The Japanese and the War: From Expectation to Memory by Michael Lucken (review)

This translation of the French work Le Japonais et la guerre by Michael Lucken presents a thoughtful and wide-ranging discussion of war experience and, more importantly, memorialization. The translation is fluent and very approachable for a general audience. Each chapter is split into small, digestible units focusing on specific issues, such as the imperial household and war responsibility, or the Allied Occupation and State Shinto. The book gives lucid insights into what Lucken defines as the second (1943–1952) and third (1952–present) stages of the transwar experience. Its greatest strength is, however, sometimes bedeviled by its narrative style—namely, its occasional representation of "Japan" as a singular protagonist, despite the powerful arguments the author himself makes about the pluralism of wartime experience and memory in Japan compared with other countries such as South Korea.

One shortcoming of Lucken's approach is that the periodization he embraces artificially separates Japan from its empire, and more importantly from the war in China. For Lucken, the experience on the home front (Japan's main islands), which has dominated memory in Japan, is the most salient, because for many Japanese the war in China, for example, was a "serious but distant" event that they understood but poorly (p. 1). Certainly, Shanghai is far from a city like Akita or Miyazaki, but so is Tokyo; the "territories" may well have been a "land of fiction" dreamed up by tourism companies and professional writers (p. 28), but might we also not say the same about a supposedly timeless and traditional Kyoto, or even the putative hypermodernity of the metropole? Separating the home islands as a known space and the empire as an unknown one may create anachronistic discrepancies between wartime and postwar memory discourses. For example, why should the soldiers and civilians who periodically returned from Manchukuo to their families in Japan's northeast be less relevant to "Japanese" memory than children evacuated from Osaka, with whom the residents of other parts of Japan had little or no contact? Correspondence from China kept home front and battlefield linked, despite the censorship regime. Movement to and from Japanese enclaves in Southeast Asia and Latin America also destabilized notions of "Japan" that became more fixed in the postwar period.¹ More importantly, I think it is becoming axiomatic in the historiography that the conflicts in China were the primary transformative factor, along with the Great Depression, in Japanese politics during the 1930s. Lucken argues that "memory in isolation from the events being remembered" is less productive than the discourses that "structure and predetermine" wartime experiences (p. xvi), but this claim is better served by integrating the empire and the China war with the home front experience, not isolating them—particularly with respect to his second stage of the transwar era.

Chapter 1 summarizes the process behind the conflicts in East and Southeast Asia that led to the Pacific War in 1941, analyzing state efforts to establish a national ideology; mobilize civilians; "repress and rehabilitate" dissenters; and "control" media, bodies, and time. As Lucken points out, as of 1937 Japanese authorities do not "appear to have had a long-term plan" for war in China, despite their attempts to organize nationally for war (pp. 9–10). He describes the subsequent period, in which the 1938 General Mobilization Law was enacted and crackdowns on intellectuals and dissident politicians intensified, as having mainly had an impact on the "middle classes," whereas for "the peasant families that still made up the majority of the population, war was a reality only in terms of their concern, tinged with pride, for the young men doing their duty on the battlefields" (p. 11). It is certainly true that conscription disproportionately affected rural families, but characterizing the changes in Japanese politics and culture of the time as a concern solely of the middle classes risks undermining the dire consequences of this systemic shift. Farmers were not subject...