War and Conscience in Japan is a collection of works by Nambara Shigeru, a prominent scholar, political thinker, and public figure in twentieth-century Japan. Among other books such as Ienaga Saburō's Japan's Past, Japan's Future: One Historian's Odyssey (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), and Takeyama Michio and Minear's The Scars of War: Tokyo during World War II (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), this volume belongs to the continuing effort of Richard Minear, the editor and translator, to make available in English different Japanese voices on the Asia-Pacific War and its memory. This is not a comprehensive anthology of Nambara's works, but a careful selection of his writings and speeches, both public and private, between 1936 and 1963. It does, however, provide a unique lens through which readers can view Nambara's intellectual resistance to the totalitarian state and his anguish over the war.
The introduction of the book offers a short biographical account of Nambara. The discussions of Nambara's teaching at Tokyo University, study of European intellectual history, failed attempt to hasten Japan's surrender, and his experience as the president of Tokyo University provide rich historical context for the selected works before, during and after World War II. The main body is divided into three parts, including Nambara's writings and speeches before and after the end of the war, and his poetic diary.
Part 1 contains four essays and speeches between 1938 and 1945. Three of them address the relationship between universities and the state. By advocating the autonomy of university education and the self-cultivation of scholars and students, Nambara not only implicitly criticized the Ministry of Education's complicity in wartime totalitarianism, but also cast doubt on the justice of Japan's war. The essay on Goethe's Faust, Minear argues, is Nambara's most “inspiring and impressive” proclamation to hasten Japan's surrender.
The second part, also the central section of this collection, comprises a series of poems from Nambara's poetic diary from 1936 to 1945. With refined translations and introductions to the historical setting for each year, Minear brings readers into the nuanced inner world of Nambara in era of the “dark valley,” a world of struggle and courage, of faith and perseverance, of anguish and restraint. As Minear points out, the poetic diary sets Nambara substantially aside from many other Japanese intellectuals of the day who immersed themselves in social scientific discourses in order to maintain distance from fascism and, accordingly, lost the language to articulate their inner struggles and grief. Nambara, Minear argues, was instead able directly to express his sorrow and divided feelings during the war via poetry on daily basis.
A few speeches that Nambara delivered to students and public audiences in the two decades following the end of World War II make up the final section. The speeches address a variety of issues in Japan, such as postwar reconstruction and the mourning of the war dead. In particular, the editor includes two important and contested speeches that are considered respectively by Kevin Doak as an early example of ethnic nationalism in the postwar era and by Tessa Morris-Suzuki as a representative of postwar Japanese political and racial thought that reinvented the Japanese as a homogenous racial group by depriving the membership of the former colonial “subjects” in the nation.
Minear's selection of texts opens up a few questions for further discussions. For example, while the poetry diary successfully highlights Nambara's courage and conscience of resisting war and totalitarianism, a few speeches in Part Three may leave readers wondering how an anti-fascist scholar during the war became a leading nationalist thinker in the aftermath. Just as the epistemological dichotomy of “good” and “evil,” while absolutely necessary, is not sufficient to grasp the history of colonial and wartime Japan, Nambara's intellectual trajectory can help us to re-think the equally complicated transition from the wartime to the postwar era.
The editor's diligence and talent has produced a set of primary sources in English for understanding Nambara Shigeru's political thought and conveying the genuine and nuanced voice of an intellectual in wartime Japan. It is a valuable book and should serve as a reference for researchers who are interested in the intellectual and political history of modern Japan. The second part of the book, which contains Nambara's poems in Japanese and Minear's lucid and elegant translations, will be welcomed by students of Japanese literature.
