[In the following essay, Hijiya-Kirschnereit considers the intellectual and artistic currents that form the background to Japanese fiction during the forty years since the end of World War II.]

A common and not necessarily critical understanding of literature presupposes a relationship to general history as well as to the so-called intellectual climate. According to this view, both are "mirrored" in the literary creations of the time, and on the other hand they are, in some way or another, also influenced by history and virulent ideas. So far, so true—but how to establish these relationships in more concrete terms? This [essay] first sketches aspects of the intellectual climate which appear to be of special relevance to our focus of concern, namely the corpus of literature dealing with the war experience. It then proceeds to propose a set of paradigms for screening and classifying the works and closes with observations on some widespread patterns of perception and attitudes in the Japanese literature dealing with the war experience.

First, what does "intellectual climate" mean? Let us assume that this climate can be grasped through the observation of a succession of topics in public discussions on matters concerning society, the focus of media interest in certain issues, or the controversies of intellectuals and other public figures.

Despite the war damage and the shortage of food, housing, and all the materials necessary for printing, the publication industry revived almost immediately after the termination of the war in Japan. Since the early 1930s, rigid censorship and an extensive system of "advisorship" and control had marked Japanese literary creations, allowing nothing but the most conformist texts to appear. Even works as apolitical as Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Sasameyuki (The Makioka Sisters) were held back after the first episodes had appeared in Chuo ko ron in January and March 1943, on the ground that they ran counter to the national interest in time of emergency; Tanizaki's translation of the classic Genji monogatari into modern Japanese also was censored "because of the irregular ties it described in the succession to the throne." Left-wing writers of the so-called Proletarian School had been forced to "convert" (tenko) as early as 1933, and with the authorities' grip tightening on all spheres of public life, including literature, writers readily succumbed to the pressure in one way or another. The majority seemed to have regarded it as their duty to cooperate with the war effort in their field. They voiced no opposition to the system, emigration was out of the question for Japanese writers, and only rarely did they consider taking up jobs other than writing in order to avoid compromising. Only a few of the leftists, such as Kurahara Korehito, preferred going to prison rather than "converting."

Writers eagerly volunteered to be sent abroad as war correspondents, and except for perhaps the established figures of Nagai Kafu, who lapsed into silence, and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, who kept his cooperation to a minimum, Japanese writers and poets seemed to have felt obliged to support what they, too, regarded as the national cause. The streamlining of the press and the "voluntary dissolution" of important general magazines such as Chuo ko ron and Kaizo serve as further landmarks to indicate what Donald Keene has termed the "barren years," or, in the terminology of Marxist writers, the "dark valley" (kurai tanima) in the literary and intellectual history of modern Japan.

The emperor's broadcast on 15 August 1945, declaring Japan's acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, caused different reactions in the population, but, while mourning and harboring deep feelings of shame at their nation's first defeat in history—even in the writings of intellectuals such as the author Dazai Osamu, "shame" (haji) is the central expression when describing his reaction at the end of the war—the overwhelming majority of Japanese felt relief that the war had come to an end.

Within a few weeks, the Japanese people underwent a transformation of attitude, the rapidity and extent of which surprised members of the occupation so much that they found it hard to trust and feared a possible resurgence of militarism later. But these fears proved groundless. Busy with the task of sheer survival, people had turned away from matters of public concern, and the breakdown of the oppressive system of control inspired the press to write in an increasingly bold tone. The first new literary magazine, Shinsei (Vita Nova), appeared, along with others temporarily suspended during the war such as Shincho and Bungei shunjo. The following year saw a boom of already established or new magazines, beginning with Chuo ko ron and Kaizo and the newly founded Sekai, Ningen, Tenbo, Kindai bungaku, all starting in January 1946, as well as Shin Nihon bungaku and Sekai bungaku following in March and April, respectively.

It may come as a surprise that in view of the radical changes in the political system and in the daily life of the people—and the abolition of the system of pressure and political-ideological claims on literature—literary historians insist on the power of continuity rather than postulating a new beginning. Much evidence supports this view. Those authors who had been established before the war resumed their writing and publishing activities seemingly undisturbed by any sense of obligation to "explain" to themselves and others what had happened in the meantime. Continuity is also obvious in the ease with which the bundan, the literary establishment, revived, and in the "surprising tolerance" granted to writers who had closely cooperated with the militarists. A beginning can be claimed only for that generation of younger writers who started their careers in the years after the war, the so-called sengo ha (Postwar School), but this fact sets the "beginning" off from any mere reorientation.

The writers generally appreciated the new air of freedom. Kawakami Hajime is reported to have observed that "the Americans and British had bestowed in the course of a few months freedoms that the Japanese could not have won unaided in ten or even twenty years." Others such as Takami Jun expressed shame that this new liberty should have been given to his country by an occupying power, and even the critical Nakamura Mitsuo, who in his history of contemporary Japanese literature chooses to speak of freedom after the war only in quotation marks and who insists in other places in calling postwar literature the "literature under the occupation" (senryu ka no bungaku), admits that a new freedom in political and daily life formed the basis of a new and enlarged role of literature in society.

The question of war responsibility and guilt of writers was first put on the agenda in the inaugural edition of another literary magazine, Bungaku jihyo, in January 1946, by Odagiri Hideo, who attacked the poet Takamura Kotaro as one of the foremost figures in the world of poetry to carry "responsibility for the war" (senso sekininsha no iwaba dai ikkyu). The June 1946 issue of Shin Nihon bungaku, organ of the writers of the former proletarian literature movement, featured, again on Odagiri's proposal, a blacklist of twenty-five names of colleagues accused of intensive propaganda for militarist goals. Kindai bungaku, founded by Marxist members but less orthodox than Shin Nihon bungaku, also brought up the question, this time voiced by Hirano Ken, Ara Masato, and others, but on the whole it seems to have been inseparably connected with Marxist writers who praised their liberation by the Allies, condemned their nonleftist colleagues who had willingly cooperated with the militarists from a moral standpoint, and sought to justify their second "conversion" immediately after the war.

The discussion seems never to have reached a substantial level, touching political or moral issues, but mainly ran to global accusations and reproaches, these being overshadowed by constant hostilities between the two Marxist groups, culminating in Nakano Shigeharu's verdict on the Kindai bungaku critics Ara Masato and Hirano Ken as "inhuman and anti-human." Other writers tackled the question by attacking what they saw as the self-deception of the so-called democratic literary movement (leftist literature). Such criticism was voiced by Yoshimoto Takaaki and by Fukuda Tsuneari, who, in an article on "Literature and War Responsibility" ("Bungaku to senso sekinin") in the February 1947 issue of Asahi hyo ron, declared that he did not believe in anything like war responsibility for writers, adding that "the attitude of those who pursue the issue of war responsibility has nothing to do with literature."

Needless to say, this dissociation of politics and history from literature, which as an implicit idea was wide-spread among intellectuals of the time even if it was not voiced in such a clear-cut manner, was also prevalent during the war, when a writer such as Nakajima Atsushi, while being sent to Micronesia by the government in 1941, could maintain that war and literature were completely separate and unrelated. Other intellectuals and writers, such as Kobayashi Hideo or Dazai Osamu, self-indulgently declared themselves simple citizens without political interests or education, who could not have been expected to see through the machinations of the militarists.

The debate over war responsibility soon ebbed away in literary circles, but the question was approached from a more fundamental angle in the works of the political scientist Maruyama Masao. He related the problem to Japanese political mentality in general as it was formed by centuries of social and intellectual history, and his contributions had exerted wide influence on critically minded Japanese intellectuals since the late 1940s. Maruyama made important statements about the nature of Japanese political mentality.

On the whole, the early postwar years were tinged by a strong progressive current, which also reflected the fact that Japanese intellectuals had regained contacts with the international scene. The "almost completely uncritical acceptance of Marxist ideology" during these years, however, drove Donald Keene to suspect that the writers might have been motivated by the vague anticipation that sooner or later a socialist or Communist government might take over in Japan.

Political developments, however, did not move in the expected directions. Although leftist groups obtained prestige and influence in the immediate postwar period, and the GHQ actively supported a coalition government of Socialists and leftist Liberals, the coalition suffered a severe defeat in the January 1949 elections. Under the strong influence of American policies, priorities shifted from democratization to reconstruction, paving the way for what the political scientist take Hideo recently described as an "anti-communist coalition between militant liberalism and traditional authoritarianism."

From all that we know about it today, censorship under the occupation cannot have represented an important factor in the development of intellectual life. To describe its effects in Jay Rubin's phrasing,

[It] may have come close to destroying the Kabuki theater and briefly inconvenienced a few determined believers in the imperial myth; it certainly did delay some of the more intense expressions of outrage at the use of the atomic bomb, and it reduced the number of mixed couples holding hands in the literary landscape. None of this qualifies as a general or systematic distortion of postwar literature.

That this view differs markedly from the opinion of many Japanese literary historians is a point to which I must return later.

Under the liberal reactionism (Otake) of 1948-49, more often termed reverse course, and a government that increasingly represented traditional authoritarianism under the Yoshida cabinet, the economy made substantial progress toward recovery, further stimulated by the Korean War (1950-53). The prevailing mood in the early 1950s was one of optimism and privatism. People enjoyed consumption, and while one faction of intellectuals, the progressive liberals, were discussing the merits and demerits of Stalinism and while others were still attempting to understand what was by this time termed Japanese fascism (Maruyama Masao contrasted it with German fascism to explain its specific character), the wider public had long accepted the return to office of wartime leaders. The selection of Kishi Nobusuke, former member of the Tojo cabinet, as prime minister in February 1957 was only the most conspicuous case.

The question of writers' wartime responsibility was raised once more in 1956 in a study by Takei Teruo and Yoshimoto Takaaki, Bungakusha no senso sekinin (The War Guilt of Literary Writers), but, again, their research dealt not with writers in general but only with those left-wing representatives who had been the focus of the discussion in 1946 and 1947. Yoshimoto took them to task for not facing the problem of collaboration among themselves. Leading figures of the democratic literature movement whose task would have been to explain themselves evaded the issue, while the rest of the members of the group merely closed their eyes during the decade after the war. Thus, according to Takei and Yoshimoto, they failed to face up to their wartime responsibility as well as their postwar responsibility; moreover, their avant-garde stance caused the failure of the "democratic revolution" (minshu kakumei). This seems to be the last contribution of some consequence to the issue under the heading of war guilt and the responsibility of writers.

The general public meanwhile enjoyed a period of high economic growth and increasing international attention with popular highlights such as the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, which the Japanese public viewed as the most conspicuous sign of international recognition. The nation also appears to have regained national confidence. At the same time, the 1960s and early 1970s represented a phase of sociopolitical activism in the form of mass demonstrations and citizen movements. The mass protest against the signing of the U.S.-Japanese Security Treaty in May and June 1960 was supported by a majority of intellectuals, as were the protests against the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the support of that involvement by the Japanese government between 1965 and 1973. Student riots in the late 1960s, the fierce resistance of Sanrizuka farmers to the construction of Tokyo International Airport at Narita since 1966, the antimodern movement, and antipollution movements of which the Minamata case in the late 1960s and early 1970s is the most widely known, dominate the picture of Japan during these years.

Most of these citizens' movements appear to have parallels in other countries and thus to have international aspects as well as having concrete economic and ecological motives. Japanese cultural historians such as Tsurumi Shunsuke, however, tend to emphasize the indigenous, premodern roots of these citizen movements. According to Tsurumi, these movements were issue oriented and thus disappeared with the issue. This characteristic seems to set them off, despite surface parallels, from phenomena like the "'68 generation" in Western Europe, which tackled more fundamental issues from an idealistic and socialist perspective. Issue orientation in the Japanese case also implies a spontaneous reaction to concrete problems. It does not grow out of a heightened political awareness as Tsurumi writes:

Only when he [the ordinary citizen] feels his life affected by the political situation, or his life style hampered by it, does he rouse himself from political apathy and voice his political view in public. The citizen's political interest is in contrast to the political interest of the professional activists whose livelihood depends on being politically well informed.

Writers took an active part in all these movements, and their activities were reflected in their literary works or essays, which often became bestsellers and gained the status of authentic condensations of the Zeitgeist, as did Oda Makoto's Nandemo mite yaro (We will look at everything, 1961) or Shibata Sho's Saredo war era ga hibi (Those were the days, my friend …, 1963). As the historical distance from the war years lengthens and the interest of the public turns to more immediate contemporary issues, this phase of Japanese history is hardly addressed. Those who do speak about the issue treat it in a clearly affirmative, noncritical manner.

One focus is the reevaluation of the Tokyo war crimes trials, which, according to the leftist liberal Tsurumi, were never accepted by the Japanese people but did serious harm to their notion of justice, although at the time of the occupation, they had to suppress their protests. Now, according to Tsurumi's slightly curious phrasing, "in the wake of the prosperity since 1960 there has been a surge of compassion for the victims of the War Crimes Trials." As a matter of fact, documentary novels on wartime officials such as Yamamoto Isoroku (The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy, 1965) by Agawa Hiroyuki, or Shiroyama Saburo's Rakujitsu moyu (War Criminal: The Life and Death of Hirota Koki, 1974) were widely acclaimed and won coveted prizes. Kinoshita Junji's play Kami to hito to no aida (Between God and Man, 1972), first staged in 1970, links Japanese doubts about the legitimacy of the Tokyo war crimes trials with the issues of the dropping of the A-bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Thus, the roles of the accuser and the accused were reversed. Writers who argued for a relationship between the contemporary Vietnam experience and the Japanese role in World War II usually reasoned in this way, using Vietnam as a means of Japan's exculpation.

Another, more extreme example for such a positive reevaluation of the war experience is Hayashi Fusao's Dai Toa senso kotei-ron (In Support of the Greater East Asian War, 1964, with a sequel published in 1965), which revived the wartime argument that Japan simply functioned as a liberating force against Western imperialism in Asia. According to Tsurumi, these views were widely acclaimed in the Japan of the 1960s. Hayashi, by the way, is also notable as an example of a writer of originally Marxist inclinations who, after the war, never revoked his tenko.

Whether because the issues of the citizens' protests were settled, as Tsurumi maintains, or because people generally swung toward conservatism after a phase of political idealism and failed aspirations for direct democracy, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw a turning away from humanitarian idealism and solidarity toward more introspective activities. This development occurred not only in Japan but in other advanced nations as well. On the politico-economic plane there was an "almost simultaneous restoration of economic liberalism and traditional conservatism." Around the mid-1970s, popular theories about the so-called national character, which are now known as Nihonjinron, appeared in such great numbers that they began to be regarded as a genre per se. This new interest in explanations and definitions of "Japaneseness" was prompted in part by Japan's opening to the world and the need the Japanese suddenly felt to understand themselves and to make themselves understood to the outside world, especially because international criticism tended to satirize the nation as "Japan, Inc." and to characterize its citizens as "economic animals."

Self-explanation as self-defense is, however, only one part of the reason for the new interest in Japaneseness. Growing pride in the nation's economic successes and international standing also provided a new perspective. One important motif in many Nihonjinron texts is the refutation of the unconscious or conscious Amero-Eurocentrism in Japanese thinking—or what the authors of popular studies on the origins of the Japanese people, their language, their cultural history, and the "Japanese" brain held to be the ethnocentric values of Western nations, which the Japanese had long mistaken for universal ones. Although some of these Japanese criticisms hit the mark, the effect in many cases merely represented a simple exchange of ethnocentric values. If the possibility of universals is denied from the beginning, the task remains only to substitute "genuinely Japanese" attitudes and values for real or supposedly Western ones.

An example of how this attitude has developed since the mid-1970s is the publications of the linguist Suzuki Takao, from his best-selling Tozasareta gengo: Nihongo no sekai (A Closed Language: The World of Japanese, 1975), down to his most recent Buki toshite no kotoba (Language as a Weapon, 1985). Suzuki starts with a critique of the history of his discipline and the unconscious Eurocentrism in subject matter and methodology, and then widens his scope to include statements about how to improve the Japanese standing on the international stage. His public influence has grown considerably over the years, as his tone has grown more and more militaristic.

Suzuki is, however, only one prominent spokesman in the chorus of authors dealing with the Japanese language in the form of a Nihonjinron. The language is commonly regarded as the core of Japanese culture, symbolizing and representing the essence of Japanese history and race (note the contamination of all these different entities!). Therefore the degree to which the language issue, including the recent discussion about Japanese as a foreign language, dominates public discourse should not surprise us. Roy A. Miller has rightly identified this preoccupation with language as embodying the Japanese essence as a central "modern myth."

As for the issue of World War II, since the mid-1970s a series of publications that document the war experience from the perspective of average citizens have appeared. Tsurumi Shunsuke lists sixteen of them between 1974 and 1983. To this list should be added the series of fifty-six volumes compiled by the youth division of the Buddhist lay organization Soka gakkai, which appeared between 1974 and 1979 under the title Senso o shiranai sedai e (To the Generation Which Does Not Know War). The aim of the latter and many other documentary collections is not to deal with the question of how the war could have happened, but to record the sufferings of the ordinary Japanese in order to show the "inhuman nature of war, with honest appeals that the folly must not be repeated."

Wartime sufferings of ordinary people are also a popular subject for TV dramas. Thus, the serialized TV version of the novel Oshin centering on the life of a woman called Oshin and a deserter from the Japanese army in the supporting role for the portion of the story that takes place in the "Fifteen-Year War" (between 1930 and 1945), achieved an unprecedented popularity rating of more than 58 percent in 1983. Although these and other popular dramas of the period intended no critical investigation or enlightenment but were aimed at a sentimental identification, Tsurumi points out that there have been consistent (although unsuccessful) efforts on the side of the ruling party and the government to keep the Fifteen-Year War from being treated as the subject of TV plays.

Japanese literary histories resort to the generational model when classifying postwar literature. They also maintain this division into "generations" when discussing the literary approach to the World War II issue, and the model is extended to include the intellectual scene as a whole. For example, Hashikawa Bunzo identifies four patterns of approach to the issue alongside these generational borders:

1. One group, which would correspond to the generation of already established older writers in presentations of literary history, is the generation that has continued to symbolize authority during and after the war, a group supposedly unaffected by war.
2. The second generation is the one that, according to Hashikawa, had finished its higher education during the war, was critical of the "meaningless" and "pathological" war, eagerly awaited its end, and regarded Japan's defeat as a liberation.
3. A slightly younger age group, called the war generation (senchu ha sedai) by Hashikawa, regarded war as a given "natural" fact and as an "everyday myth" (nichiyo no shinwa). Innocent and young as they were, almost all of them became "unconscious nationalists." Defeat at the end of the war deprived them of all their ideals.
4. The next generation in Hashikawa's model had no direct relationship with the war experience whatsoever. No reorientation was necessary for this group, which espoused a "healthy materialism and a contractual pragmatism" (kenzenna materiarizumu, keiyakuteki go rishugi) and took the initiative in the students' movement.

Hashikawa's model reflects the popularity of generational explanation patterns in modern Japanese history while containing the same blind spots that I have noted elsewhere. (Note, for example, that his model has no room for a "generation" of convinced supporters of the war.)

Despite the obvious biases of the generational model in literary and intellectual history, and despite the fact that it is not an age group model in the strict sense, I suggest a modified version for classifying the literary response to the World War II experience, because it appears useful—and the frequency with which this model is employed seems to back me up. The fact that within modern Japanese culture the war issue is approached predominantly on an individual level, with personal experience being the most important factor, speaks for itself. I propose the following "generations":

1. The older generation of established writers, who are, according to popular opinion, aloof, untouched, and unaffected by the war. Among them, however, we can distinguish between the ones who refused to cooperate (Nagai Kafu and possibly Tanizaki Jun'ichiro) and the rest, who engaged in cooperation to different degrees, such as Kawabata Yasunari, Takamura Kotaro, and Masamune Hakucho. A strategy of this generation in coping with postwar reality was, as it had been with many of them during the war years, an escape into aestheticism and an idealized picture of a "purer" or premodern Japan. To give only one example: Kawabata reports himself to have been completely absorbed by his reading of the Genji monogatari when the war ended and, not without an element of self-stylization, he writes, "I might well be surprised at the disharmony between me and the train, loaded with the baggage of refugees and victims of the bombings, making its way irregularly through the charred ruins, in terror of another bombing; but I was even more surprised at the harmony between me and a work a thousand years old."
2. The generation of the activists, an age group old enough to be recruited for "patriotic services." We could distinguish several subgroups, such as straightforward supporters, like the "Romantic School" (Nihon Roman-ha); former Marxists who underwent conversion (tenko); and a group of writers who started their literary career after the war but were old enough to have taken an active part in the war (whether "voluntarily" or forcibly). This third subgroup makes up the bulk of what is usually subsumed under the heading of the Postwar Group (sengoha), and for them, the war experience forms the central concern in their literature. The best-known names in this group are Noma Hiroshi, Takeda Taijun, Haniya Yukata, Ooka Shohei, Umezaki Haruo, Nakamura Shin'ichiro, and Shimao Toshio.
3. What is—slightly misleadingly—termed the War Generation (senchuha) is the next younger age group of writers who grew up during the war and were indoctrinated by the militarist thought and value system but were not yet in position to play an active adult part in the war. This group includes writers such as Mishima Yukio, Abe Ko bo, or the so-called third generation of new writers, to whom, as Matsubara Shin'ichi contends, war was not of such a big concern, as they showed that "even during war, daily life continued without being directly affected by the idea of war" and as they "got through war as a simple individual."
4. The generation of writers who at the end of the war were still children includes those who are occasionally called "engagds" such as Oe Kenzaburo or Kaiko Ken. Some of this generation began to publish at the end of the 1950s, but as a whole, the times when they started their literary careers and their motifs and approach in dealing with World War II vary to an even greater degree than in the case of the older generations. Writers such as Kono Taeko, Kaga Otohiko, or Morimura Sei'ichi fall into this category.
5. The generation born after the war does not figure at all in Japanese generational models dealing with writers' attitudes toward World War II. It is presupposed that, for this generation, the war is of no immediate concern and interest. In fact, Japanese literature appears to contain no works of this generation in which they question their fathers about what they did during the war or about "how it all could happen," as is common in the German context. Writers of this generation, such as Murakami Ryu, treat the topic of war abstractly, as in his Umi no muko de senso ga hajimaru (Across the Sea, a War Begins, 1977).

The generations demonstrate different motivations for dealing with war. The highest degree of relative uniformity, notwithstanding individual differences in ideological outlook, appears to be in the second generation group, where the prevailing motif is the immediately felt necessity to explain, to oneself and to others, and self-justification. At the same time, the period in which these authors have written about their war experiences is relatively short, limited mainly to the immediately postwar years.

The third group deals with the subject over a longer time and across a wider spectrum of accents, their contributions on the topic concentrating on the 1950s and 1960s. The fourth generation shows an even wider variety in time of writing—from the late 1950s to the 1980s—motivation, and topicality.

The second paradigm I propose is a topical one, differentiating the writings according to subject matter, such as:

1. War, especially battlefield experience overseas and in Japan;
2. Civilian life during the same period overseas and at home;
3. The end of the war and the capitulation with the large subgroup of so-called A-bomb literature (genbaku bungaku);
4. The aftermath of war in postwar everyday life as experienced in physical hardship and value reorientation, generational conflicts because of the war, and the war crimes trials, among other things. Needless to say, this paradigm can be further differentiated.

The third paradigm distinguishes the degree to which the writing focused on the war experience. There are three main categories:

1. War as the central topic;
2. War as a secondary or side aspect; and
3. War as omission or ellipsis (Ausblendung).

The second group of works is a large one, containing, for example, many works of the first generation of writers. Kawabata could serve as a convenient example again. In many of his works wartime memories enter into the stories of the characters, frequently and significantly enough to make the reader realize that they constitute a secondary topic. (Again, a certain discrepancy can be noted between a writer's statements about his personal attitude and his literary creation.) This pattern also appears frequently in the works of a writer like Mishima. In the novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 1956), the author's systematic and deeply meaningful allusions to the war in the story, which deals with a young acolyte who burned down the temple in Kyoto in 1950, are so convincing that a Japanese critic classifies the novel as one dealing with the war experience. Nevertheless, Kinkakuji belongs to the second category according to our paradigm.

The third group should not escape our attention, especially because although this group is probably substantial in number, the Japanese usually do not take it into consideration when dealing with this topic. Many works that deal with the time of war without referring to war, shutting out this reality, can be found in the narrowly personal genre of shisosetsu. Kato Shuichi, in commenting on two famous examples, finds a relationship to the time: "They are of course solely concerned with the author's personal life, not with the fate of the Japanese Empire. However, Dazai did write Setting Sun at the time that the sun of the empire was setting and 'unfit to be human' when Japan was found to be unfit to be an independent nation."

The last paradigm I propose differentiates the (prose) genre. Whereas the interest in literary studies clearly lies in the realm of so-called pure literature, in the case of literature dealing with the World War II experience, Japanese critics tend to be more flexible than usual and to include other genres. Therefore it is important to take into account the following groups:

1. "Junbungaku" (pure literature, or literature proper). This group is by far the largest one.
2. "Taisho bungako" (mass literature). Famous examples are the popular novels Ningen no joken (Human Conditions), a work in six volumes by Gomikawa Junpei, and Senkan Yamato no saigo (The End of the Battleship Yamato, 1952) by Yoshida Mitsuru.
3. Personal records (collections of letters, diaries), which, by their publication, gain a status similar to that of literature. Thus the famous collection of letters by student-soldiers who died in the war, Kike, wadatsumi no koe (Listen, Voice of the Sea, 1949) is treated as a piece of "antiwar literature" in Odagiri's article on "Senso bungaku."
4. Documentary accounts, occasionally fictionalized, also have to be taken into account such as Morimura Seiichi's three-volume novel Akuma no hoshoku (A Devil's Feast, 1982), dealing with Japanese war crimes of a secret special unit using prisoners of war and civilians in Manchuria as guinea pigs for cruel medical experiments, crimes that have not been brought to court. The book clearly was intended to enlighten and was well researched, but according to Kato Shuichi, many may have read it out of a cruel voyeurism comparable to the "outlet" function ascribed to SM comics in Japan.

The last example reminds us that it is important to note carefully the possible gaps between an author's intention and the work's intention, the critic's interpretation of the work (which may be a projection of the declared author's intention) and the critic's own bias, or countless other factors besides it, and the actual impact the work leaves with the typical reader or several representative groups of readers. Or, to give another example: Oe Kenzaburo's early short stories dealing with war and occupation experiences from the perspective of a boy are usually regarded in Japanese scholarship as fine examples of a decidedly critical stance, the author being known as a representative of a consciously political and anti—A-bomb group of intellectuals. A closer look at the works in question, however, reveals that a far stronger element is his veneration of vitality and power—in fact, the story could well be set in a time other than in the war or occupation.

The literary work and its reception form the two focuses of the most meaningful approach to the subject of "World War II and Its Legacy in Literature"—at the micro level of one or a group of works, analyzed according to their textual strategies, their "philosophy" and value system, and their effects. Of course, it is vital not to lose sight of the macro level, for even an intratextual analysis necessitates relating elements of a work to inter- or extratextual contexts. Only careful microanalysis will prevent us from producing the stereotypical views that are prevalent in much of the research on the subject so far. There are, however, promising new approaches that dig below surface opinions. In a recent contribution on A-bomb literature, John Whittier Treat shows that Hara Tamiki, a writer famous for his story "Natsu no hana" ("Summer Flowers," 1947), had already developed certain topics, above all, the theme of death, in his writing at an earlier stage, so that he was able to adapt his patterns of description and interpretive schemes to the subject of the atomic holocaust.

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to present practical analyses, but I want to draw attention to some patterns of description and interpretation that can be found in so many examples—regardless of their possible classification within the paradigms presented earlier—that they appear typical for the large corpus of pertinent literature as a whole. I sketch them under the following headings:

Sentimentalization;

Strategies of fatalism: depersonalization and derealization (Entwirklichung);

Aestheticizing; and

Transforming history into nature.

Anyone familiar with modern Japanese literature will also know its sentimental traits, which are particularly characteristic of its central genre: the autobiographical shishosetsu, which concentrates on a phase in the private life of a person, a "focus figure" that the reader identifies with the author. An autobiographical approach, and a basically sentimental mood, is also typical for most Japanese fiction dealing with the war experience. This mood is also evident in the personal accounts of ordinary citizens collected as documentaries on the war. Reliving one's sufferings by telling them, savoring one's past pains, and expressing quiet resignation add up to a basically affective, emotional attitude that leaves no room for reflection. The result is therefore a purely individual description of an instant of personal suffering, from which the historical dimension is shut out. The strictly apolitical stance of even those texts written to document war as history is symbolized by an example from the two-volume Waga ko ni nokosu—Senchu, sengo boshi no kiroku (To Leave Behind to My Child-Records of the Lives of Mothers and Children in War and Postwar Times, Tokyo, 1978). The reports of the forty mothers include photographs of the author, in one of which the author is shown posing in front of the Imperial Palace, an obviously inadvertent irony, considering the suffering reported in the story.

The prevailing personal approach to war being emotive and sentimental, the reaction to disaster is one of accepting it as fate. This reaction is not only implied in the attitude but sometimes put into words directly. In the story "Sayonara," by Tanaka Hidemitsu, for example, the author displays a clear consciousness—and thus a degree of detachment and self-criticism—toward this fatalism: Originally published in November 1949, "Sayonara" features an autobiographical account of events when the author was a soldier fighting against the Chinese. The title is explained right in the beginning as being symbolic of the Japanese attitude, for, whereas in most European and other languages, salutations at parting imply a positive attitude, as in "au revoir" and "auf Wiedersehen," the Japanese "sayonara—if things are like this, (we will have to part)" has a resigned, "defeatist" coloring.

The protagonist himself demonstrates this attitude in an incident involving an attractive young Chinese soldier, the only one not killed by the Japanese, who usually did not make prisoners of the Chinese. They used the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boy as a porter. One day when the soldiers marched on a cliff, the boy, as the only act of revenge possible to him, threw his load into the depth and jumped after it, thus committing suicide. The protagonist witnessing this scene likens the dark spot disappearing to a young eagle and shouts, "Sayonara," behind him, "I only shouted 'sayonara.' (This is fate. Young man, it cannot be helped. If this is so, I am sorry.)"

Having become a "fatalist by necessity" (yamu o enu unmeironja ni natte ita), the protagonist reacts to the sudden death ef thirty young girls hit by a bomb in a factory with the same, "extremely simple" (kiwamete assari) "sayonara" ("I only felt this was their fate").

The narrator is a double fatalist, so to speak, for he attributes this fatalism to a mental attitude deeply ingrained in the Japanese, which becomes clear as he further reflects on the deaths of four young Chinese whom he has just killed by himself: "It was not my hands who have killed these young men, it was fate called war that felled these youngsters." And he continues with a comparison of nations:

The French, who can say "au revoir" or "bon voyage" at parting and who do not believe in war as an inescapable natural calamity, could continue their resistance unbroken under the Nazi occupation, but the miserable people of Japan, who even when parting from a lover, can only say "sayonara," could not put up any resistance against the takeover of power of the military clique.

This remarkable statement shows that even the slightly ironical reference to his own fatalism is combined with self-justification.

Instead of depersonalization, as in the foregoing example ("It was not my hands … "), we may encounter "translation" into the sphere of unreality to cope with reality. Tamiya Torahiko's story "Ashizuri misaki" ("Cape Ashizuri"), first published in October 1949, ends with a scene in which the narrator witnesses a drunken man, a former member of a suicide squad called Ryu kichi, stumble through the streets at night shouting his rage against his superiors, the emperor, and all those who told him to die. On hearing the voice gradually fade again as the man disappears in the darkness, the narrator muses, "I suddenly thought that in this voice, I heard the voice of the old pilgrim. It was a dream—everything was a dream. Where is truth which is not a dream? I tried once more to follow the voice of Ryukichi which could not be heard any more but then the street lights which had flickered weakly, suddenly went out."

Aestheticizing is another widespread strategy, for which numerous examples offer themselves. As a conscious attitude it is practiced by Kawabata Yasunari, of whom Nakamura Mitsuo writes that the more Japan "is made to take the position of a loser" (makeinu no tachiba ni tatasarereba sareru hodo), the more he feels driven to stress the beauty of "Japan's soul," and this beauty, according to Nakamura, is embodied in the figure of Kikuko in Kawabata's first postwar novel Yama no oto.

In literary practice, there are many examples of the "beauty in destruction" pattern of description—with Mishima Yukio, in a series of novels down to Akatsuki no tera (The Temple of Dawn, 1970), and in the A-bomb literature. Ota Yoko, in her Kaitei no yo na hikari (A Light as if at the Bottom of the Sea), the first literary text to be published about the A-bomb, which appeared on 30 August 1945, writes of the "beauty" of the sacrifice with which Hiroshima was decorated at the end of the war. The "horrible beauty" of an air-raid scene is evoked by Kaga Otohiko in his Kaerazaru natsu: in consonance with Japanese conventions, he contrasts the sight with cherry trees in full blossom.

Transformation into aesthetic and erotic categories can go to extremes, as in the case of Mishima Yukio, who imagines the relationship between a Kamikaze plane and the ship to be destroyed as penis and vagina. But other writers show this fascination with destruction as well. Sakaguchi Ango, for instance, has repeatedly written of the "beauty of people submitting to fate."

The fourth pattern of description—transforming history into nature—amounts to an extension of the others: The attitude of regarding war as a category of nature is also characteristic of many descriptions of war. For example, Tanaka Hidemitsu's protagonist called war an "inescapable fate resembling calamity" (tensai ni nita fukahi no unmet). A resigned aestheticism has marked the Japanese attitude toward natural catastrophes. Shimizu Ikutar recalls the sight of those inhabitants of Tokyo who, after the Great Earthquake of 1923, sat within the ruins. Even those who had lost their houses and families felt an indescribable inner calm as they watched how the setting sun colored the sky over the horizon of destruction.

It is interesting to note that similar photographs, showing families sitting in the ruins regarding a newly discovered nature with a wide horizon after the bombings of the capital can be found in documentaries of Sh wa history, suggesting that the attitude was very similar. The attitude is often likened to the aesthetic resignation, informed by the escapist and pessimistic medieval Buddhist outlook of Kamo no Chomei, who, in his Hojoki (An Account of My Hut, 1212), enumerates natural calamities like fire, earthquakes, typhoons, and famines, wonders about the ephemerality of the world, and finds peace in the heart of nature in his lonely hut.

It must be more than mere coincidence that I recently came across a comment on Ibuse Masuji's famous A-bomb novel Kuroi ame (Black Rain, 1966), which states:

The ancient Greek notion of Fate pervades the atmosphere of the novel. At the same time, we feel that the reason why Ibuse was able to draw this hellish picture of sufferings of people after the atomic explosion without losing his composure, was partly because he viewed it with the same passive resignation he has shown towards unusual calamities beyond human control in Aogashima

Taigaiki (Aogashima Tragedy, 1934) and Gojinka (The Sacred Fire, 1944). Therefore, it is possible that his attitude towards the atomic bomb calamity, expressed in Kuroi ame (Black Rain), is not fundamentally different from his attitude towards natural calamities. The novel may be an angry one: the inhumanity of using an atomic bomb seems to be amply revealed through the sheer weight of the facts recorded; however, these facts may have been produced with the resignation to fate characteristic of Japanese sensibility. If so, what Ibuse Masuji has presented in this novel … is the view of a nihilist observer who reacts with the traditional Japanese resignation to fate. In this sense Ibuse in a spiritual descendant of Kamo no Chomei …, who had a traditional penetrating understanding of the transience of the world.

Certainly, there are other attitudes and literary approaches to the subject of war and its aftermath in contemporary Japanese literature, but the cluster of attitudes just sketched is undoubtedly a widespread pattern to be found over the whole four decades. I believe that it corresponds to a number of basic patterns in Japanese intellectual life, which can only be hinted at here.