Japanese Society at War: Death, Memory and the Russo-Japanese War (review)

The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) was, without doubt, a major crossroads in modern Japanese history and an episode that paved Japan's way to the forefront of world politics. Much has been written about this conflict's consequences for the nation's domestic politics, for its place in international relations, and for the development of its society. In particular, several books were published in the wake of the numerous conferences, exhibitions, and other events held worldwide during the years 2004 and 2005 to commemorate the war's hundredth anniversary. One outstanding example is Naoko Shimazu's excellently researched and well-written study, Japanese Society at War.

This book distinguishes itself from other scholarship on this subject through three approaches that differ markedly from the angle of political history adopted in many of those works: Throughout her analysis of the war's effects on Japan, Shimazu returns repeatedly to three themes: social history, media history, and the development of a national consciousness.

Though wartime decisions are made by a small elite, often based on deliberations concerning that country's position in international relations, the burden of those decisions is shouldered predominately by society at large. Shimazu analyzes in detail the consequences of the war for the "home front," the reactions of different social groups, and new societal developments that resulted from the conflict. In particular, she takes a fresh look at how local developments were occasionally at odds, sometimes for the first time, with the goals of the nation.

One of these social developments was the "'democratisation' of the former samurai values, formerly jealously guarded prerogatives of the top 5 per cent of the population, being imposed on all and sundry in the age of conscription" (p. 87), and, together with this, the creation of the ideal of "honourable war death" (the title of chapter 3) for all. This term (meiyo no senshi in Japanese) "was a rhetorical invention of the Russo-Japanese War" (p. 98). The "honourable war death" of Japanese soldiers was celebrated in journals, through commemorative ceremonies such as the Shōkonsai (festivals held to enshrine the spirits of the war dead in either a local shrine or the Yasukuni Shrine), and through the building of monuments. Notwithstanding such attempts to motivate those left behind to continue mobilization for the war effort, and contrary to "the stereotypical image of the death-defying Japanese soldier," Shimazu concludes that conscripts wanted "desperately not to die in battle, because of their love for their families, underlined by a strong sense of filial piety. . . . What mattered most was the family" (p. 118).

In several chapters throughout the book, Shimazu analyzes her topic from the perspective of media history. Her "primary interest lies in understanding popular responses to the war, as a way of critically reassessing how the war influenced the relationship between state and society" (p. 7), and her analysis brings to bear important—but long underutilized—sources such as pictorial magazines and other popular periodicals, movies, exhibitions, and individual accounts of the war. Chapter 1, for example, focuses on war imagery in visual culture. Here, Shimazu critically considers "the idealised notion of the 'unity of the nation'" and argues that "a closer examination of wartime Japanese society . . . will reveal that it was a complex and pluralistic society, displaying signs of ambivalence" (p. 19). A "technological revolution" (p. 51) ensured that images of the war not only proliferated as never before, but also became more realistic. New mass-circulation periodicals were created and became part of a lucrative sector. The publisher Hakubunkan led this trend, pioneering the use of photographs—a move that gave a huge boost to its sales of pictorial magazines. Public exhibitions also depicted for people at home the heroes on the front and their fight. Even the cinema, though still in the very early stages of development and not yet having attained significance as a form of media, helped to feed and shape the...