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CONTENTS
Vol. 10, No. 2: AprilJune 1978
Noriko Mizuta Lippit - Literature, Ideology, and Womens
Happiness: The Autobiographical Novels of Miyamoto Yuriko
Miyamoto Yuriko - The Family of Koiwai / A Short Story
Herbert P. Bix - Miura Meisuke or Peasant Rebellion Under the
Banner of Distress
Sato Tomoyuki - Children of the A-bomb I
Howard Schonberger - Hiroshima Survivors and the Atomic Bomb:
Peoples Art as History
Barton J. Bernstein - The Decision to Drop the Bomb / Appendix
Ikuko Wakasa - Children of the A-Bomb II
Stephen Salaff - The Diary and the Cenotaph: Racial and Atomic
Fever in the Canadian Record
John W. Dower - Science, Society, and the Japanese Atomic Bomb
Project During WWII
Alexander Kuo - New Letters from Hiroshima / A Poem
Stephen Salaff - Bikini Atoll 1954
Ichioka Yuji - Los Angeles Issei / A Review Essay
BCAS/Critical AsianStudies
www.bcasnet.org
CCAS Statement of Purpose
Critical Asian Studies continues to be inspired by the statement of purpose
formulated in 1969 by its parent organization, the Committee of Concerned
Asian Scholars (CCAS). CCAS ceased to exist as an organization in 1979,
but the BCAS board decided in 1993 that the CCAS Statement of Purpose
should be published in our journal at least once a year.
We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of
the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity or silence of
our profession with regard to that policy. Those in the field of
Asian studies bear responsibility for the consequences of their
research and the political posture of their profession. We are
concerned about the present unwillingness of specialists to speak
out against the implications of an Asian policy committed to en-
suring American domination of much of Asia. We reject the le-
gitimacy of this aim, and attempt to change this policy. We
recognize that the present structure of the profession has often
perverted scholarship and alienated many people in the field.
The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars seeks to develop a
humane and knowledgeable understanding of Asian societies
and their efforts to maintain cultural integrity and to confront
such problems as poverty, oppression, and imperialism. We real-
ize that to be students of other peoples, we must first understand
our relations to them.
CCAS wishes to create alternatives to the prevailing trends in
scholarship on Asia, which too often spring from a parochial
cultural perspective and serve selfish interests and expansion-
ism. Our organization is designed to function as a catalyst, a
communications network for both Asian and Western scholars, a
provider of central resources for local chapters, and a commu-
nity for the development of anti-imperialist research.
Passed, 2830 March 1969
Boston, Massachusetts
Contents: Vol. 10, No.2
April-June 1978
Focus on Japan
Noriko Mizuta Lippit 2 Literature, Ideology and Women's Happiness:
The Autobiographical Novels of Miyamoto Yuriko
Miyamoto Yuriko 10 The Family of Koiwai/short story
Herbert P. Bix 18 Miura Meisuke, or
Peasant Rebellion Under the Banner of "Distress"
Tomoyuki Satoh 28 Children of the A-Bomb: I
Howard Schonberger 29 Hiroshima Survivors and the Atomic Bomb:
People's Art as History
Barton j. Bernstein 30 The Decision to Drop the Bomb/appendix
31 Survivors' Art
Ikuko Wakasa 36 Children of the A-Bomb: II
Stephen Salaff 38 The Diary and the Cenotaph:
Racial and Atomic Fever in the Canadian Record
j. W. Dower 41 Science, Society, and the Japanese Atomic-Bomb Project
During World War II
Alexander Kuo 55 New Letters from Hiroshima/poem
Stephen Salaff 58 Bikini Atoll, 1954
Yuji Ichioka 60 Los Angeles Issei/review essay
Editors
Bruce Cumings (Seattle); Saundra Sturdevant (San Diego)
Associate Editor: Jayne Werner (Tucson, AZ); Managing Editor: Bryant Avery (Charlemont, MA)
Editorial Board
Len Adams, Nina Adams (Springfield, IL), Doug Allen (Orono, ME), Steve Andors (Staten Island), Frank Baldwin (Tokyo),
Ashok Bhargava (Madison, WI), Herbert Bix (Tokyo), Helen Chauncey (Palo Alto, CA), Noam Chomsky (Lexington, MA), Gene
Cooper (Hong Kong), John Dower (Madison, WI), Richard Franke (Boston), Kathleen Gough (Vancouver), Jon Halliday (Mexico
City), Richard Kagan (St. Paul, MN), Sugwon Kang (Oneonto, NY), Ben Kerkvliet (Honolulu), Rich Levy (Jamaica Plain, MA),
Victor Lippit (Riverside, CA), Jon Livingston (Berkeley), Ngo Vinh Long (Cambridge, MA), Angus McDonald (Minneapolis,
MN), Joe Moore (Flagstaff, AZ), Victor Neelthaca, NY), Felicia Oldfather (Trinidad, CA), Gail Omvedt (Pune, India),. James
Peck (New York), Ric pfeffer (Baltimore, MD), Carl Riskin (New York), Moss Roberts (New York), Joel Rocamora (Berkeley),
Mark Selden (Tokyo), Hari Sharma (Burnaby, BC), Linda Shin (Los Angeles), Anita Weiss (Oakland, CA), Thomas Weisskopf
(Ann Arbor, MI), Christine White (Sussex, England), Martha Winnacker (Berkeley).
General Correspondence: BCAS, Post Office Box W, Charlemont, Massachusetts 01339. Typesetting: Archetype, Berkeley,
California. Printing: Valley Printing Company, West Springfield Massachusetts.
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Apr.-June, 1978, Volume 10, No.2. Published quarterly in Spring, Summer, Fall, and
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Copyright Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 1978. ISSN No. 0007-4810 (US)
Postmaster: Please send Form 3579 to BeAS, P.O. Box W, Charlemont, MA 01339.
Literature, Ideology and Women's Happiness
The Autobiographical Novels of Miyamoto Yuriko
by Noriko Mizuta Lippit
Although the liberation of women was one of the basic
concerns of the Meiji intellectuals who struggled with the
question of modernizing the self-and thus the women's
liberation movement has a long history in modern Japan
women's concerns were generally left to women intellectuals
and treated separately rather than as a part of broad social
movements. Similarly women writers were classified separately
(as "female-school writers") and their literature considered a
special category related only tangentially to the central
activities of modern Japanese writers.
Heirs to a long tradition of women's literature in Japan,
modern Japanese women writers tended to focus on emotions
and psychology, while women's status in a modernizing
society was excluded from the principal literary currents.
Japanese proletarian literature, which reached its peak at the
beginning of the Showa period (1926-present), was no
exception in this regard. Such major writers as Kobayashi
Takiji paid only scant and superficial attention to the
questions of women, and in general the theoreticians who were
concerned with the questions of laborers, peasants and
intellectuals in revolution ignored women. I
Miyamoto Yuriko, a leading proletarian writer of the
first half of the Showa period, stands out in this context as an
exceptional figure, as a writer who placed women's concerns at
the center of her literature and integrated them with the
socialist movement of her time. She began her writing career as
an idealistic humanist who was disturbed by the alienation of
elite intellectuals from the masses, yet in her attempt to grow
into a real intellectual, liberated from the conditioning forces
of her bourgeois background, she came to realize that being a
woman imposed an obstacle as great as any other she
confronted. She came to believe that overcoming the class
nature of her philosophic and aesthetic ideas and becoming a
truly liberated woman were both crucial to living a rich and
meaningful life. She saw the family and marriage system,
feudal institutions preserved in the interest of modern
capitalism, as the primary forces oppressing women. At the
same time, she noted the failure of women intellectuals to
grasp the class nature of their ideas, and their cynical and
reactionary retreat into false femininity. For Yuriko, being a
humanist meant being a feminist and communist revolution
ary, and the humanist, feminist and revolutionary struggles
were necessary truly to liberate human beings.
Miyamoto Yuriko was born into an upper-middle class,
intellectual family in 1899 and died a committed and major
communist writer in 1951. She accepted historical incidents as
personally significant events and grew from a bourgeois
humanist into a humanistic communist, from an intellectual
observer into a committed fighter, from a bright, over
protected daughter of an elite family into a liberated woman,
and, above all, she grew into a fine fiction writer who
combined history and individual experience in literature. Her
art is a mirror reflecting the complex history of Japan and the
inner life of the Japanese artist who lived through it.
She dealt with three major concerns throughout her life,
concerns which she considered central problems or conflicts to
be solved. They are the questions of consciousness and
practice, women's happiness and creativity, and politics and
literature. Focusing on her ideas on women, I would like to
examine how these central problems and her consciousness of
them shaped her creative works and are reflected in them.
A precocious writer, Miyamoto Yuriko published her
first novel, Mazushiki Hitobito no Mure (A Flock of Poor
Folk), in Chill okoron in 1917, when she was only
eighteen years old.
2
It appeared with a strong endorsement by
Tsubouchi Shoyo, who observed that she was endowed with
keen perception and an ability to think originally, qualities
that are clearly shown in this first novel. The novel is about an
ojosan (an honorable daughter) from Tokyo who visits the
remote agricultural village owned by her grandfather. The
protagonist, observing the details of the poor peasants' life,
becomes appalled by the injustice of the system of land
ownership as well as by the distortions which absolute poverty
creates in human psychology and character. In her sincere
attempts to help the poor peasants, she meets only vicious
greed and apathy on the part of the peasants and cynical
arrogance from the village elite. Although the work is filled
with youthful sentimentalism, Yuriko's treatment of the
protagonist's deep self-reflection and self-analysis when she
confronts the absolute defeat of her upper-class humanism is
impressive. The novel ends with the protagonist's determina
tion to find something, however small, which could be shared
with the peasants and her determination to grow into a person
who understands life.
What principally characterizes the novel is the author's
tendency toward introspective self-searching, together with her
idealism and strong faith in human good will, characteristic
traits which were to stay with her the rest of her life.
Reflecting the strong influence of Tolstoy and such writers of
the Shirakaba group as Arishima Takeo, she expresses in this
2
work a youthful and hopeful belief in the union of
consciousness and practice, and her determination to
contribute to human welfare. In this respect she differs from
the naturalist writers and urban intellectuals of the late Meiji
period (1868-1912), whose discovery of the deep chasm
between themselves and the peasants, and of the evil of a
system which separates people so absolutely, merely led them
to an overall pessimism and desperation about human nature.
Soon after the appearance of this novel, however, she
was confronted by a serious contradiction between her
consciousness and practice, a contradiction which emerged not
so much from social conditions as from her personal life. In
1918, she accompanied her father, a prosperous London
trained architect, to New York, and while studying at
Columbia University she fell in love with Araki Shigeru, a
scholar of Oriental linguistics fifteen years older than her.
Although she was passionately in love with him (he appears as
the character Tsukuda in the novel Nobuko), the marriage was
important for her in other respects too, since it would allow
her to be independent from her family, assuring her a new
start in life. She saw it as a way to live as she wished, to
develop her feelings and sensitivity, and her husband declared
his commitment to help her do so. Yet in her marriage, to
which her parents objected unyieldingly, she found herself still
trapped by the feudal institution of the family, with pressure
from the family as a daughter replaced by even heavier
pressure as a wife. She went through an agonizing and futile
struggle with her mediocre scholar-husband, a security-seeking,
emotionally cold man, and she concluded that the occupation
of housewife, with its emotional and mental inactivity, petty
hypocrisy and banality of thought, is totally detrimental to
human creativity. She realized that she would have to sacrifice
her imagination and creativity as a writer unless she were to be
reborn as a different woman or unless society's attitude
towards women were to change. She discovered from her four
years of marriage that a woman becomes emotionally and
psychologically vulnerable to her husband, and at the same
time, paradoxically, that the "security" of the wife's role
justifies and maintains relations between man and woman on
the basis of the family institution rather than on the basis of
real human involvement in each other.
3
Her experiences in
marriage were soon to become the basis of her first
masterpiece, Nobuko (1923), which, like all of her subsequent
novels, is highly autobiographical in nature, reflecting the
experience and realization of a particular phase of her life.
4
Unlike many women, Nobuko did not think she could
change her life-situation by finding a new love, for then she
would just be moving from one man to another and would
still be someone's wife. It was not that she disliked her
married life because she compared Tsukuda with someone
else. It was because of the many difficulties that the
incompatibility of their personalities created and because
she could not accept the differences between men and
women in the way they fulfill themselves in marriage,
differences which are accepted generally. Either she would
have to be reborn as a different woman or the common
social ideas of sex life would have to change in certain
respects for her to remain married without problems.
To be perfectly honest, she could not claim to be free from
apprehension about her independent life in the future. She
could not imagine that Tsukuda was unaware of her subtle
weakness. No matter how eager Nobuko was for her
independence, he saw through her weakness, thus allowing
her to act as she liked, like a spoiled child, and called her
his "baby. "
(Nobuko, p. 133; my translation)
Yuriko-Nobuk0
5
also discovered the hypocrisy of
intellectuals who argue for ideals but have no intention of
living according to them. She determined to live according to
her beliefs, distinguishing bourgeois intellectualism from
revolutionary intellectualism, and paid a high price to put this
into practice; the traumatic experiences during the four years
of what she called her "swamp period" convinced her finally
that any ideas which were not substantiated by her personal
life were meaningless. She set out to establish her own
life-style and to live according to her ideas.
When she became a communist after living for three
years (1927-1930) in the Soviet Union, she was forced to
confront the social and political implications of her belief that
consciousness can be intellectually meaningful only when it
contributes to a concrete change in life which facilitates one's
inner growth. Subject to the heavy censorship of her writings
and the strenuous experiences of trial and imprisonment after
her return to Japan, her health deteriorated and she suffered at
one point from a complete loss of vision. During these years,
when she was not allowed to write freely, she committed
herself to leading a study-group composed of women, and to
Yuriko received Akutagawa's death as the tragic self
dissolution of a bourgeois intellectual fundamentally
alienated from life itself, as the total defeat of his in
tellectualism and aestheticism. She was chilled by the
thought that she herself might follow his path if she
continued to live as a detached intellectual writer.
wntmg essays on women,
6
as well as to writing letters to her
second husband, a communist who had been sentenced to life
imprisonment.
7
These years required a firm commitment;
many writers, subject to great pressure and actual physical
torture, declared, some truly and others superficially, that
they had given up their communism, while a majority of the
writers wrote non-political works or fell into silence. All
suffered from self-doubt, self-pity, cynicism and desperation.
Yuriko, together with Kobayashi Takiji, who was brutally
murdered by the police, stand truly heroic in this context.
In Nobuko, the protagonist's decision to give up her
husband and to go against the desires of her family was for the
sake of her personal growth and happiness. Although well
aware that her action would invite criticism as an egotistical
act, Nobuko is portrayed as having felt at that time that
marriage was detrimental both to women's happiness as
individual human beings and to their creativity. It was
necessary to be independent from men, emotionally as well as
economically, in order to secure a room of one's own. Yet
Nobuko's solitary life makes her experience the frightening
loneliness and emptiness that exist in life without love. She
comes to reconsider whether marriage itself is the problem or
whether it exists in deviation from an ideal form of marriage.
In Futatsu no Niwa (The Two Gardens, 1947), an
autobiographical sequel to Nobuko, Yuriko traces her life after
3
her divorce to her decision to visit the new Russia. Although
she was now writing novels steadily and enjoying a newly
independent life as a professional writer, she (Yuriko-Nobuko)
suffered from loneliness and a sense of sterility which came
from the absence of total involvement in human relations.
After the divorce, she lived with a woman translator and came
to realize the prejudice to which single women are subject in a
male-oriented society and the distortion in their characters
which women suffer because of it. They force themselves
unnaturally to behave like men, yet they are more vulnerable
than married women, more conscious of themselves as sexual
objects, and cannot liberate themselves from sex. Her
relationship with her friend Motoko gradually comes to
resemble that between lovers, and Nobuko feels it a
psychological burden.
8
She feels that single women tend to
become alienated cripples, deprived of proper objects of love,
and realizes that a satisfying male-female or sexual relationship
is necessary for women's happiness. Thus she comes to reject
the androgenous existence which she once though t necessary.
9
Nobuko-Yuriko describes two incidents which occurred
during this period as decisive in her determination to step into
a new life. One is the affair of her mother, then 52, with the
32-year-old tutor of her son. The unfortunate love affair,
which ended in her mother's bitter disappointment, illustrated
the tragic fate of women who could not find the correct
channel for their passion and self-growth in the feudal family
system. Nobuko-Yuriko came to realize the impossibility of
love's transcending differences of age and environment, given
the existing warped male-female relationship. At the same
time, she found herself appalled by her mother's romanticism,
so miserably removed from reality, and by the easy cynicism
about love and men her mother adopted and her quick return
to a bourgeois life after her brutal disappointment. There
Nobuko-Yuriko saw a lack of the true passion which might
have enabled her to develop the full possibilities of happiness
and the meaning of life in love, even though defeated. 10 Above
all, Nobuko hated the hypocrisy of the intellectual who talks
of beautiful ideas yet is a cowardly egotist in daily life.
She sees as \\ _11 the traps created by women's
vulnerability to romantic love. Women desire. to be romantic
heroines, finding happiness only in being loved by men. They
spend all their psychic energy in loving and lose the capacity
to see that they are only catering to an illusory ideal of
femininity created by men. She sees in her mother both
passion misused and the lack of a true commitment to love.
This realization leads Yuriko to explore love relations which
are not based on romantic love. II
The second decisive incident was the suicide of
Akutagawa Ryiinosuke in 1927. The Two Gardens describes
the profound shock brought by his death, a shock which
resulted in her decision to go to Soviet Russia.
If indeed to grow in class awareness is the only
correct way to live in history for a member of the
bourgeoisie, how does such growth take place?
"Do you know?" Nobuko sat next to Motoko, who was
proofreading, and continued,
"I know that there is a limitation in Aikawa Ryonosuke's
[Akutagawa Ryunosuke'sl intellect .. . but how does the
'class transformation' occur in such individuals as you and
I? "
She knew that among those who are identified as
members of the proletarian school, writers who did not
come from the working class or were not living in poverty,
with the exception of such theorists as Shin ohara Kurato,
would be ignored. In fact, her own writings were indeed
ignored by them.
Nobuko felt, however, that whether or not she was
recognized by them, she had things to say as a human being
and as a woman, and that she could not wipe out her own
way of life. If she could stop her way of life somewhere
because she became hung-up on some theory, why had she
thrown away the life with Tsukuda, pushing his pleading
face away with her own hand . .. ?
"I think I will go to Soviet Russia. I would like to live
there. I would like to see with my own eyes and experience
with my own body everything there, good and bad. "
(The Two Gardens, p. 263; my translation)12
Yuriko received Akutagawa's death as the tragic self
dissolution of a bourgeois intellectual fundamentally alienated
from life itself, as the total defeat of his intellectualism and
aestheticism. She was chilled by the thought that she herself
might follow his path if she continued to live as a detached
intellectual writer. Interestingly, her future husband, Miya
moto Kenji, made his critical start by writing a brilliant and
influential essay, "The Literature of Defeat," in which he
analyzed the class nature of Akutagawa's sensitivity, anxiety,
desperation and aesthetics. 13 At the time, Yuriko was already
an established writer while Kenji was a very young man, fresh
from the countryside, vacillating between politics and
literature as his life's work. (Today he is the chairman of the
Japan Communist Party.)
What particularly shocked Yuriko-Nobuko was Akuta
gawa's deep loneliness as a man. Akutagawa, firmly tied to his
family, with a gentle, homemaker wife and bright children,
4
was desperately lonely, starved for love. He fell in love with a
woman whose intellect matched his own, but gave her up for
the sake of his family. His sentimental overflow of emotion
when he finally did so, and the pathetic sincerity of his
subsequent writings in which he describes his own feelings and
sense of defeat, moved her deeply. There she saw a sensitive
man burdened by obligations as a father and provider which
drained his energies and damaged his fine sensibility. She
recognized that Akutagawa's anxiety and sterility as a
detached bourgeois writer would also be her fate and that she
too would be a victim of the institution of the family,
deprived of love. Here she gained a new insight in her struggle;
it was not only women but men as well whose creativity was
stifled by their effortS to cope with an oppressive reality. A
vital love of life, of a life committed to active thinking,
writing, acting and loving, sprang up in her. In order to
complete and enrich her life she needed a liberated man.
Human liberation, not merely women's liberation, was
necessary.
Her concern with meaningful male-female relations
deepened when she met Miyamoto Kenji and married him in
1932. This was also the point at which she actually joined the
Communist Party, although she had already become a
communist in Russia, begun to write Proletarian literature, and
been engaged in active organizing work-particularly among
women-since her return. After a short life together, both of
them were arrested; Kenji was sentenced to life imprisonment,
and a life of separation for twelve years started. * Although she
learned through her pa:ssionate love for this brilliant ideologue
ten years her junior that women's happiness and creativity,
supported by faith in life and in love, are truly compatible,
this fortunate union was by no means earned easily.
In "Koiwaike no Ikka" (The Family of Koiwai, 1934),
Yuriko describes the wife of a communist forced to go
underground. The wife, although uneducated, is endowed with
natural intelligence and strength of character developed
through a life of poverty. She is firmly committed to her
husband and works hard to maintain the family under the
unusual circumstances, supporting and taking care of her
parents-in-law and her children. She is the epitome of the
strength and endurance with which traditional women are
usually supposed to be equipped. Although she is the actual
center of the family, she comes to feel a curious sense of
isolation and lack of purpose when her husband finally decides
to go underground. She is an ideal wife for an activist,
supplying abundant moral support, yet she knows clearly that
an unbridgeable gap has been created between her and her
husband, who were united only as partners in a home-making
enterprise. The story ends as the wife, appropriately named as
Otome (young maiden), realizes that there will be a day when
he will not return home unless she herself joins the movement
with equal seriousness and commitment. The story describes
the growth of this maiden into an independent participant in
life, and this growth is treated as an essential factor in true
love-relations. Later, in Banshu Heiya (The Banshu Plain,
Arrested in 1933, Kenji was imprisoned until 1945. Yuriko was
arrested six times between 1932 and 1943; her time in prison totaled
approximately two years. She was finally released when her own health
deteriorated from the imprisonment and when her parents died.
1946), Yuriko deals with the question of ideological
differences between husband and wife and concludes that the
sharing of ideology and political actions is also essential.
Yuriko's relationship with Kenji was deeply satisfying.
Contradicting her previous insistent stance, she changed her
name from her maiden name Chujyo to her husband's name
Miyamoto, and assumed positively the role of daughter-in-law
and sister-in-law in his family. This evoked criticism and
disgust among women writers and intellectuals, for she
appeared to be protecting his male ego.
14
Although we may
discern in her attitude the concern of an older woman and
established writer to eliminate any source of inferiority
complex which her young husband might have, we would
totally miss the point to see in it a willingness to assume the
traditional role of a woman. However, although she believed
that what she was doing was right, she later came to realize
that she was indeed trying to protect her husband's male ego
and was thereby creating another fraudulent male-female
relationship.
In Banshu Heiya, a work dealing with her love of Kenji
and set in the days around the end of the war, Yuriko presents
her protagonist, who is unshakably certain of her love for and
commitment to her husband, as naturally attached to his
family. Her concern with and understanding of the women in
his rural, lower-middle-class family is alive, devoid of any
intellectual aloofness, and filled with genuine love. In this
novel, the protagonist achieves a genuine tie between herself
arrd the working class and peasant people from whom she is
separated by education, class and cultural-social background.
5
What makes this possible, twenty years after her first
novel and Nobuko, is her understanding of the common fate
which women in the Japanese family system share and her
commitment to proletarian revolution. When the protagonist
of Banshu Heiya Hiroko, hears that her brother-in-law was
among the victims of the Hiroshima holocaust, she visits her
husband's family in Yamaguchi prefecture, a visit which
renews her recognition that women have once again had to
bear the tragedy of the war and society more heavily than
men. Her sister-in-law, now widowed, changes into a nervous,
greedy and calculating woman, losing all tenderness toward
other people. Saddened by the psychological distortion
created in this woman, Hiroko is struck by the misery which
women in the family system have had to endure. She feels it
unfair that the maintenance of the system depends upon the
endurance of women, and is at the same time appalled by the
role which women had assumed in maintaining this dehuman
izing and sexist system. She calls the strength produced in the
frail woman's body at the time of emergency and the
psychological and mental distortion caused by it "goke no
ganbari, " the widow's stubborn strength.
The recent autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir also
resembles her works in its basic attempt to trace the
inner, as well as social, growth of the author-protagonist,
and to place her in history. By placing inner growth
within a concrete historical and social framework,
history and individual life are uniquely interfused,
creating both a personal drama and social, intellectual
history; Yuriko's hero is an honest reflection of herself,
yet she emerges as a universal, modern hero.
Yet soon this widow's strength/distortion is to be found
in Hiroko-Yuriko herself, and worst of all, this is pointed out
by her husband, with whom she is finally reunited after twelve
years of separation. In Fuchiso (1946), Jyukichi (Kenji) points
out that her over-anxious, protective attitude to himself and to
his family is goke no ganbari, and suggests that she return to a
more relaxed attitude. His observation of her widow's hardness
and strength, implying a lack of femininity, is a male
chauvinist one, yet she realizes that her eagerness to protect
her husband was indeed distorted and mistaken, that she was
unconsciously adopting a protective attitude toward him just
as a husband might do toward his wife, and that the love
relation must be based on mutual equality and independence.
The full cycle had come; twenty years earlier she had suffered
from the hypocritical protectiveness of her older husband and
she was now unconsciously assuming the same protective role
towards her younger husband.
Most importantly, when the question arose of her
rejoining the Communist Party, the executive committee of
which Jyiikichi-Kenji was now a member, she asked him to let
her work in a way that would let her continue to write novels.
He replied that she must work in her own way, and must
continue to write novels. With this understanding she joined
the party without h-:sitation, but later found that he had
foreseen a possible conflict that might have wrecked their love
had she not done so. Although Yuriko's deciosion to join the
party was reached from her own belief and the decision was
hers, ironically it was the same experience which her
protagonist in "The Family of Koiwai" had gone through.
Ideological sharing was an important condition for love.
Yuriko here argues that ideal love is the most human one, in
which each partner is concerned with his or her own life
without an overinflated confidence in bringing happiness to
others, but a love based firmly on the support of and faith in
each other. Together with such support, complete sharing of
basic attitudes toward life and the same world view are
considered necessary; this is the hardest demand made on
women, the demand to participate in political as well as
intellectual activities as equals of their men. She calls such a
relationship that of humanistic communism. Women's happi
ness must be instrumental in the development of their
creativity, while there will be no happiness where creativity is
stifled.
Yuriko believed in human growth as the most significant
purpose of life. She committed herself to communism only
when, impressed especially by the condition of women in
Soviet Russia, she came to believe in it as an ideology which
aids both human growth and social justice. For her, human
growth was not a matter of inner awareness, but could be
achieved meaningfully only in relation to others: it could be
achieved only by living within the real world, within history,
in vital association with other people. For this reason, personal
concerns-ideal love relations especially-and social and
political ones become interfused in her creative activity. In her
understanding, practice takes a central role; the pursuit of art
for life's sake and of intellectual activity for its practical
consequences provided the means for her to unite life and
ideas, life and writing. Yuriko's firm belief in human growth,
her unending interest in and love of women, and her
commitment to positive male-female relations make her close
to such writers as Simone de Beauvoir. Like Beauvoir, she lived
passionately, creating her own life-style as a woman, and tried
to create a unique autobiographical novel in which the
protagonist emerges as a modern as well as an historical hero.
Yet of the three conflicts, the one which gradually came
to concern Yuriko most in her later years was that between
politics and literature. As I have noted, she started her creative
career as a bourgeois inteltectual, deeply influenced by the
humanistic writings of Tolstoy and Arishima Takeo at a time
when the moralistic, introspective "I-novels" (first-person
novels) had established the tradition of the modern novel in
Japan. The historical perspective of Yuriko's autobiographical
novels distinguishes them from the traditional I-novels, in
which the perspective of the author-protagonists is exclusively
internal and psychological. This historical perspective grew
stronger in the course of her writings. Although the conflict
between consciousness and practice, the realization of which
was to become central in Japanese writers' struggle against the
I-novel, was clearly the starting point of Yuriko's writing and
the basis for the development of her thought, when she was
6
writing Nobuko she understood this conflict only as a problem
of her personal growth, not directly related to history or
society. When she came to realize that sexism is a political
phenomenon, the conflict developed another layer of meaning,
that is, the conflict between literature and politics. Writing
about her personal growth, about achieving her personal
freedom, came to appear to her the sterile self-satisfaction of
an elite intellectual. Thus the conflict was transformed from a
metaphysical-philosophic concern with realization (conscious
ness) and practice to a socially concrete question of politics
and literature.
The early Showa period produced a flood of theoretical
arguments with regard to proletarian literature and the writers'
role in revolution yet did not produce many significant
fictional works. Miyamoto Yuriko, together with Kobayashi
Takiji, undertook the task of creating literature as a
communist. Her problems were more complex than those of
Takiji, who was committed to presenting situations or dramas
in which the oppressed masses come to attain a revolutionary
understanding and commitment to action, or than those of
Tokunaga Sunao, another important proletarian writer who,
himself coming from a lumpenproletariat background, writes
naturally about laborers-their struggle for change, their
limitations, their happiness and their distortions. Yuriko, on
the other hand, was an intellectual who was keenly aware of
her basic alienation from the masses and of the limitations of
her understanding. She had not forgotten the bitter lessons she
learned from the tragic failure of the humanist writer Arishima
Takeo, who embraced proletarian literature and gave up his
inherited property to become a socialist but later had to
declare that the class nature of a writer cannot be transcended.
After declaring that he could not pretend to be a socialist and
could write only as a member of his bourgeois class, he
committed love-suicide with a woman.
15
During the first years of Yuriko's life as a communist, *
her writing suffered from didacticism and from dogmatic
analysis; her best contribution during this period was clearly in
the field of essay-writing, in which she analyzed the conditions
of women. Although her belief that literature should
contribute to the progress of people and should be meaningful
to the emerging new class and generation was not shaken, she
did come to feel uneasy about the possibility of artistic
stagnation in her political life. Although Kenji was more than
eager in urging her to pursue her novel-writing in her own way,
for him there was no doubt that she should not write other
than as a communist.
In Fuchiso (1947), the protagonist Hiroko hesitates to
join the party because she still does not see clearly the relation
between her art and political activities, and worries how her
joining the party might affect her writing.
"Hiroko, will you leave your curriculum vitae since you are
here (at party headquarters). "
'iWy vitae?"
She hesitated, feeling that it was too sudden. To present her
vitae must mean going tbrough a formal procedure to join
the party.
"Of course, but . .. "
Hiroko was not prepared to do so here, at this moment. She
felt that two kinds of work were pushing her from opposite
She joined [he Communist Party in 1931.
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7
sides of her body: literary work and political work
concerning women, which was the natural consequence of
her being a woman. At present she was occupied more with
the latter. As a result, what she wrote became entirely
educational . ...
"How would it affect my work? ... If only I knew."
Whenever Hiroko wrote short educational pieces, Jyukichi
himself advised her to organize her political work, telling
her that otherwise she would not be able to write novels. It
was also felt keenly [by the communists} that they must
produce specialists in every field of the humanities . ... But
when Jyukichi asked her when she planned to write novels,
how was it related to his suggestion to present her
vitae? ...
"There is no reason for me to refuse if I know what my
writing will be. "
"Hiroko, you can only prove objectively through your own
writing what is the best. "
"I am very glad if I can work in that way . ... "
"But that you can write in a way most appropriate for your
present concern does not mean that a writer does not have
to assume historical responsibility in ber own daily life . ...
People in the humanities are too preoccupied with it [the
relation between politics and literature} in general. ... It
must be because their life and work are too personal. But in
the case of husband and wife, the gap can become too big
to bridge. "
(Fuchiso, p. 256; my translation)
..

Her only solution was to maintain her determination to
write novels in history and to find out what kind of novel is.a
good novel by writing with all her energy. Yet this was an
indirect way of saying that she was going to set aside the
problems of politics and literature, and would be immersed in
writing novels, not political novels but just novels. Indeed,
most of her communist ideas were expressed in her essays and
her novels deal almost exclusively with her personal growth.
She was also totally committed to actual political activities,
organizing, lectures, and so forth, as if she were trying to
bridge the gap between politics and literature in this way.
When she started writing as a feminist, however, with her
own life as the central theme of her novels-and that started
with her postwar novels-the gap between politics and
literature, and that between history and individual life, was
eliminated. She had discovered new modern heroes, the
oppressed class of women struggling for liberation, a class
emerging to play an important role in the history of human
liberation.
By writing autobiographical novels from a revolutionary
feminist perspective, she achieved a unique combination of
literature and politics, of history and individual life. The result
was an overflow of creativity. The Banshu Plain, Fuchiso, The
Two Gardens, and Road Sign, which were written within the
short years of bubbling creativity between the end of the war
and her death in 1951, were all autobiographical works and
extensions of Nobuko, tracing her personal growth as a woman
writer and woman communist, but these later works were
distinguished from Nobuko by their communist-feminist
perspective. She had plans for writing two more such novels,
plans left unmaterialized by her sudden death.
The form of Yuriko's novels is closest possibly to the
Bildungsroman, a form of novel which traces the moral as well
as social development of an individual. Her works, most
simply, are a communist and feminist variant of the
Bildungsroman. The recent autobiography of Simone de
Beauvoir also resembles her works in its basic attempt to trace
the inner, as well as social, growth of the author-protagonist,
and to place her in history. By placing inner growth within a
concrete historical and social framework, history and
individual life are uniquely interfused, creating both a personal
drama and social, intellectual history; Yuriko's hero is an
honest reflection of herself, yet she emerges as a universal,
modern hero. Although Yuriko's hero is by no means
portrayed as an ideal, superhuman woman, she is a positive
hero whose faith in female and human liberation through
communist revolution is unshakable.
Yuriko's works present the drama of a woman
developing from a member of the bourgeois elite, dependent
on men, into an independc;nt, mature woman writer and
communist; they also mirror realistically an important page in
the social, moral and intellectual history of modern Japan.
Thus Yuriko created a new form of autobiography, one in
which the protagonist emerges as an historic figure of the age,
living fully its limitations and possibilities. Her writings
uniquely bring together the tradition of the I novel and the
historical, social commitment derived from her political
activities. *
Notes
1. The Japanese anarchists and communists considered
women's demands as petit bourgeois and thus not revolutionary. They
refused to establish women's bureaus in their organizations for fear that
they would lead the movements in a petit bourgeois direction and mar
cooperation with the male branch. See, for example, Takamure Itsue,
Jyosei no rekishi (A History of Women; Kodansha, 1958).
2. The complete works of Miyamoto Yuriko were published by
Kawade Shobo, 15 vols., 1951. There are also selected works published
by Aki Shoten (11 vols., 1949) and Shinnippon Shuppansha (12 vols.,
1968).
3. Yuriko kept diaries during the years of her love for and
marriage to Araki Shigeru (Nobuko Jidai no Nikki, 1920-23, Yuriko
Kenkyukai, 1976). Such autobiographical stories written during the
same period as "Chiisai ie no seikatsu" (Life in a Small House, 1922),
"Hitotsu no dekigoto" (One Incident, 1920), "Yoi" (Evening, 1922),
"Kokoro no kawa" (The River of Heart, 1925), in addition to the
unrevised first versions of Nobuko, supply reliable information about
her life during these years. See also Tomoko Nakamura, Miyamoto
Yuriko (Chi kuma, 1974).
4. Nobuko was serialized in Kaizo in len installments between
1924 and 1926. This original version was shortened and radically
revised when the novel appeared in book form in 1928. The following
quotation in the text is from Selected Works ofMiyamoto Yuriko and
Kobayashi Takiji, Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1969.
5. The protagonists in Yuriko's novels are readily identifiable
as real-life persons, and for grasping her world it is as appropriate to use
the names of their real-life prototypes as of the characters themselves.
6. In her early works (such as "Yoi") Yuriko had already been
writing about lhe problems of women artists, especially about the
difficulty of fulfilling the dual role of home-maker and creative woman,
a theme which was developed as central in Nobuko. However, her
interest in women in general and her linking of her personal questions
to the larger problems of women took place when she visited Soviet
Russia. Her commitment to women's liberation became apparent and
unshakable only after her return from Russia, where her ideological
understanding and perspective took definite form.
7. Jyuninen no tegami (Letters of Twelve Years), 2 vols.,
Chikuma, 1965.
8. The relationship between Nobuko and Motoko was more
than one of friendship between two women, both psychologically and
in some respects physically. It is clear that Motoko was attached to
Nobuko as a lesbian while Nobuko was not attached to Motoko in this
way. However, Nobuko's need for close human relations did find an
outlet, soon after her divorce, in her friendship with Motoko, and her
new life with Motoko did supply her with a vision of a new start as
significant as marriage.
9. Yuriko had never advocated the maternal femininism which
characterized such feminists of the Bluestocking group as Hiratsuka
Raicho. Yuriko's own decision not to have children was based on her
concern that women who spend their psychic energy on child-rearing
and the emotional dependency on children it entails would have little
remaining of the energy and emotional commitment necessary for a
creative life. (See Diary). Yet her love for Miyamoto Kenji changed her
attitude and she wished to have a child with him, a desire which was
not fulfilled because of his prolonged imprisonment.
10. As in many cases of women artists and intellectuals,
Yuriko's complex relation to her mother was a crucial factor in her
intellectual and emotional growth and the formation of her character.
Yuriko was a keen and even cruel observer of her mother. Yet her
admiration and sympathy for her mother as a woman grew over the
years, enabling her to love her mother dearly. Yuriko has written as
much about her mother as about herself in her works.
11. Yuriko saw clearly the class nature of the aspiration for
romantic love, viewing it as the product of the feudal-bourgeois concept
of women, a concept which idealizes virginity, chastity and
motherhood. See such essays as "New Monogamy," "Discussion of
Love for a New Generation," "Passion for Home-making" (Yuriko
Zenshu, Kodansha, vol. 9), and "On Chastity," "The Wife's Morality,"
and "The Morality of Marriage" in vol. 12.
12. Selected Works of Miyamoto Yuriko and Nogami Yaeko,
Tokyo: Kodansha, 1967.
13. Yuriko must have read the essay in Soviet Russia, since she
kept receiving Kaizo, one of whose issues carried MiyamQto's article.
She tells of her impression of the essay in her novel Dohyo !Road Sign).
Kobayashi Hideo's essay, "Samazama naru Isho" (Various Designs),
received the second prize.
14. The most outspoken critic was Hirabayashi Taiko, a woman
writer and once an anarchist.
15. See "Sengen hitotsu" (One Declaration), Gendai Nihon
Bungaku Ronsoshi (A History of Modern Japanese Literary Disputes),
Miraisha, vol. I, pp. 11-14.
16. Selected Works of Miyamoto Yuriko and Kobayashi Takiji,
Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1969.
9
The Family of Koiwai
by Miyamoto Yuriko
translated by Noriko Mizuta Lippit
I
A night in February-there was not a touch of fire in the
room.
Otome, wrapped in a dyed kasui nightcover with a soiled
shoulder patch, and leaning her face against the table, sat
immobile on a folded sewing board placed across a round,
brown porcelain hibachi in which the ashes had congealed.
Severe cold, coming down with the night from the black
suburban sky where stars were shining, froze the streets and the
earth of the farm fields, pierced the tin roof and penetrated to
the roots of her hair. She felt faintly the warmth of the
electric bulb hanging low in front of the table. The electric
bulb illuminated the lusterless hair of Otome, sitting near, and
the many roughly bound books kept in the beer boxes stacked
a bit out of the way at the windowside. The burnish of the
table glittered smoothly, its shine so cold that one hesitated to
touch it.
Shortly, while keeping her hands across her chest and
inside her clothes, and raising only her face from the sleeves of
the nightcover, Otome asked her husband Tsutomu, slowly
and with emphasis on each word,
"The hot water bottle-is it still hot?"
In front of the same table, Tsutomu, also wearing a
nightcover over his shirt in place of a house-jacket, sat on a
wicker chair-the only chair in the house-resting his cheeks in
his palms. Moving his large mouth, conspicuous in the
fair-skinned face characteristic of people born in the north,
Tsutomu spoke, heavy-mouthed,
"Yes. Shall I give it to you?"
"No, that's all right."
The couple, both covering their small bodies with the
nightcovers, almost fell into silence again, but this time
Otome, licking her chapped lips anxiously and appearing as if
her long eyebrows were raised, said,
"Grandpa may send Mitsuko to us in a package."
"Hmm ..."
"Grandpa ... We can't tell what he will do."
On the table lay a letter from Teinosuke, scribbled
carelessly with a charcoal pencil on tissue-like paper. Omitting
the phrases with which people of the older generation
invariably began, he had written directly to the point, asking
when they intended to send the money for which he had
written many times. Tsutomu may be engaged in an important
movement, although he-Teinosuke-does not know how
important, but here a family of five is half-starved. What do
you, the eldest son, intend to do? If you do not send the
money, then I will make a package of Mitsuko, who is in our
way, and send her back to you. Expect that! Teinosuke had
cursed the unmatched letters which, sometimes broken,
sometimes smudged, reminded them of his stubbornly hairy
eyebrows. On the envelope just below the name of
Tsutomu-Mr. Tsutomu Koiwai-there was a large oil stain that
had penetrated to the letter inside.
In their home town, A-city, Teinosuke had been
peddling natto on the street every morning for the past few
years. In the evening, Mother Maki, taking the initiative
herself, let him take a cart of imagawa-yaki sweets to a street
on the river-bank which, although particularly windy, was
filled with passers-by. There they worked until about one
o'clock in the morning. Tsutomu's younger brother, Isamu,
who had finished elementary school, was working as an office
boy at a bank. In this way, the family, including the younger
sister Aya, lived.
There was a reason why Tsutomu and his wife had left
their three-year-old Mitsuko in the hands of a family so poor.
In the spring of the previous year, Tsutomu had been picked
up by the police for having worked with a proletarian cultural
group, and, because of the beating he had received on his
cheeks, he had contracted a middle-ear infection. Tsutomu was
moved from the police station to a welfare hospital only when
the disease had progressed to the point of causing a brain
infection. There a military intern operated on his ear,
following instructions to cut here, stuff there, and so forth.
The care he received after the operation was so rough as to
have astonished a specialist, and in the summer, he contracted
quite a bad case of papillitis. Through his friend, he was
admitted to a different hospital, but he had remained in
critical condition for more than a month. The doctor who
headed the ear, nose and throat department carried out a
skillful operation, but even he could not tell for sure whether
or not Tsutomu, who lay in bed, a blood-soaked gauze
bandage wrapped around his head like a Cossack hat, would
10
recover. As a part of her effort to save Tsutomu, Otome
borrowed a kimono from her friend and promptly took it to a
pawnshop. Then she took Mitsuko on a night train to her
grandparents' place, leaving her there almost forcibly.
It was only for the first two or three months that she
was able to send them for two or three yen. When autumn
deepened, Otome sent Mitsuko a sweater-mantle she had
knitted. She was unable to keep the promise she had made to
her parents-in-law that she would send them money for rearing
Mitsuko.
Tsutomu survived. Since the spring, however, the
publishing section of the group for which he had worked
devotedly had been beset with great difficulties. There were
few who could work, and money was lacking. In the morning,
raising the collar of his coat to protect his injured ear,
Tsutomu would leave by the front entrance, holding the old
essays on Marxism bound in a single volume that he had
bought with great sacrifice. After locking the front entrance,
Otome would exit by the kitchen door. Receiving several
ten-sen coins from Tsutomu at the customary second-hand
bookstore, she would return home. This happened more than
once.
First her parents-in-law demanded money and then they
began complaining that, with Mitsuko keeping Maki tied up,
the volume of sales at her sweets-cart had decreased sharply.
They had Isamu write such things for them in great detail.
Tsutomu and his wife felt saddened by their inability to send
money, yet Tsutomu was annoyed by his narrow-minded
father who blamed Mitsuko for the decrease in their business.
Nor did Tsutomu, remembering his own experiences at home
as a young boy, fail to see the feeling of Isamu, the 17-year-old
second son, who had had to write that sticky, complaining
letter, writing down what his father had said without adding a
word of his own. A-city was included in the Tohoku
[Northeast) famine district. Since the war started, the
deprivation of farmers in that district had been extreme. At
the end of the previous year, there was even an incident in
which the mothers in families whose young men had been
drafted got together and demanded that their sons be returned
to them. It was natural for there to have been a decrease in the
number of young men who, returning from an evening's
amusement, would hold hot baked sweets in the bosom of
their kimonos, and eat them one by one. If they had money to
spend for such things, they would go to a wanton cart instead
of an imagawa-yaki cart.
Tsutomu had earnestly explained the world situation in
these terms, describing the reasons for their poverty in a way
Teinosuke could understand, and writing in the margin that
Isamu should be shown the letter too. Teinosuke's letter,
which arrived shortly afterwards, showed that Tsutomu's
effort had been completely in vain. With his dull shrewdness,
Teinosuke had begun to use granddaughter Mitsuko in an
effort to burden Tsutomu with the responsibility for their
straitened circumstances. Moving his disproportionately-large
mouth as if he were saying "puff-puff," and looking at Otome
with sharp eyes, Tsutomu said,
"I never went to a barber before I was eighteen and
never bought my underwear." In order to earn money to buy
the books which he loved reading, he had worked nightly at a
rope factory after his regular job at a post office. His mother,
Maki, also found a job at the rope factory. Then she bought a
pair of scissors to cut his hair and cloth to sew his underwear,
and paid for the medicine for her fragile daughter Aya.
Tsutomu burned the letter from his father. He would be
angry, he thought, if his house were searched and the letter
seized and used to persuade him to quit the movement.
Otome felt in sympathy with Tsutomu's anger, but,
opening wide her eyes with the double-folded lids and looking
at her husband's hair which had thinned strangely after the ear
infection, she said quietly,
"I hope Grandpa is not mistreating Mitsuko." Otome's
voice reflected her dual concern. She felt guilty for not being
able to bring up Mitsuko herself, as well as for reminding
Tsutomu-already plagued by numerous troubles-of the
worrisome family matters.
After the lunar new year was over, Aya, in her unskilled
but clear handwriting, wrote to them that Grandma kept
saying these days that she wanted to die, and that she worried
that Grandma might indeed die. Before Tsutomu appeared the
image of the gentle, wise face of his half-graying little mother,
carrying the heavy granddaughter on her back, mentally tired
and sandwiched between Tsutomu and her stubborn husband.
Out of consideration for his mother, Tsutomu agonized over
ways to make money to send or to use in bringing Mitsuko
back. The poetry-writing which had led Tsutomu to become
involved in the proletarian movement would bring no money.
It was at this time that the letter with the oil-stain
arrived. While Tsutomu, after returning home, sat at the table
without a word, Otome scurried about in the kitchen that had
no electric bulb, her feet wrapped thickly in Tsutomu's old
navy-blue tabi. She prepared a hot watter bottle for Tsutomu.
Even the money for charcoal was saved to meet his
transportation expenses.
Tsutomu remained silent for a long time. Then, tearing
his father's letter with a hand whose middle finger had a red
ink-stain, he said in a tone of voice not much different from
his usual one,
"I will tell them to close up their place and come to
Tokyo."
Otome did not know how to take his statement and
looked at Tsutomu as if paralyzed. Then her eyes with
two-folded lids gradually grew larger under her unconsciously
raised eyebrows, and with the tip of her nose reddened by the
cold, she assumed the expression of a startled wild hare.
11
Closing up the household and the five of them coming to
live here-how would they eat? Something akin to fear spread
wide and weighed on her. Isn't Tsutomu himself like his father
to think of such a thing, she thought?
Tsutomu, however, in between his various activities, had
been thinking of this all day. He could not think of any ways
to make money, either to send there or to bring Mitsuko back.
It was evident that Teinosuke would sink deeper into poverty.
In Tokyo, if Isamu worked, Teinosuke sold natto and
Grandma did some part-time work at home using her skillful
hands, they would at least be able to eat. Better that they
should come to Tokyo and see how Tsutomu and Otome lived.
Tsutomu felt certain about it. That would correct Teinosuke's
narrow-mindedness, his using the fact that they were taking
care of Mitsuko to place the responsibility for their livelihood
on the "eldest son" and let Isamu's second-son-character
develop further. Besides, he might come to understand the
nature of Tsutomu's work-understand by being together with
them and by seeing the way they live.
When Tsutomu explained this to Otome, she did not
consider it unnatural.
"It may be a good idea."
Thus Otome, her eyes still wide open, gave her
wholehearted consent, moving her tongue slowly and
moistening her upper and lower lips.
"Then I will send them a letter. You go to bed first."
Tsutomu wrote a letter to Teinosuke and then, taking a
long time, wrote something else on a thin piece of paper.
Putting each in a different envelope, he took one out of the
room and hid it somewhere.
Otome lay in bed facing the shoji screen but did not
sleep. When Tsutomu told her to go to bed first, she was
accustomed to doing so without asking any questions or going
into the three-mat room beside the kitchen.
Writing in a small, precise script, Tsutomu often took his
left hand out of the sleeves of the nightcover and pressed the
wound on his ear with his fingers. The area behind the ear was
indented because the bone had been scaled off, and there
gauze cloth had been stuffed in. Because of his fatigue and the
cold, the wound ached and half his head felt heavy. Behind his
ear, in addition to the scar left by the operation, there was a
severe scar from a burn. It had been made in the winter of
1930, when Tsutomu, having resigned from the group that was
publishing Literary Front because he was not satisfied with its
direction, had joined the activities of Battle Flag. Ishifuji
Kumoo of Literary Front, a man known for his hunting hat,
had placed a hot iron there. It was that scar.
II
Carrying furoshiki-wrapped packages of various shapes
and colors, Grandpa, Grandma, Aya, Isamu and Mitsuko all
moved wordlessly via Veno Station to the two rooms under
the tin roof of Koiwai. They took up their lives there,
spreading even onto the tokonoma alcove their sooty packages
that contained only rag-like things.
The couple's life changed.
At five o'clock in the morning, while it was still dark,
Teinosuke sat up on his mattress and turned on the light above
the faces of the family members sleeping next to one another
in the narrow room. Preparing his pipe with a noise-"pan,
pan"-he started to smoke. Grandma had left out an ashtray
for him.
Disturbed by the noise, Tsutomu, who had gone to bed
around two o'clock in the morning, turned his body
uncomfortably and pulled the cover over his face.
Then Mitsuko started fussing. Otome, who had been
patting her daughter'S back half-asleep, became wide awake
and tried whispering to soothe her lest she wake up Tsutomu.
But as if throwing off her mother's soothing words, the
bull-necked Mitsuko arched her back, calling for Grandma as
she had become accustomed to doing in the past half year.
"No, Grandma, no."
Tying her apron, Grandma got up from her mattress and
said,
"All right Mitsuko, don't cry. I will give you something
to eat."
She brought rice to Otome's mattress and gave it to Mitsuko.
Then Isamu got up followed by Aya; Tsutomu could no longer
sleep and threw off his thin bedding. While Tsutomu washed
his face, dry from lack of sleep, Teinosuke swept curs9rily
with a broom in front of the entrance and came back to sit in
the room, which had already been cleaned and tidied. Aya
brought out a dining table. Isamu read the colored advertising
leaflet which had fallen onto the tatami from Grandpa's
newspaper.
Otome, who was preparing breakfast in the kitchen
without cooking utensils, asked,
"Grandma, please taste this," and with the expression
formed these days by her raised eyebrows, stretched out a
little plate to Maki, who was squatting there. Maki tasted the
miso soup noisily.
"Seems all righ t. "
Otome and Grandma started serving the miso soup, which was
diluted and had lots of salt added. Sitting around the small
dining table, the family ate breakfast very quickly, and even
Mitsuko did not say a word. Even though after breakfast he
had time before having to leave for work, Tsutomu did not
talk to anyone. Lying on his stomach near the open corridor,
he read a book. As if he had just remembered, he would
sometimes ask his father,
"What did you do with the tools for baking
imagawayaki sweets?"
"I sold them."
Teinosuke said no more. The conversation between them
developed no further. Tsutomu left in a tattered, navy-blue
coat. Even at that time, Teinosuke never stood up to see
Tsutomu off. He remained sitting with his raised shoulders
wrapped in a handwoven cotton haori jacket.
In the evening, Tsutomu returned. Quite often, Grandpa
was still sitting in the same place as in the morning, with the
newspaper and ashtray before him. The only difference was
that the light was on. While Tsutomu was away, Otome had
made and served dumplings out of the flour which Grandma
had managed to obtain.
After going to bed in the three-mat room, Tsutomu
asked Otome in a small voice,
"What does Grandpa do all day?"
"He sits."
Then, lowering her voice still further as if saying something
frightful, she said,
"I hope Grandpa has not lost his senses."
Tsutomu did not answer. Stubbornly slttmg thus,
Grandpa was watching the way Tsutomu lived. Tsutomu felt
12
it. He knew with bitterness that Teinosuke's mute attitude
indicated that he was observing whether the situation dictated
that he must work or not.
Every day around five o'clock, Isamu used to go down
the gradual slope to a radio shop where he listened to the
employment news or looked for a long time into the show
window, the blue shade of which reflected the light on his
boyish red cheeks. After a month, he was hired by a company
near Kyobashi as an office boy. Tsutomu found for him an old
bicycle costing five-yen-twenty-sen that could be paid for over
two months. Isamu commuted happily, pedaling the bicycle,
and when he returned at night, he said:
"This company is very big; there are five office boys like
me."
He said this with his mouth extended as if he had found out
how small the bank in A-city was.
"But everyone says about me ... ," speaking uncon
sciously in his native dialect, "that although I am young, I am
a miser."
At that company, it was a fad among the office boys to
treat each other. People said that Isamu was a miser because
although he ate when others treated him, he could not return
the favor. Grandma, mending the belt of Mitsuko's dress
clothes with crudely sewn stitches, worried aloud,
"Then, do not be treated." Tsutomu, for a change, had
returned early and was working at the table.
"You do not have to be concerned with such a thing."
Moving his large mouth, he said gently and encouragingly,
"You can tell them proudly, Isamu, that since you are
helping the family you cannot afford to spend money."
Isamu, short and stout and fair-complexioned--like his
brother but with a small mouth-neither protested nor agreed,
but began turning the pages of a very old issue of Children's
Science. Otome wished that Grandpa too would say something
at such a time. But he just sat silently, smoking.
However, an incident finally occurred which forced even
Grandpa to talk with people and to walk around Tokyo, with
which he had not yet familiarized himself. Aya, who had been
delicate and tended to stay in bed, contracted a complicated
stomach infection of tuberculosis. She needed to be
hospitalized.
Tsutomu could not return home every night, not only
because he was busy but also because his situation had become
dangerous. Bringing Grandpa's wooden clogs and making them
ready for him to go out, Otome sent him to see his uncle in
Mikawashima. Although there was not a great age difference
between them, Teinosuke's uncle, Kankichi, had been working
as a clerk at a borough government office for over ten years,
and was the only relative of the Koiwai family in Tokyo. They
had finally come upon the idea of borrowing money from him
with the promise to return it out of [samu's 17-yen-a-month
salary, and, through his government connections, of getting
the district committee to be responsible for the medical care
of Aya.
Kankichi's third wife, Oishi, visited them after a few
days, bringing a contract sheet to receive Teinosuke's seal. The
minute Oishi entered through the torn shoji screen, she
remarked, "What can I do with country folks? They don't
even know how to tidy their house."
"In an exaggerated way, she walked on her toes in her
colored tabi, gathering the end of her kimono as if it should
not touch such a dirty floor. She sat down on the only cushion
in the house and looked around indiscreetly at Aya lying in
her sick-bed. Turning to Grandma who, politely taking off the
sashes that tied her sleeves for working, bowed her half-gray
head, Oishi said, "Because we are relatives, you use us when
you need money, but you do not even show your face in
ordinary times. Now stamp the seal here."
Otome raised not only her eyebrows but her skinny
shoulders as well. Holding the money Oishi gave to her and
carrying Mitsuko on her back, she left to buy ten-sen worth of
potato wine and five-sen worth of fried things. Tsutomu had
lived for years without having anything to do with his
uncle-or with the former-bar-girl aunt whose reputation in
their n'eighborhood was quite bad. As Otome was about to
step out, supporting Mitsuko on her back and holding in her
hand' an empty bottle which might hold about a cup, Oishi
said,
"Hey, you. Are you going shopping with that? Even
though you want to buy only one cup, they'll give you less
than one if you don't take a bottle that contains four cups."
Oishi's philosophy of life was like this.
Glued to a spot in front of the table with her eyes wide
open like saucers, Mitsuko stretched her hand close to the
fried food, almost touching it.
"I want to eat that, Mommy-that I want to eat," she
pleaded.
Oishi, protruding her lower lip like a little girl making a face,
imitated her,
"This, you want to eat, heh?" Looking at Mitsuko with
an expression of hatred, she drank wine alone and ate the fried
food.
Because you do not believe in religion, you become
poor, sickness appears in the family, and your son turns into a
red. Using such talk as a relish for her drinks, she finished the
ten-sen worth of wine. Belching, she took out another ten sen
from her wallet and, putting it inside her obi sash, she sent for
more wine. This took place two or three more times until the
time came for her husband to return from the office.
When Oishi left at last, Teinosuke took out the debt
contract sheet from the drawer of Tsutomu's desk. He looked
at it, turning it over again and again. Standing up to put it
back again, he said,
13
"Poverty certainly follows us." It was a tone of voice
with deep emotion, a tone in which Otome had not heard
Tsutomu speak since he came to Tokyo.
"If one has money, one becomes like that."
"You see, isn't it just as big brother used to say?"
Otome, angry from having to tolerate a woman like Oishi and
affected by her expectation that Grandpa was changing his
attitude, spoke in a voice that sounded as if her mouth had
dried up.
"If society changes, Aya will receive medical care
without worry." Licking her lips, Otome explained in detail
that in Soviet Russia there is a free medical clinic ih each
borough to take care of sick people. Tsutomu used to send
them the photographic journal Soviets' Friends even when
they lived in A-city. Otome had no way to know what
Teinosuke thought when he read it then, but today he
certainly listened to her intently. At night she also heard him
remark to Grandma,
"I should not have sold the tools for making baked
sweets."
III
Turning from the silent main street where everyone was
asleep, and bearing to the left around the gas station, Otome
entered a newly developed area with only a few scattered
houses. The moon suddenly appeared, high and cold, casting
its shadow on the ground.
Far and near, keyaki trees were enwrapped in the haze
melting in the moonlight, and in the sky, light, white clouds
were floating. While walking, looking at the clear moon with
the halo around it, Otome felt that only the sound of her
shoes and the rustling of her skirt was disturbing the subtle
sound of the moonlight falling on everything. It was lonely
and frightening to walk alone at such an hour. Yet only while
she was walking on such a street could Otome, now
commuting to Shinjuku as a bar-girl trainee, regain herself.
Through the efforts of the district committee, Aya was
hospitalized in a charity hospital, but the family had to supply
someone to take care of her, and that created a transportation
expense. Besides, they could not give Grandpa their usual
soup-with-everything-in-it as lunch to take to the hospital.
Since Oishi started coming to the family, she began to
bring sewing jobs to Grandma and Otome so they could earn
some money. They sewed one cotton kimono for twenty-five
sen, but they had to supply their own thread. Yet this sewing
job was somewhat frightening for them who could not argue
well. Early on the promised day, Oishi would come without
failure with twenty-five sen.
"I am putting the twenty-five sen here. You work where
you are and usc a messenger. What high class people you are."
When Grandma cut the last thread with her teeth and
went out to the corridor to dust off the kimono which was
just finished, Oishi, who had been drinking potato wine while
waiting, examined it immediately.
"Let me see." She folded the kimono as if she were a
neat and precise person, and pressed it for awhile by sitting on
it. Then, standing up to leave and holding the kimono wrapped
in a Juroshiki, she would extend her hand before Grandma or
sometimes before Otomes delicate pigeon-chest, and say,
"Give me twenty sen for I am going to buy tonight's
dinner." She spoke looking straight into their faces, without
moving an eyebrow. Struck by her aggressiveness and unable
to answer, they swallowed their saliva as twenty sen were
taken away from the small amount left from what had been
placed there.
Otome had decided to work as a bar girl in order to get
rid of this witch as soon as possible. But there was another
reason as well. It had become apparent that in order for
Tsutomu to continue his activities safely, it would be
necessary for him to rent a room outside of the house.
Recently, when the printed copies of the journal had
been sent to a bindery, he had discovered that the police were
after them. At the right moment he took them out quickly. It
was such a sudden action that he didn't have any place to send
them. Therefore, randomly riding around in a taxi, he came to
a wooded suburb where he thought to hide the package. It was
a Saturday afternoon. As Tsutomu went further and further
into the woods, staggering under the weight of the package, he
came suddenly upon a narrow, open stretch of lawn. Three
young students were lying on the lawn, talking. Both the
students and Tsutomu were startled. The students stopped
talking. One of them stood up and looked at the short man in
a hat who, his large mouth tightly closed, was carrying a
package.
Unable to tum back, he continued on and entered the
woods that stretched beyond the open area. Deciding upon a
certain spot, he began to wrap the journals with the paper and
cord which he had brought with him. Soon the vibrating sound
of a high-pitched whistle came from the direction of the lawn
where the students were. It was a jazz phrase with which
Tsutomu was not familiar, but he sensed immediately that the
hurried tone of the whistle was directed to him and that it was
meant as a warning. He covered the journal with grass, placed
his coat with its torn collar and hem over it, and, listening
attentive! y, pretended to be urinating.
He heard the laughter of women coming nearer and the
footsteps of two or three people as they stepped on small
14
branches. When they came to the open area, they seemed
undecided but finally turned to the left. The footsteps and
cheerful laughter no longer reached Tsutomu.
It took two hours for Tsutomu to finish, and during that
time, the students once again let Tsutomu know by whistling
that someone was coming into the woods. That night Tsutomu
told Otome with deep emotion how the students had
conveyed their support. He also told her at that time that he
needed a room.
Otome, whose appearance had been changed by the
waves newly applied to her hair, used to stand by Tsutomu's
table when she returned late at night and, licking her lips that
were dry from fatigue, tell him in a low voice what had
happened that day at "Beauty Club."
"There is one man-a democrat who sings 'Red Flag.' He
showed me a scar on his wrist and boasted that it"was from
having been tortured."
"Hmm."
"I felt offended, thinking people will think that
communists are all like that."
Tsutomu, who had been suffering constantly from lack
of sleep since Grandpa and Grandma had come to live with
them, just listened to Otome silently, pressing the wound
behind his ear and never asking her about the bar. When
Otome talked continuously, he would say sullenly,
"That's enough. Go to bed." Hecould not get used to
thinking of Otome as a bar-girl.
As for Otome's suitability for such a job, she was
certainly an unwaitress-like waitress-more so than Tsutomu or
even Otome herself could imagine. One of Otome's customers
arrived, sat down heavily in a booth, and gave an order:
"Well, I guess I'll have a cocktail."
Otome, who had been standing and waiting for the order
beside him-unblinking and with eyebrows raised-repeated
the order:
"One cocktail, right?" She went off with her shoulders
raised, repeating the order to herself. She returned with the
drink. When the customer extended his hand and tried to
touch her, Otome was unable to brush him off skillfully or
respond cheerfully with words; when he held her hands, she
tightened her body and wordlessly raised high her eyebrows.
Her face, with some beauty in it, suddenly assumed the
desperate expression of a startled hare. With the unexpected
change, the customer felt ridiculous or abashed, and, letting
her hand go, reassumed his usual demeanor-but clicked his
tongue. "Tut."
After working for twenty days, including the training
period, Otome was fired from "Beauty Club." The reason was
that, even after so many days, she had not learned how to
serve properly. Bringing a book even to bed, Tsutomu asked
for the first time,
"What must people do to serve properly?"
"I don't know!" Otome looked depressed, shaking her
waved hair.
The way she said "I don't know!" with such strength
reminded him of the two of them four years earlier. In the
outskirts of A-city there was a butcher who had pasted on a
glass door a notice "We carry pork." Otome was the daughter
of the butcher. When Tsutomu's cousin was hospitalized in
A-city for a serious eye disease, Otome was working there as a
helper. She and Tsutomu gradually started to speak to each
other, and Tsutomu, who was working for the post office, lent
her War Flag and other books to read. Otome had just finished
elementary school, but she read it carefully and showed great
interest. She borrowed many books from Tsutomu and at one
time asked to borrow Marx's Das Kapital, possibly mistaking
the book for something else. About five days later, Otome,
who still had her hair braided, came to the patient's room with
drops of perspiration on her nose to return the book.
"Did you understand?"
Tsutomu had unintentionally relaxed his mouth as he
asked the question. Otome, raising her long eyebrows so high
they might have come out of her forehead, had looked up at
Tsutomu who was almost twelve centimeters taller than she
(although both of them were quite short), and had said: "I
don't know." She had said it with all her strength, shaking her
head, just as she did now.
Tsutomu had almost forgotten that, when they were
about to marry, he had insisted that he should not have to
present the family with the traditional preparation money
because he was not accepting a horse or a cow. Otome's
mother had cried, saying that since she was not born a horse or
a cow, she would like his parents to present a formal marriage
gift. Otome said that if her family did not approve, she would
leave the house. Then she joined Tsutomu who was already
living in Tokyo.
The money that Otome had earned with such great
pain-disliking the job and knowing Tsutomu's silent dislike of
it-was gone after she returned ten yen to Oishi and paid for
Tsutomu's room.
After Tsutomu had moved but before Otome had any
time to relax, the debt to Oishi had doubled. Aya had died.
They did not have money for the funeral. From whom other
than Oishi could the family of Koiwai have borrowed money?
Grandpa and Grandma (who held Mitsuko on her back
with a sash) returned from the crematory with Aya's bones.
Grandma moved some of the packages to the back of the
closet which left the front part empty. There she spread a
blue, Fuji-silk filroshiki wrapper and placed the urn containing
15
Aya's bones. Otome was working the early shift at a bar
where she had recently begun to work. She returned early
and found Grandma sitting before the urn with Mitsuko on her
back, her legs dangling down.
"We do not need red cloth any longer," she said quietly
without taking her eyes off the urn. She signed, "Ahh." Isamu
also returned and, without sitting down, looked with
embarrassment at the urn. Then he bowed abruptly, lowering
his head awkwardly.
No 0I1e cried. Mitsuko, her hair in a Dutch cut, turned
toward Otome and said repeatedly, "O! O!" pointing at the
urn as if she were sorry that it was not something to eat. There
was no longer a homeland for Grandpa and Grandma-neither
a place to bury her nor a temple to which they could take her
bones. The stubborn attitude which Grandpa had assumed
since coming to Tokyo gradually began to disappear. Otome
could sense it even from the way Grandpa sat.
Since their debt had increased, Oishi came to their house
every three days. Learning that Oishi was being inquisitive
asking why Tsutomu stayed away from home so frequently
and asking for the location of the bar where Otome was
working-Otome warned Grandma earnestly with force in her
eyes, "Grandma, be careful. You don't know what she would
do to us."
Oishi might do anything to obtain money. It would be
nothing at all to Otome if she came uninvited to the bar to
threaten, but she might do far worse. Otome shuddered with
fear. At that time, Grandma just answered vaguely, "Yes,
that's true," without showing whether or not she understood.
But that night she must have thought over the matter, and in
the morning she came to Otome who was doing the wash in a
bucket in the kitchen. Holding Mitsuko, who was poking her
hands in the bucket and making a mess, she reported to
Otome:
"When Aunt came yesterday, she asked whether Otome
too was helping the reds."
"You see, I told you. And what did you say?"
"You are working for a bar, so I told her that you are
working for a bar."
Worrying about the time when she was not at home,
Otome told her,
"Please warn Grandpa well too."
These days, Grandpa had begun to use the baby carriage
to peddle sweets to children, going out whenever the weather
was good. In the evening, Grandpa would return to the area
near home at almost the same time as Isamu. Coming in
through the back alley without the carriage, he would check to
see that Oishi was not there, and then push the carriage to the
front entrance. Once he had bumped into her and she had
taken ten sen out of his small sales. It was a bitter experience
for him.
At the sound of the carriage's front wheels being raised
so that it could be taken inside, Mitsuko, hearing it from
somewhere, came rolling out without failure.
"0,0, Grandpa."
She raised her strong-willed forehead in an expression that was
comical but filled with happiness.
"I want some sweets."
Sitting kite-like with her little legs folded kite-like, she placed
her dirty hands on a square package wrapped in aluroshiki.
"Hey, wait until Grandpa enters the house."
"No, these are mine."
Grandpa sat down silently just inside the entrance and
let Mitsuko have a few cookies coated with sugar. Mitsuko,
looking with an upward glance at Grandpa and Grandma in
turn, quickly put all the cookies in her mouth.
It was about five or six days after the conversation in the
kitchen. Carrying both the crochet-work she had knitted while
sitting at the "Lily of the Valley" bar-on the worst occasions
she was called to work only once in three days-and the
sixty-odd sen she had earned, Otome was walking leisurely up
the slope towards home when she saw a policeman coming
towards her. There was only one road, on one side of which
was a cedar nursery. As Otome walked slowly up the slope
watching him, he moved from one house to the next checking
their name plates. He stopped in front of the house which had
a paper on which was written "Koiwai." Opening the door, he
entered the house and called in a loud voice,
"Hello, is anyone home?"
Otome's breathing became rapid-not only from
climbing the slope-and she unconsciously opened her mouth
and looked around. Appearing unconcerned, she turned in two
houses before her own house and went around to the back.
Grandma had taken out the bucket and evidently had been
hanging the laundry. Trying not to make any noise, Otome
listened to the conversation in front while wringing out the
washed clothes and hanging them on the clothesline.
"The family, are there five now?"
"That's right."
"T'hat child-Ah, it is Mitsuko."
The policeman was silent and it seemed that he was
checking his notebook. Soon he shifted his weight to his
other leg, making a clashing sound with his sword fiS he did so.
"So the son, Tsutomu, is missing, huh?"
Holding Mitsuko's little pink underwear, Otome felt as if
her ears were filled with sound. Grandma answered in her
16
usual slow ,low and polite voice,
"Yes. "
"Why did he leave the he had the child?"
" "
"Dissipation? "
"Well, that is about right."
Unconsciously, Otome almost smiled. Looking down
with tightened shoulders, she said to herself, "Good work,
Grandma." She really felt so.
Living in poverty for over thirty years, Grandpa had
managed to exist until today without even knowing how to
cook rice, and he had managed to put Isamu through
elementary school. Sometime in the past Tsutomu had said
that Grandpa's life depended on Grandma. In an instance like
this, Otome felt Grandma's earnest quick wits.
For the next few days, under the dusty red and green
lights of the "Lily of the Valley," Otome recalled vividly the
two voices in the conversation, "Dissipation?" "That is about
right." Yet the more she recalled it, the more complex became
the emotions which accompanied it. The fact that Tsutomu
was the very opposite of a dissipated person made the
conversation with the policeman indescribably humorous, and,
as his wife, Otome even enjoyed it. However, the more she
thought seriously of his strong character, the more deeply she
came to feel about their relationship. She had not thought
about it previously. Because of the pressing circumstances,
Tsutomu had begun to live apart from her without giving her
time to think over their separation. But Tsutomu was not a
man who would desert her out of dissipation. She had carried
the thought only to this point before. If she did not keep up
with his activities in the movement, however, he would not
have her as his wife. Now she understood it firmly. If indeed
that were to happen, Otome knew that she could not cling to
Tsutomu and show him her shame. The value of the
proletarian movement and the value of Tsutomu had
permeated her being. Thinking of these things for the first
time since Tsutomu had lett the house, Otome could not sleep
for a long time; leaning her face on the table, she held
Mitsuko.
It became the season for wearing serge. Frequently a
bright, fine rain fell. On the rainy days, the fragrance of the
resin from cedar saplings floated subtlely from the cedar
nursery out front into the open corridor of the two-room
house in a closet of which was the urn containing Aya's bones.
It was a late-shift day and Otome was reading at
Tsutomu's desk. Grandpa, who could not go peddling because
of the weather, had been reading the newspaper for a long
time. "Oh," he called to Otome, taking an unlit pipe from his
mouth. "They can't be arrested like that."
"What is it?"
Wondering what it was about, Otome went to look at the
newspaper. In the corner of the third page, there were a few
lines that two "all union" workers had been arrested
at an employment agency in the Koto area.
Grandpa's way of reading the newspaper had changed.
That was clear to Otome. Grandpa was asking questions which
even Isamu did not ask. After listening silently to Otome's
faltering explanation, he coughed and, as if thrusting a stick,
asked,
"Isn't there a union for peddlers of sweets?"
Otome was flurried without knowing why. She raised her
eyebrows and answered,
"I don't know."
Silent again for awhile, Grandpa bit his pipe. Abruptly, he
took the pipe from his mouth and hit the ashtray with force,
"It will be troublesome if the world does not change in
the direction which Tsutomu describes."
It sounded as if he meant that it would be troublesome
for him personally, but Otome thought that it showed how
much progress Grandpa had made.
"Yes, and that's why, Grandpa, you should not say such
things as you did the other day."
About a month earlier, when Otome was hanging up
Tsutomu's overcoat, Grandpa had turned its tattered insides
out and remarked,
"He is no good, a man nearing thirty, living in Tokyo,
and walking around in such a thing."
Otome had involuntarily lost her temper and quarreled
with him. Now she was referring to that incident.
Grandpa silently shook his knees, slowly puffing the
smoke from his pipe toward the out-of-doors where the rain
was falling softly.
Otome soon stood up to change, letting Grandma take
care of the clinging Mitsuko. While tying her obi, she felt as if
she could see Tsutomu before her eyes, clad in a suit, walking
along steadily with his mouth tightly closed, and holding an
umbrella over his small body. *
(1934)
17
Miura Meisuke, or Peasant
Rebellion Under the Banner of "Distress"*
by Herbert P. Bix
I don't think you realize how hard it is for the oppressed
to become united. Their misery unites them--once they
recognize who has caused it. "Our sufferance is a gain to
them." But otherwise tbeir misery is liable to cut tbem
off from one anotber, for they are forced to snatch the
wretched crumbs from each other's moutbs. Think bow
reluctantly men decide to revolt! It's an adventure for
them: new paths have to be marked out and followed;
moreover the rule of rulers is always accompanied by
that of their ideas. To tbe masses revolt is tbe unnatural
rather than the nature tbing . ...
(B. Brecht, "Study of the first scene
of Shakespeare's Coriolanus")
The Setting
Nanbu lay against the Pacific coast in the rugged
mountainous region of northeast Honshu, a large tozama fief
valued originally at 100,000 koku. I To its south lay Sendai, to
its west and northwest the fiefs of Akita and Tsugaru.
Abutting it along the northern coast was the small,
independent branch fief of Hachinohe, where the great Ando
ShOeki lived out his life in the first half of the eighteenth
century. Called in modern times the "Tibet of japan," this was
the region whose people would later be known for their
tenacity and stubbornness (like Nanbu hanamagari-local
salmon ascending a river), where peasant families during the
great depression of the 1930s were reduced to selling their
daughters into prostitution, where children grew up before the
war not having known the taste of sugar.
Since the Kamakura period the old and powerful Nanbu
family had ruled over the region from their headquarters in the
castle town of Morioka. During the first century of Tokugawa
rule, which began in 1603, Nanbu's economy grew on the basis
of mining and the development of commerce, in a manner
similar to the other semi-autonomous fiefs into which feudal
japan was divided. But soon enough the country's rice
economy evolved into a money economy, without any
accompanying political legitimation. The feudal lords of
Nanbu then grew more oppressive, as they themselves were
oppressed by the bakufu government at Edo. As the
This essay appears in Great Historical Figures of Japan by Murakami
Hyoe (editor). (Tokyo: Japan Culture Institute) 1978, pp. 243-260.
eighteenth century drew to a close, a marked decline could be
seen in the fortunes of three of the four official classes caught
up in the self-destructive bakuhan system. Only the lowly
merchants continued to prosper.
In the northeast the crisis of feudal disintegration
worked itself out with particular severity, aggravated by a
succession of devastating famines and droughts. Nanbu lost
49,600 people through starvation in the great Horeki famine
of 1755, more than ten percent of the fief's entire population
of 358,000. The scars of that disaster had hardly healed when
the famines of the Tenmei era (1781-88) struck, taking
another 65,000 lives and causing over 10,500 dwellings to be
abandoned.
2
With rice productivity low even in the best of
times, the peasants were compelled for their very survival to
seek other sources of food and income. Whereupon the
daimyos of Morioka levied new taxes, obstructing rather than
encouraging the development of new lines of industry and
commerce. Not content to take tribute from the peasants in
accordance with the standard ratio of "six to the prince and
four to the people," they devised taxes on every form of
profitable activity. Finally, because the fief's treasury and cash
reserves were chronically depleted, and pressed by the
unending burdens of the sankin kotai system, they moved
toward a strategy of reinforcing samurai control over the
countryside and squeezing the peasants even harder. The
peasants of Nanbu, although unarmed by law and at the mercy
of the fief's. officials, answered back, drawing on a long
tradition of peasant rebellions_
During the Tokugawa period there were at least 2,967
peasant uprisings (ikki), and if urban and rural disturbances are
included the figure comes to over 4,000.
3
The authors of
Nibon zankoku monogatari [Tales of Cruelty in japan) give a
figure of 1,240 major peasant uprisings during the early
modern period and claim that as many as 361 or 29 percent
occurred in the northeast. And more occurred in Nanbu than
in any other fief in japan-96 by one count and 120 according
to another.
4
As the nineteenth century unfolded and Western
military pressure on japan grew, the rebellions in Nanbu
intensified: in tempo, size, planning, degree of organization
and militancy. Finally, in the year of Commodore Perry's
arrival at Uraga, they culminated in one of the greatest and
most anti-feudal peasant uprisings in all of Tokugawa history.
This was the uprising that began in May 1853 and twice swept
Kunohe, Shimohei and Kamihei-Nanbu's Three Hei Districts
18
(Sanheidari)-toppling the corrupt regime in Morioka castle
and forcing its successor to accept and implement most of the
demands of the people. Directed against the authority of
Nanbu itself, it brought 16-17,000 people onto the road in a
meticulously planned and executed mass exodus from the fief;
and it represented, in the last analysis, the striving from below
for a wider market free from feudal restrictions.
This short essay has a dual objective which is, first, to
present a few of the more important economic and political
factors behind the famous 1853 rebellion against Nanbu fief
that have a bearing on the thought of Miura Meisuke
(1820-64). Meisuke, at age thirty-three, joined the command
group of the rebellion at a critical stage and was probably the
main drafter of the forty-nine peasant demands. Later, while
in prison, he went on to produce a unique document, the
"Prison Memorandums and Letters," which historian Mori
Kahei, the first scholar to have found it, has named the
Gokuchuki. Second, by characterizing the contradictions in
Meisuke's Class position it is possible to point out some salient
features of his thought as revealed in the Gokuchuki, and to
show the contribution that the peasants, particularly those of
the dissolving nanushi stratum from which Meisuke sprang,
made to overthrowing Tokugawa feudalism from within and
preparing for the Meiji Restoration.
The Class Struggle in
Nanbu Fief
The story of the Nanbu uprisings and of Miura Meisuke,
whose life spanned the worst period of misgovernment in the
fief's history, must be set first in the larger framework of
peasant rebellions (hyakusho ikki) that arose in the last forty
years of the Bakuhan system and feudal society. Although
nineteenth century rebellions displayed an essential historical
continuity with those of the preceding centuries, they also had
characteristics that set them apart from earlier Tokugawa
rebellions.
For one thing there were more of them and they were
being paralleled at the local level by unchikowashi and sodo,
the largely spontaneous and highly destructive collective
actions of proletarianized peasants and urban poor. Although
exact figures for minor disturbances are not available, scholars
have counted as many as 479 ikki between 1830 and 1867. As
in the early Tokugawa period, they occurred all over Japan but
were most numerous in five areas: Nanbu (presentday Iwate
Prefecture), Iwashiro (Fukushima Prefecture), Echigo (Niigata
Prefecture), Shinano (Nagano Prefecture) and Iyo (Ehime
Prefecture).5 By contrast, the fiefs of the southwest which
were to launch the Meiji Restoration-Satsuma, Choshii and
Tosa-and which have been studied the most intensively by
Western scholars, experienced comparatively few.
6
Second, whereas nearly all the rebellions of the
Tokugawa period can be regarded as expressing the structural
contradictions of the closed bakuhan system, and the peasants'
desire for liberation from feudal oppression, those at the end
of the period expressed both in a more self-conscious, if not
class conscious, way. They also expressed the peasan t belief in
the ikki as an actual right, to be exercised when all other
peaceful tactics had failed and their basic existence stood to be
destroyed by intolerable feudal tax levies and corvees.
7
Peasants who rose up in late feudal society, when the
possibility for material progress-even in backward Nanbu
was becoming self-evident, gave freer reign than ever before to
their underlying moralism, to their pride at being society's
producers, and to their belief in their own indispensability to
the fief.
8
Third, the form of protest at the fief level underwent a
subtle change. On the occasion of earlier uprisings, either
individuals or councils representing entire villages, would draw
up a petition of grievances and take it personally to some
higher feudal often the domain lord himself, or
even the shogun, thereby violating the feudal chain of
command. This was the daihyo ossa, a traditional form of
protest that ran the penalty of death, but which expressed in a
veiled way the groping from below for a new system of rule.
By the 1840s and '50s, however, the mass ossa began to
acquire a dual significance as the feudal system itself entered
the final stage of disintegration. Not only did the ossa break
the feudal chain of command and reveal a scale of class
consciousness that was more national than fief-bound but the
peasants in the process were starting to proclaim the
illegitimacy of the fief itself-first by threatening, and then by
actually implementing the threat to seek redress in other fiefs.
This was a progression in anti-feudal consciousness and
nowhere was it more clearly expressed than in Nanbu. Thus,
when the first rebellion of the Three Hei Districts erupted, on
As the nineteenth century unfolded and western military
pressure on Japan grew, the rebellions in Nanbu intensi
fied: in tempo, size, planning, degree of organization
and militancy. Finally, in the year of Commodore
Perry's arrival at Uraga, they culminated in one of the
greatest and most anti-feudal peasant uprisings in all of
Tokugawa history.
December 2, 1847, over 12,000 peasants followed the
seventy-year-old Yagobei, their leader, only as far as Tono, a
dependent fiefdom within Nanbu domain. It was to Tano's
karo, Nitta Kojuro, also a direct retainer of the Nanbu family,
that the rebel petition and demands were submitted.
9
The
implied threat to go outside the fief, as well as the tone of
despair, are unmistakable.
We are coming out to the door of the Bakufu because the
Nanbu family is so crude. Peasants are people of the
country [i.e., not of a particular fief] and therefore we
want benevolent intervention by the Bakufu. ... We can
hardly live in this fief So that even if we seize all the boats
on the coast and row out with the winds as far as the coasts
of such foreign lands as China or India, we will find a better
place to live than this. 10
Six years after this first major uprising of the Three Hei
Districts-after Yagobei had died in jail in Morioka and after
the fief government had broken everyone of its promises to
the peasants-they rose up again in the Three lIei Districts, not
even bothering to appeal to the fief at all. The rebellion of
1853, in which Miura Meisuke participated as Yagobei's
spiritual successor, carried thousands of peasants southward
19
across the border into Toni Village in neighboring Sendai fief.
From there, if their demands were not met, they were
prepared to go on to Edo.
Why were the peasants of the Three Hei Districts driven
repeatedly into revolt? To answer that it is necessary to review
briefly the situation in Nanbu at the opening of the nineteenth
century. By then the villages of the fief were fully enmeshed in
the money economy; the various agricultural strata had
undergone further differentiation; and the position of the
hereditary servant-owning nanushi stratum, which bore the
brunt of taxes, was becoming increasingly unstable. 11
In addition, by this time, Morioka's policy of raising
cash from merchants and rich peasants by selling them samurai
ranks at fixed prices had become an important crutch of the
regime. Desperately seeking an outlet from its financial
difficulties, the fief government continued to expand the ranks
of the samurai class. 12 It did this by reviving in the countryside
the medieval "retainer" system, implied by the term Jikata
Kyunin. In its new (pseudo) incarnation, jikata kyunin meant
"local resident official." Originating from the nanushi stratum,
the kyunin had acquired considerable wealth through land
reclamation, iron mmmg, fishing and money lending.
Significantly, after purchasing samurai status and becoming
enfeoffed, they continued living right in the villages,
supervising the activities of the peasants and directly
participating in the suppression of their rebellions. This
despised stratum of pseudo "retainers," the "local resident
officials," totaled only 361 in 1738. By 1827 their number
had swelled to 559. But thereafter they grew by leaps and
bounds, going from 760 in 1831 to 1164 in 1858 and 1151 in
1861.
13
The greatest proliferation of kyunin occurred in the
heartland of the Three Hei Districts-Ozuchi, Miyako and
Noda-and that was a major factor in the rebellions of those
years.
Besides spawning kyunin, who lived in the villages like
the goshi ("rustic samurai") of Satsuma, Morioka also
established a stratum of kaneage zamurai (literally, "money
contributing samurai"), who were really privileged merchant
capitalists. Unlike the kyunin, the latter went to live in
Morioka castle in direct service to the lord, under whom some
of them set fief policy. Ishihara Migiwa, who figured
prominently as an object of peasant hatred during the 1853
rebellion, was an oil merchant who rose to the position of karo
(fief elder) after his daughter became Lord Toshitada's
concubine. A document quoted in the Nihon zankoku
monogatari captures the image of this kaneage zamurai in the
eyes of a samurai chronicler.
The high officiallshihara Yusubei {MigiwaJ of Nanbu, who
came from the chonin class and by mysterious fortune
became. a fief retainer, was gradually promoted. Sitting
beside the lord, he flattered and seduced him with his
sycophantic words just as Chao Kao of the Ch'in dynasty
did. Flatterers and sycophants who became familiar with
Migiwa, at both upper and lower ranks, indulged themselves
in selfish desires. Meanwhile Migiwa, who was in command
of those people, sought to cover his own corrupt practices
through them. He developed his evil schemes day after day,
with the result that tributes were doubled every year,
causing great suffering among the people. 14
If the emergence of kyunin most vividly signalled the blurring
of the line between samurai (shi) and peasants (no), then the
kaneage zamurai symbolized the fief's policy of sheer tax
pillaging, as another document cited in the above source
confirms.
First they [fief authorities] would contrive excuses and
demand tax paymf"1ts on unjustifiable grounds. But later,
because the were reluctant to comply, they
resorted to illegal means, treated people harshly and even
arrested them. And if the peasants failed to pay assigned
taxes on the day due they would press them unmercifully.
And, in addition to taxes, those rascals in lower offices and
the ruthless prison guards would seize household effects as
reminder fees. One can hardly bear to see their insatiable
greed. IS
The tax abuses, peasant protests and turmoil which
accompanied the rise of the kyunin and the kaneage zamurai
meant that the very groups Morioka was relying on to keep the
peasants under control and augment its wealth were actually
undermining the framework of the fief itself. Yet the threat of
fiscal insolvency, which grew as the bakufu added to Nanbu's
coastal defense obligations, compelled Morioka to continue its
rule over the peasants with the aid of big merchant capital.
The years 1820-1840 saw the establishment of new
monopolies on silkworm egg-cards and cotton thread (1822),
on salt (1823), on marine products (1832 and 1837),16
together with new taxes of all sorts-all at a time when famine
raged in the countryside. It was in this period that the
thirty-eighth daimyo of Nanbu, Toshitada, by his indiscretions
managed to crystallize the discord at his court into two
factions: one that supported him together with the kaneage
zamurai, and another that supported his eldest son,
Toshitomo. As friction between the pro- and anti-Toshitada
cliques deepened, the peasants stirred themselves. Rebellions
occurred in 1836-1837 and in 1847 the peasants of the Three
Hei Districts rose up, organized and led by the intrepid
Yagobei. The 1847 uprising, seventeen years in the planning,
succeeded in forcing the bakufu's intervention and Toshitada's
retirement from the headship of the Nanbu family; but little
else. He continued to rule the fief with an iron hand, hastening
its ruination, while his weak-kneed son, Toshihisa, ruled as
nominal daimyo. Moreover he immediately returned to the
only financial policy he knew-forced loans and donations and
crushing taxes, thereby breaking his promise of a moratorium
on taxes to the Sanheidori peasants. The ingredients for a new
social explosion piled up until finally, in 1853, a year the lord
was scheduled to make the costly journey to Edo, the peasants
of the Sanhei seized their chance.
The Nanbu Uprising of 1853
The uprising staged on May 20, 1853, by the peasants
from Tanohata Village in the Noda District of Nanbu, quickly
developed into a great rebellion. Young and old, men, women
and children, whole villages participated, carrying with them in
straw backpacks food and provisions for a long exodus from
the fief. The object was to flee into Sendai, smashing any
resistance encountered on the way. The march was led by a
command group, numbering approximately 300, which raised
a great banner inscribed with the words, "In Distress" (made
by combining the character ko [small] with a circle [marul to
be read as komaru). Each participating village constituted a
military unit with its own banner of identification: a number.
20
As new villages joined the march, armed marshals from the
command group, calling themselves "petty magistrates"
(kobugyo), some wearing white hanten with red sashes and
others wearing yellow hanten with white sashes, were
deployed to meet them. During the course of the march they
attacked the Daikan's office in Nodadori, smashed a samurai
detachment sent out to stop them and destroyed the sake shop
of Sato Gisuke, a large mine operator and kaneage zamurai.
In June 1853, the organized peasants of the Sanhei,
reduced by half to approximately 8500, crossed the border
into Sendai fief. Up to that point their leadership seems to
have been a large council. But sometime after the marchers
reached Toni Village in Sendai the command seems to have
fallen to three men, the main one of whom was Miura
Meisuke, a stoutly built, eloquent, minor official from
Kuribayashi Village who had not been part of the core group
at the start of the uprising. However, as one source speculates,
Meisuke may already have been involved at the planning stage
of the rebellion under several pesudonyms, one of which was
Yakichi.17
Of the actions of the peasant leaders after entering
Sendai only two need concern us. One was the presentation of
their petition to the daimyo of Sendai, the Date family, who
had long had territorial ambitions on the adjacent districts of
Nanbu; the other their passing over of a list of grievances and
demands. These documents summarize the history of peasant
oppression in Nanbu and constitute as well a damning
indictment from below of late Tokugawa feudalism in general.
To The Lord of Sendai from the
Peasants of the Sanhei
-We Respectfully Make This Petition
1. We sincerely aspire to see that Lord Kai no Kami
[Toshitomol, now retired in Edo, comes back to the
fief.
2. We sincerely aspire to see you keep benevolently in
your fief all the peasants coming from Sanheidori and
save their lives.
3. We aspire that you designate Sanheidori to be a part
of the bakufu domain and if this is not possible,
designate it to be part of Sendai domain. 18
After presenting this petition to Sendai officials in Toni,
the peasant leaders were questioned as to what had caused
them to rebel. Miura Meisuke is then believed to have drawn
up this list of forty-nine specific complaints against Nanbu
fief, only some of which are quoted below. The grievances
show that despite the economic advances made in Japan since
the seventeenth century, the mechanisms for extracting t
surplus from the peasants devised at that time, as well as t
political control structure at both upper and lower leve
remained essentially intact right down to the middle of t
nineteenth century.
The peasants are suffering from these things:
1. Advance payment of fixed corvees.
2. In addition to taxes in lieu of fixed corvees, excessive
taxes have been levied on the peasants several times a
year since twenty years ago and ten times last year, and
twice this year large sums have been ordered to be paid.
3. Exorbitantly high prices have been fixed for the
annual rice tribute, though formerly peasants paid in
<aSh at the rate quoted at the Miyako exchange.
4. We are suffering because ever since the Bunsei era
[1818-29] all sorts of public works [ukeoigoto] have
been imposed.
5. We are suffering from the fief's hoarding [okaimono I
of soybeans, floss silk and other things.
6. In recent years we have had four Daikan; previously
we had just two.
7. In recent years we have had six Forest Magistrates,
though in the Bunsei era Daikan usually held the two
posts concurrently.
Morioko

.lapan
21
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8. In recent years we have had four officials under the
Daikan sent from the castle town, while formerly we had
two local resident officials [kyunin] .
9. In recent years we have had four clerks [i.e. lowly
samurai, equivalent to asbigaru] ; formerly we had one
clerk. (Since foods are paid for by the peasants, as the
number of officials increases, the peasants suffer
accordingly. )
10. In recent years we have had four officials in charge
of cattle and horses whereas previously we had only one.
12. The villages are suffering from the burden of having
to care for [fief] horses and cattle until they foal and
calf.
33. We are suffering from the losses involved in the
manufacture of gunpowder, i.e. having to furnish
firewood for the making of gunpowder and supplying
our own houses as sites for this manufacture.
39. We are suffering from matters relating to the fief
monopoly on copper mines.
46. We are suffering from the increased transport,
communication and travel corvees that have accom
panied the increase in the number of officials [we must
support] since the Bunsei era.
47. Speaking of contributions to the lord, we would like
to have the kimoiri bring the tribute directly to the lord
while he is in the fief as was the practice in the past.
48. We are suffering because the various ranks of
samurai who were promoted to that status fifty years
ago were formerly peasants.
49. Chiitaro and Shunji of Atsuka Village, two leaders
of those who assembled in Tono seven years ago were
banished to Ushitaki.
In October 1853, months after the Nanbu peasant leaders had
secured Morioka's immediate acquiescence to all but eleven of
the above demands,2O they made the return of the remaining
forty-five to Nanbu fief conditional on the acceptance of four
additional demands, and exchanged papers with officials of
Sendai fief as follows:
1. that various types of taxes be paid directly as in the
previous year;
2. that debts of all peasants of the Sanhei be paid in
installments for thirty years;
3. that upon their return to the fief the people
assembled not be arrested;
4. that Ogawa Kiyoshi, Ogawa Ichizaemon and Ogawa
Naoemon [kaneage zamurai] not be appointed
officials.
21
Miura Meisuke
Let us now see who the man was who had carried the
second Sanheidori uprising to its successful conclusion.
Meisuke was an educated peasant whose position in the
market and administrative structure of his home village was
hereditarily privileged, giving him a status above the majority
of the villagers. A minor village official, he also operated as a
small rural merchant who, when the need arose, lent money to
other peasants. Breaking down the various determinants of his
class position:
First, he was a small-scale, independent landowner and
agricultural producer whose family worked the land with the
22
help of four hereditary servants or bondsmen, remnants of the
historically superseded serf system. After his participation in
the Sanheidori uprisings, this agricultural-producer aspect of
Meisuke seems to have waned, a fact that also reflected the
difficulty of farming under the onerous system of tax levies
imposed by the fief government.
Second, he was a petty merchant who "purchased rice
from Tsuchizawa and Hanamaki and marketed it in the Three
Hei Districts." 22 Another source describes him selling
"agricultural produce from the interior of Nanbu in exchange
for marine products from Ozuchi and Kamaishi." 23 This
second aspect of Meisuke, his merchant concern, apparently
grew throughout his life. By the time of his arrest, he appears
to have resolved to enjoy the freedom of the middleman,
earning as lucrative a living as possible through merchant trade.
Third, as the son of a kimoiri (literally, village
"caretaker") Meisuke was a hereditary member of Kuribayashi
village'S official elite. Kimoiri families belonged to the
dissolving nanushi stratum mentioned earlier. They traced
their origins back to the Sengoku period of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, when their ancestors fought side by side
with local samurai, which is why Meisuke retained his
surname. It is worth noting that Meisuke showed no particular
distaste at being a privileged member of the old village elite. In
fact, holding such a position was perfectly congruent with his
ideal of material affluence and living life to the fullest.
Carrying this discussion of Meisuke's class position a step
further, it is possible to extrapolate two principle features.
Meisuke may be seen as reflecting the interests of petty
merchant capital in a period of feudal disintegration, when
strong possibilities existed for the rapid rise or rapid fall of
different social strata. His own family stood in an intermediate
position above the ordinary (lower and middle) echelon
peasants and below the new kyunin or pseudo-retainer class of
local resident officials that Morioka re-created for the dual
purpose of keeping the peasantry under control and meeting
its own dire need for money. Had Meisuke himself been more
venal, had he not hated the growing absolutism of the fief
government, had he not chaffed at the poverty, isolation and
countless restrictions on life and trade in Nanbu, then it is
possible that he might have sided with the kyunin who also
sprang from the nanushi stratum. Instead, to his credit, he
chose to share the indignation of the majority of poor peasants
of the region and participate with others in leading the
rebellion against the fief.
Where feudal theory sawall value as emanating from
land to its possession, Meisuke locates its source in
man and his labor. A small merchant and agricultural
producer, Meisuke played his role on the stage of his
tory just at the moment when a break had occurred in
the disintegration of Japan's feudal mode of production
-a break symbolized by the linking of the country to
the expanding world capitalist market system and by the
virtual revolution against Nanbu fief, both in the year
1853.
Secondly, by virtue of his position as a Village Elder
(otonayaku) Meisuke stood in an objectively antagonistic
relationship to the poor, the majority of the village, his own
personal integrity and uprightness notwithstanding. In March
1853, two months before the rebellion, he had advanced a
loan of 76 kan 300 mon to someone, accepting as security the
labor of a forty-eight year old man.24 His family account book
of 1856 reveals also that he had earlier lent over 93 ryo to
peasants living within Kuribayashi Village and to others in
Ozuchimachi, Senbokumachi, rono and Kamaishi.
25
Meisuke
however seems not to have confronted the pitfalls in his own
position. Yet once the lord of Morioka submitted to the
peasants' demands, the unity of the villages would dissolve and
the smaller contradictions inherent in his situation would
inevitably reassert themselves. The optimistic Meisuke's failure
to anticipate that natural reversion may have contributed to
his own undoing.
Morioka had publicly pledged itself not to arrest or
punish any of the forty-five peasant representatives who had
remained in Sendai to negotiate. But its officials, believing that
the house of Nanbu had lost face, seethed with resentment and
were looking to revenge the humiliation inflicted by the
peasants. They had somehow to find a scapegoat through
which to exorcise the spirit of the successful 0550. When
Meisuke returned home from Sendai fief after the uprising, he
immediately resumed his duties as a Village Elder (otonayaku)
in Kuribayashi. The fief officials thereupon moved to exploit
the vulnerability of the man they remembered as the tough
peasant negotiator and drafter of the rebel demands. That they
could do so presupposes the latent resentment of the majority
of poor against the village officials who also doubled as
merchants and exploiters of the lower and middle-echelon
peasants. For what occurred next was, according to one
authority, nothing less than a dispute in which the entire
New, Revised Edifion
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the first major Shang Dynasty site and the tomb pit
in which the Communists won their decisive victory
of the first Ch'in Emperor.
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23
village, represented by six peasants, appealed to the Daikan's
Office for the removal of the kimoiri, Heiemon, and the
appointment of Zen'emon to otonayaku, whereupon all the
otonayaku, including Meisuke, offered to resign.
26
Another
writer, emphasizing the machinations of the fief, describes
Meisuke's downfall as follows:
An ikki of thirty people under Rokuzaemon arose in
Kuribayashi Village on July 5, 1854. Meisuke tried to stop
it but it broke out again on July 21. The Daikan [of
buchi] , without investigating the case, railed at Meisuke
who had tried to get the peasants to listen to reason, and
rebuked him for his role at the time of the uprising of tbe
Three Hei Districts . ... Tbis bas tbe very strong smell of an
ikki instigated by tbe fief Meisuke, unable to bear tbe
pressures, fled tbe fief on July 23 and was charged witb tbe
crimes of seizing public money and illegally leaving tbe fief
Later Meisuke repeatedly said that leaving tbe fief was a
mistake.
He was doubly stigmatized because of this and bis
pride as an ikki leader was wounded. Here is why, despite
all the dangers, he had to return to the fief, issue various
public confessions and make personal explanations. They
demonstrated his sincerity but at the same time they
provided grist for the mill of tbose who were out to get
him. 27
Meisuke fled Kuribayashi Village and the jurisdiction of
the Ozuchi Daikan on July 23, 1854, leaving behind his
pregnant wife and five children.
28
From then until his arrest
and imprisonment in Morioka in 1857, his actions and
motivations are not entirely clear. By his own account, as
reconstructed by Moti Kahei, he stayed nearly three months in
Nanbu before crossing into Sendai in early October 1855.
While in Sendai he became affiliated with two Tendai sect
temples that seem to have been connected with the Nijo
family in Kyoto. These were Sekiunji, where his brother served
as a resident priest, and Nishinobo, where he stayed for a year,
becoming a priest himself and practicing a type of ascetic
mountain worship. In late October 1856 he returned secretly
to Nanbu staying at different places and managing somehow to
communicate with his family. His diary entry for November
21, 1856, states, "Finally I am ready to go." On December 23,
1856, he arrived in Kyoto, where he later said he became a
retainer to the noble court family of the Nijo. After staying
only four days in Kyoto he departed for what was tp be his
last return journey to Nanbu. Meisuke was arrested on July 4,
1857. It was recorded that at the time "he was calling himself
Miura Meisuke, a retainer of the Nijo, bearing a signboard
saying 'In the Service of Lord Nijo,' wearing two swords,
accompanied by servants and walking swaggeringly past the
guard house at Hirata Village.,,29
In 1864, in the sixth year of his imprisonment, Meisuke
died, too soon by three years to witness the dismantling of the
feudal political order, an historical event he had helped fur
ther by his own actions apart from his conscious motives.
The invaluable record of his thinking which he left behind, the
Gokuchuki, is essentially a collection of four notebooks of
letters and diaries to his family written between June 1859
and February 1861. (The first three were completed between
September 26, 1859, and sometime in 1860, and the last in
February 1861.)30 Notebooks one and two open with an
invocation to three popular peasant deities, under whose
banner peasant uprisings often occurred:
Hachiman Daibosatsu: May Peace Prevail Under Heaven
Tensho Kotaijingu: A Prayer [i.e. in this country]
Kasuga Daimyojin: Safety for the Country31
Hachiman was a quasi-Buddhist deity and the ancestral god of
Minamoto. Kasuga Daimyojin, the god honored in the Kasuga
Shrine in Nara, was the ancestral god of the Fujiwara family
and a figure associated with syncretic Shintoism. Tensho
Kotaijingu, the sun goddess in Japanese mythology associated
with the creation of Japan, was another object of peasant folk
belief, though her connection at this time with the emperor
living in seclusion at Kyoto is a matter of dispute among
scholars. A prayer offered to Tensho Kotaijingu did not, one
suspects, necessarily connote a peasant belief in loyalty to the
emperor.
THE
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CHINA'S RURAL INDUSTRIES: SELF
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But having stressed the very mundane and non
nationalist content of the opening invocation, it is still possible
to interpret it, as Yasumaru Yoshio has, as expressing the
intimate connection Meisuke made between certain "universal
tasks on a national scale-peace and safety for the
country"-and the way he devised to achieve "wealth and
prosperity and the perpetuation of the family line for all the
descendants." 32
In fact, Meisuke's prescriptions for his family for
achieving that goal constitutes the main theme of the
Gokucbuki. And in describing "the way of wealth and
prosperity" (gokuraku no bo)-the title of a letter addressed to
his family on june 16, implies that even in
backward Nanbu fief a market for handicrafts exists and that,
when all land is lost, it is still possible not only to survive but
to live provided one works hard and diligently.
The Bulletin in your classrooms?
Of Course!
For the past year we have been listing 'sets' of back issues that
are available for classroom purchase and assignment (or for
your own research).
India ('set' listed in 9:1)
China (9:1 Be 9:4)
Korea (9:2)
Thailand (9:3)
japan (10:1 Be 10:2)
Imperialism in Asia (9:3)
The 'Green Revolution' (10:1)
Gordon Bennett (Univ. of Texas) is one person who has tried
the package on China. The situation: an undergraduate lecture
course, "Politics of China," emphasizing the nature of the
Chinese state since the beginning of the revolution. Enroll
ment: 30-50 students. Here is his solicited (but unpaid)
comment:
Every year students ask most frequently about economic
policies-development strategy, rural industries, work incen
tives, food supply, arId so on-so I need readings in this area
that non-economists can comprehend. Some texts are available
but they are usually too long, too expensive, or tbey assume
that readers already know some economics.
The Bulletin's articles on China have several advantages.
They cover several aspects of China's economic policy. Each
piece is short enough for assignment in one class. They are
intended for non-economists, yet the writing is scholarly. And
you get entire issues of the Bulletin with all the other articles.
* * * * *
If you prefer, make up your own set.
A complete list is free.
Write to: B.C.A.S., Box W, Charlemont, MA 01339.
-
Man should go to bed late in the evening to do work worth
30 mono By day earn 35 mon, thus totaling 65 mono With
tbis much he may support himself for a day. .. First let
me write down tbe day's expenses: for each person, 30 mon
for rice, five mon for miso, 5 mon for fish, 5 mon for
radish, 10 mon for kimono and another 10 mon for
services. Thus totaling 65 mon to be needed everyday.
Therefore, each should work for 65 mon for one day and
one evening in order to live a comfortable life. This method
of living is devised to meet requirements when our fields
[lit. paddies and uplands} are lost to us. Keeping this in
mind, each of you should earn 65 mon by doillg some
suitable handicraft in an emergency, so that you may not
disclose your weaknesses to your enemies. To show your
back means flight [i.e. stay in tbe village by doing
handicrafts}.
Man sbould seek to earn money. I mentioned this
method for the time when one has insufficient land to
support oneself 33
An essential part of Meisuke's outlook, boldly stated at
the beginning of the Gokuchuki, was a belief in man rather
than in land as the source of all value. After telling his family,
who had fallen into distress because of his escape and
imprisonment, not to be afraid of debts or loss of land, he goes
on to declare,
If one compares man and tbe rice fields, man is tbe Udonge
flower [i.e. tbat magical flower tbat makes fortune} that
blooms only once in 3,000 years. 34
And a little later he adds:
On holidays go to bed early. You should revere your spirit
from tbe bottom ofyour heart. If I may say, the figure ofa
man is quite like the moon and sun. Just as you worship
them, every morning you should pray to your own soul. 3S
Where feudal theory sawall value as emanating from
land to its possession, Meisuke locates its source in man and
his labor. A small merchant and agricultural producer, Meisuke
played his role on the stage of history just at the moment
when a break had occurred in the disintegration of japan's
feudal mode of production-a break symbolized by the linking
of the country to the expanding world capitalist market
system and by the virtual revolution against Nanbu fief, both
in the year 1853. At this juncture, a merchant with Meisuke's
experience could perceive the possibilities of the situation and
the power of the individual ruled by peasant values of
diligence, thrift, hard work and honesty, to realize those
possibilities. The foundation for his self-confidence and his
modern insight that man was the very "Udonge flower"-the
source of all value-lay precisely in his immersion in the
developing capitalist market sector.
But that immersion in the market also accounts for his
despair with the fief, which retarded the economy and the
peasants' desperate efforts to eke out a living by developing
trade and handicrafts. Miesuke's mood changes as his years in
prison go on. A letter to his family dated September 27
[probably 1860) states,
. .. whenever you have to leave the fief, you should make
the rumor that you are moving to Morioka. Wherever you
may move to, you should make that ru11'l0r. You should
arrange things very carefully. However, if I am not killed,
25
you should not go anywhere. If I am killed, I sincerely hope
you will move to one of these five places: Matsumae,
Tsugaru, Shiogama fa port near Sendai] and Ishinomaki fa
port within the fief of SendaiJ. 36
Finally in one of the rare political statements in the
Gokuchuki and one often dwelt on by writers,37 he observes
Heaven is benevolent but because the lord of the domain
lacks benevolence everything is difficult. 38
Conclusion
Rebel leaders like Miura Meisuke expressed a vague
longing for a larger public authority, which to them meant
greater freedom-and, in a sense, greater freedom could be
expected under the direct rule of the bakufu than under
Nanbu fief. But their criticism of local fief authority did not
entail a grasp of the limitations of the bakuhan system itself.
Lacking opportunities for communication across feudal
boundaries, lacking the intellectual catalyst of a community of
revolutionary intellectuals, they found it difficult to build on
their own historical experiences and to develop their own
analytical capabilities for grasping political realities. In other
words, a continuous tradition of peasant rebellions such as
existed in Nanbu, where the memory of Yagobei was still fresh
in 1853, was not the same thing as an intellectual heritage of
revolutionary thought. The tragedy of Miura Meisuke and
Notes
I wish to thank Okubo Genji for many pleasant occasions on
which we discussed Nanbu ikki and Kano Tsutomu for reading
and commenting on the text.
1. See Kodama Kota et al. (eds.), Kinseishi handobukku
[Handbook of Early Modern HistoryI (Tokyo, Kondo Shuppansha,
1972), p. 58. Nanbu, also called Morioka fief, had its seignorial value in
rice, that is to say, its ranking in the feudal order increased to 200,000
koku in 1808. A useful annotated bibliography on Nanbu is found on
pages 58-60.
2. Miyamoto Tsuneichi, Yamamoto Shugoro et al. (eds.),
Nihon zankoku mongatari, daisanbu-sakoku no higeki [Tales of
Cruelty in Japan, Part 3, The Tragedy of Seclusion) (Tokyo,
Heibonsha, 1960), p. 304.
3. Shoji Kichinosuke, Hayashi Motoi and Yasumaru Yoshoi
(eds.), Nihon shiso taikei 58-Minshu undo no shiso [Outline Series on
Japanese Thought, Vol. 58, The Thought of the People's Movements)
(Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1970), p. 391.
4. Nihon zankoku, p. 307, and Sasaki Junnosuke (ed.), Nihon
minshu no rekishi 5, Yonaoshi [History of the Japanese People, Vol. 5,
Millenarian Movements) (Tokyo, Sanseido, 1974), p. 209.
5. Murakami Hyoe, Seinen no sanmyaku -ish in no naka no sei
to shi [Youth Who Mack History-Life and Death in the Meiji
Restorationl (Tokyo, Tokuma Shoten, 1966), p. 58.
6. Perhaps one reason for the onesided, rose-colored
interpretation of the Tokugawa period in most postwar Western
accounts is the neglect of peasant rebellions and, indeed, the history of
the plight and aspirations of the peasants.
7. Minshu undo, p. 397.
8. See Kano Tsutomu, "Peasant Uprisings and Citizens'
Revolts," in The Japan Interpreter, vol. 8, No. 3 (Autumn 1973),
279-83.
9. Nihon zankoku, p. 313.
10. Quoted in Sasaki, Nihon minshu, p. 210.
11. See Moriya Yoshimi, "Bakumatsu koshinhan no keizaiteki
jokyo-Morioka han bakumatsu hyakusho ikki no yobiteki kosatsu no
tame ni," in Nihonshi kenkyu, Nos. 150-51 (March 1975), pp. 184-86.
12. According to Moriya (Ibid., p. 187) the full-scale sale of
samurai ranks began in 1773 though the policy itself antedated the
17005.
others like him was that, lacking such a heritage, they could
find no way to raise their desire for human freedom to a
self-conscious and anti-feudal ideology.39
Yet in two basic ways Meisuke at least did effect a
transcendence and transvaluation of feudal ideology. Through
involvement in the market economy of the fi.ef he came to
perceive that man and his labor, rather than land, was the
source of all value, and that it was better for man to serve an
impersonal master-the bakufu or even the emperor-rather
than remain the private possession of a feudal lord. Ultimately,
Meisuke's outlook had acquired, by the time of his arrest if
not earlier, a specifically non-feudal, indeed bourgeois content.
Then, toward the end of his life, deprived of physical freedom
and the hope of ever again being able to satisfy his nature
through labor, he even displayed the characteristic dualism of
the petite bourgeoisie. The optimism of the early letters of the
Gokuchuki changed swiftly to despair and the gokuraku no
ho, that prescription for the good life, revealed its essential
ambiguity: the temporal way of wealth and prosperity
reverted to the religious way of paradise. The last entry in the
Gokuchuki reads:
Discard the sense of rivalry;
Be free from stinginess;
Do not mind being laughed at by people;
Do not care where you end your life.
On this day of February 24, 1861
I abandoned desires. 40
13. I am indebted to Kikuchi Hayao for kindly giving me data
on the growth in numhers of kyunin from his own research on the
Nanbu fief. Kikuchi's most recent essay is "Miura Meisuke 'Matsumae'
ijuron no shiteki igi," in Rekishi hyoron, No. 331 (November 1977),
pp.68-79.
14. Nihon zankoku, p. 320.
15. Nihon zankoku, pp. 32()'21.
16. Moriya, "Bakumatsu koshinhan," p. 192.
17. Nihon zankoku, p. 321.
18. Mori Kahei, Nanbuhan hyakusho ikki no shidosha, Miura
Meisuke den [A Biography of Miura Meisuke: A Leader of the Nanbu
Peasant Uprisings) (Tokyo, Heibonsha, 1962), p. 41.
19. Ibid., pp. 41-45.
20. Morioka rejected four of the demands outright (33, 39,47,
48), promised to investigate three (20, 25, 40) and claimed that five
others (23,26,31,32,37) were not clear.
21. Miura Meisuke den, p. 73.
22. Nihon zankoku, p. 332.
23. Minshu undo p. 421.
24. Fukaya Katsumi, "Koseitaiteki kiki no dankai ni okeru
jinmin-'Miura Meisuke Gokuchuki' no kento 0 tsujite," in Minshushi
kenkyu, No. 75 (April-May 1969), p. 61.
25. Ibid., p. 61.
26. Fukaya, p. 62.
27. Minshu undo, p. 443.
28. This paragraph summarizes Mori Kahei's account in Minshu
undo, p. 443.
29. Cited by Mori in Minshu undo, p. 444.
30. Ibid., 445.
31. Miura Meisuke den, pp. 219, 228.
32. Minshu undo, p. 428.
33. Miura Meisuke den, pp. 234-35.
34. Ibid., p. 220.
35. Ibid., p. 221.
36. Ibid., p. 245.
37. See Sasaki, p. 212; and Yasumaru Yoshio in Minshu undo.
p.448.
38. Miura Meisuke den, p. 253.
39. Minshu undo, p. 421.
40. Miura Meisuke den, p. 254.
26
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NEW TITLES 1978
Land and Labor in China
By R. H. Tawney, with an
introduction by Barrington Moore, Jr.
I
"Considering the materials with which Tawney had
to work and the state of knowledge about China at that
time, this book is an outstanding tour de force . ..
(and) is likely to retain its value for a long time to come.
From this book, as from no other known to me, it is
possible to learn why a peasant revolution might give
the Communists their opportunity, not why all these
things had to happen."-from the introduction
216 pages 0-87332-106-5 Paper: $5.95 Now Available
f
China's Finance and Trade: A Policy Reader
1
Edited with commentaries by Gordon Bennett,
1 University of Texas, Austin
A survey designed as a course text in contemporary
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and pre-Cultural Revolution primary sources, the
book covers the general economic line, planning and
markets, and money, banking and investment.
I
256 pages 0-87332-115-4 Paper: $8.95 June
Chinese Economic Planning
Translations from Chi-hua ching-chi
Edited with an introduction by Nicholas R. Lardy,
Yale University; Translated by K.K. Fung
Selected from late 1950s issues of the organ of the
State Planning Commission and the State Economic
Commission. Increasingly relevant as China's post-Mao
leadership stresses anew economic growth and
modernization and a return to more regularized,
formalized economic planning.
" ... a benchmark for measuring the evolution of
Chinese planning principles and practice since the First
Five-Year Plan."-from the introduction
280 pages 0-87332-117-8 $20.00 July
China and the Three Wlrlds
A Foreign Policy Reader
Edited with an introduction by
King C. Chen, Rutgers University,
and Michael Y. M. Kau, Brown University
Emphasizing major current issues, this useful course
text is a collection of Chinese internal and public
documents written or published by-and-Iarge between
1972 and 197Z Covered are Chinese policies toward
and relations with the three worlds, including the theory
of revolutionary diplomacy, Sino-American
rapproachement, anti-super power hegemonism,
support for the Third World, relations between foreign
affairs and modernization.
A lengthy, comprehensive introduction by the
editors highlights the major developments since 1949
with an emphasis on the 1970s.
0-87332-118-9 September
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Documents and Commentary
Edited with an introduction by
Peter J. Seybolt, University of Vermont,
and Gregory Kuei-ko Chiang, Middlebury College
Translations of the pertinent documents that record
the prolonged debates engendered by the bold attempt
to modernize both written and spoken Chinese. The
introduction analyzes the reasons for language reform,
its political and cultural implications, steps to be taken
to implement it, and the numerous problems
technical, historical and psychological-encountered
by promotors of reform.
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Children of the A-Bomb: I
by Tomoyuki Satoh
a boy in 4th grade
4 years old in 1945.
On that sixth of August I wasn't going to school yet. At
the time, I was playing in front of the public bath near home.
Then Sei-chan said, "Please go to the garden and pick some
flowers." So I was on my way to get them. All of a sudden
there was a big flash and I was scared and tried to go back to
the house. And all of a sudden a lot of needles got in my eyes.
I couldn't tell where anything was. When I tried to go toward
the house I bumped into the front door. When I opened my
eyes everything was darkish. Then Grandma rushed out with
Keika-chan on her back. I followed Grandma. We went toward
our bomb shelter.
My younger big sister was already inside the shelter so
the four of us huddled together. Then my older big sister came
running in and we huddled together again. That older big sister
was old enough so that she had already gone to work at a
bakery; our mother had already died from illness.
Father, who had been working with the Volunteer Labor
Group, came back and was looking to find where we were.
When she heard him, my big sister went out and took Father's
hand and led him to the shelter. Father was burned all over
above his hips. When Sister and the other people saw it they
were all scared. A stranger spread some oil on his body for
him.
In my heart I thought, "Thank you."
After that we went away to Fuchu in the hills. In a
broken temple we put up a mosquito net and we lay down
there. We stayed here for a long time. After a while other
people began to go back to their homes so we went home too.
When we got back we found that the glass was all broken, the
chests were all toppled over, the family altar was tipped over,
the shoji were torn, the roof tiles were broken and the plaster
had fallen off the walls. We all helped to clear it away and laid
Father there. After about sixty days, in the middle of the
night, Father called to Grandma and said he wanted to eat a
sweet potato. Grandma said, "All right," and cooked the sweet
potato.
"Father: the potato is she said and looked at
him, but he didn't answer. I touched his body and it was cold,
and he was already dead. Dear Father, dear Mother, good-bye.
The copyright in the U.S. and Canada for Children of the A-Bomb,
compiled by Arata Osada, is held by G_ P. Putnam's in New York
(1959). In the British Commonwealth, the English-language copyright is
held by Midwest Publishers, Ann Arbor, Michigan. The two selections
which we have reprinted here are from the Putnam edition and are
reprinted with permission.
NO
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UNFORGETTABLE FIRE:
DRAWINGS BY A-BOMB
SURVIVORS
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28
Hiroshima Survivors and the Atomic Bomb
(
I
I
I
People's Art as History
by Howard Schonberger
More than thirty years have passed since the atomic
bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite the
volumes that have been written about and photographs and
documentaries made on the A-Bomb, the world has remained
largely ignorant of what it meant to those who experienced
and survived one of the worst tragedies of modern times. But
in fact the memory of Hiroshima is especially important
today. The United States and the Soviet Union are engaged in
a nuclear arms race, and nuclear weapons and the accompany
ing technology have been diffused to a score of other nations.
A collection of drawings and paintings by A-Bomb
survivors (hibakusha) housed in the Peace Memorial Museum
in Hiroshima is a stark and shocking reminder of the barbaric
cruelry of nuclear war that still threatens the existence of all
humanity. The collection began quite by accident when, in
May 1974, Mr. Iwakichi Kobayashi, 77 years old, visited the
Japan Broadcasting Station (NHK) studio in Hiroshima. He
had a single picture with him entitled "At about 4 P.M. August
6, 1945, near Yorozyo Bridge." The picture had been inspired
by a television drama then on the air. In the crudely drawn
picture were numerous people suffering from burns and
thirsting for water. Mr. Kobayashi explained to the NHK staff
that he was at the railway station when the A-Bomb exploded
over Hiroshima and was looking for his son at the time he
witnessed the scene drawn in his picture. The NHK staff was
awed by the extraordinary power of Mr. Kobayashi's picture
and the vividness of his memory even after the passage of
thirty years. The Yorozyo Bridge, to which they had
previously paid no attention, suddenly took on a new
meaning. Conscious that a generation of A-Bomb survivors
would soon pass, NHK officials decided to immediately launch
an experiment. At the conclusion of a documentary entitled
"A Single Picture" based on Mr. Kobayashi's drawing and
aired on a local morning program in June 1974, NHK appealed
to survivors to draw "Pictures of the A-Bomb."
Almost as soon as the program ended, a flood of pictures
poured into NHK. About half were sent by mail and the rest
were brought directly to NHK. The pictures were drawn with
all kinds of tools-pencils, crayons, water colors-and on all
kinds of paper-from backs of calendars to the paper used in
sliding doors. Almost every picture had a written explanation
either on the picture itself, on the backside, or on an attached
sheet. During the two summers of 1974 and 1975, a total of
about 2300 drawings were collected by NHK.
On the occasion of the 29th anniversary of the A-Bomb
tragedy (1974) a selection of the survivors' drawings was
exhibited at the Peace Memorial Museum. The response of the
20,000 visitors was so favorable that an arrangement was made
for the exhibition to be shown in the major cities of Japan.
Subsequently, NHK filmed a documentary on "Pictures of the
A-Bomb" that included interviews with the survivors, and they
published a book of 150 of the paintings under the title The
Unforgettable Fire. Below and on the cover of the Bulletin are
nine pictures selected from The Unforgettable Fire with the
English translations of the explanations of the pictures.
As they drew their pictures, the survivors became
impatient and dissatisfied because they could not express the
full extent of their feelings. Despite such frustrations they
testified that the drawing of the pictures helped to relieve
some of the anguish of their souls and to make amends
individually for those who died. More positively, the survivors
hoped that their drawings would lead others to understand the
truth of atomic war so that there would be, in the motto of
the Japanese peace movement, "No More Hiroshimas" "*
Nihon Hoso Kyokai, ed. The Unforgettable Fire (Tokyo: Japan
Broadcasting Publications Association, 1975). The introduction and
translations of the explanations of the pictures were done as a project
of the World Friendship Cmter of Hiroshima under the direction of
Mrs. Leona Rowand Dr. Thomin Harada. I prepared a polished final
draft whose accuracy was checked by Mrs. Yuriko Kite. I am deeply
indebted to the World Friendship Center for their generous cooperation
and initiative in the translation project.
29
Appendix by Barton J. Bernstein Instead, policymakers had come to assume that a
The pictures of the A-Bomb survivors, of course, raises
the questions of why the A-Bombs were used. Were they
necessary? Were they justified? Probably no other event of
World War II has generated as much controversy as the atomic
bombings on Japan, yet nothing since 1945 permits the belief
that the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would prevent
American or other nation's policy-makers from engaging in
nuclear war. Indeed the threat of nuclear destruction is
greater. A review of that controversy in the United States is
beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, the following
selection from Barton]. Bernstein's "The Atomic Bomb and
American Foreign Policy: The Route to Hiroshima" provides a
brief summary of the most recent revisionist interpretation of
why the A-Bomb was used. (H. S.)
************
Truman inherited the assumption that the bomb was a
legitimate weapon for ending the war. No policymaker ever
challenged this conception. If the combat use of the bomb
deeply troubled policymakers morally or politically, they
might have reconsidered their assumption and searched
ardently for other alternatives. But they were generally inured
to the mass killing of civilians and much preferred sacrificing
the lives of Japanese civilians to sacrificing those of American
soldiers. As a result, they were committed to using the bomb
as soon as possible to end the war. "The dominant objective
was victory," Stimson later explained. "If victory could be
speeded by using the bomb, it should be used; if victory must
be delayed in order to use the bomb, it should not be used. So
far as [I] knew, this general view was fully shared by the
President and his associates." The morality of war confirmed
the dictates of policy and reinforced the legacy that Truman
inherited. Bureaucratic momentum added weight to that
legacy, and the relatively closed structure of decision-making
served also to inhibit dissent and to ratify the dominant
assumption.
Had policymakers concluded that the use of the bomb
would impair Soviet-American relations and make the Soviets
intransigent, they might have reconsidered their assumption.
But their analysis indicated that the use of the bomb would
aid, not injure, their efforts to secure concessions from the
Soviets. The bomb offered a bonus. The promise of these
likely advantages probably constituted a subtle deterrent to
any reconsideration of the assumption and, in effect, also
confirmed that operating assumption. Policymakers rejected
the competing analysis advanced by the Franck Committee:
Russia, and even allied countries which bear less mistrust of
our ways and intentions, as well as neutral countries, will be
deeply shocked. It will be very difficult to persuade the
world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing
and suddenly releasing {the bombi is to be trusted in its
proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by
international agreement.
Reprinted with permission from Barton J. Bernstein, "The Atomic
Bomb and American Foreign Policy: The Route to Hiroshima," in
Barton J. Bernstein (ed.), The Atomic Bomb: tbe Critical Issues
(Boston: Little, Browrf, 1976), pp. 112-114. Footnotes deleted.
combat demonstration would advance, not impair, the
interests of peace-a position shared by Conant, Oppenheimer,
Arthur H. Compton, Nobel laureate and director of the
Chicago Metallurgical laboratory, and Edward Teller, the
physicist and f u t u r ~ father of the hydrogen bomb. In
explaining the thinking of the scientific advisory panel in
recommending combat use of the bomb, Oppenheimer later
said that one of the two "overriding considerations ... [was]
the effect of our actions on the stability ... of the postwar
world." Some policymakers thought, Harvey H. Bundy,
.Stimson's assistant, wrote in 1946, "that unless the bomb were
used it would be impossible to persuade the world that the

saving of civilization in the future would depend on a proper

international control of atomic energy." The bomb, in short,
would impress the Soviets.
In addition, there was another possible advantage to
~
using the bomb: retribution against Japan. A few days after
Nagasaki, Truman hinted at this theme in a private letter
justifying the combat use of the bombs:
Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs
I
than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted
attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of
our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to
understand is the one that we have been using to bombard
I
them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat
him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.
I
In this letter, one can detect strains of the quest for
retribution (the reference to Pearl Harbor and prisoners); and
one might even find subtle strains of racism (Japan was "a
beast"). The enemy was a beast and deserved to be destroyed.
I
War, as some critics would stress, dehumanized victors and
vanquished and justified inhumanity in the name of
nationalism, justice, and even humanity.
In assessing the administration's failure to challenge the
assumption that the bomb was a legitimate weapon to be used
against Japan, we may conclude that Truman found no reason
to reconsider, that it would have been difficult for him to
challenge the assumption, and that the prospect of benefits
also deterred reassessment. For the administration, in short,
there was no reason to avoid using the bomb and many reasons
making it feasible and even attractive. The bomb was used
primarily to end the war promptly and thereby to save
American lives. There were other ways to end the war, but
none seemed as effective, and all seemed to have greater risks.
Even if Russia had not existed, the bombs would have been
used in the same way. How could Truman, in the absence of
overriding contrary reasons, justify not using the bombs, or
even delaying their use, and thereby prolong the war and
sacrifice American lives?
Some who have searched for the causes of Truman's
decision to use atomic weapons have made the error of
assuming that the question was ever open-that the administra
tion ever carefully faced the question of whether to use the
bombs. It was not a carefully weighed decision but the
implementation of an assumption. The administration devoted
thought to how, not whether, to use them. As Churchill later
wrote, "The decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb
to compel the surrender of Japan was never an issue."
"Truman's decision," according to General Groves, "was one
of non-interference-basically, a decision not to upset the
existing plans. " *
30
Survivors' Art
Slide 4.
In Hiroshima City and its suburbs there live about
120,000 atomic bomb survivors. They feel frustrated by
photographs or stories about the atomic bomb. "It was
not at all like that," they say. A total of 2300 drawings
with written explanations on most of them were
collected during the summers of 1974 and 1975. Taking
their often crude drawings in hand, the survivors again
said, "No, it was not like this. This is only one
ten-thousandth of what it actually was."
It would be appreciated, therefore, if each of you
would help compensate for what these slides lack by
using your own imagination.
This drawing is the "mushroom cloud" as observed
from a mountain village 20 miles north of Hiroshima.
From that distance the deathly cloud even looked
beautiful, and breathtaking.
Slide 7.
"I tried desperately to rescue my baby daughter,
trapped inside the collapsed house, and scratched at the
clay wall with my fingernails. But when 1 finally
succeeded in opening a hole, flames had enveloped the
"ono ..." I)'
,

t
,
,
.
.
Slide 8.
"Mother! Run! You must run away!" a child cries.
But Mother prays, begging for forgiveness.
f
"The city seemed to have been wrapped in fire. A
!
small fire-prevention water-tank overflowed with a
number of victims, all dead. Those dead on the streets
were scorched black but those dead in the tank were
1
I
I
!
"Morning came. Fire was still smoldering in Hiroshima. I entered the city. Many people were dead in
the fire-prevention tank, their bodies scorched black. I saw a dead woman, her standing body scorched black,
holding a baby in her arms, still in a running position. Utterly incredible, but this was reality."
I
j
1
1
I
J
I
I
!
~
t
i
I
i
4
I
Slide 30.
swollen red."
Slide 27.
\
i
Slide 33.
A 34 year old father had to cremate his 3 year old
daughter Hisako. He remembers, "the fat burnt and
melted, and the flames formed a pillar. Truly this is hell! Slide 29.
"I still don't know where my 9 year old son is. ) "The corpse of a child with hands and fingers
hope he is alive!" pointing to the sky. It was difficult to tell whether it was
a boy or girl."
.
..
I
I
Slide 1 8 ~
"This little girl, crouched and leaning against the
stone bank of the river, passed away in this posture. No
one came to save her."
3S
I
Children of the A-Bomb: II
lkuko Wakasa
a girl in 5th grade
5 years old in 1945
I really hate to think about war and I hate to remember
the day when the atom bomb fell. Even when I read books I
skip the parts about war. And I shiver at the newsreels in the
movies when the scenes of the war in Korea appear. Since I
was assigned this for homework, and even though I don't want
to do it, I am making myself remember that awful time.
That morning of the sixth of August my brother's friend
who was in second grade then, came calling him to go to
school in the temple. At that time I was five and my little
sister was two. My little sister and I were playing house in the
garden.
Father, although he always left for work at eight
o'clock, happened on that day to say, "I'm not going until
eight-thirty today."
He was facing the north windows and practicing brush
writing. Mother, in front of the south windows, was clearing
up after breakfast and from the kitchen I could hear the noise
of dishes being washed.
Just about then 1 could hear the sound of an aeroplane
flying very high, and thinking it was a Japanese plane I
shouted, "Oh, there's an aeroplane!"
Just as I looked at the sky there was a flash of white
light and the green in the plants looked in that light like the
color of dry leaves.
I cried, "Daddy!" and just as I jumped into the house
there was a tremendous noise and at the same time a bookcase
and chest of drawers fell over and broken glass came flying
past grazing my face. I dashed back into the garden scared to
death.
Mother called, "Ikuko, I'm over here."
I went blindly in the direction of Mother's voice and I
dived into the shelter. After a little while a lot of blood came
out of my ears and it didn't stop for a long time. Even when
we put cotton and gauze in, the blood came pouring out
between my fingers holding the cotton and gauze in place. My
father and mother were frightened and they bandaged my ears
for me. Father had his little finger cut with glass-it was almost
off. And below his eye there was a big cut from glass. When I
looked at Mother she was all bloody below the hips. It must
have been from the glass that came flying from the north
windows. A big piece of glass was still sticking in Mother's
back. The cut was about six inches long and two inches deep
36
and the blood was pouring out. The edges of the cut were sort
of swollen out like the lips of a savage. As Mother cried out
with the pain, Father pulled out the glass and poured a whole
bottle of iodine on the place to sterilize it. When my older
brother dived under the table he hit his head and he got a big
bump on it. My little sister who had been outside, even though
she only had on a pair of pants, wasn't hurt because she had
crawled under the porch.
After they finished bandaging me, a pain stabbed me so I
lay down. When I woke up I was lying in a funny little shed.
When I tried to lift my head it was stuck to the mattress by
the blood that had seeped out and I couldn't lift it.
Father said, "We don't want this to get any worse, so
let's go to the hospital." So he carried me on his back to a
military hospital nearby. The hospital was full of people who
were groaning and people who were naked. I was scared to
death. Finally I said to Father, "I'm too scared; let's go
home." Since there were so many people that we didn't know
when our turn would come-and besides that, there were so
many people who were hurt worse than I was-Father said All
right, let's go back, and we did.
We had a good view from the fields and we could see
)
that it wasn't only the part where we lived but the whole city
1
that was burning. Black smoke was billowing up and we could
hear the sound of big things exploding. Since a north wind was
blowing and the fire was gradually coming closer and closer to
the place where I was standing, I didn't know what to do and I
1
was scared to death. About noon the wind changed to the
south and our house was saved from being burned.
1
Mother's younger brother was a high school student but
since he was seventeen he had gone to be a soldier. He was a
big strong man and he belonged to the Second Army. He was
stationed at the Nobori-cho School. Since he didn't come
home on the night of the sixth, Father and Mother and all of
us went searching for him until late at night in those dreadful
streets. The fires were burning. There was a strange smell all
over. Blue-green balls of fire were drifting around. I had a
terrible lonely feeling that everybody else in the world was
dead and only we were still alive. Ever since that time I haven't
liked to go outside. A soldier friend of my Uncle Wakasa said
that my Uncle Wakasa had finished his night duty and was
sleeping at a place at the school that was next to the rice
storehouse.
Father and Mother went right away to the school. Next
to the rice storehouse among the ashes there were lots of
bones scattered around. Since they didn't know which were
my uncle's they picked up a lot of them and put them in a
funeral urn. Also among the ashes they found his schoolcap
insignia and his aluminum lunch box. Even now we are making
ourselves think that my uncle was killed instantly by the blast
and we are not letting ourselves think that he was burned or
pinned under a house and burned while he was still alive.
A man who was so badly burned that you couldn't tell
whether he was a young man or an old man was lying in front
of Grandpa's house which is right next to ours. Poor thing, we
laid him on the floor in our hall. Then we put a blanket down
for him and gave him a pillow; while we were looking at him
he swelled up to about three times his size and his whole body
turned the color of dirt and got soft. Flies came all over him
and he was moaning in a faint voice and an awful smell was
coming from him.
He kept saying, "Water! Water!"
Father and Mother and Grandpa, although they were
wounded, picked up broken glass because the house was badly
damaged and since it was wartime they were taking important
things to the little shack in the country and they were so busy
they couldn't take care of that sick man. I went and looked at
him every now and then and gave him water but when I had to
pass the place where he was I closed my eyes and held my
breath and ran past. Soldiers came and took him to the
hospital; we gave him the blanket and pillow.
The house was squeezed sideways three feet, the floor
was fallen in, the bookcase and chest of drawers had fallen on
top of each other, and the ceiling and roof had fallen on top of
all that, and you could see the blue sky.
I thought, "We can never live in this house again."
There were ten eggs in a basket on the table in the north
room. Strangely enough they were plastered around the far
ther, south side of the sliding doors of that room. Mother said,
"What sort of a wind could have carried those eggs there? The
blast must have come first from the north and then turned
around and come from the south to have soiled the south side
of the doors that way."
Father said that ten of the tiles from the roof were piled
up in one place in a spiral. Since the foundation stones of the
house had moved we imagine that the whole house must have
been lifted into the air at some time. From about then on
Mother began to be sort of sick. The doctor said, "It's prob
ably because she breathed poison while she was walking
around looking for her brother."
A half year ago a ten-year-old girl suddenly developed
radiation sickness. All her hair fell out and she became entirely
bald and the doctor at the Japan Red Cross Hospital fran
tically did everything he could for her but she vomited blood
and died after twenty days. I shudder when I think that even
though it is already six years after the end of the war, still
people are dying in a way that reminds us of that day. I can't
think that those people who died are different people from us.
What would I do if such a thing happened in my house? When
I only hear about the suffering of people who have that
radiation sickness, it makes me so frightened that I wish I
could think of some way to forget about it.
The grandma of some of our relatives was made lame.
Every time I see her I remember the sixth of August and I feel
miserable. Sometimes when I ride on the streetcar I see people
with their ear burned so that it's just a little bump of flesh, not
even an inch, stuck on their head. The father of the Sarada
family also lost his ear.
Even though the atom bomb was so terrible and hateful,
they're saying in the news broadcasts on the radio that a bomb
ten times more dreadful than the Hiroshima bomb has been
made and they are discussing whether or not to use it in
Korea.
This is a dreadful thing.
I think that everybody who was in Hiroshima on the
sixth of August hates war. Our grammar school still hasn't
been fixed where it was damaged during the war. The reason
my family became poor is because all the houses that we were
renting out fell down or were burned. This sixth of August is
the seventh anniversary of my uncle's death. When that day
comes around, everybody will be reminded of that terrible
time; this makes me feel very bad. '*
37
The Diary and the Cenotaph;
Racial and Atomic Fever in the Canadian Record
by Stephen Salaff
Rest in peace.
The mistake shall not be repeated.
(Inscription on the A-bomb monument, Hiroshima)
In Ottawa, the capital of Canada, on August 6, 1945,
Prime Minister Mackenzie King learned that an atomic bomb
had obliterated Hiroshima. Subsequent to an initial public
statement lauding this "greatest achievement in science," 1 Mr.
King wrote in his diary:
We can now see what might have come to the British race
had German scientists won the race. It is fortunate that the
use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather
than upon the white races of Europe. I am a little
concerned about how Russia may feel, not having been told
anything of this invention or of what the British and the
u.s. were doing in the way of exploring and perfecting the
process.
2
The first sentence in Mr. King's triptych reminds us that
atomic ordnance was originally developed in strenuous
competition with Nazi Germany, which embarked upon an
A-bomb program after uranium fission was discovered there in
1939. The menace of Germany absorbed most of the energy
and war materiel of the U.S., U.K. and Caflada until late 1944;
initially, the atomic bombardment of Japan was not their
primary wartime objective. Since the bomb was not perfected
and tested until July 16, 1945, victory in Europe was achieved
with less cataclysmic weapons. Thus the Atlantic triangle's
policy objectives "fortunately" appeared obtainable without
an atomic assault on the "white races of Europe."
The second sentence in Mr. King's testament of power is
an acute indicator of an endemic "racial purity" creed which
far transcends the bigotry of one lonely politician or of one
government. Shared by many co-leaders of the "British race"
even as they severely punished the Nazi Fuehrers of the
"Aryan master race" at Nuremberg for monstrous crimes
against humankind, the doctrine confided by Mr. King to his
diary holds that a mysterious and unprecedented catastrophe
is more acceptable when it afflicts the "non-white races." We
are now quite conscious of the ways in which racists represent
Asian nationalities as ethnically inferior and geopolitically
overpopulated. They falsely ascribe the indifference to human
life of the Japanese military-fascist leaders to the Japanese
people as a whole.
Mr. King, in particular, was armored against moral and
ethical restraints by a lifetime of political trade in
prejudice-with racial and social class stereotyping of
immigrant Japanese. Rising to eminence as Deputy Minister of
Labor, Mackenzie King was dispatched as a one-man Royal
Commission to British Columbia in 1907, where in September
of that year a pogrom against the Oriental residents of
Vancouver had been carried out by vigilantes of the "Asiatic
Exclusion League." A mob organized by the League ransacked
and plundered Chinatown and swept into Vancouver's
Japanese qurter before the immigrant Japanese laborers beat it
back. Mr. King negotiated a 30 percent reduction in Japanese
property damage claims arising from the ugly episode, and in
May 1908 submitted his Report on Immigration to Canada
From the Orient, which stated that Canada "should remain a
white man's country.,,3 He asserted that an overwhelmingly
white population was "not only desirable for economic and
social reasons, but highly necessary on political and national
grounds.,,4 Mr. King was to become a leading advocate of
"industrial peace" (as expressed, for example, in his book
Industry and Humanity, 1918), and "conciliation" in British
Columbia kindled his successful campaign for a parliamentary
seat in October 1908. Following the lead of Mr. King, Ottawa
enacted legislation in 1910 cutting off Oriental immigration to
Canada.
Mr. King held the office of Prime Minister for a total of
over twenty-one years between 1921 and 1948. During World
War II his government continued the tradition of anti-J apanese
chauvinism when it dispossessed over 20,000 J apanese
Canadians from western British Columbia to the interior.
s
As
happened in the United States,6 Canadian citizens of German
and Italian origin were relatively unaffected, and the ruinous
incarceration was applied under the War Measures Act, with no
trace of due process, strictly to the allegedly treacherous
Japanese. But despite numerous police raids and seizures, no
threats to wartime security were ever discovered among the
Canadian Japanese. Historically responsive to anti-Oriental
vigilantism in British Columbia, Mr. King raised the brutal
effort to destroy the Japanese-Canadian community to a
culmination in the House of Commons on August 4, 1944. He
38
demanded that, although there had been no instance of
sabotage, all "disloyal" Japanese-Canadians be deported "as
soon as physically possible." Those adjudged "loyal" could
remain, but they would be forbidden from concentrating in
one area of the country.7 Although Canadians of civil
libertarian conscience prevented sweeping deportations, over
4,000 persons, many of them Canadian since birth, were
shipped to devastated Japan in 1946-47.
Racial supremacy was compounded in the Canadian
Prime Minister with the fever of atomic superiority taking hold
within the Manhattan Project, where A-bomb construction was
carried out. The United States feared postwar economic,
scientific and political competition from Britain and Canada,
and moved to exclude them from A-bomb capabilities, but
diplomatically, the U.S. sought an "Anglo-Saxon" nuclear
alliance. The secret pact signed by Roosevelt and Churchill at
Quebec City on August 19,1943, called for the pooling in the
Manhattan Project of "all available British and American
brains and resources," and the Montreal heavy water research
team aUlmented the British scientific talent deployed into the
Project. The major development of the Canadian uranium
industry began in 1942, "in response to demand for virtually
unlimited quantities of uranium for the military programs of
the United States and Great Britain." 9 Several hundred tons of
Ontario-refined uranium was fabricated into the Hiroshima
bomb, and the large scale supply of uranium for military
purposes to the U.S. and the U.K. continued well into the
19505. The U.S. built a heavy water plant in British Columbia,
which sustained the Nagasaki bomb effort and produced
several hundred tons of heavy water annually between
1944-1955.
The Quebec Agreement stipulated that A-weapons
would be used against a third party only with the joint assent
of Roosevelt and Churchill. "To ensure full and effective
collaboration" in the Manhattan Project, a six-man inter
governmental Combined Policy Committee was formed,
through which the U.S. coordinated British and Canadian
nuclear developments. On this committee sat "the founder of
modern, industrialized, Americanized Canada," 10 Ottawa's
Minister of Munitions and Supply, C. D. Howe. The
Anglo-Soviet agreement of 29 September 1942 called "for the
exchange of new weapons, both those in use and those which
might be discovered in the future," 11 and Mackenzie King, as
the' third sentence from the diary epigram quoted at the
beginning of this article shows, was disquieted by the
indignation sure to follow in Moscow over the hidden
development and unilateral exercise of atomic energy.
However, the Quebec Agreement was honored when on July 4,
1945, with Mr. Howe in attendance, the Committee received
Churchill's assent to the atomic detonations. Seeking to
prevent the permanent militarization of atomic technology,
some far-sighted scientists moved the case for continuance to
Roosevelt, Truman and Churchill, but Mr. King and Mr. Howe
loyally acquiesced to the inundation of atomic death. The cost
in "nonwhite lives" was over 300,000, with as many more
persons now medically registered with the Health and Welfare
Ministry of Japan as A-bomb sufferers.
After the war, A-bombs became one basis of U.S.
military-political doctrine. The Atlantic triangle stiffened into
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the
response of the Soviet Union was to nullify nuclear superiority
by exploding its own A-bomb in 1949 and by forming the
Warsaw Pact in 1955. Meanwhile the U.S. threatened to use
atomic bombs in the Korean War of 1950-53. Canada and
Britain also mobilized their sizable "Commonwealth Division"
for what Mr. Lester Pearson termed the "defence against
Russian communism." 12 The Western powers inflamed their
respective citizens for the intervention in Korea by slurring the
Korean and Chinese soldiers as "gooks," just as a decade later
the U.S. side labelled each Vietnamese antagonist a
"Vietcong." In that latter war too, Washington flashed atomic
weapons when in 1954 the Vietminh besieged the French
Mackenzie King.
Roosevelt and
Churchill
at the Quebec
Conference in
August, 1943.
39
t
I
I
fortress of Dienbienphu. (The threat was also uttered during
the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1958.) Finally, for our purposes
here, the thermonuclear fireball which roared upward from the
Bikini test site in March 1954 was timed-or so it was
perceived in much of Asia-to precede by one month the
Geneva Conference on Indochina and Korea. As with the
A-bomb, the world's first H-bomb victims were again Asians:
23 Japanese fishermen and several hundred Micronesian
islanders trapped under the Bikini death ash.
In these many historical ways, the government of
Mackenzie King mortgaged Canada's nuclear future to the
global strategy of the United States, while democratic
decision-making was sacrificed to secrecy. Thus the Quebec
Agreement was not published until April 1954 (during the
worldwide outcry against the lethal Bikini fallout). The history
of the negotiations begun during the Korean War on
overflights of Canada by nuclear-armed U.S. aircraft, which led
to the establishment in 1957 of the NATO-linked North
American Air Defence Command (NORAD), has not yet been
revealed.
13
The second, starkly illuminating sentence from the
diary epigram ("It is fortunate that ...") was excised from
The Mackenzie King Record, the biographical project of Mr.
King's literary executors,14 and concealed until the lapse of a
thirty-year prohibition on the publication of secret govern
ment papers on January 1, 1976.
This maneuver, which has retarded our understanding of
the temper of Mr. King's times and scientific-technological
civilization, is doubly unfortunate in view of the IlDre recent
engagement of Canadian nucleonics with Asia. Supplied in the
framework of the neocolonialist Colombo Plan, a loosely
safeguarded Canadian heavy water research reactor cooked the
fissile plutonium for India's 1974 nuclear explosion. Despite
this setback to the fragile regime of non-proliferation, Ottawa
went ahead in the same year, in the absence of a broad,
.country-wide debate on reactor exports, to sell a "Candu"
nuclear power station to South Korea. By providing a
substantial plutonium source to the nuclear weapon-coveting
Seoul autocracy, this incendiary "commercial" transaction
courts a second Korean War and erodes the crucial but
equivocal non-proliferation commitment of Japan.
In Japan to promote the sale of Candu reactors and
other Canadian high technology, Canadian Prime Minister
Pierre Trudeau found it expedient in October 1976 to express
regrets for the evacuation of the Japanese-Canadians and their
deprivation of civil rights "in the heat and fright of the Second
World War."IS The attempt by Mackenzie King's latter-day
successor as leader of the' Liberal Party to capitailze on official
Ottawa's belated acknowledgment of this injustice perpetuated
the central myth that Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry
belong in the final analysis to Japan and are "racially" alien to
Canada: Mr. Trudeau's "explanation" of Canada's "unhappy
record" was offered to the government of Japan instead of the
Japanese-Canadian community itself.
In sum, Canada's avid copartnership in the wartime
bomb enterprise and the sensitive technology germinating in
its laboratories as Mackenzie King penned his testament, and
its ensuing hard commercial marketing of nuclear materials
prefigure the quest to attain nuclear advantage whatever the
cost in morality and international security. By letting go the
fiction that "the British race" can command atomic
supremacy, Canadians, along with people of all nations and
races, can effectively bear witness to the cenotaph of
Hiroshima. '*
40
Notes
1. J. W. Pickersgill and D. F. Forster, The Mackenzie King
Record, Volume lI, 1944-45 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1968), p. 451.
2. Diary of Mackenzie King, August 6, 1945. Public Archives
of Canada. The voluminous King diary "was kept largely to serve as a
record from which he could recount and explain his conduct of public
affairs." Pickersgill and Forster, p. viii. C. P. Stacey, the official
historian of the Canadian army during World War II, asserts that the
diary "is the most important single political document in
twentieth-century Canadian history." C. P. Stacey, A Very Double
Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King (Toronto: Macmillan of
Canada, 1976), p. 9.
3. W. L. Mackenzie King, Report on Immigration to Canada
From the Orient, Sessional Paper No. 36a (Ottawa: Kings Printer,
1908), p. 7.
4. Ibid.
5. The basic reference on the Canadian evacuation is Ken
Adachi, The Enemy That Never Was (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart,
1976).
6. Jacobus tenBroek, Edward N. Barnhart, Floyd W. Matson,
Prejudice, War and the Constitution (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1968).
7. House of Commons Debates, August 4, 1944, p. 5948.
8. "Canadian scientists, especially those with training in atomic
or nuclear physics, were begged, borrowed or stolen from university
staffs or wherever they could be found to augment this team." Atomic
Energy of Canada Ltd. Review, March-April 1977, p. 18. The Montreal
group of Canadian and French scientists laid the basis for postwar
development of the "Candu" heavy water nuclear reactor.
9. Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, An Energy
Policy for Canada, Phase I, Vol. 1/ (Ottawa: Information Canada,
1973), p. 325.
10. Peter C. Newman, The Canadian Establishment, Vol. I
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), p. 370. C D. Howe organized
Canada's contribution to the production of the A-bomb, and for this
contribution he was in 1947 awarded the Medal for Merit by President
Truman.
11. Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar E. Anderson, The New
World: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission,
193911946 (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1962), pp. 267-68.
12. Lester Pearson, Mike: The Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Lester
B. Pearson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 154.
13. An integrated military air headquarters was established at
Colorado Springs on August 1, 1957. "For some years prior to the
establishment of Norad," however, "it had been recognized that the air
defence of Canada and the U.S. must be considered as a single
problem." Agreement Between the Government of Canada and the
Government of the United States of America Concerning the
Organization and Operation of the North American Air Defence
Command, May 12, 1958. Canada, Treaty Series 1958, No.9, p. 2.
14. Pickersgill and Forster. J. W. Pickersgill, former Minister of
Citizenship and Immigration, long served on Mr. King's personal staff.
Mr. T. B. Pickersgill, who oversaw the "repatriation" of Japanese
Canadians to Japan as Commissioner of Japanese Placement in 1947, is
almost certainly J. W. Pickersgill's brother.
15. "Remarks by Prime Minister Trudeau in Tokyo," October
25, 1976. Department of External Affairs, Ottawa.
Before and After the Pacific War

The United States and Japan!
Read and assign these articles from the pages of the Bulletin:
1) U.S., Japan and Oil, 1934-35 (Breslin)
2) Origins of the Pacific War (Breslin)
3) Literature on the Occupation (Dower)
4) Zaibatsu Dissolution and the U.S. (Schonberger)
The total cost of this packet: $6.00. Order from:
BCAS, P.O. Box W, Charlemont, MA 01339
Science, Society, and the Japanese
Atomic-Bomb Project During World War Two
t
!
r
J
by J. W. Dower
I
On January 7, 1978, the front page of Tbe New York
Times carried a headline reading "Japanese Data Show Tokyo
Tried To Make World War II A-Bomb." This is history as
news-but history of a politically consequential sort
nonetheless, although it can be used in different ways. It is of
interest to students of science, technology, and the state who
are concerned with arms control and anti-nuclear proliferation,
for example. At the same time, it can be grist for the mill of
anti-Japanese sentiment, which is grinding with increasing
momentum now, for economic reasons, in the United States.
The former concern appears to be the major interest of
the two American scientists who are most responsible for the
recent publicity concerning Japan's wartime A-bomb research,
Herbert York of the University of California at San Diego, and
Charles Weiner of MIT. Professor York, the chief scientific
adviser to the Defense Department during the Eisenhower
administration, is a noted expert on weaponry and a
prominent spokesman for arms control. In commenting on the
significance of the Japanese project, he has drawn two
conclusions: that in Japan, as in all other nations with World
War Two A-bomb projects, the initial impetus came from the
scientists and engineers rather than the highest ranks of the
military and government; and that the Japanese project, which
"completes the set" for World War Two (the U_S., U.S.S.R.,
Britain, Germany, France, and Japan), constitutes yet another
demonstration of "technological momentum," or "a general,
technological imperative." 1
The information gathered by Professors York and
Weiner WlS broadly summarized by a reporter in the January
13, 1978, issue of Science (on which the Times based its
article). Here, however, a different lesson was drawn,
suggestive of the more specifically anti-Japanese uses to which
the information may be put:
... tbe bistorical importance of tbe project lies not in tbe
fact tbat Japan failed but that she tried, and tbat Japan's
postwar attitude, tbat sbe, as tbe one nation victimized by
atomic weapons, is above seeking to acquire tbem for
herself, is not bistorically accurate. Tbe historical record
shows-on tbe basis of tbe eagerness of her military and the
willing cooperation of her scientists-tbat if other factors
bad made a bomb possible, the leadership-which by the
end of the war were placing their own youth in torpedoes
to home tbem on the advancing u.s. fleet-would not have
besitated to use the bomb against the United States.
Where the York thesis places technology in command and
thereby diminishes the significance of national or socio
political considerations, the interpretation reflected in Science
returns state, national (and, indirectly, racial) considerations
to the fore, although it also minimizes the social and political
context.
It is no doubt true that Japan would have used the
A-bomb if it had been available, and this may be comforting to
those Americans who bear, but lightly, a sense of guilt for
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A thin wafer of history, and one's
sins are absolved. The potential anti-Japanese thrust of the
argument, however, lies elsewhere, viz., in the impression that
for over three decades the Japanese have deliberately and
effectively concealed their own wartime engagement in
A-bomb research, and in doing so have assumed a hypocritical
posture of moral superiority. Thus the recent American
publicity concerning what Science labeled Japan's "social
secret" can be turned into a notion, a "confirmation" for
those so inclined, of Japanese duplicity.
2
These are all provocative notions, and it may be well to
begin here with several broad observations. Japan's wartime
research on the atomic bomb is not news but an old story; it
has been resurrected and refurbished, rather than revealed.
Also, the "set" may be complete, but its pieces are grossly,
almost grotesquely, unbalanced; such disparate matching
would not sell as crockery or chessmen, and there seems no
reason to accept looser standards for intellectual constructs.
And while the thesis of a technological imperative is attractive,
it is not a conclusion one would emphasize from studying the
Japanese case alone.
Certainly the intimation of a "social secret," a postwar
conspiracy of silence on the part of the Japanese, must be
qualified at the outset. In one of the earliest major postwar
survey histories of Japan, first published in 1949, Chitoshi
Yanaga of Yale University, discussing the destruction of
Hiroshima, noted that "Japanese scientists knew immediately
that it was the atomic bomb, for they too had been working
on it for years." 3 Ten years later, a Rand Corporation study of
atomic energy in the Soviet Union included a general but quite
41
accurate paragraph on Japan's futile wartime project, and cited
a 1952 article in Japanese entitled "Japan's Uncompleted
Atomic Bomb."4 The research has been mentioned, although
not always accurately, in a number of more popular English
sources since that time.
5
That this information did not make a great impression
upon the American consciousness-and that it subsequently
evaporated from standard Western histories .of Japan-cannot
be attribu ted to a Japanese conspiracy, and in fact Japanese
scholars and publishers have acknowledged the wartime work
on the atomic bomb in English in a number of places. It was
mentioned well over a decade ago by several Japanese
historians of science.
6
And it was described in considerable
detail in a 1972 book, The Day Man tost, written by a group
of Japanese scholars and published in the West by a major
Japanese firm. The "revelations" proclaimed in Science and
the Times add only minor detail to this latter account. 7
It is true that the full story was not seriously pursued
and publicized in the West until recently. This has also been
the case on the side of Japanese-language materials, although
to a lesser degree. The Japanese government apparently has
not spoken publicly on the matter, but by the early 1950s
various discussions of the wartime project had been published
in Japan. Among these was a 1953 volume on Japanese
weaponry which included a reminiscence by Ito Yoji, a naval
officer who coordinated some of the earliest deliberations on
the military application of atomic energy in Japan.
8
Certainly
by 1968, the subject had been quite thoroughly exposed in
Japan. In that year, a volume in a widely advertised popular
history of the Showa period devoted over 150 pages to
"Japan's atomic bomb," consisting almost entirely of accounts
by participants in the project.
9
The Science article itself refers to several of the major
sources, all Japanese, utilized by Professors York and Weiner,
among them a 1970 volume in a multi-volume history of
science and technology in Japan. This includes, as it turns out,
an entire chapter of commentary plus technical documenta
tion and excerpts from earlier references pertaining to the
A-bomb project.lO Among these documents is a tantalizing
Japanese version of a memorandum dated October 10, 1945,
and addressed to the U.S. military in which the Japanese
describe that aspect of the atomic-bomb project which
involved the Navy and Kyoto Imperial University.ll This
naturally raises the question of how much U.S. military
intelligence and the U.S. government have actually known
about the Japanese A-bomb project all along-and whether the
"social secret," to the extent that it has existed on the state
level, has in fact been binational. 12 Thus one has a triple
question here which provokes speculation about the United
States itself, and not merely Japan: concerning state secrets;
concerning how facts once acknowledged can disappear from
standard texts, only to reemerge decades later as important
revelations; and concerningwby now?
Professors York and Weiner have performed a service in
making this data more widely known to the English-reading
public, and they cannot be held responsible for the
Yellow-Peril manner in which others may choose to use it. * It
Indeed, in a letter published in the. February 17, 1978, issue of
Science, Professor Weiner expressed criticism of the manner in which
the magazine had presented the subject. For other responses, see letters
published in the issues of March 24 and April 21.
42
must be acknowledged, however, that their subject is old, their
details (to the extent summarized in Science) are not notably
new even to the English-language record, and their spadework
was done by the Japanese themselves. Insofar as the relative
early silence on the subject by the Japanese is concerned,
moreover, it can be suggested that motivatio.ns were more
complex than the crass and externally-oriented moral
hypocrisy which some of the recent accounts imply-and that
such reticence reflected personal, professional, and domestic,
as much as international, considerations. This could have
become a volatile subject within Japan in the early postwar
period, and it is reasonable to assume that both the
conservative government and scientific community were
apprehensive of the public criticism that might ensue. On the
part of the scientists involved, viewing the charnel houses of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there may have been retrospective
personal shame and regret-but also, and in a contrary
direction, an element of professional embarrassment. For what
emerges from the story of Japan's "A-bomb program" are the
facts that, first, Japan unquestionably did engage in such
research; but, second, that its accomplishments were miniscule
and miserable, and cast a harsh light on the relative
backwardness of science and technology in Japan.
II
In addition to its intrinsic interest, Japan's atomic-bomb
project provokes speculation on science and society, and the
structure of power and politics, in presurrender Japan. Here,
for the historian, it is important to keep in mind that the
project failed-and, indeed, that it was a rather strikingly
half-hearted and uncoordinated endeavor. In great part, this
reflected paucity of human and physical resources, com
pounded by the confusion and material drain of a losing war.
The failure, however, also exposes constraints within the social
structure of the Japanese scientific community, as well as
within the structure of authority and political control in
presurrender Japan.
In addition, and contrary to what appears to be one of
York and Weiner's major conclusions-that it is "the cadre of
scientists and engineers" who took the lead in promoting the
A-bomb in Japan as elsewhere-it seems more accurate to
argue that the most readily identifiable initiatives came from
the military; that no one, however, really took much of a lead
at all; and that many of Japan's leading scientists approached
the project with ambivalent feelings at best. This is not meant
to deny that Japanese scientists as a whole were mobilized
behind the war effort, or toimply that those involved in the
A-bomb project addressed moral questions more squarely
than their Western counterparts. But the situation in Japan
contrasted sharply with that in the West, and the evidence is
scant for suggesting, as the account in Science does, that
Japanese scientists were either driven by "blind patriotism" or
drawn irresistibly to what Oppenheimer called the "sweet
problem" of the explosive potential of the atom.
Scientific research in wartime Japan was bittersweet at
best. There was certainly a nationalistic imperative. There was
also a practical, financial imperative: it took the military crisis
(and eventual severance of the Japanese scientific community
from the rest of the world) to bring in the funds, bring about
the restructuring, and begin to approach the scale which had
long been necessary for first-rate research in general, and for
solid basic research in particular. 13 In addition, there was often
a simple personal and opportunistic imperative at work: good
scientists were rarely sent to the front. For the younger
scientist, participation in the war effort of the laboratories was
thus a form of self-preservation unavailable to students in the
humanities and social sciences. For the olljer scientist,
collaboration at a higher organizational level was a way of
saving younger colleagues from probable death. This appears
to have been one consideration in the A-bomb project, and it
can be taken at two levels: the bond of human affection, and
the desperate desire to save the future of science-in this case,
the future of physics-in Japan.
14
For some Japanese scientists, the war years were
undeniably good years. Some of the intellectual challenges
'Were intrinsically attractive, and the unprecedented support
for advanced research was a bonanza. Indeed, one of the many
ironies of World War Two for Japan is that-at a cost of
devastation and close to two-million Japanese lives-it forced
the breakthroughs, not least in scope and scale of scientific
research, which provided a base for postwar economic
"miracles." In the crisis context of a disastrous war, however,
the prospects for epochal leaps in the militarized new science
were limited to certain areas (Japan, albeit belatedly, did
develop radar and penicillin), and the new priorities were often
disruptive of promising on-going research (for example, on
cosmic rays).
Japanese scientists who had occasion to comment on the
A-bomb project appear to have been almost unanimous in
believing that this was a hopeless task for the immediate
future-certainly for Japan, but for every other belligerent
country as well, including the United States. They
immediately recognized what the Hiroshima Bomb repre
sented, but they had not believed it possible before Japan's
defeat. Thus it is difficult to detect any esprit in the Japanese
undertaking, any genuine sense of a race against time or a race
against the enemy or a race toward an imminent scientific
threshold. The Allied A-bomb project marshaled an inter
national cadre great in numbers and superlative in expertise at
every level, all giddy with anticipation and all fearful almost to
the end that Heisenberg and his German colleagues would beat
them to the wire. The Japanese worked in isolation, deeply
and realistically pessimistic concerning their prospects but
naively sanguine that it did not really matter. For sound
reasons, Allied intelligence dismissed the possibility of an
atomic threat from Japan.
IS
But for these same reasons, and
for others suggested below, the Japanese work on a potential
nuclear or uranium bomb presents qualitative as well as
quantitative differences from the research in other countries.
In most general terms, the point is this: For economic,
technological, and material reasons, Japan proved incapable of
mounting anything remotely comparable to the American,
British, . or German atomic-bomb efforts. Beyond this, even
after it had been decided to investigate the feasibility of a
nuclear weapon, the country was unable to effectively
mobilize and coordinate the limited resources available. The
Japanese endeavor was badly fragmented, inadequately
staffed, indifferently pursued, and plagued by doubt and
ambivalence at the individual level. In various respects, in fact,
it seems to repudiate some of the most cherished stereotypes
commonly applied to Japan: of a "consensus" society, a
robot-like "efficiency," a wartime solidarity of "one-million
hearts beating as one," and a tightly regimented prewar
"totalitarian" regime.
III
The historical interest of japan's wartime nuclear
research thus cuts simultaneously in several directions. On the
more purely scientific side, it calls attention to contradictions
in the prewar development of Japanese science. It serves as a
reminder, on the one hand, that the Japanese scientific
community was capable of pioneer theoretical and conceptual
work prior to World War Two-and, on the other hand, that
this community was vulnerable to social and economic
constraints.
The former point can be briefly illustrated by a few
highlights of chronology in the development of nuclear physics
in Japan: 16
In 1903, Nagaoka Hantaro proposed a detailed
"Satumian" model of a nuclear atom. (The existence of the
atomic nucleus was confirmed by Lord Rutherford in 1911,
although Nagaoka had overestimated the probable number
of electrons.)
The theoretical physicist Ishiwara Jun introduced
relativity theory to Japan after a period of study in Europe,
under Einstein among others, from 1911-1915.
"Riken," the Institute of Physical and Chemical
Research (Rikagaku Kenkyujo), which is regarded as the
first great step in the advancement of pure research in
prewar Japan, was established in Tokyo in 1917-in
response to the economic boom and economic challenges of
World War One.
Nishina Yoshio, later a key figure in the wartime A-bomb
work, studied under Rutherford in 1921-1922, and under
Niels Bohr from 1923 to 1928, and established the famous
Nishina Laboratory within Riken in 1931. Einstein himself
had visited Japan in 1927, and serious research in quantum
mechanics and nuclear physics in Japan is commonly dated
from around 1931-1932. Historians of Asia will note that
this coincided with the global depression, the Manchurian
Incident and beginning of Japan's "fifteen-year war" with
China, and the gearing of the economy toward a
"total-war" capacity. Historians of science might emphasize
that 1932 was the year of great breakthrough, the so-called
annus mirabiJis, in the field of nuclear physics itself-and
that Japanese physics thus approached maturity at the
moment that international physics embarked upon the path
which culminated in the controlled release of nuclear
energy.
In this setting, in December 1932, the Japan Society for
the Promotion of Scientific Research was founded, with
both government and private subsidy. This became a major
vehicle for the funding and rationalization of research.
Yukawa Hideki proposed the meson theory in 1934.
(The meson particle was discovered in 1937, and Yukawa
received the Nobel Prize for this early work in 1949.)
In 1935 the Nuclear Research Laboratory was founded
at Riken, and the institute began work on a huge cyclotron
in 1937 (obtaining a 6o-inch magnet through E. O.
Lawrence, seven years after Lawrence had built the
prototype of the first cyclotron). Major research on cosmic
rays had begun in 1935, largely under Nishina, and in
43
March 1937 this project was reorganized to include research
on the atomic nucleus.
By the time of the China Incident in 1937-and prior to
the discovery of nuclear fission in late 1938-Japan had thus
made substantial progress in physics, and several of its leading
scientists were of international stature. Nishina is credited with
assembling a talented corps of young researchers and running
his laboratory in a democratic manner; approximately 110
scientists, mostly physicists, were associated with the Nishina
Laboratory when war broke out with the United States in
1941. 17 After 1933, moreover, considerable funds for research
in cosmic rays and nuclear physics were made available
through the Japan Society for the Promotion of Scientific
Research and from private business circles.
Despite such advances, the level of expertise remained
uneven and scientific progress was impeded by restraints
inherent in both the archaic structure of the academic system
and the relatively underdeveloped stage of the' economy.
Experimentation was still largely carried out by fragmented
small groups. Research was still not well coordinated
nationally, and the scale of funding was low by comparative
international standards. The several levels of a truly coherent
These quick vignettes may convey an impression of
constraints and ambiguities within the prewar commu
nity of physicists. In the case of the A-bomb project,
such internal problems assume further significance when
it is recognized that they meshed with tension, factional
ism, and disorganization at the governmental level. To
wrest a metaphor from the field under discussion, it
can be said that at both the scholarly and official levels
there were numerous forces operating against the crea
tion of a critical mass of expertise and efficiency.
program, moreover-theoretical research, experimental re
search, technological adaptation, and manufacture-remained
out of phase and uncoordinated.
18
In all countries, scientists making the break with classical
physics encountered a certain professional and social
resistam;e. In Japan, this had peculiarities. and may have lasted
longer. Nagaoka. who advanced the nuclear model of the atom
in 1903, was accused of practicing metaphysics rather than
science by his Japanese colleagues, and turned to another field
of study (magnetism) in the face of this discouragement,
although he remained the venerable elder statesman of
Japanese physics into the war years. Ishiwara, who introduced
quantum theory to Japan, was fired from Tohoku University
because of his love affairs.
19
Even after World War One, and notwithstanding the
considerable collegiality and accomplishments of the leading
physicists, the community of scientists remained plagued by
institutional rivalry and elitism (the notorious gakubatsu, or
"academic cliques"), and by what is commonly described as
the "feudalistic" Koza or professorial-chair system, which
granted virtually dictatorial power over funding and research
to the single senior professor in each tightly defined university
unit. Where gakubatsu rivalry and elitism impeded inter
university collaboration, the koza system sometimes stifled
creativity and initiative on the part of younger scholars.
Sakata Shoichi-another of the great prewar physicists,
who was also known for his radical political views-later
commented that truly serious theoretical work had only been
possible at Osaka University, where Yukawa was based for a
period.
2o
Even the Osaka nexus did not hold, and Sakata
eventually moved to the new Nagoya University. It is symbolic
of the internal university pressures of prewar-and, indeed,
much of postwar-Japan, that Sakata is still famous for
"democratizing" the physics department at Nagoya. At the
same time, however, the hiatus between the advanced
theoretical and experimental work of the scientific vanguard
and the applied research being developed under the auspices of
private enterprise and the military establishment also reflected
to some degree an elitist detachment and proud "academism"
on the part of the leading scientists themselves.
In looking back upon the prewar physics community, it
is also appropriate to consider a further problem which can be
only briefly and tentatively suggested here. This involves the
relationship between science, politics, and ideology, and
evokes the "externalist-internalist" debate among historians of
science. It is well known that Marxism influenced both the
political and scientific thinking of some of the leading Western
theoretical physicists; Einstein is perhaps the best-known
example. This was also true of some of Japan's leading nuclear
theorists in the 1930s,. for one of whom, Taketani Mitsuo,
there is available an illuminating semi-autobiographical essay in
English?1 Taketani collaborated closely with Yukawa and
Sakata in refining the meson theory in the mid-1930s, while at
the same time he was involved with a radical group of young
scientists in Kyoto who "engaged in lively discussion about
resistance movements." In early 1935, the group began
publishing a journal called Sekai bunka (World Culture), which
included articles dealing not only with science and
methodology, but also with popular-front movements against
fascism in Europe. These discussions were construed as an
attempt to create a basis for resistance against Japanese
imperialism-the journal was suppressed in 1937. and Taketani
was imprisoned from September 1938 to April 1939-but
Taketani also applied his immersion in Marxist thought
directly to his theoretical work on the meson. ultimately to
great effect: "Throughout these thrusts in the dark it was the
three-stage theory of materialistic dialectics that guided our
research and fortified our resolution to overcome difficulties."
Shortly after the war. Sakata also published an article
arguing that the development of post-classical physics in the
twentieth century confirmed the validity of dialectical
materialism-and Sakata's own propessive attitudes and
activities have already been noted.
2
Such vivid, concrete
examples of the integration of political consciousness and
theoretical natural science at the highest level are obviously
provocative. The more limited question which arises here is
how pervasive and how important the political dimension may
have been in influencing the nature of collaboration between
the scientific community and the state as Japan mobilized for
war-related research and production. Where many dissident
and persecuted European scientists were able to escape to the
Anglo-American countries, for example-and where partici
pants in the A-bomb projects in the Allied countries as well as
44
Germany were sustained by a strong sense of mission-Japan's
scientists did not or could not flee, and in some instances at
least clearly did not identify with the goals and practices of
their government and society.
It thus seems a plausible hypothesis that political and
ideological considerations may also have contributed to the
haphazard mobilization of scientific talent which characterized
Japan's wartime atomic-bomb research. That proof of this
thesis will not be easy is suggested by the case of Taketani
himself, who near the end of the war was visited in succession
by Nishina and the Special Higher Police, or Thought Police
(Tokko). The former asked him to apply his theoretical talents
to the floundering research on the bomb; the latter placed him
in jail, once again, for his subversive thoughts. Taketani then
proceeded to work out his equations-and indeed discover the
problem-under surveillance in a police interrogation room. It
was better than being at the front, he observed. It was a nice
intellectual challenge. And there was no crisis of conscience,
for there was no possibility of Japan actually being able to
manufacture an atomic bomb.
23
These quick vignettes may convey an impression of
constraints and ambiguities within the prewar community of
physicists. In the case of the A-bomb project, such internal
problems assume further significance when it is recognized
that they meshed with tension, factionalism, and disorganiza
tion at the governmental level. To wrest a metaphor from the
field under discussion, it can be said that at both the scholarly
and official levels there were numerous forces operating
against the creation of a critical mass of expertise and
efficiency.
This is a tedious point to document, but relatively
simple to state. Recent Western scholarship on Japan has
shown increasing awareness of the pervasiveness of conflict
within Japanese society, and it is clear that this persisted-may
even have been exacerbated-during the supreme test of
national unity, World War Two. As in the case of prewar
science, here on the side of government and bureaucracy, of
power and authority, there was also a great contradiction:
after 1937, and especially after 1941, the mechanisms of
centralized control were tightened, but factionalism remained
bitter and particularism remained intense in Japan. In the
midst of global war, this was a country beset by internal
skirmishes.
The military historian, for example, will point to
tensions between the Army general staff and field officers;
between the Control Faction (Tosei-ba) and the Imperial Way
Faction (Kodo-ba); among the various naval commands; and,
with extraordinary ferocity, between the Army and Navy. The
economic historian of these years must deal with the dual
structure; the conflict between old zaibatsu (kyu-zaibatsu) and
"new zaibatsu" (sbinko-zaibatsu); the controlled-economy
theorists (tosei-keizai-ronsba) versus the apostles of capitalist
"free enterprise." The student of bureaucratic politics must
come to grips not merely with normal interministerial and
inter-agency in-fighting, but also with the phenomenon of a
cadre of so-called "new bureaucrats" . (shin-kanryo) or
"renovationist bureaucrats" (kakusbin-kanryo), who defined
their role in terms antithetical to those of the traditional
technocrats. The diplomatic historian finds an ongoing
squabble between the advocates of autarky and Pan Asianism,
and the proponents of cooperative imperialism in collusion
with the Western powers. The intellectual historian wrestles
with the potentially paradoxes of National Socialism
(how nationalistic? how socialistic?) and rightwing radicalism
(how conservative? how radical?). Those who follow the spies
find the Special Higher Police of the Home Ministry dogging
the Army's military police (Kempitai), and vice versa, with
scant exchange between the two. And on, and on.
This was, to be sure, factionalism within a system of
overriding authoritarianism, and as the Pacific War drew to a
climax, the channels of control were increasingly clarified and
narrowed. It was not until 1945, however, that scientific
research was more or less coordinated under a single agency
(the Japan Scientific Research Council), and even then, until
Japan's surrender, competition and disunity on research
priorities persisted among such groups as the Army, the Navy,
the Ministry of Munitions, the Ministry of Education, etc.
24
It is, in fact, incorrect to speak of the Japanese A-bomb
project. The Army appeared, retreated, then reappeared to
sponsor research on the problem under Nishina in Tokyo. The
Navy showed early interest in the bomb, then sank from sight,
then resurfaced under a different command as the patron of an
In the final analysis, howver, it seems indisputable that
the scale of Japan's wartime work on the uranium bomb
was so small as to be virtually meaningless. The number
of persons employed in this research full-time was never
more than a handful. The Tokyo project, which involved
a single preliminary isotope-separation experiment,
ended in failure. The Kyoto project never got to the ex
perimental stage. In the end, Japan could show for its
pains a few theoretical papers and a wafer of metallic
uranium.
atomic-bomb project in Kyoto. It was in the context of such
bureaucratic disorganization that Nishina requested coordina
tion and clarification of government demands and priorities
("one window" in the Japanese phrase), and it appears to be
on the basis of such slight phrases that the thesis of initiative
I
emanating from the scientific community is based in the
I
recent U.S. accounts.
2S
IV
The German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann
I
discovered atomic fission, the breaking-up of the uranium
nucleus, in the closing weeks of 1938. The possibility of an
explosive avalanche of fission, a chain reaction caused by
emitted neutrons, was recognized soon thereafter, and Hahn
later claimed that upon confronting the awesome military
implications of this he contemplated committing suicide.
26
As
it turned out, he stayed his hand, received the Nobel Prize
(1944), and contributed to Germany's unsuccessful A-bomb
project.
German scientists moved swiftly in investigating the
military potential of atomic fission, and their activities were
4S
j
observed elsewhere and, in some instances, replicated. In Japan
in August 1939, for example, a scientific article appeared
under the title "A New Super-Weapon Utilizing the Energy of
the Uranium Atom-the Ominous Silence of the German
Academic World.,,27 In the United States, great refugee
physicists who had fled fascism in Europe, such as Einstein
and Fermi, warned of Germany's potential atomic menace and
called for a counter-project. There was surely a deep personal
and political imperative at work here, but that is another
matter. It is, however, useful to set Japan's activities against
the atomic-bomb research undertaken elsewhere at this time.
Although many of the most eminent physicists and
chemists who remained in Germany collaborated in exploring
the military potential of nuclear fission, they never received
the full support of the Nazi government. Hitler was hostile to
"Jewish physics," and the Blitzkrieg mentality of Germany's
military strategists was not receptive to the uncertain and
long-term prospects of nuclear weaponry. The German
scientists themselves were not all equally committed to
reaching the point of actual manufacture of a nuclear weapon,
moreover, and progress was impeded further by factors seen
also in the case of Japan: underestimation of American
capability; an academic fascination with pure over applied
research; and the necessity, in the end, of working amidst
falling bombs under a dying regime. In the end, Germany
committed approximately $10 million and less than one
hundred researchers to the development of nuclear weaponry.
Although the Western powers had been genuinely alarmed by
the possibility of a German A-bomb, these fears turned out to
have been unfounded; as the head of the postwar U.S.
investigation into the matter observed, "the whole German
uranium setup was on a ludicrously small scale.,,28 It is a
measure of the "relativity" of these undertakings, however,
that the Japanese effort was in turn ludicrous in comparison to
the experiments and accomplishments of the German nuclear
scientists.
In contrast to the Anglo-American powers, and the
refugee physicists in the West, the Soviet Union did not take
the German nuclear threat seriously, and actually ceased
serious nuclear research in the summer of 1941, when Hitler
invaded Russia. Prior to this date, nuclear physics had attained
a high level of sophistication in Russia, and the decision to
temporarily abandon research reflected the dire exigencies of
immediate life-or-death struggle in the homeland (and the
absence of strategic bombing as part of Soviet military
strategy), as much as any sanguine intelligence evaluation of
the improbability of a nuclear threat from .Germany. A major
study of Soviet atomic policy thus concludes that "despite the
impressive early advances of Soviet nuclear science, the Soviet
government did not see, or did not take seriously, the military
implications of the atom until, probably, well after the war."
Although Soviet nuclear scientists began to resume their work
in the latter part of 1943, after the defense of Stalingrad and
turn of the military tide against Germany, the thrust of their
research even then does not appear to have been heavily
oriented toward military objectives.
29
In the Soviet case, it
thus seems to require a stretch of the imagination to even
speak of a wartime A-bomb project-and certainly the
"imperative" that operated in the postwar era was not
primarily technological but rather a response-as the Soviets
themselves argued, on strong grounds-to American "atomic
diplomacy. "
In contrast to the Soviet Union, Great Britain, also
confronted by the Nazi menace, moved decisively to
investigate and develop the military potential of the atom.
British scientists and officials were initially skeptical
concerning the feasibility of a nuclear superbomb-in April
1939, for example, the chairman of the Committee on the
Scientific Survey of Air Defense put the odds against such a
weapon at 100,000 to one-but by spring of 1940 the British
had become essentially convinced of the practical possibility
of building a "uranium bomb." The famous MAUD
Committee, composed of several of Britain's most eminent
scientists, was formed in April 1940 with the urgent charge of
reporting on the possibility of developing an atom bomb
during the present war. Simultaneously, major research was
initiated, involving first-rate physicists and chemists from a
numbe.r of institutions, who addressed the many problems
involved from a variety of methodological approaches. By the
end of 1940, the British had made impressive progress at
minimal cost; they were further along in many areas of atomic
research than the United States, and had accomplished far
more in a matter of months than the Japanese were to
accomplish over the course of several years.
By July 1941, the MAUD Committee had completed a
report which was effusive concerning the happy prospects of
the uranium bomb ("the destructive effect, both material and
moral, is so great that every effort should be made to produce
bombs of this kind"), and extremely optimistic concerning
when the first bomb could be available (by the end of 1943).
In every respect-speed, coordination, breadth, imagination,
and unblinking zeal-the British pursuit of the bomb
I
I
contrasted dramatically with the Japanese situation, and
indeed with any other country as of 1941. "There is no
doubt," the official history of Britain's wartime atomic policy
observes, "that the work of the Maud Committee had put the
British in the lead in the race for a bomb.... Without the
work of the Maud Committee, the clarity of its analysis, its
synthesis of theory and practical programming, its tone of
urgency, the Second World War might well have ended before
an atomic bomb was dropped." 30
Despite this head start and heady optimism, for
numerous reasons Britain found it necessary to pass the baton
to the United states, which soon became the only serious
participant in the race. The scale of the Manhattan Project is
well known: it involved, in the end, 150,000 persons, an
estimated 539,000 man-years of effort, a physical plant
covering tens of thousands of acres, and an outlay of roughly
$2 billion. Here it may suffice to note merely that the
Japanese "A-bomb project" was miniscule even when
compared with U.S. experiments and accomplishments prior
to the inauguration of the Manhattan Project in September
1942.
31
Japan's atomic-bomb activities can be divided into four
segments, or four somewhat overlapping stages: (1) prelimi
nary, and rather desultory, inquiries by the military, from
1940 to 1942; (2) evaluation of feasibility by a committee of
scientists, under naval auspices, from July 1942 to March
1943; (3) the "NI-Project," carried out with Army support in
Tokyo from late 1942 to April 1945; (4) the "F-Project" in
Kyoto, sponsored by the Navy from possibly as early as
mid-1943, but barely underway at the time of Japan's
surrender.
32
Early Inquiries
The first serious inquiries concerning a nuclear weapon
for Japan appear to have come from Lt. General Yasuda
Takeo, chief of the Army Aviation Technology Research
Institute, who in April 1940 ordered Lt. Colonel Suzuki
Tatsusaburo to investigate the matter. Suzuki consulted
Sagane Ryokichi, his former professor at Tokyo Imperial
University, and in October produced a twenty-page report
which concluded that manufacture of an atomic bomb was
possible and that Japan might have adequate uranium
resources to pursue this. The report was not treated with great
confidentiality, but was circulated quite widely in military,
academic, and industrial circles. Around April 1941, Yasuda,
through Suzuki, approached the head of Riken, Okochi
Masatoshi, and formally requested expert advice. Okochi
turned the problem over to Nishina, whose response to the
Army certainly appears on the surface to have been languid
and informal. More than a year elapsed before a committee
of experts was actually convened to render a considered
opinion, and this committee was sponsored by the Navy rather
than the Army. 33
The Navy had approached the scientific community for
an opinion on nuclear weaponry in late 1941, as relations with
the United States neared the breaking point. Their approach
tended to parallel that of the Army. The Navy's inquiries were
directed by Captain Ito Yoji, who was affiliated with a
subsection of the Navy Technology Research Institute. Initial

advice was solicited from Sagane and another Tokyo professor,
Hini Juichi, through Lt. Commander Sasaki Kiyoyasu. Both
I
professors agreed on the necessity of investigating the
problem, and this led eventually to the creation of a
Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics
I
(Kakubutsuri oyo kenkyu iinkai). The committee's investiga
tions were subsidized by a modest grant of 2,000 yen from the
Navy.34
I
The Committee of Experts
I
The committee of experts, comprised of eleven
i
prominent scientists under the chairmanship of Nishina, did
not hold its first meeting until July 18, 1942, over haifa year
after the first serious contact between the Navy and the
scientific community. "Ten-plus" meetings followed, ending
on March 6, 1943. In 1953, Ito Yoji published the following
summary of the committee's conclusions:
(a) Obviously it should be possible to make an atomic
bomb.
(b) The question was whether or not the United States and
England could really do tbis in time for this war. and
whether or not Japan could do so ahead of them. The
venerable Professor Nagaoka Hantaro studied this carefully.
Dr. Nishina Yoshio also gave it serious consideration.
(c) It emerged that the basic mineral does not exist in
Japan. There were some prospects in Korea but they had
not been developed. Among the territories occupied by the
Japanese. Burma was most hopeful.
I remember that Burma was old Dr. Nagaoka's idea.
The professor explained that a heavy substance like
uranium is likely to appear where there are wrinkles in the
earth. Since earlier, the Army had already been pursuing
this research in collaboration with Riken. The Navy had not
the slightest intention of initiating a rival project, and only
had in mind doing their own investigation and, based on the
results, entering into collaboration with the Army. In the
committee, problems concerning nuclear fission and the
critical mass for a chain reaction were discussed, and the
sending of a mineral investigation group to Burma was
taken up.
(d) The general line of thought, however, led to the
conclusion that it would probably be difficult even for the
United States to realize the application of atomic power
. during the war.
These observations convinced the Navy Technology Research
Institute that its resources were best concentrated elsewhere
(notably in radar research), and it withdrew from the
picture.
35
Subsequent Navy interest in the project was to
emanate from a different command and be pursued by a
different group of scientists.
47
NI-Project
Prior to the end of 1942, it remains unclear exactly what
studies Nishina initiated in response to the separate inquiries
of the Army and Navy. Although he had several scientists
preparing data and calculations for him, he does not seem to
have assigned anyone exclusively to the "uranium problem"
until December 22, 1942-the same month that Enrico Fermi
created the first chain reaction in a uranium pile in the now
famous squash court at the University of Chicago. The
experimental physicist selected in Nishina's last-minute
Christmas shopping, Takeuchi Tadashi, was no Japanese
Fermi-and, indeed, no nuclear physicist. Takeuchi was a
specialist in cosmic rays, and responded to Nishina's summons
with good will and a good measure of puzzlement concerning
his designated lot. 36
Takeuchi discussed the general problems of isotope
separation with Nish ina and other scientists for several
months. In mid-March of 1943-almost immediately after the
committee of experts conveyed its pessimistic conclusions-a
basic experiment was initiated under Nishina at Riken and
pursued until April 1945, when the single building housing it
was destroyed in an air raid. All this was subsidized by the
Army and, from around May 1943, designated NI-Project
(Ni-go kenkyu). Army research projects were often identified
by symbols from the katakana syllabary, and in this instance it
was generally understood that NI stood, conveniently, for
Nishina.
37
NI-Project--which was accompanied by a futile
search for uranium in Japan, Korea, and the territories under
Japanese military occupation-constituted Japan's major
atomic-bomb. research.
N I-Project ran on a single, modest track: it was aimed at
developing a method for isolating the rare and critical U-235
isotope, and it explored only one of the four possible methods
of separation, thermal diffusion. The decision to pursue this
method alone was reached by Nishina on March 17, 1943, and
conveyed to the Army two days later. 38 For technical and
financial reasons, the Tokyo projects excluded a priori any
experimentation in the other three potential methods of
isotope separation (electromagnetic, ultracentrifuge, and
gaseous diffusion), and no attempts were ever made to create a
uranium pile or develop the plutonium method. Although
actual production of U-235 by the thermal-diffusion process
would require construction of elaborate, multi-stage "cascade"
plants, the Japanese never advanced to the point of seriously
planning these. And, since NI-Project never transcended the
rudimentary technical problems of U-235 separation, the
Japanese never got to the point of actually designing, let alone
attempting to manufacture, a uranium bomb.
A personnel roster for the NI-Project lists 32 different
individuals (25 associated with Riken, six scientists from
Osaka Imperial University, and one military coordinator).39
This is misleading. Some of these persons appear to have
contributed little to the project, while on the other hand it is
possible to cite a number of scientists, technicians, and
military officers not listed who had at least a partial and
passing relationship with these activities. The more significant
figures, however, are these: until March 1944, NI-Project was
entrusted primarily to two young scientists. In March 1944,
they were joined by ten recent graduates in physics who were
assigned to assist them by the Army. These young scientists
had joined Riken upon graduating, but were drafted soon
thereafter; they were assigned to the NI-Project after
completing officer training. When the project was destroyed
by bombs in early 1945, its full-time work force was less than
fifteen persons- all young, none distinguished, and none a
recognized expert in nuclear physics.
40
Beginning in June 1943, NI-Project was housed in
"Building No. 49" in the Riken complex, a two-story wooden
structure which had been built in 1942 to serve, in part, as a
dining room. The total floor space was 330 square meters,
with five rooms on each floor. On the first floor,
Takeuchi-who was in his early thirties when Nishina recruited
him in December 1942-devoted himself to designing and
constructing an isotope separator. On the second floor,
Kigoshi Kunihiko-a researcher in his mid-twenties-ran a
laborious series of experiments to produce uranium hexa
flouride, which had a notorious reputation for devouring
metal, glass, and human patience. This uncongenial compound
was to be introduced into Takeuchi's separator, turned into a
gaseous state, and carefully heated to surrender its precious
U-235.
Kigoshi labored for well over a year before producing, in
early 1944, what hc described as a single lovely crystal of
uranium hexaflouride the size of a grain of rice. Takeuchi
completed his separator almost simultaneously, in March, and
tested it out with argon in mid-May. The argon test was a
failure, but it was decided nonetheless to push on and test the
uranium compound, which by now was being produced in
small quantities. For six months, beginning in July 1944, the
small group in Building No. 49 ran Kigoshi's handiwork
through Takeuchi's handiwork. In the interim, the terror
bombing of Tokyo began, and several vials of the precious
product of the thermal-diffusion run were lost in the process
of being secured; they simply disappeared from a bomb-proof
storage place. By February 1945, the group had a small
amount of something, which they wished to analyze on a mass
48
spectrometer, but they were unable to get access to such a
machine. They used Riken's small cyclotron instead, which
indicated that the experiment was a failure. U-235 had not
been isolated.
41
On April 13, 1945, bombs fell on Tokyo and part of the
Riken complex was destroyed. Building No. 49 appeared to
have survived the air raid, but hours later, in the darkness after
midnight, it burst into flame. Takeuchi's modest and as yet
unsuccessful separator was destroyed. Before this occurred,
vague plans had been made to relocate the experiment and
make use of separation devices at both Osaka Imperial
University and a Sumitomo factory in Amagasaki. These plans
were not seriously pursued-not least because the Tokyo
experiments with thermal diffusion and uranium hexaflouride
had ended in failure-and for all practical purposes, NI-Project
was dissolved in May 1945.
42
The Seareh for Uranium
While Takeuchi and Kigoshi and their draftees were
running these discouraging experiments, the Army was
combing the old and new empires for uranium. They were
guided in their search by limori Satosayu, an eminent Riken
expert on rare elements who had studied under Frederick
Soddy at Oxford from 1919 to 1922; Soddy had collaborated
with Rutherford in the famous experiments on the atom in the
early twentieth century.
The quest in the field complemented the quest in the
laboratories quite nicely. It was hoped that abundant and high
quality ore could be obtained from the Ishikawa mine in
Fukushima prefecture, but the deposit proved to be sparse and
coarse. High expectations were placed in a mine near Seoul,
but it turned out that the mine was closed and it would take
one-thousand miners working every day for one year with
shovels to produce ten kilograms of refined uranium.
Instructions were sent to commanders throughout the new
Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: find uranium. An
investigation team from Tokyo visited China and the southern
theater. All in vain. Promises of several tons of uranium from
Manchuria failed to materialize. Burma's wrinkles proved to
be . . . just wrinkles. "Black sand" was located in con
junction with tin deposits in Malaya, and around 1943 the
Japanese prepared to ship this home; a single shipment of
4,500 tons arrived, before U.S. submarines began to decimate
the transport ships. An alternative source of black sand was
then sought in nearby Korea, but what was discovered turned
out to have a uranium content of less than one-tenth of one
percent. In early 1945, plans were made to ship monazite
(which contains thorium) from China to Japan, but the
Chinese deposits were in areas where the anti-Japanese
resistance was strong, and the war ended before much was
accomplished here.
43
In the midst of this ride on the mineralogical
merry-go-round, the Japanese even pumped up the moribund
Axis Pact and requested pitchblend from Germany (Marie
Curie had used this in her experiments on radium, and the
Germans had control of deposits in Czechoslovakia).
Ambassador Oshima I1iroshi reportedly succeeded in convey
ing the urgency of the request to the Nazi high command, and
Japan was promised two tons of the ore, to be sent by two
submarines. Nothing ever arrived. Reportedly one submarine
was sunk, and the other never left.
44
This brief and essentially
commercial exchange, incidentally, appears to be the only
point of contact between the Japanese and Germans which
involved, however peripherally, potential development of an
atomic bomb. There appears to have been no contact
whatsoever between the scientists of the two countries, and
development of nuclear weaponry was never discussed at the
official level. Here, as in so many other areas, it is obvious that
the concept of a "front" or "camp," which does have meaning
in the case of the Allied powers, merely distorts the realities of
relations between the Japanese and German "Axis powers."
F-Project
Although the Navy Technology Research Institute
bowed out of the picture following the discouraging report of
the committee of experts in 1943, a different naval command,
the Fleet Command, emerged as a sponsor of A-bomb research
in the latter stages of the war-when there was, of course,
virtually no navy left upon which to devote attention. This
project centered upon a research team under Professor
Arakatsu Bunsaku of Kyoto Imperial University, and bore the
designation "F-Project" (F-go kenkyu), the "F" standing for
"Fission." 45
In the recollections of Arakatsu's wartime colleagues,
there is quite a bit of ambiguity concerning the actual date of
origin of F-Project, but the formal record (the Navy's
49
memorandum of October 10, 1945 to the United States)
indicates that Arakatsu received Naval funding for "research
on the utilization of nuclear energy" beginning in May 1943.
This seems entirely plausible, and the differing starting dates
suggested by participants-which range from late 1942 to early
1945-merely reflect the rather casual beginnings and leisurely
early pace of the Kyoto project. The first and last formal
meeting between F-Project scientists and their Navy sponsors
took place on July 21, 1945-over two years after the
"official" start of the project, and twenty-five days before
Japan's surrender.
There was not close collaboration between the Navy and
Army projects, although some data was exchanged. The basic
technical difference was that the Kyoto group decided to try
to separate the U-235 isotope by the ultracentrifuge, rather
than thermal-diffusion, method (still relying, however, on
uranium hexaflouride). It was calculated that a centrifuge
capable of at least 150,000 revolutions per minute would be
necessary. The speed of the existing machines in Japan was
one-fourth or one-fifth this, and consequently much of the
activity of F-Project was devoted to designing an ultra
centrifuge. The design was completed in July 1945. The
machine was never built.
46
On paper, there were nineteen scientists in Arakatsu's
team. In practice, there appear to have been five major
contributors in addition to Arakatsu himself. Kobayashi
Minoru, working under Yukawa, addressed theoretical
problems, including the critical mass of U-235 necessary to
produce a chain reaction. Kimura Kiichi and Shimizu Sakae,
the associate professor and lecturer under Arakatsu,
concentrated on the centrifuge design. Chemical problems,
expecially the handling of gaseous states, were entrusted to
Sasaki Shinji. Okada Takuzo of the engineering department
dealt with the production of metallic uranium, essential to any
actual manufacture of a bomb.
47
The concrete accomplishments of F-Project consisted of
several theoretical papers, plus success on the part of Okada in
producing a stable sample of purely metallic uranium for the
first time in Japan; it was about the size of a postage stamp,
three centimeters on each side and one millimeter thick.
48
v
The preceding summation derives largely from the
retrospective accounts of Japanese participants, most of which
were collected by the Y omiuri newspaper in the latter half of
the 1960s. Although Nishina died in 1951, and left no known
account, other major participants spoke freelY,and often at
considerable length to the Y omiuri. They include Takeuchi,
Kigoshi Iimori, Taketani, and several of the "ten draftees"
from NI-Project; Arakatsu, Kimura, Shimizu, Kobayashi, and
other participants in F-Project; and a number uf the former
Army and Navy officers who acted as key- liaison on the
atomic-bomb research. These accounts are not always precise
of consistent, and the familiar perils of relying upon
reminiscence obviously apply here. There is some corrobo
rating material, and also a pattern in the recollections,
however, which suggest several concluding observations.
First, the impetus to build a uranium bomb appears to
have come from the military rather than from the civilian
scientists and engineers as Professors York and Weiner suggest.
Both the Army and Navy began to explore the possibility of
military adaptation of nuclear energy on their own around
1940. The Army Aviation Technology Research Institute
approached Riken in early 1941. The Navy Technology
Research Institute requested a feasibility study in late 1941 or
early 1942. The Navy Fleet Command took the initiative in
urging Arakatsu to explore the possibilities of a uranium
bomb, probably in mid-1943. According to Kawashima
Toranosuke, a former Army colonel who is hyperbolically
described as the "General Groves" of the Japanese project in
the Yomiuri publication, the creation of NI-Project was
strongly supported by Prime Minister Tojo Hideki himself.
49
Several accounts also indicate that the emperor's brothers,
Princes Mikasa and Takamatsu-shadowy uniformed figures in
much of japan's wartime activity-knew of the project and
encouraged it, taking special interest in the search for uranium
ore. so
Second, data concerning the projects can be played like
a concertina, and when figures concerning personnel and
subsidies are stretch to the limit, it may appear that Japan's
50
commitment to developing an atomic bomb was fairly
substantial. The total number of scientists on the fonnal
rosters for NI-Project and F-Project comes to fifty. To this one
can add the committee of experts which met in 1942-1943,
plus other physicists and chemists who were consulted at one
point or another. Takeuchi estimated that in the long course
of building his thermal-diffusion apparatus, he borrowed the
services of probably thirty or forty engineers and technicians
at Riken.
51
In addition, numerous military officers and
industrialists became involved with aspects of the two projects.
The amount of money spent on Japan's wartime
atomic-bomb research may also have been relatively large
although the sums suggested are uncomfirmed, and extremely
difficult to place in perspective. According to Koyama Kenji, a
key Army figure at the time, a total of two-million yen was
allotted to the NI-Project, but one-quarter of this was not
actually disbursed to Riken until immediately after Japan's
surrender. 52 There are conflicting figures given concerning
support of F-Project. One version has it that upon being
approached by the Navy. Arakatsu requested an annual grant
of 3,000 yen, with which the Navy readily complied. This is
the type of small subsidy which would be granted for
theoretical work rather than actual experimentation. Although
F-Project made little progress beyond theory, however, the
October 1945 memorandum which the Japanese Navy
prepared for the U.S. indicates that the Kyoto group received
a total of 600,000 ren in two installments between May 1943
and the surrender.
5
These figures are great or small depending
upon the point of comparison. The round sum of 2.6-million
yen, for example, is equivalent to one-quarter of the total
research expenditures of the Japan Association for the
Promotion of Scientific Research from 1942 to 1945. On the
other hand, it amounts to less than one-half of one percent of
the total Anny and Navy research expenditures from 1942 to
1945.
54
In the final analysis, however, it seems indisputable that
the scale of Japan's wartime work on the uranium bomb was
so small as to be virtually meaningless. The number of persons
employed in this research full-time was never more than a
handful. The Tokyo project, which involved a single
preliminary isotope-separation experiment, ended in failure.
The Kyoto project never got to the experimental stage. In the
end, Japan could show for its pains a few theoretical papers
and a wafer of metallic uranium.
The haphazard organization of these projects, their
leisurely pace, their negligible size, and their failure to
effectively mobilize or coordinate available expertise lead to a
third general observation, already suggested earlier: that the
project was of relatively low interest to the scientists
themselves. It should be kept in mind that over one-hundred
physicists were associated with the Nishina Laboratory at the
time of Pearl Harbor, but little interest was shown in applied
nuclear energy-and certainly none in the bomb-until the
military requested such studies. This was also true of the
Kyoto University group, which included Yukawa and Sakata
at this time and had long been engaged in advanced theoretical
and experimental work on the atom. The Japanese record
simply does not reproduce those British, German, and
American scenes of scientists carrying the case for the bomb to
the government.
On the contrary, there emerges in the Japanese case an
almost antithetical impression: of the best physicists and
chemists indicating disinterest in working on the bomb-or,
alternatively, approaching the problem once assigned to it in a
manner quite contrary to the military, viz., as gakumon, a
purely scholarly exercise. This is a common word in the
reminiscences of the participating scientists, and there seems
no reason to doubt it, for its connotations are pragmatic rather
than moral. It is difficult to cite a scientist who believed that
Japan had a serious chance of actually manufacturing an
atomic bomb. When pressed to a timetable, they rolled out
decades as metaphors of impossibility: ten, twenty, fifty,
one-hundred years would be necessary before Japan, in its
present state, could make a nuclear weapon. As a result, the
Japanese never progressed to the stage of actually working on
the theory of the bomb itself, and were thereby spared hard
questions of both a practical and moral nature.
This led to an often ambivalent and ambiguous situation.
When the Navy approached the Kyoto group, for example,
they were told flatly that for reasons of research structure,
industrial capacity, materials, and resources, Japan could not
hope to have an atomic bomb during the present war. The
Navy's purported reply revealed a new appreciation of
long-range planning: "If it's not ready for this war, then it can
be ready for the next war." This was a catchy riposte, and is
surely destined to be one of the staples of all future
commentaries on Japan's wartime A-bomb work. But it does
not accurately convey the atmosphere in the research centers
themselves. Kimura Kiichi, who recounted the Navy's
comment in his account for the Yomiuri, for example, went
on directly to suggest that Arakatsu and Nishina-like Kimura
himself and his colleagues in F-Project-regarded the bomb as a
catch phrase which could be "borrowed" to keep nuclear
physics going and young researchers alive. But at the same
time, Kimura acknowledged, he felt guilt at being relatively
safe on the homefront while his peers were giving their lives;
and thus he gave himself to the bomb project with great
devotion and diligence. 55
Nishina can be taken as an example of the complexity of
this general question of motivation and imperatives. He was, to
begin with, ordered to work on the bomb. But he was also,
without question, a patriot, and it is easy to illustrate both his
dismay at Japan's insane military quest and his commitment to
help his country. Thus he gave rousing speeches to his staff,
and told the Army and Navy to shape up. What is striking
about NI-Project, however,. is that in concrete practice Nishina
did not really do much at all. He did not promote the applied
use of nuclear energy on his own. He did not respond at all
quickly to Army or Navy importunement concerning a
uranium bonb. And even after he had committed himself to
the atomic-bomb project, he did not put the best men on it,
and indeed left it all but unstaffed. Neither of his two major
researchers, Takeuchi and Kigoshi, had outstanding creden
tials, and Takeuchi was not even a specialist in nuclear
research. One of the most valuable basic documents on
NI-Project is a 'chronicle which Takeuchi assembled after the
surrender, based on his diary and research notes. At one point
he refers to himself as a "blank page" in the area of atomic
energy, and at another point, at the very beginning of his
assignment, he asks rhetorically why the order not go to
certain scientists actually engaged in research on the atom. "In
the first place," he writes, in answer to his own question,
"they all wanted to do their own work.,,56 51
Takeuchi and Kigoshi did have access to the expertise
available within the great complex of the Nishina Laboratory
and the Institute for Research in the Physical and Chemical
Sciences (Riken), as well as the outside academic community.
They often took advantage of this, and also occasionally made
use of outside faculties and equipment, but the effort was not
really systematic. Advice from Riken colleagues frequently
appears to have been solicited during the lunch break, and
assistance on critical basic problems was not always readily
forthcoming. In his diary-memoir, for example, Takeuchi
wrote that while he could undertake construction of an appa
ratus for thermal diffusion, fundamental theoretical calcula
tions concerning "probability" and neutron behavior simply
had to be done by others: "I strongly urged that this be given
to the nuclear people, but the nuclear people apparently had
no desire to do it, and this situation continued up to the end
of the experiment {October 1944)." At one point, Takeuchi
sought advice from Takeda Eiichi, a physicist at Osaka
Imperial University, and then urged that Takeda be brought in
as a member of the NI-Project. Neither Nishina nor Takeda,
however, showed any interest in this proposal. 57
There was a kind of casual desperation in these activities
which suggests the larger tragi-comedy of the enterprise as a
whole. Takeuchi and Kigoshi were clearly on a doomed solo
flight in Building No. 49. Kigoshi estimated that for want of
expert advice on one aspect of his experiment he probably
wasted a whole year in working out the preparation of
uranium hexafluoride, 58 and there is no question that he and
his colleagues on the floor below also wasted an immense
amount of time by being forced to personally scrounge for
materials. Both men have left some memorable vignettes of
their activities as scavengers, not least of which' is Kigoshi's
account of attempting to obtain sugar from the Army for a
heating experiment ("We would like to obtain an extra ration
of sugar to build an atomic bomb,,).s9
By late 1944 and early 1945, the absurdity of the
situation had assumed a Kafkaesque quality. Kigoshi was
producing small quantities of the noxious compound on the
second floor. Takeuchi's separation apparatus was running
night and day downstairs without ever having proved it could
separate anything. The military-officer scientists were sleeping
round the clock in the rickety building to observe the behavior
of an invisible gas. Taketani was in jail, working out formulas
in an interrogation room belonging to the Thought Police and
belatedly proving that the whole experiment was theoretically
flawed. The navy was sunk; the air force was replacing bombs
with young men; the army was girding for a bamboo-spear
defense of the homeland-and it was calculated that a serious
atomic-bomb project would require one-tenth of the
electricity and one-half of the critical military stock of copper
in Japan.
60
There was no uranium anyway. The terror bombing
of Japan's cities was commencing, in the name of peace and
democracy.
And, contrary to what the scientists believed possible,
the atomic bomb was about to be realized in Japan.
*
* * *
Notes
1. Professor York's comments appear in Science, January
13,1978 (p. 155), and were repeated in a radio interview on the
program "All Things Considered," National Public Radio (Washington,
D.C.), on January 9,1978.
2. A comment by Professor Derek de Soli a Price of Yale
University which accompanies the Science article carries this
undertone: "Japan's attempt to acquire an atomic weapon during the
World War II changes the moral and ethical relationship between Japan
and the United States that has grown up over the use of the atomic
bomb against Japan. The story has been that the Americans were guilty
and the Japanese were innocent and blameless; that the Americans
developed this terrible new weapon and proceeded to commit an
atomic rape of the then-helpless Japanese. But the fact that the
Japanese were trying to develop the bomb, too, means that America
was in an arms race with Japan as much as she was with Germany."
The account in the Times, which begins "Documents have come
to light ... ," reinforces this, although in a confusing manner. After
mentioning Japanese sources on the subject dated 1970 to 1973, the
article notes elsewhere: "The American scholars currently studying the
period suggest that a conspiracy of silence on the part of Japanese
atomic physicists had been so effective that the truth had come close to
being obscured forever. But accounts in the last two years [sic) by
various Japanese scientists have disclosed some information about the
project."
3. Chitoshi Yanaga, japan Since Perry, First edition (Hights
town, N.J.: McGraw Hill, 1949), p. 618.
4. Arnold Kramisch, Atomic Energy in tbe Soviet Union
(Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1959) p. 56.
5. In 1959, Yanaga's reference was incorporated in the adapted
translation of a popular Japanese military history: Saburo Hayashi (in
collaboration with Alvin D. Coox), Kogun, tbe japanese Army in tbe
Pacific War (Quantico, VA.: The Marine Corps Association, 1959), pp.
162, 216. The original Japanese version of Hayashi's study, published
while Japan was still under occupation, had noted, without annotation
or reference to Yanaga, that "The Army high command was interested
in the military adaptation of uranium, and research was being pursued.
They accepted at face value, however, the opinion of the nuclear
scientists, viz., that 'No country whatsoever will be able to perfect an
atomic bomb during World War Two'" Taibeio sensa rikusen gaisbi
(Iwanami shinsho, 1951 No. 59), pp. 261-262.
Passing mention of wartime research on the bomb in Tokyo
appears in John Toland, Tbe Rising Sun: Tbe Decline and Fall of tbe
japanese Fmpire, 1936-1945 (New York: Random House, 1970), p.
795. Fairly frequent mention of an aspect of these activities is made in
Thomas M. Coffey, Imperial Tragedy (New York: World Publishing Co.,
1970); see the index citations under Nishina Yoshio. An article in the
August 12, 1977 issue of New Statesman referred to the Kyoto side of
Japan's wartime work on the A-bomb as if this were common
knowledge (p. 199).
6. Chikayoshi Kamatani, "The History of Research Organiza
tion in Japan," japanese Studies in the History of Science, 2 (1963), p.
63; Tetu Hirosige, "Social Conditions for the Researches of Nuclear
Physics in Pre-War Japan," ibid., pp. 87-88. Hirosige's article was
reprinted in Nakayama Shigeru, David L. Swain & Yagi Eri, ed., Science
and Society in Modern japan, Selected Historical Sources (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1974; originally Tokyo University Press). In a
1965 article, also in English, Hirosige again referred in passing to the
fact that Japanese "nuclear physicists began the study of the atomic
bomb" around 1943: "The Role of the Government in the
Development of Science," Cabiers d'bistorie mondiaie, 9.2 (special issue
on "Society, Science and Technology in Japan," 1965), p. 335.
7. The Pacific War Research Society, Tbe Day Man I.ost:
Hirosbima, 6 August 1945 (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1972); see
especially the data within pp. 18-49, and also pp. 93-94, 126-127,
183-184,201-202,293.
8. Kimitsu beiki no zemba: waga gunji kagaku gijutsu no
shinsa to bansei l The Full Story of Secret Armaments: Facts and
Reflections on Our Military Science and Technology] 1953).
It6's account is excerpted in Sbowasbi no temla (footnote 9 below), IV,
pp. 177-182, and contains some of the data "revealed" in Science. The
article cited by Kramish (footnote 4 above) appeared in a special issue
of Kaiza, November 15, 1952. An article titled "The Truth of Japan's
Atomic Bomb" was published in August 1953, and has been excerpted
52
in more recent publications (see footnote 10 below): Yamamoto
Yoichi, "Nihon gembaku no shinso," Daihbron, 20.8. This is mentioned
in Science, but its reliability is questioned.
9. Yomuiri shimbunsha, ed. Shbwashi no tennb [The Emperor
and Showa History], volume 4 (Yomiuri shimbunsha, 1968), pp.
78-229; this source is cited below as SST. Much of the account in The
Day Man Lost, which is poorly annotated, derives from this volume.
10. Nihon Kagakushi Gaakai, ed., Nihon kagaku gijutsushi taikei
(Daiichi Hogen, 1970), volume 13, pp. 441-472; cited below as NKGT
This volume, with its "documents," accounts for three of the four
major sources mentioned in Science. The fourth is a 1973 "social
history of science" by Hirosige Tetu which has not been consulted here,
but which apparently represents the book form of a series of articles
published by Hirosige in Shizen. Here japan's bomb project is discussed
in the March 1972 issue, pp. 97-98. I am grateful to Professor Edward
Daub for identifying these sources.
11. NKGT, pp. 468-469; SST, 172-174.
I
12. The Science article touches briefly on the ambiguity of this
issue, and its relationship to the notorious U.S. destruction of japanese
cyclotrons in November 1945. (The five existing cyclotrons in japan
were seized on November 20 and totally destroyed beginning November
24, causing heartbreak among japanese researchers and an immediate
cause celebre within the international scientific community. The
'" setback to postwar nuclear research in japan was naturally substantial).
I
It should be noted that U.S. military authorities acted swiftly to
prohibit nuclear research in occupied japan. A directive (SCAPIN 47)
of September 22, 1945 prohibited all research "which has as its object
effecting mass separation of Uranium-235 from Uranium, or effecting
mass-separation of any other radio-actively unstable elcments." An
!
I
I
order from Washington dated October 30, 1945 reaffirmed this ban,
and ordered all persons engaged in such research to be taken into
custody and all atomic-energy research facilities to be seized; the
scientists were not released from custody until mid-December. A
"Scientific Intelligence Survey in Japan," which completed its report
on November 1, apparently concluded that "the japanese had made
little progress on the release of atomic energy up to the time of the
i
J
Surrender"-but in the furor which arose upon destruction of the
cyclotrons, the U.S. War Department intimated that its actions had
been based upon certain, unspecified, intelligence findings. The issue
requires further research; as will be seen, the cyclotrons played almost
no part in the atomic-bomb-related work which the japanese did
undertake during the war. Some general comments appear in Supreme
Commander for the Allied Powers (Japan), General Headquarters,
Statistics and Reports Section, History of the Non-Military Activities of
the Occupation of Japan (1952): monograph no. 54, "Reorganization
of Science and Technology in japan, 1945 - September 1950"
[available on microfilm from the National Archives], pp. 1-5, and p. I
of the Appendix.
13. Cf. the previously cited articles by Kamatani and Hirosige. It
might be noted that japanese historians of science, many of whom
work with a rather Neo-Marxist framework, are acutely sensitive to the
relationship between development of scientific research and the stage of
economic growth and military demand. Thus the relative backwardness
of the Japanese research structure vis-a-vis the West prior to World War
One is placed firmly in the context of the comparative underdevelop
ment of Japanese capitalism. Among other considerations, this
backwardness and comparative disadvantage led the Japanese to
attempt to remain competitive by relying upon cheap wages and
borrowed technology, rather than the development of original
technology through costly research investment.
14. Cf.SST, pp.103-104, 171, 189-190,219.
15. Thus the famous Smyth Report, which was completed in
July 1945, noted that "most of us are certain that the Japanese cannot
develop and use this weapon effectively." Henry DeWolf Smyth,
Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the
Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United
States Government, 1940-1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1947), p. 224. Cf. Arthur Holly Compton, Atomic Quest: A
Personal Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 225.
Professor Price's suggestion that the U.S. was in, or even thought it was
in, an "arms race with Japan" (footnote 2 above) is patently absurd.
16, Cf. Nakayama, t aI., especially the articles by Taketani
Mitsui, Itakura Kiyonobu and Vagi Eri, Hirosige Tetu, and Kaneseki
Yoshinori.
17. SST, pp. 88-89.
18. Cf. NKGT, p. 443; Also Kamatani, p. 56.
!9. Nakayama, et aI., pp. 25-26.
20. Ibid., p. 213.
21. "Methodological approaches in the development of the
meson theory of Yukawa in Japan," in Nakayama, et aI., pp. 24-38; this
originally appeared in Japanese in 1951.
22. Tetu Hirosige, "Studies of History of Physics in japan,"
Japanese Studies in the History of Science, 1 (1962), p. 28.
23. SST, pp. 163-171. The Tokko operated under the Home
Ministry. The Army, which was sponsoring the bomb research and had
its own police arm (the Kempeitai), apparently was not concerned by
Taketani's leftist associations.
24. Cf. Kamatani, especially pp. 48-57.
25. NKGT, p. 442. In the Science version, " ... Nishina
managed to keep the Riken atomic research going by suggesting that
the research sponsorship be unified"-but the article itself goes on to
note that no unification of sponsorship ever occurred.
26. David Irving, The German Atomic Bomb: The History of
Nuclear Research in Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1967), p. 33.
27. NKGT, pp. 441-442.
28. Quoted in Kramish, p. 51. For a general account, see Irving.
29. Kramish, Chapters 1-8; the quotation appears on p. 54.
30. Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 19391945
(New York: MacMillan, 1964), especially Part I. The quoted passage
appears on p. 85.
31. The standard account is Richard G. Hewlett & Oscar E.
Anderson, Jr., The New World, 193911946, volume I of A History of
the United States Atomic Energy Commission (Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1962).
32. The discussion which follows derives primarily from SST
and NKGT. The Day Man Lost also reproduces much of the
information in SST. The Science article has selectively culled data from
NKGT, but includes a number of factual errors, including several basic
dates; the argument here, strained and questionable on its own terms,
suffers greatly by having apparently neglected SST, the most detailed
source on the subject. This neglect is puzzling, since NKGT actually
includes an excerpt from SST; the citation in NKGT is slightly botched
(giving volume 3 rather than 4 of SST), but hardly incomprehensible.
33. SST, pp. 78-81 (account of Suzuki Takusaburo). In another
version, Nishina was commissioned to study the problem by the Army
around September 1940;Shizen, March 1972, p. 97.
34. SST, pp. 177-180 (account of Ito Yoji). The members of the
committee were Nagaoka Hantaro and Nishina Yoshio from Riken;
Nishikawa Masaharu, Sagane Ryokichi, Hino Juichi, and Mizushima
Sanichiro from Tokyo Imperial University; Asada Tsunesaburo and
Kikuchi Masashi from Osaka Imperial University; and Tanaka
Masamichi from Tokyo Shibaura Electric Company.
Here, as on many points, there is some ambiguity on dates.
Coffy (pp. 333-338), apparently relying on an interview with Asada
Tsunesaburo, states that the decision to form the committee was made
in a very formal setting on December 17, 1941, in a meeting attended
by over a dozen high-ranking naval officers and at least five members of
the subsequent committee of experts (Asada, Sagane, Watanabe,
Kikuchi, and Nishina). Coffey depicts Nishina as a scientist long
interested in the military application of science, and even has him
suggesting that the Navy might obtain uranium from Africa. He gives
the Navy title for the study ordered at this time as "Project A." The
Day Man Lost has it as "B-research" (p. 26).
35. SST, pp. 180-181.
36. NKGT, pp. 442, 445; SST, pp. 86-88 (account of Takeuchi
Tadashi). Science unaccountably gives the key date as December 1940
instead of December 1942.
37. NKGT, p. 442; SST, p. 85.
38. NGKT, pp. 446-447; SST, p.p. 92-93. Science interprets the
decision of March 19, 1943 as evidence of Nishina's vision of and hope
for a large-scale project. This interpretation is facilitated by a
mistranslation of the phrase "several hundred kilograms" as "several
hundred tons" (the ideographs are similar)-in reference, presumedly,
to the amount of uranium the Japanese might hope to process once the
preliminary thermal-diffusion experiments had been completed. It also
rests on one of Nishina's cryptic notations to the effect that "Whether
the explosion will be successful or not will be determined by
experiments parallel to and separate from thermal diffusion." This was
of course an official Army project to build an atomic bomb, and one
would indeed expect Nishina to talk in terms of ideal post-preliminary
objectives. As the Japanese accounts make clear, however, the practical
meaning of the March decision was restrictive. And as suggested in the
final section of this essay. Nishina in practice appears to have been
content to keep NI-Project on a miniscule scale.
39. NKGT, p. 465.
40. There were actually eleven officer-scientists assigned to the
project in March 1944. Five assisted Takeuchi, five worked with
Kigoshi, and one was assigned to assist Professor Iimori Satoyasu, noted
below in connection with the search for uranium? SST, pp. 99-101.
One of the men assigned to work with Kigoshi at this time, Ishiwatari
Takehiho, had actually been quite intimately involved in the uranium
project before being drafted.
41. SST, pp. 101-137: this includes both Takeuchi's and
Kigoshi's accounts of the experiJTIents. A close technical summation is
given in Takeuchi's diary-memoir in NKGT, pp. 444-464.
42. SST, pp. 156-164.
43. SST, pp. 141-156.
44. SST, pp. 146-148.
45. SST, p. 221. An alternative and improbable interpretation
associates "F" with the fluoride in the critical uranium haxafluoride
compound; SST, p. 204.
46. SST, pp. 183-205. Only four Kyoto scientists attended the
July 21, 1945 meeting: Arakatsu, Yukawa, Kobayashi Minoru, and
Sasaki Shinji. Yukawa gave a report surveying "International Research
on Nuclear Power," based on information from neutral countries, in
which he reiterated the belief that no nation was capable of harnessing
the atom to military uses in the immediate future.
48. SST, pp. 191, 201, 203, 228; NKGT, p. 468.
49. SST, pp. 84, 142, 145.
50. SST, p. 155. The possible role of the princes is also picked
up by Science, which identifies them as "sons" of the emperor.
51. SST, p. 120.
52. SST, p. 206.
53. SST, pp. 183, 173; NKGT, p. 469.
54. For 1942-1945, research expenditures were approximately
as follows:
Japan Society for the Promotion of
Scientific Research Y 10,417,000
Ministry of Education 46,550,000
Agency of Science & Technology 70,027,000
Army 462,166,000
Navy 281,516,000
See Kamatani, pp. 58-61; Shizen, March 1972, pp. 97-99.
55. SST, pp. 190-191; NKGT, p. 468. Science uses the quote in
this manner: " ... So it seems that the scientists viewed the project as
!!xtremely long term at best, or, as one of them would later write, 'if
not for this war then in time for the next one.' "
56. NKGT, p. 445.
57. NKGT, p. 447.
58. SST, pp. 107-108.
59. SST, pp. 97-99, 114.
60. NKGT, p. 442; SST, pp. 122,208.
54
New Letters from Hiroshima
by Alexander Kuo
All armies prefer high ground to low,
and sunny places to dark.
-Sun-tzu, The Art of War (500 B.C.)
1.
7:25 A.M., August 6, Straight Flush.
We are six miles over Hiroshima
a speck against the sun.
We have flown west
across the city, and are flying east
back across it. We are doing
what we have been told
we must. My sergeant has just
tapped the weather report back
to Colonel Tibbets flying
the Enola Gay with the 9,000 pound
Little Boy
200 miles south of us over Shikoku.
Our advice: BOMB PRIMARY.
Hiroshima.
With your permission, sir
the biggest gamble in history
will be done.
2.
It is close to midnight
here in the Atlantic
August 5. I had just asked
Harry S Truman en route from Potsdam
to Washington, what he thought
of old Joe Stalin. He was a S.O.B.
Then he said there's to be a gamble
soon, two billion dollars
have been spent on it
from his executive budget.
A very powerful gamble.
This poem first appeared in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars Volume 5, No.2 (September, 1973), pp. 46-48.
55
His authority was absolute
his responsibility crushingly final.
The sun must be coming up
over the Pacific tomorrow now.
3.
It's a quiet morning here
on this little island.
The sun is almost up
and a deep blue has settled
over the base. There is
no sound or movement
all around, more silence
than the last two days
after the bad weather
the first days of this month.
Over the squawk box by the tower
just now I heard Colonel Tibbets
radio for clearance: "Dimples
Eight-Two to North Tinian Tower.
Ready for take off on runway Able."
He's quite a man
that colonel. I hope you'd
get to meet him some time.
I'd heard that he is commanding
the first personal air force
in history, that he reports
to no one but the very top.
My buddy Jim told me
that Tibbets had changed
the code name from Vjctor
to Dimples just this afternoon
on a hunch
the J aps were tuned in.
What a guy., You'd like him.
Just a few days ago he changed
the name of his B-29, you know
the biggest bomber we have
from #44-86292 to Enola Gay
after his mother
in Glidden, Iowa.
Well. Since they all took off
at 0245 this morning, no one
on the base had said much.
They all seem to be waiting
for something to happen.
Which reminds me. There was something
sometime ago that happened
that I forgot to tell you.
When I was training
at the Manhattan District in Salt Lake City
(that's when I first met the colonel)
Bob Hope and Bing Crosby entertained
us. Bob named the base
Leftover Field, and Bing, Tobacco Road
with slot machines. Anyway
I thought you'd like that.
How're things at home?
How's the football team
look for next year?
You know, the Senators have a chance
to move within a half game
of first place if they sweep
both games from Boston today.
Well, I better head off and see
what everyone's so quiet about.
4.
How are they treating you
these days? Do you have enough
to eat? The war must end soon
you just wait
and see.
We haven't felt the blast
or flames of the United States
20th Air Force bombs yet.
You remember neighbor Segoyi?
He said yesterday that Truman's
mother lives around
here, that's why Hiroshima's been spared.
But we are beginning to anticipate
the worst. People are openly saying
that this insulation is only preparing
us for some irrevocable fate.
Already 70,000 dwellings
have been demolished to make
three east-west fire-breaks
in the city. And with the Ota
River's seven north-south channels
they think we're ready.
I'm not so sure.
Things get worse by the day.
Only 150 stores are open now.
There is less
of everything but money.
The banks are flourishing though
they said that savings are higher
by 28% than a year ago.
There are very few soldiers left
here any more. There is no more
banzai sounding in the streets.
The war must be getting worse for us.
My son, you must
56
serve your Emperor well. Do it
with honor to your country too.
5.
First a flash
A noiseless blast
Then white heat
A great wind
A fire wind
That burned for two and a half miles
That fused quartz crystals in granite blocks
That roasted exposed children only their shadows remained
That welded women into asphalt and stone forever
That made eyes into holes
Black letters of newsprint burned right out of the white
paper a mile and a half away
Dark garment patterns of flowers burned into the skin of
women
Workers' brown shoulder straps burned into their chests
The white was untouched, unscorched, only slightly singed
And the dark, the darker, the darker, always the darker
burned into enemies forever
And then the rain
The strange rain
Drops big as marbles
The Black Rain
The peeling skin
And much later
No bodies to be counted
Only parts to be named
From the beginning
6.
By the time you get this
you would have heard
what happened today.
I was in that plane
instant D.S.C.
It had to be done.
To end the war quickly.
To save countless lives.
If I had to, I would
do it all over again
for you.
There I was
alone in the tail turret
with my goggles on
watching the mushroom
get bigger and bigger
the farther we flew away
from it,
No one t() lalk to lip there
Only the icy silence
six miles above the earth
next to nothing.
7.
Why didn't you make the Army
keep its promise?
Why wasn't the uranium 235
activated over Mt. Fuji?
Why was another dropped
on Nagasaki three days later?
20,000 tons of TNT for 200,000 killed.
One for every ten.
Tell me. Tell
me, now, Dr. Einstein, in 1952.
8.
WASHINGTON-The demilitarized zone-the
strip of land between the two Vietnams so cru
cial to diplomatic progress on the war-is
in a comparative lull.
This reading by the military officers came
Thursday along with the official report from
Saigon that Americans killed in the war totaled
177 for the week ending Aug. 17.
Military officers noting the lull in the
DMZ were frank to say that nobody really knows
where the enemy has gone from his old positions.
57
Bikini Atoll, 1954
by Stephen Salaff
On March 1, 1954 the United States exploded a hydrogen
bomb over the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The blast
marked the beginning of a class of "super" weapons that
dwarfed the atomic bombs used in the destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just as these earlier nuclear weapons
had dwarfed the conventional explosives of World War II.
Military teams making the measurements at the coral reef were
told to expect a blast of 7 megatons (7 million tons of TNT),
the biggest explosion ever. (The bomb on Hiroshima measured
0.02 megatons.) The Bikini device detonated with an actual
force of 15 megatons, more than double the yield predicted.
The bomb gouged a huge 500 meter chasm in the atoll,
blasting tons of coral into powder and sucking tremendous
quantities of the radioactive debris high up into the fireball.
The fallout heavily contaminated more than 7,000 square
miles of the surrounding Pacific ocean. In addition to the
military personnel caught in the fallout (who were given some
degree of protection and promptly evacuated), radioactive
dust and ash descended upon several hundred residents of
Rongelap, about 100 miles downwind from the explosion, and
other islands near the equator in the Marshalls group. Over 250
of these islanders, under a US-administered "Strategic
Trusteeship,,,l were afflicted with serious thyroid and other
illnesses from which they suffer and die to the present day.
Twenty-three other persons were unwittingly present:
the crew members of the 100-ton wooden tuna trawler
Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon), drifting approximately 90
miles east-northeast and downwind of the burst point. At
around 3: 30 a.m. in the morning of March 1, the crew finished
breakfast on the quarter deck and were chatting in the cabin.
At 3: 50 the cabin window shone as if it were the sunrise.
"The sun has risen!" someone exclaimed, even though the
brilliant flash occurred in the west. At 7:25, white ashes started
to descend upon the ship, and the crew members began to
experience sore eyes, headaches and nausea. In two days their
faces became black. Barely five weeks into its anticipated
three-month voyage, the Lucky Dragon limped back to its
home port of Yaizu, in Shizuoka Prefecture, southwest of
Tokyo. The fishermen arrived there two weeks later, suffering
painful facial burns and falling hair in addition to the earlier
symptoms.
At first, United States officials insisted that the Lucky
Dragon was not exposed to "death ash" from the Bikini
H-Bomb test. They later admitted the fact, but then falsely
suggested that the ship had deliberately entered the off-limits
perimeter for espionage purposes. But the craft's sailing route
map proved that the Lucky Dragon was approximately 40
miles away from the forbidden area. The Yomiuri Sbinbun, in
its morning edition of March 16, headlined: "Japanese
fishermen affected by atomic bomb at Bikini?" The Lucky
Dragon and its fishing gear, as well as the crew, were so
radioactive that the Geiger counters brought aboard virtually
squawked. The ship was quarantined, and all crew members
were hospitalized. Such of the Lucky Dragon's 12,000-pound,
highly radioactive catch as had not already been sold and dis
tributed was deeply buried after inspection. But some of the
affected fish had been marketed in distant cities, and as the
fish was tuna, which is cut up and sold in very small portions,
many Japanese feared for their survival. Tuna, shark and other
fish brought back by fishing boats were proved to be
contaminated by strong radiation, and all fishing for a time
became impossible. After a severe siege of illness, chief radio
operator Aikichi Kuboyama, age 40, fell into a coma on August
29 with a low white blood cell count. Despite the assurance of
a speedy recovery made by U.S. medical officers in Japan, Mr.
Kuboyama died on September 23. The U.S. has never
officially admitted that the Bikini test was the cause of his
death. The remaining crew members even today report for
periodic examinations, in case a time-delayed deterioration in
blood count should suddenly occur.
The widespread fallout from the Bikini explosion was
the first indication that H-Bomb tests could cause global
radioactive contamination. This tragedy revived the anguish of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and aroused spontaneous,
universal indignation. Richard Storry has noted that "It has
never been appreciated in the West that this affair caused
resentment in Japan at least equal to that occasioned by the
atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki." The radioactivity
conscious people of Japan strongly identified with Kuboyama
and the ill-fated vessel and crew. More than 400,000 mourners
rallied to his funeral. By August 1955, a petition against A
and H-bombs gathered over 30 million Japanese signatures.
The activity of the movement against nuclear weapons that
was taking place both in Japan and throughout the world led
to the convening in Hiroshima on August 6, 1955, of the First
World Conference Against A- and H-Bombs, a tradition which
is renewed annually. In addition, commemorative meetings
are held each year on March 1 in Shizuoka City and in front of
Kuboyama's grave at the Kotokuin Temple in Yaizu.
The ironically-named Lucky Dragon was also a casualty
of Bikini. After its emergency return to Yaizu, the vessel was
58
1
taken over by the Ministry of Education, which from
1956-1966 used the rebuilt trawler as a fisheries training ship.
Sold to a scrap dealer in March 1967, the Lucky Dragon was
denuded of its fittings and abandoned to the elements at a
graveyard for wooden ships in Tokyo Bay. In October 1967
the ship was miraculously found by residents in the downtown
ward of Koto. A reader's letter, "Should We Sink. the Lucky
Dragon?" in Japan's largest circulation daily, the Asabi
Sbimbun (March 10, 1968), triggered a significant new
movement: "The Lucky Dragon is a ship never to be forgotten
by any Japanese. It should remind us of what happened at the
Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean fourteen years ago. Let us
discuss immediately how to preserve this monument." In April
1969 a save-the-boat appeal was issued by well-known public
figures and in July 1969 the "Lucky Dragon Preservation
Committee" was initiated. The Committee raised funds to
restore the Lucky Dragon, just as the Atom Bomb Dome was
preserved in Hiroshima as a memorial to the A-Bomb victims
and as a warning to future generations. A target of over
$125,000 in donations was set, and in February 1970 the
Committee assumed ownership of the vessel. Volunteers
helped to pump out the badly waterlogged ship, and managed
to fix it on the beach, where pumping operations continued.
On April 1, 1972, the Preservation Committee rented a
patch of land around the Lucky Dragon from the Tokyo
Metropolitan Government, and began the work of restoration.
The Governor of Tokyo, Ryokichi Minobe, lent his support in
the establishment of a permanent "Peace Park" with the
Lucky Dragon as its central focus. Gatherings "to beautify the
Lucky Dragon" were held in 1971-1973, and in July 1973 a
sit-down protest against French nuclear testing in the South
Pacific was held alongside the Lucky IXagon. Engineers and
scientists of the Preservation Committee built a triangular
roofed Display House for the Lucky Dragon. Within this
25-yard high and 4Q-meter wide sanctuary they have
established a library for the preservation and exhibition of
documents, photographs and tape recordings of the movement
to prohibit nuclear weapons. The Peace Society for the
Fukuryu Maru, which succeeded the Preservation Committee,
is entrusted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government with the
management and protection of the Display House, and the
Society has vowed that "We shall use our restoration work to
teach correct information about nuclear weapons to the young
people." A ceremony inaugurating the construction of the
sanctuary was held in September 1975, and in May 1976 a
stone monument was unveiled near the Display House.
Inscribed on the monument are Aikichi Kuboyama's dying
words: "Please make sure that I am the last victim of the
bomb." The Display House was opened to the public in the
summer of 1976. "*
Notes
1. Because of the trusteeship, no surveys concerning the
radioactive contamination of the Marshall Islands and the status of the
exposed inhabitants have been permitted except those undertaken by
the U.S. government. Thus, the 1971 investigation team of the Japan
Congress Against A- and H-Bombs was not permitted to enter the area
of the Rongelap and Utirik Atolls near Bikini.
2. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission never issued an official
statement on the cause of Mr. Kuboyama's death. An explanation of
the Commission's position is, however, found in an internal AEC
Memorandum (April 6, 1955):
At a time when he was convalescing satisfactorily from his radiation
injury, he {Kuboyama/ developed hepatitis which was presumably
of infestious type caused by a filterable virus. From this he grew
steadily worse with severe liver pathology and generalized jaundice.
After a prolonged illness, he died from the effects of hepatitis. Such
hepatitis is not in itself a direct consequence of radiation injury and
does not constitute a part of such injury.
The Memorandum was written by Dr. John G. Bughter, Director of the
AEC's Division of Biology and Medicine. Dr. Bugher's account is
amplified by Dr. Robert A. Conard, Medical Department, Brookhaven
National Laboratory, who observes that Kuboyama "had been given
prophylactic daily blood transfusions and blood transfusions not
uncommonly are the causes of acute hepatitis." Letter of Dr. Conard to
Stephen Salaff, August 15, 1977. Dr. Conard has asserted that
19year-old Lekoj Anjain, one of 64 Rongelap islanders subjected to
heavy fallout in March 1954 and who died of leukemia in November
1972, was the "first known" fatality from the bomb blast over Bikini.
Walter Sullivan, "Marshall Islander's Death Tied to Fallout," New York
Times, November 21, 1972, p. 26. The version of Drs. Bugher and
Conard is at odds with the autopsy report. On March 28, 1954,
Kuboyama and 15 other Lucky Dragon crew members were admitted
to the First National Hospital, Tokyo. An autopsy was performed on
Kuboyama's body immediately after his death there in September
1954, in the presence of a U.S. Army doctor. The autopsy revealed a
remarkable deterioration in many of his organs, especially his blood
producing organs. The hospital's chief pathologist, Dr. Seiichi Ohashi,
concluded that "It is evident, even by visual examination, that the chief
cause of death was radioactivity." Asahi Shimbun, September 24,1954.
3. Richard Storry, A History of Modern Japan (London:
Penguin Books, 1960), p. 261.
59
Review Essay
Los Angeles Issei
by Yuji Ichioka
An historical study of the Japanese of Los Angeles from
1900 to 1942, the volume at hand presents a novel
interpretation of prewar Japanese American history. The book
is, in the author's own words, "an account of the
accommodation of one minority to racist America, and some
of the benefits and costs implied by that minority's strategies"
(p. 190). The theme is derived from an analysis of the
Japanese immigrants' occupational distribution. The Issei
commenced to enter southern California at the turn of the
century as Los Angeles was undergoing a period of economic
expansion and population growth. There they found
employment in "niches" left open to them at the "fringes" of
the local economy. Agriculture was the most prominent niche
in which the Japanese specialized in the production of fruits
and vegetables, crops that demanded intensive labor with a
"high profit-to-capitalization ratio." Of secondary importance
within agriculture were horticulture and floriculture in which
the Japanese also found employment. Outside of agriculture,
they entered smaller niches, among them the fishing industry
on Terminal Island in Los Angeles harbor. This occupational
pattern is attributed to the Issei's "accommodation" to a sharp
color line drawn by white Los Angelenos. A racial barrier
barred the Japanese from other occupations and enforced
residential segregation on them as well. Circumscribed severely
by the barrier, the Japanese chose the niches instead of
contesting the color line to breakdown the barrier. Stereotypes
of the Japanese, according to the author, included certain
"positive traits," which depicted them as an industrious,
diligent, and persevering people with whom white Americans
were unable to compete. Once ensconced in the niches, the
Japanese exploited the "opportunities" in them by living out
the positive stereotype. Through hard work and industry, they
achieved a measure of success within set limits.
Issei political leadership and economic progress rein
forced this initial accommodation. In the midst of the
exclusion movement, the Central Japanese Association of
Southern California, the principal political organization of the
immigrants, adopted a policy of "self-policing" rather than
"militant outward protest." To win the acceptance of whites,
association leaders stressed "proper behavior" on the part of
60
The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation:
The Japanese of Los Angeles, 1900-1942, by John
Modell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977.
the immigrants, employed group sanctions to promote such
conduct, and enthusiastically embraced "Americanization,"
especially during and after World War I. In short, the author
argues that Issei political leadership accommodated to racism
too, and parallel economic progress made the accommodation
all but complete. To take full advantage of the niches, the
Japanese engaged in "cooperative economic behavior" and
created a "vertically and horizontally integrated economy,"
particularly in the fruit and vegetable industry where they
gained successful control not only of production but also of
wholesale and retail marketing. Self-contained and segregated,
this "ethnic economy" was a rational and logical development
of the economics of accommodation.
While providing benefits within limits, the accommoda
tion was not without its costs. By the 1930s the Issei had fully
exploited the niches so that, coupled with the effects of the
depression, there was no room for the ethnic economy to
expand. As a result the Issei developed a defensive posture, a
conservative outlook of preserving what they had built. As
evidence of this conservatism, the author cites the actions of
the Issei leadership in the El Monte Berry Strike of 1933.
Against unionization and the strikers, who were predomi
nantly Mexicans, the leadership mobilized Nisei high school
students as strikebreakers, and even went so far as to ally itself
with the white power structure to defeat the strike. Aware of
their own economic stake, the Issei did not hesitate to resort
to such means since unionization would have threatened what
they had. Even though the ~ t h n i c economy was premised on,
and indeed had originated from, the color line, they, the
author maintains, now had a vested interest in upholding the
status quo.
In the 1930s the first-born Nisei came of age within this
static economic situation. Shut out from occupations in the
larger society by discrimination, they had only the ethnic
economy to which to turn for employment. Yet the economy
was incapable of providing meaningful jobs; the best the Nisei
could hope for was to be peddlers at small fruit and vegetable
stands. A Nisei dilemma was inextricably linked to this
incapacity. The author illustrates the dilemma by way of the
A.F. of L. union drive in the 1930s to organize Nisei produce
workers. These workers faced the problem of choosing
between class or ethnic solidarity. If they joined the A. F. of L.
affiliate, they had to oppose Issei conservatism and repudiate
the ethnic economy in the name of class unity. If they
remained steadfastly loyal to the Issei, their were subject to
tile limitations of the ethnic economy. Never fully resolved
because of Pearl Harbor and the ensuing wartime internment,
this dilemma was one of the major costs of the economic and
political accommodation that the Issei had pursued. Such in
brief outline is the main theme of this book.
The theme can be criticized in a number of ways. To
begin with, whether in southern California or elsewhere, the
transition from common laborers to agriculturists, which the
Issei immigrants made, was in no way a matter of simple
accommodation to a color line. When Japanese laborers landed
on the Pacific Coast in the 1890s and after, they were
generally migrant workers or "sojourners" (dekaseginin) who
intended to return eventually to Japan. From approximately
1906 immigrant leaders-and most Japanese consuls for that
matter-actively encouraged them to discard the dekaseginin
ideal in favor of permanent residency in this country. But in
order to make the transition, the leaders realized that the men
had to have an economic base, that is, a stable livelihood. In
the belief that the laborers were suited ideally to become
farmers, the leaders exhorted them to settle down on
agricultural land. For the Issei leadership interest in land
became the necessary economic foundation for the transition
to settled communities with permanent residents. Amply
documented in consular reports, immigrant newspapers, and
other sources, the author has ignored this fundamental reason
why the Japanese immigrants entered the field of agriculture.
The premise of his theme is erroneous or, at best, only
partially true.
By his own admission, the author's inability to use
Japanese immigrant sources limited his research. Except for
translations of minutes of the Central Japanese Association, he
relied exclusively on English-language sources. Thus he stands
on shaky grounds when he discusses the immigrant generation.
To compensate for his shortcoming, he claims that his interest
was "accommodation as a public position" (p. xi), which he of
course ascertained mainly by examining English sources. Citing
public statements in English issued by the Issei leaders, he
accepts them on their face value without taking into account
any possible political motives the leaders may have had. His
approach is tantamount to reading "joint communiques"
without probing into their true diplomatic intent and meaning,
or akin to that of early American historians of East Asia whose
works rested upon western sources because they were unable
to handle Chinese, Japanese, or Korean.
The author's one-dimensional interpretation of the Issei
leadership's "public position" on Americanization illustrates
this glaring shortcoming. That the leadership publicly
advocated a degree of assimilation is not in question. However,
there were many disagreements among the leaders. Not only
wcre there individuals and groups who opposed assimilation,
there were others who, while favoring it, debated at great
length its meaning and desired extent. For example, some were
only for "surface assimilation" (gaimenteki doka). For such
Issei assimilation meant no more than adapting one's external
appearance to accord with American customs and manners.
Others upheld "substantive assimilation" (naimenteki doka)
which entailed the incorporation of values. For some these
values were associated with American democratic principles;
Issei Christians equated them with Protestant spirituality.
Unless interpreted in the light of these and other complexities,
the public stance of the Issei leadership on Americanization
makes no sense whatsoever. In addition, "accommodation" is
an inappropriate term to describe it, for the term implies that
militant outward protest was a distinct option. Whatever
assimilation meant to individual leaders, the public stance was
stated in the face of overwhelming pressures from the larger
society to Americanize which precluded such protest. It was,
above all, a means of political survival.
At times the author stretches his theme to farfetched
extremes. Unable to delve below public pronouncements, he
makes the absurd statement that "the first generation grew
increasingly comfortable in their niche" (p. 13), suggesting a
kind of happy resignation to their pariah status. After the
enactment of the 1920 California Alien Land Law, the Issei
commonly averred that they were being treated in America as
the pariah caste was in Japan, and openly voiced anger and
bitterness. Equally nonsensical is the author's assertion that
the Issei in the 1930s, to the extent they envisaged the Nisei
continuing and expanding Issei farming, "anticipated-and
even welcomed-racial separation. The color line was an
essential and almost welcome element of this vision" (p. 135).
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61
Though dovetailing neatly with his theme, this assertion is
pure humbug. The Issei saw the Nisei's future in agriculture,
not because of a conservative attachment to the ethnic
economy, but because they knew the employment discrimina
tion the Nisei faced outside of immigrant society. Had the
color barrier come down in the 1930s, the Issei would have
been the first to welcome it.
Contrary to becoming increasingly comfortable, the Issei
felt increasingly alienated in this country. In the early years
they endured various acts of legal discrimination and countless
instances of informal racial hostility. In the 1920s their sense
of alienation heightened when the Supreme Court in 1922
declared them aliens ineligible to citizenship and in 1923
upheld the constitutionality of the alien land laws.
Stigmatizing Japanese as undesirable immigrants, the Immigra
tion Act of 1924 was the culminating event. Prohibiting the
entry of all aliens ineligible to citizenship, the Issei interpreted
the Act as this country's final rejection of them. From this
point, stripped of illusions about their future here, they
transferred their aspirations onto the Nisei who, they hoped,
would receive fair treatment, which needless to say the Nisei
never enjoyed. Embittered and resentful, the Issei expressed
their disillusionment with this country by identifying
nationalistically with Japan in the 1930s. As victims of racial
oppression, they psychologically turned away from the
immigrant land.
The chief merit of the book lies in the author's
treatment of the attitudes and behavior of white Los
Angelenos toward the Japanese. Here he stands on surer
grounds. During the exclusion movement period, he finds that
there were notable differences between the movement in Los
Angeles and in northern California where organized labor was
so prominent. In contrast to San Francisco, Los Angeles
lacked a cohesive labor movement that manipulated the
anti-Japanese issue for its own organizing ends. No labor leader
on the order of Olaf Tveitmoe of San Francisco was at the
forefront of agitation in the city. Thus labor was lukewarm in
supporting the Los Angeles County Anti-Asiatic Society, the
main anti-Japanese organization composed mostly of nativist
groups. Progressives and businessmen also did not lend support
to the society. Compared to the stridency of northern
Californians, white Los Angelenos were concerned basically
with, what the author terms, "racial dominance" rather than
"racial purity," which they firmly established by drawing the
color line. The author's analysis of how white Los Angelenos
perceived the Japanese in the immediate prewar years is also
informative and provides readers with a number of insights.
Historians of European immigrant history have long
accepted the requirement of researching immigrant-language
sources. This study originated as a doctoral dissertation
submitted in 1969 at Columbia University. That the author
was not held to this requirement indicates that the study of
Asian immigrants is still considered somehow outside the
canons of scholarly stand.rds set for that of European
immigrants. Though this volume is an antidote to past cultural
explanations of Japanese immigrant behavior and the recent
spate of works relating to Japanese American "success," it
does not go below the surface of Japanese American history.
Instead of having been a history of "racial accommodation,"
in the considered judgment of the reviewer, the Japanese
immigrants' response to racist American was fundamentally
one of political and economic survival. *
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