The Japanese and the War: Expectation, Perception, and the Shaping of Memory by Michael Lucken (review)

Michael Lucken's book, made available from the French by Karen Grimwade's skillful translation, addresses the place of World War II in Japanese history and memory, and provides an important addition to the Anglophone scholarship on wartime and postwar Japan. Lucken provides a fascinating account of the war in Japan as it was imagined and experienced on the home front, and as it has been remembered since, thus complementing and extending in crucial ways the current scholarship on Japanese history and memory on the war. Lucken implicitly aims to complicate the simplistic dichotomies which underpin and undermine much of the commentary on the war in Japan: victims versus aggressors, conflict versus peace, conservatives or nationalists versus progressives and pacifists, or state versus population. As Lucken demonstrates, the many spaces in which the war was imagined, was experienced, and has been remembered in Japan defy easy categorization: at the level of each community and even individual, there are overlapping and, at times, contradictory stances, timelines, and emotions. In a world where the words "Japan" and "war" joined together become entwined in a host of acrimonious debates about denial of atrocities, failure to atone, or cynical refusal to acknowledge the suffering of victims,¹ Lucken's careful and sober analysis is a must-read.

An important aspect of Lucken's approach is his transwar focus. His discussion of the evolution of memories of the war in Japan is anchored in a careful analysis of the many meanings the war had at the time of its prosecution. The artificial separation of Japan's history into a "bad" prewar and a "good" postwar has been criticized for a long time, not least since the death of the Showa emperor in 1989 reminded everyone that some of the continuities between pre- and postwar Japan were obvious.² Though the artificiality of this separation is widely recognized and upheld, nevertheless it is rare for the two periods to be tackled together, and most work on war and memory in Japan usually finds a starting point with the defeat. Lucken, however, argues convincingly that it is important to rethink time frames, and that it would be more useful to consider separately the period between 1937 and 1943, when invasions were successful and eventual victory still appeared possible; the period between 1944 and 1952, when defeat was presaged through bombing and turned into reality and occupation; and the period after 1952, when Japan returned to sovereignty (pp. viii–ix). Admittedly these slices of time are also artificial (and obfuscate the many changes that occurred within each), but they are certainly more useful than the 1945 divide. These time frames allow Lucken to separate carefully and analyze, as these were discussed during the war, aspects of wartime mobilization, of the commemoration of fallen soldiers, of the impact of bombing, or the deployment of kamikaze pilots, to name just a few topics, as opposed to what these and other elements became after the war in the debates about history and the conflicting memories of individuals and groups. This approach injects our understanding of the wartime period with an appreciation of its cultural and symbolic elements, undermines a tendency to homogenize both period and experiences of that period, and provides crucial elements to understand the diversity and fluidity of postoccupation attitudes to the war.

Lucken brings to his entire analysis an attention to literature, art, and architecture as well as to the religious elements that shape the funeral rites and the commemoration of fallen soldiers, a crucial element of any nation's management of a wartime past. There is little attention paid in this book to the functioning of government, to the reach of bureaucracy, or to hierarchies of authority in either the wartime or the postwar period. Lucken does not ignore government and bureaucratic structures but rather suggests that they do...