide thestrongest case for media literacy.

War in Japanese Popular Culture

46

Conclusion
Sensoron exemplifies the recent trend of nationalism articulated within the realm of the“popular”, promoted via consumer culture and “enjoyed” by the masses. It stands in contrast tonationalist ideals and perceptions propagated traditionally by the intellectual and political elite.
However, there also are some important differences between Kobayashi’s manga and the “pop”
nationalism discussed earlier. “Pop” nationalism is about ordinary people’s modes of relating to
the nation-state and it is often mediated by the dynamics of mass/popular culture. It relies heavily
on images and icons that are cut-off from their historical meanings. It is not always clearly
articulated or even overtly nationalistic in terms of the content – hence the characterization of itas being “unthinking” and “non-intelligent”. Kobayashi’s manga, in contrast, while clearly a
popular and commercialized product targeted at “ordinary” people, carries far more explicit anddetailed political messages of nationalism, using many references to Japan’s wartime history. If
the icons and symbols of pop nationalism - immediately appealing, fashionable and pleasurable are dissociated from history and politics and do not call for intelligent, ethical, and criticaljudgement, [51] Kobayashi’s text combines the immediate appeal of the visual images withcomplex textual messages, openly combining the pop and the political. In other words, it ispopular and accessible in its style and medium, but not totally naïve or “unintelligent” in its
content. It requires some thought on the readers’ part and challenges readers (Kobayashi tells hisreaders to doubt everything and everyone – even Kobayashi himself), and may possibly appeal toa different segment of the population from those who are attracted to “pop” nationalism. [52]Sensoron is an entertainment product, and at one level its use of history is utopian, fictional andpopular cultural. But it also contains strong historical truth-claims and constructs a nationalist
discourse in today’s Japan around historical images of brave soldiers and the rhetoric of “ourgranddads”. By incorporating detailed explanations and interpretations of historical events suchas the Nanjing Massacre, it exerts much tighter control over the readers’ interpretations of its
content compared with “pop” nationalism’s use of the national icons and symbols such as therising-sun flag, national football team, samurai ethics or the Royal Family. Furthermore, whilethese icons do not identify any particular group or country as the national enemy, images of theenemy are clearly, unequivocally and eloquently articulated in Sensoron. Maruyama Masao hasargued that the production of a national enemy or at least national threat is the precondition forthe shift from apolitical national consciousness to more exclusivist and aggressive forms ofnationalism. [53] If this is true, then Kobayashi’s portrayals of various enemy figures clearly has
the potential to mobilize people beyond the pleasurable consumption of national icons, whose
primary function is to create a sense of connection in an otherwise alienating and meaninglessworld, into the realm of a far more politicized form of nationalism.
Sensoron clearly shows that history is important in popular expressions of nationalism incontemporary Japan. Popular culture has now become a site for contesting historical truth, andthis manga functions as a ground for a political battle over memory and history, promoting
nationalism. For the Post-Cold War revisionists’ hegemonic project aimed at creating a newconsensus over the interpretation of history and cultivating national pride among Japanese, therealm of culture that is accessible and familiar to ordinary people, as opposed to the purely
political or intellectual realm, has become increasingly important. As a reserve for the collective
imaginary, too, popular culture is an important site for the politics of emotion, which Japan’sSakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’47

new nationalism is largely about.
Using popular culture as a vehicle for politics, however, comes at a price. As a form ofentertainment, it has a different impetus and logic from academic work on history or politicalnegotiations. The fiction/reality boundary is collapsed, and the tendency towards oversimplification, sensationalism, polemic, and controversy dominates. Instead of complex andnuanced history that captures the multi-dimensional reality, history is reduced to the matter oftaking a clear-cut either/or position. Historical events such as the Nanjing Massacre is morphed
into a caricaturized “debate” that fascinates many but does not create a new, shared meaning.
History is a collective narrative that needs to be told and retold without ignoring the views andsensitivities of “the other”; it must be a process underpinned by commitment to a common future.
The modern history of Japan inevitably concerns and contains “others”, for Japanese imperialism
has inescapably connected the history of the Japanese people with histories of people in Asia. In
the era of globalization and digital communication, no “national” history is insulated from the
input of and scrutiny by these “others”. It is not possible to tell a purely “national” narrative, forexample, about the Nanjing Massacre. And yet Sensoron attempts exactly that, insistently
excluding what it stipulates as the nation’s Others from its short-circuit of the author and readers
as both proud Japanese. In fact the whole thing depends on the construction and exclusion ofvarious Others - not just China, other Asian nations and the Japanese left, but also former
Japanese soldiers who denounce Japan’s war-time atrocities, or bereaved families who demandthat the souls of their loved ones be taken out of the Yasukuni Shrine. History in Sensoron isclosed-off from any possibility of participation by them as co-authors of a collective narrative. In
the domestic context of postwar Japan’s intellectual discourse, Kobayashi’s manga does have a
critical function challenging the mainstream interpretation of history and opening up a dialogue
over important issues such as the continuity between Japan before and after 1945; however, thispotential is unrealized because of its exclusive focus on the nation and the closed nature of his
language. His challenge may make sense domestically and internally; externally, however, it isclosed off and simply unacceptable. At the end of the day, what is provided is a narrowly
national story woven around the image of the heroic struggle against the external enemy in thepast as well as in the present. History thus becomes a mere sign: plenty of images and accountsof the last war circulate in the public domain, but history, in all its abundance, is here reduced toan empty signifier for the nostalgic desire for the unity of the nation.
This is a revised version of Rumi Sakamoto’s chapter, 'Will you go to War? Or will you stop
being Japanese?': Nationalism and History in Kobayashi Yoshinori's ‘Sensoron', in Michael
Heazle and Nick Knight (eds), China-Japan Relations in the Twenty-first Century: Creating a
Future Past?, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 2007. Posted at
Japan Focus on January 14, 2008.
Rumi Sakamoto is Lecturer in Asian Studies at Auckland University and a Japan Focus associate.
She is the coeditor with Matt Allen of Popular Culture and Globalisation in Japan.
Notes[1] Kobayashi Yoshinori (1998), Sensoron (on war), Tokyo: Gentosha. Other examples include

War in Japanese Popular Culture48

Akiyama Joji (2005), Chugoku nyumon (introduction to China), Tokyo: Asuka Shinsha; Yamano
Sharin (2005), Ken-kanryu (hating Korean wave), Tokyo: Shinyusha.
[2] Kobayashi Yoshinori, Takeda Seiji and Hashizume Daizaburo (1997), Seigi, senso, kokkaron(on justice, war and state), Tokyo: Komichi Shobo, p. 25.
[3] Kobayashi Yoshinori (2002), Shin-gomanizumu Sengen (new proclamation of arrogance)
Vol. 5, Tokyo: Shogakkan Bunko, p. 54.
[4] Kitada Akihiro (2005), Warau nihon no ‘nashonarizumu’ (laughing ‘nationalism’ of Japan),Tokyo: NHK Books, p. 211.
[5] Kayama Rika (2002), Puchi-nashonarizumu Shokogun (petit nationalism syndrome), Tokyo:
Chuko Shinsho Rakure.
[6] Iida Yumiko (2004), ‘Kashi-ka sareta kokumin-kokka to kairaku no ideorogî:johoshihonshugi-ka ni okeru nihon no nashonarizumu (visualized nation-state and ideology ofpleasure: Japanese nationalism under information capitalism)’ in Ito Mamoru (ed.) Bunka no
jissen, bunka no kenkyu (practicing culture, studying culture), Tokyo: Serika Shobo, 2004.
[7] Kitada (2005), Warau nihon no ‘nashonarizumu’ (laughing ‘nationalism’ of Japan).
[8] In this respect it is suggestive that Ueno Yoko’s ethnography of a grass-roots conservative
movement - which officially focused on history textbooks - has also shown that its participants
were more interested in sharing a communicative space with other members via the use ofcertain key words than in the nation-state as their object of identification or nationalism as apolitical movement. See Oguma Eiji and Ueno Yoko (2003), ‘Iyashi’ no nashonarizumu(nationalism as healing), Tokyo: Keio-gijuku daigaku shuppankai.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Maruyama Masao (1964), Gendai-seiji no shiso to kodo (thought and behaviour in modern
Japanese politics), Tokyo: Miraisha.
[11] Asaba Michiaki (2004), Nashonarizumu (nationalism), Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsho.
[12] Kang Sangjung (2001), ‘Togi: kugatsu juichinichi ikou no nashonarizumu (discussion:nationalism after 9/11)’, Gendaishiso 29 (16), p. 40; Kayama Rika and Fukuda Kazuya (2003),
Aikoku-mondo (A debate on patriotism), Tokyo: Chuko Shinsho Rakure, pp. 9-10.
[13] In addition to nationalistic comic books such as Akiyama’s Chugoku nyumon (introduction
to China)and Yamano’s Kenkanryu (hating Korean wave), a number of films such as Puraido:
unmei no toki (pride: fateful moment, 1998), Otoko tachi no Yamato (men’s battleship Yamato,2005), Kyoki no sakura (madness in bloom, 2002) also indicate the use of history in recent
popular culture.
[14] This is not to say that Japanese popular culture only or even mainly transmits nationalist
messages. For example, Matthew Penney has argued that the prevalent antiwar images inpostwar Japanese popular culture have contributed to the considerable support of Japan’s Peace
Constitution today. See Penney, Matthew (2005), “The ‘most crucial education’: Saotome
Katsumoto, Globalization and Japanese anti-war thought”, in Allen, Matthew and Rumi

Sakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’

49

Sakamoto (eds) (2006) Popular Culture, Globalization, and Japan, London: Routledge. The useof popular culture for carrying right-wing and nationalist messages is a new phenomenon.
[15] The new history textbook group is a collection of conservative academics and others. They
have produced a history textbook that glorifies Japan’s past, and attempted to have it adopted inschools. Although the adoption rate was negligible, their activities sparked a lot of debate inJapan regarding to the interpretation of history and revisionist tendency within society.
[16] Originally serialized in Weekly Spa, from 1992 to 1995 but moved to Sapio in 1995.
[17] Prior to Kobayashi’s “turn to history” he had addressed such issues as the HIV lawsuit overthe infections via contaminated blood and Japan’s new cult religion, Aum Shinrikyo. In both, he
was actively involved, supporting the victims, fighting with the cult, and even at one point
becoming a target of the assassination plot.
[18] They were not just scholars of media or popular culture, but those from a more traditional
disciplines such as historians, philosophers, and sociologists.
[19] Uesugi Satoshi won in court and went on to write another book on this legal battle over the
copyright issue regarding the use of Kobayashi’s manga in his book.
[20] de Bary, WM T., C. Gluck, and A. E. Tiedemann (2005), Sources of Japanese Tradition:
1600 to 2000, Vol. 2., second edin, New York and London: Columbia University Press.
[21] Kobayashi Yoshinori (2000), Ko to koron (on the individuals and the public), Tokyo:
Gentosha, p. 276.
[22] Kobayashi, Sensoron, p. 287.
[23] Anderson, Benedict (1991), Imagined Communities, London: Verso, pp. 141-4.
[24] Kobayashi, Sensoron, p. 9.
[25] Ibid., p. 354.
[26] Ibid., p. 281.
[27] Ibid., p. 208.
[28] Ibid., p. 203.
[29] Ibid., p. 64.
[30] Ibid., pp. 292-6.
[31] Ibid., pp. 363-4.
[32] Ibid., p. 96.
[33] Ibid., p. 312.
[34] Similarly, individual heroism in the past slides into the image of Japan as the brave Asian
nation that fought against “white imperialism”, despite the fact that individual heroism cannot
establish Japan’s role as the “liberator of Asia” as an objective historical reality.

War in Japanese Popular Culture50[35] For example, Fuji Nobuo (1995), “Nankin daigayakusatsu” wa ko shite tsukurareta (this is
how the “Nanjing Massacre” was created), Tokyo: Tentensha; Higashinakano Osamichi (1998),“Nankin gyakusatsu” no tettei kensho (a thorough examination of the “Nanjing Massacre”),
Tokyo: Tendensha; Matsumura Toshio (1998), “Nankin gyakusatsu” e no daigimon (A big
question on the “Nanjing Massacre”), Tokyo: Tentensha; Suzuki Akira (1999), Shin “Nankin
daigyakusatsu” no maboroshi (the new illusion of the “Nanjing Massacre”), Tokyo: Asuka
Shinsha; Fujioka Nobukastu and Higashinakano Osamichi (1999), “Za reipu obu Nankin” nokenkyu (study of “the Rape of Nanking”), Tokyo: Shodensha; Takemoto Tadao and Ohara
Yasuo (2000), Saishin “Nankin daigyakusatsu” (the alleged “Nanjing Massacre”), Tokyo:
Meiseisha.
[36] Buruma, Ian (2001), ‘The Nanking Massacre as a historical symbol’, in Li, Fei Fei, R.
Sabella and D. Liu (eds) Nanking 1937, London and New York: M. E. Sharpe.
[37] Fogel, Joshua (ed.) (2002), The Nanjing Massacre in history and historiography, p. 3.
[38] Kobayashi (2000), Ko to koron, p. 233.
[39] Kobayashi, Sensoron, pp. 120-35.
[40] Fukuzawa, Yukichi [1883] (1981), ‘Toyo no koryaku hatashite ikansen (how to capture theEast)’, Fukuzawa Yukichi Senshu (selected works of Fukuzawa Yukichi) Vol. 7, Tokyo:
Iwanami Shoten, p. 147.
[41] Ibid.
[42] The image of China in Japan sharply changed in the nineteenth century from that ofcivilization and the Middle Kingdom to that of a backward and uncivilized people.
[43] Kobayashi, Sensoron, p. 123.
[44] Yamauchi, Masayuki (2005), ‘Restraint in the uses of history: recent developments inJapan-China relations’, Gaiko Forum, Fall, pp. 11-23.
[45] Kitano, Mitsuru (2005), ‘The myth of rising Japanese nationalism’, International Herald
Tribune (12 Jan 2006), , accessed on 10 April 2006.
[46] Despite the use of the sensational word “fabrication”, Sensoron does not actually deny thefact of violence itself; rather it minimizes the scale of the atrocity and justifies the action of theJapanese troops. This is also the case with most of the so-called “illusion-school” writers whowrite on the Nanjing Massacre.
[47] Uesugi Satoshi (1997), Datsu-gomanizumu sengen (leaving the proclamations of arrogance),
Tokyo: Toho Shuppan, pp. 11-12. According to Uesugi, Kobayashi’s visual style is similar to
war propaganda used by Japanese military, while Tessa Morris-Suzuki has pointed out thesimilarity between Kobayashi’s manga and the former Soviet Union’s poster arts, which also
used techniques of juxtaposing of past and present images, collage and photomontage, thecontrast between realistic and nice-looking ‘we’ versus exaggerated and deformed ‘them’. See
Morris-Suzuki, Tessa (2004), Kako wa shinanai (the past within us), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, pp.
230-5.
[48] Kobayashi, Sensoron, p. 127.

Sakamoto: ‘Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese?’

51[49] Kobayashi Yoshinori, Fukuda Kazuya, Saeki Keishi, and Nishibe Susumu (1999), Kokka tosenso (state and war), Tokyo: Asuka Shinsha, p. 42.
[50] Ibid., p.48.
[51] Iida Yumiko, ‘Kashi-ka sareta kokumin-kokka to kairaku no ideorogî: johoshihonshugi-ka
ni okeru nihon no nashonarizumu (visible nation-state and ideology of pleasure: Japanesenationalism under information capitalism)’, p. 172.
[52] Kayama and Fukuda have observed that the readers/supporters of Kobayashi’s works tend
to be students who take social issues seriously. They speculate that those who in the past would
have been attracted into student movements or volunteer work with some affiliation with the left,
are now drawn to Kobayashi due to the diminished attraction of the traditional left in Japan. See
Kayama Rika and Fukuda Kazuya (2003), Aikoku-mondo (A debate on patriotism). This portraitof the readers also fits with Kobayashi’s stated target group as thinking young people who takehistory and society seriously.
[53] Maruyama Masao (1964), Gendai-seiji no shoso to kodo (thought and behaviour in modern
Japanese politics), p. 274.

War in Japanese Popular Culture

52“Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism: Testimony in Sensoron, Sensoron as
Testimony”
Philip Seaton
August 9, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Philip-Seaton/3397“Historiography” refers both to the study of history and to the body of research,
writing, and debates about a specific historical theme or topic. In historical debates,
historians have tended to place priority on written documents, even when dealing withrecent events. More recently, however, oral history—interviews with eyewitnesses andsurvivors and attempts to come to terms with how ordinary people see their own historicalexperience—has become mainstream among academic historians.
One important concept in oral history is “shared authority.” Popularized by oral
historian Michael Frisch in A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oraland Public History, “shared authority” means that historians have an ethical responsibility
to consider the interview-based accounts that they produce to be collaborative projects
between interviewer and interviewee. More than trying to simply find out “what happened”
or force the narratives of individuals into overarching stories of history, oral historians try
to enter into dialogues that can offer insight into dimensions of lived experience lost in
written documents, in short, how “history” has meaning for people. When it comes tohistorical suffering and loss in war, oral history is especially important.
Alessandro Portelli, an oral history pioneer, describes the practice as vital forhistoriography because it has “disarranged many accepted truths.”4 Many historical
documents are produced by institutions and show the priorities and biases of thoseinstitutions. In addition, groups like the wartime Japanese military officers deliberately
destroyed countless important documents because they believed they would become
vulnerable to prosecution at postwar war crimes trials. Historians use what is left, but
serious scholars do not consider it to be a complete picture, especially when it comes to theexperiences of people for whom the military paid little mind, people like the Comfort
Women, Chinese prisoners, and forced laborers whose very existence, let alone theirsuffering or deaths, seldom made it into documents in the first place.
The selectivity of surviving documents is matched by the selectivity of “national
history.” Textbooks and courses are often organized under headings like “American
History” and “Japanese History,” but these categories are problematic in that they tie ourunderstanding of the past to modern national categories that emerged in the 18th and 19th
centuries. Individual lives cross these arbitrary borders and are influenced by myriadinternational factors, just as many important events are not “national” in character. For
example, national history is not an appropriate framework for understanding the
Holocaust, a series of atrocities that took place across many countries. Relevant sources
exist in literally dozens of languages. Any one “national history” is bound to leave out somuch that the big picture disappears, just as those same national histories can have little
meaning when trying to follow the story of an individual victim. The same is true forvictims and victimizers under Japanese Empire.

4

Portelli, viii

Seaton: Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism

53

More than anything, Japan’s neo-nationalists and historical revisionists have
tried to “protect” what they see as Japan’s national story from the viewpoints of others.
They argue that historical documents are necessary to “prove” that war crimes happened,knowing full well that mass destruction of incriminating evidence took place after the war.
This is part of a strategy of pitting “us” and “our story” against “them” and “their falsehoods”
that also involves disregarding a plethora of critical historical writing produced by
Japanese academics, as well as popular historical perspectives by eye-witnesses like Mizuki
Shigeru. One of the bestselling works of neo-nationalist revisionism is Nishio Kanji’s
Kokumin no rekishi (The History of the People). The very title of the work suggests that
there is a history of “we Japanese” that exists independently from the histories of others
and that the author can define what that history is and what it is not.
As Philip Seaton explains in this chapter, neo-nationalist writers like Sensoron (OnWar) author Kobayashi Yoshinori do not discount oral history and testimony. They do,
however, discount the accounts of non-Japanese. Racist generalizations are used to justify
this. Neo-nationalists have consistently put forward the view that Chinese arefundamentally untruthful. In The Alleged Nanking Massacre—Japan’s Rebuttal to China’s
Forged Claims by Takemoto Tadao and Ohara Yasuo, the authors make the claim that “…
Japanese culture, which has produced the serenity of the Noh play and the Tea ceremony,
may be quite opposite contrasted with the Chinese culture, which is festively decorated
with gongs and firecrackers. The peculiar Chinese [sense of] fantasy of such expressions as'30,000 feet of long white hair' may have produced The Rape of Nanking.” This is areference to a Chinese folktale, and its obviously exaggerated character becomes anargument that Chinese have an ethnic or cultural proclivity to simply make things up.
Takemoto and Ohara are equally selective in choosing noh plays and the tea ceremony (theaesthetics of which originated in China) to represent Japan, ignoring the country’s richfantastical literature and folk traditions to make an essentializing point. Some neonationalists go even further. Rightist pundit Watanabe Shoichi argues that Japanese could
not possibly have committed atrocities in Nanking because such concepts do not exist inJapanese culture: “Originally, the idea of ‘massacre’ did not even exist in Japan…. The
Chinese, however, they loot, they kill, they’ll do anything.” Contempt for China combinedwith silly self-aggrandizement sets the pattern of much neo-nationalist writing.5
We should note as well that neo-nationalists are thinking about history as a formof struggle between nations over truth. They claim to be writing Japan’s rebuttal against
China. This is despite the fact that most mainstream Japanese academics and some of thebest research on the extent of Japanese war crimes in China has been carried out by
Japanese historians like Fujiwara Akira and Yoshida Yutaka. Indeed, David Askew hasargued that “Japanese [scholarship] has produced the most advanced research, with thedebate in English lagging years if not decades behind.” None of this is relevant to Japanesedeniers, however, who claim to speak for all Japanese against all Chinese as the true
representatives of “national history.”6

5

Watanabe Shōichi, Chūgoku wo eikyūni damaraseru 100 mon 100 tō (One Hundred Questions and Answers to
Shut China Up for Good) (Tokyo: Wac, 2007), p. 36.
http://www.truthofnanking.com/allegednankingmassacre1.pdf
6
http://www.japanfocus.org/-David-Askew/1729

War in Japanese Popular Culture

54

Philip Seaton’s article explains how Kobayashi Yoshinori prioritizes Japaneseexperiences based on often emotional testimony while dismissing the viewpoints of others.
This fetishism for documents in some cases but not in others shows the hypocrisy ofJapanese neo-nationalism and the lengths that some of its ideologues will go to protect
what they view as “Japan’s story.”

Seaton: Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism

55

Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism: Testimony in Sensōron, Sensōron as
Testimony
Philip Seaton
This essay looks at the use of testimony by manga artist Kobayashi Yoshinori, a prominent
neonationalist voice on war issues. It focuses on three themes to assess his 1998 manga
Sensōron (On War): Kobayashi’s stated position on the validity of testimony as evidence, howtestimony is used within Kobayashi’s arguments, and the inherently autobiographical nature of
Kobayashi’s writings. It reveals a key nationalist hypocrisy: while the rejection of personal
testimony by victims of Japanese war actions as evidence on historiographical grounds remains
central to nationalist denial strategies, testimony is used freely and uncritically to support
nationalist agendas.
NOTE: This article originally included several pages of Manga, which for copyrightreasons could not be reproduced in this reader. The Manga can be viewed at the end of theonline version of this article: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Philip-Seaton/3397
Introduction
The bestselling manga Sensōron (1998) established Kobayashi Yoshinori as one of the mostinfluential voices within Japan’s neonationalist movement of the 1990s and 2000s. Sensōron wasa collection of Kobayashi’s writings on war in his Shin gōmanizumu sengen (New Declaration of
Arrogance) column in the magazine Sapio.1 This and Kobayashi’s subsequent books have total
sales of many millions.2 Kobayashi also became a spokesman for the Japanese Society for
History Textbook Reform (Atarashii rekishi kyōkasho wo tsukurukai, hereafter “Tsukurukai”) as
it produced its nationalistic junior high school textbook in the late 1990s, although he left
Tsukurukai in 2001 following the dismal failure to achieve school adoptions of the book. From2002 to 2009 he focused his energy on editorship of the magazine Wascism (Me-ism), and hecontinues to write his manga column for Sapio. In the twelve years since Sensōron was published,
Kobayashi has lost none of his ability to stir controversy regarding important issues affecting
Japan today and to regularly work his way onto thebestseller shelves in Japanese bookstores.
Kobayashi’s manga covers many topics other than war history, but his chauvinistic war
nationalism (the defense of Japanese war aims and conduct during World War II, and categoricaldenial of atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre) combined with his undoubted talent as amanga artist have earned him a large, loyal fan base. He also has numerous domestic andinternational critics. There is an extensive Japanese literature dedicated to debunking
Kobayashi’s arguments in Sensōron and elsewhere.3 Whereas these critiques are mainly by
progressives aiming to discredit Kobayashi’s evidence and historical narrative, in English hiswork has been analyzed more for the insights it provides into the state of contemporary war
debates and ideological confrontations in Japan over war history. Aaron Gerow, for example, has
analyzed Sensōron for its slick, new packaging of well-worn nationalist arguments;4 Rumi
Sakamoto focuses on what Kobayashi’s eulogies to the kamikaze and exhortations to patriotism
mean to Japanese youth in the twenty-first century;5 and I have argued that Sensōron provides
important insights into how family relationships and other personal experiences seemingly
unrelated to the war can feed into understandings of war history.6

War in Japanese Popular Culture

56This essay does not focus on Kobayashi’s politics per se, but on historiographical andmethodological issues relating to his use of testimony in Sensōron. Throughout the manga thestories of numerous individuals are told, including those of Kobayashi himself. Kobayashi acts
as his own narrator/central character and one of his trademarks is to appear at the end of achapter and say “Gōmanka mashite yoka desu ka” (“Mind if I sound off a little arrogantly?” inKyushu dialect – Kobayashi hails from Fukuoka) before making his point for the chapter.7
Furthermore, with many episodes recounted from his own family background and childhood,Sensōron can be read as an autobiographical account of how and why Kobayashi has come tohold the nationalistic views he does. In this sense, Sensōron is testimony: Kobayashi’s testimony.
It is ironic that a prominent nationalist in Japan should have made such an impact with this kindof book given the litany of attacks by neonationalists on the introduction of testimony ashistorical evidence. Nationalists have typically promoted documentary-based positivist
historiography, with a particular focus on official documentation, and made great efforts toinvalidate testimony as a reliable historical source, particularly when the testimony is given bysomeone deemed to have an agenda hostile to Japan (such as former “comfort women” or forcedlaborers demanding apologies and compensation from the Japanese state). With tens of
thousands of witnesses testifying to the atrocities of the Japanese military, it is far easier to makea blanket rebuttal of testimony as evidence than to rebut the evidence within each piece oftestimony. There are concerted nationalist attacks on specific pieces of testimony consideredespecially “dangerous” or “damaging” (the best example, discussed below, being Yoshida Seiji’s
testimony – later withdrawn as a “fabrication” – that as a soldier he abducted women to makethem “comfort women”), but the blanket discrediting of testimony is still necessary because notevery witness can be discredited individually.
Within the context of war history, therefore, the appeal to nationalists of the methodology of
traditional positivist history has far less to do with concerns for historiographical rigor than withlegitimizing the obvious bias within Japanese documentary evidence. For example, in thehistoriography of the era of colonialism and war from 1895-1945, the voices of non-Japanese (oreven Japanese) victims do not appear in official wartime documents, specifically in the
documents that survived the willful destruction of all incriminating evidence at the end of thewar. Rather, it is the authoritative voice of the state that commands the stage. But nationalists
face a secondary problem: positivist history as methodology does not specify whose documents
may or may not be used. The historiography of Japanese nationalistic denial requires anotherstage: the dismissal of documents in international archives as “wartime anti-Japanese
propaganda”. This fits into a broader campaign to say that the Japanese public today is easily“brainwashed” by Chinese use of the war as a diplomatic card, or duped by other foreignaccusations of Japanese war guilt, such as the postwar War Guilt Information Program run by US
Occupation forces.
Damning testimony, it goes without saying, is ipso facto unacceptable as evidence within thisself-serving nationalist historiography. The inclusion of “favorable” testimony in so manynationalist texts, including Sensōron, however, indicates what is really going on: the mantra ofpositivist history is inconsistently applied and constitutes little more than an attempt to place ascholarly veneer on the real agenda of discrediting any testimonial evidence inconsistent with theline that Japanese war actions were just or noble.

Seaton: Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism

57

It is within this context that Kobayashi’s work assumes particular significance. This “Bible” of
the Japanese rightwing relies heavily on testimony, which has been so frequently attacked by therightwing. Sensōron is replete with named, drawn characters telling their stories, including
Kobayashi himself. The depiction and treatment of the testimony varies markedly from case tocase depending on whether the testifier’s views are congruent or not with Kobayashi’s own
views. In other words, Sensōron epitomizes the inconsistent and self-serving use of testimony
and evidence in nationalist texts.
Sensōron on Testimony
Kobayashi’s stated position on testimony, typical of that of many nationalists, is outlined in
Chapter 12 of Sensōron: “‘Shōgen’ to iu mono” (This thing called “testimony”). With no
obvious sense of irony, Kobayashi introduces his subject through some testimony by describing
one of his personal experiences: a murder plot against him hatched by the Aum Shinrikyō Cult(which perpetrated the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway). Kobayashi had been astrident critic of the cult, a stance that won him many plaudits, even from people who would later
revile his stance on nationalism and war. Kobayashi describes how in December 1994 hereported to the police that he was being tailed by members of Aum. In addition, a member of
Aum testified in police custody to the murder plot, and another witness positively identified aperson acting suspiciously outside Kobayashi’s home. Nevertheless, none of this testimony was
sufficient to lay charges of conspiracy to commit murder. “There was no evidence” (shōko ganai), he laments; by implication, testimony is not evidence.8
Kobayashi then makes a statement on the trustworthiness of testimony that would be familiar to
testimony-based researchers, and would not be particularly disputed by even the most fervent
practitioners of life history.
“Testimony” is mingled with various things: preconceptions, mistakes, embellishments,
or lies. It changes over time and may be distorted according to the person eliciting thetestimony. People may exaggerate, and in repeated tellings of the testimony it becomes astory. Any sensible person in a constitutional state must be aware of this.9
The subsequent warnings of the dangers of smooth-talking liars, or the prejudices that encourage
people to believe false accusations are also eminently reasonable: he gives the example of awoman “crying rape” against rugby players, and discusses how rugby players in suchcircumstances face a battle to prove their innocence because people are often quick to assume
rugby players would do such things.
So far so good, or so it seems. However, part of Kobayashi’s skill in winning over people to his
views is the way in which he makes reasonable points and then extends similar arguments tomore controversial (and not necessarily comparable) arguments. The controversial arguments,
therefore, seem reasonable. For example, shortly after discussing the issue of false accusations
against rugby players, Kobayashi slips effortlessly into a seemingly comparable situation: “false
accusations” against Japanese soldiers regarding the rape of “comfort women”. According to
Kobayashi, prejudices against Japanese soldiers mean that people all too readily believe thestories of “comfort women”.
The comparison is disingenuous because it makes the point of comparison people’s prejudices(namely the common assumption of guilt based on reputation rather than evidence) rather thanWar in Japanese Popular Culture58

the crimes in question (which differ because rugby players do not commit such crimes indesignated rugby player brothels set up on the instigation of the rugby authorities). Kobayashi isencouraging his readers to feel that the Japanese soldiers, rather than the “comfort women”, arethe victims because they have been unfairly maligned, but he is avoiding the core issue. Given
the coercive nature of the “comfort station” system, organized and controlled by the Japanesemilitary, it is reasonable to assume that every time a “comfort woman” was visited by a Japanesesoldier it was rape in the absence of proof that the “comfort woman” a) had freely consented tobeing a “comfort woman”, and b) truly wanted to have sex with Japanese soldiers. By contrast,in the case of rugby players, the absence of a dedicated rugby players’ brothel system set up by
the rugby authorities means that the determination of whether a crime has been committed rests
solely on the circumstances of the individual case: word of accuser against accused and any otheravailable physical/circumstantial evidence.
Such issues clarify why Japanese nationalists are passionately dedicated to refuting thecriminality of the “comfort station” system. The alternative is to accept that the state was liable
for setting up a rape system, and that every soldier who visited a “comfort station” was bydefinition a rapist. Such a conclusion would be utterly antithetical to the nationalist claims of ajust war, and the purity and nobility of the sacrifice of those Japanese soldiers who fought anddied for the cause.
In the attempt to refute the “rape system” charge, nationalists have focused their energies on
denying that there is any evidence (narrowly defined to mean “official Japanese government
documents”) of “forced transportation” (kyōsei renkō, a euphemism for abduction or
enslavement, which is also used in the context of forced labor in factories and mines).10 If suchdenials are accepted, responsibility for any sufferings of “comfort women” lies with “comfort
station” managers, recruiters and individual clients, not the Japanese military or Japanese state.
Japanese soldiers were not rapists by definition, but (to cite an analogy proposed by nationalists
that understandably caused a firestorm of indignation) were individuals purchasing a
subcontracted service, just like civil servants eating at a canteen in their ministry building that isrun by a private catering company.11
In this context, the “involvement” (kanyo) in the running of the “comfort station” system by theJapanese military – which was the major claim made by historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki on the front
page of the Asahi newspaper on 11 January 1992 that forced an apology from Prime Minister
Miyazawa Kiichi a few days later on a visit to South Korea – was a non-issue. Of course there
was Japanese military “involvement”, in the same way that a government ministry is “involved”
in a canteen within its building. So what? For Kobayashi:“There were no women abducted (kyōsei renkō) by the Japanese military or turned into
sexual slaves. There were women who sold their services to Japanese soldiers of theirown volition (jihatsutekina shōfu) or because of unavoidable circumstances (yamunaki
shōfu), and that’s all there is to it.”12
The implication within Kobayashi’s reasoning is that any “comfort women’s” sufferings werebrought upon themselves.
But, unwittingly, Kobayashi’s comparison with rugby players illustrates precisely why“involvement” is the issue, and not simply “forced transportation”/abduction. The comparison

Seaton: Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism

59

clarifies why the “comfort women” issue is a collective/state responsibility issue by introducing
a supposedly “comparable” situation which is clearly only an individual responsibility issue.
Nevertheless, for nationalists the lack of documentary proof of “forced transportation” is the key.
Kobayashi states that former Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Ishihara Nobuo and even Chief
Cabinet Secretary Kōno Yōhei (who delivered the Japanese government’s official apology to the“comfort women” on 4 August 1993) have admitted that there was no “evidence” (meaning“something other than testimony”) for “forced transportation” provided for the 1993 report.
Admission of “forced transportation” had been made to appease political pressure from South
Korea, Kobayashi claims.13
Kobayashi continues by trumpeting the recantation of the testimony of Yoshida Seiji, a soldier
who said he abducted women to work as “comfort women” in a book titled Watashi no Sensō
Hanzai (My War Crimes, published by Sanichi Shobō in 1983). Yoshida’s testimony, in
Kobayashi’s view, is a classic example of “testimony” as “fiction”.14 Kobayashi completes his
dismissal of the “comfort women” as a war responsibility issue by portraying the testimony of“comfort women” as a product of contemporary political expediency. The “comfort women”
were not testifying immediately after their wartime experience, but decades later on theincitement of leftist activists. Indeed, the first significant testimony by former “comfort women”
only took place more than forty years after the end of the war. As Kobayashi put it:
There was no testimony then, but there is now. People are wrapped up by testimony
tainted with today’s values of human rights, feminism and anti-war principles, Gōmanka
mashite yoka desu ka? People who want to be good people don’t have the guts to distancethemselves from testimony.15
These arguments reveal the three key mechanisms of nationalistic denial with regard to thetreatment of testimony.
First, a distinction is made between “testimony” and “evidence”. Actually, testimony is a form ofevidence, which, like any other piece of evidence, needs to be corroborated. It may not be“physical evidence”, but it is evidence nonetheless.16
Second, Kobayashi insists upon criminal court standards of “innocent until proven guilty” and“beyond all reasonable doubt” regarding the “charges” brought against Japan relating to the“comfort women”. In other words, as long as the testimony of witnesses may be disregarded andthere is a lack of official documentary evidence, Japan remains “not guilty”. This helps explain
the nationalist obsession with disputing individual pieces of evidence of Japanese war crimes,
such as some gruesome photographs, allegedly of atrocities in China, dismissed by Kobayashi as
fakes (Chapter 11, see below Figure 11). Kobayashi and other nationalists have had somesuccess in exposing doctored or fake photographs, and this contribution to historiography must
be recognized. But a photograph proven to be a fake is not evidence for the lack of Japanese
atrocities. It is merely a statement about that individual photograph. The disingenuous feature ofsuch nationalist tactics is creating the impression that each piece of evidence declared “unreliable”
constitutes a step toward the “innocent” verdict for Japan that must follow if guilt cannot be
conclusively proven.
But historians cannot operate in terms of simple black and white, or “innocent” and “guilty”.
Historical evidence is often contradictory and incomplete, and defies a definitive reconstruction

War in Japanese Popular Culture

60of the past. Yet this does not mean that historians are unable to reach a conclusion “beyond all
reasonable doubt”. Nobody denies that the “comfort stations” existed, and the compelling
evidence of what went on inside them (extensive harrowing testimony from both “comfort
women” and Japanese soldiers) is that the “comfort station” system subjected thousands ofwomen to appalling and sustained sexual violence. Even so, we do not yet have a definitive
history of the “comfort women” as there are many issues which remain to be uncovered – suchas the extremely sensitive issue of how local recruiters, and not only the Japanese military, werecomplicit in the enslavement of, and abuses suffered by, “comfort women”. So, whether
documents exist to “prove” the existence of “forced transportation” or the exact circumstances ina specific case is hardly the point, unless one is trying to “prove” the exact details of a specificindividual’s case in a court of law.
Third, and most significantly, Kobayashi’s chapter on testimony reveals the nationalist double
standard that exists throughout Sensōron: testimony supporting his historical views is acceptable,
while all other testimony is ipso facto “unreliable”. Kobayashi started his chapter on testimony
with the story of Aum’s plot to kill him. Using his standards of “evidence”, we should actuallydisregard this anecdote as “unreliable” because it is based on only three pieces of testimony (afar smaller body of evidence than exists concerning the brutalities committed in “comfort
stations”). Using testimony, specifically his own uncorroborated testimony, to make theargument for why testimony is “unreliable” is ironic. … or perhaps extraordinary hubris.
Kobayashi has been extraordinarily successful, however, in blinding many readers to suchanalytical inconsistencies. It is vital to recognize that nationalists like Kobayashi are not simply“extremists”. Kobayashi and others with similar views are dedicated to defending national honor
and promoting their idealized view of Japan. Often these goals can be achieved using eminently“reasonable” or “moderate” arguments that resonate strongly in the mainstream of Japanesepublic opinion. For example, when going on the offensive about the war records of other nations,
Kobayashi is hardly extremist in attacking the inhumanity of atomic and firebombing of civilian
targets toward the end of the war, or the multiple atrocities committed by the Chinese statethroughout the twentieth century. The problem lies in the failure to apply equivalent moral
standards to Japanese actions.
Likewise, Kobayashi makes many sensible points about testimony. Spotting when the argument
tips over from “reasonable” to “self-serving and inconsistent” is the key to assessing his work.
Kobayashi as both polemicist and manga artist is highly skilled, however, in obscuring thattipping point.
Testimony in Sensōron
Having established Kobayashi’s double standard in the use of testimony, instances of the double
standard in practice become glaringly obvious as one reads the rest of Sensōron. Despite
debunking testimony in Chapter 12, in Chapter 15, “Tsūkaina sensō taiken” (Thrilling War
Experiences) Kobayashi spends 64 pages (pp. 209-272, just under one sixth of the 381-pagebook) recounting the “war experiences” of one individual: Takamura Takehito.
Before turning to Takamura’s story, however, the chapter title “Thrilling War Experiences”
deserves discussion. Kobayashi judiciously avoids the word shōgen, “testimony”, although thechapter clearly is testimony – in other words, a personal narrative account of experiences,whether written or oral. Instead, he used the word taiken, “experiences”, which somehow makes

Seaton: Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism

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it sound as if the narrative has been substantiated and can thereby join the canon of “historicalfact”.
The tremendous irony is that Kobayashi actually depicts himself doing what any conscientious
life-history researcher would do when confronted with testimonial evidence: cross-referencing
the testimony to other forms of evidence to verify the testimony’s utility as evidence, andfollowing up inquiries with the witness.
“I [Kobayashi] am not a military history buff and am lacking in knowledge, but I tried to write
this section making the best use of the available materials (shiryō). [His assistant adds] I wastouched by how Takamura-san gave frank answers to our ignorant questions.”17
On the surface, Kobayashi’s rendition of Takamura’s war service appears to constitute a model
example of how to use testimony and demonstrates that Kobayashi is perfectly aware of what isrequired to satisfy professional codes of life-history research. He has chosen as his witness an
upstanding, “reliable” member of postwar society in Japan (Takamura had a distinguished careerin business after the war). The story that Kobayashi recounts is of one man’s service as anartilleryman in the Philippines, Burma and towards the end of the war back in Japan as a training
officer. As a member of a named unit, the Sakaguchi Unit, Takamura’s testimony (presented inextensive diaries kept at the time) could certainly be cross-checked against the documentary
record in the form of the unit history and contemporary newspaper reports. Kobayashi indicateshe has done this.18 The witness was questioned for clarification on certain issues and Kobayashi
says there has been a rigorous process of checking the story. This is all one can ask theresearcher using testimonial evidence to do.
However, there must be three notes of caution, despite the appearance of rigor in thehistoriography.
First, Takamura’s testimony is obviously used precisely because it supports Kobayashi’s broader
political aims: to present “thrilling war experiences” as a counterargument to Japan’s many
peace groups with their mantra of “war is bad”. Kobayashi is heavily critical of progressives forthe way, he believes, that they actively seek out testimony compatible with their political
agendas to press Japan into apologizing more. Such accusations merely sound like hypocrisy,
however, when one sees Kobayashi’s own selective use of testimony in action, and, in particular,
his overwhelming reliance on a single witness.
Second, some have questioned the story itself. In a discussion on the anonymous internet chatroom 2 Channel during 2009 there was an ongoing debate about the reliability of Takamura’s
story (running to over 150 postings) under the title “Takamura Takehito-tte” (About that
Takamura Takehito). One person noted that Takamura’s diaries and other materials that could
have been used to verify his story do not appear in Kobayashi’s bibliography. Indeed, they do not.
An innocent oversight on Kobayashi’s part perhaps, but it constitutes a serious omission given
Kobayashi’s attempts to portray himself as a rigorous researcher. Consequently, Takamura’s
story in Sensōron is effectively an unsourced story. Kobayashi nowhere indicates precisely whatmaterials were used. Other netizens question why a person whose war experiences have achieved
such prominence seems to exist only in Kobayashi’s book. My own net searches have drawn ablank regarding alternative presentations of Takamura’s story – either in print or online form.
Takamura undoubtedly existed: he fought (and lost) an election in 1976 in his native Yamaguchi(running against Kishi Nobusuke of all people!). But it seems Kobayashi has a complete

War in Japanese Popular Culture62

monopoly on his story. If a “comfort woman” had her story told in such an opaque fashion,
Kobayashi would surely have been the first to decry it as “unreliable”.
Third, the chapter is an exciting adventure story cum morality tale in which Takamura is theheroic central character. The chapter has almost a cinematic feel, helped in no small part by thevisual format of manga. This significantly increases the danger of the semi-fictionalization of
Takamura’s experiences for the purposes of both providing an exhilarating read and conveying
the intended message. As Rumi Sakamoto argues (about the whole book, although it isparticularly applicable here), “Using manga as a mixed media of visual and written texts,
Kobayashi effectively blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, history and ideology, pastand present.”19 One may only speculate at what “inconvenient” aspects of Takamura’s story werealtered or omitted (either by Takamura or Kobayashi).
Most important, however, is the fact that Kobayashi’s treatment of this veteran’s story is in stark
contrast to the treatment of the testimony of soldiers confessing to atrocities. This is clearest in
Chapter 13, where Kobayashi ridicules the testimony and confessions of members of the Chinese
Returnees Association, Chūkiren. This group of around 1,000 soldiers was interned at the Fushun
War Criminals Detention Centre after the war, where they reflected on and came to acknowledge
their crimes. The soldiers returned to Japan in 1956. In the half-century thereafter, they
continued to speak out about their personal crimes and those of their units in an effort to prevent
such crimes occurring again. Kobayashi portrays them as sniveling wrecks brainwashed by theirChinese gaolers, rather than ordinary men whose treatment at the hands of their erstwhile
enemies placed their own wartime brutality in stark and painful perspective.
The contrast between the treatment of Takamura with his “thrilling” war experiences and this“sniveling” soldier confessing to war crimes is also noteworthy because it illustrates the power ofmanga as a visual format to influence readers’ views by means other than the use of “evidence”.
Through the way people are drawn within the manga, the perceived reliability of witnesses canbe portrayed in far more underhanded ways than explicit statements about them. Compare forexample Kobayashi’s then colleague in the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform(Tsukurukai), Nishio Kanji, describing the barbarity of an American soldier in sending a
Japanese soldier’s skull to his fiancé as a souvenir (a story made famous by being featured on the
cover of Life Magazine in May 1944),20 with arch-opponent historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki (theman whose scoop in the Asahi newspaper on 11 January 1992 ignited the “comfort women”
debate in Japan and whose subsequent book became a classic study of the “comfort women”)
having to back pedal on the issue of the “forced transportation” of “comfort women” following
the 1996 confession of Yoshida Seiji that his testimony of rounding up women was “fiction”(Kobayashi’s term).21
The use of testimony in Sensōron, therefore, is revealing not only for the clear imbalance
between the treatment of testimony supporting and opposing a nationalist agenda, but also in theway that the visual format of the manga is utilized to sway the reader’s opinion about thereliability of both the testimony of historical actors and the views of scholar-activists
participating in war debates in Japan.
Sensōron as Testimony
Sensōron was published in 1998 and a lot has happened in Japanese war discourse since then.
Nevertheless, Sensōron remains relevant to our understanding of Japanese war nationalism

Seaton: Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism

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twelve years after its publication because it remains an influential text and because it frankly
reveals why its author, Kobayashi Yoshinori, came to hold nationalistic views.
Sensōron can be read as testimony. Kobayashi himself appears frequently throughout the manga,either as narrator or as central character in the story. He often recounts stories from his own life(the Aum death plot incident described above, or his parents’ fights, see Figure 2), he depicts
himself in the process of researching his topic (see Figure 7), and he often faces his readers andtells them his views.
The autobiographical episodes provide great insight into why Kobayashi has come to hold theviews he does. Two particularly important themes emerge: first, his playground scraps with otherboys; and second, his reverence for his grandfather in contrast to some thinly veiled disdain forhis parents.
First, in Chapter 6 (“The Sprouting of a Moral Individual”, Rinri aru ko no Mebae), Kobayashi
describes being an avid reader of military adventure manga as a boy. The heroic stories ofwartime kamikaze pilots were an inspiration during playground fights at school, where he often
suffered a beating at the hands of bigger boys.
As an adult, Kobayashi’s reverence for the self-sacrifice of kamikaze is transformed but
undiminished. “The Kamikaze Spirit” (Tokkō Seishin, the title of Chapter 7) is juxtaposed withthe selfish individualism and consumerism of modern Japanese society (detailed in Chapter 1,
where he concludes by saying, “Japanese individuals are just consumers”).22 The individual (ko)and public (ōyake) are two key themes for Kobayashi. He finishes Chapter 7 with his trademark
Gōmanka mashite yoka desu ka? “The kamikaze did not lose their individuality. They discarded
it for the sake of the public. They died for the future of the nation, in other words, they died forus.”23The second autobiographical theme concerns his grandfather. Kobayashi paints a very
unflattering portrait of his parents, particularly his father. There are scenes of Kobayashi as ayoung boy being hit mercilessly and being held head down by his ankles over a waterfall. This is
in marked contrast to the depiction of his grandfather, who was a soldier and member of Katō
Daisuke’s theater troupe in New Guinea that has been the subject of the book (and later two
films) Minami no shima ni yuki ga furu (Snow Falling in a Southern Island).24 Kobayashi has
great respect for his grandfather and depicts himself listening intently to the stories of his
grandfather as a little boy.25 At his grandfather’s funeral, Kobayashi mourns the passing of a man
first “abandoned by the military leadership in New Guinea” and then “abandoned by amasochistic nation of peace activists”. But for Kobayashi he was the kind grandfather who tried
to stop a little boy from being dangled over the waterfall by his feet.26 For Kobayashi the thoughtof his grandfather and other former soldiers being demonized is too much: “Even if they arecalled evil, I want to defend our grandfathers.”27
These episodes provide insight into the roots of Kobayashi’s nationalism. Both are perennial
themes within studies of war memories: the uses to which war history can be put incontemporary circumstances (inspiration in playground fights) and importance of the war
narratives of those with whom there are strong ties of blood or identification (his grandfather,and also the kamikaze). Once the strong moral and emotional agenda is defined, treatment ofother issues follow suit. If his grandfather was fighting and the kamikaze were dying for Japan,
then that Japan must be a nation that was worthy of sacrifice. It cannot be a rapist state complicit

War in Japanese Popular Culture64

in the forced transportation of thousands of “comfort women”, nor can it be the perpetrator of aheinous massacre in Nanjing or other war crimes. Japan’s honor must be defended at all costs.
Kobayashi’s views may have been taken to an extreme in the length to which he goes to denyJapanese war crimes, but he is utterly “normal” in one important way: his views of history are
inextricably linked to personal circumstances. In this sense, Kobayashi’s book has much incommon with that of Kurahashi Ayako (see ‘War Responsibility and the Family in Japan’),although Kobayashi’s and Kurahashi’s positions on war history and responsibility could not be
further apart. Both books interweave autobiography with historical investigation and clarify how
the priorities of the latter are so often driven by the personal/family experiences cataloged in theformer. As Japanese people look back on war history, there are few lenses that refract their viewsof the past more strongly than love and respect for relatives from the war generation.
Positivism as the Default Historiography of Japanese Nationalism
This paper has looked at Kobayashi Yoshinori’s arguments in Sensōron from the perspective of
testimony: his stated position on testimony, his use of testimony, and possible readings of
Sensōron as testimony. One must conclude that there is precious little consistency in
Kobayashi’s treatment of testimony: the flaws of testimony as “evidence” are explicitly stated ina book whose emotional power rests on the author’s personal testimony; the testimony of thosewith “friendly” views is treated utterly differently from the testimony of those with “hostile”
views; and by becoming his own narrator/central character, Kobayashi blurs the boundaries
between personal statement and historical research.
Such inconsistencies place into sharp relief what is really happening in nationalist historiography.
Historical positivism has almost become the default methodology for nationalists in Japan, intheory at least (on the evidence of Sensōron, as we have seen, the practice may be very different).
If one is to continue denying Japanese aggression and atrocities during World War II, one must
work to exclude or invalidate the voluminous evidence to the contrary. An important componentof this agenda is to insist on Japanese official (government and military) documentary evidence,
which to this day remains the basic position of the political right in Japan on war issues. In the
October 2009 edition of Seiron (the rightwing monthly opinion magazine), for example, Abiru
Rui repeated the old mantra that there was no documentary evidence to demonstrate that
“comfort women” were forced into military prostitution.28 Abiru’s arguments were explicitly
stated in the context of the Democratic Party of Japan’s election victory, explaining that Prime
Minister Hatoyama had to be prevented from going any further than previous governments inrepeating the Murayama communiqué of 1995 (the apology repeated by all subsequent Japanese
governments as the standard wording of Japan’s official apology). The flaws of such positivist
approaches and nationalist historiography have been exposed at length by many researchers,29
but as long as these disingenuous historiographical practices persist, it is necessary to draw
attention to them.
With the installation of the Democratic Party of Japan government in September 2009, the war
issue has disappeared somewhat from the international political agenda in East Asia (or perhaps
it has just been drowned out by the controversy over the Futenma base relocation issue on theJapanese public agenda). But this does not mean that the historical consciousness debate has
been resolved. Japan’s political rightwing may be in the temporary wilderness of opposition, butrightwing voices remain influential and maintain the ability to stir controversy. Kobayashi
Yoshinori remains an active publisher, and former Air Self Defense Forces Chief of Staff

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Tamogami Toshio (who was forced to resign after winning a prize for an explicitly nationalistic
and militaristic essay denying Japanese war guilt) has become the new darling of the rightwingand recreated himself as a prominent pundit following his dismissal from the ASDF in 2008.30
One can be sure that such people will not lie down and accept a Japanese government taking an
apologetic stance, particularly on the “comfort women” issue, based on what they consider to be
the “flimsy” evidence of testimony by victims. Consequently, however calm the diplomaticwaters seem to be given the more conciliatory stance of the Democratic Party of Japan
government toward China and South Korea, Japan’s war memories will remain heavily contested,
and the use of testimony will remain an issue of historiographical contestation at the heart ofJapan’s unresolved national debate over colonialism and war.
Philip Seaton is an associate professor in the Research Faculty of Media and Communication,
Hokkaido University. An Asia-Pacific Journal Associate, he is the author of Japan’s Contested
War Memories: the “memory rifts” in historical consciousness of World War II and translator of
Ayako Kurahashi’s My Father’s Dying Wish: Legacies of War Guilt in a Japanese Family. His
webpage is www.philipseaton.net He wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.
Notes
1

The ‘Shin-Gomanizumu Sengen’ column started in SPA! in 1991 and moved to Sapio in 1995.
See Frederik L. Schodt, Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga (Stone Bridge Press,
Berkeley: 1996); pp. 224-8.
2

Kobayashi’s other books include: Taiwanron (On Taiwan, 2000), Sensōron 2 (On War 2, 2001),
Sensōron 3 (On War 3, 2003), Okinawaron (On Okinawa, 2005), Yasukuniron (On Yasukuni,2005), Iwayuru A-kyu senpan (The So-Called Class A War Criminals, 2006), Heisei Jōiron
(Expelling the Barbarians in the Heisei Period, 2007), Tennōron (On the Emporor, 2009).
3

For example, Uesugi Satoshi, Datsu Gōmanizumu Sengen, Kobayashi Yoshinori no “ianfu”
mondai (Breaking Away from the New Declaration of Arrogance, The “Comfort Women” Issue
According to Kobayashi Yoshinori) (Tōhō Shuppan, Osaka: 1997); Obinata Sumio et al,
Kimitachi wa Sensō de Shineru ka, Kobayashi Yoshinori “Sensōron” Hihan (Can you die foryour country in war? A criticism of Sensōron) (Otsuki Shoten, Tokyo 1999); Uesugi Satoshi,
Datsu Sensōron, Kobayashi Yoshinori to no Saiban wo Hete (Breaking Away from Sensōron:The Kobayashi Yoshinori Lawsuits) (Tōhō Shuppan, Osaka 2000).
4

Aaron Gerow, “Consuming Asia, Consuming Japan: the neonationalist revisionism in Japan” inLaura E. Hein and Mark Selden (eds) Censoring History: citizenship and memory in Japan,
Germany and the United States (M. E. Sharpe, New York: 2000).
5

Rumi Sakamoto, “Will you go to war? Or will you stop being Japanese? Nationalism andHistory in Kobayashi Yoshinori’s Sensoron”, The Asia-Pacific Journal, 2008.
6

Philip A. Seaton, Japan’s Contested War Memories: the “memory rifts” in historicalconsciousness of World War II (Routledge, London: 2007), pp. 199-200.
7

Schodt, Dreamland Japan, pp. 225-6.

8

Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensōron, Tokyo: Gentōsha; pp. 176-7.

9Sensōron, p. 177.

War in Japanese Popular Culture

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10

A further argument is that the high wages “comfort women” could receive in comparison to
the soldiers they “comforted” explains why women might want to work as “comfort women”.
However, refuting abduction (“forced transportation”) is the primary goal for nationalists.
11

There are various renditions, but one prominent proponent of this analogy was Fujioka
Nobukatsu. See Fujioka, Nobukatsu, “Jigyakushikan” no byōri (An Analysis of Masochistic
Historical Views in Japan (Bunshun Bunko: Tokyo 2000), p. 126.
12

Sensōron, p. 180.

13

Sensōron, p. 179. Following the publication of the Japanese government’s initial investigative
report into the “comfort women” on 6 July 1992, the Korean government complained that it was
based solely on documentary evidence and ignored “comfort women’s” testimony. The second
report, issued on 4 August 1993, which precipitated Kōno’s apology, did include testimony. The
testimony was central to the report’s conclusions that there had been the “forced transportation”
of women. This is Kobayashi’s primary objection to the second report and Kōno statement. For
details see Philip Seaton, “Reporting the ‘comfort women’ issue, 1991-1992: Japan’s contested
war memories in the national press,” Japanese Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1, May 2006, pp. 99-112.
14

The leading figure in the campaign to expose Yoshida as a liar was historian and Tsukurukai
member Hata Ikuhiko, who visited the areas where Yoshida said he had served and abducted
women to become “comfort women”. Hata’s conclusion that Yoshida was lying was published in
the nationalistic magazine Seiron in the June 1992 edition: “Shōwa shi no nazo wo u – Jūgun
ianfutachi no shunjū” (In Pursuit of the Mysteries of Showa History – the age of the “comfort
women”). Yoshida was forced to admit he had fabricated parts of his story.
15

Sensōron, p. 182.

16

Kobayashi suggests through his introductory anecdote (the murder plot against him) that
testimony on its own is insufficient to bring criminal charges, but this is somewhat misleading.
Groping on trains (chikan) is a crime for which there is typically little or no physical evidence,and court proceedings rest solely on the word of accuser, accused and witnesses. Such cases arenotoriously difficult to prove (leaving thousands of molested women with little recourse tojustice) but have also led to some well-publicized miscarriages of justice. Nevertheless, theexistence of such trials (and the admission of testimony in all other trials) clearly indicates that
testimony is an important form of evidence that will stand up in court.
17

Sensōron, p. 271.

18

Sensōron, p. 248.

19

Sakamoto, “Will you go to war?”.

20

John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon Books, New
York: 1986), p. 65.
21Sensōron, p. 180. See also Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in theJapanese Military in World War II, (Columbia University Press, NY: 2000).
22

Sensōron, p. 18. It is highly ironic that such a critique of consumerist Japanese society exists ina text that has become so representative of “consumerist nationalism” on the war issue (seeGerow, “Consuming Asia, Consuming Japan”). Not only Kobayashi but also other nationalist

Seaton: Historiography and Japanese War Nationalism

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writers put out dozens of mass-market books regurgitating the familiar nationalist arguments of“Japan did no wrong” or “Japan has been tricked into accepting war guilt”. A consumerist publicthat feeds on nationalism and the sensational controversy it creates is what enables Kobayashi tobecome extremely influential (and wealthy!) as an individual.
23

Sensōron, p. 96.

24

Sensōron, pp. 57-64.

25

Sensōron, p. 59.

26

Sensōron, p. 208.

27

Sensōron, p. 64.

28

Abiru Rui, “Dai-ni Murayama danwa wo soshi seyo” (Let’s prevent a second Murayama
communiqué), Seiron September 2009, pp. 92-3.
29

For a good recent example see Yonson Ahn, ‘Japan’s “comfort women” and Historical
Memory: The Neo-nationalist Counter-attack,” in Sven Saaler and Wolfgang Schwentker (eds)
The Power of Memory in Modern Japan (Global Oriental, Folkestone: 2008), pp. 32-53.
30

Herbert Bix, “Tamogami's World: Japan's Top Soldier Reignites Conflict Over the Past”, The
Asia-Pacific Journal, 2008.

War in Japanese Popular Culture

68“Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen”
NAKAZAWA Keiji; Translated by Richard H. Minear
September 27, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Nakazawa-Keiji/3416
Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor Nakazawa Keiji’s (1939-) manga Hadashi no Gen(Barefoot Gen, 1973-85) is one of the most powerful graphic novels ever produced.
Running over 2000 pages, the manga is loosely based on the experiences of the author, wholost his father, sister, and younger bother to the bomb. Barefoot Gen has been enduringly
popular and sold millions of copies. It has been adapted into other media numerous times
including two harrowing animated films, which opened in Japan in 1983 and 1986 and areavailable in English translation from Geneon, a live action film trilogy in the 1970s, and a2007 TV drama.
In Barefoot Gen, the devastation of Hiroshima is seen through a child’s eyes andstrongly evokes the image of Japanese as victims in war, but the story is extremely
nuanced in the way that it deals with Japan’s war experience. While Nakazawa expresses
ire toward American GIs who, laughing and carrying on, casually posed for photos in theruins of the devastated city, like Mizuki Shigeru, he reserves most of his anger for Japan’s
wartime leaders. Nakazawa’s work is notable for condemning the ease in which Emperor
Hirohito, the wartime head of state, was redeemed and incorporated back into public life asa symbol of “peace and democracy.” He also rails against hypocritical elites who preacheda fight to the last against “American devils” late in the war only to vigorously cooperatewith the American occupiers’ crackdowns on unions, socialists, and communists, some ofthe very groups and individuals who had done the most to resist Japanese militarism.
In articulating a critique of wartime Japan in Barefoot Gen, Nakazawa sketches avision of Japan’s war experience that is difficult to characterize. That diversity is one of thestrengths of the work. While the hellish scenes of the destruction of Hiroshima and thegrim suffering of survivors in the aftermath of the bombing are the manga’s most powerful
and memorable images, Nakazawa does not dwell on the image of Japanese as victims ofwar. In the manga, protagonist Gen’s father condemns militarism and tells his son about
the atrocities committed by Japanese troops in China. His anti-war beliefs make him atarget of the thought police and he is arrested and tortured. The family are branded“traitors” and are shunned by Japanese neighbors. They are helped, however, by Park, a
Korean neighbor who shares his rice ration to help them get by. In the aftermath of thebombing, Park’s father, badly burned in the blast, is refused treatment by a Japanese doctor
who yells, “Do you think we have time to waste treating you Koreans!?” In this way,
Nakazawa puts forward varied positions on war history, coupling his experience as a
victim whose family was shattered by the bomb with honest reflection on the violence,
racism, and stifling ideological controls of wartime Japan.
Throughout his career, Nakazawa remained a consistent critic of nuclear armamentand militarism of all kinds. While they remain un-translated, Nakazawa penned othermanga on themes as varied as Japanese atrocities in China and the suffering of Okinawan
civilians under American occupation which lasted into the 1970s. These are available aspart of his “Complete Works” in Japanese.
Presented here is an excerpt from Nakazawa’s autobiography which, in prose as
powerful as his manga penmanship, gives a stark look at the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

Nakazawa: Hiroshima

69

Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen
Nakazawa Keiji
Translated and Edited by Richard H. Minear
The Asia-Pacific Journal is honored to offer a preview of Hiroshima: The Autobiography ofBarefoot Gen by Nakazawa Keiji, including Richard Minear’s introduction and a chapter of thebook, with Nakazawa’s manga illustrations.
Translator’s Introduction
Richard H. Minear
Many in the English-speaking world need no introduction to Barefoot Gen.1 They have read themanga, available in ten volumes in fine translation, or they have seen the animated movie,
available on YouTube and elsewhere. Barefoot Gen is already international. It started in Japan,
as a manga serial, in 1973. Then a relatively unknown manga artist, Nakazawa Keiji completed
the serial in 1985. By then it had grown into a ten-volume book. Barefoot Gen’s Japanesereaders number in the many tens of millions. And there have been film versions: a three-partlive-action film (1976–1980), a two-part anime (1983 and 1986), and a two-day television drama(2007). There is a book of readers’ responses, Letters to Barefoot Gen. On GoogleJapan,“Hadashi no Gen” returns more than two million hits.
What has its impact been outside of Japan? In the late 1970s there was a first, partial English
translation of the manga. It has now appeared in a second, complete translation (Last Gasp,
2004–2009). Volume I has an introduction by Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus. Spiegelman
begins: “Gen haunts me. The first time I read it was in the late 1970s, shortly after I’d begun
working on Maus. . . . Gen effectively bears witness to one of the central horrors of our time.
Give yourself over to . . . this extraordinary book.” R. Crumb has called the series “Some of thebest comics ever done.” Wikipedia has articles on Barefoot Gen and Keiji Nakazawa and on thefilms, the anime, and the television drama. On YouTube, the anime sequence of the dropping of
the bomb—in English—has racked up more than one hundred thousand views, and the rest of theanime is also available. There are translations into Dutch, Esperanto, German, Finnish, French,and Norwegian, with others in the works.
The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen may well come as a surprise to those in the Englishlanguage world who don’t read manga or watch anime. I hope it will lead them to seek out bothversions. Even those who already know Barefoot Gen may wish to relive that story in a different
genre. After all, manga has its conventions, and they differ from the conventions of prose
autobiography. In his introduction to the ten-volume English translation of the manga,
Spiegelman mentions the “overt symbolism” as seen in the “relentlessly appearing sun,” the“casual violence” as seen in Gen’s father’s treatment of his children, and the “cloyingly cute”
depictions. Under the latter category Spiegelman discusses the “Disney-like oversized
Caucasian eyes and generally neotenic faces.” Neotenic? Webster’s Encyclopedic Dictionary(1989) defines neoteny as “the retention of larval characters beyond the normal period; theoccurrence of adult characteristics in larvae.” Spiegelman has the latter definition in mind:
consider our cover and its faces of Gen, age six, and Tomoko, a few months old.

War in Japanese Popular Culture

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Apart from the illustrations he drew specifically for the autobiography, those conventions do not
apply to Nakazawa’s autobiography. Beyond the conventions Spiegelman mentions, I wouldcomment that even though he writes of the extreme hunger that most Japanese experienced in
1945, he depicts all of his characters as remarkably well-fed. Such is also the case with thealmost Rubenesque figures in the Hiroshima screens of Iri and Toshi Maruki.2 Nakazawa had noformal training in art, but perhaps conventions of the art world trumped memory.
The autobiography has appeared in two editions. It appeared first in 1987, with the title The
Void That Is “Hiroshima”—Account of the Nakazawa Clan. Nakazawa revised that version andreissued it in 1995 in the version that I have translated.3 It poses few problems of translation, but
I should mention one issue: the names of family members. Throughout the autobiography,
Nakazawa refers to his older brothers as “Oldest brother” and “Next oldest brother.” I haveidentified them always by given names, Kōji and Akira. He uses given names consistently for his
older sister, Eiko, and baby sister, Tomoko. He refers to his younger brother throughout as
Susumu. (The manga calls him Shinji. Susumu and Shin are alternate readings of the samecharacter.)4
Nakazawa’s Autobiography of Barefoot Gen makes compelling reading. Mark Selden has writtenthat it is “in certain ways the most riveting book we have on the bomb.” Suitable—if that’s theright word—for readers of all ages, this may be the single most accessible account of theHiroshima experience. Needless to say, it is Nakazawa’s account, and it is colored by his biases.
These include an intense aversion to the wartime Japanese government and its policies, domestic
and foreign, and an understandable hatred of the American military that dropped the atomic
bomb on Hiroshima.
This translation preserves the character and quality of the original. To reach the broadest
possible English-language audience, I have left few Japanese terms beyond manga and anime
untranslated. I have even translated the term hibakusha as “bomb victim” or “bomb victims.” I
have deleted specific place names where it was possible to do so without altering the narrative. I
provide maps of Nakazawa’s Hiroshima, a limited number of footnotes, and five excerpts from
Barefoot Gen. But these additions are not essential to a thoughtful reading of the book. As an
appendix I include an excerpt from an interview with Nakazawa that took place in August 2007.
This book is a translation of Nakazawa Keiji’s prose autobiography. It also includes, between
the prose chapters, four-page excerpts from Nakazawa’s graphic novel Barefoot Gen. The
complete Barefoot Gen fills ten volumes, a total of some twenty-five hundred pages. These
excerpts are intended to give readers who have not read it a taste of the manga.
Graphic novels are works of art with their own conventions and perspectives. They are not“creative nonfiction,” an oxymoron I encountered for the first time in a discussion of a recent
fraudulent book on Hiroshima.5 They are fictional even if based on actual events. Like
Spiegelman’s Maus, Barefoot Gen is an artistic representation of reality. Compare Barefoot Gen
and this autobiography, and numerous contrasts emerge. Nakazawa himself has pointed to one
important one:
What differs about the death of my father from Barefoot Gen is that I myself wasn’t at the scene.
Mom told me about it, in gruesome detail. It was in my head, so in the manga I decided to have
Gen be there and try to save his father. Mom always had nightmares about it. She said it was
unbearable—she could still hear my brother’s cries. Saying “I’ll die with you,” she locked my

Nakazawa: Hiroshima

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brother in her arms, but no matter how she pulled, she couldn’t free him. Meanwhile, my brothersaid, “It’s hot!” and Dad too said, “Do something!” My older sister Eiko, perhaps because she
was pinned between beams, said not a thing. At the time, Mom said, she herself was alreadycrazed. She was crying, “I’ll die with you.” Fortunately, a neighbor passing by said to her,
“Please stop; it’s no use. No need for you to die with them.” And, taking her by the hand, he got
her to flee the spot. When she turned back, the flames were fierce, and she could hear clearly mybrother’s cries, “Mother, it’s hot!” It was unbearable. Mom told me this scene, bitterest of thebitter. A cruel way to kill.6
Gen’s presence at a crucial moment when Nakazawa Keiji was absent is not the only difference.
To sustain the twenty-five hundred pages of Barefoot Gen, Nakazawa invented subplots. One
example is the character Kondō Ryūta, who appears nowhere in the autobiography.
Astonishingly, the recent fraudulent book treats Ryūta as a real person, including him, forexample, in his appendix “The People”: “A five-year-old Hiroshima orphan, unofficiallyadopted into the family of Keiji ‘Gen’ Nakazawa. He lived in the same neighborhood as Dr.
Hachiya.” It’s as if a historian of the European holocaust were to treat one of the characters in
Art Spiegelman’s Maus as a real person.7
Barefoot Gen is art. This book is autobiography. Even if, as a genre, autobiography is notorious
for a bias in favor of the author, sheer fabrication is beyond
the pale. RM
The Day of the Flash and Boom
August 6, 1945, Monday. B-29s had flown over Hiroshima
twice the night before, and air raid sirens had sounded
constantly. I awoke unhappy that I hadn’t gotten enoughsleep. The weather the morning of August 6 swept that
unhappiness away. The sky was cloudless and absolutely
clear, bright sunlight pierced our eyes, and houses and trees
stood out as if painted in primary colors. My eyes felt as ifthey’d been washed clean, and my unhappiness over lack ofsleep vanished, too.
Suddenly, at about 7:20, soon after the whole family,
gathered about the round table, had finished breakfast, thesirens sounded. I was surprised. Strange: I didn’t remember
sirens sounding that early in the morning. Dad muttered,“Mr. Enemy is coming really early. Unusual.” Urged on by
Mom, who said we’d be in danger if bombs fell, we madeour preparations and headed for the neighborhood air raid trench. Mom’s due date wasapproaching, and clutching her swollen belly, she huffed and puffed as she ran. In the trench, I
said, “At worst, it’s another observation plane. No need to worry,” and played with Susumu.
Sure enough, the megaphone voice came, “All clear!” and we returned home, kidding ourselves
for getting all flustered over the alert—“An observation plane, after all.”
Looking up into the clear blue sky, I could still see the contrail of the B-29, a white strip; in the
distance it had already fanned out. Dad said to Mom, burdened by her big belly, “Today will behot.” The B-29 that flew in that morning was a reconnaissance plane to check the weather

War in Japanese Popular Culture72

conditions over Hiroshima and to photograph the target before the bombing. Had the atomic
bomb been dropped then, many would have survived because they’d run to the trenches.
The “all clear” came, and reassured, the four hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima all began
the day’s activities. City trolleys went busily on their rounds, car after car disgorging its
passengers; a continual flow of people headed for businesses and factories. People began theiractivities. Children headed to school. Housewives cleared away breakfast things and set about
cleaning or doing the wash. Soldiers started drilling. Mobilized for labor service, women andstudents collected the detritus from collapsed houses and carted the stuff off.
At that time the elementary school we were going to had no summer vacation; we had to go toschool to study to become strong “little patriots.” With my air raid hood hanging off one
shoulder and my satchel on my back, I went out onto the clothes-drying porch off the second
floor and said to Mom, who was hanging laundry out to dry, “I’m off.” In her apron, wiping off
sweat, Mom went on hanging out the clothes.
On the drying porch, flowers and plants in pots were lined up, models for Dad to paint. A strange
thing had happened with these potted plants. There was fruit on the loquat. The whole familystared: “Fruit on a potted tree?” Dad told us, sharply, “When it’s ripe, I’m going to paint it, so
hands off!” With a sinister premonition, Mom worried, “Something must be out of kilter
meteorologically.” I’m not a fatalist, but Mom’s sinister premonition turned out to be accurate.
With one eye on the loquat, I went downstairs. Eiko was sittingin the nine-by-twelve-foot room leading to the entryway. On theround table she’d lined up textbook and notes and was
sharpening a pencil. I called to Eiko, “C’mon.” For once Eikosaid, “I have to look something up; you go on ahead.” Besidethe entryway was a nine-by-nine-foot room, and Dad, clad inkimono, was setting to work. I said to Dad, “I’m off,” and henodded and straightened his kimono. In the entryway my
younger brother Susumu (age four) was plumped down, holding
a model warship, pretending that it was making headway
through waves. He was singing in a loud voice, “Tater, tater,
white potato, sweet potato.”8 Seeing me, Susumu urged, “Hurry
home after school. We’ll go to the river and sail this ship.”
I never dreamed that this would be the last time I saw Dad, Eiko,and Susumu. With Susumu’s song at my back, I joined theneighborhood kids, and we went to Kanzaki Elementary School,
less than half a mile from our house. Kanzaki Elementary
School faced the trolley street linking Eba and Yokogawa. It
was surrounded by a concrete wall. The gate on the trolley street was the back gate. In the centerof the schoolyard towered a huge willow tree, spreading its branches wide. Behind it was thetwo-story wooden school building, L-shaped. Those of us in the lower grades would enter theschool singing, led by students in the upper grades:
We owe it to the soldiers
That today, too, we can go to school
Shoulder to shoulder with our classmates.

Nakazawa: Hiroshima

73

Thank you, you soldiers
Who fought for country, for country.
Singing at the top of our lungs this totally militaristic anthem, we’d advance up the trolley street
and go through the gate.
A person’s fate—life or death—truly is a matter of sheerest chance. Had I entered the gate thatday as I always did, I would have been wiped off the face of the earth. Standing in the broad
schoolyard with absolutely no cover, I would have been bathed—my whole body—in the rays
the atomic bomb radiated, more than 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt iron. Burned
pitch-black, I would have died.
That day, a moment before entering the gate, I was stopped by a classmate’s mother. She asked
me, “The air raid alert sounded a bit ago. Are today’s classes at the school or at the temple?” At
that time, those in the lower grades alternated between the school and a local temple as place of
instruction because of the danger that we wouldn’t be able to flee if bombs fell. The concrete
wall on either side of the gate was a foot thick. Moving close to it, I replied to her, “We won’t
know till we ask Teacher,” and I happened to look up.
In the sky, the vapor trail of a B-29 stretched along the mountains of the Chūgoku range,
seemingly headed for the center of Hiroshima. The sun reflected off the nose of the plane’s
glittering duralumin body. Pointing at the B-29 approaching steadily, I called, “Ma’am, it’s a
B. . . .” She too looked up and said, “You’re right: a B-29. Strange that the air raid alert hasn’tsounded,” and the two of us looked up at the approaching B-29.
Had the sirens sounded at this point, as they had earlier that morning with the reconnaissanceplane, many people would have fled to air raid trenches and survived. I think it was truly a clever
psychological tactic on the part of the U.S. military. To make the residents short of sleep fromhaving the air raid alarm go off twice the previous night and to foster the mind-set “Hiroshima issafe”: that’s what enabled the Enola Gay, carrying the atomic bomb, to fly over majestically on
the attack. That way, even if a B-29 flew over, we’d think, “It’s only a reconnaissance plane,”and let our guard down.
“Why didn’t the air raid alert sound?” That thought has stayed in my heart forever, a gap in the
Hiroshima story. After the war, I checked the documents and found that NHK Hiroshima began
to broadcast an air raid alert at 8:15. It was at 8:15 that the bomb was dropped and exploded. If
only the alert had sounded earlier!
The Enola Gay cut its engines, penetrated quietly to the heart of Hiroshima, and dropped theatomic bomb, raising the curtain on hell. Even today, if I close my eyes, the colors of the atomic
bomb the moment it exploded come floating right up. A pale light like the flash of a flashbulb
camera, white at the center, engulfed me, a great ball of light with yellow and red mixed at its
outer edges. Once that violent flash burned itself onto my retinas, all memory stopped.
Pictures of HellHow long was it? When consciousness returned and I opened my eyes, it was pitch dark. I was
confused: “Huh? A moment ago it was broad daylight, and suddenly it’s night?” When I rolled
over and tried to stand, pain shot through my right cheek. “What happened?” I focused andlooked about and saw that a six-inch nail sticking out of a board had pierced me. Raising myWar in Japanese Popular Culture74

head had torn my cheek. Blood was flowing. The weird atmosphere frightened me. I realized I
was sweating.
I tried to stand up, but my body didn’t move. Turning my head, I saw that bricks, stones, tree
branches, scraps of lumber lay on top of me. The concrete wall, too, had fallen over and wascovering me.
Frantically I pushed at the stones and wood on top of me and scrambled my way out.
Instinctively, I looked about for the satchel that had been on my back and the air raid hood that
had been hanging from my shoulder. But I didn’t find them—perhaps they’d been sent flying,
torn off in the blast? Turning to look at the trolley street, I gasped.
Until just a moment ago, the mother of my classmate had been standing right in front of me and,like me, looking up at the B-29. Her entire body had been burned pitch-black. Her hair was intatters. The workpants and jacket she’d been wearing, charred and looking like seaweed, hungabout her neck and waist. And she’d been blown across to the other sidewalk and was lying on
her back. Her white eyes, wide open in her blackened and sooty face, glared across at me.
Confused, not knowing what had happened, I stood in the middle of the trolley street. This
familiar street had been transformed shockingly; I stood in amazement. The trolley wires had
been cut from the poles lining either side of the street and were coiled like spiderwebs on the
pavement; thick telephone line sagged from telephone poles like a great snake sleeping on a tree
branch. It sagged into the distance. The rows of two-story houses on each side had been crushed,
and the lower stories had collapsed utterly like popped paper balloons, flat. Atop them, thesecond stories lay piled, undulating off into the distance. Drop India ink into water, and it thinsand spreads. Smoke just like pale ink covered the sky and wafted all about. The sky was like an
ink painting; boards and sheets of metal danced helter-skelter into the sky, quite like birds. Every
now and then, out of the collapsed rows of houses a dragon’s tongue of bright red flames crawled,disappeared, moved. Aghast, I burned that scene onto my retinas.
I learned that when people are thrust suddenly into extremity, they are without emotion. They act
only by instinct. Returning instinctively to the nest, my feet moved on their own in the directionof home. There’s an expression, “Spinning your wheels,” and that’s precisely the way it was. I
felt I was running and running, yet getting nowhere. Up ahead, the pale-ink smoke drifted, as if
bubbling up. When people materialized out of it, I was shocked and raced up to them, wanting toknow what on earth had happened to them.
First I met five or six women. Hiroshima’s summers are very hot, so they’d probably beenwearing only simple chemises as they tidied their kitchens or cleaned house. One after another,
the women I saw had chemises on. As I got near them, I was amazed. They had countless sliversof glass sticking in their flesh: in the front of some of the women, on the right sides of others, on
the left or on the backs of still others.
People who’d been in rooms with windows to their right had been pierced only on the right sidesof their bodies as the bomb blast pulverized the windowpanes. They were like pincushions, withblood flowing. People who’d been in rooms with windows straight ahead of them had their fronts
covered with glass splinters. The glass splinters had pierced even their eyeballs, so they couldn’t
open their eyes. They felt their way along, like blind people. How they’d been standing inNakazawa: Hiroshima

75

relation to the windows determined where on their bodies the glass splinters stuck, and one
person differed from the next.
I noticed one woman. Her hair was dusty and swirling in disarray, the shoulder strap of herchemise was cut and her breasts exposed, and her breasts were blue, as if tattooed. As I was able
to understand later, the glass splinters looked blue, and she had so many piercing her, mainly herbreasts, and countless splinters buried in her that the glass splinters seemed like a tattoo dying
her breasts blue.
The women pierced by glass splinters were bleeding. They walked silently. Countless pieces ofglass were embedded in their bodies, so that each time they took a step, the glass splinters jinglejangled. Aghast, I watched these women go by, then raced for home.
On the sidewalk on the left side of the trolley street, naked people burned so black that I couldn’ttell male from female sat with both legs outstretched, eyes wide and fixed on a point in the sky,cowering, as if simpleminded. Pumps for firefighting had been installed earlier at set intervals
along the sidewalk on the right side of the trolley street. Uninjured people hurried to those pumps,
twisted the cocks, and scooped up water. People clustered suddenly about the pumps. The
women with innumerable glass splinters in them took the pump’s water with both hands andpoured it all over themselves. Washing their blackened bodies covered with blood and dust, they
exposed the glass fragments that stuck into their bodies and silently pulled them out.
On the opposite pavement, too, were people with not a stitch on, dazed and burned so black I
couldn’t tell male from female. Seeing water flowing from the pumps, they crawled sluggishly
along the ground and approached the pumps, each of them sticking their hands into the flow ofwater, scooping up water and lifting it trancelike to their mouths. Around the pump womengathered, absorbed in washing off the blood and picking out glass splinters, and people burned
black were drinking water blindly. The same scene occurred at each pump. They were acting
simply on instinct. The glass was sticking into them, and it hurt, so they pulled it out. They’dbeen burned all over by the rays, and they were thirsty, so they drank. Neither words nor poses
showed conscious intent.
In scenes of carnage—fire or calamity—in movies or plays, voices cry, “Ouch!” “Horrible!”“Help!” People suffer and writhe. But those scenes are unreal. When people are thrown suddenly
into the carnage of an extreme situation, they utter not a single emotion-laden word but act
silently on instinct. Just as if watching a silent movie, I, too, looked on at the quiet scene, notsaying a word. From time to time gasoline drums exploded, the sound carrying in all directions.
Coming to myself, I took the street leading to our house. But at the beginning of the lane to ourhome, fires were spreading along the row of structures on either side. Flames crept along the
ground. The two fires stretched forward from either side, as if joining hands, and in an instant theroad became a sea of fire. The roadway functioned as a chimney, and a hot wind gusted through.
The road ahead became a wall of fire, and flames completely blocked the way.
Sensing instinctively that I’d burn to death if I went farther, I reversed course, as if in a daze. I
followed the trolley street, and suddenly, for the first time, like an electric current running
through my body, wild terror ruled. Loneliness—my family’s abandoned me!—and terror—I’m
all alone!— seized my mind. I ran back and forth on the trolley street, searching desperately,
crying “Daddy!” “Mommy!”War in Japanese Popular Culture

76

The trolley street from Funairi Naka-chō as far as Saiwai-chō was a human exhibition, inhumanforms utterly transformed. Naked bodies moving sluggishly, burned by rays and trailingblackened bits of clothing like seaweed. Moving forward, glass splinters from the explosion
sticking into all parts of their bodies, spurting blood. People whose eyeballs hung down theircheeks and trembled; they’d been blown out by the sudden pressure of the blast. People whose
bellies had been ripped open, trailing a yard of intestines, crawling along on all fours. Shrikes
impale fish and frogs on dead tree branches, storing them to eat later; people, too, had been sent
flying and hung from branches, impaled. I ran among these horrific humans, threading my way,
crying out, searching for family.
Black smoke eddied violently, covering the area. Flames danced crazily, wildly. The trolley
street, too, became dangerous. The terror I felt then sank into my heart; I will have it with me aslong as I live.
Black Rain
Luckily, a neighbor found me as I was running about and crying. She too wore a chemise, andbits of glass pierced her entire body. She was dousing herself with pump water to wash off theblood. Her white chemise was dyed bright red. It was as if it had been red to begin with.
“Aren’t you Nakazawa Kei?” she asked. “Your mother’s on this road at the Funairi Kawaguchichō trolley stop. Quick, go!” In a trance, I headed for the Funairi Kawaguchi-chō trolley stop.
The crowd fleeing in the same direction proceeded, naked bodies blackened, each holding both
hands chest-high, leaning forward, just like the specters depicted in paintings.
In this sluggish procession, I noticed a strange thing. The parts of a person wearing whiteclothing—white shirt, white pants—were completely uninjured. White shirt, white pants alonecaught my eye, bright, as if dancing in space, flickering. When the instant rays, hotter than 9,000
degrees, shone on people on the ground below, their white clothing acted as a mirror, reflecting
the rays. By contrast, people wearing black were consumed instantly, clothing and body, by theradiant light. During the war, clothing stood out and was easy for enemy planes to spot was
outlawed, so most people wore dark clothes. Hence the number of those suffering from burns
over their entire body increased several times over.
Struck by 9,000 degree rays, your skin immediately developed countless blisters, one connectedwith the next; scattered over your whole body, they grew to eight inches in diameter. When you
walked, the fluid inside the large blisters sloshed with the vibration, and finally the fragile
blisters burst, the liquid poured out, and the skin peeled off.
I wouldn’t have thought human skin would peel so easily. The skin of the chest peeled off, fromthe shoulders down; the backs of the hands peeled; the skin of the arms peeled off, down to thefive fingernails, and dangled. From the fingertips of both hands, yard-long skin hung andtrembled. The skin of the back peeled from both shoulders, stopped at the waist, and hung like adroopy loincloth. The skin of the legs peeled to the anklebone and dragged, a yard long, on the
ground. People couldn’t help looking like apparitions. If they walked with arms down, the skinhanging off their fingertips dragged painfully on the ground, so they raised their arms and held
them at shoulder level, which was less painful. Even if they wanted to run, the skin of their legs
was dragging along on the ground, impeding their steps. Shuffling one step at a time, they
proceeded, a procession of ghosts.

Nakazawa: Hiroshima

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In this procession of ghosts, I made my way to the Funairi Kawaguchi-chō trolley stop. On bothsides of the trolley street in Kawaguchi-chō were sweet potato and vegetable fields. The
farmhouses scattered in the fields were leaning from the blast. Wide-eyed, I looked about thetrolley street. There, on the sidewalk on the left, sat Mom. She had spread a blanket on the
sidewalk, set some pots beside it, and was sitting in her apron, face sooty, a vacant expression on
her face. I stood in front of her. We looked each other in the face, silent, exhausted, and I sank to
the ground beside her. I was overcome with joy and relief that I had finally found family. Soon I
noticed that Mom was holding carefully to her chest something wrapped in a dirty blanket. I
peeked inside the blanket and saw a baby, newborn, face red and wrinkled. It was a mystery:“Huh? Suddenly a baby. . . .” I looked again at Mom’s tummy, and it had shrunk.
The shock had sent Mom into labor, and in the carnage of atomic hell she had given birth on the
pavement to a baby girl. As she writhed in pain on the pavement, several passersby had gathered
and helped with the birth.
Exhausted, I squatted on the pavement. Perhaps because of the effect of the radiation, I wasnauseous. I vomited a yellow fluid, and I felt bad; I hadn’t the energy to sit up. Trying to holdback the urge to vomit, dazed, I watched the scene unfolding before me. From the direction oftown, the procession of ghosts continued one after the other, passing before me. Right before myeyes, skin trembled from arms now completely skinless, drooping twenty inches from fingers. I
watched in amazement, “Skin really does come right off!”
Each person shuffled, dragging a yard of skin from each leg, so
from way back in the direction of town, dust swirled into the air.
When the procession of ghosts reached the trolley street, they
climbed down into the potato and vegetable fields on either side,collapsed atop the plants, and fell asleep. Burned by the rays
and blistering, their entire bodies were hot and painful, and thecool of plants against their skin felt good. Instead of blankets,
they lay on plants. As I watched, the vegetable fields turned
into row upon row of people whose skin had melted.
The sky suddenly turned quite dark, and when I looked up, astormy black cloud had covered the sky. Large raindrops
spattered against the asphalt and created a pattern of spots.
Large drops of rain struck my head and my clothes. The surfaceof the drops was oily and glittering; it was “black rain.” Blackspots clung here and there to Mom’s clothing and mine. When I
wiped the drops from my face with my hand, they were slippery.
I didn’t like how they felt. Somehow or other a rumor spread:“Those damned Yanks! This time they’re dropping heavy oilfrom the sky to make Hiroshima burn easier!” The black cloud moved rapidly to the west, theblack rain stopped, and the sky cleared. I never dreamed that this black rain contained
radioactivity that forever after destroyed your cells.
We were lucky. Had we fled to the northwestern part of Hiroshima, we would have been soaked
in radioactivity, quickly contracted leukemia, and died. Black rain continued to fall, concentrated
in northwestern Hiroshima. Where we were, it rained a bit and then stopped, and we avoided
being drenched in a lot of radioactivity. While I watched the pavement, patterned with large

War in Japanese Popular Culture

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black raindrops and gleaming eerily, I was overtaken by drowsiness and, before I knew it,
dropped off to sleep.
When, feeling as if I was choking, I opened my eyes, night had fallen. With no electricity andvirtually no lights, it should have been pitch-dark, but all Hiroshima, leading city of the Chūgoku
region, was going up in flames, a waterfall flowing upward instead of downward. By the light of
the fires, you could see clearly. The heat reflected from the flames blazing brightly had made me
gasp for air and wakened me. I turned my eyes to the right, and on the shore of the lower reachesof the Honkawa, thick tree trunks had been piled high in a long row. The hot wind quickly dried
the wood, and the fire spread to them, one after the other. The tree trunks made loud sounds, split
apart, and flew up into the air. The heat reflected from the flames was hot; we moved right up
next to the field’s stone wall and shielded ourselves from the heat. The stones were cool and felt
good. I looked up at the night sky, dyed red, scorching; smoke eddied in columns, and the flamesreflected off the smoke. It was as if a double red curtain covered us. Watching that night sky, I
fell asleep again.
Twice, three times, I was awakened by a sound as if dozens of insects had flown into my ears,
flapping their wings. Already confused, I kept thinking, “What a racket! What is it?” As time
passed, the sound became louder, and I couldn’t sleep. When I listened carefully, it turned out tobe a one-word chorus: “Water!” “Water!” From the fields on either side resounded the agonizedchorus. I looked at Mom, and she too had been awakened by the chorus crying, “Water!” Momsaid, “Those poor people—let’s get them some water. Go scoop some up.” At her urging, I
picked up a metal helmet that was rolling about on the pavement and pumped it full of water.
Mom found the cup we needed, scooped water from the helmet I was holding, and offered it to aperson groaning, “Water! Water!” With a start, as if he’d caught the scent of water, he bent hishead over the cup, and emptied it in one gulp. Then, three or four seconds later, he collapsed, hishead striking the ground. Alarmed, Mom shook him and cried, “What’s wrong?” but he wasalready dead. We offered the cup of water to others groaning “Water! Water!” and each andevery one buried his or her face in the cup and drank it off in one gulp. And then, three or four
seconds later, they all died, their heads hitting the ground. When we gave them water, they died,
one after the other. Amazed at this strange phenomenon, Mom and I stood stock-still in the field.
Editor’s note: Toward the end of volume I of Barefoot Gen, Nakazawa depicts the events ofAugust 6. Gen and his mother try to rescue Shinji and Gen’s father from the ruins of their home.
We know from the autobiography that Nakazawa himself was not present, that he learned about
these events only after the fact, from his mother. But in Barefoot Gen, Gen is the focus
throughout, and here he tries heroically first to rally neighbors and then to lift the roof beams
himself.
The treatment of bomb damage begins fourteen pages earlier and includes a striking variety offorms: one panel fills the entire left half of a page (the explosion itself), one panel stretches
across the top half of two pages (a scene of collapsed houses on either side of a highway down
the middle of which run trolley tracks), and one panel fills a full page (a burning horse). This
treatment of bomb damage completes volume I and extends through much of volume II.
NOTE: This article originally included several pages of Manga, which for copyrightreasons could not be reproduced in this reader. The Manga can be viewed at the end of theonline version of this article: http://www.japanfocus.org/-Nakazawa-Keiji/3416

Nakazawa: Hiroshima79

One can purchase the book Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen here.
Richard H. Minear is Professor of History emeritus, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His
books include translations: Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, Kurihara Sadako’s Black Eggs, and
The Autobiography of ‘Barefoot Gen.’ His best-selling Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War
II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel contains an introduction by Art Spiegelman.
He is also the author of Victors' Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial (1971) and the editor ofThrough Japanese Eyes (4th edition 2007). He is translator of Requiem for Battleship Yamato(1985), Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (1990), Black Eggs (1994), the autobiographies of Ienaga
Saburo (2001), Nakazawa Keiji (2010), and Oishi Matashichi (2011 forthcoming), and writingsof Takeyama Michio (2007) and Nambara Shigeru (2010 forthcoming). He has written andtranslated a number of essays for Japan Focus and is a Japan Focus associate.
Notes
1

Gen is pronounced with a hard g and a short e, as in again, where the second syllable ispronounced to rhyme with then. Hadashi means barefoot. Hence, “Gen of the Bare Feet.” In the
final chapter of this autobiography, Nakazawa explains the origin of the name: “I called theprotagonist ‘Gen’ in the sense of the basic composition of humanity so that he’d be someone
who wouldn’t let war and atomic bomb happen again.” (Gen is the first half of the compound
Genso, meaning chemical element.)
2

The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki, ed. John W. Dower and John
Junkerman (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985).
3“Hiroshima” no kūhaku—Nakazawa-ke shimatsuki (Tokyo: Nihon tosho sentā, 1987);‘Hadashi Gen’ no jiden (Tokyo: Misuzu, 1995).
4

Nakazawa refers to his mother throughout as Mother/Mom, but on August 6 his father cries out
to “Kimiyo.” The manga gives her name as Kimie. In the manga, she calls her husband“Daikichi.”5Charles Pellegrino, The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back (New York:Henry Holt, 2010). A New York Times account of the brouhaha that has greeted Pellegrino’s
book quoted Jeffrey Porter of the University of Iowa, “There’s a hazy line between ‘truth’ andinvention in creative non-fiction, but good writers don’t have to make things up.” Motoko Rich,“Pondering Good Faith in Publishing,” New York Times, March 9, 2010, p. C6. For an extended
discussion of the issues involved in this hoax, see my “Misunderstanding Hiroshima,”
Japanfocus.org.
6“Barefoot Gen, Japan, and I: The Hiroshima Legacy: An Interview with Nakazawa Keiji,” tr.
Richard H. Minear, International Journal of Comic Art 10, no. 2 (fall 2008): 311–12. An excerpt
from this interview is an appendix to this book.
7

Pellegrino, The Last Train from Hiroshima, 325. Without footnotes, without a list ofinterviewees and the dates of the interviews, Pellegrino’s assertions are impossible to evaluate
and hence virtually worthless. At best, those survivor accounts are sixty-year-old memories ofthe event, and intervening events and experiences have played a major, if undocumented, role.

War in Japanese Popular Culture
8This ditty was a take-off on the “Battleship March,” which had the syllable mo twice in its
opening line. Imo is the Japanese word for potato.

80

Mason: Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century

81“Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century: A New Generation of Historical
Manga”
Michele Mason
November 23, 2009http://japanfocus.org/-Michele-Mason/3260
Japanese war memory has diversified since 1945, but the atomic bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki have retained their importance.
Scholars and critics have written in detail about how Japanese neo-nationalists
have attempted to whitewash or deny war crimes committed by Japanese troops acrossAsia. Less widely discussed, however, is the fact that their revisionist school textbooks
have also given short shrift to Japanese wartime suffering, or the understanding ofJapanese as victims. Notably, while the Atarashii rekishi kyokasho (New History Textbook)failed to give even tentative numbers of the victims of Japanese wartime violence, theeditors of the controversial first edition also left out the number killed by the atomic bombs.
Since the early 1990s, neo-nationalists have argued that the Japanese population suffersfrom heiwa boke—a sort of “senility” brought on by peace. Since most Japanese oppose an
expanded military role for the country or the development of nuclear weapons, neonationalists accuse their countrymen of unrealistic idealism. Downplaying the atomic
bombings and focusing instead on “heroic sacrifice” and “service to the nation,” asKobayashi Yoshinori does in Sensoron, is a way of undermining what scholar Thomas
Berger has described as postwar Japan’s “culture of anti-militarism.”
There are significant contradictions in Japan’s official pacifism. The country
maintains a large army, navy, and air force that is among the best funded in the world.
Postwar conservative governments preached peace and prosperity at home while voicing
support for American wars abroad. Critics have called this stance ikkoku heiwashugi or“single country pacifism.” Japan, it is said, has simply ignored violence outside of its
borders.
It must also be said, however, that for all its contradictions, Japanese peace
philosophy has placed considerable restraints on conservative governments. While other
US client states such as South Korea participated in the Vietnam War, Japan stayed out ofwhat became a bloody quagmire with millions of civilian deaths across Indochina. Japan
has also not developed nuclear weapons. Doing so could spark a potentially disastrous
arms race and atomic brinksmanship in East Asia. Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki inparticular have added strength to international disarmament movements and maintained
criticism of nuclear weapons.
With survivors like Nakazawa Keiji, now elderly and retiring from public life, it falls
upon new generations of authors, artists and creators without direct experience of theatomic bombings to continue Japan’s anti-war, anti-nuclear legacies. Neo-nationalist
bestsellers have raised the stakes, but the nuclear weapons development and dramaticallyaccelerated armament that the authors call for have not been seriously debated by politicalelites.
Importantly, the works described in Michele Mason’s article do no rely solely on theimage of Japanese as victims of war to develop their critical narratives. The story of
Korean hibakusha (literally “the bombed,” the Japanese term used to refer to atomic bombWar in Japanese Popular Culture82

victims) was touched upon in Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen and is also dealt with inKimura Kana’s A Summer Afterimage, described in this article.
These manga do not only present diverse representations of the atomic bombings in
1945, they also reflect on the importance of memory and how traumatic events are
remembered and passed on to children and grandchildren. In a 1988 article, John Whittier
Treat described a “documentary fallacy” in interpretations of atomic bomb literature.
While critics have often interpreted novels and short stories by hibakusha ascommunicating their experience of the bombings to readers, Treat argues that authors are
seldom trying to set out an “objective” account of their experience, that is, a documentarystyle account. Instead, they work through subjective concerns such as the meaning of
memories, the way that comfortable life stories were fragmented by an experience difficult
to put into words, and the many things which are meaningful to victims of violence but do
not translate easily into “realistic” representation in prose or artwork. Metaphors andsymbolism abound. Works of literature and popular culture are very different fromstandard narrative historical accounts. They attempt and accomplish very different things.
Mason’s article details how these subjective concerns have been taken up by a newgeneration of creators of popular works about the atomic bomb.7

7John Whittier Treat, “Atomic Bomb Literature and the Documentary Fallacy,” Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol.
14, No. 1 (Winter, 1988), pp. 27-57.

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Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century: A New Generation of Historical
Manga
Michele Mason
This article addresses the struggles of two manga artists, Kōno Fumiyo and Nishioka Yuka, who
attempt to portray the unprecedented tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a contemporary
audience, and how they come to terms with their authority to write this history as non-hibakusha.
While historical comics (manga) have generally not captured the popular imagination in the
United States, they regularly rate among the top bestsellers of the medium in Japan. Examples
range from the mostly fictionalized “chanbara” works that glorify samurai swordsmen to
narratives featuring prominent historical figures, such as Miyamoto Musashi, Caesar, andGautama Buddha, as written by Tezuka Osamu in his biography Buddha (1972-83). While theera of the samurai remains a particular favorite, other historical moments have also provided richsource materials for this genre of graphic novels. For example, Tezuka’s work, Shumari(Shumari, 1974-76), set in Meiji era (1868-1912) Hokkaido and Gomikawa Junpei and Abe
Kenji’s The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken, 1971), which treats Japanese imperialism
during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945).
Some historical manga go beyond simple entertainment and take explicit pedagogical or
propagandistic aims. There is, for instance, Ishimori Shōtarō’s monumental A Comic Book
History of Japan (Manga nihon no rekishi, 1997-99), whose fifty-five volumes cover over amillennium of Japanese history. In the vein of tackling overlooked and controversial subjects are
Sato Shugā’s two critical volumes on the history of the emperor system (Nihonjin to tennō, 2000
and Tennōsei wo shiru tame no kingen daishi nyūmon, 2003), Higa Susumu’s Kajimunugatai(2003), depicting the Battle of Okinawa, and more recently the collectively produced Ampo
Struggle (Ampo tōsō, 2008). Yamano Sharin’s Manga: Hating the Korean Wave (Manga:
kenkanryū) is just one example of the growing number of revisionist and nationalistic histories.
In The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History, Tessa Morris-Suzuki states, “…comic bookversions of history – whether fictional or non-fictional – have probably shaped popular
understandings of history at least as much as any textbook.”1 With their compelling combinationof visuals and text, historical manga clearly represent a powerful means for constructing modern
notions of the past and shaping national collective memories.
Recently, two Japanese manga artists have tried their hand at writing about one of Japan’s mostsignificant historical events, namely the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
bestselling and award-winning Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Yūnagi nomachi sakura no kuni)2 by Kōno Fumiyo first appeared in 2003, with a live-action film version
debuting in 2007. In 2008, Nishioka Yuka published A Summer’s Afterimage: Nagasaki – August
9 (Natsu no zanzō: Nagasaki no hachigatsu kokonoka).3 Both feature prominent female
protagonists and inter-generational narratives that address such topics as discrimination against
hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors),4 living in post-A-bomb poverty, the plight of Korean
survivors, and the uncomfortable implications of both the denial of Japanese aggression in Asiaand the American myth that continues to justify the bombings.
Both Kōno and Nishioka, who grew up in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, havecommented on their struggles over how to portray these unprecedented tragedies and how tocome to terms with their authority to write this history as non-hibakusha. Committing to theirWar in Japanese Popular Culture

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projects more than sixty years after the events, these two manga artists negotiate difficult ethicalterrain. Motivated to reach a new audience that knows little of the truth of this period of history,
Kōno and Nishioka grapple with balancing the need to create stories that will capture readers’attention and the imperative to maintain ethical limits of representation that respect bothsurvivors and the dead.
In this article, I elucidate how narrative structure and perspective in Town of Evening Calm,Country of Cherry Blossoms and A Summer’s Afterimage: Nagasaki – August 9 are linked totheir creators’ position in history. Namely, Kōno’s and Nishioka’s narratives creatively
interweave stories of the past and present viewed from the vantage point of the children andgrandchildren of survivors, prioritizing the long aftermath over the immediate effects of thebombings. This choice is also manifested in the scant number of frames “recreating” August 6
and 9. The “point of view,” anchored in the central characters, might more appropriately becharacterized, especially in the case of A Summer’s Afterimage, as the “point of listening.”
Ultimately, Kōno’s and Nishioka’s narrative strategies ensure that these works are not just a “retelling” of these two historical events, but make crucial connections to their relevance to global
citizens living in the 21st century.
Non-Hibakusha Writers and the Ethics of Representation
The thorny issues related to the representation of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima andNagasaki – for instance, the inability of language to fully convey the reality of survivors’
experiences and the significant chasm between the victim-writers’ experiences and the nonvictim readers’ ability to “understand” them – have sparked debate among and presented
challenges to the hibakusha community. In his invaluable work, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese
Literature and the Atomic Bomb, John Whittier Treat remarks that the belief on the part of somesurvivors that their experiences are “unspeakable” and inaccessible to outsiders, poses a“considerable technical and even ethical hurdle”5 to the writing process. Moreover, inconfronting the decision to write or remain silent, survivors feel a justified apprehension towards
the “stylization” of language necessitated when committing one’s experiences to paper, fearing
outsiders may dismiss the truth of their “unimaginable” narratives as “fiction,” or, equally
troubling, as “too real.”6 As Treat notes, even the most capable stand frozen in the face of thetask. “Hibakusha who were or become professional writers, and who thus might be thought tohave the talent to make the ‘incredible’ available to us, …confess an emotional surplus thatparadoxically paralyzed the expression of those emotions and that made ordinary communication
impossible.”7
Still, hibakusha have taken up the pen for a great many reasons. Some seek to comprehend theirexperiences or attend to grief by addressing the trauma. Some feel compelled to document thepain and losses for themselves and others. Recording their testimonies and personal experiences
is sometimes understood as a moral imperative to challenge those who write history in such a
way that justifies the use of atomic weapons. Due to the perseverance of many writers,
professional and otherwise, a vast and varied collection of prose, poetry, and drama now
constitutes a genre in and of itself known as “atomic-bomb literature” (genbaku bungaku).
The non-hibakusha who attempts to depict such a disturbing and monumental event confronts a
different, yet sufficiently challenging, set of problems. Her preparation begins not only in thefactual historical research – which may be emotionally challenging enough in and of itself toforestall the project – but also the task of framing her legitimacy to write on the subject. If one

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considers Hiroshima writer Fumizawa Takaichi’s statement, “It was a primal event that denies all
but other hibakusha its vicarious experience,”8 or hibakusha poet Hara Tamiki’s question of“whether the meaning of the atomic bomb could be grasped by anyone whose own skin had notbeen seared by it,”9 it is only natural that a non-victim should pause and even doubt thefeasibility of writing on the subject.
In the essay “The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” Anna Richardson,
examines contentious debates on representing the Holocaust, tracing tensions between argumentsfor keeping silent and speaking out, testimony and fictionalization, survivor and non-survivor
writing and ethics and aesthetics.10 In weighing the argument that the writing of fictional
narratives of the Holocaust by non-victims can be disrespectful to survivors, Richardson quotes
Imre Kertesz, who writes, “the survivors watch helplessly as their only real possessions are done
away with: authentic experiences.”11 As numerous scandals over fake memoirs in recent years
suggest, there is a moral prohibition against falsely claiming legitimacy to write traumatic
memory.12 The tacit bond of trust between the writer and reader is paramount, and Richardson
cautions that representations of extreme horrors by those who are not victims “…runs the risk ofnegating similar excesses of violence represented in actual testimony, and, in the worst casescenario, opening the door for Holocaust deniers to claim that other accounts are equally
fictitious.”13 While cognizant of the charged nature of representation, Richardson makes a casefor the benefits of Holocaust fiction, by both survivors and non-survivors, suggesting it is not aquestion of whether but how one represents these events.14 She points out that fictionalizations
may have the advantage of being “more accessible than a survivor memoir,”15 have importantpedagogical value, and, above all, ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten.
New generations of writers, in fact, continue to address the Holocaust in a variety of media. The
Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus by Art Spiegelman, son of two Holocaust survivors, is arguably themost famous and courageous historical graphic novel from the United States. Thisgroundbreaking work that portrays its ethnic/national characters through anthropomorphic
animals - Jews as mice, Poles as pigs, and Nazis as cats - explicitly illustrates the struggle of thesecond-generation in its self-referential mode. In Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, II: And Here My
Troubles Began, the author depicts his own struggle to engage with and portray theunfathomable horror of his topic. Speaking to his therapist, he bemoans, “My book? Hah! What
book?? Some part of me doesn’t want to draw or think about Auschwitz. I can’t visualize it
clearly, and I can’t BEGIN to imagine what it felt like.”16 Addressing Holocaust fiction, Sara
Horowitz states, “Because second-generation writers lack… validation in the personal history of
the aesthetic project, they must struggle to define artistic parameters to represent Auschwitz inthe ways that avoid the pornographic, the voyeuristic, the sensational, or the sentimental.”17 In
the cases of the Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there is areasonable “discomfort with the idea of an aesthetic project built on an actual atrocity”18 withwhich both writers and readers must engage directly.
As for atomic-bomb literature, we are certainly provoked by Ota Yōko’s City of Corpses,
stunned by Tōge Sankichi’s graphic poems, and touched by Hara Tamiki’s short stories. We
have little trouble believing the veracity of their “testimony” even in these survivors’ “fictional”
and “literary” works. Still, we are likewise moved by the “storytelling” of Ibuse Masuji, who is
not a hibakusha. His Black Rain remains one of the most famous works of this genre that
continues to pass on larger truths of the atomic bombings.19 At the same time that we respect theauthority that comes with being a survivor, we can recognize the merits of works by those who

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are committed to an ethical rendering of such tragic events (whether it be Hiroshima, Nagasaki,or the Shoah) by those who possess no direct experience.
Second generation hibakusha or children of Holocaust survivors are often particularly aware of
their families’ histories, sometimes through oral stories and sometimes by the palpable absenceof them. Discussing artistic works of second-generation Holocaust survivors, Stephen C.
Feinstein writes, “This is an event they did not live through, yet the event, or the memory of theevent, has a compelling presence.”20 In their secondary materials, Kōno and Nishioka, evercognizant of their native cities’ tragic histories, express sentiments similar to those of fellow
comic-book-artist Spiegleman – apprehension, doubt, hesitancy – as they articulate theirmotivations and honestly record their complicated engagement with the painful subject of theatomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Kōno and Nishioka’s Narrative Strategies
Among historical manga, Nakazawa Keiji’s Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen, serialized from
1973-1985 in Weekly Shōnen Jump), stands out as something akin to a “manga memoir,”21 based
as it is on the author’s personal experience as a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
After his mother’s death in the late 1960s, Nakazawa began writing on the atomic bombing in his“Black” and “Peace” series, but it was not until his editor urged him to write about his own
experiences that he penned “I Saw It” (Ore wa mita), which he expanded to make what would
eventually become the ten volumes of Barefoot Gen.22
In Barefoot Gen, readers get to know third-grader Gen (Nakazawa) and his family beginning in
April 1945, “witness” the catastrophe on August 6, and then take in the frightful scenes andconfusion of the immediate aftermath. Unable to rescue three of his family members, Genattempts to carve out a precarious existence in the atomic wasteland with his mother and infantsister, who is born prematurely on the day of the bombing. Framed through Gen’s experiences,
the narrative portrays emotional reunions and deaths, ordeals of privation and discrimination, andthe harsh realities of life during the occupation years. Nakazawa deftly weaves light-hearted
humor, centered on the antics of young Gen and his “brothers” and friends, in this compelling
depiction of both the horrors of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and the struggles of hibakusha
in the early postwar period. It might be said that such a juxtaposition of playful and painful
scenes is the prerogative of a survivor like Nakazawa, who speaks of being haunted by “thestench of corpses” when he conjures up his many disturbing memories to write on Hiroshima.23
For writers like Kōno and Nishioka, who are not survivors or descendents of survivors, thequestions related to writing on the atomic bombings are inflected in a decidedly different way.
Although Kōno and Nishioka state clearly that their works are not based on personal experience,
they still tremble in front of their projects and search for a narrative mode that will allow them to
use their voices and create their visions. Both speak to how deeply affecting it is to listen to
hibakusha testimonies, view photographic images and artistic renditions, read personal stories,
and imagine the events in the course of preparatory research. They acknowledge theimpossibility of “understanding” the experience of being an atomic bomb victim and never claim
a legitimacy that is not rightfully their own.
Kōno was first encouraged to write on “Hiroshima” by her editor. Mistaking her editor’s
meaning at first, Kōno delighted in creating a story set in Hiroshima and being able to use thelocal dialect freely. When it finally occurred to her that he was talking about “the Hiroshima,”

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87

she was immediately overcome by doubts. She recalled nearly fainting more than once when
faced with disturbing artifacts at the Hiroshima Peace memorial or viewing historical footage ofthe aftermath of the bomb. She admits having convinced herself that the atomic bombing ofHiroshima was “a tragedy that occurred in the distant past” and that she had “tried to avoid
anything related to the bomb.”24 However, when Kōno realized that many people outside ofHiroshima and Nagasaki knew little or nothing about the bombings, she felt it “unnatural andirresponsible to remain disconnected from the issue.”25 “This was no time to hold back. I hadn’t
experienced war or the bomb firsthand, but I could still draw on the words of a different time andplace to reflect on peace and express my thoughts.”26 While initially hesitant, Kōno finds that her
past experience in drawing manga gave her “courage” to take on a story that was not her own.
After all, she decided, “drawing something is better than drawing nothing at all.”27
Nishioka, as well, found her decision to produce A Summer’s Afterimage accompanied byuncertainty and misgivings. A native of Nagasaki, Nishioka grew up thinking she would like tosome day write on the city’s tragic history. However, she recalls, “… as I turned the pages ofcollections of survivors’ testimonies, my fingers would simply freeze. How can one convey thecries of people thrown into this hell and stench of death, which are ‘beyond imagination’ and‘impossible to express with words’?”28 It was a seemingly unconnected international incident,
Israel’s bombing of the Lebanese city of Qanaa on July 30, 2006, that pushed her hand.
Several days later, Japanese people who had been pained by the bombing gathered
together, and a man, who was an atomic bomb survivor took the microphone and madean appeal, saying, “Soon it will be August 9. People like me who have experienced thetragedy of atomic bombs, cannot allow another war in which innocent children are killedin this way.” This gave me a shock. The war-torn city [of Qanaa] and Nagasaki wereconnected through suffering.29
In linking Qanaa and Nagasaki, Nishioka realizes that she could write from an outside
perspective, which allows her to create Kana, her female protagonist named after the city in
Lebanon.30 Even after this insight, however, Nishioka’s malaise continued. To make it possible
for her to take on the project she visited the monument that marks the epicenter in Nagasaki,
prayed to the many victims of the atomic bombing, and asked for permission to create her manga.
With the same tenuousness displayed in Kōno’s phrase “It was better to draw something rather
than draw nothing at all,” Nishioka laments. “I was only able to merely skim the surface of theatomic bombing.”31
Kōno and Nishioka take pains not to present their work as autobiographical. To address thisoverwhelming concern, both artists center most or all of their narratives around a descendent,
daughter or granddaughter of survivors. Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
interweaves stories that move between the 1950s and 2005. The first narrative, Town of Evening
Calm, portrays the lives of survivors Hirano Minami and her mother, Fujimi, as they cope withprivations in the “atomic slum” (genbaku suramu) of Hiroshima,32 long-term illness related toradiation poisoning, and the loss of three family members. Yet this constitutes just one-third of
Kōno’s text. Country of Cherry Blossoms, begins in the late 1980s, focusing on fifth-grader
Nanami, the daughter of Asahi Ishikawa, Minami’s brother who was not in Hiroshima in August
1945. Nanami’s deceased mother was a hibakusha. Much of Nanami’s life is shaped by visits toa hospital where her grandmother (Fujimi) and younger brother Nagio are treated regularly forchronic illnesses. Part Two, set in 2005, finds Nanami on a mission to discover the reasons

War in Japanese Popular Culture88

behind her father’s recent odd behavior and disappearances. When she and an old friend follow
him, they discover that, occasioned by the 50th anniversary of his sister Minami’s death, Mr.
Ishikawa had been traveling to Hiroshima to hear stories about her from people who knew andloved her.

Nanami follows father to family grave in Hiroshima. Kōno Fumiyo, 2004. Courtesy of Futabasha Publishing.

Through flashbacks and subplots, Kōno fleshes out the story of how Nanami’s parents met andgrew to love each other, Nanami’s mother’s death, and discrimination against both first- andsecond-generation hibakusha as marriage partners.33
The main character and our portal to memories in Nishioka Yuka’s ambitious work, A Summer’s
Afterimage, is Kimura Kana whose grandparents survived the Nagasaki atomic bombing. This
work grapples with not only the painful memories and trauma of Japanese survivors, but also thediscrimination Korean hibakusha faced, the legacy of Japan’s colonial past, the American

Mason: Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century

89“atomic myth,” and questions of the morality of science. One of just a few works that focuses on
Nagasaki,34 A Summer’s Afterimage follows protagonist Kana through five vignettes, in which
she hears the testimonies of Japanese and Korean hibakusha and other persons who share their
wartime experiences as she travels to Nagasaki, the United States, and Korea.
Kōno and Nishioka reinforce their historical positionality by directing the transmission ofmemories from survivors of the war and atomic bombings to contemporary characters andreaders.35 In much the same way that their manga pass on the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
to a new generation, the elders in their texts share their “authentic memories,” bequeathing themto younger individuals. In Country of Cherry Blossoms, Nanami’s father, Asahi, who was sent tolive with relatives in Mito during the war, travels to Hiroshima to hear (and collect) stories about
his beloved sister so that he can properly commemorate her death. Pushing the limits of memoryis the touching and humorous scene wherein Asahi asks Kyoka to marry him. This “memory” infact comes to us in a “flashback” by their daughter, Nanami. She muses: “Perhaps I’d heard thesestories from my mother. Somehow, I remember these scenes. From before I was born…I waswatching them. I looked down at those two and decided to be born to them. I am sure of it.”36
Kōno suggests that when we listen to history – to the stories of those who lived history – it canbecome our memory. In this way she moves away from the idea of proprietary memory towards
one of shared memory across generations.
Notably, Nishioka’s narratives emphasize active listening and the recognition of historical“others” as she ponders the potential of healing personal pain, families, and nations. The fivevignettes in A Summer’s Afterimage maintain the complexity of people’s differing experiences(from person to person and across nationalities) and highlight the importance of acknowledging
the suffering of others who were once an “enemy.” The section “Manhattan Sunset,” follows
Kana and her grandmother, who travel to New Mexico to attend an exhibit, which features afilm-clip of Kana’s grandmother soon after the dropping of the bomb. When the grandmothertakes ill, Dr. Smith, provides medical assistance and shares a narrative of his childhood in Los
Alamos where his father worked with Dr. Oppenheimer to produce the world’s first three atomic
bombs.

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Dr. Smith as a child at Los Alamos. Nishoka Yuka, 2008. Courtesy of Gaifū Publishing Inc.

A trip to the Trinity Test Site reveals Dr. Smith’s conflicted feelings, but ultimately he cannot let
go of the idea that the bomb was necessary.37
The last episode, “Asian River,” concentrates on Kana’s visit to Korea, where she is guided by
the grandson, Soyon, of a Korean hibakusha, Mrs. Park, who was treated by Dr. Kimura, Kana’s
grandfather, in Nagasaki after the bombing. Kana listens to Mrs. Park’s moving story and visits
the demilitarized zone (DMZ), “the Berlin Wall of Asia.” Her short trip turns out to be an
important lesson for Kana on the history of Japanese colonialism, the discrimination against
Koreans after the atomic bombing, and the legacy of the Korean War.

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Mrs. Park faces discrimination in immediate aftermath of the bombing.
Nishioka Yuka, 2008. Courtesy of Gaifū Publishing Inc.

On August 15, the day Koreans celebrate liberation from their Japanese oppressors, Kana andSoyon build and launch a “spirit boat” that they name “Asia” for all who passed away in the war.

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Kana and Soyon launch a “spirit boat” in the name of all who perished in the Asia-Pacific war.
Nishioka Yuka, 2008. Courtesy of Gaifū Publishing Inc.

“The Portrait,” finds Kana and her grandmother getting ready for anniversary services on August
9 when they run into a German who shares his story of returning from the war to find nothing
more of his wife, a painter, than her self-portrait. He has come to Nagasaki to pay his respects
believing that it could just as well have been Germany that the U.S. bombed with the newweapon. Together the three remember the dead and pray for their repose.
In their plot lines and textual organization, both Kōno and Nishioka create room for collective
memories grounded in the inter-generational transmission of “stories.” For most of Kōno andNishioka’s texts both characters and readers are firmly located in our current historical moment,
occasionally traveling back in time via survivors’ testimonies and memories. In a variety of ways,
they attempt to link the summer of 1945 to the contemporary moment, pointing to the lingeringMason: Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century

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social and political ramifications of history that can otherwise seem distant and cut off from thepresent.38 Nishioka’s brief epilogue, in which Kana joins other high school students collecting
signatures for a petition calling for nuclear abolition, goes one step further in urging members ofa new generation to seek their own place in this ongoing history.
Given that Kōno and Nishioka’s works are undoubtedly about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thedearth of scenes depicting August 6 or 9 is striking. Both eschew drawing scenes that attempt to“recreate” the period immediately after the atomic attacks. Whereas readers of Nakazawa’s
Barefoot Gen join Gen and his family in August 1945 and “witness” the pika-don moment (theinitial flash and blast), for most of Kōno’s and Nishioka’s texts, both characters and readers are
firmly located in our current historical moment, occasionally traveling back in time via survivors’
testimonies and memories. Just three frames in all ninety-eight pages that comprise Town of
Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms depict the immediate aftermath of the bombing. In
these Kōno usually keeps the character Minami in her body and clothing of 1955 – a mingling of
the present and the past. In one frame, the heavily penned hair, shoes, and bags of Minami andher suitor first draw the reader’s eye to the lower left corner. Then we notice the mass ofindistinguishable bodies floating in the river under a cracked bridge strewn with debris.

Minami struggles with her disturbing memories. Kōno Fumiyo, 2004. Courtesy of Futabasha Publishing.

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In another frame, the Minami of 1955 runs past a group of children’s vacant faces, as she relives
those initial moments of panic, while one scene shows the postwar Minami following behind hersister Kasumi and walking amongst the dead bodies and detritus.
Only eight pages in A Summer’s Afterimage, a work numbering 132 pages, feature scenes of theinitial moments of the bombing – for instance, a flash and a mail carrier blasted into the air. In
one episode, we see a pile of skulls and bones and a woman screaming in tattered clothing. Still,even though some disturbing images are included, many of the visuals are one step removed. In
one case, we see only the faint details of four photographs that are part of the exhibit in Los
Alamos. In one episode, a highly stylized version of the mushroom cloud symbolizes the
Nagasaki bombing.
There are no attempts to overwhelm our senses with the violence of the atomic bomb. Rather the
manga artists choose to portray the quieter suffering of hibakusha and their loved ones. In Town
of Evening Calm this is revealed through the character Minami who survives ten years only tofind that she too will join the ranks of dead victims. Her last thoughts are, “This isn’t fair. I
thought I was one of the survivors.”39 Nanami and her brother Nagio in Country of Cherry
Blossoms represent the “second generation” of survivors who endure (atomic related) diseases
and the silent pain of older relatives who continue to grieve for family members lost to thebombings. Depictions of the mundane details of survival are prioritized over visuals of the flash,blast, or heat that a rare and simple line of text informs us seared a barrette into Minami’s hairand melted the soles of her shoes.
If these two historical manga focus on the living more than the dead, it is not because the authors
have forgotten them. One critic of John Hersey’s 1947 Hiroshima made the provocative
observation that “The living occupy all the foreground, and the mounds of dead are only seenvaguely in the background,”40 while another claimed, “To have done the atom bomb justice, Mr.
Hersey would have had to interview the dead.”41 Richardson maintains that this is precisely thetask that fictional works can perform; “… a work of fiction has the power to take the narrative toplaces that survivor testimony cannot,”42 namely to let the dead speak. Hibakusha have madesimilar claims, such as when Numata Suzuko states “… that as a survivor who was ‘made to live
among thousands of those who fell victim to the bomb,’ she feels a need to ‘embrace thevoiceless voices of the dead – so that they do not have to feel they died in vain.”43 Nishioka’s
words echo this idea in her commentary on the episode called “The Last Letter.”
There is a model for the character who is a postal carrier. I finally realized something
upon hearing this person’s testimony given after the bombing, when he told me in a lively
fashion about the beautiful townscape and the lives of the people before the bomb when
he was going about delivering mail on his red bicycle. Until “that moment,” people weregoing about their modest daily lives just as we do today. When I faced the fact that before
1945 an atomic weapon had never been used in war, I came to understand how
presumptuous I had been, and I felt compelled to say in front of the epicenter monument“All you who died, it was not in vain. Certainly, it was not in vain.44
Nishioka also allows those who perished to have the last word in each of her stories. “All fivestories collected here end with the words of the dead. In lending my ears to the voices of theafterimages and bringing them back to life today, I want to offer the only tribute to them that I
can.”45 The moving words of characters or, in the case of the episode “Manhattan Sunset,” thelines of a poem by the Nagasaki survivor and poet Fukuda Sumako, resonate as they bring each

Mason: Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century

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chapter to an end.46 Even more directly Kōno depicts Minami’s last moments in Town of Evening
Calm. Pictures of Minami on her deathbed are interspersed with completely blank frames thatconvey the heaviness of death better than any number of strokes Kōno’s pen could have.
Eventually all renderings of Minami’s body give way to images of faces hovering over her,placing us in her viewpoint. Readers are privy to her thoughts, which are printed in otherwise
empty frames. In one instance there is the single word “pain” and in another we “hear” Minami
thinking, “It’s been ten years. I wonder if the people who dropped the bomb are pleased withthemselves – ‘Yes! Got another one.’”47

Empty frames contain Minami’s dying thoughts. Kōno Fumiyo, 2004. Courtesy of Futabasha Publishing.

As many similarities as these two works share, it is imperative to note several significant
differences. Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms concentrates on the memories
of Hiroshima hibakusha and specifically the personal experiences of members of theWar in Japanese Popular Culture

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Hirano/Ishikawa family. Although emotionally powerful, Kōno’s work focuses its “humanist”
lens narrowly on Hiroshima, failing even to make the obvious connection with Nagasaki. One of
the two references to a wider conversation on nuclear issues is a large sign announcing the 1955
World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (gensuibaku kinshi sekai taikai) that
Minami passes in the street on her way home from work. The other is a tattered flyer version of
the sign, imprinted with the phrase “the power of peace for Hiroshima,” which flutters in the airand falls to the ground in the frames immediately preceding Minami’s death. This ending of thefirst story begs the question of whether the text aims to equate the futility of fighting radiation
sickness to the peace movement’s struggle against nuclear proliferation.
Nishioka’s A Summer’s Afterimage on the other hand, takes a much broader perspective,
including the memories of Germans, Americans, and Koreans and addressing a wide range ofissues. Although its discursive format may be considered a weakness, it maintains thecomplexity of history as it addresses the history of Japanese colonialism, recognizes thehumanity of those who justify the U.S. decision to drop the atomic bombs, and poses uneasy
questions regarding science and technology. If the ending of Town of Evening Calm suggests a
dim prospect for “peace in Hiroshima,” Nishioka’s work concludes on an optimistic andoutward-looking note as Kana joins a group of youth bearing a banner that calls for global
nuclear abolition.
Their differing framing of and commitment to broader issues can be seen in other ways as well.
It is notable that reviews of Kōno’s work routinely remark that the antiwar stance is subtle.
Otaku USA writes that the “anti-war message is unspoken, and comes naturally from the desire
not to see the characters die,”48 and Manga: The Complete Guide salutes its “understated antiwar
statement.”49 Kōno’s biography on the backflap is devoted completely to her impressive training
and accomplishments as a manga artist, and she does not seem to have thought about producing
a work about the subject until her editor suggested the project. Nishioka’s author profile,
however, makes explicit her engagement with the peace movement, such as her
circumnavigation of the globe on the Peace Boat, her participation in the Hague Peace
Conference, and her volunteer work in a Palestinian refugee camp. She also writes, as statedabove, that she had long hoped to create a manga on the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
These differences are not, however, merely manifestations of personal inclinations. They also
reflect distinctions between the way the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kōno and Nishioka’s
respective hometowns, reflect on their atomic legacy and engage with its significance today. The
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, even in its updated version, centers on Hiroshima, giving
scant attention to the larger question of nuclear issues, even the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
The Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, on the other hand, goes well beyond the summer of 1945
and the boundaries of its city. Visitors do not leave the building without passing through a hallwhose exhibits present the scope of contemporary proliferation and make crucial connections
with world-wide environmental degradation and human suffering connected to nuclear testing(Marshall Islanders, downwinders in the United States) and nuclear power plant accidents (Three
Mile Island, Chernobyl) and more.
Still, both Kōno and Nishioka clearly see their aim to be, in large part, educational. Because they
conceive of their audience as a younger generation who knows little of the facts or truth ofHiroshima and Nagasaki, they include maps, historical information, and bibliographic references
for further reading. Kōno’s supplementary materials, for example, provide contextualization ofMason: Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century

97

what were called the “atomic slums” in Hiroshima and the history of the preservation of theAtomic Dome. Nishioka appends a short essay to explain the events upon which each chapter isbased and briefly provides factual details of the Nagasaki bombing, discusses problematic tenetsof the American “atomic myth,” and introduces youth participation in post-war nuclear abolition
movements. In order to speak of the past and of the dead to the living, Kōno and Nishioka buildon their organic “education” from growing up in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In these two manga,
they bequeath critical historical truths in a medium that has the power to reach younger people in
the narrative and visual language of their generation.
Conclusion
Different historical periods, events and personages permit different degrees of license to
fictionalize. Writing on singular, unprecedented events such as the atomic bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki raises particular issues for both survivors and later generations. For
survivors there are numerous challenges, not least of which is reliving the traumatic memories in
the writing process. How to overcome the inadequacy of language to depict the truth of theirexperiences and the fear that non-survivors might too readily assume they can “understand” thetrauma are also common concerns. For later generations the issues revolve around questions ofauthorial authenticity, literary license, historical imagination, and truthfulness. Kōno andNishioka are the first non-victims to marshal the popular medium of manga and produce nuanced
full-volume treatments of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite theirtemporal and experiential distance from the events and the fact that some may consider theirworks “non-literary,” I believe we need not hesitate to add their works to the impressive body ofatomic-bomb literature. In their organization, themes, and tone, these two works are distinct. Yet,both writers creatively engage a weighty subject, and in doing so they eschew any hint of amemoir, instead aligning their narratives’ temporality with a new generation of readers who alsofind themselves far removed in time from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Both Kōno and Nishioka speak to the psychic and conceptual hurdles that had to be overcome toundertake their projects. That Kōno and Nishioka detail their conflicted feelings about theirsubject seems a necessary part of ethically representing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ever careful ofthe bond of trust between writer and reader, Kōno and Nishioka take great pains to position
themselves as non-hibakusha, as well as to be faithful to the personal accounts inherited fromthose who experienced Hiroshima and Nagasaki firsthand. Through the depiction of people andexperiences not so removed from our own lives and historical moment, they have effectively
drawn characters and created stories to which their contemporaries can relate. I would guess thatthey would be sympathetic to German artist Lily Markiewicz’s statement:
Mine is an exploration of an aftermath, of a past which has become a present, of theabsence of a traceable reality which has become the presence of memory. I am notconcerned with the Holocaust directly, the event, its causes, reasons and details. I am
concerned with the ripples, the ramifications, the consequences and our perceptions of it– our place ‘in it.’50
This idea is suggested in Nishioka’s title, A Summer’s Afterimage, which evokes the personaland collective memory that lingers long after the summer of 1945.
Representations of those fateful days in August that ruptured history and anointed the atomic age
with flames and the stench of human flesh play a crucial role in keeping historical memory alive.

War in Japanese Popular Culture

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Yet, it is equally important to think beyond that one month in 1945 to the years that stretched out
before the “survivors” and contemplate the strength and courage needed to live on. Kōno andNishioka offer a solemn and respectful tribute to both the dead victims and the hibakusha.
Moreover, they give those of us who care to reflect on the relevance of past suffering to that of
our world not just a reminder of historical events far removed from the present but two fictional
manga that speak important and timely truths. Stephen Feinstein’s statement that “The art thatmemorializes the Holocaust may itself become the subject of memory, a memory of a memory,or memory within the complex remembrance of the Holocaust”51 seems particularly applicable tothese two works. Kōno and Nishioka’s historical manga – two articulations of “memory” within
the complex remembrance of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – offer powerful“afterimages” that can inform and shape our collective memory and future.
Michele Mason is assistant professor of Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at the
University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching interests include modern
Japanese literature and history, colonial and postcolonial studies, feminist theory, andmasculinity studies. She also continues her engaged study of the history of the atomic bombingsof Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear studies, and peace and nuclear abolition movements.
Mason co-produced the short documentary film entitled Witness to Hiroshima (2008). Link
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Yuki Tanaka and Matthew Penney for their invaluable comments. To Kōno
Fumiyo and Nishioka Yuki I owe a great debt for writing these two important manga and forallowing me to reprint images. The encouragement and suggestions I received from Masayuki
Shinohara, Mariana Landa, Angela Yiu, Laura Hein and participants at the Revisiting Postwar
Japan Conference (May 2009, Sophia University) are greatly appreciated. As always, a very
special thank you to Leslie Winston for her witty and never waning support.
Notes
1

Tessa Morris-Suzkui, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso, 2005),
177.
2

The two stories were originally published separately in the youth-oriented weekly serial Weekly
Manga Action in 2003 and 2004, and debuted as a single volume in 2004. The response to
Kōno’s work has been impressive. A radio drama version was produced in 2006, and both
Sasabe Kiyoshi’s live-action film and Kunii Kei’s novel adaptation came out in 2007. The JapanMedia Arts Festival awarded Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms the Grand
Prize for manga in 2004, and it received the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize Creative Award in2005. Both the film and actor who played Hirano Minami, Aso Kumiko, garnered criticalacclaim and numerous awards. It has been released on DVD and a soundtrack is available. Last
Gasp published the comic in English, and it has been translated into Korean, Chinese and French
as well. Kōno Fumiyo, Yūnagi no machi sakura no kuni (Tokyo: Futabasha, 2004). Quotes
herein are from the English translation by Naoko Amemiya and Andy Nakatani. Town of
Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (San Francisco: Last Gasp, 2006).
3

Nishioka Yuka, Natsu no zanzō (Tokyo: Gaifūsha, 2008). Gaifūsha produces books that addressa wide range of political, economic, and social justice issues. All translations of this work are myown.

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4

The contested and complicated use of the word hibakusha is rightly receiving more attention
recently. In this paper, however, I use the term interchangeably with the English translation“survivor.” For more information on this subject, see Takemine Seiichirō’s “‘Hibakusha’ toiu
kotoba ga motsu seigisei” [The Political Aspects of the Word Hibakusha], Ritsumeikan
heiwakenkyū, No. 9, (March 2008): 21-30.
5John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 27.
6

There is plenty of evidence, unfortunately, to confirm this fear in the case of images. Tessa
Morris-Suzuki offers one example in The Past Within Us. After Nakazawa Kenji’s Barefoot Gen
began serialization in Shōnen Jump in 1972, serious criticism was aimed at his visuals for being
too graphic and disturbing. “In response, Nakazawa admits, he was forced to exclude from his
testimony some of the darkest images engraved on his memory.” Later he commented, “When I
reread my own work, my flesh crawled with loathing. I fell into a state of thinking ‘how could I
have done it so badly?’ And this was so painful that I could not bear it. I immediately hid themagazines in which my work was serialized in a drawer. The plot of Gen kept running throughmy head, but I had spent half a year trying to alter my mood by writing entertainment comics(Nakazawa 1994, 215).” Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us, 162-63.
7

Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 26.

8

Ibid., 27.

9Ibid., 26.

10Anna Richardson, “The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” eSharp No.
5 (2005): 1-19.
11

Richardson, “The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” 7.

12

I am thinking here of, for example, the 2008 discovery that the best-selling work Misha: A
Memoire of the Holocaust Years was completely fictionalized and written by a Belgium woman
who was not Jewish, the scandal of Herman Rosenblat’s authorial liberties in Angel at the Fence,and the scholarship over the last decade on fake slavery narratives (written by whiteabolitionists) and “autobiographies” about if not by people of the first nations (e.g. Asa Carter’s
The Education of Little Tree). One excellent example of this scholarship is Laura Browder’s
Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identity (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina, 2000). Richardson’s article treats Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (1995),
which was marketed as a “memoir” and “personal testimony.” A controversy over its
categorization erupted when it was revealed that the author, whose real name is Bruno Dösseker,
was a non-Jewish Swiss national. It has not been reprinted since 1999.
13

Richardson, “The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” 9.

14

Ibid., 5-6.

15

Ibid., 7.

16

Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1991), 46.

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17

Sara Horowitz, “Auto/Biography and Fiction after Auschwitz: Probing the Boundaries ofSecond-Generation Aesthetics,” in Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, Ed.
Efraim Sicher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 278.
18

Horowitz, “Auto/Biography and Fiction after Auschwitz: Probing the Boundaries of SecondGeneration Aesthetics,” 277.
19

For excellent translations and commentary on the work of the first three writers see Richard H.
Minear, Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). John
Bestor’s wonderful translation of Ibuse’s Black Rain (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1988)
stands the test of time. Another important resource for short stories by both survivors and nonsurvivors is the anthology edited by Ōe Kenzaburō The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of theAtomic Aftermath (New York: Grove Press, 1994).
20

Stephen C. Feinstein, “Mediums of Memory: Artistic Responses of the Second Generation,” inBreaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, Ed. Efraim Sicher (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1998), 201.
21

I use the term “manga memoir,” cautiously, realizing the contentious issues surrounding thedefinition of such a reference. It brings to mind an interview (conducted by Stanley Crouch) on
the Charlie Rose Show (July 30, 1996), wherein Art Spiegelman asserts, “I kind of like living inthe space between categories” when he explains that he wrote the New York Times to complainthat his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel, Maus, had been listed as “fiction” on the bestseller
list. He adds that he would “have done so no matter which side of the list it had appeared on.”(link)
22

Subsequent anime and live-action film adaptations and the completion of the full English
translation attest to Barefoot Gen’s wide reach and long lasting popularity. Yamada Tengo
directed three live-action adaptations, which came out between 1976 and 1980. Barefoot Gen(1983) and Barefoot Gen 2 (1987) were both created by Mori Masaki. The English translation ofVolume 10 of the manga Barefoot Gen was released November 2009.
23

For more details see the interview of Nakazawa Keiji in Japan Focus. Nakazawa Keiji,“Barefoot Gen/The Atomic Bomb and I: The Hiroshima Legacy.” (link)
24

Kōno, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, 103.

25

Ibid.,103.

26

Ibid.,104.

27

Ibid.,102.

28

Nishioka, Natsu no zanzō, 133.

29

Ibid., 133.

30

Nishioka writes, “Thinking I would engrave this day on my heart, I gave my protagonist thename ‘Kana’” (133). Michael Rothberg’s excellent new work, entitled Multidirectional Memory:
Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, speaks to how collective memory
emerges out of a dynamic process that is frequently inspired and shaped by seemingly unrelated
events in time and place. One of the most important interventions of this book lies in Rothberg’sMason: Writing Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st Century

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notion of “multidirectional memory,” which he characterizes as “subject to ongoing negotiation,
cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (3). Thus, in the same waythat the Algerian War constituted a cite of “transfer,” which stimulated articulations of memoriesof the Holocaust, the production of A Summer’s Afterimage can be attributed in part to
Nishioka’s association of the bombing of Qanaa with that of Nagasaki. See Michael Rothberg,
Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009).
31

Ibid., 137.

32

In 1960, approximately 900 households were located along a strip of land running along the
Hon River. In 1968, a development plan was proposed, everyone evicted, and over a span of ten
years the land redeveloped. Today, in addition to an apartment complex, there exists a municipal
art museum, youth center, swimming pool, and several libraries where the “atomic slum” used tobe.
33

For instance, Fujimi Hirano expresses disappointed when her son Asahi, who was in Mito at
the time of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, decides to marry a hibakusha. In the contemporary
story, Nagio tells the woman he has been dating, Toko, that her parents have instructed him tonever see her again because he is a second-generation survivor with a history of health problems.
34

The many writings of Hayashi Kyoko, a survivor of Nagasaki, stand out as particularly
important contributions to the genre of Atomic Bomb Literature. Numerous works by Hayashi
have been awarded prestigious literary prizes, such as “Procession on a Cloudy Day” (Kumoribino Kōshin, 1967, trans. Kashiwagi Hirosuke, 1993) and Ritual of Death (Matsuri no ba, 1975,
trans. Kyoko Selden, 1984). Readers can also find English translations of her short stories“Empty Can” (Akikan, 1978, trans. Margaret Mitsutani, 1985) and “Masks of Whatchamacallit:
A Nagasaki Tale” (Nanjamonoja no men, 1968, trans. Kyoko Selden, 2005). (For the latter work
see this link.) Another widely available work in English is Dr. Nagai Takashi’s The Bells ofNagasaki (Nagasaki no kane, 1949, trans. William Johnston, 1984), which can help fill in thisoverlooked history.
35

This strategy of casting both characters and readers as the audience of oral testimonies recalls
Spiegelman’s ever-present tape recorder in Maus.
36

Kōno, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, 93-95.

37

See Hayashi Kyōko’s poignant novella “From Trinity to Trinity” (Toriniti kara toriniti e,2000), which describes her 1999 visit to Los Alamos, New Mexico and, specifically, the Trinity
site where the U.S. tested the first atomic bomb. (link)
38

Other historical novels make explicit links between the past and present, especially those that
seek to “revise” the historical record in order to place it within the “proper” light of the times.
Manga: Hating the Korean Wave and Japanese and the Emperor, although from the opposite
ends of the political spectrum, can be considered in this light. Both employ “straw man” devices
to present their arguments, building their storylines around contemporary college students
discovering the “truth” about the past. In the former, this is facilitated through a debate with
Zainichi and Korean exchange students who lose to the “superior” neo-nationalist narrative. In
the latter, conservative, authoritarian school officials who attempt to punish a student for not
singing the national anthem are shot down and shamed by an older supervisor who uses his

War in Japanese Popular Culture102

personal experience during the war to bolster his authority to speak and teach everyone a lesson.
For more on the former work see Rumi Sakamoto and Matthew Allen’s “’Hating “The Korean
Wave’” Comic Books: A Sign of New Nationalism in Japan?” (link).
39

Kōno, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, 34.

40

Treat, Writing Ground Zero, 55.

41

Ibid., 55.

42Richardson, “The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” 7.

43

Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999), 135-6.
44

Nishioka, Natsu no zanzō, 134.

45

Ibid., 135.

46

These lines come from the poem entitled “One Note for the Creators of Atomic Bombs” whose
original first lines read “Creators of atomic bombs! For a short while, lay your hands down andclose your eyes!”
47

Kōno, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, 33.

48

Jason Thompson, "Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms" in Otaku USA(October 30, 2007).
49

Jason Thompson, Manga: The Complete Guide (New York: Del Rey, 2007), 371.

50

Feinstein, “Mediums of Memory: Artistic Responses of the Second Generation,” 204.

51

Feinstein, “Mediums of Memory: Artistic Responses of the Second Generation,” 202.

Gerow: War and Nationalism in Yamato

103“War and Nationalism in Yamato: Trauma and Forgetting the Postwar”
Andrew Gerow
June 13, 2011
http://japanfocus.org/-Aaron-Gerow/3545
In many ways, Hollywood sets the tone for global cinema, at least of the blockbuster
variety that big-budget war movies must almost inevitably become to justify their hugebudgets. After 1998, many countries tried to produce their own Saving Private Ryan.
Canada has the 2008 World War I melodrama Passchendaele. Russia, grappling with issuesof national identity in the decade after the fall of the Soviet Union, has the “Great Patriotic
War” epic The Star (2002). South Korea’s Brotherhood (2004) was an attempt tounderstand the fraternal violence of the Korean War. While each of these national epics
presents an account of war coherent with that country’s memory culture, visual andnarrative nods to Saving Private Ryan are evident in each.
The first scenes of Saving Private Ryan, depicting the Normandy landings, are someof the most discussed movie moments of the 1990s. The extent of the violence and thevisceral point of view of the ordinary soldier facing overwhelming firepower awed critics
and moviegoers. Otoko-tachi no Yamato (literally “The Men’s Yamato,” but just Yamato in
the official English release), a 2005 Japanese film about the sinking of the Imperial Japanese
Navy’s largest battleship, tried to bring a similar style to Japanese screens.
Many have taken the extreme violence of these films as representing powerful antiwar statements. Some critics, however, have described how the return of the epic war film
has a different type of significance. In the article “Saving Private Ryan and Postwar
Memory in America,” John Bodnar writes that despite the violence and visual innovation,“At its rhetorical core, [Saving Private Ryan’s] story’s argument would have seemed very
familiar to audiences in the 1940s.” Family men and wide-eyed youngsters do their duty.
All suffer, some die. This type of film is a paean to sacrifice and heroism.8
The style of war film represented by Saving Private Ryan fell out of fashion in the
United States in the 1970s because of the horrors of the Vietnam War. In the article “Saving
Private Ryan” World War II veteran and historian Howard Zinn wrote, “Vietnam caused
large numbers of Americans to question the enterprise of war itself. Now Saving Private
Ryan, aided by superb cinematographic technology, draws on our deep feelings for the GIs
to rescue, not just Private Ryan, but the good name of war” (139). Violent imagery alone
does not make a popular work “anti-war,” and on this level Saving Private Ryan and theJapanese Yamato have ambiguous messages.
Historian of Japanese wartime violence Yoshida Yutaka has elaborated on a “Naval
View” of the Asia-Pacific War important in postwar Japan. Following wartime nationalist
investments in Japan’s naval technology, like the battleship Yamato, the largest big-gun
warship in history, and the “Zero” fighter which ruled the skies in the first years of the war,
postwar filmgoers and readers have preferred works about Japan’s sea and sky battles.
The “naval view” reproduces a narrative arc of tragic heroism. Japan’s naval and airforces struck a serious of “glorious” victories between late 1941 and the end of 1942 andthen battled to the last against the increasingly technologically and materially superiorAmerican forces until defeat in 1945. Importantly, the “naval view” of the war has allowed
8

John Bodnar The American Historical Review Vol. 106, No. 3, Jun., 2001 805

War in Japanese Popular Culture104

ex-naval officers, their families, the Japanese entertainment industry, military hobbyists,and others to salvage a form of heroic narrative from the often grim history of the AsiaPacific War. While the Imperial Navy was certainly complicit in Japanese Empire, theorganization was not central to the massacres of civilians for which the Imperial Army has
become notorious. As horrifying as deaths in naval battles can be, and Yamato pulls nopunches in this regard, often surpassing the bloodshed of Saving Private Ryan by showing
young navy men torn apart by American bombs and shells, it is a historical viewpoint thatskips the worst horrors of Japan’s Pacific battlefields.
In Uejini shita eirei-tachi (The ‘Heroic Spirits’ Who Starved to Death), historian
Fujiwara Akira makes the striking argument, based on broad assessment of primaryhistorical documents and testimony, that as many as a million Japanese soldiers died fromstarvation or related diseases. On some battlefields, starving soldiers, cut off from chain ofcommand and any chance of supply, turned to cannibalism. These facts support anunderstanding of Japanese troops as both victimizers, the killers of innumerable civilians
and prisoners, and victims of military and political elites who treated them as “resources”
to be expended in a hopeless fight against a much more numerous and better armed enemy,
sending them to fight for the Emperor without even enough food to survive. Ooka Shohei, aveteran of the fighting in the Philippines, who became one of Japan’s most highly-regarded
postwar authors, describes his war experience in the 1951 novel Nobi (Fires on the Plain).
Ooka has the novel’s protagonist tell his commander that he is too sick to march, andinstead of receiving medicine or even sympathy, he is told that he is a burden and should
just “lie down somewhere and die.” This type of brutal indifference to the lives of drafteeson the part of officers runs through much autobiographical writing about the Asia-Pacific
war including Mizuki Shigeru’s manga. Compared to these horrors, taking a “naval view” of
the war allows for a relatively clean heroic story of Japanese battling Americans in amodern technological war distant from the grime, face-to-face slaughter, and emaciatedcorpses of the land fighting. Yamato is not a revisionist work, but by taking such a narrow
view of the war, it offers a skewed vision of tragic heroism. In this article, Andew Gerow
expands on the themes of Yamato and where it and similar works stand in Japan’s 21st
century memory culture.

Gerow: War and Nationalism in Yamato105

War and Nationalism in Yamato: Trauma and Forgetting the Postwar
Aaron Gerow
The recent spate of Japanese films dealing with World War II or with Japan fighting modern
wars raises questions about what kind of histories are being narrated, both wartime and postwar,
what they say about Japanese responsibility for war and atrocities in the Asia-Pacific War, andhow they relate to current trends in nationalism. The fear is that such movies resonate with otherphenomena, from the comments of Japanese officials, most recently exemplified by the speeches
and writings of retired General Tamogami Toshio, Japan’s former Air Self-Defense Force[ASDF] Chief of Staff, to popular manga like Kobayashi Yoshinori’s work, that seem tolegitimize Japan’s pursuit of war in East Asia and deny Japanese responsibility for atrocities.1 I
have already argued in Japan Focus, with regard to two cinematic imaginations of Japan at war,
the alternative World War II history Lorelei (Rōrerai, Higuchi Shinji, 2005), and the Maritime
Self-Defense Forces mutiny movie, Aegis (Bōkoku no ījisu, Sakamoto Junji, 2005), that suchfears of a rising revisionist nationalism in cinema are not always justified.2 Both works present a“victorious” Japan, populated by young people willing to sacrifice themselves for theircommunity, but through an entertainment cinema that appears so conscious of a consumer basewith conflicting opinions about the war and nationalism, that it attempts to construct ahegemonic vision of the nation that appeals to all sides, only to end up portraying an empty
Japan that can mean anything to anyone.
One could argue that this emptiness is a product of the fact that these films, both of which are
fantasies, do not carry the burden of the real memory of WWII and its aftermath. What of therecent films that take up actual historical moments and figures, such as kamikaze pilots or othersuicidal missions? Yamato (Otokotachi no Yamato, 2005), for instance, about the final days ofthe famed battleship, was a significant box office success, grossing ¥5.1 billion in ticket sales,
the fifth best selling Japanese film in a year when Japanese movies out-grossed foreign films forthe first time since 1985 (it was also the most successful Japanese war film in decades).
Yoshikuni Igarashi has argued that post-2000 kamikaze films
such as Fireflies (Hotaru, 2001) respond to the end of the
Shōwa Era and the Cold War by moving away from narratives
that previously marked a division between the war and thepostwar by depicting the heroic deaths of the kamikaze, as if
their demise signified the end of the war and its problems.
Newer films are considering the lingering traumatic effects of
the war on postwar Japan in the form of surviving kamikaze.3 I
contend, however, that the effect of many of these films is toengage not their manifest subjects, the post-1989 present oreven the wartime, but the problematic, usually unrepresented
history in between. Igarashi argues that Fireflies avoids dealing
with the trauma of the war by narrating a second set of deathsin the present, which cleanly conclude the postwar and divide
it from today. I contend that Yamato, on the other hand, which
offers no such deaths, performs wartime trauma in a vicarious
Advertisement: Yamato “rattles the fashion, using the disruptive effects of depicting WWII trauma
soul”
so as to divert the audience’s attention away from what mightWar in Japanese Popular Culture106

be for the majority of the audience, born after the war ended, the greater trauma: the postwar era
and its history of economic upheaval, American bases, student protest, or “democracy.” That
these films are also appearing at the time of the “Shōwa 30s” boom, featuring nostalgic
narratives of Japan between 1955 and 1965 such as the successful film series Always—Sunset on
Third Street, is no coincidence. Some films ignore the war and the long history of postwar
conflict to construct an idyllic postwar, while others “remember” wartime trauma in order to skip
to a present where that trauma has been solved. Both, however, construct a postwar empty ofproblems in order to avoid dealing with its traumatic and divisive history, primarily in order toestablish the illusion of a more unified present.
Yamato was produced by Takaiwa Tan, the chairman of Tōei, and Kadokawa Haruki, a maverick
producer who in the 1970s and 1980s introduced into the Japanese film industry new marketingstrategies for big-budget spectaculars. The film was Kadokawa’s return to success after his
cocaine bust in 1993 and reunited him with director Satō Jun’ya, who had helmed such early
Kadokawa blockbusters as Proof of the Man (Ningen no shōmei, 1976). Purportedly budgeted at
2.5 billion yen, quite high by Japanese standards, Yamato featured an all-star cast, including
Nakadai Tatsuya, Sorimachi Takashi, Nakamura Shidō, Matsuyama Ken’ichi, Okuda Eiji,
Suzuki Kyōka, Aoi Yū, Terajima Shinobu, and Watari Tetsuya, and a colossal set: a life-size
reproduction of the front half of the Battleship Yamato, itself the largest battleship everconstructed.
Yamato narrates the last days of the famous battleship, which was sunk off Japan on 7 April 1945
with a loss of 2740 lives after being sent on a suicidal mission to defend Okinawa. It does thisthrough two structuring devices: the first focusing on several young recruits who were only 17years old at the time of the last battle,
and the second, a framing narrative inwhich one of those recruits, Kamio
Katsumi, is asked sixty years later by
Makiko, the daughter of Uchida Mamoru,
one of his former shipmates, to take her
to the site of the sinking. Both are central
in articulating the film’s ambiguous, if
not contradictory politics. By
concentrating on the young men, the film,
Lost youth: Kamio (by the flag) and the other recruits
which was based on the award-winningbook by Henmi Jun (Kadokawa Haruki’ssister), is able to narrate a tale of innocent, promising spirits needlessly sent to their grisly deaths
by a central command that even the fleet commander, Itō Seiichi, registered objections to.
Although the older, adult trio of Moriwaki Shōhachi, Uchida, and Karaki Masao, who are
directly in charge of these young recruits, can convincingly voice their desire to sail to their
deaths because of their love for Yamato (and, correspondingly, the nation it is named for) andtheir hope of defending their families at home, the greenhorns’ similar statements lack force andare even questioned by Moriwaki at one point. Quite a number of voices, including that of thedirector, claimed Yamato was an anti-war film, one revealing the horrible waste of life caused bya reckless leadership.4 Yet right-wing commentators could also point to the same chaste sailors
and, especially by citing other texts like Nagabuchi Tsuyoshi’s honorific ending song, claim they
were presented as an example of selfless patriotism that all Japan should follow.5

Gerow: War and Nationalism in Yamato107

The framing structure only reinforces these possible, contradictory readings. Kamio’s narrationof what happened after Yamato’s loss, especially the deaths of his girlfriend Taeko and Uchida’s
lover Fumiko in the atomic attack on Hiroshima, prompts him to declare that even the hope ofdying to save their families came to naught. Kamio in particular is presented as a victim oftrauma after the war, unproductive (without wife or children) and reclusive (he did not evenknow Uchida had survived the Yamato sinking), whose problematic relation to memory is
exemplified both by his refusal to take part in Yamato memorials, and a physical debilitation (aheart ailment) that worsens as the site of his traumatic experience nears. Coupled with Uchida,
who was presumably rendered sterile by the war (his children are all adopted), Kamio represents
the loss of the masculine bravura that Moriwaki and Uchida exemplified during the war.
The present-day narrative is supposed to show the overcoming of such trauma, and, like films ina similar vein, such as Titanic and Saving Private Ryan, makes Yamato a film that combinesostensibly accurate spectacles of past events with the work of processing memory forcontemporary purposes. Perhaps it belongs in the “trauma cinema” that E. Ann Kaplan, Joshua
Hirsch, Janet Walker, and others have discussed.6 One would initially think not, however. Given
that mental trauma is usually theorized as coming from an experience so shocking and forcefulthat normal psychological structures are unable to manage it, thus leaving the traumatic memoryin the mind unprocessed and occasionally able to wreak havoc, many have labeled trauma
cinema those motion pictures which deal with experiences so overwhelming that normal modesof film, particularly the classical realism of Hollywood, cannot properly deal with it. Prominent
examples of trauma cinema are then films like Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog that are modernist
in form, which evince in their disjunctive cinematic structures both symptoms of the rupturing
effects of trauma, as well as innovative methods of representing experiences that are inherently
difficult to represent. Yamato, however, as many critics noted, even when judging it favorably, islargely conventional, if not clichéd in style. The form it relies on is not just the war film, but the
television history program, since it features both the familiar voice of TV Asahi announcer
Watanabe Noritsugu as the narrator, and the explanatory titles common to Japanese television
documentaries and historical dramas. Actually starting with documentary footage and images of
the Yamato Museum in Kure, Yamato manages a loss that, at least in terms of its own film form
is not hard to represent, that has already been memorialized in conventional ways. In some ways,
it is simply a reminder for those who haven’t gone to the museum.
That, however, does not account either for the film’s pretensions or its effects and popularity.
Uchida’s daughter, Makiko, visits the Yamato Museum at the beginning, but must go further tothe spot where the Yamato sank.
Yet this is a place where there is nothing,
not a trace of the ship or the event. The
film must fill in for such absences.
Nakamura Hideyuki has argued, bothwith regard to kamikaze films in generaland Yamato in particular, that such works
function as ceremony, representing thoseon suicide missions as essentiallydivine.7 Makiko, Kamio, and even the
Makiko’s visit to the Yamato Museum in Kure is not enough 15-year-old deckhand Atsushi thus travelto this place of nothingness because theWar in Japanese Popular Culture108

odyssey itself ceremoniously honors the dead. The fishing boat’s journey is also ostensibly
therapeutic, since it is directed not just at the honored dead, but also at the troubled living; notjust at a heroic past, but at a crippled present. Narratively, the voyage to this location is theoccasion for Kamio’s remembrances, with the authentic geography working to double theirveracity. What specifically triggers his recollections is photography: the portrait of Moriwaki,
Uchida, and Karaki that Makiko showshim.
And just as the photo introduces his
exploration of the past, so Yamato thefilm similarly offers itself to the audience
as a privileged means of not only
accompanying the travellers on thisauthentic journey, but also obtaining
unique access to the truth of thetraumatic event. If the trip helps cure
Kamio, so should it—and the movie-presumably help Japanese audiences
manage a problematic history.

A photograph of Karaki, Uchida, and Moriwaki summonsthe past

Before considering how it does that, we must ask what it is that the film ostensibly cures them of.
One can debate whether the trauma of WWII and Japan’s defeat is still felt, over sixty years after
the fact, with an audience that was mostly not alive at the time and, we are repeatedly told, notfully educated about those events. What is more important is that the film itself cites no suchproblem for average Japanese. Even their representatives on the boat, Makiko and the 15-yearold deckhand Atsushi, fail to speak of haunting memories that require resolution. Perhaps theirs
is not a narrative of trauma, but a coming of age journey: through Atsushi, the adolescents whoboarded Yamato (at the same age as Atsushi) but who could not grow up can finally become
adult, largely, as with Makiko, by discovering the identity of the absent father. The question is
how the audience is supposedly inserted into these larger issues. Recent Japanese war films, I
have argued, share the difficulty of linking individual narratives to the collective. Yamato alsobears this problem, but attempts to overcome it through what I call vicarious trauma.
Yamato was in some ways a traumatic film for spectators, too. Viewer comments on Yahoo
Japan and other sites often describe the difficulty of speaking or communicating after the film, as
if aphasia was one of its effects. What tends to be shocking is less the general narrative of theloss of the Yamato, than the way the innocent young recruits are killed through quite graphic
cinematic representation.

A vicariously traumatic depiction of young deaths

The gore exceeds narrative necessity, andwhile it might somewhat be justified
thematically if the film is anti-war, it is abrutal form of filmmaking that can be
cruel both to its characters and its
audience. To begin with, the violence canfunction to collectivize Kamio’s
individual trauma, to form a national
experience that is epitomized by theGerow: War and Nationalism in Yamato

109

salute of three generations to the honored
dead at the end of the film.
As a disruptive phenomenon, however,trauma helps disguise the inherent
differences between these generations.
For while Kamio’s trauma is rooted notjust in the meaningless loss of young
lives, but in the guilt over surviving andthe powerlessness to alter history—his
problem is precisely linear, based in the
Makiko, Kamio, and Atsushi salute the nation’s deadinability to turn back the clock—thespectator’s trauma is circular because it
refers to itself and allows for revisiting. The film touts its ability to access the source of trauma
just as it offers viewers the chance to relive it multiple times, even during the same viewing. Thisis a different form of vicarious trauma than the one described by Joshua Hirsch, who valorizes
some cinema as “a traumatic relay,” actually transmitting, sometimes in analogous form, aspectsof the original traumatic experience.7 There might be an element of this in Yamato, but here thevicariousness functions more as an indirect substitute than as empathic identification, one thatallows spectators to experience trauma in a safe, detached circularity. This is confirmed at theend of the film, which after giving audiences a strong emotional experience, allows them toremember and memorialize it only minutes later through slow-motion flashbacks of the same
brutal battle scenes under the credits. Just as trauma reflects back on cinema itself, the process ofremembering that experience is directed towards the movie. It is thus quite fitting that when
Yamato became a hit, the set of the movie became a tourist attraction in the six months after thefilm’s release for over one million people interested in reliving their experience.9
Kamio’s trauma can only be solved by becoming
similarly circular. On the personal level, it is theassertion that he has lived in order to remember
and memorialize the dead. This is a common
refrain in war films, but it doesn’t answer thetraumatic question of why these young men died,especially in a film that minutes before
questioned the meaning of their sacrifice. If
Kamio lived to memorialize the dead, did theydie only that so that they could be memorialized?
This perverse circularity is somewhat reinforcedon the collective level by the film’s quotation of
the legendary statement made by Lieutenant
Remembering war through its reproduction: the Usubuchi Iwao10 on the Yamato the day before
movie set at Onomichi
its final battle: that Japan can only progress
through defeat, and that the Yamato’s demise
was necessary for the rebirth or awakening of Japan.11 How this cause is supposed to bring about
the effect is uncertain, but the paradoxical victory of Japan through defeat clearly depends on theconstant reiteration of that defeat. This may be the justification for the film Yamato in a time ofpolitical and economic stagnation in Japan, but it writes a peculiar history, because linear

War in Japanese Popular Culture

110

progress can only be based on a repeated return to the past if part of that history is ruptured,dismembered, and forgotten. It takes the operations of trauma—by definition an often
unprocessed, unmediated, and disruptive experience—to make this possible, and that is one of
the main functions of the film’s vicarious trauma.
In Yamato, what is excised and forgotten is the history of postwar Japan. That is practicallyacknowledged by Kamio, who, at his moment of resolution, declares that for him the Shōwa era
is finally over. He has overcome his problem with history by recalling what happened sixty years
before, as if that alone is sufficient to deal with the entire problem of Shōwa, which continued
until 1989. Such resolution is possible only if the postwar is rendered inconsequential or a mere
reverberation of the wartime. Gone is the long-standing narrative of the postwar as return to andcontinuation of Taishō democracy, as the formation of a new international economic power. The
erasure of the postwar is evident in how Yamato rewrites one of the emblematic moments inpostwar Japanese cinema: the scene in Kurosawa Akira’s 1947 film No Regrets for Our Youth(Waga seishun ni kui nashi) where Yukie, played by Hara Setsuko, sets out during the war totend the rice paddies belonging to her mother-in-law, despite the public approbation sparked byher husband’s execution as a political traitor. Yamato shifts this into the immediate postwar, as
Kamio tends the paddies of his dead buddy Nishi’s mother not out of determination to maintainhis values or to change society, but out of guilt that he and not Nishi survived. Memorable
postwar transformations are morphed into postwar paralysis and impotence that supposedly lastfor the rest of the Shōwa era and become the focus of male melodrama—until they are to beforgotten. Next to shock, tears were the most common response reported by Yamato’s audiences,
and as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto has argued, melodrama was also a crucial narrative in immediate
postwar cinema.12 But whereas 1950s cinema used the melodrama of postwar suffering as ameans of forgetting wartime atrocities, Yamato, if not other recent kamikaze films as well, uses
wartime suffering to forget not only Japanese war responsibility, but also a postwar increasingly
defined, especially in contemporary popular culture, by emasculation and hypocrisy, orahistorical idealization. The latter is evident in the cultural nostalgia for the “Shōwa 30s” (1955
to 1964) that peaked around 2005. In cinema, this was exemplified by the two successful“Always” films that featured a late 1950s gemeinschaft community of lower class residents ofTokyo, apparently free of the political or cultural
strife that defined those years.13
Such nostalgia for the postwar, however, should
be seen not as the opposite, but as the other sideof the coin of the attempt to forget or bypass thepostwar, since both phenomena reveal afundamental aversion to confronting thehistorical transformations and socio-politicaldivisions that occurred in that era.
If Yamato deals with or reflects historical trauma,
it is less that of the war than of the postwar; it isthat history which its audience had reallyexperienced and desired to see erased by meansof the shock of defeat and the tearful eyes ofForgetful nostalgia: Always—Sunset on Third Street
Japanese masculinity. It is this trauma that thefilm cannot really face except through displacement, and so the postwar can only directly appear

Gerow: War and Nationalism in Yamato

111

in the film through absurd plot inconsistencies (how on earth could Kamio not know Uchida had
survived?) and the blatant inability to acknowledge contemporary political reality (i.e., showing
MSDF ships returning from a “refueling mission in the Indian Ocean” without daring to state thisis part of Japan’s support for the Iraq War).
This displacement, at least in Yamato, isrendered possible, I argue, through the
deployment of vicarious trauma. By
definition, trauma is an experience thathas not been properly processed or
mediated, that thus repeatedly returns,
disrupting time and narrative. Vicarious
trauma in Yamato allows spectators toshare in the experience proposed by the
Hidden reality: MSDF ships on a “refueling mission”
story, while also enabling the movie tojump between past and present, in thestory and in Japanese history, while avoiding the mediations and digestive processes of postwar
history.
Recent war films such as Yamato certainly seek a consensus in propounding a direct link
between the wartime and present-day Japan, but in the end they differ little from the empty
national consensus that their more fantastic brethren rely on. Postwar trauma is to be avoided—or displaced through such techniques as vicarious trauma—precisely because of the intense
divisions and turmoil it created; Yamato can only imagine a unified audience if it renders the
disputes of the postwar null and void, creating an imagined community only if an empty postwar
is equally imagined. That, of course, is the danger of such a text but it can also be said to be thesymptom of the very postwar trauma and turmoil it tries to elide. A new history that severs andskips the postwar (just as previous histories skipped the wartime), and re-members a cycle of
return between the present and the memorialized wartime, is a problematic one, especially for afilm like Yamato that bears at least some anti-war pretensions. This is partially the source of its
contradictory nationalism: celebrating life and survival like many other contemporary war films,
yet also depending on death and defeat for its reworking of postwar history; imagining an adultJapan in the new millennium, but without being able to narrate either a history of Japan’srecovery (its becoming adult?) or its geopolitical dependency on the United States. Yamato
strategically uses the ruptures of trauma to try to efface these aporia, all the while reassuring its
shocked audiences with a familiar, conventional film style. Remembering is here re-membering,
but with the dismembered parts of the nation, cinema and history, still poorly connected after
their rearrangement.14
This is a revised version of a paper initially presented in December 2008 as part of theconference “Divided Lenses: Film and War Memory in Asia” held at Stanford University. A
greatly expanded version will appear in an anthology of the conference papers, provisionallytitled “Divided Lenses: Asia Pacific War Memories on Film,” edited by Chiho Sawada andMichael Berry.
Aaron Gerow is Associate Professor of Film Studies and East Asian Languages and Literatures
at Yale University. His book, A Page of Madness came out from the Center for Japanese Studies
at the University of Michigan in 2008, and Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of

War in Japanese Popular Culture

112

Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship, 1895-1925, was published in 2010 (the Japanese version will
be coming out from the University of Tokyo Press). He also co-authored the Research Guide to
Japanese Film Studies with Abe Mark Nornes (Center for Japanese Studies, 2009).
Bibliography
Gerow, Aaron. “Fantasies of War and Nation in Recent Japanese Cinema.” Japan Focus (20February 2006)
Hirsch, Joshua. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2004.
Igarashi, Yoshikuni. “Kamikaze Today: The Search for National Heroes in Contemporary Japan.”
In Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia. Eds.
Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. 99-121.
Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005
Nakamura Hideyuki. “Tokkōtai hyōshōron.” In Iwanami kōza: Ajia, Taiheiyō sensō, vol. 5:
Senjō no shosō. Iwanami Shoten: 2006: 301-330.
----. “Girei toshite no tokkō eiga: Otokotachi no Yamato/Yamato no baai.” Zen’ya 7 (Spring2006). 134-137.
Satō Kōji. “Otokotachi no Yamato o megutte: Rekishigaku no shiza kara.” Kikan sensō sekinin
kenkyū 56 (Summer 2007): 74-80.
Standish, Isolde. Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema. Richmond: Curzon, 2000.
Wakakuwa Midori. “Jendā no shiten de yomitoku sengo eiga: Otokotachi no Yamato o chūshin
ni.” Tōzai nanboku (2007): 6-17.
Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2005.
Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro. “Melodrama, Postmodernism, and Japanese Cinema,” East West Film
Journal 5.1 (1991). 28–55.
Notes
1

In October 2008, General Tamogami won a lucrative prize for an essay entitled “Was Japan an
Aggressor Nation?” in a contest sponsored by a construction company whose CEO has espoused
rightwing views. His main arguments were that Japan was manipulated into participating inWorld War II by China and the United States under the influence of the Comintern, and thatJapan’s reliance on America for military defense is destroying its national culture. In the ensuing
controversy, he was eventually relieved of his post and pressed into retirement. Kobayashi’s
manga, beginning with the notorious On War (Sensōron), have aggressively attempted to rewrite
Japan’s history of war and colonization and advocate a nationalism that abandons the selfishnessof today’s youth and emulates the sacrifices of the kamikaze pilots.

Gerow: War and Nationalism in Yamato

113

2

Aaron Gerow, “Fantasies of War and Nation in Recent Japanese Cinema,” Japan Focus (20February 2006)
3

Yoshikuni Igarashi, “Kamikaze Today: The Search for National Heroes in Contemporary
Japan, ” in Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post-Cold War in Asia, eds. Sheila
Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007): 99-121.
4

Shūkan Kinyōbi (6 January 2006); or Julian Ryall, “Raising the Yamato,” Foreign
Correspondents Club of Japan.
5See, for instance, the rightwing blog: red.ap.teacup.com/sunvister6

See E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film,
Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004); or Janet Walker,
Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005).
7

See Nakamura Hideyuki, “Tokkōtai hyōshōron,” in Iwanami kōza: Ajia, Taiheiyō senno, vol. 5:
Senjō no shosō (Iwanami Shoten: 2006): 301-330; and Nakamura Hideyuki, “Girei toshite notokkō eiga: Otokotachi no Yamato/Yamato no baai,” Zen’ya 7 (Spring 2006): 134-137.
8

Hirsch 13.

9“Onomichi fan kakutoku ni kōken,” Chūgoku shinbun, 8 May 2006.

10

Played by Nagashima Kazushige, son of baseball legend Nagashima Shigeo.

11

While there are doubts about the authenticity of this statement, it was popularized by Yoshida
Mitsuru’s Requiem for Battleship Yamato. The same sentiment is uttered in Lorelei as well.
12

Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “Melodrama, Postmodernism, and Japanese Cinema,” East West Film
Journal 5.1 (1991): 28–55.
13

Always—Sunset on Third Street (Always—sanchōme no yūhi) was released in 2005 andAlways—Sunset on Third Street 2 (Always—zoku sanchōme no yūhi) hit theaters in 2007. Bothwere based on the manga by Saigan Ryōhei and directed by Yamazaki Takashi. The first film
was the seventh best-grossing Japanese film of 2005, and its sequel the third best of 2007.
14

The longer version of this essay considers other recent kamikaze films such as For Those We
Love (Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku, 2007) and Sea Without Exit (Deguchi no naiumi, 2006). Few such films have been made since 2008, but the rewriting of the postwar has
continued with remakes of classic postwar films such as Kurosawa Akira’s Sanjuro (Tsubaki
Sanjūrō) and Hidden Fortress (Kakushitoride no san akunin) or Kudō Eiichi’s Thirteen
Assassins (Jūsannin no shikaku). It will be important to see whether the trauma of the March 11
disaster will be used as another means for avoiding the problems of the postwar—including theinstitutional structures that themselves led in part to the Fukushima accident.

War in Japanese Popular Culture

114“World War II as Trauma, Memory and Fantasy in Japanese Animation”
Susan J. Napier
May 31, 2005
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Susan_J_-Napier/1972
As the essays in this collection suggest, representations of war are varied andmemories of war are expressed in many different ways. Apart from works that seek torepresent the Asia-Pacific War directly, there are also examples of popular culture thatrefer to the conflict obliquely or even use fantasy or science fiction scenarios as a metaphor
or allegory to address the historical conflict and its postwar ramifications.
In this article, Susan Napier looks at the perennial popularity and importance of the
Yamato story. The historical battleship that featured in Andrew Gerow’s article wasresurrected as a “space battleship” in the 1974 anime series Uchu senkan Yamato (Space
Battleship Yamato). The show, which has spawned a range of spin-offs down to the 20122013 Uchu senkan Yamato 2199 (Space Battleship Yamato 2199), follows a Japanese crew
who protect the earth from alien invasion and radioactive destruction.
The Yamato has popped up in other forms as well. In Kawaguchi Kaiji’s manga
Chinmoku no kantai (The Silent Service, 1988-1996), also detailed in Napier’s article, aJapanese Self Defense Force captain hijacks a nuclear-armed submarine that Japandeveloped jointly with the United States. Renaming it Yamato, he seeks to break Japan’s
military ties with America.
Uchu senkan Yamato and Chinmoku no kantai are pop culture visions that draw on
the memories and legacies of the Asia-Pacific War in ways very different from the otherworks detailed in this reader. Neither fits easily into victim, victimizer, or neonationalist categories. Instead, both combine a “war as entertainment” tone with someserious discussion of Japan’s place in postwar geo-politics and reflect on the overall
meaning of war in contemporary culture. The anime and manga mediums have produced
many such works, some of which rank among the country’s most popular cultural exports.
Hagane no renkinjutsushi (Full Metal Alchemist, 2001-2010) features a team ofprotagonists who participated in a genocidal war years before and continue to struggle
with memories of the atrocities they committed or allowed to take place. Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex (2002-2003) and the follow-up 2nd Gig (2004-2005) look at theconcept of Japan’s ikkoku heiwa shugi (“one country pacifism”) and question the place of
the Japanese military and military alliance with the United States in the context of Article 9,
the “peace clause” of the Japanese Constitution. The film version, Solid State Society (2006),
even casts neo-nationalists as the villains. Susan Napier’s article provides an excellent
foundation for considering the prevalence of themes related to the Asia-Pacific War inJapanese twenty-first-century popular culture.

Napier: World War II as Trauma, Memory and Fantasy in Japanese Animation

115

World War II as Trauma, Memory and Fantasy in Japanese Animation
By Susan J. Napier
In her book Hiroshima Traces Lisa Yoneyama discusses how recent scholarship has tended todefine memory in opposition to history, suggesting that “Memory has often been associated withmyth or fiction and contrasted with History as written by professionals. [1] Yoneyama herself
problematizes this opposition as a “false dichotomy,” stating that “the production of knowledge
about the past … is always enmeshed in the exercise of power and is always accompanied byelements of repression.” [2] She exhorts her readers to remember that, “we begin ourinvestigations into the past with an awareness that historical ‘reality’ can only be made available
to us through the mediation of given categories of representation and processes of signification.”[3] This article examines how one of the most significant events in modern Japanese history,
defeat in the Second World War, is represented through the medium of animation, a medium
which allows history and memory to transform into myth and even into fantasy, ultimately
creating for the viewer an experience which allows for a working through of what might becalled historical trauma.
Japanese popular culture has engaged with memories of the Second World War since at least theearly 1950’s when the first Godzilla (Gojira) film took on atomic testing, wholesale destruction
and the American enemy in the form of a kaiju eiga or monster movie. Japanese manga (comic
books) have revisited WWII often, especially in the works of Matsumoto Leiji whose depictionsof aerial dogfights and last minute sacrifices gained a wide following. Since the 1960s, animatedfilms and television series have produced some of the most memorable visions of the war. The
two most famous of these are the remarkably faithful recreations or rememorations ofcataclysmic events such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima depicted in Barefoot Gen (Hadashi
no Gen 1983) and the final days of the war as seen by two children in Kobe shown in Grave ofFireflies (Hotaru no haka, 1988). In these two films personal memory on the part of the writersof the original texts (respectively Nakazawa Keiji on whose autobiographical manga Barefoot
Gen is based and Nosaka Akiyuki who wrote the semi-autobiographical short story Grave ofFireflies), became part of a collective Japanese memory as the films were seen by millions ofJapanese schoolchildren. But the war, the defeat and the atomic bomb also manifest themselves
consistently in more displaced forms, most obviously in the overall fetishization of apocalypse
which has been a staple of Japanese animation since the 1970’s to the present.
Here discussion focuses on one anime depiction, the Space Battleship Yamato (Uchu Senkan
Yamato) television and film series from the 1970’s and what might be called the Yamato’s
descendant, the series Silent Service (Chinmoku no Kantai) from the late 1990’s. Both works
refer explicitly to the Second World War at the same time as they go beyond history and memory
to produce a cathartic and fantastic reworking of the loss.

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The Space Battleship Yamato series premiered in October of 1974, three years earlier than thefirst Star Wars film. Like Star Wars and the 1960’s American Star Trek series, however, Yamato
can be seen as an immensely entertaining science fiction series, with memorable characters,
cutting edge special effects (for the period), and compelling story lines, that also possesses astrong ideological subtext. In the case of Star Trek and Star Wars, this subtext is clearly linked tothe period in which each was created. Star Trek with its introspective, racially mixed crew andregular invocation of the Enterprise’s mission, “to seek out new worlds and new civilizations”
may be seen as an optimistic answer to American anxieties during the Vietnam War, when many
at home and abroad perceived America’s advance into Southeast Asia as racist and imperialist.
The original Star Wars trilogy, on the other hand, with its evil Galactic Empire and largely
Caucasian cast, took place mainly during the manicheanism of the Reagan years when American
triumphalism coexisted with heightened Cold War tensions.
The Yamato series can also be seen as a product of its time when Japan was one generation awayfrom the war, an era in which technology and economic success seemed to promise a bright
future, but also one in which many expressed anxiety over loss of basic Japanese traditions,
including notions of community, sacrifice, and respect for the past. Unlike Star Wars and Star
Trek, however, which take place in the science fiction continuum that Fredric Jameson describes
as “the defamiliarization of the present “ (my italics), the action of the Yamato films ispredicated on coming to terms with a past event, the sinking of the battleship Yamato off
Okinawa in the final days of the war, an incident that, in its iconic significance for the Japanesepeople, may be interpreted as an originary event, linked with the supreme originary event, theloss of the war. Furthermore this is an event which, in displaced form, is revisited constantly
throughout the series, a dip into a quasi-repressed nightmarish past which, through the mediumof animated science fiction, is reworked into a dream of success.
Interestingly, when the series was initially shown on Japanese television it garnered relatively
low ratings, forcing the producer, Nishizaki Yoshinobu, (the actual creator of the series was
Matsumoto Leiji and there were a number of different directors involved), to shorten the original
39 week broadcast to 26 weeks. It was with the opening of the first Yamato film, however,(essentially a compilation from the season’s episodes), that the film and series began to become a
pop culture phenomenon. In fact, the Yamato film series is widely credited with having inspired
the beginnings of anime fandom, as fans from around the country came to camp out on thecinema’s steps the night before the opening. [5] As the editorial staff of Animerica puts it, “thefirst film] ignited a ‘Yamato craze’ which would go on to consume Japan-and eventually manyother parts of the world-for the next ten years.” [6]The four films comprising the 1970’s cinema series range over a mise en scene that varies from
Earth to the Magellanic Clouds and beyond, even to the fourth dimension, but always calling
attention to the WWII historical framework. [7] This is most obvious in the first film of the series
Battleship Yamato (Uchusenkan Yamato), when an increasingly radioactive future earth ismenaced by alien invaders known as the Gamilans. For somewhat enigmatic reasons, thegovernment decides that the only way to save humanity is to revive the actual battleship Yamato
from its watery grave off Okinawa. The sequence in which the Yamato is raised is clearlycalculated to be both thrilling and deeply evocative of the actual historical event of the Yamato’s
sinking. In a several minute sequence the film flashes back to the sailing of the original Yamato,Napier: World War II as Trauma, Memory and Fantasy in Japanese Animation

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the largest battleship ever created. As the film indicates, the battleship Yamato was freighted
with far more iconic significance than an ordinary ship. Its name itself consciously refers toJapan, since “Yamato” was the ancient name for Japan and warriors were urged to have
Yamatodamashii (Yamato spirit). Equally important, the ship bore the final hopes of warding off,
or at least slowing the advance of invading Americans on the eve of the battle of Okinawa.
The film shows the 1945 Yamato setting sail, waved off by ordinary Japanese hopeful of its
success, then offers a detailed depiction of its destruction. The film then cuts to the future,
showing the ship’s literal resurrection. Through the astonished eyes of two young soldiers, we
see the reconstituted Yamato breaking through mud and rock (the accretions of history), to thestrains of moving music. The following scene shows its successful first flight, also accompaniedby emotionally charged music. In these few minutes the film encapsulates emotions ranging fromdespair to hope, the basic emotional trajectory of the entire series.
In an article on the Yamato phenomenon originally published in Bungei Shunjuu, the Japanesewriter Yoshida Mitsuru sums up the first film in the following manner:
Space Cruiser Yamato fights alone as best it can against the swarms of enemy forces, its
unassisted fight reminiscent of how the battleship Yamato accompanied by only 10 ships andwith no air protections, fought a fatal battle and sank off Okinawa before the onslaught of 300
American warships and 1,200 American planes. But unlike the tragic demise of its prototype, thespace cruiser Yamato successfully obtains the radioactivity-removing device with the help of
Stasha, a mysterious beauty who lives on the planet Iscandall, destroys the Gamilus forces andreturns safely to earth. [8]The Yamato's successful saving of the earth becomes the basic diegetic pattern for the series.
Battles are fought, new worlds are discovered, the earth is menaced and then saved, always by
the Yamato which miraculously survives destruction time after time. Indeed, throughout the
spaceship’s interstellar journeys one tactic is particularly common: faced with a particularly
menacing threat—one that seems impossible to escape—the crew consistently chooses, notsimply to confront the menace, but to head straight into it, courting almost inevitable disaster but
somehow emerging intact. At one point in Space Battleship Yamato (the first film of the series),
for example, the crew of the Yamato is attempting to engage with an alien attack force, only to
be stymied by the intensity of a star that blocks their passage. Rather than trying to go around thestar and lose precious time, the crew suits up in special heat suits and skims the fiery surface,plunging through awesome solar flares that almost consume it and finally just managing toescape. Later in the same film the Yamato is nearly destroyed by a metal-eating oil sea while
being attacked by an enemy above the surface. Rather than emerge from the water, however, theYamato submerges into the sea just long enough to start a chain reaction on the planet’s surface
that will annihilate the enemy. At the end of Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato (Saraba
Uchusenkan Yamato, 1978), the brave and handsome young captain Kodai Susumu, alone on theship with his dead girlfriend, plunges the ship into a kind of death star disguised as a white cometin order to save the earth even at the cost of the Yamato and his own life. In Be Forever Yamato(Yamato: Eien ni, 1980), the fourth film of the series, the ship is forced to go into the center of
the terrifying Black Nebula, where it are bombarded by both asteroids and enemy forces in a
virtual visual and aural symphony of destruction. At the last moment, however, the crewWar in Japanese Popular Culture

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discovers an exit space from the Nebula that places them above a planet that seems to be an exact
twin of the Earth, 200 years in the future.
All these exciting sequences no doubt provide suspenseful pleasure for the series’ target
audience of children and adolescents, as the Yamato comes again and again within a hair’s
breadth of being annihilated. But the craft’s constant plunges into danger followed by miraculous
recovery can also be looked at psychoanalytically as plunges into the collective unconscious of
the postwar Japanese citizenry, a form of “working through” the collective national trauma of
defeat. By offering the audience the chance to vicariously approach the moment of Yamato’s(Japan’s) annihilation and then successfully escape what seems like inevitable destruction, thefilms can be seen as a form of cultural therapy in which loss is revisited in a fundamentally
reassuring manner.
One of the most interesting examples of this “cultural therapy” may be seen in Forever Yamato
when the ship, after going through what is perhaps another dimension, discovers what seems to
be a future earth. This is an earth however, in which according to its history, the Yamato neverreturned from its current mission and much of earth’s culture was lost. The present day
inhabitants of the future “earth” attempt to convince the Yamato’s crew that they should simply
stay in the future since history tells them that they will only be annihilated if they try to return.
Just as the crew is about to despair, however, one of the crew begins to notice suspicious
differences between our earth and the future earth (such as the fact that Rodin’s “Thinker”’shand is the wrong one). Realizing that this future earth is actually a simulacrum, a trap set up by
the alien enemy, the Yamato escapes, battles its way back across the universe and, of course,
saves the earth.
Even more than the first film, Forever Yamato addresses and plays on postwar Japaneseanxieties, perhaps the most fundamental of which is that the successes of the postwar period
were not sustainable. Like a dream within a dream the film’s diegesis allows for an initialreworking of the defeat only to suggest that this reworking was itself a fake, (just as when we“wake “from a nightmare only to realize that the nightmare is still continuing) and that in “reality”
the Yamato never does make it back to save the earth. At the last moment however, the film
offers an alternative “true” reality in which the nightmare future is seen as only a simulacrum
and the Yamato sails triumphantly on.
Of the postwar attitude toward the defeat, Yoshikuni Igarashi writes, “…the desire to return to
the traumatic experiences of the Pacific War did not disappear with Japan’s prosperity, since thenarrative of progress posited its losses as the origin of the postwar Japanese society.” He goes on
to say that “the familiarity of the narrative simply transformed the eyewitness accounts intoclichés “ and that “the articulation of the war experience could take place only in the form ofrepetition, trapped between the contradictory needs to remember and to forget the traumatic war
experience.” [9]I would suggest that the Space Battleship Yamato series goes beyond both remembering andforgetting. Through its medium (animation) and genre (futuristic science fiction) the series
defamiliarizes the war experience, allowing not only a working through of the trauma of defeat(through innumerable repetitions of attack and destruction) but ultimately a reworking of thedefeat, both through the final success of the Yamato in every encounter and, even more

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importantly, through the fetishization of the spaceship Yamato itself, not only a symbol ofJapan’s final battles in WWII but also a symbol of the Japanese nation. Even more than theatomic bomb, which has become what Marilyn Ivy calls a metatrope for loss in contemporary
Japan, [10] the Yamato, both the original and the animated versions, are tropes of the Japanese
identity, initially configured as one of loss and destruction but, through the medium of animatedfantasy, able to become a trope of renewal and hope. For in many ways this reworking is apositive one, as the Yamato is more or less transformed from the emblem of prewar Japanesemilitarism to a global (literally) emissary of peace and love to the universe. This universalizationof the Yamato’s iconic significance is made abundantly clear throughout the series. The earth is
now a single nation united against alien blue-skinned enemies (although the characters’ names
are all Japanese and some, such as “Tokugawa” or “Okita” have historical significance) and thetheme of love of humankind is constantly evoked, sometimes explicitly in the lyrics to various
theme music, and in the second film Farewell Yamato’s subtitle Soldiers of Love (Ai nosenshitachi).
If the atomic bomb was a symbol for Japanese of powerlessness and victimhood, as a result of an
unexpected outside force the sinking of the Yamato is a more culturally specific vision of defeat
and despair. While some Japanese criticized the film on its initially appearance as potentiallyreviving militarism [11] the films project a very explicit message of universal love, not simply
among the inhabitants of earth but involving at least some of earth’s alien enemies as well.
Furthermore, the Yamato unlike the Enterprise in Star Trek is always in a reactive rather thanproactive mode, defending the earth rather than seeking out adventures.
A more complex situation is limned in the 1990’s film and manga series Silent Service. This
series, set in the contemporary era, features a nuclear submarine, originally under joint. U.S.Japanese command and originally called the “Seabat.” In a surprise twist, however, the Japanesecrew takes over the submarine and turns it into a rogue vessel, no longer under the command of
any nation. Most of the series consists of the travels of the submarine and the attempts by theinternational community to find and seize it, constantly defeated by the plucky and resourceful
Japanese captain who masterminded the takeover in the first place. Although unexpected, thetakeover is actually presaged by a significant action taken by the Japanese commander early onin the story. Alone with the Seabat, he takes out his knife and carves a single word into the hull.
The word (in Japanese) is “Yamato.”
Although the overall diegesis of Silent Service is less specifically evocative of history than was
the Yamato series, history is still an important emotional catalyst behind the plot, as the above
incident illustrates. This more recent series is a reworking of defeat and loss on a more proactive
level. No longer in the therapeutically safe and dreamlike realm of the outer space of the future,
Silent Service suggests a world of increasing international tension and rising Japanesenationalism, with the Americans clearly delineated and made to appear foolish.
Whether this contemporary reworking of loss and defeat is therapeutic or problematic remains
open to question. Yoshida Mitsuru, himself a survivor of the Yamato’s sinking, insists that,“Fortunately the space cruiser Yamato is decisively different from the battleship Yamato.” [12]The same may not be said as easily of the Japanese appropriation of the Seabat, clearly a symbolof the desire for Japanese autonomy from America.

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In his seafaring novel Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad creates a character (Jim), who cannot escape oreven completely acknowledge a tragic mistake in his past, one that involved the lives of many
innocent passengers on a pilgrim ship. In a famous and much critically debated scene, Jim’s two
mentors, Stein and Marlowe, discuss what to do with him. It is Stein who has the last word,
telling Marlowe that Jim must “in the destructive element immerse,” advice that I take to meanthat Jim must confront his past and his own identity. In a sense Jim does accomplish this task
although in a somewhat displaced and deeply romantic form, and one which ultimately involves
the sacrifice of his life. Both the crew of the Yamato and the former SeaBat are also plunging
into a destructive element, one composed of memory, history, loss and desire. That these“immersions” are also popular entertainment does not lessen their impact.
Susan Napier is Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Professor of Japanese Studies at the University ofTexas. Her most recent book, Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke, will be published in arevised edition as Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle in December from Palgrave.
This article, prepared for Japan Focus, expands on a presentation on the sixtieth anniversary of
the end of World War II at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Chicago,
March, 31- April 2, 2005. Posted at Japan Focus on May 31, 2005.
[1] Lisa Yoneyama. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1999) 27.
[2] Ibid, 27[3] Ibid,, 28.
[4] I am indebted to two former students for my initial interest in the Yamato series. Karline
McLain’s paper “Remembering the Past, Recasting Identity” linked the sinking of the Yamato to
the atomic bombings while Eric Carmen’s presentation on the original battleship Yamato mademe aware of how accurate was the anime version of the historical event and inspired me to
explore reasons behind this obsessive attention to verisimilitude.
[5] See “All Aboard to the Land of Dreams,” an interview with Ishiguro Noboru, one of the
Yamato directors, for an account of the beginning of Yamato fandom. (Animerica, Vol. 3, No. 8,
1995), 7 and 9. Ironically, the Yamato series, renamed Star Blazers and edited for an American
audience, is also considered to be the initial inspiration behind American anime fandom. See
Robert Fenelon, “Talking about my Star Blazers Generation,” (Animerica, Vol. 3, No.8, 1995), 8
and 10, and Walter Amos, “The Star Blazers You Didn’t See” (Animerica, Vol. 3, No. 8, 1995),
10.
[6] Animerica Editorial Board, “Yamato Forever," (Animerica,Vol. 3, No. 8, 1995), 6.
[7] More so than either Star Wars or Star Trek, space itself becomes a character in the Yamato
series since much of the action takes place while the ship is on interstellar voyages (beautifully
rendered in lush, dreamlike imager), rather than on planets. The fascination with the element of
space may connect with the modern Japanese consciousness of the Pacific Ocean, whichsurrounds their island nation, and more specifically, with the crucial role the Pacific in both thesuccesses and failures of World War II. For a discussion of the Pacific in Japanese scienceNapier: World War II as Trauma, Memory and Fantasy in Japanese Animation

121

fiction see Thomas Schnellbacher, “Has the Empire Sunk Yet? –The Pacific in Japanese Science
Fiction,” in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, Part 3, 2002, 382-396.
[8] Yoshida Mitsuru, “The ‘Space Cruiser Yamato’ Generation,” (Japan Echo, Vol. VI. No. 1,
1979), 82.
[9] Yoshikuni Igarashi. Bodies of Memory. (Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 2000),167.
[10] Marilyn Ivy. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 14.
[11] See the discussion by Yoshida Mitsuru, “The ‘Space Cruiser Yamato’ Generation,” op cit.,
85-87.
[12] Ibid., 86.

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Asia-Pacific Journal Articles Recommended for Further Reading
Popular Culture“‘To Protect Japan’s Peace We Need Guns and Rockets:’ The Military Uses of Popular
Culture in Current-day Japan”
Sabine Frühstück
August 24, 2009http://www.japanfocus.org/-Sabine-Fruhstuck/3209
This course reader has explored the ways in which past wars are presented in Japanese
popular culture. In this article, Sabine Frühstück brings the discussion forward to explore
how Japan’s contemporary armed forces are represented in pop culture and particularly
how the military has used manga, models, and teen idols to build a “peace” brand for public
consumption.
“Nationalism and Anti-Americanism in Japan—Manga Wars, Aso, Tamogami, andProgressive Alternatives”
Matthew Penney
April 26, 2009http://www.japanfocus.org/-Matthew-Penney/3116
This article describes ways that the Japan-US relationship has been represented in popular
culture. While some works engage in demonization of America because of complex
concerns about Japanese sovereignty and American militarism, others seek a more variedor positive portrayal, looking at Japanese war crimes alongside different contexts ofAmerican violence.
“‘Hating “The Korean Wave”’ Comic Books: A sign of New Nationalism in Japan?”
Rumi Sakamoto and Matthew Allen
October 24, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Mathew-Allen/2535
Sensoron (On War) author Kobayashi Yoshinori has a rival for the title of the most popularand influential of Japan’s right-wing cartoonists. Yamano Sharin’s Kenkanryu (Hating the
Korea Wave) is an anti-Korea screed that is representative of the xenophobic culture of
online comments and videos that has emerged in Japan in the 2000s. Sakamoto and Allen
explain why South Korea, a democracy that like Japan is a close ally of the United States, has
become the primary target of the online right.

War in Japanese Popular Culture

123“‘Koreans, Go Home!’ Internet Nationalism in Contemporary Japan as a Digitally
Mediated Subculture”
Rumi Sakamoto
March 7, 2011
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Rumi-SAKAMOTO/3497
In this article, Rumi Sakmoto expands on her critique of Kenkanryu and looks at therhetoric of online rightists, exploring how the internet as a medium of communication has
shaped ultra-nationalist expression.
“Godzilla and the Bravo Shot: Who Created and Killed the Monster?”
Yuki Tanaka
June 13, 2005
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/1652
Godzilla is one of the most famous characters in Japanese popular culture and is deeply tied
to memories of the Asia-Pacific War, especially the atomic bombs and firebombing ofJapanese cities. In this article, Yuki Tanaka explains the significance of Godzilla in Japanese
historical memory and how the famous series reflects Japan’s postwar relationship with
the United States.
“War and Peace in the Art of Tezuka Osamu: The Humanism of His Epic Manga”
Yuki Tanaka
September 20, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Yuki-TANAKA/3412
Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989) is known in Japan as “The God of Comics.” He is the creator of
innumerable famous manga such as Astroboy, Jungle Emperor, Phoenix, and Black Jack andalso produced Japan’s first TV anime. Anti-militarism, including reflection on Japan’s
wartime past, was a consistent theme in Tezuka’s work. In this article, Yuki Tanaka
presents an analysis of Tezuka’s career and a personal reflection on the manga artist’s
importance as an anti-war thinker.
Other Themes
Textbooks Controversies“Japanese Textbook Controversies, Nationalism, and Historical Memory: Intra- andInter-national Conflicts”
Yoshiko Nozaki and Mark Selden
June 15, 2009http://www.japanfocus.org/-Yoshiko-Nozaki/3173

War in Japanese Popular Culture
Memories of the Atomic Bombings“Hiroshima and Nagasaki at 65—A Reflection”
Satoko Norimatsu
December 27, 2010
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Satoko-NORIMATSU2/3463
Tokyo Air Raid Testimony“The Tokyo Air Raids in the Words of Those Who Survived”
Bret Fisk
January 17, 2011
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Bret-Fisk/3471
The Tokyo Air Raid in Drawings“That Unforgettable Day--The Great Tokyo Air Raid through Drawings”
The Sumida Local Culture Resource Center, Translated by Bret Fisk
January 17, 2011
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Sumida_Local_Cultural_Research_Center_of_Taize-/3470
Museums“Exhibiting World War II in Japan and the United States”
Laura Hein and Akiko Takenaka
July 20, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Akiko-TAKENAKA/2477
Imperial War Responsibility“Emperor, Shinto, Democracy: Japan’s Unresolved Questions of Historical
Consciousness”
Herbert P. Bix
June 13, 2005
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Herbert_P_-Bix/1865

124

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Yasukuni Shrine“Yasukuni Shrine at the Heart of Japan’s National Debate: History, Memory, Denial”
Takahashi Tetsuya
April 6, 2007
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Takahashi-Tetsuya/2401
Artwork“Against Forgetting: Three Generations of Artists in Japan in Dialogue about theLegacies of World War II”
Rebecca Jennison and Laura Hein
July 25, 2011
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Laura-Hein/3573