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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
As Randolph Bourne discerned as far back as 1917, a state waging war is readily able to obtain support for its undertaking from sizable numbers of intellectuals. Such factors as jingoism, combative egos, power worship, or considerations of profit and prestige ensure that numerous academics, journalists, writers, and critics will pronounce eloquently in favor of the warring state and exhort their compatriots to back it without question. Although a uniformly pro-war consensus is seldom attained, hawkish intellectuals play an important role in engineering consent and discrediting opposition to official policies. Appreciative of the services rendered by its intellectual myrmidons, the state rewards them, directly or indirectly.
[1] Tatsuo Kawai, The Goal of Japanese Expansion 1938; reprint, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973), 67. For historical and cultural background to the period, see the Introduction in Ishikawa Tatsuzo, Soldiers Alive (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003), 1-54. For a look at the work of Japanese antimilitarist writers like Kuroshima Denji, Oguma Hideo, Kaneko Mitsuharu, and Ishikawa Jun, see the following: Kuroshima Denji, A Flock of Swirling Crows & Other Proletarian Writings (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2005), Oguma Hideo, Long, Long Autumn Nights: Selected Poems of Oguma Hideo (Trans. David G. Goodman. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1989), Kaneko Mitsuharu, Shijin: Autobiography of the Poet Kaneko Mitsuharu (Trans. A.R. Davis. Sydney: Wild Peony, 1988), Ishikawa Jun, The Legend of Gold and Other Stories (Trans. William J. Tyler. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998). See also: http://www.counterpunch.org/cipris04122003.html
[2] Kobayashi was especially impressed by Okawa's “common sense and unwavering eye for history.” See Edward G. Seidensticker, “Kobayashi Hideo” in Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 441. Kobayashi flirted with Marxism in his youth, but soon veered to the right. Thanks to Mark Driscoll for pointing out that Kobayashi's oeuvre is filled with purloined elements of leftist thought, prominent among them a vulgarized version of praxis theory. A useful discussion of Kobayashi may be found in Yoshio Iwamoto, “The Relationship between Literature and Politics in Japan, 1931-1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1964). For a succinct summary of Kobayashi's thought, see the last three pages of Harry Harootunian's essay “America's Japan / Japan's Japan,” in Masao Miyoshi and H.D. Harootunian, eds., Japan in the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 196-221. A number of Kobayashi's essays are available in English in Paul Anderer, ed. and trans., Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism, 1924-1939 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Two more of Kobayashi's essays can be read in J. Thomas Rimer and Van C. Gessel, eds., The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, vol. 1: From Restoration to Occupation, 1868-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). The translations in the present essay are my own.
[3] Kaizo, November 1937, 220.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 220-221.
[7] Ibid., 221.
[8] Ibid., 222.
[9] Ibid., 223.
[10] Those who disagreed with Kobayashi may have expected some such “patriotic” call from him, and felt it not worth the trouble and risk to respond. Already the previous year, 1936, the Marxist writer and critic Nakano Shigeharu had dismissed Kobayashi as an “out-and-out reactionary” and a worthless critic to boot. See Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, vol. 2, Poetry, Drama, Criticism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston), 598-600.
[11] Iwamoto, “The Relationship between Literature and Politics in Japan, 1931-1945,” 270-271; Richard H. Mitchell, Censorship in Imperial Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 295; Donald Keene, Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era, vol. 1, Fiction (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), 927. For a revealing account of Kishida Kunio's experience as member of the Pen Corps, see J. Thomas Rimer, “Paris in Nanjing: Kishida Kunio Follows the Troops,” in Marlene J. Mayo, J. Thomas Rimer, eds., with H. Eleanor Kerkham, War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia, 1920-1960 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001), 176-187. A roster of the writers who participated in the Pen Corps appears in Miyoshi Yukio, ed., Nihon bungaku zenshi (Tokyo: Gakutosha, 1978), vol. 6, 259. For a fairly extensive (though at times flawed or clumsily written) discussion of literary responses to the war, see Zeljko Cipris, “Radiant Carnage: Japanese Writers on the War against China” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1994).
[12] Keene, Dawn to the West, vol. 2, Poetry, Drama, Criticism, 603; Ariyama Daigo, “Senso bungaku sakka no senso taiken” in Yasuda Takeshi and Ariyama Daigo, eds., Kindai senso bungaku (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankokai, 1981), 36. See also Joshua A. Fogel, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China 1862-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 287-290. Some of Kobayashi's trips to the war-torn continent lasted as long as six months, his last was in 1944. Many other literary figures were traveling through the occupied territories around the same time, prompting a later historian to comment: “Not unlike a year's study in Europe or the United States in earlier years, a visit to the empire bestowed cultural legitimation on those who aspired to the high arts.” See Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 267.
[13] Tsuzuki Hisayoshi correctly calls Kobayashi's dispatches from wartime China “sightseeing reports” (kenbutsuki). See Tsuzuki Hisayoshi, Senjika no bungaku (Osaka: Izumi Sensho, 1985), 20.
[14] Kobayashi Hideo, Gendai bungaku taikei 42 Kobayashi Hideo shu (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1965), 437. Hangzhou, located on West Lake (Xihu), is famed for its beauty in Chinese lore, and was widely admired by Japanese Buddhists and other travelers over the centuries.
[15] Miyoshi Yukio, ed., Nihon bungaku zenshi, vol. 6, 228. The lilting, melodious gunka (war song) “Mugi to heitai” is available in virtually any karaoke bar, and wartime copies of Hino's books sell inexpensively in many second-hand bookstores. Hino's other wartime bestsellers include Tsuchi to heitai (Earth and Soldiers, its movie version filmed on location in China), Hana to heitai (Flowers and Soldiers), Umi to heitai (Sea and Soldiers, also known as Kanton shingunsho, March into Guangzhou), and the short narrative “Tabako to heitai” (Cigarettes and Soldiers). Shortly after the end of the war, at Hiroshima station, a recently demobilized soldier who had lost his younger brother in the war informed Hino Ashihei that he and his comrades were wondering when Hino was going to get around to writing Kane to heitai (Money and Soldiers). Growing afraid of getting thrashed by other embittered soldiers who had gathered around, a stunned Hino—who had always considered himself a loyal supporter of the troops—fled the scene. (See Keene, Dawn to the West, vol. 1, Fiction, 924-925). For more on Hino, see David M. Rosenfeld, Unhappy Soldier: Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War II Literature (Lanham, Boulder, and Oxford: Lexington Books, 2002).
[16] Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, 451.
[17] Kobayashi, Gendai bungaku taikei 42Kobayashi Hideo shu, 442.
[18] Ibid., 444.
[19] Ibid., 443.
[20] Ibid. 449. Japanese Modernist writer Yokomitsu Riichi (1898-1947) traveled in China during the 1920s and published his novel Shanhai (Shanghai) serially between 1928 and 1931. See Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanghai (Trans. Dennis Washburn. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001).
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., 434, 435. Many Japanese writers, including Hino Ashihei, were impressed by the beauty of China's landscape, but Pen Corps writer Hayashi Fumiko (1903-1951) was not. In her book The Battlefront she concedes that Chinese territory (which she openly wishes to annex) is desirably fertile and sporadically enchanting, yet insists that its “filthy soil,” muddy rivers, and landscape resembling “a heap of rotten fruit” cannot compare with the “purple hills and crystal streams” of her homeland. See Hayashi Fumiko, Sensen (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1938), 15, 108, 196, 200.
[23] Kobayashi, 447.
[24] Ibid., 452.
[25] Ibid., 466.
[26] Fukuda Kugao, “Bungei Jugo Undo” in Kokubungaku kaishaku to kansho, special issue (May 1982), 561-562. As the war in China escalated into an even wider military conflict after 1941, Kobayashi would also deliver addresses before such government-sponsored organizations as the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association and the Greater East Asia Writers Decisive Victory Assembly. In late 1943 he helped plan the third meeting of the Writers Decisive Victory Assembly in Nanjing. See Keene, Dawn to the West, vol. 2, 603, 607.
[27] Kon Hidemi, ed., Bungei Jugo Undo koen shu (Tokyo: Bungeika Kyokai, 1941), 41.
[28] Keene, Dawn to the West, vol. 2, 603.
[29] Ibid., 608-610. Deeply impressed by the presumed quality and breadth of Kobayashi's criticism, exemplified by his work on such figures as Dostoyevsky, Mozart, and 18 th century Japanese writer and scholar Motoori Norinaga, Professor Keene contends that “Kobayashi typified not only the critics but all the best Japanese writers of the twentieth century.” (Ibid., 613).
[30] See Karatani Kojin and Nakagami Kenji, eds., Kobayashi Hideo o koete (Tokyo: Kawade shobo, 1979). The book's title is a playful reference to “Kindai o koete” (Overcoming Modernity), a famous symposium held in the summer of 1942 at the prestigious Kyoto Imperial University (now Kyoto University) at which Kobayashi Hideo was a prominent participant. Karatani and Nakagami's book is entitled “Overcoming Kobayashi Hideo.”
[31] Keene, Dawn to the West, vol. 2, 582, 587.
[32] See http://www.miho.or.jp/english/member/shangrila/vol11/eshan11_2.htm For a sample of Kajima Corporation's vision of architectural beauty, see http://www.skyscraperpage.com/cities/7buildingID=3224
[33] For a Japanese writer's brief essay on Oda Makoto, see http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/heroes/oda.html
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