Post-war diaries (1945–1950)

Although diaries from the immediate post-war period show some change, soldiers often stuck to the language they had adopted during the war. In the transition from soldier to veteran (sometimes through a liminal period of being a ‘prisoner of war’), the diary continued to serve as a space in which the individual could sort out, for himself, how to articulate experience. First, many East Asian servicemen were understandably eager to finish with fighting. One GMD officer recorded a victory speech into his diary:

Still, veterans could not so easily put military matters behind them. The GMD, who had spent the entirety of the war utterly devastated by enemy attacks, continued to mobilize for war against ‘bandits,’ political rivals, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and even the defeated Japanese. The diarist above also recorded the following warning from the central government in Nanjing: ‘The Japanese bushidō spirit has not been totally destroyed, so our victory cannot be considered complete’. Mobilization against the spectre of potential Japanese remilitarization was also connected to the GMD's attempts to clean corruption out of its own ranks: ‘Our Party, state and military men are as corrupt and degenerate as ever, completely ignorant of self-respect’.Footnote ⁹ Also, GMD officers could not lay down their arms and embrace peace, for they had been busily preparing for the coming conflict with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at least since the United States had entered the war against Japan, if not before.Footnote ¹⁰ In this sense, the end of the war did not see a major transformation in GMD servicemen's diary-writing from about 1940, when the GMD, in addition to surviving the war against Japan, also committed itself to exterminating the CCP, ‘bandit’, and ‘puppet’ forces behind the lines.

The account of the diarist above is typical of GMD officers’ recorded experience of the beginning of the Civil War: on 28 October, 1945, he wrote that ‘cries of despair from the common people [baixing]’ could be heard as the CCP began drafting young men into their ranks.Footnote ¹¹ The next day, he wrote that Chinese Communist units were attempting to assume control over formerly Japanese-held territories in the south by overseeing the surrender of Japanese units. By 19 November, he also noted that enemy forces (jian-weijun) were still cutting communication lines and transportation routes for ‘an unknown scheme’ in Gansu, where his unit was stationed. In fact, the chaos suffusing China at this point—former puppet government armies turning to banditry, Communist insurgents spreading throughout the north, and former GMD troops looting from the departing Japanese, selling military goods to the highest bidder—would prove to be an insurmountable challenge for the returning Nationalists.Footnote ¹² Whatever the situation really was in China after the conclusion of the war, it is clear from these diaries that Chinese officers had been decrying the downfall of their Party since the early 1940s. They had constructed a heroic past for themselves for the period 1937–1939, and saw what followed as a travesty.

Japanese servicemen too had trouble abandoning the rhetoric of the war. ‘Tanimura Kanzō,’ who had been in the Japanese army in Northern China since the early 1930s, maintained his wartime voice even as he watched the empire crumble around him. He still wrote about ‘nurturing’ the Manchurians and the ‘holy work’ (tengyō) of the Japanese army in China, even as he despaired at the fate of Manchuria in the new post-war world order: ‘Ah, at which nation's behest will [Manchuria] be sucked dry [kyūketsu]’? Servicemen like Tanimura were subjected to Chinese re-education programmes, but his transformation from advocate of empire to critic was done through familiar wartime language. For example, while still in China, Tanimura changed his tone and began to speak of ‘self-criticism’ (hansei) and a need to re-evaluate Japan's involvement in China; this term was used extensively by his military trainers, but he re-defined it in order to express new views. Writing during his captivity in China, he described in his notebook how he had discovered, ‘in this environment, the true significance [igi] of self-criticism’. Using phrases from the war—hansei, ‘nurturing of public morals’ (kōtoku kyōyō), and ‘unified hearts’ (tōitsu shinkyō)—Tanimura was able to imagine a national self-criticism born out of the ‘reality of the war's loss’ (haisen no genjitsu).Footnote ¹³ Thus, while the ending of the war in East Asia was eventually accepted and even embraced by many servicemen, they did so through the lens of their wartime selves. Even if the war itself was rejected, the rules and values of veterans’ language community survived the early post-war period; in fact, they used their wartime ‘self-discipline’ to overcome the stinging losses of the eight-year conflict.

Testimonial literature

As in the wartime period, the state was deeply involved in attempting to guide veterans’ voices immediately after 1945, but the peacetime state could be a very different beast from one engaged in total war. Both occupying and local authorities conducted trials in East Asia, as well as establishing ‘re-education camps’ that encouraged (or forced) prisoners of war to produce ‘testimonies’ and ‘self-confessions’ regarding their wartime conduct. Court documents inspired later forms of academic, government, and popular publications featuring the term ‘testimony’ (Japanese shōgen, Chinese zhengyan). Although this provided a forum for the wartime generation to communicate their memories to a broader audience, it was very restricted and thus gave them little room to shape the tale. Both trial documents and, later, popular ‘testimonies’ reveal the state and mass media's involvement crafting memory narratives, often driven by short-term political concerns, but veterans were not always cooperative when such forces engaged with them.

The immediate post-war GMD government alternately condemned and forgave ‘Chinese traitors’ (hanjian, those who had worked with Japan), largely influenced by the exigencies of the Civil War. Decisions were not solely determined by realpolitik, however, as many ‘traitors’ were punished in order to ‘satisfy the people's anger’.Footnote ¹⁴ Part of the legal process involved in bringing a ‘traitor’ to trial required the defendant to compose a ‘confession’ (zibaishu). For example, Liu Yushu, a graduate of the Japanese Army Officer Academy (1908), detailed his experience of the war as a member of Wang Jingwei's government. He need not have composed it himself, as it primarily listed his ‘offences,’ but he was quick to point out that it was the overnight collapse of the GMD forces in Tianjin that left him and other officials to become captives of the Japanese.Footnote ¹⁵ During questioning, he became more defensive and insisted on portraying himself, an accused ‘Chinese traitor,’ as a man with noble motives who faced difficult decisions:

Court documents from the period reveal that defendants frequently attempted to thwart the process of becoming the GMD's ‘traitors.’ Indeed, the naming of ‘traitors’ largely constituted a legal performance that was used to legitimate Nationalist authority. Despite defendants’ explanations, good or bad, the courts could produce contrasting testimonies and textual evidence to prevent ‘traitors’ from shaping the tale to their own liking.Footnote ¹⁷

Japanese troops were also forced or encouraged by their captors to express themselves in this limited format. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Khabarovsk War Crimes Trials, and the ‘re-education’ camps and interrogations run by both the GMD and the CCP produced similar ‘testimonies’ from former Japanese military men. In a 1946 affidavit, Sakurai Tokutarō narrated his participation in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (which sparked war between China and Japan in 1937). General Song Zheyuan's officers, originally tasked with defending northern China in 1937, were probably surprised to hear Sakurai bemoan the ‘lack of mutual understanding’ that led to both sides’ belligerence, but they were almost certainly displeased when he proceeded to accuse Song's forces of launching an ‘illegal attack’ (fuhō shageki) on Japanese troops. During this interview, he admitted that the Japanese army suffered from many ‘contradictions’ in its handling of the situation in Northern China, but vehemently insisted that his men were there to protect Japanese citizens and interests, and that the Japanese armed forces wished only peace and prosperity for East Asia. He blamed Song's assistants’ for the ‘misunderstandings’ that led to armed conflict and, in general, a ‘spirit of resistance’ (kōsen no seishin/kangzhan de jingshen) among Song's troops.Footnote ¹⁸ The tribunal was not swayed, likely due to the fact that the rhetoric Sakurai employed was far too reminiscent of Japanese wartime ideology. Consequently, commentaries (then and now) framed Sakurai's testimony as an example of Japan's intractable militarism. In the end, Sakurai was unable or unwilling to accept that the language used to discuss the war had changed.

In fact, the GMD state had long been preparing to force Japanese soldiers to speak with a new voice: POWs had already been ‘confessing’ (tanbai) their crimes and engaging in ‘self-reflection’ (fanxing). During the war, Japanese captives produced propaganda for the Chinese in a GMD-run prison camp called the ‘Peace Village’ (heiwa-mura/hepingcun). Japanese captives twisted Japanese military rhetoric in service of the GMD, conducting a campaign of psychological warfare against active Japanese troops. One pamphlet declared:

GMD efforts to transform Japanese soldiers’ language usually met with mixed success. POW ‘Uchimura Akira’ kept a diary in which he complained of the corruption that suffused his prison camp: Chinese officers confiscated goods from foreign aid organizations, did not give them food adequate to sustain their health, ‘collected Japanese materials (progressive literature)’ from (Communist sympathizer and anti-war activist) Kaji Wataru, and limited Kaji's meetings with the ‘enlightened captives’ (furyo kakusei bunshi).Footnote ²⁰ Creating a breed of Japanese leftists was hardly appealing to the GMD state. Former Japanese POWs created a unique hybrid language community, including ‘prisoner’ and ‘soldier:’ these veterans still spoke respectfully of their comrades’ ‘heroic deaths,’ even if they had learned to hate the war and demean its ‘holy mission’. This alienated them not only from the post-war public, but also from other veterans in general. Arriving in Shanghai with other returning troops after the end of the war, one veteran was questioned by his former superiors about whether he thought his anti-war activities with the GMD were ‘traitorous’. He reputedly blurted out: ‘Are those who opposed the misguided war traitorous? Or are those who carried out the misguided war traitorous? The people who start a war that destroys a nation are the traitors’.Footnote ²¹

Following the Chinese Nationalists’ example, the CCP also mixed mercy with ambitious lessons in new language. Zhou Enlai insisted on re-educating Japanese prisoners for the purpose of ‘world peace’, which took place at the Fushun War Criminals Detention Centre (Fushun zhanfan guanlisuo) and included activities such as self-criticism (tanbai), exposing one's crimes, and writing memoirs, diaries, and confessions. Like ‘Chinese traitors’ and recalcitrant Nationalist servicemen, the Japanese who were forced to ‘expose’ (baolu) their wartime acts aimed to achieve what their guards (and instructors) referred to as a ‘true acknowledgment of crimes’ (makoto no ninzai/zhen de renzui). Although Americans referred to such tactics as ‘brainwashing’ during the Korean War, some post-war Japanese collections of these ‘testimonies’ valorized them. ‘Returnee’ Suzuki Yoshimasa reflected:

Influenced by wartime and the immediate post-war production of ‘confessions’ and ‘testimonies’, a post-war ‘testimonial literature’ phenomenon emerged in East Asia. These were primarily employed to generate sympathy for victims of past injustice by the political opposition in Japan and later by aggrieved former subjects of the Japanese empire. In Japan, the first collection arrived out of ‘interviews’ conducted with veterans; this was Kanki Haruo's controversial The Three-All: Confessions of Japanese Soldiers’ War Crimes in China (Sankō: Nihonjin no Chūgoku ni okeru sensō hanzai no kokuhaku, 1957). Kanki's ‘confessions’ were quickly dismissed by the conservative media as a CCP-inspired fraud. By the 1980s, however, Japanese society seemed more receptive, so Japanese writers, journalists, and historians reinvigorated the study of the war in Asia. Fujiwara Akira and Matsuoka Tamaki collected ‘testimonies’ by veterans who had committed war crimes.Footnote ²³ Honda Katsuichi also contributed to this history for East Asians, describing his work as ‘not oral history, but the history of experience’ (taikenshi). He often included his own explanations in testimonials in order to give them expanded descriptive power and a feeling of direct communication.

Honda's introduction of his own voice into the narrative of Nanjing survivors is indicative of the proactive role that the Japanese intelligentsia believed they should play in historical memory debates. The participants in the new movement to unearth the wartime past believed that these ‘testimonies’ represented the immediate transmission of ‘truth’, even though these memories were less than totally reliable.Footnote ²⁵ In this way, popular ‘testimonials’ imitated the war crimes trials in order to buttress their claim to speak the ‘truth:’ veterans’ involvement and agreement was irrelevant to the ‘true’ tale of the past, even when their words were used by writers such as Honda.

It is important to note the synchronicity of events that helped prepare East Asia for a renewed interest in the war around the time of its fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries. Japanese publications such as Honda's were released at exactly the same time as the PRC was ‘opening up’ to foreign countries and ‘reforming’ (gaige kaifang). Re-examining the wartime past through testimonials and other ‘evidence’ quickly became a popular intellectual project in 1980s East Asia. Although some undoubtedly were already aware of the extent of Japan's activities in China, citizens of the PRC were being exposed in an unprecedented manner to print media outside of the main channels of the Communist Party. Furthermore, researchers and journalists such as Honda Katsuichi were able to travel throughout China and interview those who had experienced the war firsthand—leading to incendiary publications such as The Road to Nanjing (Nankin he no michi, 1987). Mainland Chinese archives were simultaneously releasing books full of typed copies of GMD documents, such as the 2^nd Historical Archive's Files on the Japanese Invaders’ Nanjing Massacre (Qinhua Rijun Nanjing datusha dang'an, 1987), which included statistics and official reports. In Taiwan, institutions such as the National Archives and the Modern History Institute launched their Oral History Series in the 1980s, and many issues were dedicated to figures and events from the war.Footnote ²⁶ The reinvigoration of the historical memory of Chinese suffering at the hands of Japanese invaders quickly became the basis of a new pan-Chinese nationalism.Footnote ²⁷ The language that soldiers had used during the war, however, was still problematic for the post-war community.

Even as late as 1985, mainland historians were still supporting the CCP historical orthodoxy: ‘the GMD counter-revolutionaries continued to carry out their passive stance towards the war, and opposed the proactive CCP policy; a great army of 400,000 retreated [from the Japanese] without a fight, losing forty eight cities’. Even within such a formulaic hagiography of the CCP, however, the complexity of veterans’ experiences and voices peek through. While deriding his uncle's ‘traitor’ activities, one veteran recalled that they had also argued endlessly about whether the CCP or the GMD were waging a better war against the Japanese. Then, long-suppressed GMD wartime rhetoric resurfaced—as it would in so many other publications to come:

Importantly, these new works were not the result of some policy-change from Beijing; many of these testimonies and oral histories were organized by local officials who were most interested in regional history. Rather than seeing them as a nation-wide, top-down effort to guide historical memory, these sporadic compilations in the PRC represent a localized historical consciousness.Footnote ²⁹ Most importantly, the post-war language that GMD veterans used to describe the past was still linked to wartime discourse, even if they were writing in mainland China after nearly four decades of CCP rule.

Publications that claimed to ‘capture the voices’ of those who experienced Japanese aggression (xingcunzhe, or ‘fortunate survivors’) were very popular in the Sinophone world. Again, compilations of this sort were largely the work of local efforts, not a coordinated national programme spearheaded by Beijing. That being said, usually these efforts began with a justification that situated them safely within acceptable discourse in the PRC.Footnote ³⁰ Zhu Chengshan, director of the Nanjing Massacre Museum, framed the publication of victims’ narratives as an essential part of ‘patriotic education’ in China based on the CCP's desire for ‘historical truth’ as a ‘basis for foreign relations’. Still, publishing these testimonies was truly a departure from how the war was usually remembered in mainland China. Rather than focus on CCP heroism and GMD cowardice, new narratives allowed sympathy for the GMD, as well as recording the gory details of Japanese brutality.Footnote ³¹ Although these testimonies were not legal documents, they frequently borrowed the language of the courts in order to appear more authoritative:

The similarity between this text and the court proceedings from the war crimes trials is not coincidental. The composition of these ‘testimonies’ came at a time when the victims of Japanese aggression on the mainland and elsewhere began to renew their demands for reparations from the Japanese government. By appealing to the courts and using terms such as ‘crime against humanity’, the editors of testimonial literature were situating their experiences within the post-war political order; in this sense, they were attempting to resolve issues left unsettled by the war crimes tribunals, or to ‘complete’ an inadequate historical record. The genre left little room, however, for veterans to contribute to the narrative—except wherever they were prepared to make a proper ‘confession’ or ‘testimony’ that supported its ‘truth’.

Surveys, oral history, and the commercial media

Commercial media outlets provided some space for veterans to speak about their experiences. In the Japanese case, Ōoka Shōhei vented his frustration with the war through the publication of literary works such as Record of My Captivity (1948–1951) and Fires on the Plains (1952).Footnote ³³ Ōoka recapitulated and confronted a ‘forgotten’ wartime past, but his writings also represent his communication with the outside world. Less famous veterans attempted to make their mark on public memory in the early post-war era, as well. Those veterans who attempted to produce literature deemed inappropriately sympathetic to Japan's wartime past —such as Yoshida Mitsuru and his Requiem for the Battleship Yamato—were censored by SCAP.Footnote ³⁴ Yoshida's literary memoir was confusing to censors: on the one hand, he wrote nobly of many of his comrades and the Yamato itself using a language reminiscent of wartime Japan, but, on the other, he concluded with the phrase, ‘. . .did I know how precious life is? How despicable the slightest pride in having seen actual combat?’.Footnote ³⁵ Meanwhile, the Japanese Communist Party was one of the only political organizations not stained by past militarism, so some veterans employed the language of Marxism to attack the military elite. Even Ōya Sōichi, editor of the conservative journal Bungei shunjū, accomplished a political about-face, and allowed angry veterans to attack the military using the rhetoric of the far left:

This period of criticism was short-lived and is mostly forgotten today, and it is not clear how the Japanese public might have reacted to veterans if SCAP had lifted censorship on troublesome wartime accounts.Footnote ³⁷

In any event, Marxist rhetoric became rapidly passé following the ‘fall’ of China to the CCP in 1949 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1951—particularly as Japan continued to be governed under SCAP's tenure (1945–1952). Thus, by the time that most of the ‘re-educated’ captives of the Chinese Communists had returned to Japan in 1956, they discovered that post-war society was already hostile to their message.Footnote ³⁸ For example, veteran Nagatomi Kōki spoke out against Japan's war crimes, attempting to add his voice as a veteran to the memory of the war; he found himself not only labelled by the police a ‘dangerous person [kiken ninbutsu] brainwashed by the Chinese Communist Party’, but also completely unemployable due to his strident rhetoric.Footnote ³⁹ Using mass media for self-expression presented other problems, as well. The post-war struggle in Japan to find an appropriate manner to mourn (often personal) losses and acknowledge collective responsibility is rife with contradictions, symbolized by the confused politics of war films in the 1950s and 1960s and Japanese NHK television specials on anniversaries of Japan's surrender. Particularly in the latter case, Takahashi Tetsuya, often a participant in roundtable discussions on war memory, has shown how NHK edited its broadcasts to eschew content that might overly offend its conservative viewers—including the testimonies of veterans.Footnote ⁴⁰ Mass media selected narratives it thought would turn a profit, but not all veterans’ stories would be suitable for or desirable by the public.

In Taiwan the GMD also created a restricted publishing environment for veterans. Even high-ranking veterans such as former General Staff Officer Qiu Guozhen, of the 19^th Route Army, found it difficult to get his memoirs published at the end of the 1960s. According to Qiu, the primary reason was the high cost of printing his account, but he also noted that ‘each publishing house had different positions [on these materials], each had their own status, each had their own constituency’, suggesting that the market was still strongly constrained by political factors. Being a member of the 19^th Route Army, which was historically critical of Chiang Kai-shek's clique in the GMD, was certainly not helpful in early post-war Taiwan. Indeed, Qiu's narrative begins with a typical indictment of the GMD's reluctance, under Chiang, to engage the Japanese in 1931–1932. Nevertheless, he was still using the language of GMD propaganda as late as 1970, which was shared by Chiang's clique. These politics, then, had persisted in Taiwan as long as veterans continued to be active, long after their idioms ceased to resonate with the public. Recalling when he was asked to become part of the General Staff, Qiu wrote:

Qiu appears to have had some other position in mind, but he portrayed himself as being above petty careerism in his memoirs. The language he used—China's ‘life or death struggle’ (ci guo cun wang) and the fight for the ‘existence of the Chinese people’ (minzu shengsi zhi yanzhong guantou)—come directly from GMD propaganda of the period. So, although Qiu was not one of Chiang Kai-shek's sycophants, they both shared the same ideological premises. Nevertheless, alternative memories of the war experience were difficult to publish in Taiwan during the early period of GMD rule, and Qiu had waited until 1970 to release his memoirs to the public.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, democratization and the decline of GMD power in Taiwan permanently changed the nature of historical memory there. As forces allied with the other major political party—the Democratic Progressive Party (Minjindang, or DPP)—gained power over the state apparatus, they made archives more accessible and used state funds to open up discussion of other historical narratives. The DPP styles itself as a ‘Taiwanese’ party, so it was fitting that the National Archives in Taiwan used its first Oral History project to interview Taiwanese soldiers who had served the Japanese. Chief editor Hui-yu Caroline Ts'ai did not hide the political consciousness behind this effort:

Diversification of the narratives on World War II opened a Pandora's Box: publications on the war expanded in a way that rivalled that of the 1980s, and scholars were more interested than ever in finding diaries, letters, and memoirs that suited their interests. Most importantly, formerly silent veterans began to speak out.

Self-published narratives: the persistence of language community

As their war diaries decayed in old boxes or family sheds, some ageing veterans were more and more concerned with re-writing them or, by using wartime records, to compose their memoirs. Their goals and intended audiences for these memoirs were as diverse as the diarists themselves. In the case of Japanese veteran ‘Kogura Isamu’, it was no secret to his friends and family that he was ‘doing this’.Footnote ⁴³ Ōshita Toshirō, however, a former transport corps infantryman, locked himself in his study while he secretly copied his decaying field notebook. Only when he was deathly ill did he hand over the text to his brother's care, although the project was still incomplete. Before his poor health disrupted the work, Ōshita had laboured to copy the blurry characters into his new ‘diary’—a project as unforgiving as Ōshita's honest portrayal of his suffering at the crumbling edges of Japan's empire.Footnote ⁴⁴ Some veterans would wait decades to offer their accounts. After China's division into two competing states, only with the arrival of a cross-straits ethno-nationalism in the 1990s would the Chinese systematically investigate their wartime past. Until then, Nationalist veterans had been, compared with their Japanese counterparts, less vocal. Nevertheless, as rulers-in-exile, the Nationalists relied on their memory as victors of the war for legitimacy, so many did offer their personal narratives as a corrective measure against CCP historical revisionism and an explanation for their right to govern Taiwan. In China, Japan, and Taiwan, what ties veterans’ narratives together is a belief in their monopoly over truthful representation of the war.

First, it is necessary to recognize veterans’ desire to be heard, and to communicate with others. Comparative scarcity of Japanese veterans’ narratives in the late 1940s is attributable to a number of factors, including: tight SCAP censorship of mass media, and the fact that most veterans were still stuck in former theatres of war.

Once back in Japan (the largest group returning in 1949), veterans were discouraged by Japanese society to write, but many did enlist in social groups. Members of veterans organizations in Japan (senyūkai) came from as diverse socio-economic backgrounds as those who participated in the war—farmers, labourers, college graduates and professional soldiers. Veterans’ organizations were not attractive merely for those who wanted to relive positive memories of their ‘glory days’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Membership in veterans associations in Japan skyrocketed as this generation began to age, and the peak came during the early 1960s, around the same time as veterans’ publications peaked for the first time.Footnote ⁴⁶ One would think that the Chinese Nationalists, who were scattered around East and Southeast Asia after 1949 and suffered many defeats, would be loathe to gather for the purpose of remembering their shared past as servicemen. Many Nationalist veterans, however, faithfully attend Huangpu Military Academy Alumni Association meetings from as far away as San Francisco's Chinatown. Post-war films such as the acclaimed ‘Everlasting Glory’ (Yinglie qianqiu, or ‘Heroes for One Thousand Autumns’) demonstrate a willingness among the GMD in Taiwan to celebrate their war history with the general public.Footnote ⁴⁷ The explosion of post-war narratives in film and text, many of which were based on the experiences of veterans, show that we must re-evaluate tired canards such as ‘veterans don't want to talk about war’ to ‘only those who didn't see any action will talk about the war.’

In fact, veterans have always been active, albeit usually in their own language community. As Takahashi Saburō has shown, since the 1950s most veterans have read ‘war chronicles’ (senkimono, a term Takahashi employs to include diaries, memoirs, letters, and war literature). By the 1980s, however, the dynamics changed: war accounts peaked in publication as veterans began to age, but they also coincided with major memorial events—such as the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of the war's end.Footnote ⁴⁸ This suggests that veterans not only publish their accounts at the end of their lives, when feeling reflective, but also wish to participate in national debates on the history of the war. This was not simply a manufactured media phenomenon: veterans have used self-published accounts to communicate with one another, with their families, and the local community.Footnote ⁴⁹ Demand was so great that, in Japan, some publishing houses even sponsor writing seminars to teach veterans how to compose their memoirs. Although the publishing industry was initially disinterested in texts produced by those untrained in the art of writing, these samizdat memoirs and diaries formed horizontal lines of communication about the war in Japanese society. Anyone who frequents official military archives in Japan has seen veterans studiously reading their ‘unit history’ (butaishi), or memoirs by other members of their unit. Both local and national government ministries, often staffed by the relatives of fallen soldiers (izoku) and veterans themselves, reproduced wartime records of the soldier's experiences because they felt their post-war wealth ‘was erected on sacrifices of countless servicemen who offered up their invaluable lives without any thought for self or family.’Footnote ⁵⁰

In Japan, the first major publication of personal accounts from World War II was the unexpectedly popular Listen to the Voices of the Sea Gods (Kike, wadatsumi no koe). The book attempted to channel the anger of the youth abused by the mobilization of university students, mainly by publishing the letters and diary selections of students who had embraced anti-war sentiment and then perished. This text in fact followed the publication of Nakamura Tokurō's brother's diary in 1947, In the Far Flung Hills and Streams (Haruka naru sanka), and Nakamura, a veteran himself, was in part responsible for the compilation of Voices. It was first released in October, 1949, by a cooperative connected to Tokyo University, with an underwhelming five thousand copies. When the second and third reprints sold out within days, this shocked the editors of the ‘Wadatsumi Society’ (Senbotsu gakusei kinen kai, or, Fallen Student Soldiers Memorial Society, but commonly referred to as Wadatsumi-kai). Soon, bookstore owners began arriving at their door with bundles of one hundred yen notes asking for more. In short, it was an instant sensation, and the Wadatsumi Society became ‘Japan's first pacifist organization [heiwa dantai]’.Footnote ⁵¹ The Society, however, operating under the guidance of the Japanese Communist Party, had actively searched for students who had opposed the war while alive—not those who had imbibed the dominant ideology of the time. Another problem pointed out by veterans and their families was that Tokyo University students’ experience of the war was hardly representative. After all, university students were exempt from the draft until 1943.

In response to this complaint, a group of government officials in Japan's poor, rural northeast—the Iwate Prefecture Department of Agriculture and Fishing—assembled an impressive collection of letters from a group more likely to resemble the ‘common soldier’. The Iwate Prefecture Rural Culture Preservation Society (Iwate-ken nōson bunka kondankai) was inspired by Miyazawa Kenji's ‘General Theory of the Rural Arts’ (Nōmin geijutsu gairon) to understand the indigenous (and thereby authentic) culture that arose out of agricultural productivity in their region.Footnote ⁵² Their effort to include ‘farmer soldiers’ into the narrative of World War II was an attempt to prove that rural people supported the army only for their own socio-economic advancement. To this end, they released the Letters of Fallen Farmer-Soldiers (Senbotsu nōmin heishi no tegami) in 1961.Footnote ⁵³ The appeal of the army was strong for those in rural regions, the founders believed, because it allowed them to look down on the elite of the Kantō (Tokyo) and Kansai (Osaka) regions who otherwise monopolized Japan's wealth and power. Tragically, of course, the Japanese military ultimately threw their lives away —symbolized by the wartime government's seizure and melting of Iwate military hero Kiso Yoshinaka's statue for scrap metal. Meanwhile, veterans exchanged privately published memoirs amongst themselves and their families, and newspapers periodically featured stories about veterans with particularly interesting stories to tell.

Early publications of war memoirs in post-1949 Taiwan reveal that GMD narratives about the war had changed little since their Pyrrhic victory in 1945. Liu Ziqing's 1954 memoir showed how the language forged by many servicemen was nearly inescapable in the post-war era, even in the face of utter defeat. Resurrecting the language of the Northern Expedition, he described how the Chinese people ‘rose up’, (qilai) ‘awakened’ (juexing) and ‘grew up’ (zhangda) to become one of the great nations of the earth. After ‘smashing the shackles of imperialism, this should have been our era of great rejoicing’. That the GMD's self-appointed historic mission to free China was, at its moment of victory, usurped by the CCP was a source of great frustration for veterans. Liu proclaimed:

Remembering the war itself, when he served as the 32^nd Division Commander in Sichuan, Liu recycled rhetoric from the period. ‘When the Marco Polo Bridge Incident occurred, the call for a War of Resistance echoed in every corner of China; the Japanese artillery at the Bridge shook awake all those who were fast asleep’.Footnote ⁵⁵ His account also borrowed techniques from wartime reportage such as using unidentified speakers (‘a soldier said. . .’). When criticizing the Party's inner divisions, he was careful to attack specific individuals, such as Liu Xiang and Zhang Xueliang, and not the whole Party or the war effort. What was important for veterans like Liu was to preserve the place of the Nationalist Party as the victors of the War of Resistance and the legitimate rulers of China, as designated by ‘History’ itself.

The persistence of military self-discipline continued unabated in post-war Taiwan as well. Two years after Liu, Li Zhenqing, a former 31st Division Reserves Regiment Commander (elevated to the rank of general in the post-war era), published a ‘memoir’ that could have been a copy of his original field diary. Relying heavily on classical Chinese grammar, Li also strictly disciplined his personal record into sections bearing the titles of his engagements such as ‘the Battle at Linxin,’ and then into categories such as date, battle experience, position, assignment and rank (at the time). Even the language with which Li narrated these battles had not been significantly transformed. Perhaps because the GMD was then thoroughly engaged in ‘retaking the mainland’ from Communist ‘bandits’, Li's memories of the War of Resistance were permeated by these considerations.

Li's memoir frequently also indulged in nostalgia for the good old days of the GMD's efficacy as a fighting force, when it could marshal the patriotism of its citizens and inspire real fighting élan among its troops. ‘We fought despite the freezing chill, bivouacking in cold water, realizing the principle of ‘being reborn from the land of the dead’ (zhi zhi sidi er housheng)’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The memoir, likely written based on a field diary or log, could also serve as an unforgiving mirror for Li. Like many Nationalist officers, including Chiang Kai-shek himself, Li acknowledged GMD officers’ collective responsibility for losing the mainland to the Communists. Recalling the GMD's failures at Dabieshan, Li wrote, ‘It is known that there are no soldiers incapable of fighting on this earth, but there are such officers, and this should invite thorough reproach’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The GMD remained adamant in its claim to sole legitimacy on the mainland and its rhetoric from the wartime era—a memory and language that became increasingly strange and obsolete in the post-war years.

Texts that were not reconstituted for post-war audiences slowly emerged in Japan, as well. Researchers such as Yoshimi Yoshiaki quickly noticed the rise in self- and commercially-published diaries in a 1988 article, and Takahashi Saburō would follow with his study of diaries and memoirs just a year later.Footnote ⁵⁹ Azuma Shirō then stirred up a political firestorm by publishing in 1988 a heavily edited version of his diary entitled, My Nanjing Platoon (Wa ga Nankin puratōn), which described many of the atrocities committed by the Japanese armed forces in graphic detail. Although scholars and many veterans had known for years the extent of the armed forces excesses, the Japanese public, who had primarily experienced the war through firebombing, atomic bombing, rationing, and evacuations, was more or less newly exposed and highly dubious. Publicity surrounding Azuma's high-profile exposure of Japan's war crimes inspired many subsequent investigations, primarily because detractors claimed Azuma's account was not a ‘diary’. Defenders of Azuma's view of the war (even if they did not embrace his war diary as ‘authentic’) quickly found other evidence: the most successful effort was Ono Kenji's documentation of Japanese war crimes in Nanjing through servicemen's diaries, published in 1996 as Imperial Soldiers Who Recorded the Nanjing Massacre (Nankin Daigyakusatsu wo kiroku shita kōgun heishitachi). It was primarily through the efforts of Ono, who was neither an academic nor a professional writer, that the diaries of the 13^th Division veterans became known. Ono conducted sensitive negotiations with relatives and veterans, carefully prepared legal documents (to protect himself from libel suits), and travelled extensively for these documents with no institutional support.Footnote ⁶⁰ Meanwhile, Azuma would respond to his critics by publishing his entire diary manuscript in 2001, but it was clear that many of his generation were already responding to this zeitgeist by publishing their wartime diaries and post-war memoirs in full.

Why did Japanese veterans choose to publish their diaries and memoirs? They were coming to the end of their lives in the 1980s, and many were naturally feeling reflective about the past. This personal motivation was in many cases tied to their desire to make an impact on public discourse—‘setting the record straight’. Taketomi Tomio, a veteran who in 1979 used his own property for a ‘Soldiers’ and Common People's Museum’ (Heishi/shomin no sensō shiryōkan), explained to interviewer Hayashi Eidai why veterans’ diaries and memoirs were so critical:

In the passage above, Taketomi used several Japanese words to underline the importance of the ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ in servicemen's written records, and explicitly condemns media representations of war in the same interview—even military history (senshi) itself. As irrefutable proof of the misery of servicemen's existence, Taketomi, even above his personal memories of the war, held up the blurry diary of Ōshita Toshirō, whose brother had donated it to the museum in 1996 (after Ōshita's passing).

According to para-textual commentaries (such as Forewords, Afterwords and Appendices) by Japanese veterans and their families, the decision to publish wartime accounts had as much to do with ‘pacifying the spirits’ (irei, a term frequently used by Yasukuni officials) of comrades and loved ones as it did with telling the ‘true story’ of the war. Kawakami Yoshinobu, also a veteran, published the war diary of his elder brother, Kawakami Yoshimitsu, in 1985. He described the emotional experience of reading the diary Yoshimitsu (who died during the war) kept in China, mentioning in particular his brother's homesickness (bōkyō) and nostalgia (kaiko). Yoshinobu quickly added the following caveat: ‘In the text, there are points that will not agree with current views (yosō), but in my brother's heart, he only did these things as a result of his superiors’ orders’.Footnote ⁶² Like many relatives of Japan's war dead, Yoshinobu was unwilling to acknowledge his brother's complicity in Japan's war crimes. When reading Yoshinobu's explanation for why he decided to publish Yoshimitsu's diary, however, his reasons for this reticence become clearer:

Similarly, a 2004 survey conducted by the National Museum of Japanese History found that many veterans and their families visit Yasukuni Shrine to ‘pacify the spirits’ of their fallen relatives and comrades. We should not, however, assume that their attendance, or their membership of veterans’ organizations, equals support for the stated or implied politics of these institutions. Regular observance of ‘pacification’ rites does not even guarantee belief in these rituals’ efficacy or even the afterlife. In the survey, one respondent, who carried out group and private rituals among fellow veterans, wrote, ‘Before I shipped out, I believed in gods and Buddhas, but I changed my mind because of the war, and now I don't believe in them at all’.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is also important to recognize that belief in the spirits of one's fallen comrades was not limited to conservative forces. Even Azuma Shirō, whose diary was a banner for Japan's peace movement, felt compelled to write, ‘. . .helping people to know the true face of war and promote good Sino-Japanese relations is the highest and greatest way to pacify the spirits of my fallen comrades’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Many veterans and their families donated self-published memoirs and diaries to Japan's Peace Museums and the National Diet Library, generating an invaluable documentary history on an entirely voluntary basis.

Recent Chinese Nationalist accounts of the war adopt a similar stance of ‘telling the truth’ when narrating the past. Historians should take care, however, because Chinese veterans are just as engaged in self-fashioning at the end of their lives as they were during and directly after the war. When scholars from the Academia Sinica interviewed former ROC naval officer Li Lianheng in 1998, his evaluation of the GMD's military capabilities was as harsh as any field diary from the war. When asked if he believed the military training he received in Japan had ‘value,’ he immediately replied:

Li's compulsion to recognize the ‘facts’ was likely the result of his training and his self-discipline. Acknowledgement of the GMD's weaknesses did not mean that officers such as Li ‘gave up the ghost’ when it came to their identities as soldiers—he was still putting on a performance of self, similar to a wartime diarist's. While Li admitted without hesitation that ‘during the eight years of the War of Resistance, I never once saw a Japanese person’, he also took care to note his dedication to the cause of national defence. Li claimed that when his unit pulled out of Qingdao, trekking all the way to Taierzhuang at the end of 1937, he recalled many of the enlisted men abandoning the ranks. He spoke to the officers and men, saying, ‘Under no circumstances should you run—it looks bad. You're fleeing even though we're resisting Japan and fighting the Japanese. Do you think you can protect yourself if you run home’? Using such rhetoric, which could have come directly from a GMD propaganda pamphlet or field diary, Li claimed to have been able to keep men in the ranks. He also took great pride in his ability to win his men's respect, and constantly pointed out how his men were faithful to him during the collapse of the GMD in 1949.Footnote ⁶⁷ Even though others would just as readily admit to a different ‘truth’—that their unit discipline was abysmal—Li held on to this voice because it had become meaningful to him. Even though strident GMD politics were hardly in fashion in 1997 (when this interview was conducted), veterans such as Li were too thoroughly attached to the identities from their past to change.

Accounts not directly related to warfare, such as those by GMD administrators or military bureaucrats, show a similar preoccupation with disciplined, factual records—even when their version of the war is less than heroic. Published in 1996, Zhang Xuanhuang's memoirs from the War of Resistance seemed less concerned with providing a typical ‘guts and glory’ version of the war. Describing his life in and around Wuhan in early 1938, he wrote:

He normally composed his memoir in the form of a novel, but the narrative slips into a diary format from time to time—possibly due to notes that he had kept previously. Beginning with the date, weather, and an orderly, chronological description of events, the memoir borrowed heavily from travel diaries and official diaries with which Zhang would have been familiar. Starting with ‘March 18: At 7am we departed Enshi’, Zhang delineates the strength of the force, destination, purpose of the journey, and other sundry details in a terse, formal language.Footnote ⁶⁹ Despite his sometime adherence to military and governmental modes of writing, Zhang's self-published memoir demonstrates the increasing freedom that veterans felt to express themselves after the 1980s. This sense of permissiveness extended to Japan as well, with memoirs that seemed to romanticize the ‘comfort women’ system and accounts of Korean and Taiwanese servicemen (and women) in the Japanese army.Footnote ⁷⁰