Japan's Total Empire - Louise Young Twentieth Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power

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anti-Western bombast nor derision of the Chinese was new to Japanese imperial rhetoric, but they came together with an explosive force and all-inclusiveness in the new xenophobia of the early thirties. It is important to add, however, that the continued popularity of such Western cultural imports as movies, music, and literature placed certain limits on the usefulness of anti-foreignism as a strategy for mobilization. Moreover, Japanese imported not just finished products, but the cultural forms that produced them. Adapting Western forms, they incorporated them into native practices. Like the cultural borrowing from China that had occurred over the centuries, Western influence could not be expunged by a burst of hostility. For a heavily Sinified and Westernized Japan, criticism of the Chinese and Western other quickly ran into criticism of the self. In the Western case particularly, contradictions between the new images of racial confrontation and the continued embrace of Western culture led to a series of private and government initiatives to eliminate Western cultural influence, culminating in the prohibitions on certain styles of dress and loan words during the Pacific War.137 And, like the outbreak of war itself, these campaigns against Western decadence were anticipated in the reimagining of the West that took place during the Manchurian Incident war fever.

      THE HEROIC SELF

      While rehguring racial others to accommodate the new realities of empire, mass-media images of the Japanese self redefined the meaning of patriotism to fit the new era. This was accomplished through the outpouring of Manchurian Incident bidan, or “tales of heroism,” in the press, popular magazines, and on stage and screen. A traditional form of moral storytelling that celebrated doing good deeds, bidan rendered the Incident in the light of personal experiences. These fictionalized experiences of imperial warfare were shaped, like the real ones, by gender. Hence one genre of bidan celebrated male heroism on the battlefield, while another eulogized female sacrifice on the home front. Together, these war-fever bidan reformulated the idea of patriotism in two striking ways.

      The first of these concerned the extraordinary preoccupation of battlefield bidan with death. Death provided the dramatic center of the stories, and patriotic heroism was defined by martyrdom through death. In pursuit of the martyred hero, bidan exaggerated incidents of battlefield death in the Manchurian Incident. Although casualties during some engagements were high, there seemed to be many more bodies littering the fictionalized field of battle. The 2,530 total Japanese military deaths in the Manchurian Incident (compiled between September 1931 and July 1933) constituted a tiny fraction of those killed in the earlier wars. It certainly did not prepare people for the slaughter that was to come: 185,647 were killed in the China War between 1937 and 1941.138 The comparatively low death tolls of the Manchurian Incident permitted the storytellers in the mass media to glibly kill off their heroes in large numbers. Much like hyperbolic accounts of the Western pressures on Japan, these depictions of untold carnage in battlefield bidan unwittingly prepared the nation for the days to come.

      The second element in the reformulation of patriotism related to the idea of sacrifice for the nation. In 1931, vocabularies of sacrifice could draw on any number of venerable traditions. The virtues of self-sacrifice for family and village were stock in trade for rural agrarian improvers; ef-facement of individual desires for the collective good constituted a pillar of Confucian morality. Bushid (the way of the warrior) exhorted sacrifice on the battlefield for men, and the official prescription of female virtue, rysai kenb (good wife, wise mother), urged sacrifice to the family for women. But this impressive tradition was matched by the equally venerable idea of individualistic competition, emerging from Meiji dreams of rising in the world and Darwinian metaphors of a struggle for survival.139 In the 1920s, both the growth of consumer culture and the increasingly fierce competition for middle-class educational and employment opportunities favored the latter doctrine of self-improvement and personal success. As factory workers were demanding better pay and tenant farmers lower rents, the calls to obey social superiors and sacrifice for the collective good fell increasingly on deaf ears.

      The Manchurian Incident bidan rescued this embattled tradition of sacrifice. Relating experiences of both soldier and housewife, bidan told Japanese that uncommon valor on the battlefield and extraordinary sacrifice on the home front were the highest expression of national virtue. Ironically, such appeals to sacrifice were framed, not in homilies about Japanese groupism, but in the language of personal glory and individualistic competition. Since it is frequently argued that group psychology and ideologies of collectivism played a key role in the mobilization of support for war and fascism in the 1930s,140 it is worth underscoring the individualistic and competitive dimensions of imperial mythology in the early 1930s.

      Among the crowd of martyred manly heroes that jostled for attention was Regimental Commander Koga Dentaro. As part of the “mopping-up” operations following the occupation of Jinzhou in early January 1932, Koga's cavalry regiment had occupied the walled city of Jinxi, southwest of Jinzhou. After a large “bandit” force attempted to retake Jinxi, Koga determined, against orders, that he would mount his own attack. Impatient for action, he was unwilling to stand guard over the city and wait passively for reinforcements. Leaving a platoon of some 21 men at Jinxi to guard the flag, Koga took the remaining 130 men with him to attack a force of over 1,000. Although Koga's forces soon found themselves in desperate difficulties, upon hearing that the flag-guarding platoon was in danger, Koga split his forces again, taking half to rescue the flag and leaving the rest to “hold off the enemy.” In the end this reckless course of action accomplished nothing and cost the regiment virtually all its officers, leaving Koga and 11 others dead and 19 wounded.141 Yet Koga became one of the most celebrated heroes of the Manchurian Incident. His story was the subject of a naniwabushi chant on the Polidor label, of T

katsu and Shink
movies, and was staged by the famous Tokyo Kokuza Theater.142 Told and retold countless times in every popular entertainment medium, the Koga bidan glorified his actions as those of the archetype of military heroism.

      In an illustrated version published in the boy's magazine Shnen kur-abu, “Ah! The Imperial Flag Is in Danger,” the suicidal attack on the “bandit army” (which had multiplied into a force of 5,000) was depicted as an act of courage and daring. Without mentioning Koga's insubordination, Shnen kurabu narrated the bidan as a series of glorious last stands at Jinxi. At each stage another band of Japanese soldiers—cut off from their comrades and hopelessly outnumbered—fought to the death to protect the flag. While the story exalted sacrifice for the nation (in the symbol of the flag), it did so by celebrating individual acts of heroism. In sequence, each of these last stands grew more dramatic and heroic. They were, in effect, a kind of competition: the reader moved up the tournament ranks, finally witnessing Koga's triumph—the most glorious act of heroism.143

      This spirit of competitive sacrifice set Manchurian Incident bidan apart from their predecessors. The principal heroes to emerge from the Sino-Japanese War were Harada J

hei, the bugler who blew the forward charge with his dying breath; and the unknown sailor who extinguished a shipboard fire and died asking whether the enemy ship was yet sunk. These stories celebrated the gallantry of the conscript soldiers who composed the new Japanese army and who became the heroes of the Japanese masses.144 Unlike the Koga story, which eulogized a series of futile acts of bravado, the Sino-Japanese War stories depicted sacrifice that positively affected the outcome of the war. Thus, Harada J
kichi became a hero when he helped the army occupy Pyongyang, while Koga sacrificed himself and his men trying to retake a flag (and a city) that his own reckless impatience had placed in danger.

      Although the heroes of the Russo-Japanese War—Nogi Maresuke, T

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