Living Soldiers/Dying Soldiers: War and Decivilization in Ishikawa Tatsuzo's Soldiers Alive | The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
David Askew
September 28, 2005
Volume 3 | Issue 9
Living Soldiers/Dying Soldiers: War and Decivilization in Ishikawa Tatsuzo's Soldiers Alive
By David Askew
Ikiteiru heitai (Living soldiers or Soldiers alive) by Ishikawa Tatsuzo (1905-1985) is arguably the best piece of war literature to emerge from the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945. In Japan, the novella has been published and republished throughout the postwar era, most recently as a Chuko Bunko in 1999, and is now available for the first time in English [1]. Providing a strong indictment not only of the conduct of the Japanese military in China but also of war itself, Ikiteiru heitai is a powerful, deeply disturbing work
In 1937-38, when the novella was written and published, Ishikawa was a young man of 32. On 29 December 1937, he was sent by the editors of the liberal journal Chuo Koron to chronicle Japanese military exploits in China. The obvious place to go was Nanjing, the recently taken capital city of Nationalist China. Arriving in Nanjing via Shanghai on or about 8 January 1938, Ishikawa spent eight days in the city, talking to Japanese infantry soldiers rather than officers, before returning to Japan and completing the manuscript of Ikiteiru heitai in just eleven days. It was published in February, in the March edition of Chuo Koron [2].
1.
An important question about (and an unseen side effect of) Japan’s informal military empire in China from 1937 to 1945 is the impact China and the Chinese experience had on the Japanese imagination. An examination of the wartime literature, including but not limited to “war literature” (senso bungaku), that emerged from and about China sheds light on this impact. A large number of novellas, novels, and other publications served to forge a Japanese historiography, memory, and perspective of China in general and the Sino-Japanese War in particular. The ideological significance of the Japanese presence on the continent was debated in, and an emerging consensus formed through, these writings. Although there were some exceptions, including Ishikawa’s Ikiteiru heitai, much of the literature (and especially the war literature) was triumphalist and jingoistic, characterized by earthy, cheerful, and stoic Japanese soldiers a la Ashihei; men who would have been recognized by anyone steeped in the traditions of the muscular Christian soldier [3]. Ishikawa is a major figure who broke with these conventions and, if for no other reason than the exceptional nature of his work, cannot be overlooked in any examination of the cultural production of memory that was pursued via representations of Japan in China. His most influential work in this context is Ikiteiru heitai.
Ikiteiru heitai begins with Japanese infantry in Northern China who have just been in combat and will soon march off to an unknown destination, and it ends with the infantry leaving occupied Nanjing after fierce fighting. The narrative follows the fortunes of a small group of soldiers in the “Kurata Platoon” of the “Nishizawa Regiment”, “Takashima Division”, as they are transferred from North to Central China to take part in the battle for Greater Shanghai, the push to Nanjing, and finally the fight for and capture of that city. Thus the story unfolds against a background of steady movement and almost constant battle, sandwiched between identical situations where a group of soldiers who have finished one battle are marching to the next, and depicts in detail what war does to the psyche of the individual soldier.
One of Ishikawa’s major themes is the human cost of war. The battlefield acts as a forge, turning individuals into fighting machines, and dehumanizing them in the process. A second (and related) theme is suggested by the Japanese title – life [4]. A number of aspects of the concept life are examined, including how the individual survives, and the ways in which the value of human life is undermined by, the brutal realities of battle. Ishikawa examines how the individual copes with an inhuman environment. The living and dying soldiers of the battlefield as depicted by Ishikawa have the frailties of real people: his Japanese soldiers are anything but idealized. Furthermore, the battlefield is a place where ambiguity is introduced into the stark differences between life and death. Finally, a third major theme is the collapse of the natural order. As the differences between life and death are submerged, a new order with links perhaps to the world of ghosts and the supernatural emerges. I will discuss each of these interlinked themes in greater detail.
The human cost of war is discussed in terms of death and injury, a cost paid in Ikiteiru heitai in explicit and graphic terms by both Japanese and Chinese, civilian and soldier, young and old, men and women. It is also discussed in terms of the psychological changes forced on the survivors of the battlefield.
2.
Ikiteiru heitai does not flinch from the horrific death and injury suffered on the battlefield. Japanese and Chinese soldiers die and are injured in battle, while civilians are also caught up in the savagery. Ishikawa’s war is indiscriminate. Although some of the battle deaths, such as those of the standard-bearers, echo an earlier bombastic and bellicose literature, in general deaths are neither clean nor heroic [5]. Ishikawa also refuses to romanticize injuries. The field hospital has “air ... thick with the stifling smell of blood and of feverish breath”. Soldiers die, or are crippled for life. One soldier is patched up to be sent home. Although this soldier “did not give a thought to the decades of disability that awaited him”, Ishikawa draws his readers’ attention to the horrific costs paid by the injured [6].
Another aspect of the human cost of war is the dehumanizing process. This is discussed in terms of the changes in the psychological state of mind of several protagonists, in particular privates Kondo and Hirao and Second Lieutenant Kurata. These members of the Kurata Platoon struggle to adapt to the battlefield and, in the case of Kondo at least, to life off the battlefield afterwards. All three are members of the broadly defined intelligentsia, being educated and, one must assume, urban. Kondo was a medical school graduate, Hirao a newspaper proofreader, and Kurata an elementary schoolteacher. All three struggle to overcome the fears that prey on the minds of urban and educated individuals (the sort of people who would have constituted Ishikawa’s readers) when placed on the battlefield, and are also forced to make compromises with their consciences, as they adapt to the savage and brutal realities of their new circumstances. In comparison, a poor, uneducated, and rural soldier, Corporal Kasahara, is portrayed as the ideal soldier. This contrast echoes another one between horses.
“Japanese army horses were pitifully weak. At the barracks they had been regularly drilled and fed at set times. Under such living conditions, Japanese army horses were certainly superior beasts. However, in the violence of actual battle, with neither regular feeding nor rest possible, their health broke down and they found it difficult even to stand on their own legs. Chinese horses, on the other hand, were used to daily abuse, and proved their worth on the battlefield” [7].
Unlike Kasahara, a poor and simple farmboy, the urban, pampered and educated elites, like Japanese horses, either fall apart under stress, or adapt and survive at a cost. As demonstrated below, Ikiteiru heitai discusses both survivors and the costs of survival.
The dehumanizing process acts in two directions, as the violation of the “enemy’s” humanity leads in turn to self-negation.
“[A] soldier on the battlefield scorns his enemy’s life as so much refuse. At the same time, he also scorns his own life no less. The soldier has not made a conscious decision to force himself to accept the notion that life is as light as the proverbial feather. Rather, in despising the enemy, he has come unawares to despise himself and his own life as well. Losing sight of their own private lives, the men lost the ability to think of their lives and bodies as precious” [8].
Elsewhere, Ishikawa notes that “[t]he battlefield was a place that appeared to possess an uncanny powerful ability that, unnoticed, transformed each and every combatant into men of identical characters, who thought at the same level, and who shared the same needs” [9]. The individual disappears, to be replaced by a cog in a well-oiled fighting machine.
Fear of death and other anxieties haunt the educated survivors. Ironically, perhaps, this fear and anxiety drives them to embrace battle, death, and war. Kurata, for instance, is initially disturbed and traumatized by his survival, and finds himself increasingly drawn to battle as a means to overcome his anxieties. The psychological process is described in some detail as Kurata comes to accept the realities of the battlefield.
“Kurata now felt that he had reached a spiritual turning point. His grating anxiety had eased and the confused heart which had sought death had found peace. If one could see into the depths of his soul, what had until now been fueling his unease and impatience, together with his courage, was the instinctive terror of a life in peril. But having seen the company commander die before his eyes, that terror had passed into a separate dimension. His emotions soared – or plunged. Perhaps this was a sort of numbing of the sensibility, instinctively activated to avert a disintegration of the self. … He began to feel a great breadth of spirit, a sensation of freedom, a sense of amorality. This was the awakening of an unreflective cruelty. He was already starting to cultivate a character that would enable him to participate in the most gruesome slaughter. That is to say, he was catching up with Corporal Kasahara” [10].
Kurata eventually is turned into a soldier who is ideally suited for the battlefield. In “scorning the enemy’s life, he had unawares attained the extremely intuitive and natural mental state of scorning his own”, and had thus overcome “the impatience to die caused by an instinctive anxiety about death” [11]. The cost is a high one: the veneer of civilization which lies on a foundation of moral and ethical values is stripped away together with morality, producing a decivilized and amoral fighting brute.
The second major theme revolves around the concept of life.
On the battlefield, the value of life is constantly undermined. Thus Ishikawa explicitly acknowledges that “[a] human life could be exchanged for a lump of sugar” [12]. In one haunting scene, a baby is left crying beside his dead mother, the fate awaiting a helpless child in a land ravaged by war brutally articulated.
“The woman had rolled to the water’s edge and lay on her back, her arms and legs flung out. Next to her breast was a baby, too young even to crawl, lying face down, his nose in the dry grass, bawling with all his might. …
Kondo … gave vent to a sarcastic chuckle.
‘Hirao’, he said, ‘do that baby a favor and kill it. Just like yesterday. It’s the merciful thing to do. If you leave it as it is, by tonight or so, dogs will eat it alive’” [13].
It is important to note that Kondo is not depicted in Ikiteiru heitai as a monster. Rather, the realities of the battlefield require participants to distance themselves from the morality of “home”, and instead internalise a new weltanschauung, an amoral outlook that negates the value of life.
The split between a universal outlook in which the value of all human life is recognized and a particularistic and nationalistic outlook in which the “enemy” is treated as less than human is symbolized by the hands of the Buddhist priest, Katayama Gencho, who wades into enemy soldiers, rosary beads wrapped around his left hand, while wielding a spade with his right, with which he “smote dead one person after another” [14]. As Katayama himself recognizes, his religion, which aspires to universal values, fails to cross national borders.
The soldiers depicted in Ishikawa’s novel are “alive” in that they are not flawless heroes, but instead are ordinary human beings in abnormal circumstances. They have been brutalized by war, and so while they have strengths and frequently exhibit martial virtues such as bravery and loyalty to their comrades in arms, they also commit murder, rape, and arson as they march and loot their way to Nanjing. Indeed, one of the major characteristics that distinguishes Ishikawa’s novel from other Japanese wartime literature is its depiction of Japanese violence – of the murder, rape, arson and pillaging that was to characterize the Nanjing atrocities and become routinized in war zones throughout the country.
Ishikawa is brutally honest about the violence these soldiers experience and commit. In the opening pages of the novel, Kasahara executes a Chinese arsonist; later, a woman suspected of being a spy, another woman whose sobbing annoys soldiers trying to rest, and a Chinese cook suspected of stealing sugar, are also murdered [15]. There are several scenes where prisoners are executed [16]. The execution of an 11- or 12-year old girl who had shot a Japanese officer is mentioned [17]. Note that this suggests a deterioration of army discipline. In the opening pages of the novella, males are the targets of Japanese violence, but there is a rapid expansion of the violence to include not only combatants but also non-combatants, not men alone but women as well, not just soldiers but also prisoners, not only adults but also children.
Rape is discussed indirectly. It takes place off-stage, but readers are left in no doubt as to what is happening. For instance, the soldiers are said to be engaged in “foraging for fresh meat”, a euphemism for “looking for guniang – girls” [18]. On the way to Nanjing, the regiment stops to rest for three days at Wuxi. Ishikawa’s narrator explains:
“It was at times like these the surviving soldiers most desired women. They swaggered around the city, searching for women like dogs chasing rabbits. … The soldiers returned sporting silver rings on the little finger of their left hands.
‘Where’d you get this?’ their comrades asked, to which they replied with a laugh:
‘It’s a memento of my late wife’” [19].
Kasahara also has a ring. When Kurata asks him where it came from, Kasahara replies:
“‘A guniang gave it to me, Second Lieutenant, sir!’
The soldiers roared with laughter.
‘In exchange for a pistol bullet, right, Kasahara?’
‘That’s right!’ rejoined the corporal. ‘I turned it down, saying I don’t need it, but she begged, saying, please, Mr. Kasahara, I so much want to give it to you, so I had no choice’” [20].
The silver rings are wedding rings, and Japanese soldiers are obviously raping and then murdering the women.
In addition to rape and murder, arson is also mentioned [21], and looting features throughout. The savage behavior of the Japanese protagonists, together with the routine brutalization is articulated by Kasahara on two occasions when women are killed. “What a waste!” he says, implying that women should be raped first [22]. Here, Ishikawa portrays a breakdown in the “civilized” laws and customs of war and demonstrates how thoroughly his soldiers have been decivilized. Their loyalty to one another prevents a complete collapse into a Hobbesian state of nature, but war has exposed the ugly realities that lie underneath the thin veneer provided by civilization and culture. (Note that Ishikawa’s modernist position is that our “savage” nature is held in check by civilization, and that it takes the brutal realities of the battlefield to unleash it. Post-modernists might well argue that war itself is an essential aspect of modern “civilization” and therefore that “civilization” nurtures and promotes brutishness).
For Ishikawa’s Japanese soldiers, the dividing line between life and death is no longer stark, but ambiguous. On the night of 10 December 1937, the soldiers whom we have followed as they fight their way to Nanjing have been ordered to capture the peaks of the Purple Mountain overlooking the city. It is winter, cold everywhere, but especially cold on the heights of the mountain. While one unit remained awake: “the rest of the soldiers, embracing each other against the cold that covered the mountaintop with frost, slept soundly. They lay alongside their dead comrades, guarding the corpses as they slept. A single overcoat served to cover two men. There was neither life nor death. A dead comrade was still a comrade, and no distinctions were drawn between the living and the dead. This was not limited only to the corpses of their comrades. Since the stony ground they slept on made their heads ache, some men dragged up Chinese corpses and used their stomachs for pillows” [23].
Previously, during the march to Nanjing, Ishikawa notes that: “A certain percentage of the soldiers carried the bones of their dead comrades as they marched. None of the bones of the dead had been sent to the rear since the landing at Baimao River; all continued to advance in their comrades’ embrace. As the front moved forward, the dead multiplied, while the numbers of the living decreased. The proportion of soldiers carrying bones doubled and continued to grow. … In this way, the dead together with the surviving soldiers continued to press toward Nanjing” [24].
These two passages indicate how Ishikawa is trying to suggest a breakdown in the stark distinction between life and death. The dead sleep with the living at night, and march with them during the day. The soldiers themselves regard the bones of their dead comrades as objects that are more than dead, and themselves as less than alive.
“They did not feel any of the dread or repugnance that corpses and bones usually evoked. Rather, they felt very close to them. It was as if the bones were still alive. Or to be more exact, they perhaps felt that they were only temporarily alive and that over the course of the day they too might be transformed into bones just like these. They were perhaps merely living bones” [25].
In the world of the battle-weary soldier where the dead are more than dead and the living less than alive, there is a strange marriage between the rationalism of modernity (symbolized by the modern military structures and weapons of the Japanese army) and the mysticism of pre-modernism.
The breakdown of the natural order and hints of the supernatural are symbolized and provided by cats. First, cats (and to a certain extent dogs) serve to symbolize a breakdown in the natural hierarchy in which human beings are clearly at the top of the food chain. For instance, after the fall of Nanjing, Kasahara and Kondo walk past “a tobacco shop across whose entrance lay a corpse partly covered with a straw mat and surrounded by five cats with glittering eyes. The cats warily watched the street, their noses dyed a deep red” [26].
The cats guard the entrance of the shop, symbolically occupying a door that acts as a metaphor of movement from this world to another. They have been feasting on human flesh and drinking human blood, a theme that emerges several times in the novella. Another member of the platoon enters a different shop.
“The shop had been thoroughly looted; not a scrap of textile was left. In the shadow of the cutting table on the second floor, among the mess left by looters, lay two young women, naked and dead. The steel shutters were half-lowered, and in the dim light, their white skin was highlighted against the dark floor. The breasts of one had been gouged out, eaten by cats”.
The breast-eating cats were in fact searching for milk: the soldier who made this gruesome discovery explains that this “woman was pregnant … She smelled of milk, and that’s why the cats ate her” [27].
Cats also act as surrogates of the supernatural. After an earlier struggle to cope with life on the battlefield, Kondo in particular struggles to adapt to life away from it. In occupied Nanjing after the fighting has finished, he entertains himself with wine and women. During a drinking session with a Japanese geisha (from the context, clearly a “comfort woman”), he is unnerved by a cat that he perceives as being accompanied by a ghost. In particular, he sees in this flesh-eating cat the female “spy”, victim of his murderous brutality, and seeks to overcome the fear and anxiety that haunt him by killing another woman [28]. Kondo shoots (but does not kill) the Japanese woman, is detained as his comrades prepare to march away, and then released. The novella ends with a panicked Kondo running furiously, catching up with his comrades, and rejoining a world where he knows peace. With the stray soldier safely home, the infantry march out of Nanjing, heading to the next battlefield.
Ikiteiru heitai triggered a controversy when originally published in Chuo Koron in 1938. Despite the censorship exercised by both author and publisher that had resulted in major changes in which phrases, sentences and even entire sections were deleted, the Japanese authorities moved quickly to prohibit distribution of the original. Given the nature of this novella, this is not surprising. As Donald Keene says, “it is hard to imagine the military in any country tolerating the [wartime] publication of a book that describes soldiers of their side as murdering, raping, pillaging maniacs” [29]. Together with his editor and publisher, Ishikawa was prosecuted under the Newspaper Law (Shinbunshiho). Because of this repression, Ishikawa’s novella has an important place in discussions of wartime censorship [30].
Although an example of war literature (in that it was written during and about the war), Ikiteiru heitai has more in common with postwar Japanese literature on the war than with contemporary works. In his celebrated work The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell notes the existence of a “simultaneous and reciprocal process by which life feeds materials to literature while literature returns the favor by conferring forms upon life” [31]. In other words, while the cultural production or representation embodied in literature is based on experience, literature and other representations influence how we organize and interpret our memories of that experience. Politics also plays a role here. The state was anxious to control Japanese representations of Japanese actions in China. The refusal to allow distribution of Ishikawa’s novella was also a refusal to countenance a particular interpretation of historical experience.
As a result, Ishikawa’s novella had little impact on the wartime Japanese imagination. It was not until the war ended that Japanese atrocities came to be branded onto the Japanese memory. In the postwar era, Ikiteiru heitai played a role in creating a new awareness of Japanese actions on the continent and acted to counter wartime cultural productions of memory. With the wartime censorship lifted, Ikiteiru heitai was republished in 1945, with expurgated words and passages reinserted [32]. Ishikawa’s novella continues to provide a central plank in a realistic acknowledgement of Japanese brutality in China.
Although Ishikawa’s novella is sometimes read through the prism of the wartime censorship, and thus read as a description of the Nanjing Atrocities and Japanese wartime brutalities which was so honest the authorities were forced to ban it, it is in fact much more interested in the psychological effects of the battlefield on living human beings. As Keene notes, Ishikawa’s soldiers are not monsters; rather, “participation in the war has transformed a group of quite ordinary men and brought to the surface primitive forces that would normally never have been exposed” [33]. In this, it leads readers to reflect on the ways in which combat situations anywhere have the potential to turn ordinary men – fathers, husbands, brothers and sons – (and of course women) into killers who discard civilized norms of behavior and even the laws of war. In addition to the theme of wartime atrocities, it is thus also a powerful and deeply disturbing work on the costs of war to soldiers in combat and on the decivilizing impact of the battlefield. Ishikawa’s insights have universal significance, and his work will continue to prove of interest to modern readers.
Notes
1 Ishikawa Tatsuzo, Ikiteiru heitai, Tokyo: Chuko Bunko, 1999. Ishikawa Tatsuzo, Soldiers Alive (translated by Zeljko Cipris), Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2003. In citing from Ishikawa’s novella here, I have drawn largely upon Cipris’ translation, but have at times made changes to it in consultation with the translator.
2 For the dates 29 December and 8 January, see Ishikawa Tatsuzo “Ikiteiru heitai” jiken Keishicho ikensho·choshusho (Ishikawa Tatsuzo, Living soldiers case: The Metropolitan Police Headquarters’ opinions and hearings). Unpublished manuscript, 1938, np. Note that there is some confusion about these dates.
3 Hino Ashihei was a major, if not the major, and certainly at the time most popular, author of Japanese war literature, including his celebrated soldier trilogy, and especially the first volume of the trilogy, Mugi to heitai (Wheat and soldiers). In addition to Hino’s works, see David M. Rosenfeld, Unhappy Soldier: Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War II Literature, Lanham, Boulder and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2002.
4 During his trial, Ishikawa was asked about the meaning of his title. He replied that by “ikiteiru” (living, alive) he meant soldiers who had survived in the face of death, and also meant soldiers who were true human beings. See Ishikawa Tatsuzo “Ikiteiru heitai” jiken Kohan kiroku (Ishikawa Tatsuzo, Living soldiers case: Court record). Unpublished manuscript, 1938, np.
5 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 92, 138-139. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 121, 157-158.
6 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 106, 108. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 131-133.
7 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 79. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 111-112.
8 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 108. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 133.
9 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 63-64. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 100-101.
10 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 76-77. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 109-110.
11 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 149-150. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 167.
12 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 98. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 125.
13 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 90-91. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 120.
14 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 60. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 98.
15 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 10-11, 49, 85, 97. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 59-60, 89, 116, 124.
16 See for instance Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 115-116. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 138-139.
17 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 112. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 136.
18 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 45. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 86.
19 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 93-94. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 122.
20 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 77-78. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 110-111.
21 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 100. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 126.
22 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 49, 86. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 90, 117
23 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 133-134. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 153-154.
24 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 102-103. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 127-128, 129.
25 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 103. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 129.
26 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 156. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 172.
27 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, p. 176. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, p. 189.
28 Ishikawa, Ikiteiru heitai, pp. 182-183, 185-187. Ishikawa, Soldiers Alive, pp. 193, 195-196, 197.
29 Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, Fiction, vol. 3, History of Japanese Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 914.
30 See, for instance, Haruko Taya Cook, “The Many Lives of Living Soldiers: Ishikawa Tatsuzo and Japan’s War in Asia”, in Marlene J. Mayo, J. Thomas Rimer and H. Eleanor Kerkham eds., War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920-1960, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001, and Haruko Taya Cook, “Reporting the ‘Fall of Nankin’ and the Suppression of a Japanese Literary ‘Memory’ of the Nature of a War”, in Fei Fei Li, Robert Sabella and David Liu eds., Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing, Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2002.
31 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, p. ix.
32 See Ishikawa Tatsuzo, Ikiteiru heitai, Tokyo: Kawade Shobo, 1945.
33 Keene, Dawn to the West, p. 912.
David Askew teaches at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, He can be reached at askew@apu.ac.jp. Recent publications include chapters in Ribatarianizumu tokuhon (The libertarian reader), Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 2005, The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2004, and Football Goes East: Culture and Business of the Global Game in China, Japan and Korea, London and New York: Routledge, 2004. He wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted September 28
, 2005.
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Soldiers Alive
by
Tatsuzō Ishikawa (Translation)
3.68 · Rating details · 62 ratings · 4 reviews
When the editors of Chuo koron, Japan's leading liberal magazine, sent the prizewinning young novelist Ishikawa Tatsuzo to war-ravaged China in early 1938, they knew the independent-minded writer would produce a work wholly different from the lyrical and sanitized war reports then in circulation. They could not predict, however, that Ishikawa would write an unsettling novella so grimly realistic it would promptly be banned and lead to the author's conviction on charges of disturbing peace and order.
Decades later, Soldiers Alive remains a deeply disturbing and eye-opening account of the Japanese march on Nanking and its aftermath. In its unforgettable depiction of an ostensibly altruistic war's devastating effects on the soldiers who fought it and the civilians they presumed to liberate, Ishikawa's work retains its power to shock, inform, and provoke. (less)
Paperback, 232 pages
Published July 31st 2003 by University of Hawaii Press (first published July 2003)
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Soldiers Alive
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Oct 01, 2013David rated it it was amazing
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A famous sinologist once wrote:
"Japan's mission is to promote Japanese culture with the taste unique to Japan and to brighten the universe. Since Japan is located in the East and since China is its largest neighbour in the east, Japan must begin its task in China."
This "task" is exposed in Ishikawa's brutal "Soldiers Alive". "Although Ishikawa's Soldiers Alive can be read as a damning document of imperialist aggression, it was not intended as such nor is this what the Japanese authorities construed it to be" writes Cipris in his fascinating introduction. "Asked by a judge whether his writing would not damage the people's trust in the Japanese soldiers, Ishikawa replied his intention had been to shatter their trust in godlike creatures and replace it with a trust in human beings." An interesting idea ... until you read:
"The woman had rolled to the water's edge and lay on her back, her arms and legs flung out. Not far from her breast, the baby, too young even to crawl, lay face down in the dry grass, screaming with all his might. A thin line of blood flowed threadlike from the woman's temple, gathering blackly in the hollow of her ear.
Standing stock-still at the prow and gripping the pole, Hirao kept his eyes fixed on the two figures. Kondo, poling diligently at the stern, gave vent to a sarcastic chuckle.
'Hirao,' he called, 'you'd better kill that child, too. Just like yesterday. It's the merciful thing to do. If you leave it as it is, by tonight or so, dogs will devour it alive.'"
and
"It was at times like these the surviving soldiers most desired women. With bold strides they roamed the city streets, searching for women like dogs chasing rabbits. Such unbridled conduct was strictly controlled at the North China front, but here it was difficult to restrain the men.
Each of them felt as triumphant and willful as a king, a despot. When they could not achieve their aim within the city limits, they ventured to the farmhouses beyond. Enemy stragglers were still hiding in the area and many of the inhabitants had arms, but this did not make the soldiers hesitate in the least. They felt themselves the mightiest creatures alive. Needless to say, in the face of such conviction, all morality, law, reflection, and humanity were powerless. The soldiers returned from their expeditions sporting silver rings on the small fingers of their left hands.
'Where'd you get this?' their comrades asked; and each man laughingly replied, 'It's a memento of my late wife!'"
and
"On the morning of departure from Wu-hsi, the soldiers set fire to the houses in which they had been lodging. Many simply left without extinguishing the cooking fires, confident they would eventually engulf the buildings.
They did this not only to demonstrate to themselves their resolve never to retreat, but also to deny refuge to their scattered enemies. Moreover, they felt that burning this city to the ground was the surest way of consolidating its occupation."
and
"The stony ground they slept on made their heads ache, so some men pulled up Chinese corpses and used their stomachs for pillows. 'Ah, what comfort!' they remarked."
and
"Garrison troops outside the city were in charge of digging up land mines. They used Chinese labourers for the task. Trembling with fear, the Chinese dug into the earth. The soldiers watched, laughing, a safe distance away."
People were to read this and be roused to support the war in China? Was Japan really that fucking crazy? Cipris adds that "The government, however, appeared unwilling to risk the consequences of showing its soldiers as too fallibly human. Ishikawa was convicted of 'disturbing peace and order by describing massacres of noncombatants by Imperial Army soldiers, instances of plunder, and conditions of lax military discipline'. He was sentenced to four months in prison with a three-year reprieve."
They'd probably be room for Ishikawa to come out of this as something of a subversive, anti-war hero ... if he hadn't subsequently agreed to going off to China and this time coming back with an account the regime really liked. Oh dear ...
... but, of course, as So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers showed us, it's not as if there were many successful writers that had a good war. In his introduction, Cipris gives us:
"Yasunari Kawabata (1899 – 1972), the future Novel prizewinner ... spoke and wrote on behalf of the war effort, defended censorship, joined patriotic literary organizations, and used the money he accepted from the military-dominated government to buy a house in the resort town of Karuizawa. Kawabata twice traveled to occupied China, where he was impressed at witnessing the creation of a colonialist utopia. As late as August of 1941, he was able to write: 'The greatest joy of my most recent journey came from being able to meet intimately many of the good Japanese carrying out magnificent work in Manchuria and China.'" (less)
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Jan 12, 2019William Kirkland rated it really liked it
Shelves: japan, translation, war, fiction, china
With Eric Maria Remarque's 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front came a virtual wave of war-sorrow novels. In the same year were Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, described by Hemingway as “the finest and noblest novel to come out of World War I.” Faulkner contributed several novellas and Dalton Trumbo Johnny Got His Gun, 1939, with its soldier who has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face (including his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue); Louis-Ferdinand Céline in France wrote Journey to the End of the Night an absolutely scabrous take on the war and the fever than came with it — “…everyone queued up to go and get killed.” — Scarcely anything was written that had the old burnish of brass and bravery.
The same change of mood was taking place on the other side of the world as well. Writers whose forebears had told of the courage and skill of the samurai warriors in gunki monogatari, or war tales, began to tell other stories.
One was Ishikawa Tatsuzō. At thirty-two years old, an admirer of Anatole France and Emile Zola, and having won a prestigious literary prize for his first novel, based on several years as a farm laborer in Brazil, he was sent to report on the Japanese war in China in December of 1937.
Japan had had military forces in China from the beginning of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895, and had increased them with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 when it established the over-seas territory of Manchuko. Hostilities broke out again in July of 1937 with the so called Marco Polo Bridge Incident. By August, elements of the Imperial Japanese Army had taken Shanghai. By January, as Ishikawa arrived at the Imperial Capital of Nanking, the infamous Nanking Massacre had been underway for three weeks.
Soldiers Alive (Ikite iru heitai) was written in furious haste based on observations and interviews with the soldiers involved; it was ready for publication in March, 1938. However, The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 and the earlier Press Law of 1909, were in increasing use: censorship, mass arrests, torture, and execution of some, mostly communist, activists were in increasing use. Ishikawa and his publisher were brought to trial and even after cuts had been made, the book was refused publication. It was not seen by the Japanese public until 1945...
... Ishikawa presents a small group of men we can follow by name. The narrator knows their thoughts and attitudes, their relations to other. Through dialog and internal eavesdropping he describes how each copes with the war in his own way; some coping in several, contradictory, ways.
Men struggle with the fear of dying, and the fear of the fear of dying: I must show a brave face. As Tim O’Brien put it in The Things They Carried, the Americans of 1968, as the Japanese of 1938, went to war, and killed, because not to was too great a shame before fellow soldiers and family. Remarque knew of it in WWI as well, when “even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward.”
Wherever men gather, and especially men as soldiers, women appear, as topics of conversation, as objects of lust, commerce and violence.
“All right! If it’s Tientsin, we’ll just live it up to the hilt! Hey, hey!”
A soldier solemnly chimed in: “Call the geisha, buy the whores, swill the sake!”
In their soldier slang, ‘Foraging for meat’ meant looking for ku-niang–girls.”
For complete review see http://www.allinoneboat.org/soldiers-... (less)
flag1 like · Like · comment · see review
Jun 22, 2018R Reddebrek rated it it was amazing
"The sweating, dust-covered soldiers marched, accompanied by countless swarms of circling flies."
Soldiers Alive is possibly the strangest book I've read so far in terms of the context of its writing and publishing. I'd heard of the book several years ago on lists of great anti war novels. That technically isn't true though I have a hard time believing it doesn't fit on the list after reading it. I also saw a brief blurb about this being the fictionalised account of the rape of Nanking. Thankfully that isn't true either. By that I don't mean I've bought into Japanese revisionism, that crime did happen, nor do I wish to downplay or minimise it, its just that.... well I really don't want to read a book about mass rape and massacres. The book is about a military unit on the march to Nanking though, and it ends shortly after the fall of the city, but no mass rape or beheading contests take place within the pages.
Curiously though the unit does commit multiple atrocities everywhere else in China they're stationed. And none of its hidden, on the contrary its stated that violent acts against the civilian population are pretty common experiences in the invasion of China. This is the oddity about Soldiers Alive, its treatment of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Japanese occupation of China is so negative that I don't believe a Chinese nationalist author could do better. Yet Ishikawa Tatsuzo was not only Japanese but a pretty staunch militarist whom believed in Japan's quest to dominate Asia.
When Japan renewed its expansion into China in 1937 one of the ways the government sort to stoke patriotism within its people was to encourage writers to create novels and short stories glorifying the IJA and the Emperor. They even created a special unit of approved writers who were allowed to tour the battlefields and early settlements. Ishikawa was one of those writers, but despite his political agreements with the government and its war aims he came to a dangerous conclusion the standard propaganda line the government was pushing in regards to the war on China was incorrect and potentially very dangerous.
Officially the war was being fought for the salvation of brother race, the Chinese army was being routed at every turn, IJA casualties were light and the civilians were welcoming the Japanese as liberators from the corrupt KMT leadership . Those were in short lies, well, ok, the KMT did have a serious problem with corruption and cliques but the rest of it was extremely inaccurate. The IJA won most of its engagements with the Chinese army, yes, but they were very messy victories. Often the Chinese army would give such stiff resistance that the IJA was constantly delayed and suffered far higher casualties then anticipated. If a village was supposed to be captured within a day of fighting, it would take two or three days to capture, and that was with reinforcements or use of superior artillery and airpower. And usually the Chinese army instead of being routed would withdraw tactically and move to a new defensive position a few miles away, or go to ground and fight as partisans. Instead of a series of decisive manoeuvres in the field, the IJA lurched from one battle to the next.
And as for being beloved by the Chinese civilians, well partisan attacks were a frequent danger in the rear. Indeed acts of resistance behind the lines by Chinese civilians were so common its become part of the post war right wing narrative and is used to retroactively justify the brutal repression of the Chinese population.
Ishikawa saw this was all false and attempted to correct this by publishing an accurate account of the war. And in so doing he effectively condemned the whole adventure. I cannot stress this enough, this is one of the most damning accounts of a war and the conduct of an army I've come across not written as a deliberate attack on militarism.
Consider the following passage
"Screaming shrilly like a lunatic, Hirao thrust his bayonet three times into the woman's chest. the other soldiers joined in, stabbing her at random. in little over ten seconds, the woman was dead. flat as a layer of bedding, she lay spent on the dark ground; a warm vapour, thick with the smell of fresh blood, drifted upward into the flushed faces of the frenzied soldiers."
The young woman (called ku-niang by the soldiers, it means girl but they're using it as slang more akin to prostitute only without any intention to pay) was butchered because she had the bad luck to mourn the death of her mother who had been killed by a stray bullet when the fighting moved onto her families doorstep. Hirao faces no consequences for stabbing a woman to death because her crying annoyed him and this is not the only time members of the unit engage in such behaviour.
Unsurprisingly the authorities were not pleased with this pro war propaganda. In addition to its literary merits Soldiers Alive is incredibly revealing, an accurate account of a conflict is inherently condemnatory even when penned by a militaristic author. (less)
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-----------
Soldiers Alive – A Novel of the Japanese in China, 1937
11FridayJan 2019http://www.allinoneboat.org/soldiers-alive-a-novel-of-the-japanese-in-china-1937/
Posted by Will Kirkland
For century upon century, from the time of the stories of Gilgamesh (18th BCE), stories of war have been told to exalt the valorous and victorious, to enshrine the names of warriors in the minds of generations to come and to provide example to the youth who listen: this is the way to eternal glory. This basic compact between warrior and story-teller (you make me famous and I’ll make you famous) endured until the barbed-wire and machine-guns of the First World War began to shred it. Perhaps the story of guts and glory wasn’t the only story to be told.
The pathos and war-regret of Remarque’s million-seller in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front, had been preceded by others of not such great fame. Arnold Zweig, a German, wrote the satiric The Case of Sergeant Grishka in 1927. Georges Duhamel won France’s Prix Goncourt in 1918 for his anguished Vie des martyrs / Life of the Martyrs, 1917. He had been a battle surgeon for most of the war. Roland Dorgelés, a French soldier, published the scathing Wooden Crosses in 1919. In England, Rebecca West movingly described “combat fatigue” by 1919 in The Return of the Soldier. In America, countering the Edith Wharton and Willa Cather’s war-positive novels of the ’20s, John Dos Passos contributed Three Soldiers, 1921, and e. e. cummings, The Enormous Room in 1922.
Ω
With Remarque came a virtual wave of war-sorrow novels. In the same year were Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, described by Hemingway as “the finest and noblest novel to come out of World War I.” Faulkner contributed several novellas and Dalton Trumbo Johnny Got His Gun,1939, with its soldier who has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face (including his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue); Louis-Ferdinand Céline in France wrote Journey to the End of the Night an absolutely scabrous take on the war and the fever than came with it — “…everyone queued up to go and get killed.” — Scarcely anything was written that had the old burnish of brass and bravery.
The same change of mood was taking place on the other side of the world as well. Writers whose forebears had told of the courage and skill of the samurai warriors in gunki monogatari, or war tales, began to tell other stories. One was Ishikawa Tatsuzō. At thirty-two years old, an admirer of Anatole France¹ and Emile Zola², and having won a prestigious literary prize for his first novel, based on several years as a farm laborer in Brazil, he was sent to report on the Japanese war in China in December of 1937.
Japan had had military forces in China from the beginning of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895, and had increased them with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 when it established the over-seas territory of Manchuko. Hostilities broke out again in July of 1937 with the so called Marco Polo Bridge Incident. By August, elements of the Imperial Japanese Army had taken Shanghai. By January, as Ishikawa arrived at the Imperial Capital of Nanking, the infamous Nanking Massacre had been underway for three weeks.
Soldiers Alive (Ikite iru heitai), was written in furious haste based on observations and interviews with the soldiers involved; it was ready for publication in March, 1938. However, The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 and the earlier Press Law of 1909, were in increasing use: censorship, mass arrests, torture, and execution of some, mostly communist, activists were in increasing use. Ishikawa and his publisher were brought to trial and even after cuts had been made, the book was refused publication. It was not seen by the Japanese public until 1945, after Occupation Authorities replaced Japanese censorship with censorship of their own. Stories of Japanese cruel conduct in China was now allowed; of the victims of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not so much.
In a fine translation and excellent introduction by Zeljko Cipris (2003), we can see what offended the war-time censors: much guts, little glory.
“Killing enemy soldiers was no different than killing carp,” according to one.
When a Chinese home, designated as headquarters, goes up in flames, the young owner is quickly caught.
“…the scrawny, crow-like youth dropped to his knees in the mud, began to shout a string of incomprehensible words, raised his clasped hands, and pleaded. But Karahara was used to such pleas. Even so, he did not enjoy them.
“Ei!”
“The youth’s screams instantly ceased, and the fields reverted to the hushed silence of a twilight landscape. The head did not fall, but the cut was sufficiently deep. His body still upright, a geyser of blood overflowed his shoulders. The body tilted to the right, toppled into the wild chrysanthemums on the bank, and rolled over once.”
Later, with the pitiless soldierly indifference to death we’ve learned of in recent post-glory war novels, one of the soldiers says:
“There’s a dead horse in the creek. Just about now he’s probably getting a hug from the horse.”
Or, on an evening when the soldiers cannot sleep:
“The stony ground they slept on made their heads ache, so some men piled up Chinese corpses, and used their stomachs for pillows.”
Ah, what comfort!” they remarked.”
In unemotive prose, almost as if writing in a Regimental Log, we have not only scenes of mayhem but accounts of the Japanese casual contempt for the Chinese, even when, at times, the shade of human recognition is felt. A soldier talks as best he can to one of the Chinese porters:
“A great serenity was to be found in these broken conversations with the Chinese. And yet, even during such peaceful moments, they could not quite overcome their contempt for the Chinese, so stubbornly and deeply was it rooted in their hearts.”
Interestingly, although spoken Chinese and Japanese are not mutually understandable, some of their shared ideographic writing is. Japanese soldiers could read Chinese resistance slogans written on the walls:
“Down with Japanese imperialism! eight characters written everywhere.”
Though of course, like invading soldiers almost everywhere the Japanese thought it absurd.
“Japan’s mission.. was not a quest for wealth or power, but rather a moral crusade for freedom, peace and justice. Goodness was at work, not greed. As a Japanese editorial of the late 1930s phrased it, “Our responsibility is not the conquest of the world; it is the emancipation of the world.”
Ishikawa presents a small group of men we can follow by name. The narrator knows their thoughts and attitudes, their relations to other. Through dialog and internal eavesdropping he describes how each copes with the war in his own way; some coping in several, contradictory, ways.
Men struggle with the fear of dying, and the fear of the fear of dying: I must show a brave face. As Tim O’Brien put it in The Things They Carried, the Americans of 1968, as the Japanese of 1938, went to war, and killed, because not to was too great a shame before fellow soldiers and family. Remarque knew of it in WWI as well, when “even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward.”
Wherever men gather, and especially men as soldiers, women appear, as topics of conversation, as objects of lust, commerce and violence.
“All right! If it’s Tientsin, we’ll just live it up to the hilt! Hey, hey!”
A soldier solemnly chimed in: “Call the geisha, buy the whores, swill the sake!”
In their soldier slang, ‘Foraging for meat’ meant looking for ku-niang–girls.”
“…the Nishizawa Regiment … roamed the city streets, searching for women like dogs chasing rabbits. … Each of them felt as triumphant and willful as a king, a despot. When they could not achieve their aim within the city limits, they ventured to the farmhouses beyond.”
And murder: The soldiers approach a woman in a house. She points a pistol at them. It misfires. They tackle her. Strip her.
“The woman’s entire body, white and naked, lay abruptly exposed before their eyes. It dazzled them so much… firm breasts rose round and full from a finely fleshed torso … First Class Private Kondō drew a knife from his belt … Without a word he drove the knife into the woman just below her breasts. The white flesh flew up in terrific convulsions. The woman clutched at the knife with both hands and groaned in agony. Like a pinned mantis, she writhed, soon ceased stirring, and died. Dark blood spread in a wet stain under the shoes of the watching soldiers.
Kasahara laughed “You sure wasted a good lay!”
A priest (likely Shinto) with the troops prays over the dead and kills the enemy with a savagely swung shovel.
“…by now had hacked to death dozens of Chinese soldiers and felt at peace…”
Not that the soldiers are completely without feeling for the defeated adversary. “Walking around the devastated city, Second Lieutenant Kurata keenly felt its misery.” Another passage admires as “magnificent” Chinese prisoners’ bearing while awaiting death by beheading.
What won’t be familiar to western readers or soldiers, is the poetry, and song writing, often with patriotic fervor, that the Japanese turn to. Not simply old standards, but poems written and recited to each other.
“We warriors face
Death with open eyes.
Crickets in the grass,
Hush your trilling cries.”
Soldiers dying for the nation were depicted as falling cherry blossoms, an almost required cliché.
Ω
I can’t think of novel from England, France, Germany, or the U.S that presents a story of such shocking brutality, carried out by the author’s own countrymen. Certainly some spoke of shooting prisoners rather than feeding them, a war-crime as most of them knew. Some wrote of brutal bayonet deaths, twisted in the body and the rifle fired to help extract it. Almost all post WWI novels and memoirs tell of bodies disintegrating under high-caliber shells and the shock and horror replaced over time with self-saving blindness. None that I know of, wrote that Tommys or Poilu or Doughboys tortured or laughed at mutilating rape.
Even so, for all the courage to represent, Ishikawa falls short at the most shocking of all: the death of upwards of 300,000 in the Nanking massacres ³ more than the Japanese dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Though he depicts looting by soldiers and severe hunger among the Chinese, as well as the setting up of brothels of Chinese women for the soldiers (the officers had their pick of imported, quasi-voluntary Japanese women), he gilds with risible reason and kindness his descriptions of the interchange between soldiers and civilians — where the count of rapes is between 20,000 and 80,000.
“Nanking’s remaining inhabitants had all been herded into the refugee zone. They were said to number two hundred thousand or so … the area was put under international control, and sentries were posted at its boundaries. The refugees were supplied with passes and Rising Sun armbands and set free.”
Well, not quite.
And though many readers today might understand Soldiers Alive as an anti-war novel, it was not –at least in intention. Several characters, even while speaking of the disaster of war –“those who lose a war suffer real misery, and there’s no help for that…” make the point that “better here (in China) than there (Japan.)” Ishikawa does not, as Cipris points out in the introduction, call into question the war’s validity, “but simply points out the high price of defeat.” We, as readers of many such novels, from many nations, may draw different conclusions. Ishikawa did not, and in fact, following his trial and parole, he returned to China with the Japanese army and wrote “The Wuhan Incident,” a novel of an entirely different color.
“The present China Incident may also be viewed as a fight by Japan for its own freedom. Japan may be thought of as having flung away an unstable peace and resolved upon a great national sacrifice … for greater peace and freedom fifty or a hundred years hence.”
As Soldiers Alive closes, Ishikawa leaves us with a paragraph that to my mind, is at the heart of all soldiery, and in fact, all human behavior:
“His company was marching on, utterly indifferent to his presence or absence, Severed from it he seemed bereft of all value and strength. Not a particle of confidence or pride remained within him, only a single-minded desire to catch up with his unit. To advance along with the unit, to go with it to the end of the world–he could think of nothing else.”
Ω
My question as I read these books is how much did such novels help change the cultural bias of readers towards the wars their nations had engaged in? In the decade and a half following WWI in Europe, the flood of war-sorrow novels and memoirs matched a rise in pacifist feeling and public expression. Perhaps this change in perception from glorious war to sorrowful war, even if necessary, remained as reports of western soldiers going to war in WWII feature far less joyous celebration and more of grim necessity.
Soldiers Alive could not have had an influence on the in-the-war generation even though written in 1937. By 1945, when it was available, along with other interesting anti-war novels, the nation in a whole was moving in full-pacifist mode, it even being written into the constitution — with much suggestion from the Occupation Forces. That non-war feeling in the culture has been giving way in recent decades. Denials about the Nanking Massacre have followed apologies. Japanese armed forces have increased in size and lethality, with loud and persistent calls for more, and for a change in the constitutional peace promise.
Will such novels as Soldiers Alive or Grass For My Pillow, (1966) by Saiichi Maruya, or Militarized Streets (1930) by Kuroshima Denji (available in A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Writings, (2005,) edited and translated by Zeljko Cipris) be re-published and re-read? Will Japan find, among these older writers or writers now in formation, their own equivalent of All Quiet on the Western Front, or Wooden Crosses, or Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse 5?
Ω
--------------------
¹ Perhaps France’s Les dieux ont soif (The Gods Are Athirst, 1912), set in Paris during the French Revolution, with a true-believing follower of Maximilien Robespierre and his contribution to the bloody events of the Reign of Terror of 1793–94.
² Zola wrote a scathing novel, La Débâcle, (The Downfall, 1892) about the failure of the French military leadership in the Franco-Prussian War, followed by suppression of the Paris Commune
³ See Irish Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (1998) for more. Several films have been made in the past few years, incuding Nanking (2007), City of Life and Death, from China, 2009, and many more. Fiction and non-fiction accounts are available as well.
Soldiers Alive – A Novel of the Japanese in China, 1937
11FridayJan 2019http://www.allinoneboat.org/soldiers-alive-a-novel-of-the-japanese-in-china-1937/
Posted by Will Kirkland
For century upon century, from the time of the stories of Gilgamesh (18th BCE), stories of war have been told to exalt the valorous and victorious, to enshrine the names of warriors in the minds of generations to come and to provide example to the youth who listen: this is the way to eternal glory. This basic compact between warrior and story-teller (you make me famous and I’ll make you famous) endured until the barbed-wire and machine-guns of the First World War began to shred it. Perhaps the story of guts and glory wasn’t the only story to be told.
The pathos and war-regret of Remarque’s million-seller in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front, had been preceded by others of not such great fame. Arnold Zweig, a German, wrote the satiric The Case of Sergeant Grishka in 1927. Georges Duhamel won France’s Prix Goncourt in 1918 for his anguished Vie des martyrs / Life of the Martyrs, 1917. He had been a battle surgeon for most of the war. Roland Dorgelés, a French soldier, published the scathing Wooden Crosses in 1919. In England, Rebecca West movingly described “combat fatigue” by 1919 in The Return of the Soldier. In America, countering the Edith Wharton and Willa Cather’s war-positive novels of the ’20s, John Dos Passos contributed Three Soldiers, 1921, and e. e. cummings, The Enormous Room in 1922.
Ω
With Remarque came a virtual wave of war-sorrow novels. In the same year were Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, described by Hemingway as “the finest and noblest novel to come out of World War I.” Faulkner contributed several novellas and Dalton Trumbo Johnny Got His Gun,1939, with its soldier who has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face (including his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue); Louis-Ferdinand Céline in France wrote Journey to the End of the Night an absolutely scabrous take on the war and the fever than came with it — “…everyone queued up to go and get killed.” — Scarcely anything was written that had the old burnish of brass and bravery.
The same change of mood was taking place on the other side of the world as well. Writers whose forebears had told of the courage and skill of the samurai warriors in gunki monogatari, or war tales, began to tell other stories. One was Ishikawa Tatsuzō. At thirty-two years old, an admirer of Anatole France¹ and Emile Zola², and having won a prestigious literary prize for his first novel, based on several years as a farm laborer in Brazil, he was sent to report on the Japanese war in China in December of 1937.Japan had had military forces in China from the beginning of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895, and had increased them with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 when it established the over-seas territory of Manchuko. Hostilities broke out again in July of 1937 with the so called Marco Polo Bridge Incident. By August, elements of the Imperial Japanese Army had taken Shanghai. By January, as Ishikawa arrived at the Imperial Capital of Nanking, the infamous Nanking Massacre had been underway for three weeks.
Soldiers Alive (Ikite iru heitai), was written in furious haste based on observations and interviews with the soldiers involved; it was ready for publication in March, 1938. However, The Peace Preservation Law of 1925 and the earlier Press Law of 1909, were in increasing use: censorship, mass arrests, torture, and execution of some, mostly communist, activists were in increasing use. Ishikawa and his publisher were brought to trial and even after cuts had been made, the book was refused publication. It was not seen by the Japanese public until 1945, after Occupation Authorities replaced Japanese censorship with censorship of their own. Stories of Japanese cruel conduct in China was now allowed; of the victims of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not so much.
In a fine translation and excellent introduction by Zeljko Cipris (2003), we can see what offended the war-time censors: much guts, little glory.
“Killing enemy soldiers was no different than killing carp,” according to one.
When a Chinese home, designated as headquarters, goes up in flames, the young owner is quickly caught.
“…the scrawny, crow-like youth dropped to his knees in the mud, began to shout a string of incomprehensible words, raised his clasped hands, and pleaded. But Karahara was used to such pleas. Even so, he did not enjoy them.
“Ei!”
“The youth’s screams instantly ceased, and the fields reverted to the hushed silence of a twilight landscape. The head did not fall, but the cut was sufficiently deep. His body still upright, a geyser of blood overflowed his shoulders. The body tilted to the right, toppled into the wild chrysanthemums on the bank, and rolled over once.”
Later, with the pitiless soldierly indifference to death we’ve learned of in recent post-glory war novels, one of the soldiers says:
“There’s a dead horse in the creek. Just about now he’s probably getting a hug from the horse.”
Or, on an evening when the soldiers cannot sleep:
“The stony ground they slept on made their heads ache, so some men piled up Chinese corpses, and used their stomachs for pillows.”
Ah, what comfort!” they remarked.”
In unemotive prose, almost as if writing in a Regimental Log, we have not only scenes of mayhem but accounts of the Japanese casual contempt for the Chinese, even when, at times, the shade of human recognition is felt. A soldier talks as best he can to one of the Chinese porters:
“A great serenity was to be found in these broken conversations with the Chinese. And yet, even during such peaceful moments, they could not quite overcome their contempt for the Chinese, so stubbornly and deeply was it rooted in their hearts.”
Interestingly, although spoken Chinese and Japanese are not mutually understandable, some of their shared ideographic writing is. Japanese soldiers could read Chinese resistance slogans written on the walls:
“Down with Japanese imperialism! eight characters written everywhere.”
Though of course, like invading soldiers almost everywhere the Japanese thought it absurd.
“Japan’s mission.. was not a quest for wealth or power, but rather a moral crusade for freedom, peace and justice. Goodness was at work, not greed. As a Japanese editorial of the late 1930s phrased it, “Our responsibility is not the conquest of the world; it is the emancipation of the world.”
Ishikawa presents a small group of men we can follow by name. The narrator knows their thoughts and attitudes, their relations to other. Through dialog and internal eavesdropping he describes how each copes with the war in his own way; some coping in several, contradictory, ways.
Men struggle with the fear of dying, and the fear of the fear of dying: I must show a brave face. As Tim O’Brien put it in The Things They Carried, the Americans of 1968, as the Japanese of 1938, went to war, and killed, because not to was too great a shame before fellow soldiers and family. Remarque knew of it in WWI as well, when “even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward.”
Wherever men gather, and especially men as soldiers, women appear, as topics of conversation, as objects of lust, commerce and violence.
“All right! If it’s Tientsin, we’ll just live it up to the hilt! Hey, hey!”
A soldier solemnly chimed in: “Call the geisha, buy the whores, swill the sake!”
In their soldier slang, ‘Foraging for meat’ meant looking for ku-niang–girls.”
“…the Nishizawa Regiment … roamed the city streets, searching for women like dogs chasing rabbits. … Each of them felt as triumphant and willful as a king, a despot. When they could not achieve their aim within the city limits, they ventured to the farmhouses beyond.”
And murder: The soldiers approach a woman in a house. She points a pistol at them. It misfires. They tackle her. Strip her.
“The woman’s entire body, white and naked, lay abruptly exposed before their eyes. It dazzled them so much… firm breasts rose round and full from a finely fleshed torso … First Class Private Kondō drew a knife from his belt … Without a word he drove the knife into the woman just below her breasts. The white flesh flew up in terrific convulsions. The woman clutched at the knife with both hands and groaned in agony. Like a pinned mantis, she writhed, soon ceased stirring, and died. Dark blood spread in a wet stain under the shoes of the watching soldiers.
Kasahara laughed “You sure wasted a good lay!”
A priest (likely Shinto) with the troops prays over the dead and kills the enemy with a savagely swung shovel.
“…by now had hacked to death dozens of Chinese soldiers and felt at peace…”
Not that the soldiers are completely without feeling for the defeated adversary. “Walking around the devastated city, Second Lieutenant Kurata keenly felt its misery.” Another passage admires as “magnificent” Chinese prisoners’ bearing while awaiting death by beheading.
What won’t be familiar to western readers or soldiers, is the poetry, and song writing, often with patriotic fervor, that the Japanese turn to. Not simply old standards, but poems written and recited to each other.
“We warriors face
Death with open eyes.
Crickets in the grass,
Hush your trilling cries.”
Soldiers dying for the nation were depicted as falling cherry blossoms, an almost required cliché.
Ω
I can’t think of novel from England, France, Germany, or the U.S that presents a story of such shocking brutality, carried out by the author’s own countrymen. Certainly some spoke of shooting prisoners rather than feeding them, a war-crime as most of them knew. Some wrote of brutal bayonet deaths, twisted in the body and the rifle fired to help extract it. Almost all post WWI novels and memoirs tell of bodies disintegrating under high-caliber shells and the shock and horror replaced over time with self-saving blindness. None that I know of, wrote that Tommys or Poilu or Doughboys tortured or laughed at mutilating rape.
Even so, for all the courage to represent, Ishikawa falls short at the most shocking of all: the death of upwards of 300,000 in the Nanking massacres ³ more than the Japanese dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Though he depicts looting by soldiers and severe hunger among the Chinese, as well as the setting up of brothels of Chinese women for the soldiers (the officers had their pick of imported, quasi-voluntary Japanese women), he gilds with risible reason and kindness his descriptions of the interchange between soldiers and civilians — where the count of rapes is between 20,000 and 80,000.
“Nanking’s remaining inhabitants had all been herded into the refugee zone. They were said to number two hundred thousand or so … the area was put under international control, and sentries were posted at its boundaries. The refugees were supplied with passes and Rising Sun armbands and set free.”
Well, not quite.
And though many readers today might understand Soldiers Alive as an anti-war novel, it was not –at least in intention. Several characters, even while speaking of the disaster of war –“those who lose a war suffer real misery, and there’s no help for that…” make the point that “better here (in China) than there (Japan.)” Ishikawa does not, as Cipris points out in the introduction, call into question the war’s validity, “but simply points out the high price of defeat.” We, as readers of many such novels, from many nations, may draw different conclusions. Ishikawa did not, and in fact, following his trial and parole, he returned to China with the Japanese army and wrote “The Wuhan Incident,” a novel of an entirely different color.
“The present China Incident may also be viewed as a fight by Japan for its own freedom. Japan may be thought of as having flung away an unstable peace and resolved upon a great national sacrifice … for greater peace and freedom fifty or a hundred years hence.”
As Soldiers Alive closes, Ishikawa leaves us with a paragraph that to my mind, is at the heart of all soldiery, and in fact, all human behavior:
“His company was marching on, utterly indifferent to his presence or absence, Severed from it he seemed bereft of all value and strength. Not a particle of confidence or pride remained within him, only a single-minded desire to catch up with his unit. To advance along with the unit, to go with it to the end of the world–he could think of nothing else.”
Ω
My question as I read these books is how much did such novels help change the cultural bias of readers towards the wars their nations had engaged in? In the decade and a half following WWI in Europe, the flood of war-sorrow novels and memoirs matched a rise in pacifist feeling and public expression. Perhaps this change in perception from glorious war to sorrowful war, even if necessary, remained as reports of western soldiers going to war in WWII feature far less joyous celebration and more of grim necessity.
Soldiers Alive could not have had an influence on the in-the-war generation even though written in 1937. By 1945, when it was available, along with other interesting anti-war novels, the nation in a whole was moving in full-pacifist mode, it even being written into the constitution — with much suggestion from the Occupation Forces. That non-war feeling in the culture has been giving way in recent decades. Denials about the Nanking Massacre have followed apologies. Japanese armed forces have increased in size and lethality, with loud and persistent calls for more, and for a change in the constitutional peace promise.
Will such novels as Soldiers Alive or Grass For My Pillow, (1966) by Saiichi Maruya, or Militarized Streets (1930) by Kuroshima Denji (available in A Flock of Swirling Crows and Other Writings, (2005,) edited and translated by Zeljko Cipris) be re-published and re-read? Will Japan find, among these older writers or writers now in formation, their own equivalent of All Quiet on the Western Front, or Wooden Crosses, or Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse 5?
Ω
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¹ Perhaps France’s Les dieux ont soif (The Gods Are Athirst, 1912), set in Paris during the French Revolution, with a true-believing follower of Maximilien Robespierre and his contribution to the bloody events of the Reign of Terror of 1793–94.
² Zola wrote a scathing novel, La Débâcle, (The Downfall, 1892) about the failure of the French military leadership in the Franco-Prussian War, followed by suppression of the Paris Commune
³ See Irish Chang’s The Rape of Nanking (1998) for more. Several films have been made in the past few years, incuding Nanking (2007), City of Life and Death, from China, 2009, and many more. Fiction and non-fiction accounts are available as well.
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