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12. Japanese Children and the Culture of Death, January–August 1945
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Chapter Twelve Japanese Children and the Culture of Death, January–August 1945 Owen Griffiths A year after Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, teacher Kayahara Kazan wrote to the Mainichi newspaper deploring the lack of a“scientific attitude of life” among his countryfolk. What was needed, he said, was a new moral spirit for the youth of Japan. Commenting bitterly on Japan’s wartime culture of death, Kayahara made the inevitable comparison between Japan and the West.Naturally,Japan was found wanting.“If you want to learn how to live,” he said, quoting an unnamed European source, “go back to Greece. If you want to learn how to die, go to Japan.”1 Kayahara’s comments resonated with many adult readers, all of whom had endured four years of unrelenting propaganda about victory through death and then one horrific year of near-death in incendiary bombing raids. To the very end, the government had exhorted the people—“the one hundred million”—to die for the nation as “a suicide squad,” “a knife tearing into the belly of the enemy,” and finally as “a shattered jewel.”2 Like the civilian bombing campaigns which obliterated Japan’s urban spaces, the propaganda of death touched every man, woman, and child. This story is now a familiar one. Numerous studies document its creation and deployment, as well as the attempts of some Japanese to undermine its power.3 None, however, have examined the messages directed specifically at children through the Japanese print media, nor the ways in which they responded to these messages. This study analyzes the propaganda of death in the last months of the war by examining two of the most popular children’s magazines of the day: Boy’s Club (Shônen kurabu) and Girl’s Club (Shôjo 160 kurabu).4 I will focus specifically on the ways in which myth and history were excavated, intertwined, and then pressed into the service of the state’s larger propaganda machine. I will also examine the gendered nature of these messages and the degree to which history and myth reinforced traditional gender roles for boys and girls. That these messages centered on loyalty and sacrifice should surprise no reader familiar with the propaganda of national crisis. Nonetheless, the extent to which they created a seamless web of such completeness is truly overwhelming. Just as American incendiary bombing offered no escape for Japan’s urban residents, so too were the pages of Boy’s Club and Girl’s Club similarly permeated with sacrificial death. Myth and History in Japan’s Culture of Death Media manipulation of Japan’s martial traditions in wartime was nothing new to 1945, but dated back to all-out war with China in 1937. From late 1944 onward, these themes increased in intensity, reflecting a clear intent to place Japan’s children directly in harm’s way. Reflecting traditional gender roles of the martial male and the nurturing female,Boy’s Club placed greater emphasis on the warrior heroes of the past than did Girl’s Club. But this line became blurred as Japan’s wartime culture of death steadily erased the distinctions between male and female and adult and child. Boys were instructed to die by engaging the enemy in combat: a gendered death. The horrific bloodbaths of Saipan and Okinawa notwithstanding, girls too were told to die, not in battle, but by their own hand—also a gendered death— to preserve the ideal of feminine purity and modesty. An auspicious year historically, 1945 was the 2600th anniversary of the mythical founding of the Japanese empire by Jimmu Tennô and the fortieth anniversary of Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905. Both magazines made every effort to link these events to the Greater East Asian War and continually urged their young readers to be resolute in this year of “certain victory.”5 Recalling the words of Kitabatake Chikafusa, Boy’s Club contributing writer Fusauchi Yukinari emphasized Japan’s unbroken imperial lineage, Hirohito ’s status as a living divinity, and Japan’s unique place as a divine country .6 He further urged children to follow the way of the old Mito Han scholars and the Meiji Restoration patriots known as “men of high purpose.”7 “Whenever our divine country was in danger,” he said, “our loyal patriots, firm in the knowledge that theirs was the land of the gods, dispatched with Japanese Children and the Culture of...