Images of the Defeat, and
What the Prefaces Actually Said

People at the time did write about "the hundred-and-eighty-degree turn." But they used it as a sales pitch.

Japan has now been released from a long war, and for the building of a peaceful Japan she is making a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and rushing forward toward the construction of a democratic state. It follows naturally that a great turn is likewise taking place in the life of each and every citizen.

Koizumi Masanori, The Automobile King Chrysler and the Two Boys (Jidōsha-ō Kuraisurā to Futari no Shōnen), Okaniha Shobō, 1946 p.5 Read the preface

Today, from militarism toward a democratic, peaceful and cultured nation, the very form of Japan and the life of her people are accomplishing a violent hundred-and-eighty-degree turn; but the only road by which Japan can live is to carry out the Potsdam Declaration and the terms of surrender faithfully and to realize a peace-loving democratic Japan.

Kume Makoto, The Story of Edison: Great Men of the World Series, Vol. 3 (Ejison Monogatari: Sekai Ijinden Sōsho Dai-san-shū), Hoshi Shobō, 1946 p.64 Read the preface

On the other side, some people did not want to be thought of as having turned. The educator Obara Kuniyoshi, reissuing a book of his own from 1923 exactly as it stood, went out of his way to add a disclaimer.

This book, published on April 1 of the twelfth year of Taishō, just twenty-three years ago, is put out as nearly as possible as it then was. This is because I wish it to be understood that I have by no means at this late hour changed my position, or curried favor, or flattered anyone.

Obara Kuniyoshi, On Free Education (Jiyū Kyōikuron), Tamagawa Shuppanbu, 1946 p.20 Read the preface

Books reissued unchanged were not few. A large part of that was circumstance — the printing houses had been damaged and new plates could not be made — but there were also a fair number of people who, like Obara, wanted to insist that they had not changed since before the war, that they had been right all along.

That same year, some watched the turn coldly. Ōmuro Teiichirō, The Recovery of Intelligence writes that "people who never had a soul to begin with" are praising democracy in the same loud voice with which they once sang the war, with the same haste and the same zeal they showed for militarism. The logic is that a changed surface is itself the proof that the substance has not changed.

Descriptions of prostration do exist.

The political world, the economic world, and inwardly even the world of education, stood blank and knew not what to do. Such was the unfeigned condition of Japan at the close of the twentieth year of Shōwa.

Fifty Years of the Japan Rikkōkai: Main Volume (Nihon Rikkōkai Sōritsu Gojūnenshi: Honpen), Nihon Rikkōkai, 1946 p.3 Read the preface

Honestly, the shock was great. I was stunned out of myself, and I wailed aloud. In all my life, certainly never before, and probably never again, shall I be placed in the midst of so great an upheaval.

Tagō Torao, The Woman Who Came Through the Storm (Arashi o Kugutte Kita Onna), Nihon Shuppansha, 1946 p.106 Read the preface

But once you tag the 883 items and count, the prostration side is not the majority.

The tags were put on by the reader (the author of this site), not by anyone at the time. Compound tags are counted broken apart. The figures are for the 879 items actually readable in "Reading Some of the Prefaces and Afterwords"; the 2 items with bibliographic data but no text are not counted.

What sits opposite prostration is not a calm forward-lookingness. It is an odd cheerfulness that makes you wonder whether the writer is thinking at all. The Problem of Marriage Difficulty opens by singing of youth — "Young men! Yours is the beautiful flower of life!" — A Guide to Fishing Spots says "let us work hard and play hard," the triple-jump gold medalist Oda Mikio talks about the next Olympics in the closing of his book on athletics, and the city planner Ishikawa Hideaki flatly declares that the total burning of the city is a fine opportunity to realize the ideal city.

There is another, structural circumstance. To put out printed matter in this period took both paper and spirit. A prostrated person cannot publish a book. Prostration is thin in the prefaces partly because prostrated people never appear in this place at all.

The joy was printed openly.

Then on August 15 came the end of the war. It was a splendid rout for Japan. Hearing of the end of the war, I rejoiced from my heart. I was so truly glad that the tears nearly came. Ah, what a long, dark, oppressive life it had been. I felt as though for the first time in years I could breathe the open air to the full.

Watanabe Junzō, A New Day (Atarashiki Hi), Shinkō Shuppansha, 1946 p.62 Read the preface

On August 15 of last year, listening to that broadcast out in the country, I began by degrees to tremble from deep inside my body, and even after the broadcast ended the trembling would not stop for some time. It was a muggy day, yet with emotion my whole body went cold and I felt chilled. It was, before anything else, an uncontainable joy.

Odagiri Hideo, Man and Literature: Critical Essays (Ningen to Bungaku: Hyōronshū), Kawade Shobō, 1946 p.107 Read the preface

Just after that, the same piece by Odagiri records an entirely different reaction. The words of a driver at a bus depot.

"Here we've been working ourselves to the bone, and now they tell us we've surrendered. Working feels ridiculous now, so no buses today."

Ibid.

The sense of release is not only about the air raids ending. Being able to write comes up again and again.

And yet, thinking that even this much could never have been put into print in the old days, I felt at ease as I wrote. I thought it was good to have stayed alive.

Ōtsuki Kanshi, Prison Record (Rōgokuki), Hanyū Shobō, 1946 p.3 Read the preface

Where the sense of release comes out strongest is among those who had been policed before the war. Majima Kan, a doctor jailed over the birth-control movement, wept at the broadcast announcing the end of the war and heard the occupation directives issuing one after another as "a solemn fact, and yet like a dream" (A Happy Married Couple). To him the occupying army was the side that had come to carry out the liberation of the people. This way of seeing connects to 09.

This is where the gap is widest. A considerable share of what came out in 1946 was written before or during the war. Manuscripts were evacuated to the countryside, and surviving stereotype plates and printing houses put out the books.

This book was written in the fifteenth year of Shōwa, and just as the printing was finished, Anglo-Japanese relations suddenly worsened and the crisis of war drew near; the author, having something to consider, decided to hold off publication for a while. Sure enough the Greater East Asia War broke out, and under fierce bombing the stereotype plates of this book were burned up, but the printed copies were moved from place to place in evacuation and narrowly escaped war damage; and now, with peace restored and the question of constitutional revision unexpectedly arising, the occasion for publication has at last come.

Asai Kiyoshi, The Full Story of the Genrōin's Compilation of a Constitution (Genrōin no Kenpō Hensan Tenmatsu), Ganshōdō Shoten, 1946 p.217 Read the preface

This ninth volume, on Qinghai and Xikang, had already completed printing in the spring of last year, the twentieth of Shōwa, but at the end of May, while in the binding process, it met with fire and the whole of it was destroyed…… Fortunately the stereotype plates had been evacuated to a branch office of this society and were safe; making use of them, we waited for the printing house to recover its capacity, then passed the censorship of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, set about reprinting, and by the goodwill and effort of the printers have at length brought it out.

The New Complete Gazetteer of China by Province, Vol. 9: Qinghai and Xikang (Shinshū Shina Shōbetsu Zenshi, Dai-kyū-kan: Seikai-shō, Seikō-shō), Tōa Dōbunkai, 1946 p.561 Read the preface

The world of hobbies was continuous in an even franker way.

From the China Incident on into the Pacific War, lovers of the hobby restrained themselves and its popularity accordingly languished; but with the end of the war on August 15 of the twentieth year of Shōwa it was recognized as a hobby befitting the construction of a new Japan, enthusiasts appeared one after another, and it has come to enjoy good favor.

Nihon Saishin Rengōkai, Wild Ginger for the Gardening Hobbyist (Engei Shumi no Saishin), Engei Shinpōsha, 1946 p.11 Read the preface

It is not only the material side that is continuous. The mood of "rebuilding through science" that floods out after the defeat also runs on from before the war. The breaking of superstition in the mid-Meiji period, the improvement of daily life in Taishō, and the wartime "cultivation of the scientific spirit" lie on one line, and A Study of the National Cost of Living (Kokumin Seikatsuhi no Kenkyū), of 1944, says that the obstacle to rebuilding daily life is "superstition arising from a poverty of scientific spirit." The nation built on science that people spoke of the year after the defeat is the continuation of that sentence.

The word "democracy" appears in 95 of the 883 items. In quantity it really does flood out from the day after. But the contents are not uniform. Hase Ken, who interviewed educators, was told the following by a newly appointed principal.

I asked: people speak of democratic education — what does it actually look like in the school you run? He first lamented bitterly the fact of the defeat, ran through a variety of complaints, and concluded that in the end there was nothing for us but to become as stupid as cats. And then he informed me, with great self-satisfaction, that in running the school today he had taken no measures whatever.

Hase Ken, The Education of Democracy (Minshushugi no Kyōiku), Kyūshū Shobō, 1946 p.5 Read the preface

"Dragging it along" does not always take the shape of fighting spirit. An eighty-year-old naturalist received the defeat as "a slide back into a Little Japan." What he regrets is insect collecting in the southern seas.

The imperial rescript of unconditional surrender of August 15 in the twentieth year of Shōwa made my heart feel that we had slid back to the Little Japan of the first years of Meiji, and I can say nothing but that my feelings are beyond measure. …… I had been looking forward with hope to the time when I should use Czech insect pins of No. 7 and 8 for examining large specimens from the tropical south seas, and now I have lost the right even to hold a single species of the Oriental region in my hand. You young men of promise, with your long road ahead, must feel it a great pity too.

Takachiho Nobumaro, Tales from Warbler Ridge (Ōrei Senwa), Hikosan Biological Laboratory, Kyushu Imperial University, 1946 p.7 Read the preface

That quantity guarantees nothing about content was noticed by writers at the time as well. Date Yūsaku of What Is Democracy? writes that "every Tom, Dick and Harry has democracy in his mouth," yet "from the opportunist politicians at the top down to the Hachis and Kumas at the bottom, they understand it surprisingly little." In the radio course Twelve Lectures on Democracy, Amano Teiyū warned that when the Japanese imitate only the form they are apt to "go bloodshot, raise their voices, and turn half mad." Yamauchi Fusakichi of The Liberation and Freedom of Women writes that this democracy is "not something we fought and won by our own strength."

Writing centered on the word "repentance" is a very small minority of the 883 (3 items under the Collective Repentance tag). What is common is not repentance but criticism of the citizens themselves. The lament of "we were deceived" is repeated.

Now you all put on a face as though you had nothing to do with the war, or pretend you had no will to make war at all, or claim as you please that "we were deceived……" or "it was the militarism that……"; but in truth, during the war every last one of the people painted a dream of expanded territory, of the development of the Yamato race, of abundant resources, lost themselves in a mistaken ideology and cooperated with the leaders — and more than that, those who took the lead by their own example and acted positively can by no means be called few.

Numine-sha, A Warning Bell to the Voter: A Guide to Voting in the First General Election Under Democratic Politics (Senkyonin e no Keishō: Minshu Seiji e no Hatsu no Sōsenkyo ni Okeru Tōhyō Shishin), 1946 p.4 Read the preface

The leaders with their delusions of grandeur bear responsibility, of course, but at bottom it was because the great mass of the people had no true awareness. People say "it was done to us" at the drop of a hat, but was it not precisely our own ignorance, our own want of awareness, that brought on this miserable result?

Saitō Saburō, Takuboku and the People of His Home Country (Takuboku to Kyōdojin), Kōbunsha, 1946 p.154 Read the preface

This direction also fed irritation at how people behaved in front of the occupying forces.

Even men in fine suits scramble for the chocolate thrown from the train windows, and when cigarettes are thrown from the streetcar windows, even women and children fight over them. Who could see this and not grieve?

Hirono Kiyoji, A New Start for Educational Japan: Democracy, Liberalism, and What Education Should Be (Kyōiku Nihon no Shinhassoku), Shin Kyōiku Kenkyūkai, 1946 p.5 Read the preface

Where, then, did the repentance go? It was absorbed into the phrase "each and every citizen." Criticism was dispersed across the whole people rather than aimed at the causes that decided on war, and no mechanism was built to gather up and examine what each person had thought. Self-reflection stayed scattered, left in individual hands (10).

Fast, yes. But not "smoothly." The author of an English textbook accepted the state of the world as though it were someone else's business.

Suddenly the age of English has come. I do not propose to argue whether this is right or wrong. I say only that such is the objective state of the world, and that from every angle — the completion of the individual, the advance of society, the rebuilding of the nation — the importance of English has come to be felt keenly by everyone.

Tomabechi Hidetoshi, A Model for Commercial English Correspondence (Shōgyō Eigo Tsūshin Kihan), Yūhōdō, 1946 Preface to the postwar edition

The music critic Monma Naoe wrote in repentance that during the war he had taken part in driving out American music.

In Japan there has long been a curious prejudice, a tendency to make light of American music, and during the war this rose to the point of excluding and banning it. I too, at the demand of national policy, had to take that attitude. Looking back now, it is the depth of shame, an inexcusable thing, and I repent it and regret it from my heart.

Monma Naoe, A Collection of American Songs (Amerika Kakyokushū), Shunjūsha Shōhakukan, 1946 p.3 Read the preface

And there were people who had not changed in the first place. A merchant who had been pressed during the war for being regarded as "pro-American and pro-British" put it this way.

Since for the past forty years we have kept the closest commercial dealings with America, Britain, China and the Soviet Union, during the war we were marked as the pro-American and pro-British faction and suffered a good deal of pressure.

Tsutsumi Seijirō, Eight Years of Miscellany (Zappō Hachinen), 1946 p.10 Read the preface

And the change of coat had a base under it. Since Taishō, the Japanese had gone on being irritated by their own officialdom, "all law and all regulation" and buried in red tape. Into that came an occupying army that decided on the spot, on its own responsibility. More than pro-Americanism, much of this goodwill arises by contrast with a slow-moving government of one's own (09).

Of the 883 items, the word "censorship" appears in 5. That scarcity itself shows how the control worked. On top of that, traces of resistance do remain. One author added a note at the end of a book riddled with deletions.

Postscript. Because passages have been deleted here and there by the censors, there are places where the connection of sentence and thought has become very defective. Rather than leaving blanks where the deletions fell, I have closed the text up as it stands. I ask the reader's indulgence.

Haruki Takeshi, Japan and the Reconstruction of Asia as Americans See It (Beijin no Miru Nihon Ajia no Saiken), Taishūsha, 1946 p.80 Read the preface

This sentence itself was then deleted by the censor.

But there is a puzzle here. Apart from Haruki, almost nobody wrote outrageous abuse in the expectation of being cut. Prewar censorship could be a matter of life and death if you were caught; running afoul of the Press Code would not get you killed. Even so, no last-ditch invective appears. What is common instead is the voice that hates the prewar censorship and rejoices at being able to write freely now (for instance "the barbarous feudal system of censorship made publication of my translation impossible," in An Appeal to Europe).

The standard of deletion is a puzzle too. In the children's book Son Gokū, a single line explaining that the somersault cloud was "truly a handy magic, faster even than a B-29" has been struck out. It is the technique of the storyteller's transcribed lecture, forcing a present-day topic into an old tale, and it is not political.

There is another face to it. Censorship is also recorded, matter-of-factly, as one stage of the publishing process (the "passed the censorship of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, set about reprinting" of The New Complete Gazetteer of China by Province quoted in 04). And self-censorship is written about more plainly.

Further, since there is much that was written during the war brought on by Japan's militarist leaders, seen from today there may be wording discourteous to the occupying nations. …… Considering future relations and the like, perhaps it should not have been printed; but I believe my own feeling could not be otherwise, and so

Tsutsumi Seijirō, Eight Years of Miscellany (Zappō Hachinen), 1946 p.10 Read the preface

Recollections of wartime censorship, by contrast, could be written freely. The shape of the occupation-era space for speech shows up right there.

But once this piece began appearing in the magazine, strict surveillance duly came from the censors. In the end it grew difficult to go on with the installments. I had thought myself quite careful, but difficulties arose all the same.

Iwabuchi Tatsuo, A History of Diplomacy Toward China (Taishi Gaikō Shiron), Takayama Shoin, 1946 p.4 Read the preface

Before arguing whether it was imposed, note that the Japanese had long been irritated with their own officialdom. A Taishō magazine says the low efficiency of government offices comes "first and last from being all law and all regulation, clinging to form and slighting substance" (Nihon oyobi Nihonjin, 1924), and that the offices run "from hour to hour, mechanically, like puppets on strings" (Intensive Management (Shūyakushugi), 1920). It did not change during the war either: administration was called "administration by chair and seal," which "in the end means nothing but the evasion of responsibility" (Up to the End of the War (Shūsen made)).

The occupying army that arrived into this was fast. An American lieutenant who distributed the stocked rice, barley, miso and soy sauce of a town in Saitama to the townspeople free of charge carried the whole thing out on his own responsibility, saying "there is no time to inquire of occupation headquarters." The headline a Japanese wrote about it was "Take a lesson from the occupation forces."

Still more, facing this situation, the lieutenant "had no time to inquire of occupation headquarters, and carried out the whole matter on his own responsibility." It is brisk, and it clears the chest. …… With a Japanese it would be all law this and procedure that, carrying nothing but papers back and forth, and by the time the essential measure was taken the goods themselves would already be gone.

Iijima Toshio, On World Citizenship (Sekai Kōminron), Bunka Sendensha Shuppanbu, 1946 https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/9853027/1/11

Even someone whose building had been requisitioned says he cannot feel resentment toward the American soldiers who move in, and that the ones he cannot bear are the officials in charge of the remodeling and the builders. The same contrast appears in the voice that calls the government "a heavy, plodding nag" (Japan's Self-Reflection (Nihon no Hansei)). Occupation policy worked as a vessel that caught, all together, the discontent accumulated since before the war and the hopes of those who had been suppressed.

"Each and every citizen" is not a postwar invention. It seems to have come into use during the war, meaning that each and every person should build up physical strength and save money to raise national power and win. The vessel stayed as it was; only the contents were swapped.

To realize democracy, it was preached, what matters is that the Japanese "each and every one, rich or poor, young or old, first become honest, diligent, kind, well-mannered, fine human beings" (Studying Democracy (Demokurashī no Benkyō)), and the constitution too was said to live only when "each and every citizen makes it his own blood and flesh" (Lectures on the New Constitution (Shin Kenpō no Kōgi)). The line of argument is that if individuals become good, the country becomes good.

The weak point runs straight on from 06. The repentance of the hundred million, too, was each and every person reflecting. Criticism was dispersed across the whole people rather than aimed at the causes themselves, and no mechanism was built to gather up and compare what each person had thought. Self-reflection stayed scattered, existing one by one, and never became a system.

As a word, they certainly did gain it. "Freedom" appears 127 times in all across the 883 items. "Equality," by contrast, appears only 4 times.

It is a strange ratio. In prewar Japan it was rather equality that was prized and freedom that was watched with suspicion. Probably equality was too obvious to need writing down, while freedom got written because the ban had been lifted. It reads as the result of that distortion being flipped over by the defeat.

The handling, though, was rough. That same year comes the lament that people "misunderstand, or willfully distort, freedom and democracy into meaning license and indiscipline, and behave selfishly without a second thought" (A Call for National Salvation Through Self-Government (Kyūkoku Jichi no Teishō)). Equality can be simplified into "everyone the same"; freedom is hard to simplify. In a 1949 Japanese-language textbook, a middle school student who pushes his own selfishness under cover of democracy appears as the subject matter (New-System Middle School Japanese (Shinsei Chūtō Kokugo)).