War and Words

2019/07/10

Last year, I published the results of my research from the past few years as a single-author book titled "Literature of Propaganda: Artists under the Second Sino-Japanese War" (Kyowakoku). It started with a simple question, but as I researched the Second Sino-Japanese War, I realized that a war does not need a "just cause." Even counting from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, it lasted for eight years and mobilized up to 850,000 troops, yet the purpose of why this war was being fought remained ambiguous until the end. According to the Japanese logic, the Chinese people were supposed to be partners in future "construction," so it was impossible to clearly define who they were even fighting against. In short, the Second Sino-Japanese War was a war that was extremely difficult to explain or represent, even for those who wanted to push it forward.

However, what is interesting is that, on the other hand, this war was also a "represented war" on an unprecedented scale. As the first total war experienced by Imperial Japan, the military and government learned techniques for controlling public opinion and the media, despite experiencing several failures. Power can decide what to show and what not to show. Through the distribution of information as a commodity, power can also induce media companies to cooperate voluntarily. Many creators, including writers, journalists, painters, and filmmakers, went to the front lines, and newspapers intensified their reporting competition. The expressions of Japanese soldiers on the battlefield were conveyed to the people on the home front through newsreels. Many accounts by soldiers who experienced the actual battlefield were also published. In these accounts, while questions about the war itself were suppressed, many stories were spun that found meaning in devoting oneself to the battlefield. Wartime sexual violence and bullying within the military were naturally subject to censorship. People who enjoyed the controlled and bleached spectacle of war were exposed to a flood of words emphasizing the "bonds" between the front lines and the home front, and were conditioned to endure and prioritize the official stance of wartime.

However, words are cruel things. Humans can only live within their era, but spoken words remain somewhere and will eventually be read by someone. My current work is to scoop up and re-receive the words of people who lived through the era of war from the vast ocean of literature and documents. In the words that survived the war, the echoes of the words that did not remain are also engraved. I believe this society should think more seriously about the meaning and horror of that fact.