ABSTRACT
Japanese literature of the interwar and wartime period, that is the era of the so-called Fifteen Years War (1931–1945) – that Japan initiated and which eventually came close to destroying the country – is a narrative of increasingly oppressive censorship: by the time of Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 most writers had been thoroughly cowed into submission, following the pro-war government line (Suzuki 2012: 24–85; Abel 2012: 89–143; Morton 2013). From the early 1930s onwards, many writers embraced the series of aggressive, imperialistic military campaigns prosecuted by the Japanese government on the Asian mainland, and later in the Pacific, during the course of the conflict eventually known as World War II. They overwhelmingly supported the argument that this was a war against the Western domination of Asia, a war that promised to cleanse Asia of Western Imperialism. Pockets of resistance did exist. Literary resistance took a number of forms: silence was one but there were others, as this chapter will demonstrate. Nevertheless, as an explicitly anti-Western war, the discourse of the times became more and more xenophobic and jingoistic, leading to the contradiction that the great body of European and Anglo-American literature so enthusiastically embraced by Japanese authors over the previous eighty years or so was now to be mostly condemned, seen as antithetical to Japanese values. This contradiction plagued the work of many authors at the time, and was most concisely expressed in the 1942 conference of intellectuals on ‘Overcoming Modernity’ (kindai no chōkoku) held to debate this very issue (Calichman 2008). This chapter will tell the story of how Japanese authors both succumbed to the prevailing literary currents and also resisted them. First, a brief overview of the situation in the 1930s will set the stage for a more detailed analysis.
