Richard H. Minear's The Scars of War: Tokyo during World War II is a collection of translations of ten essays by Japanese writer Takeyama Michio (1903–81). Takeyama is best known as the author of Biruma no tategoto (Harp of Burma, 1946), a beautiful and allegorical prize-winning novella about an Imperial Japanese Army unit in Burma at the end of World War II. What is not as well known is that he was from a distinguished family in Shizuoka, graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1926, and taught German language and culture at the First Higher School in Tokyo (Ichikō), his alma mater, from 1926 to 1950. Besides being a well-known translator and writer, Takeyama also was an essayist, and for his Scars of War, Minear chose essays from the wartime and postwar periods: two written during the war, seven during the occupation, and one right after the occupation ended. Together, they give us glimpses of an extraordinarily well-educated, cosmopolitan, and liberal intellectual struggling to come to terms with the horrors of World War II, and then with defeat and occupation.
“Germany: A New Middle Ages?” was written in April 1940 as Takeyama's contribution to a special issue of the journal Shisō, “The Future of European Culture.” The title reveals Takeyama's profound reservations about Nazi Germany. It begins with quotations from a speech given by Joseph Goebbels on May 1, 1939. Takeyama admits to being deeply troubled by what he describes as Goebbels's proclamation of “state supremacy, the primacy of politics, the rejection of the individual, the rejection of the intellect, restraints on freedom, the collapse of modern democratic society, and the dawn of a new age in history” (p. 106). He writes that Goebbels's speech brought to mind the term “a new Middle Ages,” which Takeyama had heard during his 1928–29 trip to Germany but did not understand at the time. He now realizes, however, that what has happened in Germany since Hitler's election in 1933 may truly represent a new Middle Ages. What is important, he explains, is that the Enlightenment did not have the same impact on Germany that it had on England and France, with the result that much dating from the Middle Ages survived in that country. After insisting that the “personal liberty” and “freedom of thought” at the center of “modern thought” may be in danger, Takeyama closes his essay with a dire but prescient prediction: “As far as concerns this single issue of ‘freedom of thought,’ if the British and French win, it will be possible to preserve it in some form or other, at least for our lifetimes. If Germany wins, it will be wrested from us, fundamentally and instantly” (p. 114).
Takeyama's second essay, “The Younger Generation,” was delivered as a convocation address to Ichikō students on July 22, 1945, just three weeks before Japan surrendered, when it was clear that they would lose the war. Echoing his observations in the first essay, Takeyama warns his student audience that Japan may go the way of Germany unless his compatriots are “self-aware” and “rational”:
In the blood of us Japanese, there have long been very good things. We have noble, splendid virtues. But they haven't yet undergone careful reflection. We don't realize fully just what our own virtues are. What their meaning is and in what connection, on what basis they have value—that hasn't been verified. The result is that special virtues can be abused and misused. Moreover, even such splendid virtues as self-sacrifice and love and duty aren't grounded in self-awareness, so if they should be attacked by others with assertions that have some logic to them, they get mowed down easily. That's because we don't have our own independent judgment with strong logical roots, and the virtues don't stand atop that judgment. It's like healthy bodies that haven't been inoculated. They're vulnerable to illnesses that attack from the outside. To weigh things carefully and root things in self-awareness—that's the most important single thing in dealing with the coming chaos and building anew. (p. 120)
Once again, Takeyama's knowledge of recent German history informs his account of the problems that will face Japan's “younger generation.”
The five essays written during the occupation—“The Trial of Mr. Hyde,” “Ichikō in 1944,” “White Pine and Rose,” “Scars,” and “Letter to Judge Röhling”—offer Takeyama's close analyses of wartime Japan. He addresses three important issues: popular support for the government's policies, the absence of resistance to those policies, and the commission of atrocities by Japanese servicemen. He recognizes that the Japanese people obediently followed their wartime leaders and believes that they did so, first, because the wartime leaders used “routinization” so effectively. Recalling what happened at Ichikō during the war, he writes, “The military came to exercise control over the entire school” by means of the “routinization” of military training (p. 131). The government also created an “ideology” that was “preached to the people over and over again” and was backed up by the threat of force. In this way, it persuaded “the people to follow . . . valiantly, with enthusiasm, actively” (p. 133). In answer to why there was so little effective resistance to the wartime government and its policies, Takeyama points out that the general population lacked the government's “weapons”—for example, the telegraph and the radio—and its powers of “organization.” Simply put, “tied up in the net of organization, without weapons to resist, people did not have enough power” (p. 132).
Takeyama also tries to explain the horrible atrocities that his countrymen committed overseas. Imagining an incident in which Imperial Japanese Army men beat up a Chinese boy who had befriended and then betrayed them, he writes that unhappiness about being sent to China, powerful feelings of resentment, and lust for revenge had been kept in check until that moment by “military discipline,” but that “once discipline collapses, and toward something that discipline doesn't cover, unbelievable cruelty can be carried out, in particular by an army running amok” (p. 75). It is interesting that historians studying wartime Japan have come to many of these same conclusions about popular compliance, resistance and atrocities.
The two essays that Takeyama wrote in 1950–51,“The Student Incident: Observations and Reflections” and “Those Who Refuse to Enter the Gate: Thoughts on One Contemporary Frame of Mind,” explore his continuing worries about Japanese youth. He wrote the essays after educational reforms had transformed his beloved Ichikō into the General Studies Division of the University of Tokyo and in response to a student boycott at the university. The boycott shocked and disappointed Takeyama, driving him to “turn to the right” and transforming him into a Cold War warrior. Although much in these essays supports that reading, I think they can be read in another way. Rhetorically, they are of a piece with Takeyama's wartime and other occupation essays and might be read as expressions of his concerns with the suppression of freedom, sparked by what he terms “Soviet-style freedom and peace” (pp. 171, 197).
Although Minear arranges Takeyama's essays in The Scars of War by topic, I think they would best be read in the order in which they were written. When read chronologically, they show that Takeyama remained true to his liberal ideals even as the world around him changed. Minear identifies the European philosophers and writers whom Takeyama quotes, invokes, and alludes to in his essays, but these references suggest that the essays might be located in a broader, post-1945 context that included not only Japan but also Europe. Takeyama's liberalism is rooted in his study of European literature and culture, and his careful analysis of the war years and his response to leftist students echo what some of his Italian and German counterparts were saying at this time.
Finally, Minear notes Takeyama's links with the Central Intelligence Agency. He documents the systematic efforts by Herbert Passin, Edward Seidensticker, and, later, Ivan Hall to push the U.S. government's Cold War agenda by promoting writers with strong anticommunist proclivities, in this case, Takeyama Michio. This is hardly surprising to anyone aware of American social scientists' emphasis on modernization theory as an antidote to Marxist theory, but until now, little has been said about humanists' contributions to the same Cold War project.
