Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature

One Self-Apocalypse: Tales of the Tokkōtai

Self-Apocalypse: Tales of the Tokkōtai Who were the kamikaze? In the West these suicide warriors have been seen as everything from fanatical, inhuman automatons to thoughtful inheritors of a “noble” historical tradition of self-sacrifice who willingly, even eagerly, gave up their lives. During World War II, unsurprisingly, the kamikaze (hereafter tokkōtai)1 were viewed by the Allies as one more example of Japanese “barbarous and fanatical behavior” by which the Japanese “forfeited all right to be treated like human beings.”2 “Suicide tactics,” Ivan Morris writes, “instead of overawing the Americans as had been confidently expected, produced indignation and rage” and left no compunction on the American side when it came to the decision to employ atomic weapons on civilian populations.3 This view contrasts starkly with wartime Japanese rhetoric of purity of purpose and selfless sacrifice that surrounded much of the tokkōtai ritual: [V]irtually every act in which they engaged in one way or another connoted purity. The falling cherry blossom became the best known symbol of the young flyers, appearing in their poems, their songs, their farewell letters, and in the hands of the virgin schoolgirls who assembled to see them off on their final missions. . . . In addition to their white Rising Sun headbands and white scarfs [sic], the pilots often wore white senninbari or “thousand-stitch belts,” long strips of cloth in which one thousand women had each sewn a stitch— and thus, symbolically, joined the men as they sacrificed themselves. They donned clean clothes for their last flights, and some units drank a ritual cup of water as a further act of purification.4 Wartime abhorrence in the West with what was seen as Japanese fanaticism quickly eased into postwar fascination, evidenced in the popu7 lar press with such publications as Kuwahara and Allred’s 1957 book, Kamikaze. This book was one of a series of mass-market paperbacks designed to feed the American public’s interest in the other side of the story, namely enemy exploits related by German and Japanese veterans themselves. Kamikaze details the brutal methods by which one young Japanese flyer is beaten into submission and total obedience. After repeated, sadistic sessions of beatings with a bat, of which Kuwahara writes, “Never in my life had I felt such pain,” this young man, still a teenager at the time, remembers: In one week my entire life had changed—my entire consciousness of man, of good and bad, of right and wrong. . . . The initial shock had produced a numbness, a psychological paralysis. And emerging from it all was a continual dread. It was absolutely impossible to obey the injunction not to fear a superior . We became as furtive as rats that have suffered electric shock. It was impossible at first to find even one moment when we could relax. We were always crouched, awaiting the next shock.5 Stories like this of decent young Japanese compelled to die meshed well with the occupation, and post-occupation, narrative of the wartime Japanese not as nation of fanatics but as an essentially well-meaning, pliant populace under the thumb of a tyrannical few. Thus a distinction between leaders and led, one made for the Germans during the war, was finally applied to the Japanese. By the mid-1970s, however, and the publication of books such as Morris’ The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (1975), the Western view of the tokkōtai had come full turn. No longer either wartime fanatic or well-meaning, hapless victim, the tokkōtai in Morris’ revisionist rewriting is resurrected as the inheritor of a heroic Japanese tradition of noble self-sacrifice in a lost cause. Compulsion and brutality are replaced by the image of eager volunteers culturally conditioned to die not through corporal punishment, but rather through belief in the “Japanese metaphysics of death as expressed both in traditional samurai philosophy and in religion.”6 This rehabilitation of the tokkōtai in the West, not surprisingly, comes precisely at the beginning of Western awe over Japan’s emergence as an economic superpower, and parallels attempts to account for Japan’s dominance in cultural terms—“group think,” the high value placed on education, a national stoicism reflected in a brutal work ethic, and a Confucian emphasis on social harmony. 8 Chapter 1 Significantly, a substantial portion of Morris’ argument...