"No art, however pure, can be created or understood apart from the politics of its time." So writes coeditor Marlene Mayo in her introduction to this extremely interesting collection. Its genesis was a 1992 University of Maryland conference entitled "War, Reconstruction and Creativity in East Asia, 1920-1960," the aim of which was to draw attention to the problems of writers and artists in China and Japan and Japanese-occupied Taiwan and Korea in the years before, during and after World War II.
Augmented, the collected papers are now divided into three sections. The first is devoted to the occupied territories, the second to World War II in East Asia and the Pacific, and the third to occupied Japan and postcolonial Asia. The second section is of particular interest, as much of this material has never been written about before.
Japan, as is well known, mobilized the arts in its attempted creation of a Greater East Asia. Writers, painters and film directors were given militant roles whether they wanted them or not, something which occasioned dilemmas, decisions and self-deceptions, as well as a great deal of self-serving memory loss once World War II was finally over.
Everything was eventually turned into fuel for the war effort -- there was even a Noh drama specially commissioned to commemorate the fall of Rangoon. Yet the effect of all this has not yet been fully documented. As J. Thomas Rimer has said, there are many "blank spaces" in the Western scholarly record of Japan's wartime cultural production.
He himself ably fills one of them in his account of modern playwright Kunio Kishida following the troops into China.
The journey could not have been a happy one -- Kishida had no way of communicating with the Chinese, was kept carefully far from the action and was expected to write mere propaganda. The unhappiness was revealed, but he did eventually take a leading propaganda role as a prominent official in the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (an organization used by the government to foster popular support for the wars in China and the Pacific).
That this liberal, cosmopolitan man should have thus narrowed his horizons tells more about the pressures to which he was subject than any presumed bellicose disposition of his own. The same is true in the notorious case of Tsuguji (Leonard) Fujita, a painter of international repute who returned from Paris and became a propagandist of the "Holy War."
In an excellent essay on the painter and his torturous life, the late Mark Sandler considers the pressures exerted and the choices made. He also takes into account opinion that Fujita's large and detailed war pictures actually can indicate revulsion as well as celebration, though he himself believes them to be triumphal in intention.
One may now see them for oneself. The Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo has now hung the most famous of them -- the first time they have been visible for over 50 years. The "Last Day at Saipan" is certainly horrifying, an enormous, beautifully drawn, thickly painted mural of the mass suicide on that island. Like a modern Bosch, it repels as much as it compels admiration and would seem to reflect at least a divided motive within the painter -- unlike, say, Taikan Yokoyama, who was gung-ho from the first.
The number of writers and artists who celebrated or succumbed to the pressure is so large that those who did not are famous in their singularity.
Junichiro Tanizaki continued "The Makioka Sisters" in private once it was banned in public, later turning to his "Genji" translation to escape into the Heian Period and do nothing at all for the war effort. Even more nobly recalcitrant was Kafu Nagai, who wrote up his diary and nothing else. Both writers (and there were others) preferred silence.
The rarity of such a writer is commensurate with the difficulty of taking such a stance. As Donald Keene has written in an excellent essay on this subject ("The Japanese and the Landscapes of War," found in "Landscape and Portraits," 1971), during World War II "the writer, by becoming a public figure, was under pressure to act with the uniformity expected of all Japanese, and forfeited his right to the individual conscience of the artist."
Even more rare than those who abstained were those who disagreed and said so. Among these was the film director Mansaku Itami, who was amazingly outspoken, and whose brave stance is the subject of a fine paper by Kyoko Hirano.
While many another (Kenji Mizoguchi) turned "patriot," and a few (Yasujiro Ozu) tactfully refused to work, Itami continued to speak his mind. Perhaps the reason he was not overtly punished (director Sadao Yamanaka, also critical, was sent as a private to China where he died) was that he was ill and after 1938 confined himself to writing rather than directing. Nonetheless, the outspoken nature of the writing (Hirano gives many examples) is brave indeed.
Just how much strength is needed to stand against nationalistic propaganda is indicated by its rarity not only in Japan but also everywhere else. How many writers have stood against the propagandistic demands of their wartime governments? Whether one won the war or not also affects apprehension. If Japan had won the war and the United States had lost, then John Ford, Frank Capra and John Huston (to name only film directors) would have been "war criminals."
Itami was able to stand up against not only the blandishments of wartime but also the enticements of peace. He refused to name any "war criminals," and would have nothing to do with any toadying up to the occupiers.
This integrity was to be reflected in the director's son, Juzo Itami, who bravely took on a number of social ills, including the Japanese yakuza, and who finally committed suicide only when the pressures became too great.
Among the many anomalies of the postwar Occupation period was that propaganda and censorship were just as rife but were now insisted upon by the Allied authorities rather than the Japanese. Kabuki, in particular, was found "feudal" and consequently "undemocratic." How it was reinstated is told in Mayo's fine essay on the kabuki and cultural politics in occupied Japan. Particularly welcome is her assessment of what actually occurred in the rehabilitation of the drama. The late Earle Ernst is given credit for his important role in this sensitive series of maneuvers and the claims of "the man who saved kabuki" are put into proper perspective.
There remains much to be done in this field. One would like to see put to rest or brought into the light persistent gossip of the anti-Semitic extremes to which the composer Kosaku ("Kocacu") Yamada is rumored to have gone. One would like to see a fair appraisal of the literary entrepreneur Kan Kikuchi and his wartime and postwar stances. This collection, however, is a full and fair start.
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