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Nambara Shigeru (1889-1974) and the Student-Dead of a War He Opposed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Richard Minear
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What follows are excerpts from Nambara Shigeru's speeches and poems illuminating the conscience of an intellectual in war-time and its aftermath, introduced by Richard Minear, who translated and introduced the book War and Conscience in Japan:Nambara Shigeru and the Asia-Pacific War.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , January 2011 , e1
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2011

References

Notes

1 These speeches are two of the eight postwar speeches that make up Part III of War and Conscience in Japan. Part I consists of five essays and speeches from before the surrender; Part II is some three hundred verses from his wartime tanka diary.

2 “Senbotsu gakuto o omou—senbotsu narabi ni junshokusha ireisai ni okeru kokubun,” Chosakushū 7:34-9.

3 Matthew 11:17. The topic is the unfriendly reception of John the Baptist, and Jesus says: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear. But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates, ‘We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.‘”

4 “Absolute faith in victory” was a wartime slogan. Nambara seems to speak of the Pacific War as primarily against England and the U.S., thus eliding Japan's China war.

5 “Senbotsu gakuto no isan o tsuguru mono—gakuto shutsujin nijūshūnen kinenshūkai ni okeru kōen,” Chosakushū 9:226-44. This version carries the following header: “Given on December 1, 1963 at the meeting on the twentieth anniversary of the sending off of the student-soldiers. The contents are pretty much the same as presented in Sekai's issue of January 1964, except for a section that I omitted when I gave the speech and a section that I have newly added.”

6 Nambara was then a professor on the Law Faculty, not president. The Kimi ga yo was the de facto national anthem; the hinomaru was the red-on-white flag; Umi yukaba was the leading martial song.

7 The China Incident is the war with China that began in 1937.

8 Kike wadatsumi no koe (1949), Ningen no koe (1962), Jūgōnen sensō (1963). The first of the three was made into a film in 1950 and again in 1995.

9 Yasuda Takeshi, Sensō taiken: 1970-nen e no isho (1963).

10 For the German original, see Leopold von Ranke, Über die Epochen der neueren Geschichte: Vorträge dem Konige Maximilian II von Bayern gehalten (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 166-7. Nambara glosses Nemesis as “the goddess of revenge.”

11 “Eight ropes, one roof” (uniting the world under Japanese leadership) was the wartime slogan for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.