Great Bearer: Images of the US in the Writings of the Air Raids

In terms of U.S.-Japan relationships, we should still acknowledge the importance of studying cultural images mutually built up on both sides of the Pacific. The way we perceive "others," i.e. Americans for the Japanese and the Japanese for Americans, is structured by the subsisting images fabricated through the course of history. We are seldom free from stereotypes, and in constructing the opinions of American people, the Japanese often refer to the historical past from their own perspective. Japanese people sometimes fantasize about Americans in such a way as to idealize or degrade them, making them either superhuman or subhuman. Indeed, as Ruth Benedict, author of the best-selling book on Japan, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, once stated, "No man ever looks at the world with [his] pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking."¹ American images for Japanese are framed by "institutions" set up since their dramatic, as well as traumatic, encounter in 1853.

In this paper, I will discuss Japanese experiences of the U.S. air raids in Tokyo, to determine whether constructed images of the U.S. persist in their descriptions of extreme situations of life or death, such as the indiscriminate bombings by B29s. By way of illustration, I will conduct a close reading of a passage from How I Became a Christian by UCHIMURA Kanzo (1861-1930), which was published in 1895 when U.S.-Japan relations were not yet jeopardized and the U.S., as a nation, epitomized as the model of Western civilization.² The writing produced during peacetime will make a sharp contrast with documents produced during war, but I hope there will emerge some underling modality of experiencing the U.S. in the minds of Japanese people.

In How I Became a Christian, UCHIMURA Kanzo (1861-1930), the pioneering religious thinker of the non-church movement in Japan, recollects his college days in Hokkaido, the newly developed territory in Northern Japan. Although he was born into a family of samurai and educated in the tradition of Confucianism, Uchimura converted to Christianity later. He then organized a group of Christian students whose ultimate goal was to lead a moral life full of piety with hopes of becoming closer to God. On one evening in December, when the students discussed "all the faults and short-comings of the year," one of their professors came to them and proposed they use rape-seed oil in order to save money. He (the professor) then tried to demonstrate "the possibility of making as good light with the rape-seed oil as with the kerosene." He writes about this episode dated 1878 as follows:

The fact was that the government authority passed a decree some weeks ago that imported articles be dispensed with as much as possible and the kerosene oil coming all from the hills of Pennsylvania and New York must be substituted by the rape-seed oil of our own production. Our Yankee lamps therefore were all confiscated, and new lamps to burn the vegetable oil were offered us. But the light so made was miserably poor compared with the light given by the American mineral oil [. . .]³

In the course of his eventful life, Uchimura Kanzo presents us with his multifarious characters. Fastidious and passionate, he was a devout believer in Christianity and a pacifist. He refused to respect the state Shinto religion and was ostracized from the government-affiliated academia. When the impending Russo-Japanese war was considered a life-or-death situation for the nation, he earnestly appealed for peace. At the same time, his work clearly shows nationalistic traits, extolling traditional Japanese ethics and samurai codes. In the vicissitudes of his life, he always seemed to keep a balance between what the Western civilization brought and what he considered Japanese merits.

In the passage describing the replacement of kerosene by rape-seed oil, however, Uchimura simply admits the superiority of oil from the United States. But why does he mention the place the oil came from? Why does he expressly...