How is state nationalism developed? Why do individuals sacrifice themselves for their country? How are young and intelligent men brought to fight in wars orchestrated by a totalitarian regime? These are questions that anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney asked herself upon beginning this important and enlightening book.
One of her goals in writing it was to challenge the common perception of the so-called kamikaze pilots. She felt, she says, a moral obligation to present them in a more nuanced way to non-Japanese readers, because they are known outside Japan only as ultranationalistic zealots.
Perhaps the foremost anthropological observer of Japan's power structure, she earlier dissected a major myth in "Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time." In "The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual," she investigated forces of repression in Japanese history. In "Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan," she offered one of the most trenchant and critical diagnoses of this country.
In investigating state manipulation of lives she is scrupulous, carefully differentiating between the ideology of state nationalism, pressure from above, and the particular patriotism of the individuals sacrificed. Further, she distinguishes between sacrifice for the country and for only the head of the country (the emperor). Finally, she makes a distinction between thought and action -- whether the motivation toward suicide is due to an acceptance of ideology or not.
To answer these difficult questions, Ohnuki-Tierney digs deep. She discovers that since the beginning of the Meiji Era successive governments aestheticized their military operations and the resultant deaths of soldiers on the battlefield. Especially noteworthy was the employment of the cherry blossom, deployed in numerous ways but especially as a symbol of sacrifice for the emperor, who stood in for Japan itself.
"One hundred million Japanese as one soul must truly dedicate themselves to the Emperor," proclaimed Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in 1940, and a machine was set into motion that would ensure that this would seem to occur. But did it?
In culling history and studying those records left by the young pilots themselves, she arrives at conclusions that offer compelling evidence to conclusions quite opposite those still espoused by the state. To be sure the men sacrificed themselves, but for reasons quite different from those often given.
She studies how such totems as the cherry blossom were deployed and finds that "to make the tokkotai [kamikaze] operation a 'forced' voluntary system instead of an imperial order seems to have been a mechanism to exonerate those who were directly responsible for the utterly insane operation."
The cherry blossom (coming with its heavy load of historical associations and traditional connections -- transience, immutability) was consciously displayed: on uniforms, headbands, the fuselage of Zero fighters (the glider was called the cherry-blossom plane, the payload was called the cherry-blossom bomb, and whole divisions were named after the sakura.)
All of this advertising had one end -- to aestheticize the necessary deaths of the young men about to die. As a propaganda ploy it still finds its believers, but I doubt that those reading this book will be any longer among their numbers.
Ohnuki-Tierney has carefully studied the writings left behind by the pilots in order to understand the specific way in which state nationalism penetrated into their thinking. She found them torn by its demands, by their own feelings of personal patriotism, and by their agony over imminent death and their love for family and friends. It was this that led her to write this present enormously detailed yet very subtle volume.
"Not because they were Japanese but because they were human," she writes, "I find it inexcusable to dismiss them from our knowledge and to replace them with a caricature."
And, though her book is a model of academic procedure, it also contains the honest emotion of "rage against the forces that terminated these young brilliant minds . . . What sustained me through these years was the idealism and dedication to learning so evident in the pilots' diaries, which I stopped reading at night -- they were too tragic and powerful, and after reading them it was difficult to fall asleep."
It is this contained, communicated emotion that turns this book from an excellent one into something like a great one.
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