So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers (review)

To the growing collection of English-language translations and studies of letters, diaries, and final testaments (isho) written by Japanese nationals during the Greater East Asia and Pacific Wars, Donald Keene has added his So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers. The book's ten chapters proceed through various stages of the Pacific War, including the attack on Pearl Harbor, the emergence of the rhetoric of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere during Japan's early military successes, the growth of disinformation and confusion as the Allies gain the upper hand, the increasing despair as conditions worsen, Japan's surrender, and the beginning of postwar culture under the occupation. Keene alternately summarizes and quotes his diarists in their reactions to these turns of events, believing that "the diaries, extremely varied in point of view and manner, well convey the experience of the Japanese people during a momentous period of their history" (p. 3). The perspectives are indeed varied. The curmudgeonly novelist Nagai Kafū (1879-1959) consistently ridicules the military and laments the disappearance of his Johnny Walker whisky and Lipton tea. Yamada Fūtarō (1922-2001), a writer later to become famous for his ninja tales, remains rabidly committed to the war from start to finish, arguing that it is only proper for the Japanese to wish for the "slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Americans" (p. 66). Though somewhat less vitriolic, critic, translator, and novelist Itō Sei (1905-69) echoes many of Yamada's sentiments, and novelist Takami Jun (1907-65) voices a patriotism mediated by skepticism throughout his 3,000 pages of wartime diary entries. While Keene quotes most liberally from these four literary figures, he also introduces and quotes from the diaries of Watanabe Kazuo (1901-75), Kiyosawa Kiyoshi (1890-1945), Uchida Hyakken (1889-1971), Tanizaki Jun'ichirō (1886-1965), and Hirabayashi Taiko (1905-72), among others.

The inspiration for this study, Keene writes, emerged from his personal experiences during the war. Working as a translator for the U.S. Navy, he spent approximately three years examining Japanese-language documents, including the diaries of Japanese servicemen. Keene tells us that what he encountered in these personal chronicles made him "feel a closeness to the Japanese greater than any book I had read, whether scholarly or popular" (p. 2). Curiously, however, Keene does not return to diaries of this sort in his study, opting to examine instead, as the book's title makes clear, the journals left by writers, either established at the time or poised to launch their careers after Japan's surrender. The reason? "The surviving diaries by 'unknown' Japanese tend to be repetitious because the writers usually lacked the literary skill to make their experiences distinctive" (p. 2) while the prose of those who made their living by the pen are the "most interesting" (p. 11). There is no question that the writings introduced are fascinating, but the interest is of two very different types.

On one hand, some of the diary entries that Keene introduces unmistakably exhibit a talented writer's ability to movingly portray illuminating details of the wartime landscape. For example, Yamada Fūtarō records on January 3, 1945, his impressions of an area of the city destroyed during an air raid:

What filthy remains are left when houses where human beings have lived are destroyed! Galvanized-iron sheeting, burned stones, unburned wooden posts, furniture. Here and there straw matting spread out on the ground, and groups of victims of the raid trying to restore some order. Signs are pasted everywhere, giving addresses to which victims have moved. A smell of smoldering fires. The tatami and furniture that people managed to drag from their houses evoke, more than the houses that were completely gutted, the confusion of that night. I could see clearly the pale, tense faces, the wide-staring eyes, the mouths uttering inarticulate screams.

(pp. 25...