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185 Notes Chapter 1: Victims, Victimizers, and Mythology 1. Sakamoto Yoshikazu, “Kenryoku seiji to heiwa undò,” Sekai 191 (November 1961):20. 2. In translating terms (here Japanese into English), one always encounters difficulties communicating the nuance intended in their original expression. “Minshû,” “kokumin,” and “minzoku,” for example, cannot be translated mechanically as proletarian “masses,” “civic nation,” and “ethnic nation,” for their meanings depend on the linguistic and discursive context, reflecting slippage of meaning (ambiguity) as well as intentional difference in usage. Here I want to clarify the meanings of these terms and explain my strategies to communicate my understanding of the original discourse. As suggested in the discussions that follow, both the postwar Marxist and liberal terms for the national collective—respectively, minzoku (ethnic nationalism as a form of resistance to the postwar state) and kokumin (civic nation)—no doubt carried echoes from their wartime usage in ultranationalist rhetoric—with the general meanings, respectively, of Volk and loyal subjects. Ban-the-bomb leader Yasui Kaoru used the term “masses” (minshû) in ways that did not always connote the revolutionary import this term carries in English and used “kokumin” in ways that suggested an ethnicization of the civic nation. I recognize that “kokumin” is also used sometimes simply to designate the collectivity of those who have legal Japanese citizenship. With due recognition of the difficulties presented by such slippage of precision in meaning, one can discern important shared meanings. Progressive formulations of war victimhood tended to construct a vision of the Japanese people that distanced them—whether as an ethnic nation (minzoku ) or somewhat paradoxically (as Rikki Kersten suggests, dysfunctionally) as a democratic citizenry or civic nation (kokumin)—from the postwar Japanese state. To communicate the ambiguities as well as the nuances of the original Japanese usage, in the pages that follow I use the English terms “people,” “nation,” “ethnic nation,” “civic nation,” “citizenry,” “masses,” and the like in ways that seem semantically and stylistically appropriate to the specific text. In cases where ambiguities in English may arise, I add bracketed English and sometimes the original Japanese enclosed in following parentheses. In this way I hope to communicate my interpretation in readable English without closing a window onto the texture of the original phrasing. On ethnicity formation see the classic essay by Fredrik Barth, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boun- 186 Notes to Pages 3–6 daries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 9–38. See also Kevin M. Doak, “What Is a Nation and Who Belongs? National Narratives and the Ethnic Imagination in Twentieth-Century Japan,” American Historical Review 102(2) (April 1997):283–309; Rikki Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan: Maruyama Masao and the Search for Autonomy (London: Routledge, 1996). 3. Konaka Yòtarò, “Oda Makoto: Hanoi kara minami Taiheiyò e—‘Nanshi’ to ‘kyòsei.’ ” In Nihon Ajia-Afurika Sakka Kaigi, Sengo bungaku to Ajia (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1978), p. 105. Konaka was born in 1934, Oda in 1932. 4. Unless noted otherwise, all translations of Oda’s essay “Heiwa no rinri to ronri” are from Koschmann’s abridged translation, “The Ethics of Peace,” in J. Victor Koschmann , ed., Authority and the Individual in Japan: Citizen Protest in Historical Perspective (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1978), pp. 154–170. This particular quote is from p. 166. 5. Oda, “Ethics of Peace,” p. 168. 6. Ibid., p. 165. 7. For two recent treatments of the questions of political autonomy and subjectivity as they developed out of the “subjectivity” (shutaisei) debates early in the Occupation , see J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1996), and Kersten, Democracy in Postwar Japan. 8. Shimizu Ikutarò, “Kore made no jûnen kore kara no jûnen—Zenmenkòwaronsha no tachiba kara,” Sekai 162 (June 1959):49–51; emphasis in the original. Shimizu knew whereof he spoke. As a central member of the Peace Problems Study Group, the group of intellectuals brought together by Sekai magazine in the late 1940s to consider such issues, he participated in the formation of Japan’s first indigenous peace movement. See, for example, the records of the December 1948 meeting of this group published in Sekai (July 1985):256–314, especially pp. 305–312, for a discussion of how the peace movement should construct the people’s subjectivity in war. 9. Oda shares this reaction with the minshûshi historians of the same generation, who according to Gluck “experienced not guilt, but betrayal.” See Carol Gluck, “The People...

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