Casualties of History: Wounded Japanese Servicemen and the Second World War by Lee K. Pennington (review)

Casualties of History demonstrates that the bodies of wounded servicemen were at the center of biopolitics in Japanese society during the first half of the twentieth century. The question of what Japan should do with their injured soldiers posed a challenge to the regime that embraced war violence as a sine qua non for building a modern nation. While the sacrifices that these soldiers made could not have gone unrecognized, their care imposed heavy financial burden on a government constantly strapped for cash. In the wake of the Sino-Japanese War and the Russo Japanese War, the Japanese state inaugurated programs to address the medical and economic needs of disabled soldiers. But these efforts remained largely symbolic. The bulk of relief work was financed by private as well as imperial charities. Even when there was growing popular support for committing public funding to helping disabled veterans in the 1920s, officials were reluctant to modify the existing pension system for fear of putting monetary values on their sacrifices.

Nevertheless, the 1920s witnessed a gradual shift in government focus from limited relief work to broader rehabilitation regiments for wounded servicemen. In Pennington’s words, the emphasis on their residual productivity turned “crippled soldiers” into “disabled veterans” (p. 53). Although this discussion provides an excellent opportunity to delve into the evolving biopolitics of Japan’s expanding industrial regime, the book forecloses it by simply pointing to the new “Western idea of using work therapy to provide wounded soldiers with vocational rehabilitation” (p. 53) as the source of this paradigmatic shift in Japanese government policy. Japan’s domestic conditions, which made such an idea appealing to officials in the first place, figure little in Pennington’s argument.

The book is more successful in discussing how those wounded in war—who had hitherto been marginal figures—were ushered center stage into national politics in 1937 as Japan entered undeclared war against China. As the propaganda slogan from the late 1930s—“Protect Wounded Soldiers Who Protected the Nation!” (p. 139)—intimates, the uneasy tensions that had existed between the injured bodies of individual soldiers and national politics were resolved in total mobilization for the war. The wounded servicemen continued to bring the war back to home fronts, so to speak, and thus remained central to propaganda efforts to mobilize the general population until U.S. firebombing campaigns began to blur the lines between battlefields and homeland.

In post-WWII Japan, the wounded veterans’ complaints—unlike those of the bereaved families’ associations—never gained a powerful political voice because they were unable to assume the status of pure victims. They were, after all, active participants of the war, and their political demands for medical and financial assistance were met with relative ease within the expanded welfare system. The preferential treatment of the war-wounded came to an end under the Allied occupation. Furthermore, the 1949 Law for the Welfare of Physically Disabled Persons categorized the war-wounded as disabled, depriving them of the associations with war. Their physical conditions were decoupled with the war and absorbed into broader meanings of disability.

The book covers diverse topics such as emergency medical procedures at the fronts, hospital stays, prosthetic limbs designs, rehabilitation and vocational training, popular representations of injured soldiers, and policies and debates on expanding support for disabled veterans. In order to give a strong narrative focus to his detailed exposition, Pennington relates the personal experiences of Private First-Class Saijô. By following this soldier’s retreat from the fronts—he was injured in China in October 1939—to a field hospital and eventually to an army hospital in Japan, the reader gains an insider’s perspective on how institutional care was actually administered.

Casualties of History offers extensive coverage on the issues that had direct bearings on the treatment and perceptions of wounded servicemen in Japan. However, the book is too eager at...