Silence to Light: Japan and the Shadows of War

Series Editor Frank Stewart.
Guest Editor Leza Lowitz.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, Silence to Light illuminates the tumultuous period, and the aftermath, of World War II and the war in Asia. Through fiction, memoirs, letters, testimonials, film scripts, poetry, photographs, and manga (Japanese cartoons), the volume brings to light the personal and communal memories that have disappeared into silence. Readers get a new and vivid perspective on such events as the Manchurian Incident, the Rape of Nanking, the Battle of Okinawa, Japanese American internment, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The art work includes stills from Ogata Keiichi’s film Hiroshima through Light; panels from Keiji Nakazawa’s manga novel Barefoot Gen; World War II–era photographs from the collections of Shuzo Uemoto and Francis Haar; and a portrait of Uemoto by Paul Kodama.

About the guest editor: Leza Lowitz lived from 1990 to 1994 in Tokyo, where she worked as a freelance journalist for Japan Times and Asahi Evening News. Her books of translation include a long rainy season and other side river, both anthologies of contemporary Japanese women’s poetry edited and cotranslated with Miyuki Aoyama. Her own books of poetry include Yoga Poems: Lines to Unfold By. Among her awards are a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the Tokyo Journal Fiction Translation Prize.

Extracts

Eighth of December. Early this morning, as I lay in bed thinking about all the things I had to do today and nursing Sonoko (our daughter, who was born in June of this year), I clearly heard the words coming from one of the neighbors’ radios.
     The Imperial Headquarters of the Army and Navy have announced that as of shortly before dawn this morning, 8 December, the Imperial Army and Navy have entered a state of war with British and American forces in the western Pacific.
     The words seeped through the slats in the rain shutters and into the darkness of my room with all the strength and vividness of sunlight. In the same crisp, clear voice, the announcement was repeated. As I lay there quietly listening to it, my entire life changed. It was as if I were bathed in a powerful beam of light that left my body transparent. Or as if the Holy Spirit had breathed through me, leaving a single, cold flower petal lodged in my heart. Nippon, too, has changed. From this morning on, it’s not the same Nippon.
—from Dazai Osamu, “December 8”

In 1945, my fourteen-year-old brother, Ishii Kohei, was a student at the First Xinjing Middle School in Manchuria, an area of China that had been occupied by Japan for nearly fifteen years. In order to help with the Japanese war effort—which was going badly by then—my brother and 120 of his classmates were sent to do manual labor on a National Service Farm in Dongning, near the then-Soviet border. There, on 9 August, my brother was caught up in the massive Soviet effort to drive the Japanese out of Manchuria.

     My brother was one of three million Japanese to die in the war, and as is the case with many Japanese casualties, no one knows the exact circumstances of his death. Many people still do not even know where the remains of their loved ones lie. And so my brother’s death is not only a part of my own family’s grieving but also a part of our nation’s history. In Japan, when someone dies in vain, he is said to have died “a dog’s death.” If the circumstances that led to my brother’s death are not taught in schools—along with the truth of so many other deaths of the war years—his dying will indeed have been no different from that of a dog’s.
—from Ishii Shinpei, “The Canary That Forgot
 Its Song: A Return to Wartime Manchuria”

232 pp., summer 2001 (13:1), $20
ISBN 978-0-8248-2436-9
Project Muse
JSTOR