Organizer: Lee Pennington, U.S. Naval Academy
Chair: Samuel H. Yamashita, Pomona College
Discussant: Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University
Wartime Japan echoed with the slogan “for the sake of the nation” (okuni
no tame ni), a phrase regularly employed on both the home and fighting fronts.
As the Asia-Pacific War waged on, Japanese society endured ever-increasing hardships
created by total war mobilization and, in later years, the escalation of the
Allied military offensive. The state instructed society to persevere, but at
times, people in Japan willingly chose pathways that led them to deprivation,
suffering, and loss in everyday venues ranging from the intimate reaches of
family life to the public realm of mass entertainment. This panel investigates
various articulations of sacrificial devices and desires in wartime and postwar
Japan. Dennis Frost recasts the life, death, and afterlife of Sawamura Eiji,
the popular baseball player who surrendered his professional career to fight
at the China front. Lee Pennington uncovers the strange bedfellows of love and
war in his study of the wartime recruitment of self-sacrificing brides for Japan’s
disabled veterans. Ian Miller captures the bestial nature of sacrifice by examining
the August 1943 immolation of the animals at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoo in relation
to the dying of the Japanese empire. Ellen Schattschneider charts the terrain
of overseas military and civilian martyrdom laid out in postwar Japanese and
Okinawan memorial practices for war casualties. By examining a diversity of
topics such as wartime sports culture and postwar memorialization of the dead,
these four papers explore the martyrdom and sacrifice brought into play during
and after Japan’s most demanding modern war.
Dennis J. Frost, Xavier University
In 1938, Sawamura Eiji, one of Japan’s most celebrated and popular baseball
players, left the professional league to enter the military and was soon dispatched
to the front in China. This paper examines popular interest in Sawamura’s
military experiences, revealing that the relationship between baseball and the
wartime state was far less antagonistic than most accounts of the sport’s
history suggest. Sawamura, who was drafted three times and killed in action
in 1944, regularly commented on his wartime experiences, drawing explicit parallels
between military life and baseball. Published in both mainstream media and the
sports magazine Yakyukai, Sawamura’s personal recountings made him a particularly
effective, though unofficial, spokesperson for the war, and especially the need
for all Japanese, even “Japan’s Number One”, to give their
all for the sake of the nation. At the same time, analyzing postwar biographies,
novels, films, and children’s stories about Sawamura provides insights
into how he and the war have been remembered in postwar society. While wartime
accounts portrayed Sawamura as willing and noble, in postwar retellings his
story was recast as a tragic narrative of wartime loss, transforming Sawamura
into an innocent and unwilling victim of the militarists, and thereby obscuring
his—and by extension baseball’s—complicity in the war. While
focusing on Sawamura and Japan, this paper exposes the often-overlooked role
of sports and sports celebrities worldwide in fostering wartime mobilization
and mediating postwar efforts to come to terms with wartime experiences at
home and on the front.
Lee Pennington, U.S. Naval Academy
Societies the world over reify the belief that the selfless devotion of a
woman is essential to the rehabilitation of a war-wounded man—an attitude
likely as old as war itself, although the recent appearance of the female disabled
veteran inverts the gendered traditions of militarized care-giving. But in the
main, male combatants fought the Second World War with female participation
relegated to the home fronts. After seven years of fitful conflict in China,
in 1938 Japan’s new Welfare Ministry inaugurated a complex livelihood
assistance system for military casualties and their families that featured a
cornerstone program for mobilizing young women to marry wounded soldiers returned
home from war. The state established marriage mediation facilities for disabled
veterans that the Patriotic Women’s Association and other grassroots women’s
organizations used to introduce the military wounded to potential brides. Meanwhile,
wartime entertainments such as ladies’ journals, popular fiction, and
feature films like The Record of My Love (dir. Toyoda Shiro, 1939) extolled
the image of the self-sacrificing, nationally-minded bride who, by marrying
a grievously injured soldier, dutifully exposed herself to the threat of financial,
social, and perhaps even conjugal hardship… all done in the name of family
and nation. Drawing together social welfare programming, popular discourse,
and everyday visual culture, this paper examines not only the institutional
structure of spousal recruitment for disabled veterans in wartime Japan but
also personal reactions to the physical and figurative sacrifices that war—and
war mobilization—introduces into domestic life no matter the national
context.
Ian J. Miller, Harvard University
Odachi Shigeo, Tokyo's powerful Governor General and future Home Minister,
faced a difficult situation in the summer of 1943. Having just returned from
his post as Imperial Mayor of Occupied Singapore (Shonan), where he had watched
the Japanese empire expand and then, with terrifying speed, begin to contract
as the weight of American industrial capacity swung behind the war effort, Odachi
knew that the triumphalist news stories of the day were woefully out of touch
with reality. The Japanese empire was on the verge of horrific collapse, and
the mass death and brutal hardships of the frontlines would soon be visited
upon the capital's populace. As the official charged with steeling Tokyo's women
and children for the arrival of Allied bombers and troops, Odachi was confronted
with the question of how to mobilize a population numbed by years of propagandist
exaggeration and exhausted from long-term material deprivation. His answer was
one of the most surreal and best-remembered events of the Pacific War: the mass-mediated
ritualized slaughter of Tokyo's wildly famous zoo animals. The slaughter was
choreographed to shock depleted Tokyoites into a higher level of ideological
compliance, suppress dissent, and instill a heightened sense of emergency through
a conscious rupture of everyday conventions. Arguably rational only within the
context of total war and impending total defeat, Odachi's diaries and official
memos illustrate not only the logic of sacrifice in a society in crisis but
also the sacrifice of logic to the dictates of blinkered military strategy and
illusory victory.
Ellen Schattschneider, Brandeis University
This paper explores ways in which standard wartime representations of martyrdom
in the service of the nation have been partially challenged or interrogated
in postwar Japan and Okinawa within ritual frameworks that propose alternate
moral cartographies of wartime experience. I discuss, for instance, a surviving
ex-tokkotai (kamikaze) pilot, who performs Buddhist memorialization on behalf
of former comrades who perished undertaking attacks in the 1945 battle of
Okinawa. After performing monthly pilgrimage to the wartime airbase of Chiran,
he experiences mystical visions of his dead pilot friends landing safely at
the base, emerging with smiling faces as he welcomes them home. I compare such
cases with recent ritual action on behalf of Okinawans who perished in 1944
by leaping off cliffs in Micronesia, in acts that were at the time celebrated
in the Japanese media as heroic self-sacrifice. In 2006, an Okinawan Yuta shamaness
visiting Tinian performed a rite of "soul re-collection" (nuji), requesting that local
divinities release the soul of an Okinawan man killed in 1944. During wartime,
she said, the road between Okinawa and Tinian was broken; the road now needed
to be "mended" if the family line was to continue. At one level, such
rites reproduce an older sacrificial logic of death and collective regeneration,
centered on what Girard terms a "sacrificial double" re-enlivened
by ritualized death. Yet these symbolic acts largely displace the previous
centrality of the nation and Emperor as the locus of sacrifice, instead emphasizing
more proximate abiding claims of kinship and comradeship.
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