Abstract: There is a multiplicity of narratives in Japan about WWII, each of which casts wartime Japan in a different light – typically as either victim or aggressor. This paper examines these differing narratives in the testimonies of Japanese civilians given 40 years after WWII, relying on theories by Lawrence Langer, Fujitani et al, and some quantitative analysis. I find that these narratives vary based on the information emphasized in the testimony: the victim narrative emphasizes personal accounts of suffering whereas the aggressor narrative emphasizes suffering Japan caused other nations. Furthermore, these narratives are not mutually exclusive, but rather can co-exist within the same testimony, as the aggressor narrative often must appeal to the societally dominant victim narrative in order to be heard. Also, testifiers are aware of other narratives of the war, so they often respond to those narratives within their own. I also find significant discrepancies among subgroups of Japanese civilians in their narrativizations of WWII. Females are more likely to lapse into a victim narrative, as are the testimonies of the generation who survived the war. These discrepancies can be explained by differing levels of subjection to the dominant narrative, differing wartime experiences, or total lack of wartime experiences.
Keywords: WWII, narrativization, memory, victim, aggressor
Introduction
Despite its advances in democratization since 1945, contemporary Japan still struggles to come to terms with its wartime past. The Japanese government has received international criticism – notably from China and Korea – for its wartime atrocities, and their answer has been deemed less than satisfactory by the international community. Yet, the Japanese government continues to deny reparations to comfort women and prominent public officials regularly visit Yasukuni shrine, which has caused other countries to view Japan’s statements of apology as insincere. Furthermore, the war is also an issue of controversy within Japan itself, especially with the continued censorship of textbooks by the Ministry of Education, which has been brought to public attention most famously by Ienaga Saburō.[1] The Ministry of Education attempts to limit mentions of Japanese wartime atrocities in history textbooks in an effort to portray a more positive view of Japanese history. This general inability to take responsibility for the war can be traced back to the Occupation of Japan by Allied powers immediately after the war, as Occupation authorities decided to limit responsibility to a handful of wartime military leaders. As such, the Japanese public and even the emperor himself were acquitted of war responsibility. Coupled with the fact that many Japanese civilians experienced much suffering on the home front during wartime due to shortages and Allied bombings, many Japanese people even today consider themselves victims of war, with only limited interrogation of Japanese responsibility for the war. Such a phenomenon demands scholarly investigation into the precise way Japanese civilians remember WWII, and the extent to which they acknowledge responsibility in the war.
Indeed, this subject has been given plenty of scholarly attention already, as scholars since the immediate postwar have been concerned with understanding the causes that led Japan on the path to war. Most famously, Maruyama Masao has written a number of essays in the immediate postwar trying to explain wartime Japan and its ultra-nationalism. Maruyama, along with most other scholars of the time, ultimately accept the narrative of the war supported by Occupation authorities, which was that ordinary Japanese people were deceived by the military elite, and as such, ordinary Japanese civilians were also to be considered victims of the war. He argues in “Theory and Psychology of Ultra-Nationalism” that the entire wartime structure can be understood as a vertical chain with the emperor at the apex, where everyone was simultaneously being regulated by authority from above while imposing their own authority below.[2] Thus, no one in wartime Japan could be considered truly free, which means that it becomes near-impossible to attribute responsibility for the war.
In the years since, more scholars have devoted their attention explicitly to Japanese remembrance of WWII, and they have come up with a multiplicity of narratives about the war in Japan. Generally speaking, scholars have identified three main types of narratives about the war: the victim narrative, the aggressor narrative, and the hero narrative. The names for these categorizations come from Hashimoto Akiko’s book The Long Defeat: Cultural Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Japan, though Walter Hatch makes a similar tri-fold distinction in his essay “Bloody Memories: Affect and Effect of World War II Museums in China and Japan.” The victim narrative follows in the footsteps of Maruyama Masao and the immediate postwar Occupation, portraying Japan as a victim of the war and emphasizing the oppression of ordinary Japanese civilians by the wartime military state. This narrative is also associated with movements in Japan pushing for universal pacifism, which deems all wars as unequivocally bad and holds that Japan, having experienced such suffering in WWII, should devote itself completely to peace. Takenaka Akiko’s paper titled “Collecting for Peace: Memories and Objects of the Asia-Pacific War” serves as a contemporary example of this narrative. Takenaka understands the obsessive drive to collect materials related to wartime in postwar Japan as a reaction to wartime trauma, and suggests that Japanese people today need to learn to forget the war to a certain extent.[3] The victim narrative also enjoys the most institutional support, given its long history of legitimation by both the Japanese government and the US Occupation. The aggressor narrative, on the other hand, emphasizes Japan’s role as an aggressor in the war, demanding reflection and apology on the part of the Japanese people. This narrative focuses on Japanese wartime atrocities and believes that only proper atonement will allow Japan to retake its place in the international community. An example of this narrative can be seen with the Japan-China Friendship Association, as described by Franziska Seraphim in her book War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945-2005.[4] Finally, the hero narrative is a resurgence of wartime ultra-nationalist ideology, portraying wartime Japan as a hero who valiantly fought against Western imperialism but faced an unfortunate defeat. Eldad Nakar and Inuzuka Ako examine the existence of the hero narrative in 1960s manga and the 2005 Fusosha textbook, respectively.[5] There have also been a great number of scholars who have generally acknowledged a multiplicity of narratives about the war in Japan, including Ian Buruma, Haruko Cook, Philip Seaton, and the duo of Ingvild Bode and Seunghoon Heo. In general, the scholarly consensus in the last 20 years is that there is no uniform way of remembering the war in Japan, as different people all push their own narrative of the war.
Methodology
The present paper hopes to contribute to this discussion on Japanese remembrance of the war, specifically focusing on civilian narratives of the war. The primary research question of this paper is therefore how Japanese civilians remember the war, with an emphasis on how they deal with responsibility for the war. Given that existing scholarly literature points at the existence of multiple narratives of the war among different subgroups of Japanese people, this paper also pays special attention to discrepancies between subgroups of Japanese civilians in how they remember the war, as well as the relationship between different narratives of the war.
I will rely primarily on testimonies of the war by Japanese civilians, obtained from three sources: Haruko and Theodore Cook’s Japan at War: An Oral History, the Soka Gakkai’s Women Against War, and Frank Gibney’s Sensō. Each of these sources presents its own problems, as well as a different context for the testimonies they contain. The testimonies in Cook’s Japan at War can be understood as individual testimonies, as each person was interviewed individually. However, the testimonies likely reflect the bias of the authors, as the authors selectively published only parts of each interview. Women Against War can be understood as group testimonies, since everyone who gives their testimony in that work does so according to their identity as a member of the Soka Gakkai. As such, the Soka Gakkai testimonies demonstrate a remarkable uniformity in the narrative they advance about the war, which is clearly influenced by the message of the religious Soka Gakkai organization.[6] Finally, Gibney’s Sensō should be understood as societal testimonies, as it is a collection of testimonies taken from the Asahi Shinbun and its column calling for testimonies of the war from its readers. The Asahi testimonies thus often respond to other testimonies, as everyone gives their testimony as part of a larger Japanese society that is embroiled in a debate over war memory. Furthermore, the Sensō testimonies have at least two layers of selection bias: first, the Asahi Shinbun was able to select which testimonies from its readers to publish in its column, and second, Gibney himself was able to select which Asahi testimonies to translate and publish in Sensō. Despite the problems with each source, together, they still represent a great variety of viewpoints and narratives of the war.
In addition, this paper will also rely on two theoretical approaches in its analysis of these testimonies. The first one, explicated by Lawrence Langer in his book Holocuast Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, focuses on Jewish testimonies of the Holocaust, and is concerned with how they recall past trauma within the context of the present. He establishes that there are two types of memory: deep memory and common memory. Deep memory primarily operates in the time frame of the past, as it attempts to recreate the past self and past trauma exactly as it was. Common memory, on the other hand, operates in the present, as it attempts to restore some logical continuity to the speaker’s life and provides reflection on past events. Langer writes, “Deep memory tries to recall the Auschwitz self as it was then; common memory has a dual function: to restore the self to its normal pre- and postcamp routines but also offers detached portraits, from the vantage point of today, of what it must have been like back then.”[7] However, there are problems in applying a theory of memory based on Jewish testimonies of the Holocaust to Japanese testimonies of the war, most of all in terms of the direction of guilt. While Jews are undeniably the victims of the Holocaust, Japanese people must be acknowledged as bearing a certain level of responsibility in WWII. Furthermore, while the Jewish experience in the Holocaust can be understood as pure trauma, Japanese memories of WWII can contain non-traumatic moments. These considerations demand an expansion of the scope of Langer’s theory, in order to allow for the possibility of a non-traumatic deep memory. I argue that non-traumatic deep memory is possible in Langer’s theory, as the primary distinction between deep and common memory is the difference in time frame, where deep memory must operate in the temporal past and common memory in the temporal present. Thus, even if the event in question is non-traumatic, as long as it is remembered in such a way as to recreate the self exactly as it was in that moment, one can still call such remembering deep memory.
The second theoretical approach used in this paper is one articulated by Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama in their book Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific Wars. Their theory was explicitly crafted based upon Japanese memories of WWII, and so they are primarily interested in the relationship between different narratives of the war. Fujitani et al establish a dominant narrative which occupies a central position in the way society recalls a certain event, while there can be many resisting narratives which challenge that dominant narrative. Fujitani et al writes, “If a particular way of remembering became dominant through the homogenization and naturalization of knowledge about the past, examinations of diverse, localized, and situated memories may constitute ‘critical’ memories that challenge and unsettle historical common sense.”[8] Their theory is thus concerned with the power relations involved in the creation and perpetuation of different narratives. Within the context of Japanese remembrance of WWII, Fujitani et al hold that the dominant narrative is what other scholars have called the victim narrative, where “the Japanese people, including even the emperor, are imagined to have been a singular and uniform collectivity that was victimized by the military elite.”[9] For the purposes of this paper, I accept Fujitani et al’s definition of the victim narrative as the dominant narrative, and will consider the aggressor narrative to be the primary resisting narrative. The sources I utilize in this paper had little to no cases of the hero narrative, and so this paper will largely overlook the hero narrative as a significant resisting narrative. Finally, this paper will also contain a certain amount of quantitative analysis in order to find discrepancies among subgroups, given the sheer amount of testimonies it deals with.
This paper gives special attention to narratives of the war among the generation of Japanese people born after the war. This topic has been severely underexamined in the current scholarly literature on Japanese war memory, as most scholars tend to focus on testimonies by the generation that lived through the war. Scholars who have dealt with the generational transmission of narratives tended to exclusively deal with the transmitting side, examining textbooks or museums, without much consideration of how these narratives of the war are actually received, or the extent to which the later generation consumes them. Only Bode and Heo’s paper titled “World War II Narratives in Contemporary Germany and Japan: How University Students Understand Their Past” has explicitly dealt with consumption of war narratives by the later generation, but their analysis has been limited to a survey they handed out themselves to university students. The present paper hopes to analyze testimonies of the war given by the later generation, differentiating them from testimonies given by the survivor generation. As such, this paper will divide the testimonies into four subgroups for the purposes of its quantitative analysis: male survivor generation, male later generation, female survivor generation, and female later generation. At this point, I should briefly comment on the temporal context of these testimonies, as differentiating between generations is only possible given that the sources I use were published 40-50 years after the war ended[10], meaning there has been time for an entire generation of Japanese people to grow up who have never known war. As such, knowledge of the war is not a given, and many of these testimonies strive to transmit stories of the war from the survivor generation. Ultimately, this paper focuses on the relationship between each type of narrative about the war, as well as discrepancies between various subgroups of Japanese civilians regarding these narratives. I argue that, far from being mutually exclusive, the different narratives of the war are actually closely intertwined with each other, and that one can find notable discrepancies among gender and generational lines.
At first, however, this paper will not differentiate the testimonies into various demographic subgroups, but will focus instead on a purely Langerian or Fujitanian analysis of the testimonies. Beginning with Langer, I hope to apply his concept of deep and common memory to testimonies of both the victim and aggressor narrative, looking for significant differences in the application of deep and common memory in each narrative type. Langer’s theory is valuable because it allows one to problematize memory, acknowledging that memory is not a perfect recall of past events, but is rather continually influenced by present circumstances. Precisely because the past is not remembered perfectly, different narratives become possible, as people selectively remember events in different ways to create a unique narrative of the past. In other words, with a Langerian approach, one asks the question, what differences exist in the function of deep and common memory between the victim narrative and the aggressor narrative? I will begin by discussing each narrative separately, then examine the precise elements that differentiate the two narrative types.
Victim Narratives
Starting with the victim narrative, a Langerian analysis immediately reveals the presence of deep memory in accounts of personal trauma. The key characteristic of deep memory, as mentioned earlier, involves the requirement to enter into the context of the past and recreate that past self, with all the emotions one felt at the time. Langer writes, “these testimonies invite witnesses to re-create ‘me, yes me, just as I know I was.’”[11] This tendency can be most clearly seen in the Japanese testimonies which center on the experience of Allied firebombing raids or the atomic bomb, which were concrete events of mass destruction. Take, for example, Ogawa Sumi’s description of the March 10 Tokyo air raid: “The town was a blazing hell, lit by the swirling and roiling flames. At dawn Asakusa was filled with so much smoke it was hard to keep one’s eyes open. Everyone was dazed and could only gaze dumbly at one another.”[12] Ogawa’s testimony here is clearly attempting to recreate a picture of Tokyo during the firebombing and show the utter impossibility of logical reaction to the experience at the time. In this case, Langer’s original focus on Jewish survivors of the Holocaust applies itself well to the Japanese experience of firebombing, as one cannot deny the severe trauma Japanese civilians must have faced due to the bombings. Furthermore, Japanese civilian suffering was not limited to bombing raids, as one can also find accounts of suffering in testimonies centering on food shortages experienced in wartime, or reactions to hearing about the death of a drafted family member. For example, Tsuji Hisayo’s account of seeing her teacher’s reaction to being drafted states, “We heard his stifled sobs, and tears flowed unceasingly from his large eyes. This was the first time I had seen a man’s tears. I caught my breath. Like a child, Mr. Noguchi raised his arm to cover his eyes and wailed aloud.”[13] The primary function of deep memory in the victim testimony, then, is to recreate a portrait of Japanese suffering for the audience.
Associated with such accounts of trauma is what Langer calls the “skin of memory,” which operates in the realm of deep memory. For Langer, an experience of extreme trauma leaves its mark on the witness, and even in the present, the witness can never forget that moment – the witness can never quite escape the clutches of deep memory. He writes, “deep memory continues to infect their experiences of time[…]Life goes on, but in two temporal directions at once, the future unable to escape the grip of a memory laden with grief.”[14] There is no shortage of examples of this phenomenon in the testimonies of Japanese civilians which fall into the victim narrative; Ōkubo Michiko’s account of accidentally letting go of a small child during the Tokyo March 10 firebombing, for instance, states, “I have never been able to forget the feeling of her soft, little hand, like a maple leaf, in mine. My heart still aches even after the passage of forty years.”[15] This skin of memory, then, serves as a constant reminder for Japanese civilians as to the horrors of war and the suffering they experienced.
The other key function of deep memory in the victim narrative is to suspend moral judgment when discussing the war. Langer argues that deep memory, in describing the abnormality of the traumatic past, presents the problem that the witness was often forced to make choices that would normally be judged as immoral. However, the context of the past elucidated by deep memory shows that the victim truly had no choice but to make that decision, creating what Langer calls “choiceless choice.” He writes that deep memory, with its requirement to enter into the context of the past, requires the audience to “suspend judgement, to revise our notion of the ‘good,’ to allow the sheer integrity of the narrative and the stubborn honesty of the narrator to forge before our eyes that I have elsewhere called ‘choiceless choice,’ but which our witness describes more vividly with her final words, ‘So this wasn’t good and that wasn’t good: so what choice did we have?’”[16] In the Japanese testimonies advancing victim narratives, this tendency can be seen most frequently seen in descriptions of being forced to take on extreme hardships, turn on other Japanese people, or engage in smuggling due to wartime and immediate postwar circumstances. Kōno Chiharu, for instance, describes losing all five of her sons during her flight from Manchuria after the war ended, stating, “With no hope of any kind, we stared death in the face: if we stayed there, we would die; if we went on, we would die.”[17] Such a statement almost perfectly parallels Langer’s earlier description of choiceless choice, where neither option resulted in a good outcome for the witness. Such a close parallel makes sense, given that the victim narrative paints Japanese civilians as a victim of the war, and Langer’s theory was crafted based upon the victims of the Holocaust. However, deep memory’s tendency to suspend morality can also end up pardoning Japanese civilians of any and all war responsibility. Specifically, victim narrative testimonies seize upon the requirement of deep memory to suspend morality in their assertions that resistance was impossible during wartime. Furusawa Atsuo, for example, states that he was raised to believe in the justice of Japan’s cause, writing, “I thought it was a matter of course to go to war. I thought it would be a matter of course to defeat foreigners. That was how I was raised.”[18] Here, the witness calls upon deep memory to recreate the wartime context, but in a way that pardons the witness for failing to resist. These testimonies argue that, if one understood what living under the wartime system was truly like, then one should understand that Japanese civilians were completely oppressed and resistance was impossible. Deep memory’s tendency to suspend morality, then, operates in the victim narrative testimonies so as to assuage the person’s guilt and eliminate the need to morally reflect on their actions.
Instead, reflection on their wartime experiences in the victim narrative leads one to a conclusion of universal pacifism, where witnesses emphatically claim that all wars are bad, and everyone is a victim of war. These statements can be understood as a type of common memory, which centers on reflection upon the past events brought up by deep memory. As Langer states, testimonies rarely operate purely in the realm of either deep memory or common memory, but rather, “the two [types of memory] interact and intersect continually, and the challenge to us as audience is to recognize and interpret those moments.”[19] In the case of the Japanese civilian testimonies of the victim narrative type, common memory is closely linked to deep memories of trauma. As the witnesses operate within common memory to reflect upon their experiences, they conclude that war must be avoided at all costs and the key lesson Japan must learn from WWII is to devote itself to peace. Haneda Hiroko’s testimony is emblematic of this tendency, as she states, “The War was an irredeemable evil. I had many personal sad experiences[…]I want to ask how that War might have been prevented.”[20] Haneda’s testimony condemns the war and is concerned with how Japan may act so as to not repeat that mistake of going to war, a moral judgment which is obviously a part of the later reflection that can only exist in common memory. However, such condemnation of the war arises from experiences of personal trauma, rather than reflection upon atrocities Japan committed upon other countries. Some of the Soka Gakkai testimonies take this universal pacifism a step further, to the point where they attribute the cause of much of their suffering even in the postwar to the abstract entity of “war.” Take, for example, Shinohara Miyako’s testimony about her life as a pre-natal atomic radiation victim. Much of her testimony describes the discrimination she faced from the rest of Japanese society as a result of her being “branded” as one who was exposed to radiation from the bomb. Importantly, however, she states at the end: “mothers must take the firmest possible stand in the name of peace and the protection of their children.”[21] In other words, instead of attributing the blame for her suffering to the rest of Japanese society who held unreasonable notions about radiation and discriminated against her, she ultimately blames WWII in general and affirms universal pacifism. To American eyes, who were raised to be aware of issues of discrimination, we find Shinohara’s attribution of blame strange, as she could have used the opportunity to instead critique Japanese society for holding such prejudiced views. This misattribution of blame becomes even more obvious in the cases of testimonies which describe the individual’s suffering as a result of being a mixed-race child or ones which describe experiences of being with abusive husbands. Yet, these testimonies notably refrain from critiquing the problems of Japanese society, placing all the blame on “war” instead.
Aggressor Narratives
Turning one’s attention to the aggressor narrative, now, one also finds examples of both deep and common memory at work in the testimonies. Deep memory continues to require that one enter into the context of the past, but it does so in order to force the individual to acknowledge that they were complicit with the wartime system. Shimojō Tetsu, for instance, describes his village’s eager compliance with “bamboo-spear defence” policy when they discovered foreigners off the shore, stating, “Eager to show off their training, the village women gathered on the beach, holding spears fashioned of bamboo. Some showed up with hoes and sickles as well. Their comments ranged from, ‘Come on ashore, come ashore and we’ll kill you!’ to ‘Here’s revenge for my man’s death – get ready for your end!’”[22] In Shimojō’s testimony, the victim narrative’s image of the innocent Japanese civilian completely breaks down, as he paints a picture of a village caught up in wartime militaristic fervor. Thus, his testimony forces one to acknowledge that even ordinary Japanese civilians were completely accepting of the wartime ideology, which raises important implications for the responsibility of every Japanese person. What is important to note here is that much of the deep memory in these testimonies belonging to the aggressor narrative revolve around non-traumatic events – or at the very least, events that were not personally traumatic to the witness. Therefore, the aggressor narratives call for an expansion in scope of Langer’s theory to allow for the possibility of non-traumatic deep memory. Shimojō’s testimony is certainly not traumatic to Shimojō himself, as he was not on the receiving end of the villagers’ aggression. However, his testimony still clearly carries elements of deep memory, as he vividly recreates the context of the time and all the excitement everyone felt then. As such, Shimojō’s testimony stands as evidence that non-traumatic deep memory is possible – the key differentiating factor between deep and common memory should be understood as a difference in time frame. Certainly, traumatic experiences may be more conducive to deep memory; humans tend to remember negative experiences more strongly than positive ones. However, as many of the aggressor narrative testimonies show, trauma is not a necessary component in deep memory – as long as the testimony effectively recreates the past self and enters into the context of the past, it can be understood as deep memory.
As for the aggressor narrative’s common memory, it typically takes the form of reflection on Japan or one’s own moral shortcomings in the war. Kaga Seiichi, for example, states in his testimony, “Rather than simply passing off responsibility for the War onto others, haven’t each of us who were adults at that time neglected to come to grips with our own guilt for the prosecution of the War?”[23] Kaga clearly uses common memory to reflect on the war, but this reflection takes the form of taking responsibility for the war. Whereas the victim narrative’s reflection focuses on the horrors of war in general, the aggressor narrative’s reflection emphasizes moral responsibility in prosecuting WWII in particular. In other words, whereas the victim narrative broadens common memory’s later reflection to generalize about all wars, the aggressor narrative tends to limits itself to the particular war that was WWII, in which Japan committed numerous atrocities. As such, reflection upon this war focuses on the immorality of Japanese acts in the war, as well as Japanese civilians’ complicity with those acts. This characteristic of the aggressor narrative makes sense given how deep memory worked in this narrative. Since deep memory focused on acts that were not traumatic to oneself but rather may have been traumatic to others, reflection upon that act focuses on one’s moral responsibility for participating in an act that caused suffering to others.
Comparing the Aggressor and Victim Narratives
In short, a Langerian analysis of testimonies of both the victim narrative and aggressor narrative type reveals that the key difference between the two narratives lies not in the application of deep and common memory themselves, but rather the events to which deep and common memory are applied. The victim narrative focuses on events of personal trauma, using deep memory to recall the past self which underwent extreme suffering. When one reflects upon that experience of suffering through common memory, one reaches the conclusion that one must never again engage in war so that one could avoid repeating such an experience of trauma. On the other hand, the aggressor narrative focuses on events that were personally non-traumatic, but may have caused trauma to others. Deep memory here operates so as to force oneself to acknowledge that they were complicit in that event. Later reflection upon that event through common memory, then, forces one to take moral responsibility.
The difference between these two narrative types can be seen most clearly when one examines the testimonies of Japanese civilians who lived in colonial territories during the war. Specifically, by focusing on what is not related in each testimony, one can see the selective remembering involved in each narrative. For example, Miyamoto Kazuyo’s testimony describes her experience being in Korea after Japan’s surrender, and how her principal was taken away by Koreans. She states regarding that principal:
He was taken away by some youths who came to raid the school. I heard a rumor that he was later imprisoned. I also heard that he died from being tortured. The figure of the elderly principal, clad only in his cotton kimono, the man who sacrificed himself to protect us, is seared into my memory, along with his lighthearted manner.[24]
Here, Miyamoto ignores the fact that the only reason she was in Korea at the time was because Japan had colonized it. She also ignores the fact that Japanese colonial rule treated Koreans extremely harshly, which was likely why they lashed out at her principal after Japanese surrender. Instead, Miyamoto’s story simply presents a villainous group of Koreans who tortured and killed her poor, innocent principal. Indeed, many of the victim narrative testimonies from individuals who lived in colonial territories wholly ignore wartime Japanese imperialism, framing their living in such areas as a natural fact. Aggressor narrative testimonies, on the other hand, do acknowledge Japanese mistreatment of colonial subjects, which in turn explains why they lashed out at Japanese people after the war ended. Maejima Daijirō’s testimony is an excellent example, as he describes how a Japanese soldier drove away looters who were attacking Maejima. However, the soldier then tells him immediately afterwards, “The peasants in that area were on the receiving end of all sorts of violence, from pillaging to rape, at the hands of the Japanese army during the War. Please keep that in mind and be tolerant.”[25] In other words, testimonies from Japanese civilians in colonial areas can be differentiated into victim or aggressor narratives based on what they remember. The victim narrative arises if the witness focuses on the immediate event of Japanese suffering, ignoring Japan’s colonial history at the start of the war. The aggressor narrative arises if the witness moves outside of their personal suffering and considers harms Japan inflicted upon other people as well. Tanaka Tetsuko’s testimony is a highly illustrative example, as her testimony begins by conveying a victim narrative as she describes the suffering she experienced working in a balloon bomb factory. However, her testimony ends with the moral reflection seen in aggressor narrative testimonies, when she realizes that the balloon bombs she made brought suffering to other nations. She states,
We only learned some forty years later that the balloon bombs we made had actually reached America. They started a few forest fires and inflicted some casualties, among them children[…]When I heard that, I was stunned. I made those weapons. Until then, I had felt only that our youth had been stolen from us, and that I’d missed my chance to study. I thought we were victims of the war.[26]
The transition from the victim narrative to the aggressor narrative only comes with the introduction of new information – information which causes one to consider the harms Japan inflicted upon other countries due to their wartime acts. This consideration, while definitive of the aggressor narrative, is wholly absent from the victim narrative. In summary, then, while both narrative types contain elements of deep and common memory, the victim narrative applies these modes of memory only to personal accounts of trauma, whereas the aggressor narrative broadens their consideration to include non-Japanese trauma.
Resistance Narratives
Moving on to Fujitani et al’s theoretical approach, one continues to differentiate the testimonies based on whether they advance a victim or an aggressor narrative, but now, one focuses on the relationship between these two narrative types instead of the differences between them. The value of a Fujitanian approach is that it allows one to examine the power relations at play in the proliferation of different narrative types and how rival narrative types interact with one another. Given that the victim narrative is the dominant narrative in Japan today, what enables aggressor narratives and to what extent do they resist the dominant narrative? Just as with the Langerian approach, my findings will call for an expansion in scope of Fujitani et al’s theory. Specifically, I argue that the dominant and resisting narratives are not always mutually exclusive – rather, it is possible for both narrative types to co-exist in the same narrative. Such an application of this theory will rely on expanding the Foucauldian elements of Fujitani et al’s theory, focusing on the power of dominant institutions to limit the field of possible action.
Indeed, resisting narratives rarely seems to be purely resisting; rather, testimonies which do advance a resisting narrative seem also to contain elements of the dominant narrative. Perhaps the most obvious example is Mogi Yoshio’s testimony, which reads,
When I recall that there were people in the prewar period who resisted war to the death – even in the face of powerful national authority – I feel most acutely the depth of the sins that I committed in my position as an educator. War is a horrible act that suppresses the conscience and thought of the people and tramples on their basic human rights.[27]
Mogi’s testimony starts by acknowledging his own responsibility for complying with the wartime system; such acknowledgement obviously challenges the dominant narrative which holds that ordinary Japanese people were not responsible for the war. However, in the very next sentence, he seems to return to the dominant narrative and affirm universal pacifism, also stating that war oppresses ordinary people. Many testimonies thus oscillate between the dominant narrative and the resisting narrative in this way, advancing a message of Japanese responsibility in one section while advancing a message of Japanese victimization in another.
Even if some resisting testimonies do not literally oscillate between the two narrative types, they contain elements which imply the dominant narrative. For example, numerous testimonies discuss the heroic efforts of sole voices of resistance to the wartime system. Such accounts of resistance clearly must be differentiated from the orthodox victim narrative view that holds that resistance was impossible during wartime, as ordinary Japanese civilians were completely oppressed. Accounts focusing on resistance, unlike the victim narrative, not only imply that wartime Japan was unjust, but also that Japanese people can be held responsible to the extent that they failed to resist. Yet, these testimonies of wartime resistance also play into the victim narrative insofar as they reaffirm the notion that the wartime state was in opposition to its people, and took acts to suppress ordinary Japanese people’s freedoms. They advance the idea that not all Japanese people were fervent militarists, and that there were some good Japanese people who resisted the wartime state. In other words, just as much as these testimonies of wartime resistance should be differentiated from the victim narrative, they should also be differentiated from the orthodox aggressor narrative which holds that all Japanese people should bear responsibility for the war. A good example is Nakamura Kyōko’s testimony of her classmate who claimed that she would respect the US flag instead of trampling on it. She states regarding this classmate, “I bow with admiration for the courage required in that period for her mother to instill a sense of respect for a national flag, even the enemy’s […]And I also admire the courage that it took for [that girl] to be the only one to raise her hand and say what she did.”[28] Nakamura clearly believes that that girl did the right thing in resisting wartime ideology and asserting that she would respect the US flag, which in turn implies that other Japanese people should also have done the same thing. Yet, Nakamura never explicitly makes this judgment of responsibility, as her testimony instead focuses on the courage of this particular girl. By shifting the focus from the Japanese people’s failure to resist to the particular cases of resistance by a few heroic Japanese people, Nakamura is ultimately able to avoid critically probing the question of ordinary Japanese civilians’ war responsibility. These testimonies which focus on wartime resistance, then, should be understood as occupying a middle ground between the dominant (victim) narrative and the resisting (aggressor) narrative.
Yet another example of testimonies that occupy this middle ground are those which probe the responsibility of the emperor or media outlets, while not questioning the responsibility of ordinary Japanese civilians themselves. Consider Hakota Atsuko’s testimony, which recalls a classmate who flung a flag onto the ground as a sign of protest to welcoming the emperor. Hakota writes, “‘The Emperor made my father die in the war,’ he said. ‘Why do I have to respect him?’”[29] Hakota argues in the rest of her testimony that the emperor must bear some responsibility for the war, which is a clear departure from the official narrative that the emperor should be considered innocent. What is notable about her argument, however, is that she completely accepts the aspect of the dominant narrative which holds that ordinary Japanese civilians were victimized in the war. Even if the emperor bears responsibility, he only does so because he victimized Japanese civilians by forcing them to give up their lives for him. Hakota never questions the responsibility of her classmate’s father, who clearly was a soldier and may have been a participant in the Imperial Japanese Army’s morally questionable actions. Instead, for Hakota, her classmate’s father is undeniably a victim of the war who was deceived by the emperor and the rest of wartime Japan’s elite. Thus, Hakota’s testimony presents only a limited challenge to the dominant narrative; she is attempting to expand the scope of Japanese responsibility, but not so much as to include ordinary people.
The existence of these testimonies that contain elements of both the dominant and the resisting narratives can be explained by the power of institutions – the dominant narrative, after all, is dominant precisely because it enjoys institutional support. As such, the dominant narrative might be understood as constituting a field which resisting testimonies must navigate in order to be heard. In other words, for testimonies of the war to be recognized as legitimate and accepted by society, the testifier must use to some degree the dominant narrative accepted by society at large. Resistance to the dominant narrative, then, can only be voiced from within the field already constituted by the dominant narrative, which would explain why these resisting testimonies are limited in their resistance. To put it in an explicitly Foucauldian way, one might consider his definition of power as a “mode of action upon the actions of others.”[30] Power, then, works to limit the field of possible actions of others. In the context of Japanese war memories, the dominant institution limits the field of possible action for testimonies of the war. If one attempts to present a testimony entirely different from established ways of remembering the war, one runs the risk of being completely ignored or not understood by the rest of society. One might take one’s Foucauldian analysis even further in the case of the Asahi and Soka Gakkai testimonies by looking at the power relations at work in the selection and publication of testimonies. Since the Asahi Shinbun and the Soka Gakkai committee have the power to choose which testimonies to publish, individuals who submit their testimony to these organizations must tailor their testimony to match the ideology of the publishers to a certain extent or else their testimony will never even be published in the first place. Here is a direct example of power working to limit the field of possible actions of others – those writing their testimony only have a limited set of ways to write their testimony if they hope to be heard at all. Thus, resisting testimonies must use the dominant narrative to a certain extent, which explains why most of these testimonies are not purely resisting, but rather occupy a middle ground.
But what of the Cook testimonies, which are individual testimonies and thus not necessarily subject to the power relations that the Asahi and Soka Gakkai testimonies were? Considering the testimonies’ oscillation between resisting and dominant narratives in light of the distinction between individual and group / societal testimonies offers yet another explanation of this oscillation, separate from the Foucauldian analysis offered by Fujitani et al’s approach. Starting at the societal level with the Asahi testimonies, one must realize that those who were submitting their testimonies to the Asahi Shinbun did so while being aware of all the other testimonies published in the Asahi Shinbun which they have read. This awareness can be most plainly seen in the Asahi testimonies which reference other testimonies and respond to them. For example, Fukushima Toshio’s testimony states, “Several letters have described people who criticized the military or made antiwar statements before and during the War. If the majority of the Japanese people had been opposed to the war, it would have been impossible, solely by police and military oppression, to mobilize the entire country to fight a war as total as that War was.”[31] Fukushima directly references the existence of other letters submitted to and published by the Asahi Shinbun, and his testimony explicitly aims to respond to some of the ideas presented in those other letters. Fukushima hopes to respond to testimonies focusing on particular cases of resistance and push a more orthodox aggressor narrative instead. This tendency can be seen throughout most of the Asahi testimonies, as writers agree or disagree with the views brought up by other people. In other words, the Asahi testimonies show that those who give their testimonies of the war do so in the context of a field already populated with other narratives of the war. Especially in the context of the Asahi testimonies, people do not give their testimonies into a void, but rather are constantly coming into contact with rival narratives. As such, they may encounter a viewpoint which they disagree with and thus hope to refute, as Fukushima did. Or, they may find elements of a rival viewpoint that they find appealing and thus incorporate it into their own testimony. In the case of societal testimonies, then, the existence of a vibrant debate and the mixing together of different narrative types is to be expected, as Japanese society continues to struggle to come up with a uniform way of remembering the war.
As for group testimonies like the Soka Gakkai ones, people primarily give their testimony according to their identity as members of that group. Indeed, what is most remarkable about the Soka Gakkai testimonies is their uniformity, as every single one advances a victim narrative of the war, complete with emphasis on universal pacifism. Such uniformity makes sense given that these testimonies are supposed to represent the views of Soka Gakkai women. In other words, the women who submitted their testimonies for the Soka Gakkai are not doing so in the spirit of the Asahi testimonies, which represents differing viewpoints of the war. Instead, their testimonies are based on their identity as a part of the Women’s Division of Soka Gakkai, which stands wholly opposed to war. The most obvious example would be the testimonies that discuss their conversion to Nichiren Shōshū Buddhism, the sect of Buddhism associated with the Soka Gakkai. Kobayashi Kimiyo, for instance, states, “I experienced an awakening, however, when I became a believer in Nichiren Shōshū Buddhism and a member of Soka Gakkai in 1951.”[32] While faith in religion does not necessarily relate to the victim or aggressor narrative, the fact that some of these testimonies so openly discuss their faith clearly shows that these people wrote their testimonies not necessarily according to their individual identity, but instead according to their group identity as part of the Soka Gakkai. Thus, the narrative of war presented in the Soka Gakkai testimonies is completely in accord with the pacifism of the Soka Gakkai organization, as the testimonies are able to achieve uniformity through group identification.
The individual testimonies presented in Cook’s Japan at War, however, offer a more complicated picture. First, one must acknowledge that many of the individual testimonies, like the Asahi ones, present a mix of different types of narratives. One can find examples of testimonies in Japan at War that oscillate between victim and aggressor narratives, focus on particular cases of wartime resistance, or generally offer only a limited challenge to the dominant victim narrative. However, given that these testimonies are those of individuals, they do not explicitly respond to other people’s testimonies, as was the case with the Asahi testimonies. Just because they do not explicitly mention other testimonies, however, does not mean that these individual testimonies are not subject to social influence. Rather, many of these testimonies acknowledge the existence of other views about the war, citing the viewpoints of friends and family members, official commemorative programs, or speak generally of how Japanese society views the war. Miyagi Harumi’s testimony serves as an excellent example. First, her testimony, which discusses the group suicides of Okinawans at the end of the war, oscillates between a victim and aggressor narrative. She begins by claiming that Okinawans themselves hold responsibility for the group suicides, stating, “Everyone used to believe that the troop commander issued an order for the killings to begin, but that order, in fact, came from men of importance within our village.”[33] Such a statement clearly challenges the dominant narrative of ordinary Japanese people being victimized by the military elite. However, she does not reject the dominant belief that the military elite did not care for ordinary Japanese people; instead, she relies on that belief to justify her attribution of responsibility to ordinary people. For Miyagi, the military elite thought so little of ordinary Japanese people that they could not possibly have cared enough to even issue a suicide order in the first place. In describing her encounter with the man who was the garrison commander at the time of the Battle of Okinawa, she states, “such a man wouldn’t have thought to issue an order for the villagers to kill themselves. The military were only concerned with their own units, their own commands.”[34] Like many other testimonies, then, Miyagi’s also occupies a middle ground between the victim and aggressor narratives. Second, Miyagi’s account of war events is entirely second-hand, as she was born after the war. She discusses how she owes her interest in the war and knowledge of the war to her mother and grandmother. As such, Miyagi’s testimony is an example of individual testimonies being aware of and influenced by other people’s testimonies. Not only that, Miyagi attempts to respond to what she perceives as the dominant way of remembering the war among Okinawans, stating “It’s an unhealthy way of living. We are dragging along the war even now. We are living off the dead.”[35] Thus, despite being an individual testimony, Miyagi’s account is clearly aware of other testimonies, as she is influenced by and responds to rival narratives. The Cook testimonies, then, are still influenced by social pressures, which explains the oscillation between different narrative types. However, because they are individual testimonies, they at least have the potential to be purely resisting, as long as the individual is able to resist the societal pressure of dominant narratives. The most notable example of a testimony which is purely resisting is Ienaga Saburō’s, who has gained fame for challenging the Ministry of Education’s textbook censorship as unconstitutional. His testimony puts complete emphasis on Japan’s role as an aggressor in the war, Japanese mistreatment of other Asians, and the responsibility of each and every Japanese person.[36] Ienaga is likely more able to resist because he has gained a certain amount of personal fame for advancing a resisting narrative – in short, he is not subject to the same level of social pressure to conform to the dominant narrative because of his personal fame. Ienaga’s testimony, then, shows that the individual testimonies presented in Cook’s work have the potential to be purely resisting, as long as the testifier him/herself is able to resist the societal pressure of the dominant narrative.
Narrative Distinctions by Subgroup
Having discussed Japanese civilian testimonies in general, I would now like to focus on discrepancies between subgroups of Japanese civilians in their narratives of the war, which calls for a certain amount of quantitative analysis. Specifically, I divided the testimonies into four subgroups based on gender and generation: the male survivor generation, male postwar generation, female survivor generation, and female postwar generation. The survivor generation refers to the generation which directly experienced the war whereas the postwar generation refers to those who were born afterwards. This division, however, creates the awkward problem of how to categorize those who were children during the war – that is, those who were alive during the war, but did not experience it in the same way as adults who had fully developed mental faculties. I decided to use the age of 15 as the dividing line between the survivor and postwar generation, since those who were 15 years old experienced mobilization that those who were younger than 15 did not. Furthermore, each testimony was categorized according to the narrative they advanced, assigned to one of five categories: victim, aggressor, hero, victim and aggressor, and other. However, this methodology presents potential problems. First, there is quite a bit of room for debate on how to categorize each testimony. For example, how should one categorize Nagaoka Eiko’s testimony, which reflects on the necessity to pass down stories of the war? She writes, “I, too, will hand down those stories to my own children. Perhaps that is the responsibility of us Japanese.”[37] Nagaoka does not clarify here whether this “responsibility” to pass down war stories is meant to be a way of promoting universal pacifism or a way of atoning for Japanese wartime atrocities. One can obviously see how the categorization of Nagaoka’s testimony would change between victim or aggressor depending on what this responsibility refers to. The second issue is that the uniformity of the Soka Gakkai testimonies represent a bias that could skew the data, as every single one of the 34 Soka Gakkai testimonies fall under the victim narrative category. To account for this potential skew, I did two separate analyses – one including the Soka Gakkai testimonies and one excluding them. The results of this categorization are illustrated below in Table 1. The number in parentheses represents the number of testimonies if one includes the Soka Gakkai testimonies. There are no parentheses in the male testimonies’ columns because none of the Soka Gakkai testimonies came from males.
Table 1: Number of testimonies in each narrative type divided according to gender and generation of testifier
| Male Survivor | Male Postwar | Male Total | Female Survivor | Female Postwar | Female Total | Survivor Total | Postwar Total | |
| Victim | 32 | 8 | 40 | 37 (62) | 19 (28) | 56 (90) | 69 (94) | 27 (36) |
| Aggressor | 9 | 3 | 12 | 2 (2) | 3 (3) | 5 (5) | 11 (11) | 6 (6) |
| Hero | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 (1) | 1 (1) | 2 (2) | 3 (3) | 2 (2) |
| Victim and Aggressor | 13 | 3 | 16 | 4 (4) | 4 (4) | 8 (8) | 17 (17) | 7 (7) |
| Other | 15 | 5 | 20 | 4 (4) | 6 (6) | 10 (10) | 19 (19) | 11 (11) |
| Total | 71 | 20 | 91 | 48 (73) | 33 (42) | 81 (115) | 119 (144) | 53 (62) |
One should note the differing amount of total testimonies in each category, which makes direct comparison difficult. To compensate, Table 2 shows the percentages of testimonies in each category. Again, the number in parentheses represents the percentage if one includes the Soka Gakkai testimonies.
Table 2: Percentage of testimonies in each narrative type divided according to gender and generation of testifier
| Male Survivor | Male Postwar | Male Total | Female Survivor | Female Postwar | Female Total | Survivor Total | Postwar Total | |
| Victim | 45.1% | 40.0% | 44.0% | 77.1% (84.9%) | 57.6% (66.7%) | 69.1% (78.3%) | 58.0% (65.3%) | 50.9% (58.1%) |
| Aggressor | 12.7% | 15.0% | 13.2% | 4.2% (2.7%) | 9.1% (7.1%) | 6.2% (4.3%) | 9.2% (7.6%) | 11.3% (9.7%) |
| Hero | 2.8% | 5.0% | 3.3% | 2.1% (1.4%) | 3.0% (2.4%) | 2.5% (1.2%) | 2.5% (2.1%) | 3.8% (3.2%) |
| Victim and Aggressor | 18.3% | 15.0% | 17.6% | 8.3% (5.5%) | 12.1% (9.5%) | 9.9% (7.0%) | 14.3% (11.8%) | 13.2% (11.3%) |
| Other | 21.1% | 25.0% | 22.0% | 8.3% (5.5%) | 18.2% (14.3%) | 12.3% (8.7%) | 16.0% (13.2%) | 20.8% (17.7%) |
The results that immediately stand out is that while victim narrative testimonies are the most frequent across all demographics, female testimonies are far more likely to be advancing a victim narrative than male testimonies. Correspondingly, male testimonies are more likely to advance an aggressor or victim and aggressor narrative than female testimonies. In addition, survivor generation testimonies are somewhat more likely to be advancing a victim narrative than postwar generation testimonies, though this difference is nowhere near as significant as the gender discrepancy. However, if one focuses on the discrepancy between the female survivor generation and the female postwar generation, this generational discrepancy becomes much more significant. Furthermore, there are very few examples of the hero narrative, which likely reflects the liberal bias of the Asahi Shinbun, which was where the majority of these testimonies came from. The rest of the paper will discuss potential explanations for why these gender and generational discrepancies exist.
Beginning with the more significant gender discrepancy, there are two potential explanations. The first, which relies on Fujitani et al’s theory, is that women’s testimonies can be understood as comprising a key part of the dominant narrative. As Lisa Yoneyama has pointed out, postwar reconstruction had a gendered dimension, as women were touted as the symbol of innocence victimized by war, and women became charged with a duty to reconstruct Japan into a democratic and peaceful nation.[38] One can find acknowledgment of this gendered duty in the Soka Gakkai testimonies, especially the one by an anonymous woman detailing her struggles to survive in the immediate Occupation and working in a brothel for US soldiers. Most importantly, she writes at the end of her testimony, “I think it is true that women are the greatest victims of war.”[39] The phrasing of this sentence would imply that this woman is not advancing a new idea about women suffering the most from the war – rather, she is simply affirming an already existing idea of the uniqueness of women’s wartime victimization. In this sense, the dominant postwar narrative of Japanese victimization was always tied up with the female image, and female testimonies are thus more subject to the dominant narrative than male ones. As such, female testimonies tend to be more in line with the dominant victim narrative.
The other explanation for the gender discrepancy, however, focuses on differing wartime experiences and ability to resist the wartime system. If one were to examine the wartime diaries of males and females, one finds that females generally exhibited greater individualism and more resistance to wartime ideology.[40] Males, on the other hand, tended to feel more acutely the pressures exerted on Japanese people to conform. With Japan’s defeat, however, the dominant ideology underwent a complete reversal, as the postwar ideology emphasized the rejection of wartime ultra-nationalist ideology. Thus, those who resisted wartime ideology suddenly found themselves part of the postwar mainstream ideology. Stories of individual resistance then showed that one was victimized and oppressed by the wartime state, which in turn proves one’s innocence. Since females were more likely to exhibit resistance during wartime, their postwar testimonies tend to advance a victim narrative, as they discuss how they felt oppressed by the war. As for males, who were more likely to conform during wartime, the postwar reversal meant they had to confront their conformity and all the issues of responsibility that raises. As such, male testimonies are more likely to advance an aggressor narrative where they reflect on their own responsibility in prosecuting the war. For example, Sakai Manabu states in his testimony, “I acknowledge that my teaching during the War was misguided, and I don’t make excuses for it. What was wrong was my ignorance.”[41] Faced with the undeniable fact that they conformed to the wartime system, which has been proven to be unjust in the postwar, these male testimonies must reflect on their own guilt – the guilt of ordinary civilians, which in turn leads one to an aggressor narrative. However, this argument can only apply to the survivor generation, as it is based on the differing wartime experiences of males and females. Interestingly, however, this argument also helps explain why there is less of a discrepancy between the male survivor generation and the male postwar generation, as compared to the female survivor generation and female postwar generation. The testimonies from both generations for males exhibited an almost equal likelihood of advancing a victim narrative, with only a gap of 5%. The female survivor generation testimonies, however, was 20% more likely to advance a victim narrative than the female postwar generation testimonies. Since male survivor testimonies are more likely to advance an aggressor narrative, they are more consistent with the postwar generation testimonies which in general are more likely to fall under the aggressor narrative category. As such, one would expect less of a discrepancy between male survivor generation testimonies and male postwar generation testimonies, and that this generational discrepancy should be more pronounced for females, since the female survivor generation does not share such tendencies toward the aggressor narrative. Indeed, this argument explains why female survivor testimonies are uniquely more likely to advance a victim narrative than all other demographics.
Examining the generational discrepancy in general, now, one finds a potential explanation in Langer’s theory as to why the survivor generation is more likely to advance a victim narrative. Specifically, only the survivor generation has deep memory of the war, whereas the postwar generation can only ever operate in the realm of common memory, since only the survivor generation actually had first-hand experience of the war. And, because deep memory requires suspension of moral judgments whereas common memory is all about moral reflection, the survivor generation is more likely to advance a victim narrative while the postwar generation is constantly concerned with moral judgments of the war. Suda Atsuko’s testimony is most illustrative of this difference, as her testimony discusses the postwar generation’s response to hearing stories of the war from the survivor generation. She writes, “To us [the postwar generation] they [the survivor generation] exhibited no self-reflection about the War. When we point that out to adults, they respond that their education and ideology were different from those of present times.”[42] Suda’s testimony effectively sums up the differences between the generations’ testimonies through the differential operation of deep and common memory. The postwar generation, which always operates in common memory, is concerned with reflection about the war, and thus accuse the survivor generation of not showing enough self-reflection. The survivor generation, which has deep memory, responds by appealing to the requirement of deep memory to enter into the context of the past and suspend present judgments. In fact, Langer seems to make this argument about the generational differences in deep and common memory exactly when he writes,
Younger audiences still persist in asking ‘Why didn’t they know what was coming?’ and ‘When they did, why didn’t they do something about it?’[…]How could we foresee gas chambers[…]when we had never heard of them? The average imagination, in other words, perceives what it or someone else has already conceived.[43]
Thus, the survivor generation is able to appeal to deep memory as a sort of defense against the judgments of common memory, pointing out the impossibility of resistance within the context of the past. Because of the exclusive existence of deep memory in the survivor generation, then, the survivor generation is more likely to advance a victim narrative.
Conclusions
The testimonies of Japanese civilians about World War II reveal a multiplicity of views and narratives about the war, but they can generally be differentiated according to the extent to which they advance a narrative of Japan as victim or aggressor during the war. Both narrative types contain Langerian deep and common memory, but those modes of memory are applied to different events, emphasizing different pieces of information. The victim narrative tends to focus on personal accounts of trauma, as deep memory works to recall the past self which was put in a position of immense suffering. The later reflection of common memory in the victim narrative accordingly leads one to a conclusion of universal pacifism, as individuals hope that they never again have to experience such trauma. The aggressor narrative, on the other hand, focuses on accounts of harm Japan inflicted upon people of other nations, therefore utilizing a deep memory that is non-traumatic in nature, but nevertheless works to recreate the past self which was in full compliance with the wartime state. Common memory in the aggressor narrative, then, is characterized by moral reflection on the individual’s own role in the war.
Yet at the same time, the two narrative types are far from mutually exclusive, as numerous testimonies either oscillate back and forth or occupy a middle ground between the two narratives. Examples of the latter include testimonies which center on particular cases of wartime resistance or interrogate the responsibility of the emperor but not that of ordinary people. The co-existence of both narrative types can be understood in a Fujitanian lens through the power of the dominant institution to limit the possible extent and methods of resistance. Those who advance an aggressor narrative, which is the resisting narrative, must at least appeal to the dominant victim narrative in order to be heard and accepted as legitimate by society. Indeed, the societal context of these testimonies are of utmost importance, as testifiers are always subject to societal pressures and are aware that their testimony is only one voice within the greater field of Japanese society which continues to debate over how to remember the war. These testimonies therefore attempt to respond to others, or adopt elements from different narratives as they encounter other testimonies. The key exception is if the testimonies are given within a group context instead of a societal one, in which cases the testimonies take on a remarkable uniformity within their group, since all the testifiers give their testimony according to their identity as a member of that group.
Furthermore, one can also find notable discrepancies between subgroups of the Japanese population as to the likelihood of advancing a victim or aggressor narrative. Specifically, female testimonies are far more likely to advance a victim narrative than male testimonies, and survivor generation testimonies are somewhat more likely to advance a victim narrative than postwar generation testimonies. If one focuses specifically within the female demographic, however, one finds that the generational discrepancy becomes much more pronounced. There are two potential explanations for the gender discrepancy. First, female testimonies comprise a key part of the Fujitanian dominant narrative, as females were held up in the post-war as a symbol of innocence and wartime victimization. The second explanation, which also helps account for the more significant generational discrepancy within females than males, is that the wartime experience of females and males differed significantly, which translates into differing postwar ways of remembering. Specifically, since females were more likely to exhibit resistance during wartime while males were more likely to conform, the reversal of the mainstream ideology in the postwar simultaneously vindicated females for resisting and indicted males for conforming. As for the generational discrepancy in general, it can be explained by the fact that only the survivor generation holds Langerian deep memory, which means that the survivor generation testimonies can require a suspension of morality whereas the postwar generation emphasizes precisely moral judgments of the war. As such, the survivor generation points out the impossibility of resistance during war, falling into a victim narrative while the postwar generation demands reflection on personal responsibility, leading them to an aggressor narrative.
Future studies of Japanese war memory should continue to examine the postwar generation and how they may remember the war differently from their parents/grandparents. This paper showed that narratives of the war are not cleanly transmitted from one generation to the next; rather, the postwar generation has demonstrated a notable difference in the way they remember the war. As such, researchers should focus on the consumption of narratives of the war by the postwar generation, looking at what aspects of these narratives are consumed or not by the postwar generation, and why. Indeed, while many seem to emphasize the importance of studying narratives of the war before the survivor generation dies out, one also needs to turn one’s eyes to the future, where Japan will inevitably come to be comprised of a population that has never experienced the war first-hand. As the generation shifts, Japan’s war memory issue will only become more complicated and ever more worthy of scholarly attention.
David Yu is an undergraduate at Pomona College, majoring in Asian Studies with a concentration in Japanese history. His current research focus is on how Japan remembers WWII, as well as how such memories impact politics and international relations today. He has also done research on East Asian philosophy, particularly Neo-Confucianism. He hopes to attend graduate school in the future, where he can continue his WWII research.
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Women’s Division of Soka Gakkai. Women Against War. Translated by Richard H Minear. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1986.
[1] Japanese names in this essay will be given following the Japanese tradition of surname, then given name. Non-Japanese names will be given following the Western tradition of given name, then surname.
[2] Maruyama, Masao. Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 16.
[3] Takenaka, Akiko, “Collecting for Peace: Memories and Objects of the Asia-Pacific War,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 153.
[4] Seraphim, Franziska, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 108-34.
[5] Nakar, Eldad, “Memories of Pilots and Planes: World War II in Japanese Manga, 1957- 1967,” Social Science Japan Journal 6, no. 1 (2003): 57-76.
Inuzuka, Ako, “Remembering Japanese Militarism Through the Fusosha Textbook: The Collective Memory of the Asian-Pacific War in Japan,” Communication Quarterly 61, no. 2 (April-June 2013): 131-50.
[6] When citing this source, I will abbreviate “Women’s Division of Soka Gakkai” as WDSG.
[7] Langer, Lawrence, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 6.
[8] Takashi Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama, Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific Wars (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 21.
[9] Fujitani, White, and Yoneyama, Perilous Memories, 7.
[10] The Asahi testimonies were originally published between 1986 and 1987, Women Against War was published in 1986, and Japan at War was published in 1992
[11] Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 7.
[12] Frank Gibney and Beth Cary, Senso the Japanese Remember the Pacific War: Letters to the Editor of Asahi Shimbun (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), 204. See also the testimonies of Shinoda Tomoko (Gibney 204), Hiratani Yasuko (Gibney 205), Ōkubo Michiko (Gibney 207), Mitomi Hideko (Gibney 209), Komatsu Mineko (Gibney 212), Wada Michiyo (Gibney 213), Funato Kazuyo, (Cook 343), Kobayashi Hiroyasu and Tomizawa Kimi (Cook 349), Yamaoka Michiko (Cook 384), Matsushige Yoshito (Cook 391), Saegusa Kazuko (WDSG 118), Takeuchi Yasu (WDSG 121), Egi Kikuno (WDSG 127)
[13] Gibney, 186. See also the testimonies of Yoshitake Tōzō (Gibney 114), Takamizawa Sachiko (Gibney 181), Satō Rokurō (Gibney 189), Hashimoto Kumiko (Gibney 191), Aihara Yū (Gibney 193), Watanabe Fukumi (Gibney 199), Takezawa Shōji (Gibney 255), Tanaka Toki (Cook 181), Nakajima Yoshimi (Cook 199), Imai Shike (Cook 438), and all of the Soka Gakkai testimonies
[14] Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 34.
[15] Gibney, Senso, 208. See also the testimonies of Kimura Takashi (Gibney 19), Hase Hideo (Gibney 103), Hashimoto Yukio (Gibney 181), Komatsu Mineko (Gibney 185), Kiga Sumi (Cook 230), Kinjō Shigeaki (Cook 366), Kawashima Eiko (Cook 471), Kōno Chiharu (WDSG 31), Goseki Setsuko (WDSG 42), Inaba Aiko (WDSG 223)
[16] Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 26.
[17] WDSG, Women Against War, trans. Richard Minear (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1986), 27. See also the testimonies of Yashiro Mieko (Gibney 174), Kumagaya Motokazu (Gibney 192), Yanami Yoshimi (Gibney 247), Maki Sakie (WDSG 35), Goseki Setsuko (WDSG 38), Kagi Kiyoko (WDSG 103), Noritake Mitsuko (WDSG 185), Aoshika Nobu (WDSG 243)
[18] Gibney, Senso, 15. See also the testimonies of Kumai Masao (Gibney 9), Kawamura Fusako (Gibney 279), Takamura Mieko (Gibney 306), Kawachi Uichiro (Cook 214), Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi (Cook 253), Yamane Ikuko (WDSG 225)
[19] Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 7.
[20] Gibney, Senso, 19. See also the testimonies of Watanabe Fukumi (Gibney 200), Satō Yasuko (Gibney 275), Gamō Hideo (Gibney 280), Hakoto Atsuko (Gibney 285), Yamatsu Sumiyuki (Gibney 286), Satō Shigeru (Gibney 288), Katō Mieko (Gibney 294), Kawaguchi Ikuo (Gibney 302), Sakuraba Mieko (Gibney 303), Kaneko Naomi (Gibney 313), Taguchi Tomiko (Gibney 317), Senda Yuriko (Gibney 318), Kobayashi Hiroyasu and Tomizawa Kimi (Cook 349), Kagi Kiyoko (WDSG 105), Tatebayashi Kimi (WDSG 111), Noritake Mitsuo (WDSG 188), Anonymous (WDSG 192)
[21] WDSG, Women Against War, 142. See also the testimonies of Anonymous (WDSG 64), Mayumi Yoshida (WDSG 147), Nobuko Davis (WDSG 196), Kamiya Shizuko (WDSG 204), Anonymous (WDSG 214), Inaba Aiko (WDSG 216)
[22] Gibney, Senso, 171. See also the testimonies of Yoshida Akio (Gibney 22), Shiobara Suzue (Gibney 103), Haseba Sueto (Gibney 104), Namekawa Matao (Gibney 179), Sachimoto Kyōko (Gibney 257) Iwamoto Akira (Gibney 258), Sasaki Fumiko (Gibney 277), Kumagaya Tokuichi (Cook 50), Asai Tatsuzō (Cook 206)
[23] Gibney, 256. See also the testimonies of Fukushima Toshio (Gibney 18), Hase Hideo (Gibney 104), Ume Yasuzō (Gibney 183), Tomoda Shōjirō (Gibney 197), Tsunoda Tsutomu (Gibney 292), Serizawa Nobuo (Gibney 295), Mogi Yoshio (Gibney 300), Suda Atsuko (Gibney 305), Sakai Manabu (Gibney 306), Itabashi Toshinori (Gibney 307), Okada Chūken (Gibney 316), Hatanaka Shigeo (Cook 67), Tanaka Tetsuko (Cook 192), Ienaga Saburō (Cook 442)
[24] Gibney, 244. See also the testimonies of Ōno Yumiko (Gibney 105), Iwamura Enji (Gibney 108), Ōba Tatsurō (Gibney 111), Katayama Yukiko (Gibney 113), Mio Utako (Gibney 117), Miyamoto Kazuya (Gibney 244), Murakami Ayame (Gibney 245), Ishitaki Keiko (Gibney 246), Yanami Yoshimi (Gibney 247), Makino Hideo (Gibney 247), Bazura Yoshiko (Gibney 250), Chiba Tomoko (Gibney 265), Tanaka Tokiko (Gibney 267), Shibahara Kenzō (Gibney 273), Fukushima Yoshie (Cook 56 and 407), Yokoyama Ryūichi (Cook 97), Kōno Chiharu (WDSG 26), Maki Sakie (WDSG 31), Nakaue Mitsu (WDSG 42)
[25] Gibney, 266. See also the testimonies of Shiobara Suzue (Gibney 103), Haseba Sueto (Gibney 104), Nagashima Shigetoshi (Gibney 251), Sasaki Fumiko (Gibney 277)
[26] Haruko Cook and Theodore Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (London: Phoenix Press, 1992), 192.
[27] Gibney, Senso, 300. See also the testimonies of Aoyama Akihiro (Gibney 10), Namekawa Matao (Gibney 179), Ume Yasuzō (Gibney 182), Tomoda Shōjirō (Gibney 197), Nagashima Shigetoshi (Gibney 251), Maejima Daijirō (Gibney 266), Imagawa Nobuhiro (Gibney 290), Fujiwara Toshiko (Gibney 291), Tsunoda Tsutomu (Gibney 292), Suda Atsuko (Gibney 305), Itabashi Toshinori (Gibney 307), Okada Chūken (Gibney 316), Muromatsu Hiroaki (Gibney 318), Kumagaya Tokuichi (Cook 47), Tanaka Tetsuko (Cook 192), Hirosawa Ei (Cook 248)
[28] Gibney, 189. See also the testimonies of Iwata Eiichi (Gibney 11), Hashimoto Masakuni (Gibney 14), Iwata Haruo (Gibney 16), Ishida Sumio (Gibney 176), Yamashita Saburō (Gibney 178), Iwasaki Taiko (Gibney 197), Hatanaka Shigeo (Cook 67 and 227), Kiga Sumi (Cook 231)
[29] Gibney, 285. See also the testimonies of Fukushima Tadashi (Gibney 12), Kimura Takashi (Gibney 19), Yoshida Akio (Gibney 22), Kii Shuichiro (Gibney 195), Yamatsu Sumiyuki (Gibney 286), Hata Shōryū (Cook 208), Miyagi Harumi (Cook 477)
[30] Foucault, Michel, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 790.
[31] Gibney, Senso, 17-18. See also the testimonies of Kumai Masao (Gibney 9), Iwata Eiichi (Gibney 10), Hiramoto Toshihiro (Gibney 13), Haneda Hiroko (Gibney 19), Anzai Hitoshi (Gibney 119), Kii Shūichirō (Gibney 196), Watanabe Fukumi (Gibney 200), Yamatsu Sumiyuki (Gibney 285), Imagawa Nobuhiro (Gibney 290), Fujiwara Toshiko (Gibney 291), Tsunoda Tsutomu (Gibney 292), Kawabe Misa (Gibney 293), Serizawa Nobuo (Gibney 294), Hagiwara Hisao (Gibney 302), Suda Atsuko (Gibney 305), Takamura Mieko (Gibney 306), Usami Satoshi (Gibney 309), Ichikawa Satoshi (Gibney 314), Okada Chūken (Gibney 316), Taguchi Tomiko (Gibney 317), Muramatsu Hiraoki (Gibney 318)
[32] WDSG, Women Against War, 98. See also the testimonies of Yamada Sadako (WDSG 18), Nakaue Mitsu (WDSG 42), Kamiya Shizuko (WDSG 204), Ueyama Yori (WDSG 238), Aoshika Nobu (WDSG 241), Hiraki Mitsuko (WDSG 244)
[33] Cook, Japan at War, 474.
[34] Ibid, 476.
[35] Ibid, 477. See also the testimonies of Kumagaya Tokuichi (Cook 50), Hatanaka Shigeo (Cook 67), Tanaka Tetsuko (Cook 192), Kiga Sumi (Cook 231), Satō Hideo (Cook 239), Yamaoka Michiko (Cook 387), Kimura Yasuko (Cook 398), Ienaga Saburō (Cook 441)
[36] Ibid, 47. See also Kumagaya Tokuichi’s testimony.
[37] Gibney, Senso, 293.
[38] Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 189-202.
[39] WDSG, Women Against War, 194. See also the testimonies of Ueda Kikuo (WDSG 111) Shinohara Miyako (WDSG 142), Noritake Mitsuko (WDSG 184), Anonymous (WDSG 214), as well as that of Tanaka Toki (Cook 181)
[40] I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Samuel Yamashita, for helping me with this point.
[41] Gibney, Senso, 306. See also the testimonies of Fukushima Toshio (Gibney 18), Tomoda Shōjirō (Gibney 197), Kaga Seiichi (Gibney 256), Mogi Yoshio (Gibney 300), Itabashi Toshinori (Gibney 307), Ienaga Saburō (Cook 442)
[42] Gibney, 305. See also the testimonies of Aoyama Akihiro (Gibney 10), Hiramoto Toshihiro (Gibney 13), Furusawa Atsuo (Gibney 15), Taguchi Hisago (Gibney 290), Imagawa Nobuhiro (Gibney 290), Tsunoda Tsutomu (Gibney 292), Takamura Mieko (Gibney 306), Usami Satoshi (Gibney 309)
[43] Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, 29.
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