The Enlightenment emphasis on the ontological priority of the individual has had far-reaching effects. We value the fruits of individual reason, inalienable rights, the social contract, democracy, and capitalism. But this legacy has also provoked significant and often legitimate criticisms. Critics cannot be pigeon-holed as representing any peculiar partisan, ideological, or religious background. The earliest European critics, such as the Romantics, warned against the tyranny of reason or, like Edmund Burke, deplored the disparagement of history, tradition, and national particularities. Hans Georg Hamann, a devout Christian friend of Kant, argued against him from a faith perspective. As Enlightenment ideas spread to other parts of the world, such critiques spread and broadened as well, continuing into the 20th century. In India, Gandhi raised troubling questions about how scientific and technological development displaces concern for moral and religious truth. In Japan, Nitobe, a Christian, considered the dangers of a society in which one’s own rights and freedoms trumped the needs of the broader society. Many non-Westerners saw colonialism and World War I as belying Western pretensions to possess a superior civilization, able to define the “good life” for all humanity.
Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers
University of Chicago Press
246 pages
$15.49
The leaders of the 1868 Meiji Restoration in Japan drew heavily on Western models to reorganize domestic society and politics after two centuries of seclusion, yet criticized these models on the basis of a close reading of Western thinkers. A conservative critique of Enlightenment liberalism, borrowing from European debates as well as drawing on Shinto and Confucian concepts, lay at the heart of the 1889 Meiji Constitution. By the time Japan sat among the victors at Versailles in 1919, bolstered by earlier triumphs in the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars, the long-isolated nation had become a significant regional power. Japanese conservatism seemed vindicated by its success.
And yet, much to the chagrin of conservative leaders, liberal influences increasingly threatened Japan’s conservative social and political order in both domestic and foreign affairs. Individualism and materialism, labor unrest and calls for unionization, campaigns for woman suffrage, the rise of party politics—all such developments challenged the priority traditionally assigned to society and state. China’s Republican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the fall of other monarchies during the World War I—these posed challenges for the aristocratic and monarchical nature of the Japanese state. The United States became liberalism’s chief proselytizer and prime embodiment: Woodrow Wilson, heir of Kant’s hopes for perpetual peace, unilaterally proclaimed that the war would “make the world safe for democracy.” The engagement by certain portions of the Japanese population with various versions of these liberal ideas and their implications stirred intense domestic debate in the 1930s. And the conservative reaction to this challenge led Japan straight into World War II.
This background provides some context for the private reflections of Japanese soldiers sent to die for their country in the Pacific War. In Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney presents translated excerpts from diaries of seven student-soldiers. Three were tokkotai (“Special Attack Force”), that is kamikaze, pilots; two other pilots were shot down on more routine scouting and bombing flights; and two were army officers who lost their lives on the ground in China. These soldiers are representative of those who had been drafted from universities and were “extraordinarily well-educated.” They had studied Latin and two modern foreign languages, reading classical writers such as Plato and Aristotle and major 19th- and 20th-century figures from Japan and the West, often in the original languages. Ohnuki-Tierney counted 1,400 books mentioned in her partial readings of three soldiers’ diaries. Astoundingly, another scholar who studied one of the soldiers estimates that he may have read over four thousand works. The diaries these soldiers left behind were thus highly literate, providing a window into their authors’ conceptual and political worlds as they faced imminent death.
The student-soldiers posed age-old questions. What was the value and role of the individual in society and in history? Was self-sacrifice for one’s country a sufficient reason for one’s death? What of individual hopes and desires? What to do if one disagreed with the state’s direction? How does one serve God in such circumstances? Sasaki Hachiro, deeply interested in Japanese and German Romantics, wrestled with the tension between individual desires and duty to society. He criticized Japanese military aggression, the state’s ideological manipulations, and even predicted defeat, but hoped his death would contribute to a better future when a new Japan would rise “like a phoenix from the ashes.” Hayashi Ichizo grew up in a Christian household; the Bible and his Christian faith were central in many of his reflections. An early critic of the military, he nevertheless was drafted and assigned to the tokkotai. Under the shadow of a virtual death-sentence, he wrestled with the notion of service to society through death as opposed to service to society through life. His solace was that God would be with him, even on his last flight: “The day when I fly my plane, I will sing hymns.”
These diaries contribute significantly to our understanding of Japanese society at the time of the Pacific War. The excerpts reveal the constraints under which such soldiers worked, to the point that serious questions regarding the extent of their freedom can be raised. Prewar Japanese society placed substantial constraints upon individual freedoms, and increasingly so in the 1930s and 1940s. Nuanced historical analysis requires an equally nuanced understanding that recognizes degrees of culpability. As Ohnuki-Tierney suggests, these student soldiers deserve sympathy. Individuals and structures further up in positions of military and state power must be held increasingly culpable.
But Ohnuki-Tierney’s discussion of the diary excerpts sometimes fails to do the student-soldiers full justice. While she vividly depicts the inner torment of young men agonizing over the prospect of death, she seems to reckon them as able to think for themselves only when they went against state ideology. Their musings, she writes, reflected a “desperate search” in which they tried to “convince themselves” of meaning. Those who believed that their fates were sealed resorted to “historical determinism.” Those who found some positive value to dying for their nation succumbed to “state ideology.” But these soldiers cannot be reduced to their psychology or seen as mere pawns of the evil, militaristic Japanese state, which Ohnuki-Tierney sometimes seems to treat as her fundamental antagonist. The militarism and the state deserve criticism, but her zeal to highlight the impossible situation in which these soldiers were placed imparts a one-sidedness to her portrayal. The rich content of the works they engage loses out in the telling to their inner psychological struggles.
These intellectually gifted young student-soldiers had broad horizons. Placed in a state that was bent on war and critical of many Enlightenment concepts, they entered a centuries-long and worldwide debate on the role of the individual in society. Did conservative Japanese society and its philosophical underpinnings offer an adequate vocabulary for expressing matters of ultimate concern? The torment experienced by these soldiers arose not because they simply knew right was on one side, and the state was on the wrong side. Rather, the tensions were painful because these soldiers had difficulty knowing how to account for the positive value they saw in both poles of the debate. It seems easier for Ohnuki-Tierney: Soldiers expressing liberal and cosmopolitan ideas are enlightened, but when they simultaneously express more conservative or nationalist ideas, they have succumbed to state propaganda. State manipulation of cultural symbols should rightly be criticized, but ideologies are compelling because they incorporate legitimate insights. These soldiers’ writings reveal significant criticisms of the West and its peculiar shortcomings, as well as a love for accomplishments of the Japanese state which had strengthened the country and nurtured their lives, families, and communities. For these soldiers, adjudicating good and evil was a complex task.
Without in any way condoning Japanese military aggression, Ohnuki-Tierney makes this a humanizing project. Tokkotai pilots were not comparable to terrorists, she argues: they attacked military targets as uniformed members of the military. Last-resort self-immolating tactics became prominent only at the very end of the war, and these soldiers were often reluctant recruits who functioned in a world of limited freedom. The system permitted draftees no conscientious objection; those who objected feared reprisals that ranged from harsh punishment to death—and deep shame for their extended families. Once drafted, it was virtually impossible to evade the corps. Hardly irrational, fanatical, or atavistically militaristic, these young men confound facile stereotypes. By giving us glimpses of their inner world, Ohnuki-Tierney reminds us of the humanity of all combatants.
Genzo Yamamoto is assistant professor of history at Wheaton College.
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