Japan at War – All the Anime

August 18, 2022
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by Lee Brimmicombe-Wood.

A country opens up to the West and goes through a flowering of political and social liberalism before reactionaries force a backlash, democracy flounders, and a repressive regime takes the reins. This could describe Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet bloc, or Japan from the Meiji Restoration to the 1945 surrender in Tokyo Bay.

Jonathan Clements dissects the arc of Japanese militarism in Japan at War in the Pacific, a book that tracks the “shattered jewel” meme in Japan from its first rhetorical usage to its infection of military dispatches and ideology. Used to describe the suicidal heroism of Saigo Takamori in the Satsuma Rebellion, “shattered jewel” was immortalised in the 1891 anthem ‘A Myriad Enemies’, and became a rallying cry for reactionaries who preferred purity and death to compromise.

Clements peppers the text with patriotic songs, because Japan’s imperial expansion was as much a project of the Japanese masses as its elites. In an age of conscription and mass communication, empire and war had to be sold to the public. Students of pop culture will be fascinated to see how it was weaponised, with blood-curdling ditties such as ‘Sounding of the Bugle’ referencing the ‘Shattered Jewels’ in accounts of the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95.

Japan’s modernisation was viewed by its architects as a struggle for survival against a domineering West. However, it also birthed the belief that the Yamato race was divinely ordained to guide the development of the whole of Asia. This ‘pan-Asianism’ would draw the nation into expansion in Taiwan, Korea, China, as well as conflict with Russia.

Clements argues that these early clashes were lost by Japan’s opponents as much as they were won by military prowess. However, victories bolstered the prestige of the armed forces. Militarism crept slowly into institutions and everyday life, to the point where even military incompetence was valorised in popular songs. Disaster could be excused if the act was sufficiently worthy. For a reader brought up on a diet of British ‘noble failure’ in works such as The Charge of the Light Brigade and A Bridge Too Far, songs extolling the foolhardy Shuta Tachibana at the Battle of Liaoyang, or the incompetent commander of the doomed submarine #6, feel achingly familiar.

Over time, the obsession with ‘shattered jewels’ would mutate into a death cult. The use of cherry blossom (sakura) to represent fallen soldiers appeared in the 1911 marching song ‘A Foot Soldier’s Duty’, referencing the poor bloody infantry cut down, Somme-style, at Mukden. The Sakura symbol soon spread to unit names, badges, and medals.

A turning point came after World War 1, when Japan did poorly out of treaties at Versailles and Washington. Key to the collapse of parliamentary democracy and the rise of military rule was the junior officer corps, a bellicose constituency within the secret societies that influenced Japan’s policy. Through the 1920s and 1930s, young officers launched false-flag and coup operations, sometimes egged on by their superiors. These culminated in a series of ‘incidents’ that provoked expansion into Manchuria and the coup attempt known as the ‘2/26 Incident’. Readers familiar with right-wing manga, such as Sanctuary (Fumimura and Ikegami, 1990-95) and The Silent Service (Kawaguchi 1988-96) might recognise a trope of ‘young men rise to save Japan’ that strongly echoes these events. For nationalists then as now action, particularly violent action, trumps caution.

An accumulation of ‘incidents’ exploded into violence, first in China, where the Rape of Nanjing reflected the manner in which samurai Bushido had been debased into a cult of brutality; then again across the Pacific. The final hundred pages of Clements’s narrative covers the apocalypse of the Pacific War and how ‘cherry blossoms’ and ‘shattered jewels’ recurred both in official pronouncements, and songs such as ‘Cherry Blossoms of the Same Era’, with its oblique references to the kamikaze suicide pilots.

The wholesale destruction of cities, via incendiaries and atomic weapons, left a deep mark on post-war Japan. Clements describes the victors’ justice that was applied to the war’s perpetrators. But the conflict, so vast and so devastating, never entirely ends. It ripples into the future and from old songs into modern pop culture.

Even today, there is a struggle between proponents of perpetrator narratives and those who claim the wars were fought out of necessity. We see the 2/26 Incident echoed in the anti-war anime Patlabor 2 and the right-leaning visual novel Muv Luv Alternative, the latter of which has the coup plotters win and restore Imperial rule. In other instances of wishful thinking, the shame of defeat is wiped out by re-renderings of a war in which Japan is victorious or righteous. In Deep Blue Fleet, Japan defeats the dastardly forces of Churchill and FDR, only to turn their guns on the only worthy enemy: the Nazis. In Kishin Corps Japan invades Manchuria, but for the righteous reason of battling alien invasion!

Clements’s book not only provides an understanding of how a nation can fall into militarism, but gives us a lens through which we can interpret its aftershocks in the modern era.

Japan at War in the Pacific: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire in Asia by Jonathan Clements is published by Tuttle.