So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture)

Of all the human gifts this reviewer most envies, the ability to fluently translate languages has always been uppermost. As a nation, we Americans are virtually useless at second languages, and this has always kept us at arms’ length from truly ever understanding foreign cultures and societies that are vastly different from our own.

Donald Keene, author of So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish and some 30 other books, all on the history, culture, and literature of Japan, provides an exception in this excellent collection of translated diaries.

A native New Yorker, Keene, now a robust 88, first studied the Japanese language courtesy of the United States Navy, attending the Navy’s Japanese Language School in 1942. Becoming fluent, he went on to serve in Naval Intelligence in the Pacific, interrogating hundreds of captured Japanese POWs and later working in the Allied Occupation Government in the early post-war period.

Following his discharge from the Navy, Keene earned a master’s degree at Columbia University, before going on to study at Harvard. He then gained a second master’s degree at Cambridge, where he then taught. He also studied at Kyoto University and eventually earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Keene is today one of the preeminent Western scholars on Japanese culture, society, and language. He latest book on Japan is like none other.

It is no doubt a tribute to the author’s knowledge and deep lifelong affection for Japan that he was given full access to the unpublished, personal wartime diaries of six famous Japanese writers: Nagai Kafu, Takami Jun, Ito Sei, Hirabayashi Taiko, Yamada Futaro, and Watanabe Kazuo—two of whom Keene knew personally. These names will likely mean nothing to Americans. But they were among the most gifted Japanese writers, poets, and scholars of their era—kin to Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neil, John Steinbeck, and Saul Bellows.

The resulting book is both shocking and touching. So Lovely a Country is shocking in how it reveals the utter ferocity with which the great bulk of Japanese society, even the most elite and best educated sectors, supported the Japanese military’s savage war against first China, then Southeast Asia and, finally, against the United States.

Although the Pacific war actually began in September,1931, with the Imperial Japanese Army’s invasion of China’s Manchuria, the focus of Keene’s book are the years 1941 to 1946.

The poet Noguchi Yonejiro, one of many other writers and scholars and other people whom Keene quotes, in addition to the five key diarists, was first introduced to poetry while visiting San Francisco as a teenager. He begins one of his wartime poems thus:

“The town overflows with the cry,
‘Slaughter them! The Americans and the British are our enemies.’
I too shout it. I shout till my voice is harsh. I shout in tears.
These are the countries that nurtured me for twelve years when I was young.
Even an act of ingratitude cannot be measured against a nation’s fate:
The ties of the past are a dream.
America and England in the old days were for me countries of justice:
America was the land of Whitman,
England was the country of Browning;
But now they are dissolute countries fallen into the pit of wealth,
Immoral countries, craving after unpardonable dreams.”

In the final line of the poem, speaking about the possibility of one day again meeting the friends he made in America, he writes:

“We’ll show you how decisively we slaughter you and your friendship.”

On the day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, novelist Ito Sei writes in his diary: “Our destiny is such that we cannot realize our qualifications as first-class people of the world unless we have fought with the top-ranking white men. I have come to understand for the first time as a reality—and with boundless affection—the meaning of each and every aspect of Japan and the Japanese.”

Keene, who doubtless knew well of the many countless war atrocities routinely and relentlessly committed by the Japanese in Burma, Borneo, Malaya, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, never apologizes or makes any excuses. He does, however, step in between often searing diary entries to explain the reality of Japanese life in the run-up to the war and during the war years. Japan was essentially a police state where every newspaper, magazine, radio station, and play house was either controlled by the military or heavily censored by them. This was a society where even an anti-government statement or a casual anti-war comment found in a personal diary could be grounds for serious trouble, including arrest.

If an American thinks that this could never possibly happen in America, recall Bush White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, who, responding to some anti-war statements by journalists in 2001, gravely warned: “People have to watch what they say and watch what they do.” When the official transcript of Fleischer's briefing was released, the portion of his comments urging people to ''watch what they say'' had been deleted. The White House later stated the missing warning was due to “a transcription error.” A case of censoring the censor?

Another present-day issue that So Lovely a Country brings up is the popular revisionist history that the atomic bomb was not needed to end the war with Japan. Adherents of this view—mainly American academics born decades after the war—have it that the Japanese people were well ready to surrender by mid-1945 and thus use of the bomb was tantamount to a war crime itself.

As an American journalist who has traveled widely in Japan, including to Hiroshima, and one who has spoken to many Japanese about this very issue, I was told by numerous Japanese, even present-day residents of Hiroshima, that if the A-Bomb had not been used, the war might well have continued for years, with many more millions killed, mainly civilians—as has always been the case in wars since the times of the ancient Greeks.

And to this reviewer’s mind, at least, Keene’s diarists seem to reveal, again and again, that there was no question that the Japanese people as a nation,were fully prepared to do whatever the venal military leaders running Japan told them to do, even if this meant national suicide. Even after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, no mention of the instant vaporization of an entire city was made by Japanese newspapers.

It was only when Emperor Hirohito himself (thought of at the time as “a living god”) came to his senses and sought to end the continued slaughter by accepting the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender, was peace made possible. Yet even then, hard-core members of the Japanese military planned a coup. The tape of Hirohito’s address to the nation announcing Japan’s surrender had to be hidden, for fear of it being destroyed by the still rabid militarists.

But once Japan’s “living god” informed his awestruck subjects that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage,” and indicated that surrender would be required of them, the Japanese population turned on a dime— accepting what, only hours before, had been deemed unacceptable.

The touching aspects of this elegant book come after the war is finally and absolutely lost to the US, when many Japanese catch a close-up glimpse, most for the first time in their lives, of an actual American. These tall, large-eyed gaijin came in the form of hundreds of thousands of young GIs who would form the first foreign occupation force Japan had ever seen. The reality that the Japanese populace encounters has no relation whatsoever to the animalistic image presented to them by the propaganda of the militarists throughout the war. (The people of Okinawa, for example, were told that if the U.S. Marines captured their children, they would be eaten.)

In early September 1945, just days after the Japanese surrender, Takami Jun writes in his diary: “There was an American soldier on the jam-packed train. He was talking with a Japanese. It seemed quite natural, as if he had been in Japan for a long time. There was something very city-like about him. He gave one the feeling of being democratic. I mentally sketched a Japanese soldier who has just arrived in China. He makes no distinction between a coolie and a university student, when he arrests a Japanese gentlemen . . . he treats the Chinese like a dog or a pig.”

A week later Takami tells his diary: “The streets of Tokyo swarm with American servicemen. One sees them wherever one goes. But no matter where I have gone, I have never seen an American soldier strike a Japanese, or behave with an air of superiority or in a menacing manner. In China, wherever I went, I invariably saw Japanese soldiers lording it over the Chinese. I invariably saw scenes of Japanese hitting Chinese. The Americans respect the Japanese as human beings, probably because they themselves are respected as human beings. The Japanese maltreated other races because they themselves had been mistreated by other Japanese. This because the rights and freedom of the individual were completely denied. In Japan there was no respect for human beings.”

In October, less than a month after the war ended, Takami reads in a (now uncensored) newspaper that by order of General Douglas MacArthur’s Occupation Forces, the Tokko Keisatsu (Japan’s notorious secret police) are to be disbanded, and all political prisoners are to be released.

In his diary Takami writes: “I felt tremendously relieved, as if dark clouds had been cleared. But why did we have to wait for the command to come from Allied Headquarters? Why couldn’t we do it ourselves? I feel ashamed. If we hard done it with our own hands, my happiness would be much deeper, and there would not be this feeling of shame at the bottom of my happiness.”

So Lovely a Country is not an easy book to read. At times it makes one both furious and sad at the stupidity of men and the many lost opportunities incurred in times of war.

This is an important and worthy work, not only in the strictly historical context, but also in the wider sense of the study of human affairs and human nature. It vividly reveals how such things as culture, religious beliefs, and love of country can be purposely distorted, twisted, and skewed, resulting in unimaginable human misery. Does it really need to be this way?