Nick Nobiletti
Japan’s War
After World War II, Japan was left to rebuild itself from the destruction it suffered during the war. They fought for glorious victory and to establish themselves as a dominant new power in the new times. During the war, Japan was in chaos. Japan’s soldiers were being sent to slaughter with death as the only option. The people of Japan were in a feverous, political hell. They were told that Japan was winning and they believed it up until the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even after the war, chaos still reigned in Japan. Times had changed radically and the old generation didn’t understand the new generation and was being left behind. New and old political powers were vying for superiority. Many authors captured these nightmarish times in writing or picture. Mishima, Nakazawa, Ozu and Oe have produced works detailing some of the darker aspects of the war and the chaos it caused from multiple standpoints. Mishima weaves a story of a particularly tragic soldier. Nakazawa follows a family back in Hiroshima and their struggles during the war. Ozu details an elderly couple as they visit family and friends and view the changes between the generations. Oe examines the after war political struggles.
The short story Patriotism by Mishima takes place during the ending period of the war and details a lieutenant’s suicide. While not quite postwar, it describes in great detail a very dark and painful occurrence for Japan. Mishima begins the story by summarizing the deaths of the lieutenant and his wife and then starts at their marriage which was not yet six months ago. The lieutenant quickly explains to his new wife what it means to be a soldier’s wife. If the soldier is to die, then the wife must follow suit and kill herself. This in itself is dark because so many men died in the war that if all of their wives had had the resolve of Reiko, there would’ve been many more dead women too. The cause of the deaths of the lieutenant and his wife was from mutiny by the lieutenant’s close colleagues whom he was tasked with finding and slaying. Because he could not go through with his orders, he instead chose an “honorable” death and disemboweled himself. In the eyes of Japanese Imperialism, suicide was an honorable way out and defeat or surrender was not. In my opinion, there is no such thing as honor in war. War is hell and the best way out is to not have a war. The chaos from war in Japan brainwashed its soldiers into thinking neither. Mishima turned this short story into a short film in which he played the lieutenant. Reading about the disemboweling was grisly enough, but Mishima used lamb intestines in the disembowelment scene which amplified the brutality. Even though the lieutenant was true to Japan, he could only stay true to his country by dying. This is the sort of damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation faced by many Japanese soldiers during the nightmarish times of war.
The war was not hell for the soldiers alone; many of the common people in Japan faced equal difficulty in just trying to live because of the war. Nakazawa created the manga Barefoot Gen about the poor Nakaoka family during the war and the struggles they went through. The family is made up of the parents, four boys and a girl. The father is against the war which causes the rest of the village to call him a traitor. The people back home were being brought up on militaristic views that caused them to be in a pro-war fervor. Even though they are all starving, the people still blindly believe in the war. In the Nakaoka family, food is scarce and the mother is pregnant and requires sustenance for the child. As the story progresses, Gen grows from being greedy and hogging food to a symbol of hope. In the beginning when their mother offers them a potato, Gen and Shinji fight over it, but eventually Gen and Shinji take to begging and giving the money to their parents so that their mother can eat. During the war, many common people had very little food because it was all being given to the soldiers and they often went hungry. The eldest son, Koji, goes to join air corps and meets a lieutenant who at first is drunk and violent towards him. Then Koji learns about Lieutenant Kumai’s fate; he has to go on a suicide bombing in five days! With all the other chaos going on, Japanese pilots were being given suicide bombing runs as a typical assignment and if they didn’t do it they would be dishonored. What wouldn’t even be a last resort normally was being used as a typical strategy for Japan during the war chaos. Even the training was harsh and one of Koji’s peers commits suicide because he can’t take the brutal training. His family is informed of his death as an accidental death during a training exercise and they are happy because their son died serving his country. Koji even tells them the truth, but they dismiss him and tell him not to mess with their hope that their son would die for Japan. Parents should never be happy that their child died, but in Japan, the chaos caused by the war made everything different. Until the bombs were dropped, Japan was unable to escape the war-time chaos, but still had to contend with the postwar chaos of rebuilding everything.
After the war had finally ended, the upcoming generations were radically different from the old generations. In Ozu’s Tokyo Story, the elderly father sees the changes brought about from the war in the way his children live and think. When the parents, Shukishi and Tomi, first arrive, nothing seems amiss to them and their children are happy to see them. After being with their parents for only a short time, the children “get rid of” their parents by sending them to the hot springs in Atami. Their children treat their visit as an obligation while they get on with their own lives. Instead of honoring their parents like you would in previous generations, the war causes the new generation to be more selfish. The only one to be genuine with them is their widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko. Her husband, their son, died in the war. At one point Shukishi meets with some old friends and they engage in discussion while drinking heavily. One of his friends expresses his disappointment with the new generation, his children. The father agrees with his friend’s sentiment after seeing his son and daughter again, but still feels that they could’ve turned out worse. They remark on how different the younger generation is compared to their own. The scene where the grandchild is running away from Tomi represents how the newer generation is changing in a way that shifts radically from the old generation and leaves it behind. Eventually they realize that they are just in the way and decide to return home. This represents how the new generations thought of the old; they were kind of a burden in the way of advancement after the war.
The war didn’t only affect the generations, the political system that Japan had been following had collapsed and new and old political parties were fighting for the chance to rebuild Japan in their own way. Oe’s Seventeen follows the story of a seventeen year old boy, known only as “A Seventeen”, and his encounter with the rightist movement. The story begins on his seventeenth birthday and for the first half of the story we see his immaturity flaunted at us. He is weak, completely normal and of no particular interest. Even he sees himself as weak and engages in self loathing over his body and his grades. Eventually he ends up at a political rally for the rightist movement and is drawn in by the charismatically spiteful leader. Rightist party leader Sakakibara notices Seventeen’s outburst and immediately inducts him into the party. He meets other young party members and finds them to be solemn like he had expected. Their blind hate of the left side causes one of them to say that he would be willing to kill leftists. Japan had just escaped from war time terror and now political upheaval directly because of the war was causing violence between opposing groups. Politics in this chaotic postwar time was often more animalistic than humane and mostly resorted to slander and violence to gain standing. In the end, Seventeen comes to a conclusion that selfishness is what is holding him back and thus loses his fear of death. The fear of death is natural for all living creatures, but even more apparent in humans. It could even be considered that which makes us human. Without his old fear of death, Seventeen becomes a demon who maliciously attacks any non-rightist. He is arrested and jailed many times, but immediately returns to his inhuman behavior upon release. Honestly, what could be done to a man who has no fear of death holding him back? The threat of death no longer confines him to the rules of society which allows him to beat, chase and even kill a girl while feeling only pleasure at serving the right. The war had ended, but it still caused much terror and chaos in Japan.
Mishima, Nakazawa, Ozu and Oe all reflected the hells that war caused for Japan. A soldier was trapped in an impossible choice where death was the only way out by the war. A peasant family was unwillingly right in the middle of every problem for the Japanese commoners caused by the war. The elderly parents visiting their children and are seen as a nuance to the daily lives of the children due to changes in society after the war. And the political turmoil that was the future for Japan after the war had ended. From the default perils of a soldier to the pathological fervor of political upheaval, these stories cover the tragedies of Japan’s war.
Credit to:
Mishima for Patriotism
Nakazawa for Barefoot Gen
Ozu for Tokyo Story
Oe for Seventeen
