In Germany today, a new generation of writers is turning back to examine the horrors of the Nazi past and painfully exploring the guilt that they feel all Germans must share in some degree for their part in it (TIME, Jan. 4). But in that other Axis partner, Japan, writers are strangely silent on the subject of the war years.
Placing the Blame. In the Japanese view, the atomic bomb was an expiation of their war guilt. With the two explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was transformed from aggressor into victim. There are innumerable mediocre books on the bomb. There is almost no fiction examining Japan's responsibility for Pearl Harbor.
But Japanese writers feel that they have less reason than the Germans to feel guilty about the war. In their view, the Japanese war was more of the old-fashioned imperialist sort, which most nations have from time to time engaged in. They point out that there was no thought control on the scale of Hitler's Germany and no knocks at the door in the night. The brutalities of the Bataan Death March and their notorious prison camps are shrugged off as inherent in warfare. After all, they argue, these sins cannot be compared with the Nazis' deliberate policy of genocide. "The Japanese are inherently incapable of committing cruelties on such a mathematically inhuman scale," says Critic Kenzo Nakajima. During the war, many writers found it easy to sympathize with the aim of driving the "white imperialists" out of Southeast Asia. Many happily ground out propaganda, though they are embarrassed to recall it now.
Since V-J day, only a handful of novels have seriously dealt with the war. Even those tended to put all the blame on the militarists. This point of view was expressed in a savage novel of barracks life, Zone of Emptiness, by Hiroshi Noma (1956). The zone is, of course, military life, which has sealed out all civilized behavior. In the barracks, depravity is the norm: hypocrisy, bribery, sadism. Soldiers are driven to fanaticism by fear of their superiors. No escape is possible. "You can't trust anything," says a soldier. "Everything here is an optical illusion."
The Roots of Fanaticism. In two isolated novels, two novelists tried to deal more directly with the causes of the war. "People are saying now that it was army pressure that made them cooperate in the war," says the hero of the novel Homecoming (1955). by Jiro Osaragi. "The excuse is true, so far as it goes. But how contemptible of a human being to have to make it." Author Osaragi traced the causes of the war to the peculiar "insensitivity" of many Japanese, the "dull opaqueness" that marks "a relentlessness that suffocated others."