5 4] Pedagogies of War and Peace Teaching World War II to Children
Every May and June, the school trip season begins in Japan when many children go on tours to visit Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Hokkaido, Okinawa, and other places for a few days of sightseeing and study. On a radiant afternoon in spring 2010, such a group of school children were visiting the Kyoto Museum for World Peace as part of their elementary school trip excursion. About 80 boys and girls dressed in brightly colored shirts and blouses wandered through different sections of the spacious museum built in 1992. They were led by volunteer guides ready at hand to take them through the exhibits. Many museums like this, and others around the country, are sites of “peace education” where intergenerational memory of the war is forged and reproduced. At this exhibit on the Asia-Pacific War, children listened to their elderly guides who patiently described the displays, taking in explanations of tattered military uniforms and flags, the mock-up of a sparse and dark living room prepared for air raids, the austere food-rationed menu, the model of a nuclear bomb, and photographs of student soldiers and annihilated cities. Some children listened raptly, absorbing the story of how everyday life was controlled in wartime, from food and clothing to beliefs and ideology; they jotted down their impressions in the notebooks that were given to them. Others showed no interest in taking notes; were more interested in hanging out with their friends; and wandered about freely from display to display, glancing, staring, reading, or pondering whatever sights or objects that caught their fancy.
“Three million Japanese died. And twenty million Asians also died. You see, we killed more people than we lost people. You see, we killed six or seven times more than we lost.” A volunteer guide speaks in the tone and style common to elderly grandparents telling stories to their grandchildren. But unlike everyday family talk, the topic here is nothing less than brutal mass death: “Half of the soldiers died of starvation when all the supplies were cut off.” “They fought until they were all annihilated [zenmetsu surumade].” She continues matter-of-factly exposing the young children to the lethal violence that took place in her lifetime. Another elderly guide introduces the children to a simulated wartime family room, and takes pains to explain why people couldn’t stop the war: “They said you were unpatriotic if you didn’t cooperate with the neighborhood war effort.” Sitting with the young visitors around a small dining table in the sparse room, she tries to bridge the gulf that separates her childhood from theirs by describing how her mother prepared for the night air raids by darkening the windows and lights. A third guide, speaking much like an elderly schoolteacher in a classroom, points to the broader relevance of war and peace in the children’s lives as he holds court in front of large photo displays of Hiroshima after the bomb: “There are people meeting right now at the United Nations to talk about the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Japan doesn’t want nuclear weapons. This goes all the way back to 1945. Hiroshima was hit around a two-kilometer radius. But today, just three bombs could annihilate all of Japan.” Introduced to the possibility that all of Japan could be obliterated like that, the young listeners were motionless. This was an early exposure to the idea that they themselves, children, were not immune from nuclear threats and that they too could easily die from just one of those bombs.
A few days later, in a different peace museum in central Japan about 50 kilometers northwest of Tokyo, another group of children on a school trip were also learning peace education. The Saitama Peace Museum, established in a municipal park in 1993, was hosting a large group of local elementary school children, dressed in bright red school caps on a rainy day. The museum staff was standing by ready to offer them a simulated air raid experience complete with an evacuation drill. The supposed “attack” takes place while the children are in a mock classroom watching an authoritarian teacher (shown in film) extolling the virtues of the fatherland. As the air raid siren interrupts the class, the children are ushered into an “air raid shelter” filled with simulated smoke and the sights and sounds of aerial bombardment for a few minutes. Some children reacted with anxiety and nervousness, while others seemed bewildered. They had been primed for this experience beforehand in the auditorium where they were treated to an animated film The Last Air Raid—Kumagaya (Saigo no kūshū—Kumagaya), based on the real air raid of Kumagaya city of Saitama Prefecture on the night before the war ended in August 1945. It is the story of a seven-year-old girl who was evacuated to Kumagaya to stay with relatives after she lost both of her parents in the Tokyo air raid. Orphaned, she tries hard to adjust to her new life and home, only to perish in yet another air raid there. This gloomy theme of abandoned children dying in war is common in a range of Japanese war stories for small children. The most well-known of this genre is the Graves of the Fireflies (Hotaru no haka) created by the animation tsar Miyazaki Hayao’s in Studio Ghibli, based on a real air raid experience, and also shown for peace education in Japanese schools. Fireflies is again a story of orphaned children who struggle to survive after losing their mother in a devastating air raid and their father in war; they are then abandoned again by uncaring relatives and finally die of starvation on the street, ragged, penniless, and alone. The young audience can identify with these children and develop gut awareness that something can go terribly wrong in war which can reduce them to sheer helplessness: they too could really lose their parents, their family, their friends, and everything else that they depend on for protection and survival. It is not uncommon to find in peace education the use of narratives that encourage negative emotions: pity, horror, and visceral fear of abandonment and violent death.
In Ethics of Memory, Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit argues that memory of negative emotions is a very powerful motivator of moral conduct.1 Peace museums exemplify this idea as sites of memory that retell the painful past and evoke strong antiwar sentiments in visitors. A growing number of cultural institutions like these play a pivotal role in producing generational memory as the wartime generation passes on and stories of direct war experience become less available at home. Drawing on the emotions of cultural trauma to forge a pacifist moral trajectory is a common technique of transmitting memory in such institutions. The effectiveness of transmitting war memory, often call keishō, relies on the symbolic weight of that cultural trauma, and the ability to keep the crude emotional memory alive for future generations.2 The narratives chosen are often compelling for remembering the war with emotions of horror and fear. Thus peace education tends to encourage the moral sentiment of pacifism based on gut survival instincts rather than on judicious reasoning about just and unjust wars. In this respect, it is not surprising that Japanese sociologist Murakami Toshifumi found in his recent survey that no more than 13.1% of Japanese middle school children support the idea of “just war”—a war of self-defense to defend the nation—compared to the 44.5% in an English sample.3 Young Japanese students who develop an early moral awareness that “something dreadful happened in Japanese war history” may not always know or understand the full picture of the events, but they can nevertheless act on the accrued negative emotions that encourage them to turn their back on the violent legacy.
Such peace museums are quite distinct from war museums that offer narratives of patriotic valor to remember the past. War and military museums around the world—far more numerous and long established than museums for peace—are designed to venerate past wars and events by showcasing the heroic martial achievements of historical figures. For the most part, exhibits in those museums tend to valorize military tradition by offering accounts of campaigns, displays of weapons, and stories of leaders and soldiers, while limiting attention to the lethal consequences. The Imperial War Museum in London and Les Invalides (Musée de l’Armée of Hôtel National des Invalides) in Paris are examples of such repositories of military accomplishments and celebrations of a heroic heritage. However, the weight of moral persuasion there rests on the premise that the wars waged were fundamentally just and legitimate, and it is this premise that distinguishes the battles from unruly carnage, and the combat from arbitrary rampage. This premise is harder to establish in defeat cultures, where military failures do not lend themselves readily to triumphant narratives of a just and valiant war. It is therefore not surprising to find many more peace museums than war museums in Japan where the former have grown exponentially especially in the 1980s and 1990s.4 Of all peace museums around the world today, almost a third of them (65) are located in Japan, spread across the nation from Hokkaido to Okinawa.5
Yūshūkan in Tokyo is an example of a war museum—privately run by the controversial Yasukuni Shrine that honors the war dead and was a state institution until the end of World War II as discussed in chapter 3—that attempts to buffer the stigma of defeat and failure in order to promote the narrative of patriotic valor. It revives the story of the “Greater East Asia War” as a just and necessary war by referencing the hostile geopolitical environment of the time and symbolically equating the value of patriotic feats to samurai gallantry in feudal society. Moral indebtedness to the war dead is built into such a story, aided with displays of photos, personal effects, personal letters, and even the last wills of suicide pilots of the Asia-Pacific War.6 By putting a human face to the ultimate sacrifice, and ignoring the violent repercussions, the emotional narratives strike a tone that encourages the viewers to feel beholden to the dead and perhaps even protective of their honor. However, portrayals of tragic death for an unsuccessful war can inspire as much pity as admiration, and stir as much aversion as passion to follow suit. Even as the portrayals of these “heroes” may shock and awe young visitors, it seems questionable that those tragic figures would arouse in many the desire to emulate their actions, especially when there seems no evident or compelling reason why the state would be worth dying for again today.
As German memory scholar Aleida Assmann argues, we are today at a critical time in the early twenty-first century when the historical memory of the war is translated into cultural memory in the public sphere.7 As the wartime generation passes away, the postwar generations with no war experience have taken over as carriers of that memory together with the injunction to “never forget.” This translation work—in museums, cultural media, and educational material—is an ongoing process of culture work where the narrative of the nation is remembered, reoriented, and reproduced. In the Japanese case, the transmission of generational war memory, keishō, attempts to transform the culture of defeat into a culture of peace, not a culture of contrition as in the case of postwar Germany. The legacy of cultural trauma is amply evoked in this process, often emphasizing the emotional memory of suffering at home more than the guilt of having inflicted even more suffering in colonized and occupied Asia. The triad of hero/victim/perpetrator narratives discussed in earlier chapters is deployed in this process, in museum exhibits, textbooks, anime films, and popular comics for children. They comprise the cultural material that will be explored in this chapter.
Plural and heterogeneous memories of a traumatic past thrive side by side in society, especially when what is remembered is a global multidimensional war. As a nation, Japan remembers itself at once as a perpetrator nation that was also victimized by the atomic bombings, yet capable also of fighting daring battles. A given family may be remembered at once as ardent supporters of military aggression as well as victims of indiscriminate aerial scorching, but also as saviors to local neighbors. An individual Japanese soldier may be remembered at once as a perpetrator of illicit invasion and also a victim of army maltreatment, while also unwilling to kill a POW as ordered. Adding more complexity, a given family may remember several members in different hero/victim/perpetrator roles, like a dissident, a war dead, and a war criminal. Thus, a mixture of hero, victim, and perpetrator roles and memories coexist uneasily from one situation to another in a state of moral indeterminacy that defies easy categorization. The contemporaneous, diverse memories often remain morally incompatible, especially when the larger picture of the Asia-Pacific War remains contentious and elusive.
Carriers of divided memories nevertheless operate within a horizon of shared meaning that is more or less contained in a normative frame that renders social solidarity possible.8 In a divided and defeated nation, the normative frame using a broad umbrella construct like “peace” or “contrition” allows the incongruent narratives within public and private lives to coexist within a common structure of meaning.9 Thus, even when “multiple forms of remembering are operating at once,” common ground can be negotiated and tenuous bonds forged.10 In this dynamic, what changes with ongoing memory work, then, are not the claims to historical truth, but the salience of some cultural narratives over others that prevail at given times in given places in describing the contentious past. If some eclipse others at different times, however, none really disappears altogether. Thus, “coming to terms with the past” is not a tidy, linear project, but a messy undertaking that is subject to recurrent waves of different historical tales that are incompatible, contradictory, and contingent on particular conditions and constraints.
History from Above: War and Peace in Social Studies Textbooks
The problem of narrating contentious national history is not unique to Japan as we know from copious examples around the world. Difficulties of recounting painful pasts abound, like the Vietnam War in the United States, the Cultural Revolution in China, and Stalinism in Russia, or the Rabin assassination in Israel.11 People are apt to disagree on how to recount traumatic pasts not only because the actual interpretations diverge, but also because the dominant accounts shape the national legacy for future generations. In the education field, the history problem is further compounded by the national project to use school instruction to shape national identity. From Turkey to France and Greece, social studies and history education have been vehicles for fostering positive identification with the nation by highlighting heroic national achievements.12 In the United States, too, history textbooks in the past have been a compilation of morality tales and proxy ideological battles such as during the Cold War.13 To be sure, textbooks are malleable in the hands of the carriers of historical knowledge and have long been subject to the ebb and flow of political tides and institutional interventions.14
In Japan, the added complication is the fact that social studies education was originally introduced by the US occupation (1945–1952) as a tool to reeducate Japanese citizens in its image, under neocolonial conditions. The occupation banned history, geography, and moral education from Japanese schools, recognizing them as the prewar instruments of mobilizing nationalist prowar sentiments. The old ideological canon of loyalty to the imperial state was supplanted by the new ideals of human rights in the democratic state, framed as the “correct” ideas for new citizenship in the new society. Thus in 1947, social studies replaced the prewar nationalist instruction and introduced American democracy in occupied Japan.15
After this inauspicious beginning, social studies turned into one of the fiercest political battlefields following the occupation.16 Although welcomed by those who wanted to see Japan move away from the prewar structure of authoritarian education, it was fought by those who feared the erosion of their political authority, and became the most intensely contested site of ideological struggle over citizenship education. Like the ferocious contest between the creationists and evolutionists in American education, the battle over war history has been a long, explosive culture war in Japan for decades, vying for the hearts and minds of the next generation. Many Japanese schoolteachers would attest that the struggle for control over narrating modern national history became so politically charged with the question of the guilt and shame over the stigmatized past that it had become “a dreaded subject.”17
Here at stake is the legitimacy of regulating national history to cultivate “desirable” national identity and solidarity, as the wartime regime and the US occupation had also done. The proponents—mostly the state and state bureaucracy—legitimated positive framing of the past by separating the pedagogical and the academic aspects of history. They argue that in history education, national stories of accomplishment should foster national belonging and confidence in the nation’s future citizens.18 To this end, the autonomy and freedom of education is necessarily diminished and secondary to national interest. The opponents—mostly the teachers and teachers’ unions—maintain that education should be based solely on academic historiography without state interference; history education should ensure both the rights of teachers to teach the truth and of children to learn the truth.19 Accordingly, Japan’s dark past must be taught in all its facets, including inconvenient truths like colonial oppression, wartime atrocities, and war crimes, whether it is the Nanjing massacre, the biological experiment Unit 731, “comfort women,” or the Three-Alls campaign.20 The discord is therefore not only about the accuracy of the historical record but also a proxy battle about the value of teaching critical history to future generations.
Teaching of perpetrator history to future citizens has been even more problematic. Representing Japan in textbooks as the perpetrator of an unjust war has been at the center of long-standing, ideological, and deeply painful discord precisely because of the inherent stain on national identity and pride. From the 1960s, the problem of portraying candid perpetrator narratives stood at the core of the Ienaga textbook lawsuits against the state’s demands to change his depictions of Japan’s aggressive role in the Asia-Pacific War. Those lawsuits spanned over 30 years through the 1990s, the longest in Japan’s modern history. The question of critically depicting perpetrator conduct has also been at the center of the international textbook controversies since the 1980s, which resulted in the “Neighboring Country Clause” policy in 1982 that requires the textbook certification process to take account of the concerns of neighboring countries that were victimized in the war. In the late 1990s, the increasing perpetrator descriptions that resulted met with a backlash in a renewed textbook controversy mostly among postwar intellectuals. The neonationalists among them published a series of controversial books and articles attacking the emergent perpetrator narratives (e.g., the “enslavement” of “comfort women,” forced laborers, etc.) and sought to replace them with their own heroic narratives in “alternative” textbooks. These volatile swings through the decades represent the pendulum move through the processes of reckoning, backlash, provocation, and entrenchment that are part of the ongoing work of coming to terms with tainted war legacies and guilt.21
Beyond their political symbolism, observers have also pointed to the limitation of textbooks as effective instructional tools for aiding the interpretation of history. Thomas Rohlen, for example, noted almost 30 years ago that most high school textbooks in Japan offered “a march of events” that explicitly avoided interpretations, passions, judgments, and evaluations. In his view, they were textbooks of the traditional mold that presented a menu of facts without a clear narrative frame that invited meaningful interpretations of events.22 Since then, however, textbooks have expanded their coverage of contemporary history and have made their war content war more explicit, while still remaining within the parameters of successive Ministry curricular guidelines. Thus it is misleading to think of Japanese school textbooks today as all alike. Although Japanese textbooks are packaged to appear similar—in size, length, format, style, semantics, coverage, and price—they differ in their perspectives on the events they describe. Carefully choosing words and phrases, they differentiate themselves in their emphasis on different intent, motivation, and locus of power and responsibility in describing the war. They differentiate themselves by deploying dissimilar frames to interpret the “perpetrators of an unjust war.”
For example, all history textbooks cover the “Manchurian Incident,” the Japan-China War, and the Pacific War, but they vary in how they characterize the state’s intent in invading or occupying the neighboring Asian countries: the territorial expansion was intended to secure strategic resources that would facilitate war or to overcome the economic crisis in the world depression; the military was deployed to China in order to gain territories or to thwart belligerence toward Japan; the rogue army garrison (of Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchuria) defied orders, policies, and agreements in order to expand colonial territories, or to secure the borders. Different emphases and justifications implicate the wartime Japanese state in the war of aggression to different degrees of illegality, which, in turn, implies different levels of responsibility, blame, and guilt. Because such differences can literally hinge on a few choice words or phrases in the short segment on the Asia-Pacific War, they are easy to overlook in a quantitative content analysis. However, they unmistakably convey different meanings of war and peace to their young readers.23
The 15 history and civics textbooks selected here for discourse analysis, published by five publishers, are widely circulated textbooks for high school students in those classes. The sample is made up of the top three textbooks in each of five social studies subjects: Japanese History A, Japanese History B, Contemporary Society (Gendai Shakai), Politics/ Economy (Seiji Keizai), and Ethics (Rinri).24 I use the 2014 edition of those history and civics textbooks that ranked highest in market shares in those subjects. There were a total of 59 texts on these five subjects published by 11 publishers.25 To help contextualize and verify the trends found in those texts, I compare them additionally with a secondary sample comprising the previous editions of those same texts, as well as the alternative texts published by the same publishers in the same subject categories. With 31 additional texts assessed in this secondary sample, I assess a total of 46 social studies textbooks for this analysis.26
These texts are usually written by teams of 6 to 12 scholars and teachers, and tend to keep the same “mold” through successive editions and Ministry curricular guidelines; thus they often develop their distinct narrative idioms that articulate preferred orientations. Such orientations often cut across social studies subjects. Partly for that reason, students and teachers usually refer to their texts by the publisher’s name rather than by the individual titles, authors’ names, or teams of authors, (e.g., “we use the Yamakawa text in history class”). I will follow that custom here as well. Japanese History A is designed to cover mostly modern and contemporary history; Japanese History B covers the entire history chronologically. As an elective, Japanese high school students can opt to take one or the other, but not both.27
Accounts of War and Peace in High School History Textbooks
Hayden White observed that historical narrations involve ethical judgments embedded in a moral framework, and the same holds for historical narrations in school textbooks.28 History texts cannot merely impart empirical “truths” to students as if they exist in a moral void. Word choices and frame choices influence the writers’ and the readers’ interpretations of the events, consciously or not. As history texts choose their language carefully, cognizant of the full political meaning and impact of the choice, some descriptors become de facto code words to signal messages to the readers. Careful attention to such “code words” that attribute meaning to military and state actions, and the legitimacy of the war is needed to decipher these ethical judgments: words like “invasion,” “advance,” “occupation,” “colonization,” “annexation,” and so forth (shinryaku, shinshutsu, senryō, shokuminchika, heigō) are politically, morally, and legally loaded, and therefore distinguished carefully by the authors and publishers. The same care applies also to phrases that imply different moral responsibility for the war: while phrases like “there was no choice but to go to war,” and “the conflict escalated unexpectedly”29 signal a lack of malicious intent on the part of the Japanese state, phrases like “Japan then escalated the war without declaring war,”30 and “it was part of the Japanese Army’s scheme to spread the war”31 signal precisely the opposite.
All in all, the history texts describe the 1920s and 1930s as a violent, turbulent era that sent Japan spiraling down a wretched path to war. Japan’s plunge was marred by misjudgments, missteps, misguided expectations, and misdirected ambitions that ultimately brought Japan into a high-stakes confrontation with Western powers. National strategies proved ineffective in the unpredictable early twentieth-century world of revolutions (China and USSR), wars (Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, and World War I), and shifting international pacts and alliances. National policies also proved exceedingly unstable as leaderships changed, political rivalries intensified, and nationalist violence escalated. The world was infested with racial prejudice, oppression, menace, suspicion and colonial ambitions, not all of which were Japan’s making. But the fact remains that Japan was signatory to the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922 (the treaty affirming the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China), as well as the Pact of Paris of 1928 (the General Treaty for the Renunciation of War, or the Kellogg-Briand Treaty), and stood in violation of those international agreements by waging war in the Asia-Pacific region.
Origins of the Asia-Pacific War
What, then, do students learn about the fundamental justifications for the Asia-Pacific War? The high school history texts offer two different broad frameworks: (1) it was a war of choice, an intentional invasion driven by imperialist ambition and carried out by unjust military aggression, which ultimately escalated into a bloody war of attrition; or (2) it was a war of necessity, an expanded occupation of the continent compelled by economic and political pressures that ultimately developed unexpectedly into a prolonged, large-scale conflict.32 Students are exposed to these different frameworks according to which texts they use, what type of supplemental material they are offered, and what kind of teachers they are assigned. The ultimate moral message taken away in both cases is that the Japanese state acted recklessly at a crucial time in history and failed its people monumentally.
Four of the six widely circulated texts use the first framework.33 In one of them, Japan is an ambitious state that entered into the conflict with China fully intending to gain power and strategic resources. The nation competed with the Western superpowers over political influence and control of China’s material resources, and believed in the legitimacy of these colonial acts as a pathway to becoming a world power. Japan was therefore not forced to wage war; it proactively sought to colonize and exploit the land and resources of East Asia.34 This argument is echoed by another: “The real intention behind the New World Order was not peace in Asia, but the establishment of Japanese hegemony; accordingly, Japan expanded the invasion in Asia to seek strategic resources for continuing the war.”35 This type of textbook has consistently taken the position that the war waged against China was a war of aggression spanning 15 years (1931–1945) to gain strategic resources and territories on the continent.
The other two texts describe a “war of necessity” that ultimately developed into a prolonged, large-scale conflict. In a text with a very large circulation in the Japan History B market, Japan in the 1920s was in a dysfunctional state, unable to resolve the crises of governance emanating from the conflicts among political parties, military rivalries, competing strategies, ideologies, and social movements. It was also burdened by a flawed system of governance that crucially restricted civilian control over the military. National leaders failed to respond effectively to explosive international crises and were incapable of coordinating and controlling the country among internationalists and nationalists, progressives and reactionaries, communists, loyalists, and peace seekers/conciliators. These texts emphasize the significance of perceived international threats, especially from China, the USSR, and the United States. By this account, Japan’s colonial ambition is primarily a defensive one. Ultimately, there was “no way other than resort to war” in a world dominated by hostile, imperialist Western powers.36
Of these top-selling history texts, the former group narrates Japan as the perpetrator of the war, while the latter tends to narrate Japan as the reluctant belligerent; thus neither group promotes any heroic narratives of the war. These “camps” comprise legitimate weight and counterweight in the history textbook market, although the latter lead the former in total circulation figures.37 The narrative of the heroic “war of liberation” is offered only in one neonationalist textbook that has a limited and inconsequential circulation in the high school
Japanese History B market.38
Since Western media reports have for years totalized and stereotyped Japanese textbooks to sensationalist effect,39 it may be surprising to some that on closer look the recent history texts actually vary in content and coverage. The range of texts used in high school Japanese History A and B merit closer attention for that reason. I review here three “war of choice” texts and one “war of necessity” text from the sample of top-circulation texts to assess their different positions and approaches on the meaning of the war and the messages they send to young readers.
1. Kōkō nihonshi B (High School Japanese History B) by Jikkyō Shuppan publishers has long taken the position that the war waged against China was a war of aggression to attain strategic resources and territories in the continent. The Asia-Pacific War was a long war spanning over 15 years from 1931 to 1945 that was out of step with the international pacts concluded with the world’s military powers after World War I. Japan was an ambitious state that competed with the Western super powers over political influence and material control of China’s resources and believed in the legitimacy of its colonial acts as a pathway to become a world power. It was therefore not forced into the war but actively aspired to colonize and exploit the land and resources of East Asia. The text describes the state and military actions leading up to war by referring to a wide cast of enablers. For example, the Emperor plays an explicit role in both starting the war and delaying the end of war. He is portrayed as the final arbiter to go to war with the United States and as rejecting the idea of surrender in the early months of 1945 that would have saved many lives. The text describes a range of perpetrator acts by the Japanese military, especially in Manchuria, Southeast Asia, and China, including the Nanjing massacre, use of poison gas, and the 731 biological warfare unit. It also lists the estimated death toll country by country, from China and Korea to Taiwan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Philippines, India, Malaysia, Singapore, and Burma.40
2. Daiichi Gakushūsha publisher’s Kōtōgakkō nihonshi A (High School Japanese History A), the top-selling text in the Japanese History A market, offers a relatively balanced account of the war, cautious of imputing blame to individual perpetrators, while illustrating the illicit wartime conduct by the Japanese military and also showing the significance of claims for compensations by Asian victims today. The text stands out for showing everyday life in wartime as experienced by well-known persons like an Olympic swimmer, award-winning cartoonists, critical academics, a dissenting legislator, and a defiant diplomat. Using text boxes effectively, the book informs young readers that popular responses to the war were neither completely uniform nor totally complacent. Although the recent 2014 edition moderates somewhat the language that describes Asian suffering as a consequence of Japan’s action, the volume mentions Japan’s war crimes against civilians in the Chongqing air raids, Nanjing massacre, use of poison gas, forced labor, “comfort women,” and the 731 biological warfare unit. Unlike the Jikkō textbook, however, it omits the larger picture, that is, the estimated total deaths that would give the students an understanding of the destruction that continues to reproduce the cultural trauma.41
3. Tokyo Shoseki’s Nihonshi A: Gendai karano rekishi (Japanese History A: Contemporary History) is creative in taking and illustrating a critical perspective from outside Japan. The text stands out for its international outlook, attempting to open up the question of what the war means for Japan and East Asia today, taking stock of the enormous damage and casualties and their long-term consequences. It features text boxes written by distinguished international scholars like Andrew Gordon, Sun Ge, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Lee Yeounsuk, Brij Tankha, Wolfgang Seifert, Mahdi Elmandjjra, and others who offer critical views on imperialist war legacies today. Readers are encouraged to consider questions posed by these contributors (who are American, Chinese, Australian, Korean, Indian, German, and Moroccan) on the consequences of national pride, ethnocentrism, colonialism, war compensation, and colonization in the Third World. This innovative text also suggests—along with Jikkyō’s and Daiichi’s—that Japan had designs to control resources in China and East Asia and implicates all who were involved, not merely a handful of Kwangtong Army leaders.42 Thus “Japan escalated the invasion in Asia, searching for more resources to carry on the war” that resulted in “Japanese conscripts experiencing not only fierce combat, disease and hunger, but also slaughter and torture of prisoners and violence toward civilians.”43 The text is also notable for highlighting issues of war responsibility and war compensation in postwar Japan, especially the international disputes in the 1990s and 2000s.44
4. Yamakawa Shuppan’s Shōsetsu nihonshi B (Japanese History B in Details) has dominated the Japanese History B market for some time, reputed to be the source book for the university entrance examinations. Of the top-circulation textbooks, Yamakawa’s text consistently stands out for its relative restraint from taking a critical perspective on the war. The text is carefully worded regarding the question of the war’s legitimacy; it neither valorizes nor criticizes the state’s conduct. The 2014 edition describes the nation in the 1920s and 1930s in a dysfunctional state. Burdened by a flawed system of governance that leaders failed to maneuver effectively, Japan responded to multiple international crises haphazardly. The Japan-China War originated in an independent military action of a defiant garrison force, stationed in Manchuria to protect Japan’s strategic interests and security. The actions by the Kwantung Army led to an expanded occupation, which then escalated unexpectedly, through a series of provocations, into an all-out war. Emphasizing the significance of perceived international threats, the Japan-China War was not a premeditated invasion but a set of poorly handled conflicts that escalated. The accounts and explanations of Japan’s war conduct, as well as the death tolls and the extensive suffering inflicted on Asian victims, tend to be limited compared to other texts.45
Conduct in the Asia-Pacific War
The history textbooks sampled here describe the conduct of war and its consequences along similar fault lines. Working within the limited space of thin paperbacks, most of the “war of choice” texts describe Japanese acts of perpetration on civilians, including slaughter, plunder, and arson (the Three-Alls campaign); maltreatment of “comfort women,” forced laborers, and prisoners of war; and the biological warfare experiments—in Shanghai, Nanjing, Chongqing, Manila, Singapore, and elsewhere. The largest circulation text in Japanese History A illustrates, for example, the illegal injury and killing of civilians from the Chongqing air raids and the Nanjing massacre to the use of poison gas, forced labor, “comfort women,” and the 731 biological warfare unit.46 Such texts follow up these descriptions with brief statements on war compensation and responsibility as well. However, only few offer the total scope of the Asia-Pacific War by indicating estimates of the total death and injuries.47
These “war of choice” texts also make use of photos that visually communicate Japan’s acts of perpetration and oppression. One text, for example, shows photographs of Korean forced laborers toiling at a stone quarry, and Chinese civilians being inspected in occupied Guangdong.48 Another text shows photographs of requisitioned local laborers slogging at the Burma railway construction site and a Shinto shrine in colonized Korea that local people were forced to revere.49 Still another text displays a photo of the derelict building that once housed the biological warfare experiment Unit 731 where it says 3,000 Chinese and Russian captives were killed.50
Young readers are also exposed to illustrations and photos of Japan’s own experiences of annihilation, from battlefronts like Guadalcanal to home fronts like the air raids in Tokyo and Osaka and the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.51 As the texts chronicle the lives of people under duress, the subjugation of Japanese citizens by their own state and military also becomes evident: the hazing of military conscripts,52 enforced deaths of Okinawan civilians,53 abandonment of Japanese immigrants in Manchuria after the Soviet invasion,54 and military suicide charges that cut many young lives short.55 Implicitly, they call into question the performance and trustworthiness of the Japanese authorities in protecting their own people.
By contrast, the “war of necessity” texts tend to tell history from above and to focus the narratives on international politics shaped in the world of political elites like diplomats, ministers, and military leaders. Illustrations of perpetrator acts tend to be generally peripheral in these texts which are relatively circumspect in critically assessing Japan’s actual conduct of war and its human consequences. In one text, perpetrator illustrations are confined to brief mention of the “Nanjing Incident” that killed scores of Chinese civilians, mass executions in Singapore, and slaughters of Filipino civilians.56 No illustrative photographs or accounts of Korean forced laborers or the biological warfare Unit 731 are offered. In another text, critical assessments of the state tend to focus somewhat more on domestic repression like suppressing popular dissidence and less on destroying the lives and livelihoods of Asian victims.57
Observers who take issue with Japanese history textbooks for not going far and deeply enough to describe perpetrator history—especially the damage and injury to tens of millions of Asian victims—render an important service in drawing attention to the inward-looking nature of Japanese war history instruction. Flawed as the texts are in many respects, however, what is easily overlooked in the focus on shortcomings is the significant impact that these types of war stories can still have on young readers by helping them grasp the monumental scale of state betrayal that Japanese subjects witnessed, not only in bringing the nation to defeat but also in sacrificing its people’s lives. Regardless of which causal narratives they hear—whether Japan was an aggressive state or a dysfunctional state—young Japanese cannot escape learning in one way or the other that their country, at a crucial time in modern history, failed to protect its people. Men, women, and children who entrusted their fate to the state as “subjects” were betrayed massively by the state that was in the end ready to sacrifice them. The chilling morality tale learned here is therefore that when push came to shove, the state abandoned its own people. The message of broken trust between state and people is here one of the most powerful historical lessons that underlie the postwar national identity of peace: for as long as Japan is at peace, the state cannot play roulette with people’s lives again. This deep anxiety embedded in the victim narratives is part of the drive that continues to render Japanese war memory into a cultural trauma. The cultural trauma reproduced in the texts serves not only to inform and educate but, latently, also to warn and question.
Accounts of War and Peace in High School Civics Textbooks
In contrast to high school textbooks for history, civics texts focus mostly on the foundations of Japanese society and the civic character of its people in the postwar years. It is in these texts that the moral values of peace come into clearer focus, especially when pacifist principles are
presented as consequences of war and defeat and democratic governance as a result of the postwar political reforms. Here, pacifism and democracy are set up as core civic values of postwar Japan and framed specifically in negative contrast to the previous dark history. Contemporary Japanese identity is therefore given special positive meaning and legitimacy through its difference from the past—which is described as authoritarian, militarist, repressive, and violent—and which culminated in the “wretched experience of war.”58 Japan’s national story told in the school civics texts is therefore by and large the story of a pacifist nation founded on a repudiation of its militarist, violent history.
This “pacifist nation” embraces a range of meanings in different arenas for varied purposes: it is, by turns, a civic identity, a guiding constitutional principle, a secular moral order, a national security policy, an antinuclear ideology, a norm against military violence, a declaration of repentance, and a vow not to repeat the mistakes of the past.59 The array of meanings is evident across the civics textbooks: for example, in one Contemporary Society text, peace is a universal right, as “Japan embraces unequivocal pacifism by confirming the rights of all peoples of the world to live in peace.”60 In another, peace is a symbol of repentance: “based on regrets about the past, Japan vowed never to invade another nation and never to wage a dreadful war again.”61 Pacifism can also be a veiled rebuke at having been destroyed by nuclear bombs, such as in the claim about the Japanese that “as citizens of the only nation in the world that experienced destruction by atomic bombs, we have taken on a special mission to promote the message of world peace.”62 Although the narratives’ emphases vary and shift over time, it is hard to miss that traumatic war memory is the referent from which desirable morality tales are produced for consumption by the next generation.63
This multifaceted definition of pacifism is based on Article 9 of the constitution whose weighty meanings must be unpacked and explained in the civics textbooks. The article—which renounces war, possession of arms, and the right to belligerence as a means to resolve disputes—is celebrated for its unequivocal stance that is “meaningful for world history” and “with few precedents in the world.”64 The broad outline of the stipulation for peace is straightforward enough in the texts like Contemporary Society and Politics/Economics; where they differ, however, is in the way they address the complexities that arise from piecing together different interpretations of peace, possession of arms, and right to belligerence. These go straight to the heart of Japan’s political dilemmas about the exercise of self-defense, collective self-defense, and people’s sovereignty.65 When is self-defense justified? How can
the Self-Defense Force be deployed legitimately? Can state and military authorities be trusted to command the armed forces again? The moral legitimacy of the “pacifist nation” is implicitly called into question beyond strategy and tactics, whether discussing deployment of the Self-Defense Force or cooperation with the US armed forces or the UN Peacekeeping forces.
Over the decades, interpretations of the constitution have evolved contentiously with the ebb and flow of geopolitics in East and Southeast Asia. Initially imposed by the American occupation to arrest wartime militarism, and then soon redefined by it to support the US military presence in East Asia during the Cold War and the Korean War, Article 9 has been at the center of contention over Japan’s rearmament for 60 years. The ensuing schism is usually represented as a struggle between two camps on opposite sides of the political spectrum. The proponents of “armed peace” have typically supported a strong security alliance with the United States who has strategic military bases in Japan and invest full legitimacy in the military role of the Self-Defense Force. These realists—typically reactionaries who tend to claim that war is a necessary evil of the last resort—emphasize Japan’s vulnerability in being surrounded by powerful, nuclear-arms-owning neighbors such as Russia, China, and North Korea. For them, exercising force for the purpose of self-defense is a legitimate and appropriate action within the stipulation of the constitution. The proponents of “unarmed peace,” on the other hand, have typically supported a stringent interpretation of Article 9, cautious of Japan’s dependence for security on the United States, and wary also of trusting the Japanese government with the power to command a military force like the Self-Defense Force again. These idealists—usually progressives who tend to consider war as unmitigated evil—see Japan’s peaceful relations with its powerful neighbors as sustainable within an international security framework. For them, exercising force even for the purpose of self-defense is a dubious proposition under the strict reading of the constitution. Neither side, however, resolves the fundamental political contradiction that Japan’s quest for peace is basically untenable, armed or unarmed, without the US security umbrella or another collective security arrangement, when nuclear weapons are stockpiled in neighboring countries.66 Nevertheless, this broadly defined fault line goes some ways toward accounting for the divergent views on the policy changes in the 1990s and 2000s—such as the emergency bills in case of an armed attack, law for antiterror measures, the UN Peacekeeping Operation (PKO) law, and others—that responded to drastic shifts in post–Cold War geopolitics.67
Civics: Contemporary Society and Politics/Economy
Civics textbooks—which are charged with explaining the complex, contradictory, and evolving ideas on sustaining peace—cannot escape these fault lines, even as they claim to practice studied neutrality. The most widely circulated high school texts used in two civics subjects—Contemporary Society (Gendai Shakai), and Politics/ Economy (Seiji Keizai)68—tread carefully around the politics of constitutional pacifism, framing the dispute around specific policies, legislation, and legal interpretations rather than tackle the broader question of what is a morally justifiable “self-defense” for a pacifist nation. The national narrative framework of peace is precarious, constructed from the fabric of traumatic war memory, held together by a brief article in the constitution, and sustained by dependence on the world’s largest military force with stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The textbooks charged with articulating Japan’s civic identity based on these contradictory premises also navigate between the reality of “armed peace” and the ideal of “unarmed peace.” One text, for example, considers the constitutionality of an armed self-defense: “The legitimacy of Japan’s militarization has been strenuously debated in relation to Article 9 of the Constitution that renounces war and prohibits the maintenance of military force . . . to date, the Supreme Court has not reached a definitive judgment about the constitutionality [of the Self-Defense Force].”69 Another text considers the serious need for restraints on state power for exercising armed self-defense: “The provisions of the Contingency Bills [of 2003 and 2004] were welcomed to prevent possible human rights violations by the government in an emergency; at the same time, however, the provisions are themselves being criticized for their incompatibility with constitutional pacifism.”70 Misgivings and apprehensions for exercising “armed peace” are evident, even as texts strive to be as uncontroversial as their counterparts in other countries strive to be.71
In civics, the long shadow of the war is also visible in the treatment of Japan’s relations with East Asia in the current globalizing world. The widely used civics textbooks on Politics/Economy all take up the issue of war compensation in these relationships and use the repudiation of the past as a common launching pad for discussing them. However, the texts—designed to survey introductory politics and economics for both Japan and the world in about 200–220 pages—only briefly cover the basic concerns without elaborating on the specific wartime deeds that precipitated those claims by “comfort women,” forced laborers, and others. As one text notes, reconciliation is an appropriate issue for sustaining future relations because “having wrought so much damage by invading the Asian and Pacific countries, Japan must . . . promote the understanding that it embraces the principles of pacifism . . . and respond sincerely to the compensation issues raised as a consequence of Japan’s deeds in World War II.”72 Another text is even more circumspect: “The government’s position is that these compensation problems have already been resolved by state-to-state compensation. But it is also incumbent upon the government to treat with sincerity the former prisoners of war and comfort women who were treated inhumanely.”73 Thus young readers are introduced to the idea of unfinished business harming international relations that harkens back to Japan’s dark history but without concrete information on how “so much damage” came to be and why. The strategy of staying above the fray by muting controversy common in civics texts is even more salient for the currently explosive territorial disputes that also derive from the imperialist past—with China (Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands), South Korea (Takeshima/Dokdo Island), and Russia (Hoppō ryōdo/Kuril Islands). Although defeat and loss of empire are here the historical referent from which the disputes arise, this link is unarticulated.
Civics: Ethics
Ethics (Rinri) is another subject in high school civics that covers war, peace, and social justice in an introductory survey of moral values and social thought.74 The Ethics textbooks describe key ideas, values, and beliefs in both Eastern and Western civilizations, drawing from subjects like moral philosophy, history of social thought, psychology, religion, and civilizations. This task is accomplished also in a limited space of about 200 pages, with the contents abridged, condensed, and packaged succinctly for young readers. A cursory count suggests that the number of thinkers crammed into each text is about 120–150, making brevity of the essence, and allowing precious little space for elaboration.
The texts are designed to survey the history of moral values and norms within the overall context of civics education to facilitate understanding of peace and democracy.75 Within these parameters, and the curricular constraints of coverage and length, the variation among the Ethics texts is relatively small but still notable. The allocation of space and choice of tone to illustrate different public intellectuals and their ideas offer some clues on the different texts’ priorities. One, for example, rather than focusing solely on orthodox thinkers, also illuminates dissenters who dared to challenge prevailing views, risking
their careers and lives.76 In such a text, young Japanese students will find surprisingly little information on the substance of Japan’s warrior philosophy and culture (Bushido), despite the significance of the military elite during seven centuries of feudal rule, but more focus on pacifists and humanists.77 In another text, the specific content of particular ultranationalist ideologies that provided the backbone of authoritarian military society in prewar and wartime Japan is relatively scant, yet a full page is given nevertheless to describe Japan’s orientalist prejudices toward Asia that wrought repressive colonial practices.78 Notable again in the three top-selling Ethics texts—which together comprise two-thirds of the market share—is the repudiation of the “abhorrent Asia-Pacific War” as the referent from which they narrate the dramatic transformation of the moral order in postwar society. The quandary of teaching Ethics remains, however, that, while students are made to wade through the array of Eastern philosophy over the millennia, the narrative of rupture and establishing a new beginning in 1945 interrupts the sense of continuity of moral heritage and leaves the pacifist and democratic ideals of contemporary society disconnected from historical ethnic self-understandings.
History from Below: War and Peace in Popular Comic Collections
In a country where the popular cultural media are ubiquitous in everyday life, it is not surprising that material for learning Japanese history is especially abundant in the commercial media. In Japan 40% of all books and magazines are manga (comic art) publications. It stands to reason that manga has been a popular vehicle for supplemental instruction and education. This genre is called “study manga,” or “education manga” (gakushū manga), and found readily in school libraries, local public libraries, and bookstores. As informal tools of cultural learning, they are on a par with television and animation films in how they bring cognitive comprehension to children, influencing their perceptions as memory carriers of the next generation. Of the public media that transmit and translate war memory—from newspapers, magazines, books, and novels to television documentaries and films—study manga merits special attention as a vehicle that exclusively targets children at a formative age, when their ethical judgment and moral dispositions are formed.79
The moral evaluation of war and peace in pop-history study manga comes into clear focus when we closely examine the content for plot, characters, visual clues, and dramatic style. They are, however, not standardized or uniform within the genre. Study manga can be classified in several categories: “academic” history manga series by professional scholars; “popular” history manga series by superstar artists in the manga industry; manga history “study guides” designed for students preparing for entrance exams; “digest” history manga for quick reference; “biographical” manga of eminent and popular figures; “novelized” history manga for entertainment, and more. I focus in this chapter on the “academic” history manga series and the “popular” history manga series that have proven their staying power as classics, reprinted many times over in the last two decades. They include six well-known history manga series: three are “academic” history manga collections supervised by professional historians, published by mainstream publishers Gakushū Kenkyūsha (referred to by the shorthand Gakken), Shūeisha, and Shōgakkan; the other three are “popular” history manga collections offered by the studios of three phenomenally successful star artists of the postwar manga industry, Fujiko F. Fujio, Mizuki Shigeru, and Ishinomori Shōtarō.
Successful study manga make grim history palatable, with dynamic plots, colorful characters, and humorous asides. The stories, in contrast to textbooks, are often page turners that sustain the readers’ curiosity and entice them to imagine and identify with distant, unfamiliar times and places. They also help the reader’s cognitive grasp of moral distinctions by showing the ethical qualities of key characters with graphic visual cues like facial expressions, body language, and other signals. For example, if characters are drawn with a menacing grin, harried body language, and in dark silhouettes, the reader readily understands that the plan they are hatching must be of dubious moral quality. Equally significant and captivating in study manga is the view of history from below, allowing readers to see events through the eyes of “ordinary families” that are interspersed in the narration to drive the plot, to comment on the events, and to express feelings about the impact of the events on their everyday life. This sympathy with the “little people” gives these stories an unmistakable populist tilt and an interpretive framework critical of higher authority. The chutzpah and irreverence typical of Japanese comics are perfectly suited to expressing misgivings about authorities like the government, military, and police; and indeed, caricatures are delightful ways to get back at the overbearing bullies who intimidated, oppressed, policed, betrayed, and devalued the masses in wartime society.
“Academic” History Manga Collections
Educational comics about national history, a familiar children’s literature genre in many countries, have been popular tools of learning in Japan since the 1970s.80 In Japan, they typically come in multivolume collections offered by major publishers in hardcovers and are purchased by schools and local libraries as well as parents and grandparents for young children to read at home. For example, the well-known Gakken’s series on Japanese history is an 18-volume set in its current edition, now in its 60th printing since 1982; the Shōgakkan’s current series spans 23 volumes and is now in its 49th printing since 1983; the Shūeisha’s current series is a 20-volume set in its ninth printing since 1998. These educational manga series, supervised by academic historians, are targeted to children of school age, mostly in elementary and middle schools.81
For the most part, the academic manga offer colorful portrayals of 2,000 years of Japanese history from early settlement through the contemporary era in chronological order. The portrayal of the Asia-Pacific War usually takes up one volume, averaging about 150 pages in length. As a portrayal of a discredited and disastrous war, there are no gallant national heroes or enchanting political leaders that brighten up the pages and dramatically drive the plot. Instead, the stories unfold with accounts of divisive politics and deteriorating economic life that are rife with social conflict, unstable governments, an ambitious military, terrorist violence, rogue actions, and rampant poverty.
The descent into war is rendered into a sobering morality tale of what not to do again. The pacifist moral frame is consistent: war-friendly characters and actions are portrayed negatively, and, by contrast, peace-friendly characters and actions are portrayed favorably. The antiwar messages of the “little people” are especially striking, from a grim conscript’s claim (“I curse this war”)82 to a stunned mother’s lament (“War—I hate war”),83 and a grandmother’s desperate statement when her grandson departs for war (“Everyone cursed the war, and prayed their children would come home safe”).84 Even a family dog bemoans, “I hate war!”85 Front and back matters of the books also convey moral evaluations, such as a note to the family that pleads, “Please make sure to let the readers pay attention to Japanese acts of perpetration in China.”86 As war memory is translated into cultural memory in educational manga, compassion for suffering is now directed to antiwar pacifism—the desired moral quality transmitted to the young readers—even though in wartime it was condemned as unpatriotic.
No heroes make their mark in these war stories, but a few villains make unceremonious appearances. None of these villains are American, Chinese, Russian, or anyone else in the enemy camps: they are Japanese. The designated “bad” characters are Japanese men who advocated, instigated, promoted, and then bungled the war. Such “war mongers” are usually officers of the Japanese army, especially those in the Kwantung garrison in Manchuria and the high military and civilian leadership who backed and covered for the rogue army. These loaded characterizations produce a vernacular understanding of Japan’s colonial war on the continent in young readers who develop an early moral awareness of “something gone terribly wrong in Japanese history.”
To be sure, what went terribly wrong is not only colonial exploitation and military catastrophes but also the massive death toll of over 20 million people in Asia, many of whom were noncombatants. To this end, two of the three study manga series—Shūeisha and Shōgakkan—offer explicit perpetrator narratives illustrating Japan’s subjugation of civilians in East and Southeast Asia during the years of war and colonization. One volume describes Japanese atrocities carried out in the “Nanjing Incident,” the slaughter of civilians in Chinese villages, recruiting forced laborers in occupied territories, and the biological warfare Unit 731.87 Another volume gives graphic accounts of civilians slaughtered in Nanjing, as well as villagers slain in rural China in the campaign to kill, plunder, and burn (the Three-Alls campaign).88 The ferocious Japanese invasion of East and Southeast Asia is also described, including full-page accounts of the massacre of civilians in Singapore and elsewhere.89 The brutal treatment of forced laborers—locally drafted or captured POWs—by Japanese soldiers and administrators also takes up full pages in both volumes.90
As a rendering of a multidimensional war, the portrayal of the violence and dehumanization inflicted by the Japanese soldiers on Asian victims is also extended to those inflicted on the Japanese soldiers by the Japanese military. Their anguish typically comes from the battlefront, from fighting unwinnable and lethal battles planned by incompetent military strategists in places like Imphal (“Damn! I curse the top brass who planned this . . .”),91 to dying of disease and starvation in Guadalcanal and elsewhere as supplies ran out (“We can’t go on fighting with malaria and malnutrition”),92 and killing themselves en masse rather than surrender to the enemy (“I can’t move anymore. Kill me.”).93 The suffering of Japanese civilians is described with equal candor—deaths by aerial bombings, atomic bombs, and the battle of Okinawa—and takes up an amount of space similar to the illustration of Asian victims at Japanese hands.
In all, these texts offer a barebones synopsis of a war that caused, in their estimates, a total death toll in the order of 20 to 23 million. The underlying causes of the atrocities, however, are not explained in detail to the young readers. Other than the bare outline of events, there is no close reasoning of the causal chain of events. They are tuned to cognitive rather than conceptual comprehension and emotional rather than rational understanding. What is inculcated here is a simple pacifist sentiment that precludes any possibility of a just war: war is bad and unjust, because war kills and makes people suffer; it is an evil that hurts people like you, your family, and friends; the government that wages war is bad and can’t be trusted to help and protect you. To be sure, abridged history stories for young children are sanitized cultural products, but they can nevertheless play a notable role in cultivating moral dispositions.
Compared to the foregoing two series, Gakken’s national war is visually brighter, shown as an event carried out by childlike, inoffensive protagonists who are muddling through an international crisis. It is largely a “war story lite” about state and military leadership decisions, without showing any bloodshed or dead bodies. The war was instigated by the belligerent Japanese army that amassed power through the prolonged crisis and turned Japan into an oppressive military state. They waged a bad war and created a bad society, but as the plot moves forward, and people’s lives deteriorate, not much suffering of Japanese or Asian victims is shown. When no suffering is shown, no one is held accountable for it; when no one is held accountable for suffering, it is possible to take a benign, no-guilt approach to war and colonial oppression. This less-perturbed approach is different from the foregoing two series, but the moral sentiment that “everyone cursed the war”94 is nevertheless built into the storyline and comes across clearly to the readers. The much simplified, abridged history strives to be unthreatening to children, yet war is anything but glamorous. When historical memory is rendered into long-term cultural memory in this type of no-guilt educational manga, the moral sentiment is nevertheless anything but prowar or promilitary.
“Popular” History Manga Collections
Fujiko F. Fujio, Ishinomori Shōtarō, and Mizuki Shigeru are superstar manga artists who are celebrated for their classics from samurai adventures and space ventures to family stories and ghost stories, and are well-known beyond the manga and animated film industries. Over the years, their imaginary characters have become household names,
like the delightful robocat Doraemon who is ubiquitous in popular culture from television shows and commercials, to paraphernalia like guitars, stationery, and refrigerator magnets. Such popular characters that enchanted and entertained successive generations growing up in postwar Japan have also been put to good use for producing popular history comics, rendering complex history into abridged stories for successive young generations. The result is a particular style of documentary history comic stories told by fictional narrators, unfolding with a kind of Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) of a Brechtian play that tells stories within stories to create a disengaged critical perspective. With commentary from lovable iconic characters, tragic dark history can be rendered into accessible morality tales rich with emotion, irony, and caricature.
These popular stories, produced by the manga artists or franchised by their production companies, are multivolume sets of history manga published in paperback that are less scholarly than the academic series and less constrained by curricular guidelines. These popular study manga take more artistic liberties than academic manga. They are imaginative in rendering war history into entertaining cultural products that are appealing to younger generations. To be sure, the artistry comes at a cost to comprehensive rigor and assessment of history. The complex reality that heroes, victims, and perpetrators are often the same people in defeat culture is left largely untouched. But readers nevertheless take away a cognitive understanding that contemporary Japanese history is a stained legacy and that being Japanese means they are burdened with that stain.
Fujiko F. Fujio Studio’s Doraemon Series
As a winner of many prestigious awards and a phenomenal merchandizing success, Doraemon is perhaps the most fitting manga icon to entice elementary school children to take an interest in learning dark history. The section on World War II in the Nichinōken series takes up only 18 out of 220 pages, but it takes the readers from the depression and the Manchurian incident through the escalation of war and oppression in society, to the final catastrophic defeat. As the section sketches the main events, young readers are given succinct commentaries about them by the endearing robocat Doraemon and his dimwitted friend Nobita. It is mostly Nobita who conveys the moral evaluation of the war and wartime society through his visceral cries: “Ugh, another war?! I can’t take another one.” “That’s a terrible law [to arrest people who opposed the government].” “I never want to go to war!” “They’re even sending students to war.” “Someone, stop [the atomic bomb]!”95 These gut pacifist sentiments are Nobita’s response to the violence and authoritarian oppression introduced in the text. Even though the number of pages devoted to the world war is slim, the morality tale to be learned here comes across clearly: the government, military, and business go to war to profit from it. The little people like us are dragged into war and are hurt by it. We don’t trust leaders in power who hurt the little people.
To be sure, the ethics of care for the suffering of little people being taught here applies only within the limits of Japan’s national boundary. Taking the blame for the horrors of war and mounting casualties are not the enemy forces in China or the United States but Japanese war mongers who instigated and promoted the war. Not even the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are blamed on the Americans but on the Japanese leadership that missed chances to capitulate earlier, which might have forestalled those tragedies.96 All told, this domestic perspective on the war depicts the Japanese as both perpetrators and victims.97
Mizuki Shigeru’s Shōwa History Series
Mizuki’s message about the war is direct and consistent: Fighting in the military to die for the country is utterly absurd. The powerful message that there is no heroism in fighting and dying in an unwinnable war is grounded directly in Mizuki’s wartime experiences—near-death experiences from combat, bombardment, starvation, malaria, and ultimately amputation—which are all depicted in the series. This compelling message also flies in the face of the patriotic mantra of “honorable death” ingrained in his generation of soldiers. Born in 1922 and conscripted at age 20, Mizuki was sent to Rabaul in New Britain, Papua New Guinea, which was a central base of Japanese military and naval operations in the South Pacific at the time. He barely survived combat and repeated bombardment that overwhelmed the ill-equipped and scantily supplied Japanese forces. He survived, thanks to the help of friendly local tribes and was repatriated after the war. He started writing his war stories in the 1970s after garnering success with Kitarō in the 1960s and has since remained an antiwar voice, driven by his loyalty to his war buddies who died needlessly, and his indignation toward the military and state leaders who abandoned the soldiers on the battlefront without proper supplies, strategic planning, or compassion—causing preventable disasters and unnecessary loss of life.98 Both Mizuki and his brother Sōhei survived, but not without sustaining life-changing traumas like many others of their generation: Mizuki became an amputee, and his brother became a Class B war criminal for killing a POW and was indicted and incarcerated in Sugamo prison.
Mizuki’s war history, focused on the lowest rung of military life, is an especially gripping tale that young readers can probably empathize with. The young men in the stories who went to war and died for the country, however, are not heroic personalities that children should aspire to. They are unfortunate scrawny characters, beaten and broken, who succumbed to defeat. To be sure, there are extensive battle scenes and gallant military encounters especially in the first six months of the Pacific War—like Pearl Harbor—reminiscent of boys’ war stories popularized in major comic weeklies in the 1960s.99 But as losses mount and war prospects turn grim, the battles become more chilling than thrilling and the soldiers become more pitiful than brave. For hundreds of pages, readers wading through graphic illustrations of men falling and dying—in Leyte, Guadalcanal, Imphal, and elsewhere—can recognize the protracted despair. There is no exhilarating valor.100
Mizuki’s accounts are largely victim narratives within the triad of narratives explored in this book. The stories of wrongs inflicted on Japanese soldiers—whose survival rate was atrocious—overshadow those inflicted on Asian people whose lands they invaded.101 This narrow focus on one’s own suffering does not necessarily derive from the intent to whitewash or divert attention from perpetrator history, though personal narratives focused on local experience can depict a narrow range of events that often exclude distant suffering. On the contrary, it is important to recognize these stories as powerful indictments of the Japanese state and military that dragged people through an unnecessary war, killed them needlessly, and betrayed their trust until the bitter end. The anguished stories barely conceal anger toward the deception of the unjust military establishment. War memory here is framed by the “pent-up anger toward war” that gnawed at the survivors like Mizuki for many decades.102 In the final volume, Mizuki takes over as the narrator to offer his reflections and reminiscences. Here, his indictment of the Japanese state as the perpetrator is no longer disguised. The antistate, antimilitary message to the young readers is unmistakable:
I really hated militarism. People deluded themselves into believing that anything daring and brave would bring luck and fortune. They parroted all along: “Loyalty to the Emperor. Patriotism to the State.” . . . We were not supposed to think about “ourselves” but be happy to die as “good subjects” when the draft letter arrived.
If truth be told, people who lived through early Shōwa [era] were bullied by the State . . . The “military” was like a cancer that had to be surgically removed [by defeat].103
Ishinomori Shōtarō’s Manga History of Japan Series
In Manga History of Japan, the Asia-Pacific War period takes up nearly 300 pages and is presented as a descent into a ruinous war through many ill-fated political maneuvers and erroneous decisions. The dominant story is that of the fierce political struggle among a cadre of elite men in power. In that struggle, the bellicose army leadership ultimately rises to power and recklessly thrusts the nation into a world war that ends in a devastating downfall. The bickering rivalries, mistrust, miscalculations, and miscoordination at the heart of the story are recounted in much detail: the leaders fail to heed warnings, miss opportunities to negotiate, lose strategic momentum, misplace their confidence in wishful thinking, and make incompetent decisions. As the military amasses more power over time through emergency legislation and totalitarian repression, the nation becomes a police state. All told, this is a disheartening history of a nation led by misguided villains without any wise heroes who stood firm enough to foil them.
Ishinomori’s comic history, unlike the foregoing examples, does not rely on familiar manga characters for narration but develops the plot solely through authorial narratives and graphic depictions of dynamic events and encounters. Taking a populist approach, a regular cast of seven or eight people appears throughout as ordinary people voicing their thoughts and feelings about the unfolding events. Their commentaries are presented as casual conversations in a mom-and-pop diner, where the proprietor family and regular patrons shoot the breeze over meals and drinks. They are imaginary witnesses and bystanders of wartime Japan: independent-minded people who own small establishments and regular customers who drop in from all walks of life: newspaper journalists feeling the squeeze of state censorship, youths at schools or in show business being called up to military service, foreign ministry workers confessing to being clueless about the ongoing diplomatic whirlwind, blue-collar workers being laid off from struggling factories, and others. As the war escalates, they feel by turns apprehensive and ambivalent, surprised and cheered, ignorant and manipulated, fearful and confused, resentful and weary, and ultimately, desperate and indignant that the war is dragging the country into an abyss with no end in sight.
The Japanese are clearly shown as the aggressors, not pitiful victims. The reasons why this war escalated to such levels of brutality or why the military callously abandoned Japanese civilians in Manchuria, Saipan, and Okinawa—driving them to desperate mass suicides—are never fully explained, however.104 While young readers are offered insights that this war should have been and could have been prevented, they are given no moral or conceptual means to reflect on practical alternative possibilities that could have been pursued.
Successful pop history projects of manga celebrities like these exemplify the power of cultural memory forged outside the reach of state educational institutions. Phenomenally effective in reaching youths—though much overlooked by scholarship—manga rode the wave of a generational turnover of Japanese youth, for whom it continues to be, with television and the Internet, a compelling, indispensable mode of communication and resource for information. Communicating history stories by manga is a generationally distinct, and decidedly freer, mode of transmitting memory, embraced first by the baby boomers who welcomed the new expressive voice unencumbered by traditional literature, plays, and poetry. Those readers were also happy to turn up their noses at “serious” moralizing work by the wartime generation that controlled the public sphere. Having sensed that those adults had themselves wrought “something dreadful that happened in the past,” the younger generation had good reason to distrust the traditional carriers of memory and celebrate an alternative sphere of communication of their very own. Manga stories, then, became their stories and allowed them to indulge in subverting the authoritarian gaze while also bonding with their peers. It is therefore not surprising that mistrust of state authority is a salient element of pop history, even if the criticism is often tactfully muted. There is neither glamour nor valor in the way most mainstream manga history depicts those responsible for the war. In this sense, young readers are more likely to come away disheartened and distressed than entertained by the illustrations of the unenviable legacy that they have inherited as Japanese nationals.
Cultural Trauma as Morality Tale for Generations of Postwar Children
British historian Timothy Ashplant once noted that “the past is not automatically passed between generations, but must be actively transmitted so that later generations accept that past as meaningful.”105 In defeated nations, that meaning has been often found in transforming the stigma of the past into a moral quality that helps purge the contamination.106 In Japan’s case, this transformation work is framed often as a moral responsibility to nurture sentiments in young generations to denounce future wars. This is, however, preferably to be done without undermining the moral standing of the parent or grandparent generation who waged the war. Thus the task is often said to be about communicating the “reality of war” to the postwar generations who do not know war (sensō o shiranai sedai), who are “blessed in ignorance of one of humankind’s oldest, most repugnant activities.”107 This discourse has allowed the wartime generation to keep much control over the mnemonic scripts of the past war and the derivative lessons learned from them. It is within this intergenerational power dynamic that the emotional memory of “something dreadful that happened in Japanese history” has been passed on to successor generations. The successor generations have, in turn, confronted that history with a mixture of dread, curiosity, anxiety, and also a desire to decontaminate both their families and themselves.
In this chapter, we have seen that Japanese children are raised in an environment encoded with generational memory that often encourages them to develop negative moral sentiments about the war. The “encouragement” comes in subtle and unsubtle ways, as young children develop gut instincts that “something dreadful happened in the past,” even if they don’t fully understand what or why. Even when they encounter emotional memory of terror that seems unfathomable, many can still understand that, unlike the wars in video games and television shows, this one really engulfed the lives of their grandparents when they were small children like themselves. It was so bad that children like themselves lost their families, friends, homes, then couldn’t escape and died. From such “shock and awe” war stories that elicit a visceral response—in animated films, textbook photos, peace education, school instruction, popular history, and more—they may learn to empathize and identify with those war orphans, malnourished children, bombed children, injured children, and abandoned children who lost everything that sustained them.108 Over time, this kind of emotional socialization that taps into instincts for self-preservation turns into “feeling rules,” with which children learn to internalize how they are supposed to feel about war in a pacifist country.109 Clearly, this choice of strategy is not geared toward raising nascent critical thinkers who would assume responsibility for the past atrocious deeds of their forefathers as in a culture of contrition, like Germany, but focused instead on not raising the type of Japanese people who could perpetrate another abhorrent war in the future.
The impact of generational memory on the emotional and normative socialization of children that we have discussed in this chapter, however, is not easily measured by robust empirical indicators. How children respond to and internalize messages encoded in their environment can vary depending on different factors and may also change over time. Cross-sectional attitudinal surveys that often serve as proxy indicators of socialization and identity are therefore best supplemented with multiple sources of empirical information, including longitudinal data, toward a method of triangulation. For this reason, I rely in the chapters of this book on multiple sources by, for, and on postwar generations from surveys, interviews, focus groups, and public fora, to blogs, websites, essays, and letters to newspapers in an attempt to build a collage. Even so, the effects of generational memory on moral and national identity making are captured indirectly and inferentially based on assumptions about the probable link between cause and effect.
What we learn from surveys, however, shows that transmitting war memory that invokes cultural trauma has probably made an indelible mark on attitudes toward future wars. For decades, the antipathy toward the prospect of exercising military power has been consistently high and especially so among the young. For example, Japan ranks lowest among 59 nations in the proportion of people who are willing to fight for their country. Only 15–33%, depending on the survey, are willing to do so; this figure is also lower for younger people in their 20s and 30s, and for women.110 Likewise, the proportion of those who support the total ban on nuclear arms (the Three Non-Nuclear Principles) has been always high and is endorsed today by as much as 80–90% of middle and high school students.111 Remarkably, the antipathy toward exercising military force has scarcely fluctuated even in the last decade when nuclear threats from North Korea and China have intensified and people reporting their fear of becoming entangled in a war have doubled.112 It seems reasonable to say that these antipathies are consistent and are a key part of the moral identity that is diffused with generational memory.
The powerful cultural code that “something dreadful happened in the past” can also signal an underlying apprehension about state power that wrought untold deaths and even demanded “voluntary” deaths from its subjects in the name of patriotic sacrifice. It is therefore not surprising that the antipathy toward military force would extend to a wariness and suspicion of patriotism associated with obedience to state authority. Japan ranks quite low—71st among 74 countries—in level of professed patriotism, with 54.2% of its people claiming to feel pride in their nation.113 This trend is also especially pronounced for younger people in their 20s and 30s and for women.114 Among high school students, only a handful claim to take pride in Japan’s national anthem and national flag, which are fiercely controversial vestiges of the militarist nation-state. Attachment to those core national symbols hovers around 11–13%, which is much lower than 54–55% in the United States, and 48–50% in China. Japanese high school students also have a high proportion who are not proud of their country (48.3%), compared to the United States (37.1%) and China (20.3%).115 The sense of detachment and skepticism toward the state resonates with the significant destabilization of trust experienced in the post-defeat society. This mistrust of patriotic devotion and loyalty encoded in generational memory has likely helped keep the heroic patriotic narratives out of the everyday cultural material for teaching children like those reviewed in this chapter. This effacement of patriotic-heroic narratives in illustrating Japan’s path to World War II has been a long-term project of the proponents of victim narratives as well as perpetrator narratives.
Critics will surely point to the many flaws of the scare tactics applied to children to swear off future wars—for good reason. The pressure can breed insecurity and anxiety in children who deserve a safe upbringing as all children do. Moreover, their exposure to domestic suffering like air raids and atomic bombs can be blown out of proportion, when considering that the deaths that the Japanese inflicted on Asian victims were several times greater. Moreover, the heavy exposure to suffering at home can breed the much-criticized “victim consciousness” that can relegate the understanding of perpetrator responsibility to the sidelines. Above all, it fails to inculcate a strong awareness that the suffering, however painful, was the result of a war the Japanese started themselves and not a calamity that befell like a natural disaster. Most criticisms from the left also make implicit comparison to the “German model” in shaming the Japanese practices of coming to terms with the past as evasive and dishonest.116 However, critics from the other end, the provocative radical right, charge to the contrary that scare-inducing antimilitarist discourse misinforms and misleads the children into believing that everything and anything about the past war was evil, including the sacrifices of brave soldiers and loyal families who are worthy of respect. In this view, Japanese children are exposed to too many perpetrator narratives that undermine their self-esteem and confidence about being Japanese. It claims that the victor’s narrative that Japan waged a “bad” war is dishonest and should be revised, so that children can develop a “healthier” sense of Japanese identity.117 In many ways, the representations of the war today are caught in the middle of these political perspectives without clear resolution, resulting in a slow, incremental, back and forth development.
As we have seen in this chapter, the museum exhibits, textbooks, and popular history books that young children can access today are actually not entirely dominated by victim narratives at the expense of perpetrator accounts. Precisely because such perpetrator accounts had made inroads in the past decades, peace museum exhibits, textbook illustrations, and nonfiction stories were targeted in a round of political backlash by the neonationalist right who sought to “correct” those problems in the late 1990s and 2000s, as discussed in the previous chapter. In this environment, public agencies were pressured into withdrawing funding for municipal peace museums, and textbook illustrations took a conservative turn.118 New comics appeared such as Kobayashi Yoshinori’s On War series, aimed to resurrect the popularity of heroic patriotic narratives and supported by neoconservative media and Internet sites.119 Soon a political movement “Tsukurukai” was afoot, embraced by the malcontent and alienated young segments of society who vehemently protested “bowing” to China and Korea.120 After this new pendulum swing, the stalemate among the triad of cultural trauma narratives moved to the next round, with new actors and new generations carrying the torch for their teams.
Thus, beneath the broader cultural premise of the pacifist nation, the plural narratives of dark history continue to cast a shadow on the nation’s political consciousness. The fault lines found in the history and civics texts are mirrored in the memory politics of the young as they enter the fray to contest issues that impact their generation. In the 2000s when Japan faced a series of critical legislative measures on national defense and education, the youth’s responses undoubtedly mirrored those fault lines. Whether or not they favored the controversial neoconservative initiatives to enhance the state’s operative capabilities in military contingencies, or its ability to cultivate patriotic instruction, observant young people were evidently aware that these measures would alter the cultural script of the “bad” military in the moral landscape of the twenty-first century. The memory of military violence as cultural trauma remained a common referent for them to gauge the present, even as they were divided in their views. For example, in a recent letter to the young readers’ column of the Asahi newspaper, an 18-year-old male student, echoing the antiwar and antistate discourses of previous generations, wrote angrily:
Now that “patriotic” instruction will be forced on us, isn’t that like going back to the compulsory education of prewar “militarism”? Although the Constitution renounces war, [the revised Fundamental Law of Education] could eventually send us high school students to the battlefront again.121
Another 18-year-old female student voiced her concern in the same vein, referring explicitly to her lessons from school:
I am tired of hearing the government exalt “Strong Japan” and “Japanese Power” . . . it reminds me of the prewar militarism that we read about in school textbooks . . . Why do we have to be so strong anyway? And what for?122
Realists retorted against such misgivings, as a 22-year-old male student expressed:
Sentimental chants of “Peace! Peace!” alone can’t bring any peace . . . We don’t live anymore in Imperial Japan under the Meiji Constitution. I can’t possibly imagine that politicians in democratic and pacifist Japan today want to go to war. But around the world, there are nations that will violate the peace of others. If Japan is invaded, how are we going to confront it? That’s why we need the contingency law. It’s important . . . in order to realize the ideal of peace and to maintain Japan’s sovereignty.123
As we have seen, the moral framework that consigns war to the category of “absolute evil” derives from negative affect based on bitter experience, not critical reflections on or judicious reasoning regarding social justice. This approach can be effective in unleashing popular antiwar emotions, but it also undermines an understanding of the vastly complicated world of human animosity, greed, conformity, and self-preservation, muddied by realities that are never clear-cut or black and white. A casualty of the passionate project to “Just Say No” to war, paradoxically, is the development of a clear, expressive vocabulary to articulate feelings and understandings of moral conscience, guilt, responsibility, and injustice that lie in the gray zone between the binary formula—vocabulary that can represent the possibility that good and evil actions are not always mutually exclusive and yet demand responsibility for those actions. It is only then that the circle of empathy for the suffering of others can widen and expand toward a universalized understanding of war and peace. Such a project has only just begun.
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