I Read All 5,728 Prefaces and Afterwords

Table of contents

After the defeat, all kinds of books were published in all kinds of ways

A great deal of paper burned in the war. The printing houses burned too. Even so, there were people who published books.

There was an author who somehow managed to publish from a set of proofs of which only a part survived. There was a book reprinted from stereotype plates that had been evacuated to the countryside.

During the war, Noda Utarō was entrusted with a manuscript by Kinoshita Mokutarō. He moved from one place of refuge to another with the manuscript, sometimes leaving it in someone else's keeping, and somehow protected it from the bombing. When the defeat came and society was in chaos, he managed at last to get it into print — but Kinoshita had already left this world.

Morishita Tomojirō was asked to produce a pamphlet on the labor movement, but his materials had been burned up in the air raids. He asked Ishizuka, a central figure in the movement, for help, but his materials had burned away as well. With no other choice, Morishita traced his own memory and wrote out "An Outline of the Communications Workers' Movement".

So it went: there were books that had survived the fires, and there were books newly printed.

There were children who read old magazines ravenously as they walked home from school. There were children sitting side by side on the crumbled stone steps of a burnt-out lot, reading magazines meant for adults. Takeda Kōichi saw, in a packed train, a child cradling a book of fairy tales with a scorched cover as if it were precious. Takeda wrote "Seashells and Ship Lights" for those children.

Yamakawa Chiō was angry. Around the thirtieth year of Meiji, newspapers and magazines had a "contributions column", and they printed good manuscripts regardless of the writer's rank or standing. Correct opinions were respected; it was an "age of free speech". But now nobody comes to hear what Yamakawa has to say. Truly this has become an age of "unfree speech"…… — and while grumbling all this he wrote and self-published *Questions and Answers Criticizing the Various Aspects of the Argument for Abolishing the Emperor System*.

Okamoto Haruzo, who had been treated coldly as the fellow who taught the enemy's language, was overjoyed: from now on it would be the age of English. The inefficient English education of the prewar years had to stop. In work connected with the occupation forces, just how useful was school English? These people cannot write even a single page of a report in English. Okamoto ran about and got his prewar book "An Introduction to English Business Correspondence" reissued. And while serving as principal of Doshisha Commercial High School, he began working out the plan for his next book, for the sake of those who would carry the next generation of the business world.

After the defeat, all kinds of books were published by all kinds of methods and for all kinds of reasons. I decided to read the prefaces and afterwords of every one of them.

Reading every preface and afterword

What I read was the publications (books) issued between 1945/06/01 and 1946/09/30 that are held in the National Diet Library Digital Collections. At the outset the search returned 6,037 items, but partway through, an "availability survey" was carried out. Because this excluded the data that turned out to be obtainable elsewhere, the registered count fell to 5,728. It is a shame that it shrank, but at any rate I read all of them.

The reason the search starts in June rather than August is to allow for the trouble caused by the postwar confusion, registration errors and so on. It is a piece of bad know-how I picked up doing a similar survey before — a kind of good-luck charm, you might say.

The survey began on February 17, 2026 and ended on May 12. Of those 85 days, 82 were working days, and the number of pages I viewed in the NDL Digital Collections was 141,841. Of those, the ones I judged worth recording and made notes on numbered 892 — a pickup rate of 0.63%, or one item for every 159 pages turned. The day I turned the most pages was May 11, at 10,346 pages; the notes for that day numbered 31 (a pickup rate of 0.30%).

The start of this whole activity was a small thing.

m## Is Japan really not reflecting on its war of aggression?

Because I read all sorts of things, I sometimes come across statements like the following.

• Japan shows no reflection on its colonial rule over the countries of Asia and its war of aggression
• Germany faced its Nazi past thoroughly, while Japan still cannot even reflect on its war of aggression
• Because schools do not properly teach the reality of colonial rule, the younger generation does not know the history of what was done to others

Against such statements come rebuttals like "How long are we supposed to keep apologizing!", but my own personal impression was: huh? They did reflect, didn't they?

As I wrote above, I read all sorts of things. So I have read any number of pieces of writing that reflect on colonial rule with tremendous force. Which is why my reaction is "Huh? I thought they did reflect……".

I also had an intuition that intellectuals, of course, would naturally reflect. If you have a functioning intelligence, it is natural to arrive at "We were deeply hurt. But we did terrible things. And we could not stop it……".

And it is a fact that Japan achieved reconstruction from defeat. Getting there requires analysis of and reflection on the catastrophe. My reading was that there was no way they had not reflected.

One more thing: the statements of people who say there has been no reflection are basically stock phrases. I had the naive suspicion that they had not read the source materials. But then again, I have not read all that much in that field myself. So I cannot judge.

I have written a lot here, but all of it is nothing more than subjective impression. I had been thinking that someday I would have to check, and since "someday" finally arrived, I decided to check by "reading every preface and afterword".

Right after the defeat, they really were not reflecting

Let me put the conclusion first: the Japanese right after the defeat seem not to have felt any responsibility for what the war had done to others. I stop short of asserting it because there is an enormous quantity of material I have not read.

Of course, if I dropped the constraint of prefaces and afterwords, gathered up the data that looks like reflection and cut and pasted it together, it would be easy to dress the thing up as reflection.

For example, in communist and left-wing books there is a great deal of abuse aimed at the military and the government. With hopes pinned on China and the Soviet Union, a great deal was written that can look like reflection. Beyond that, the colonies are actively used as material for criticizing the government and the military. Whether that counts as reflection, though, is another matter. It is criticism of "Japanese militarism", strictly speaking. It is not reflection on colonial rule.

Let me give real examples. If you search the National Diet Library Digital Collections for books and magazines published between 1945/06/01 and 1946/09/30 containing "侵略 反省" (aggression, reflection), there are 90 hits, and passages like the following can be extracted.

And in the Second World War, the great majority of Japan's writers not only showed no clear resistance to being made to cooperate with a war of aggression, but so many actively cooperated that one must say they were confused, blinded, and had lost their conscience or wounded it.
This tells us how extreme the oppression of Japan's half-feudal, militaristic politics was, and at the same time it lays bare how powerless the great majority of us writers were, apart from a very few outstanding ones, and how shallow the foundations of our thought were — and that requires deep reflection.

*Problems of Democracy* (Minshushugi no shomondai), Hori Makoto and Kaba Toshio, Aikusha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

As one of a defeated people, or rather as one of an aggressor people, I apologize deeply to your China and reflect all the more deeply; and if you would remember that time we had together in Zhangjiakou until the day comes when exchange with China is permitted, there could be no greater joy for me as a man of the theater; and while thanking China for its magnanimity for the joy of having been able to see the mountains and rivers of my homeland safely again so that I might work for the theater of a democratized Japan, and while looking with a heart full to bursting with reverence upon the theatrical passion and the humility you showed, I dream unceasingly of the day when exchange between Chinese and Japanese theater people will deepen, and if you would pledge our efforts as theater people toward that end, I think I would be truly happy.

*Japanese Theater* (Nihon engeki) 4(5); June issue, Nihon Engekisha, Nihon Engekisha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

So there certainly is reflection here, but if I may give my personal impression, honestly my eyes slide off it a little. There is no way to know whether someone else's reflection is genuine, but it is a fact that this is what I felt.

For fairness, let me also introduce a passage my eyes do not slide off. Tomizuka Kiyoshi, a researcher on aircraft engines, wrote the following in *The Ethics of Defeat* (Haisen no rinri), a collection of essays edited by Kishida Kunio and others.

To speak frankly, it was plunder, it was embezzlement of government property, it was extreme egoism, and beyond that, the merciless destruction of culture was carried out openly, in broad daylight, before the eyes of the people.
It was in the papers the other day: faced with the wretchedness of the war damage in Tokyo, Yokohama, Hiroshima and elsewhere, someone rebuked a reporter from the other side, and got back the retort, "No, Tokyo is nothing. I would say: go look at Manila." Anyone with any sensitivity can immediately read that there is something behind those words. From what I hear, we seem to have done a fair number of things that never should have been done.

*The Ethics of Defeat*, Kishida Kunio, Seiwakai Shuppanbu, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

This is exactly a passage that touches on the harm done — plunder and cultural destruction. But caution is needed. The title given to this piece is "Reflections on the Uncultured and the Irrational", and both the plunder and the destruction are handled as problems of irrationality. Tomizuka was a man who fiercely criticized Japan's irrationality even during the war, so one could call this continuity rather than reflection.

After reading various materials of this kind, I arrived at the conclusion "I get the feeling there was no reflection." "Through defeat the Japanese reflected deeply on their war of aggression……" — that would fit present-day ethics, and it is a beautiful story many people would like to be true. I was hoping for it too.

But reality is harsh. Let me write it once more: the Japanese right after the defeat apparently did not reflect on colonial rule at all. That is the conclusion I reached.

If you widen the range of years, writings that reflect on colonial rule and the war of aggression turn up in any quantity you like. It is a sense now lost, but up to a certain period there was competition over how well one could reflect on the war. Naturally the descriptions of reflection exist in bulk. And as time passes, personal memory is unconsciously rewritten. Public opinion sets, and people come to say what others want them to say.

It would be easy to use these writings as grounds to create a beautiful story and tell anyone who says "Japan shows no reflection on its colonial rule over the countries of Asia and its war of aggression": "They did reflect. You are simply ignorant." But that is not what I want to do.

So what is it that I am going to present over the long stretch ahead? It is this: what people think and what they do when they are defeated, and how that connected to reconstruction. What is not there is not there, so I gave up on it and decided to do something else.

As for reflection, I reconsidered it as a separate matter and did produce something like a conclusion of sorts.

Why prefaces and afterwords

I hold the fixed idea that prefaces and afterwords have a high probability of showing a writer's true feelings.

The body of a book is normally written with some purpose. But most prefaces and afterwords are written in the mood of "here I go" or "the job is done, what a relief……". That is, the writer's frame of mind differs from ordinary times. So I set up the hypothesis that ordinary emotions, feelings that had been hidden, ought to come out. As a real example, let me introduce the preface to a technical book on volumetric analysis.

The war against the Allied forces that began on December 8, 1941 came to a wretched end with our country's unconditional surrender on August 15, 1945. That was by no means a dream but a coldly rigorous fact, and our ever-mounting national hardship begins from this day. Ah, with this day as the boundary, the homeland Japan we had been proud of lost its position in the world.
When I consider it, a war does not begin on the day it begins, nor is a war lost on the day it is lost. We must inquire deeply into the sources of these things and, with those lessons, make them the cornerstone of the rebuilding of the homeland, and we must without fail turn calamity into fortune.

*Fundamental Volumetric Analysis* (Kiso yoryo bunsekiho), Ishibashi Masayoshi, Fuzanbō, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

There is no need to write anything like this in the preface to *Fundamental Volumetric Analysis*. Even so, Ishibashi Masayoshi could not keep himself from writing it.

I went on and on reading prefaces and afterwords on the strength of this fixed idea, but I was also aware that the method has any number of problems.

To begin with, the notion that ordinary emotions and hidden feelings come out in prefaces and afterwords is something I made up. There is no scientific basis for it.

Another is censorship. Books of that time were written on the premise of GHQ censorship. Not only that: right after the defeat there was an atmosphere of trying somehow to evade responsibility. There were people who wrote lies to protect their position, and people who worked hard at self-justification to escape responsibility for having cooperated with the war. Some evaded responsibility by becoming founding members of organizations with democratic development on the signboard; others energetically attacked people who looked unlikely to be able to hit back, before they themselves could be attacked. The reason so many prefaces and afterwords have people insisting that they had been right since before the war is this atmosphere. Writing is heavily affected by atmosphere.

On the subject of censorship, there was one interesting thing. The National Diet Library Digital Collections include the Prange Collection, the primary source material relating to censorship, and I was able to read characters that had been deleted at the time of publication. As a result I learned what the occupation side disliked, but that has little bearing on this survey.

And people who were able to publish right after the defeat were a minority in society at large, and were often in fairly privileged circumstances. That these are statements by such people has to be taken into account.

So the claim that prefaces and afterwords show true feelings is nothing more than a shaky inference. Carrying out a survey on this scale on such thin grounds would have been impossible until now. Done with paper materials, it would take ten years at the very fastest estimate. I would have been a nuisance of a patron as far as the library was concerned, and I would have been gently banned. And on top of that, there is a real possibility that the act has no meaning whatsoever. Which is why no idiot ever did this before.

However, what I am handling is not paper materials but a digital library. I can just access it and read. It is a game that can be played only now that the technology has developed.

What I wanted to know through this survey was whether they reflected at the point of defeat. If they were able to reflect correctly at the point of defeat, then the starting point was not mistaken. The reasoning is that over the several decades since, the reflection ought to have deepened. To find out, I set about looking for descriptions of reflection in the prefaces and afterwords of books published within a year of the defeat — and the result was as I stated above.

How I did the research

Even as a game, with nearly 6,000 items to process, preparation was necessary.

First, as training in seeing the past flatly, I made the following.

The behavior I personally enjoy is that of the lunatics of roughly 1902 to 1923, but this time I collected the behavior of a wide range of people. The constraints were only that it be written in Japanese and that it be vaguely old, and I looked into the behavior of people belonging to broad strata living in each period. This training had its effect, and I became able to see the past somewhat flatly.

A side effect was an improvement in my AI skills. Collecting events for 365 days was harder than I expected, tools became necessary, and I had no choice but to learn how to use AI. In the read-everything project too, AI was a great help.

There were two further unexpected effects. One is that this work weakened my value judgments. Human beings do all sorts of things in all sorts of places in all sorts of eras, and the conclusion is that there are all sorts of people. Collecting the behavior of these all sorts of people was harder than I thought. If I passed value judgments on the all sorts, I could not collect a year's worth of events, so while recognizing the all sorts, I ended up simply collecting without passing judgment. This weakened my values.

In the survey of prefaces and afterwords, I read from the earliest publication date onward. When a passage mentions the war, I record it as a note. The selection criterion underlying whether to record something is "does it show true feelings" or "do I like it". My values come out here, of course, but because I had weakened them through the training, I was able to record descriptions that until now I would have thought trivial, or would not have recorded out of distaste.

The other effect is that I became able to tell lies from the truth. A lie is not an event. So lying events have to be rejected. Continuing this work trained something like a sensor for judging false from true. It is hard to put into words. I can only say that I became able to tell. This ability is important, because the prefaces and afterwords I want to collect are what people in that era actually thought. Things written because ideology or position demanded them…… that is, lies…… I do not want to record.

Let me also write about what I did not do. I did not do anything like extracting text data from the first five and last five pages of 6,000 books and running it through text-mining-style analysis. Because it is meaningless. All that produces is mere numbers. And if you set reflection as the main axis of your analysis, the result will surely be that there was reflection. That is not what I want to do.

The other reason I did not have a machine read them is that I know that people who write abnormal things do abnormal things. In this survey there were cases where, though it was not stated, the last ten pages functioned as an afterword when viewed as a whole, and cases where there was a light preface but the first half of chapter one was the substantive preface. These cannot be found without a human checking, and they are descriptions that should be recorded.

To sum all this up: this data was collected by weakening my values, viewing the past flatly, and rejecting lies — but that too is nothing more than my subjectivity.

Since it would be bleak to have nothing but subjectivity from beginning to end, I have also posted an objective analysis, but this data is strongly colored by my subjectivity. In the end, this data cannot be handled without subjectivity.

What were they thinking as they turned toward reconstruction

What I thought after collecting the data is simple: "Facing defeat, people confronted the problems in front of them, decided that we will rebuild the country with democracy and science, and entrusted their hopes to the children. And Japan was reconstructed."

In the prefaces and afterwords there was loss and fear, a strange brightness, and a sense of release.

Grief

Much was lost in the war.

This is a private matter, but my only brother, who had been bedridden for about a year from the aftereffects of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, passed away while I was writing this manuscript, as if following after my sister-in-law, who also died in the bombing. I returned to my homeland carrying his bones, and after laying down my pen for a while I took up the writing again; but an indescribable grief and indignation coil in my breast, and I worry that they may have thrown the tone of my argument into violent disorder.
I offer this poor little treatise to the spirits of my brother and my sister-in-law.

*A Theory of Production Management* (Seisan kanriron), Numata Inejirō, Nihon Kagakusha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

"Sirius" was, I believe, something I wrote for *Fujin Koron* around 1919. I took it from an old Chinese novel, and my Asae, who died last year at ten, loved this piece enormously. I do not know how many times she read it over. But it is rather difficult for children, so this time I rewrote it entirely. I have added this one piece at the end of the volume in memory of my beloved child who died so young. When I think how happy Asae would be if she were alive to read it, a fresh grief strikes my breast unbearably.

*Adrift on the Pacific: Futaba Bunko (Shokokumin edition)* (Taiheiyo hyoryuki), Eguchi Kan, Futaba Shoten, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

These passages are the fact that there were people who lost something in the war, and that those people were sad. In the prefaces and afterwords of books right after the defeat, this sort of content appears as a matter of course. Until you get used to it, it startles you, but among the so-called intellectuals too there were many who felt loss. In this war, one could say that tragedy occurred equally.

Takahashi Takeji dedicated an adventure story for children to his own child and to young children.

This manuscript
I dedicate to Genji, my beloved, who has departed,
and to the spirits of the many pitiful young ones who were sacrificed in this Pacific War—

*Jaston's Travels: An Adventure Tale* (Jaston ryokoki), Takahashi Takeji, Shinano Kyōdoshi Shuppansha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

There were those who thought of comrades who had died in prison. The economist Ōuchi Hyōe and his companions wrote and compiled a research volume while remembering their prewar comrades.

While we were holding the round-table discussion, the late Omori Yoshitaro and the late Minami Jiro came up in the conversation any number of times. Things like "If Omori were here it would have been such fun. What would Omori have said at a time like this?" (…) Both of them, and we as well, were implicated in the so-called Popular Front Incident of 1937 and 1938, but their bodies, weak from before, could not hold out until the investigation was over, and they passed away without even seeing the first-instance ruling. Comparing the present age with those days we cannot help but feel much, and especially whenever we think of those two and of the families they left behind, we cannot help feeling a deep grief and a strong hatred toward something.

*A Study of Japanese Inflation* (Nihon infureshon no kenkyu), Ouchi, Hyoe, 1888-1980, Kodosha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

There were those who carried on the will of a dead son.

I offer this book before the spirit of my eldest son, fallen in the war
Afterword
The translation contained in this book was completed by my eldest son Shigeru before he set out for the south under orders to join the forces. The translator, Shigeru, left the home islands (naichi) on a transport ship that sailed from the port of Ujina on June 1, 1942. He stayed about a month at Davao in the Philippines, then moved to Shonan. There he was engaged in military duties. On October 15, 1943, owing to a sudden accident, he fell at Port Dickson near Shonan.
The translation manuscript for this book had already been polished while the translator was in the home islands and was awaiting an opportunity for publication, but because of the shortage of printing paper and other reasons it did not see print. The translator died without seeing the translation he had labored over come into the world. As the translator's father, I considered that bringing this book out was my duty to the departed translator, and that sending a good translation into the world was my duty to readers, and so I have now put it to press.
When I consulted Mr. Sakagami Shinichiro, president of Kensetsusha, about publishing this book, he readily agreed to it. I think the translator too must surely be glad beneath the ground.
April 1946, at a temporary lodging in Harusato village, Kani district, Gifu prefecture. Akita Genmu

*A Late First Love* (Osoi hatsukoi), Maupassant, Guy de, 1850-1893, Akita, Shigeru, 1908-1943, Kensetsusha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

In this way the prefaces and afterwords speak of the damage suffered and the misery of the war. Akita Genmu was an excellent teacher of French who taught in the army during the war. Strictly speaking, that makes him a person who took part in the war and profited from it.

Japanese peace education basically teaches the misery of war and the harm done by the war of aggression. But there is a swing. When the harm done is emphasized, people appear who take up the side of victimhood. People who doubt the emphasis on the tragedy of victimhood emphasize the side of Japan as perpetrator. Discourse like "there is no reflection on colonial rule" was probably born within this swing.

For those who emphasize the harm done, Akita's case becomes an object of criticism; but which is emphasized, harm done or harm suffered, varies with the period, and there is no universality in it. And that Akita's teaching in the army and his grief at losing his son coexist is simply a fact.

Amid the grief there is something that does not come out strongly in prefaces and afterwords. Prostration. What they had believed in collapsed and they lost a great deal. At the time of defeat many people felt a sense of prostration. This too is a matter of course. But getting printed matter out in this period required spirit and willpower. A prostrated person cannot do it. It was people who, while carrying anxiety and grief, still held hope for the future who wrote and printed.

Fear of a country grown smaller

The fear of the territory having shrunk through defeat seems to have been great.

a defeated Japan, poor in resources and with a narrow national territory besides, that must feed eighty million densely packed people

*The Story of Edison* (Ejison monogatari), Kume, Makoto, Hoshi Shobō, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Territory too was one of the things lost. Many agonized over how food could be produced on this narrow land. They were anxious.

This anxiety connects back to before the war. Malthus's theory of population was widely current in Japan. Fear of a narrow national territory was one factor driving the country toward war. With defeat the anxiety came back.

There were those who tried to meet this anxiety with increased production and guts.

As a result of defeat, our whole population has been driven into the narrow homeland, the four islands of Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Hokkaido, and we have to cultivate this homeland and eat from it; however much we demand increased rations from the government and the authorities, you cannot shake out a sleeve you do not have.
If you have time to complain and grumble, make one more grain of rice or barley, one more piece of vegetable.
We must cultivate the mountains, the fields, even the roads, and live; if you think of the officers and men who starved to death on the lonely islands of the southern seas and turned to white bones, there is nothing we cannot do.

*Twelve Months of the Self-Sufficient Household Kitchen Garden* (Katei shokuryo no jikyu noen junikagetsu), Ebata, Nakae, Hakubundō Shoten, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The advertisements at the back of this book are quite interesting.

One is for *A Quick Reference Table of Food Analysis and Nutritional Values to Supplement Malnutrition; A List of Famine Plants Growing Wild in the Provinces*, whose content is about acquiring nutrition efficiently and scientifically. Famine plants are edible plants growing wild in the hills and fields for when the crops fail. *Twelve Months of the Self-Sufficient Household Kitchen Garden* has writing about fertilizer, and one can feel the will to get through the food shortage with science in addition to guts. There is another advertisement, for *Model Detailed Solutions to National Entrance Examination Questions for Middle Schools*. This is surely evidence that right after the defeat there were children who, while enduring hunger, were thinking about entrance exams.

And the old? An eighty-year-old entomologist of the peerage lamented the shrinking of the country and thought of the sorrow of the young.

Looking back, over the eighty-odd years of my life I have seen and heard the changes of the world with my own eyes, but the imperial rescript of unconditional surrender of August 15, 1945 made me feel that we had gone back once more to the small Japan of the early Meiji years, and I can only call my feelings beyond expression. When this autobiography was drafted, I trusted the army and navy for the war and the bureaucrats for administration, and I was looking forward with hope to the time when I would be able to use Czech no. 7 and 8 insect pins for surveys of large tropical specimens of the South Seas and the like; but now I have no right even to lay a hand on a single species of the Oriental region. The promising young men with their bright futures must feel it a great pity as well.

*Tales from Oryo* (Orei senwa), Takachiho, Nobumaro, 1865-1950, Kyushu Imperial University Attached Hikosan Biological Research Institute, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Reflection on the war is refreshingly, utterly absent, and grieving over Czechoslovak-made insect pins that had become unusable because the territory was lost is quite something. This is the classic absent-minded scholar, but knowing Takachiho's background changes the view somewhat. Because he was adopted into another family, his path to studying natural history at university was cut off. And so he entrusted his dream of a "first-class scientific nation" to the next generation. Before the war he called for the establishment of a national research institute in order to give posts to young zoologists; during the war he welcomed visits from young people and would drop in at the institute to watch over their growth. Unfortunately the dream of a "first-class scientific nation" was not realized, and Japan became a "fourth-class nation".

Among those who had lost land and resources, there were, like Takachiho, some who found hope in the people yet to come.

Japan is extremely poor in natural resources, and now that the national territory has grown narrow, the technical ability of the people is the only asset; the foundation of a rebuilt Japan lies here, I think. And so its cultivation is the most important problem.

*Worker Education for the New Construction of Japan* (Nihon no shinkensetsu rodosha kyoiku), Kirihara Shigemi, Rodo Kagaku Kenkyujo Osaka Shisho Roken Junpokyoku, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Their anxiety connected directly to a fever for education, for cultivating people. It is a feeling that connects to the nation built on science and the expectations placed on children, discussed below.

It is human beings who will reconstruct Japan. The territory had grown narrow and Japan, occupied, had become a fourth-class nation — but there were people who said that for exactly that reason we must not throw away our pride.

I am one of those who feel it dreadful that the Japanese today behave like fourth-class nationals and have thrown away their pride as Japanese. There has never been a time as closed in by bewilderment and confusion as today; not a single ray of light can be seen — that is, it is a tense destitution in which even the daily food is lacking. And so there can be no country that needs light as much as ours. It is only natural that those living in darkness seek light, yet no light is given to us, and that is far too desolate a reality.
Economically, ideologically, and in every other direction as well, Japan is certainly on the verge of crisis. I should very much like to stress just who it was that made Japan fall to within one step of such collapse, but however forcefully one argues it, the Japan of the past will never come again.
All you Japanese, our surroundings are dark, but I want the spirit of us Japanese to hold to a bright feeling to the last. Of course there are various causes that make it impossible to be cheerful, but as a practical matter, if we cannot first become true human beings, the rebuilding of Japan is impossible, and along with it a Japanese-style democracy will not be established either. All Japanese are alike in their love for the homeland Japan, and now is precisely the time when we must return to our true form as Japanese.

*A Japanese-Style Democracy* (Nihonteki na minshushugi), Kushino, Taneichi, Yamaguchi Kyodai Kogyosho, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

This passage shows us the society at the time of defeat in a very legible form: the desperate, throw-it-all-away attitude that there is no use looking for the causes of the defeat, and a certain kind of blitheness — these are dark times, but let us hold hope and be cheerful.

Blithe cheer

There certainly was grief in defeat. On the other hand there was a strange brightness that made you think, has this fellow given the matter any thought at all……

Young man! Your name is the flower of a beautiful life
Will you indeed bear good fruit?
Though the spring of heaven and earth comes round again
The spring of a life never comes twice
The path of a moment of youth admits no scribbling out

Young man, your name is the flower of a beautiful life
Whether you study or play, the time will never return
The blossoms scatter — what will you harvest?
Time is like an arrow, spring! summer! autumn!
O youth, raise high your attire.

*The Problem of the Difficulty of Marriage* (Kekkon nan mondai), Ishimaru Gohei, Izumi Shobō, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

This brightness is a riddle; it is quite likely that he was in a self-abandoning mood, or simply an idiot, but I really cannot tell. A slightly different type of high spirits comes from the comic sketch writer Takeno Tōsuke.

At the moment we received the imperial rescript ending the war on August 15, probably 90% of the Japanese people thought this defeat was something that could not be believed. They must have thought it something that could not possibly be.
(…)
The remaining 10%, apart from that 90% of the people, promptly confirmed the "fact" of "defeat" and correctly foresaw "what would come after". They did not go in for any ugly panic. They knew that "what was to come" had arrived by the law of things. They did not think it the least bit strange that no "divine wind" had blown. And who were that 10%?
(…)
That 10% was none other than the cultured. And among the cultured, the literary men in particular. Leaving aside the bandwagon-riders and the toadies as beneath discussion, at the very least the literary men of the study. Then the scientists. And a very small number of religious men. Were these not the people included in that 10%?
(…)
Finally, one word I would like to address to General MacArthur as well. There is a Japanese proverb, "haste makes waste". We know that the democratic thing to be glimpsed in the Potsdam Declaration is the true "road to happiness" along which defeated Japan should now advance. However, the Japanese lack the intellectual training to make this their own. There must be no haste. For it must not be like giving a horse to a beggar.

*Discourses on Life* (Jinsei dangi), Takeno, Tosuke, 1899-1966, Yōyōsha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Takeno stayed put in Tokyo through the war, and while publishing topical works he secretly built up a stock of comic sketches; "Discourses on Life" collects them. A man who after the war put his energy into risqué comic fiction declares that he was one of the 10% who "correctly foresaw what would come after" and then goes on to give General MacArthur advice — would the ordinary, unexcited Takeno have done such a thing?

There were plenty of blithe, high-energy people.

The melody of a world that shakes the soul, listen, listen to the song of democracy! The manifestation of an unarmed cultural world! Let us throw away the dark life of the past and the bitter memories, fall into step with heads high, and sing together, shall we not? The construction of a bright new Japan, and hope——

*Young Ways of Life* (Wakai seitai), Takehisa Harumi, Wakai Sekaisha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Now, the construction of a peaceful Japan! The launching of an international Japan! Every one of us, hand in hand!

*The Outstanding Party Leader, the Ideal Democratic Statesman Hara Takashi* (Takuzetsu seru seito shuryo risoteki minpon seijika Hara Takashi), Kotani Setsuo, Nisshi Mondai Kenkyūkai Shuppanbu, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

There is not a shred of critical spirit here, and the excitement is over the top by any standard, but there were people who went further still, and the one who spoke of hope while on the run was Uchida Toranosuke.

The hand for constructing a new peaceful Japan has already been extended. We Japanese now bear the duty of devoting all our strength, on the honor of the Japanese people, to making the "freedom" granted us by His Majesty and the Allied headquarters grow in the most correct way. I believe that fulfilling that duty is the one and only road that will save Japan, and the road that accords with the august will of His Majesty, who accepted the terms of Potsdam.
Japan was defeated. But what was destroyed was a bad Japan. I want us to harden our resolve never again to permit evil forces to rise in Japan.

*Toward a New Life* (Atarashiki inochi e), Uchida Toranosuke, Soda Sogo Bunka Kenkyujo Shuppanbu, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

During the war Uchida handled work for the military in Keijo. What work he did is unknown, but since he boasted that on the defeat he drank up nearly a hundred dozen bottles of top-brand brandy left behind by the old navy, he must have been working somewhere quite close to it. So after returning to Japan, fearing that he would be called to account for war responsibility, in November he disguised himself as a non-commissioned officer and fled to Kyoto. This is the book he brought out before running off, and you cannot help thinking that Uchida already had his "freedom" — but this sort of irresponsible, unreflective brightness was everywhere.

The bright world of hobbies

Set against the blitheness there was of course also a devastation in Japan in which there was not even the leeway to speak of reconstruction.

"The country is broken; the mountains and rivers remain" is a line of verse that expresses the misery of defeat concisely and is on everyone's lips, but the miserable state of our country now is such that this line cannot express it fully. The calamity of modern scientific war has reached the mountains and rivers as well. The hills have been burned and many rivers destroyed; it is a state in which the country is broken and not even the mountains and rivers remain. On top of that, we have no leeway to intone "the country is broken; the mountains and rivers remain" and steep ourselves in cheap sentiment. Much poetry has been born amid the vicissitudes of nations since ancient times, but we now have not even the leeway to express a wretched defeat in poetry. I almost feel envious of a defeat with enough leeway to leave behind lines like that.

*National Life and Socialism* (Kokumin seikatsu to shakaishugi), Mizutani Chōzaburō, Sansuisha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Mizutani laments that there is "not even the leeway to express a wretched defeat in poetry", but haiku and tanka, which cost no money and need no space, boomed as hobbies that even disabled veterans could enjoy. The hobbies survived.

Oda Mikio, the triple jump gold medalist, wrote this at the close of a book on athletics.

Now the Second World War is over and peace has come again, but when will defeated Japan be given the chance to compete in the Olympics? Yet in the near future it will surely be recognized as Japan, a nation that loves competition, and will surely be allowed to appear on the Olympic stage. Who will it be that carries on Japan's supremacy in the triple jump?
Young men, it lies in your new devoted effort to bear this glory.

*Track and Field* (Rikujo kyogi), Oda, Mikio, 1905-1998, Ōbunsha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Most people would say, we are worrying about tomorrow's meal here, who cares about the triple jump — but in any era, it seems people want to recommend what they themselves like.

Sometimes that turned into far-fetched argument, and the man who wanted to sell Dickens repeated, "Dickens before anything else!"

What kind of novel do you want most?
It must be roughly the following. — A novel that, in the midst of adversity, gives you comfort and strength. A novel that, even if you are blessed with a good life, does not let you forget the existence of the unfortunate and their sad fates.
A cheerful novel that, after a day of hard labor, blows away your cares and your fatigue. A novel that unfolds a picture of light and shade, tears and laughter, with never a moment to catch your breath, and gives you an education in life; and one more, a novel that makes us throw off the old feudal dreams of a narrow island country, opens wide a window onto the world of freedom, and before we know it teaches us the way of life of people who breathe democracy.
Every one of them a reasonable, urgent order. But then, is there in all the world a novelist who would take on such a motley heap of demands single-handed and satisfy them right this minute?
There is! The man who accomplished this miracle was none other than the father of the world's popular literature, the Englishman Charles Dickens. Dickens, the great vein of literature that yields anything you dig for. Dickens, who strangely enough fits exactly the feelings of us Japanese of yesterday and today.
So, before anything else, Dickens! (…)
Before anything else, Dickens! It is you yourselves who are crying it.

*Dickens Story Collection* [2] (Dikkensu monogatarishu), Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870, Matsumoto, Tai, 1877-1939, Matsumoto, Keiko, 1891-1976, Fuwa Shobō, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The headquarters of the Tama Historical Society, which researched the local history of Edo, burned to the ground. The downtown burned too. With the buildings gone, one can gaze at the magnificent peak of Fuji from the streets. It is as lovely as an old woodblock print, but at this rate we cannot face our ancestors. The Edokko rose up and began to build houses of reconstruction. The Tama Historical Society took heart as well, reissued a gazetteer of Edo published in 1662, and spoke of its significance.

Learning the new by studying the old is a compass for divining the future, and comparing the burnt-out plain of Edo with the Edo of its pioneering days is not without interest.

*A Record of Famous Places in Edo* (Edo meishoki), Asai Ryoi, Tama Shidankai, Tama Shidankai, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

There were ambitious ones too. The city planner Ishikawa Hideaki flatly declared that the total burning was a fine opportunity to realize the ideal city.

Now, the fate we face can, depending on how you look at it, be seen as giving us the chance to carry out at a single bound the hundred-year demand of city planning — that "every room of every house have sunlight" and that "every garden of every house grow fresh vegetables".
This is an opportunity that those who hold a hundred-year ideal but have no occasion of a wholly burnt city could never obtain however much they wished for it.
If we who have burned awaken here and carry this through, it will not only be the wisest move as a stopgap for getting through the immediate crisis; it will mean that we have carried out this ideal ahead of the whole world.
Our descendants hundreds of years hence will forget to blame us for losing the war and will repeat, "It was good that it burned."
I would like us to have the wisdom to take the very stone of misfortune and make it a lever.

*Principles and Practice of Urban Reconstruction* (Toshi fukko no genri to jissai), Ishikawa, Hideaki, 1893-1955, Kōbunsha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Building an ideal city from a blank sheet has its romance, but as for how it actually turned out — it is the cities we have now. Ishikawa's wish did not come true, but at any rate the passion of that moment was genuine.

This kind of far-fetched argument was found in every industry. Anglers cried out that unless there is the leeway to enjoy a life of hobbies, the construction of a new Japan will not be accomplished.

As the amusement best suited to the coming age and open to everyone, I would like to recommend fishing. It goes without saying how healthy it is to spend the whole day fishing at the sea, at a river, in a valley, breathing the pure air.
There may be people who scold, at a time like this, going off to fish so idly — but that is an outrageous misunderstanding. However hard-pressed the world may be, unless one has at least enough leeway to enjoy a life of hobbies, the great enterprise of constructing a new Japan cannot possibly be achieved.

*Fishing Through the Four Seasons* (Shiki no tsuri), Masuda, Hajime, Yūbunsha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Here too there was a strange brightness. The foreword to a magazine's special issue said something as blithe as the following.

Whether you spend it fretting and gloomy, it is the same fifty years of a human life. Going out to fish on the occasional day off is like a bath after a stretch of earning your keep — sheer exhilaration. Let us work hard and play hard. And let us fish greatly and enjoy greatly.

*Guide to Fishing Spots*, vol. 1 (Tsuriba annai), Tsuribitosha, Tsuribitosha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

All I can say is that this is too good in every respect. Tsuribitosha launched a fishing magazine early after the defeat, and *Guide to Fishing Spots* had the standing of a special supplementary issue. Tsuribitosha still exists today, and when I checked the site they run, it said, "Fishing is play. That is why we get serious about it." The spirit of "Let us work hard and play hard. And let us fish greatly and enjoy greatly" seems to have been handed down.

Shouting that our own hobby or pleasure or research is precisely what can contribute to reconstruction is pretty close to a land-grab game. But even if there was some calculation involved, the brightness is genuine. There were people who spoke passionately: the war is over, come and play with us.

A sense of release

Behind the brightness was a sense of release. For those who had been unable to speak their true feelings during the war, defeat was a joy.

On August 15 the war ended. It was a splendid, crushing defeat for Japan. When I heard the war was over I rejoiced from the heart. I was so truly glad that tears nearly came. Ah, what a long, dark, oppressive life it had been. I felt as though I were breathing the open air to my heart's content for the first time in years. How carefully I had lived during the war, worrying about those around me. You cannot say anything careless. You cannot speak your true feelings. People in the world were in raptures over some conviction of certain victory, but no such conviction would well up in me however I tried. However brilliant the war results announced by Imperial Headquarters, I was not glad in the least. I only prayed one thing: that the war would end soon. And that war ended. What is more, Japan lost, and we were blessed with the prospect of the collapse of Japan's feudal despotism. It was truly a defeat that became the turning point of history. At this I cannot help being in raptures.

*A New Day* (Atarashiki hi), Watanabe, Junzo, 1894-1972, Shinkō Shuppansha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

That is rejoicing too much by any standard, but Watanabe wrote no accommodating works during the war either. On the contrary, he was arrested the day after the start of the Pacific War for violating the Peace Preservation Law, so perhaps his raptures cannot be helped. For those who had been suppressed like Watanabe, defeat was good news, and Majima Kan, a doctor imprisoned over the birth control movement, wept at the broadcast ending the war.

When I heard the broadcast ending the war, all kinds of feelings welled up in me and the tears would not stop.
How many people there must have been who thought, ah, thank goodness, there is no longer any need to suffer pointless disasters. They had hoped that this person, that child, would somehow still be alive; and yes, I too was being taught to live. Now then, what should we do, what will become of us — and while we stood there in a daze, the occupation forces' broadcasts had us listening, one after another, to proclamations of the liberation of the people, as if it were a dream and yet a solemn fact.

*The Happy Married Couple: The Science of Birth Control* (Kofuku naru fufu), Majima Kan, Shinpūsha, 1946. National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

What I would like noted is that Majima sees the occupation forces as something like a savior carrying out the liberation of the people.

The occupation and efficiency

Having accepted the defeat by the sacred decision of His Majesty the Emperor, Japan became a fourth-rate nation and lay under the occupation of the Allied forces.

The period when these texts were written is generally described as one in which most people were in a state of collapse. But feelings were not monolithic. As we have seen, all sorts of emotions were swirling around. There were no more call-ups, no more air raids, no more military drills. There were people filled with a sense of release. The "brutish Americans and British" who came ashore turned out to be surprisingly decent fellows, and brisk about their work.

Complaints about bureaucratic inefficiency

As a basic premise, the Japanese had always been dissatisfied with the inefficiency of government offices.

The reason the work of government offices is less efficient than that of the private sector is, first and last, that everything is done by law and by regulation, that form is fussed over and content slighted. Hence red tape; hence rigid, by-the-book rule.

Nihon oyobi Nihonjin (August 15 issue)(54), Seikyosha, Seikyosha, 1924 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

At the least thing they immediately take shelter behind the rules; there is no allowance for circumstances, no handling of exceptions. And so, hour after hour, mechanically, moving like puppets, they go on with a life that has no vitality, no flexibility, no application, no connection to the world. Whatever administrative office you look at, it is only natural that the air should be lifeless, gloomy and dark, like a country of the dead.

*Concentrationism: or, A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of Living* (Shuyaku shugi: ichimei, seizon noritsu zoshinho), Nishimura Fuminori, 1877-1971, Ryubunkan, 1920 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Go to a provincial prefectural office, or to a district office, a tax office, a courthouse, a registry office, a village office; or in the cities go to the city hall, to the ward office, to the ministries of the central government, or to any of their subsidiary agencies. Their attitude toward the people is so arrogant and so unkind, so thoroughly contemptuous of the citizenry, that one is left dumbfounded with displeasure. The worst of it is that this holds true even for bodies that ought to be run on business lines: the Railway Board, the municipal electric bureau, the post office, banks, companies — far too many of them are just the same. And yet, from within their own ranks, voices go up calling for the simplification of paperwork.

*A Method of Simple Living* (Kan'i seikatsuho), Nishimura Fuminori, 1877-1971, Dai Nippon Tosho, 1916 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

I could go on turning up examples forever, so I will stop here, but "removing even a little of the national custom of exalting officials and despising the people" was difficult the whole time. "Those under the gravest misapprehension became officials in order to throw their weight around," and thought of it as an honor. (*A Method of Simple Living*)

Ueno Yōichi, "the father of efficiency", held that "always improving efficiency is an important thing that must be considered not only in factories but in government offices, in shops, in households, and again as individuals," and that "even at government offices, a whole day is often used up hunting for documents." This was because "the basis of their filing has not been built scientifically," and he sounded the alarm that "looking at the general trend of the world, Japan's mission is truly a heavy one, and unless we brace ourselves considerably there is a danger that we will lose the competition and be knocked off the world stage." As a result of starting the war, Japan was knocked off the world stage.

*Increasing Efficiency* (Noritsu no zoshin), Ueno Yōichi, 1883-1957, Kyoka Dantai Rengokai, 1925 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

During the war, the situation did not change much.

Japanese administration is administration by chairs and seals; even for a government office to get an affiliated body to do one piece of work, twenty or thirty seals are required. So even at a time when we ought to be fighting and begrudging every moment, that habit comes out, and in the end it means nothing whatsoever except the evasion of responsibility.

*Until the End of the War* (Shusen made), Furuya Tsunatake, Shukyodo Shobo, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Praise and complaints toward GHQ

GHQ arrived, and this changed.

Japan over these five months has, if you say it has changed, changed greatly; and if you say it has not changed, has not changed in the slightest. As for what has changed: thanks to the whip of the Occupation headquarters, a government as sluggish as a broken-down packhorse has reluctantly set about various reforms. If it is going to be done anyway, one would like, as soon as possible, to have a national political system and a government that can decide things briskly by their own will.

*Japan's Self-Reflection, Part 2 (The Course of the War)* (Nihon no hansei), Horiuchi Yosen, 1900-1962, Seinen Bunka Shinkōkai Shuppanbu, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The occupation forces came, so reforms happened and the world changed; but the government is the same as ever and has not become a national political system that can decide things briskly — he writes some rather severe things. Disgust at the packhorse government sometimes turned into praise for GHQ.

A Proposal
Take a lesson from the Occupation forces
Around the twenty-sixth of last October, First Lieutenant Panage of the American unit stationed in Satte-machi and Kuki-machi in Saitama Prefecture distributed rice, barley, wheat flour, miso, soy sauce and the like from the stock in the army provisions depot to the townspeople free of charge, and it is said that the townspeople were grateful and the trust in the Occupation forces rose another notch.
It was not we ourselves who received this benefit, but we are all in the same trouble over food. Is it not a pleasure just to hear the story?
What is more, faced with this situation the lieutenant "had no time to inquire of Occupation headquarters, and carried it out entirely on his own responsibility." It is brisk, and it gives one a feeling of relief in the chest.
In this measure a morality — in the sense of a decisive and appropriate action — is splendidly realized and given meaning, precisely in the refusal to think of things as difficult. Is there not much here that we ought to learn?
If this had been Japanese, it would be all "what about the law," "what about the procedure," carrying nothing but documents back and forth, and by the time the essential measure was taken the goods themselves would already be gone.
Unless we imitate the Occupation forces a little more and each act responsibly, will not the freedom we were at last given become treasure left to rot....

*On World Citizenship* (Sekai komin ron), Iijima Toshio, Bunka Sendensha Shuppanbu, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

I have already spoken of the sense of release among those who were let out of prison. For people who had been suppressed before the war, GHQ was the hero who smashed Japanese militarism, and the occupation policy also functioned as a system for setting in motion social movements that had continued from before the war.

Nor is there anything strange about people with no particular doctrine or cause preferring, over the old government that fiddled with "documents, what about the law, what about the procedure," a GHQ that briskly "announced its administrative policy for occupied Japan and, on that basis, carried out its measures swiftly and precisely" (*A New Peace: The Path of the Japanese People* (Atarashiki heiwa: Nihon kokumin no shinro), Sumiya Etsuji, Kaniya Shoten, 1946, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/10263568/1/31).

As one plain fact, a great many voices praising the efficiency and speed of the Occupation forces survive.

As you already know, the Occupation forces have come in and are doing efficient work in various places. Particularly in the vicinity of Yokohama

*Doro* 8 (January)(70), 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The simple and efficient American Occupation forces

*Sincerity* (Magokoro), Gotō Fukujirō, 1901-1975, Bunka Kensetsusha, 1947 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Ueno Yōichi, who had gone on thinking about efficiency since before the war, pointed out the inefficiency of the government and its offices and argued that at this rate we would lose the war. What he thought about being under occupation is unclear, but he wrote something like this.

After the end of the war I immediately took up my pen and wrote "WHY DID JAPAN LOSE," its causes and the resolve required from here on.
(omitted)
For a country that has been beaten down to rise again, it is necessary that each and every one of its people rise reliably. For that, every last one of us must work day by day with less waste and less strain, and without slackening. In this sense, this book, which describes the right way to live the twenty-four hours of a day, is offered as showing the foundation for building a new Japan. 1946, 5, 2
The author

*Efficiency: 24 Hours* (Noritsu 24 jikan), Ueno Yōichi, 1883-1957, Kashiwa Shoin, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

A state in which tasks are handled properly was, for Ueno, simply how things ought to be, so there was no reason not to accept it.

The riddle of censorship

So were there no people who had complaints about GHQ? Of course there were.

One was censorship, and this is said to have been one of the unpleasant things. Haruki Takeshi put the following passage at the end of his book, intending it as a jab.

Because passages have been deleted here and there by the censors, there are places where the connection of the writing and of the thought is very defective. Rather than leaving blanks where the deletions were, the text has simply been closed up. I ask the reader's indulgence.

*Japan as Americans See It / The Rebuilding of Asia* (Beijin no miru Nihon, Ajia no saiken), Haruki Takeshi, Taishūsha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Of course this passage was deleted by the censor.

There is one strange thing. Apart from Haruki, no one wrote outrageous abuse in defiance of the censors, prepared to be cut. They were too afraid of GHQ to write it, one might say... but that is to underestimate prewar reporters badly. Unlike today, in the old days it was normal for reporters to include washed-up delinquent students and half-criminals, and some of them had a rebellious streak. And whereas prewar censorship could be a matter of life and death, getting caught by the Press Code would not get you killed. If they had really been furious, I would expect them to have written abuse with the resolve of a suicide charge — and yet no one did.

If anything, an overwhelming number of people wrote that they hated prewar censorship and that they could now speak freely.

The barbaric feudal censorship system made the publication of my translation manuscript impossible
(omitted)
Confined for several years by that same barbaric system of suppression, my clumsy translation has, with the help of Kurihara Yu, come to see the light of day.

*An Appeal to Europe* (Yoroppa ni tsugu), Mann, Thomas, 1875-1955, Ishikawa Yū, 1906-1976, Taigadō, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Together with the free publication of the interrupted *Shukuzu*, I feel something especially moving about the state of Japan today.

*Shukuzu*, Tokuda Shūsei, 1871-1943, Uchida Iwao, 1900-1953, Koyama Shoten, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Outside the prefaces and afterwords, I was able to find a few cases — people in the theater world complaining about GHQ's ban on performances of works depicting vendettas, loyalty, or obedient women, for instance — but on the whole censorship seems to have been accepted. Veteran reporters who had come through the hard times of the publishing world probably sneered that GHQ's censorship was as good as nothing at all.

During this investigation there were, here and there, points about the content of the censorship that struck me as questionable. For example, in a kodan shorthand book for children, the following passage was deleted.

The kinto-un technique, they say, lets you ride a cloud and fly a hundred and eight thousand leagues in a single bound — truly a handy magic, faster than a B29.

*Son Goku: Jeep-sha Bunko* (Songoku), Asaki Naizo, Jeep-sha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

This is a technique of the kodan shorthand books, a joke that forces a present-day topic somewhat crudely into an old story. What tripped the wire was "faster than a B29," which is about as trivial as it gets. Censors could read English. That means they had basically been educated — but kodan shorthand books were works aimed at people of low intellectual level. Either they did not know this device, or they judged it mechanically.

The scholar of English literature Kai Yuzuru served as a censor for a brief period and later wrote the memoir *GHQ Censors* (*GHQ Ken'etsukan*, Ashi Shobo, 1995). Its content criticizes GHQ censorship as something that restricted freedom of speech. Even he was astonished, when he sat the censors' examination, that "what mattered was ability," that "age, sex and past record had absolutely nothing to do with it here," and that pass or fail was decided on that basis; and when, sick of censorship, he tried to get a job at a Japanese prefectural office, he thought as follows.

At night an express letter came from the Kumamoto Prefecture Foreign Affairs Section. It said I was slated for appointment and should report at once.
Taking leave again, I returned to Kumamoto on the sixth and went to the prefectural office on the morning of the seventh.
The terms were a base salary of 700 yen and a family allowance of 240 yen. Working hours were said to be from eight to sixteen.
With this I could not even do side work. The Wireless Telegraphy Training Institute looked better.
But more than the terms themselves, I was appalled at the number and complexity of the documents I had to submit.
(1) Graduation certificate from the Fifth Higher School
(2) Transcript from the same
(3) Health examination certificate from the public health center
(4) University graduation certificate
(5) Transcript from the same
(6) Certificate of resignation from the U.S. Army censorship bureau
(7) Certificate of work performance from the same
(8) Explanatory statement of the content of the same work
(9) Certificate of terms of employment from the same
Nine kinds of certificate, in all, to be submitted as quickly as possible.
The same old bureaucratism. Compare it with the merit system of the U.S. Army censorship bureau's selection examination, which cared nothing at all for past record, age or sex.
Have we still not woken up even after losing the war — I was thoroughly disgusted.

It goes without saying, but the occupation army was not a gathering of saints and sages. Among the known problems, there were the burden of the war termination costs, the misconduct of American soldiers, facilities being requisitioned by the U.S. military, and various other issues.

On requisitioning, however, an interesting testimony survives. Because "government authorities were unfamiliar with the state of the industry" and "operators were unfamiliar with the machinery of the authorities," communication went awry. There were also many types who sought "to exploit, or ride on the coattails of, the present situation." As a result, people who were requisitioned would sometimes think: "I resign myself to the fact that requisitioning is unavoidable. And toward the American servicemen who move in I cannot feel the slightest hostility. If anything I can talk with them amicably. But toward the people in charge of the renovation work and the builders, I really cannot bear my indignation." Here too we see the contrast between the inefficient government office and efficient GHQ.

This is strictly an interpretation within the range of what can be read from prefaces and afterwords, but the conclusion would be something like the following.

• The Occupation forces had their problems too.
• But at the very least, GHQ looked efficient and rational.
• And the changes they brought functioned as a vessel for all sorts of calculations and feelings.

Three factors of reconstruction readable in the prefaces and afterwords

I do not really understand why Japan was able to rebuild. I suspect the element of chance was fairly large, but what can be read from the prefaces and afterwords is the following three points.

• Democracy
• A nation built on science
• hopes for the children

Let us take them in order.

Democratic Japan

These days everybody says democracy, democracy. Men and women, politicians and merchants and farmers and students, all shout in chorus that from now on it has to be democracy.

*Democracy in Japan: How Democracy Developed in Japan* (Nihon ni okeru minshu shugi), Miyazawa Toshiyoshi, Insatsukyoku, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

With the defeat, people came to feel that democracy was the only way for us to go.

The war we were deceived into for so long came to a miserable end, and now, in the midst of the burnt-out fields, we are rising up, burning with hope, to build a reborn "Democratic Japan." Rising up burning with new hope.

*The Gold Watch* (Kindokei), Panteleev, L., 1908-1987, Makimoto Kusurō, 1898-1956, Futaba Shoten, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

As this too shows, many people made "self-serving assertions — 'we were deceived...', 'militarism this and that...'", put on "a face as though they had had nothing whatever to do with the war," and "pretended they had had no intention of making war at all."

(*A Warning to the Electorate: A Voting Guide for the First General Election under Democratic Politics* (Senkyonin e no keisho), Numinesha, Numinesha, 1946, 1946 https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/3857061/1/4)

*A Warning to the Electorate* sounds the alarm that even under democratic politics we will end up "danced about in the hands of militarists and nationalists" — but "we who were deceived" was one of the driving forces of reconstruction. If you make yourself a victim who was deceived, you can numb your guilt and your sense of collapse. By thinking "we are the victims of militarism, and therefore the new Japan will be built by us," one could become a spotless protagonist.

However, if we merely "conformed to the system," then the frenzy for democracy is also merely "conforming to the system." Thus "democracy" became a slogan, and the Bank of Japan ran an advertisement like this.

From each person's savings, the dawn of Democratic Japan breaks

*Democratic Politics and Women* (Minshu seiji to fujin), Kubushiro Ochimi, Nihon Jiyūtō Fujinbu Kari Jimusho, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Democracy was accepted at the popular level too, and there seem to have been people who tossed off half-joking lines like "let's do it democratically."

When the war ended, words like democracy and liberalism suddenly came into use. Everything is democracy. "That isn't democratic," "let's do it democratically" — every man and his dog has democracy in his mouth, and there is not a day when you fail to see the word two or three times in the newspapers and magazines that come out daily. And yet, as for whether the very people saying it understand what sort of doctrine democracy actually is, from the opportunist politicians at the top down to Hachi-san and Kuma-san at the bottom, they seem surprisingly not to understand.

*What Is Democracy?* (Minshu shugi to wa nani ka), Date Yusaku, Shinbunsha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

In postwar publications and film works one can find several patterns of democracy jokes: doing something self-serving while saying "it's democracy, after all," or, when permitting something slightly out of line with precedent, saying with a smile "we live in a democratic age." This was a joke that survived even into the 1975-1984 period, a good example of how thoroughly the word democracy had entered common speech.

Because democracy was popular, explanatory books were published one after another. For children, for parents, for farming villages, as radio courses — democracy was turned into teaching material aimed at every stratum. Some of the explanatory books held that democracy was not an import, but something connected on from prewar Japan.

Democracy is today's watchword. Like a seasonal flower opening, the cry of democracy is heard everywhere. Democracy had put out its shoots and formed its buds ever since the opening of the country in the Meiji era, but the buds that were about to open were all plucked away by the storm of militarism from the time of the Manchurian Incident. Yet as one would expect, its roots did not wither, and today it has come to bloom in full flower once again.

*What Is Democracy?: Liberalism or Socialism* (Demokurashii to wa nani ka), Nakamura Akira, Kin no Hoshi Sha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The constitutional scholar Suzuki Yasuzō dug up the Freedom and People's Rights Movement as "the first democratic movement in Japan" and published a book looking back at forgotten draft constitutions. (*The Constitution and People's Rights* (Kenpo to jiyu minken), Eibi Shobo, 1946 https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1281396/1/4). Less than a year after the defeat, the work of making democracy something that had existed in our own history was already under way.

The legal scholar Nakagawa Zennosuke, in "The Democratic Spirit in Elections," took the defiant line that spirit comes first and knowledge afterward.

In this sense, if I express it in the words spirit and knowledge, what I want to say comes down to "first spirit, then knowledge." Knowledge without spirit amounts to nothing. But even without knowledge, if there is spirit, it will amount to something.
"First be thoroughgoing in the spirit of casting your vote for what you yourself believe; after that, learn what you ought to believe!" — this is my concluding word as I end this final lecture.

*A Reader in Political Culture* (Seiji kyoyo dokuhon), Nakagawa Zennosuke, 1897-1975, Kahoku Shinpōsha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

This is a somewhat irresponsible, and rough and sloppy, line of reasoning. A radio course on democracy was wary of this sloppiness and warned about the Japanese temperament.

Whether it is the May Day movement or anything else, when Japanese imitate what such people do, they easily go bloodshot, raise their voices, and become half-mad.
When a people of such a different character imitates only the outward form of something like a May Day movement, terrible mistakes easily arise. If things go badly, it easily becomes the beginning of riot and civil disorder. (omitted) You must not do reckless things such as toppling a cabinet and then, weeks later, still having no next cabinet. That is what a mob does; it is not what honest people should do.

*Twelve Lectures on Democracy* (Minshu shugi juni ko), Amano Teiyū, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai, Nippon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Going bloodshot at once and becoming half-mad. That is what welcomed democracy with a frenzy, and it is what drove the country into war. There were people who noticed this in the midst of the frenzy and said so.

Date, of *What Is Democracy?*, concocted the argument that not understanding is not a problem.

"Ah, you needn't understand those fiddly arguments. Human beings are democrats by birth anyway. If a person just strips off the strange clothes forced on him from outside and returns to the stark-naked feeling he was born with, that is democracy."
Just so; that is exactly right. Since everybody, once he returns to the natural form he was born in, is a democrat, then if we simply do not bend or obscure that natural form, and act so as to give life to our natural demands, democracy will be thoroughly realized. It is not the least bit difficult. Understanding the argument by no means makes one a democrat. Those who argue are, if anything, wearing the superfluous garment called "argument" and are therefore less able to become true democrats; and Hachi-san and Kuma-san, who know no arguments or anything else and act as the mood takes them, taking things as they come, may perhaps be said to be the true democrats.

*What Is Democracy?*, Date Yusaku, Shinbunsha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

After this he goes on: that said, human beings are creatures that think... and warns that it will not do merely to put on the mask of democracy, that saying democracy because some eminent person says so is no good either, since that would be too obedient — a repetition of the old days when we were too obedient to the military clique and ended in defeat.

A house that has fallen can be raised again. A torn garment can be sewn again. But a soul once shattered cannot return to what it was so easily. Now, in the bright light of peace, burdened with a great many dark problems, we must seek the pillars that were blown away and cut new foundation stones, and set about the rebuilding of the soul.
Only, the people who had no soul to begin with are, with the end of the war, hunting down war collaborators outside themselves in the same loud voice with which they once glorified the war, and praising democracy with the same haste and the same zeal they once showed toward militarism. Such unawareness, drifting along with the times, is by no means the way to prevent a recurrence of the error. For such a surface transformation means in fact an identity of substance.

*The Recovery of Intelligence* (Chisei no kaifuku), Ōmuro Teiichirō, 1898-1977, Kenshinsha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

And there were some who were aware that this democracy was not something obtained by their own strength.

Now Japan stands at the dawn of liberation. Women too have been given the vote, and have even sent more than thirty representatives to the Diet. But this democracy is not something we won by our own strength. It was given from outside, as the result of the defeat of that accursed war which forced unbearable sacrifices on the great majority of the people.
But whether or not we make this "given freedom" truly our own depends entirely on our own efforts. That is where the importance of the democratic revolution now in progress lies. For if at this juncture we do not, with our own bodies, realize democracy thoroughly, we will once again be driven into the bonds of reaction and oppression.

*The Liberation and Freedom of Women* (Fujin no kaiho to jiyu), Yamauchi Fusakichi, Bun'ensha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

These voices were drowned out in the frenzy, but fiction or not, Japan became Democratic Japan.

The most symbolic thing is probably that the Constitution of Japan was accepted positively. According to a survey conducted by the Research Bureau of Jiji Press in August 1947, 59.7% answered yes to "Have you ever read or heard through the articles or an explanation of the new constitution?" In the *Mainichi Shimbun* of December 16, 1946, 35% called the constitutional revision a success and 57% called it broadly a success, so more than 90% of people accepted the new constitution positively.

In fact, the opinion polls themselves were intended as democracy.

It is said that "democratic politics is politics by public opinion." That public opinion should be respected in carrying out politics is nothing new.
(omitted)
In all ages and all countries, respecting public opinion seems to have been considered the most important thing to bear in mind in carrying out politics. All the more so today, when sovereignty has passed into the hands of the people under the new constitution, politics must be conducted thoroughly on the basis of public opinion.
(omitted)
Up to now the newspaper's chief mission has been to report the events of society — this happened, that happened — but today the mission of the newspaper in a democratic age has come to include, at the same time, accurately conveying what people are thinking, so-called public opinion, treated as important news.

*About Newspapers* (Shinbun no hanashi), Hokkoku Mainichi Shinbunsha, Hokkoku Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1948 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Under GHQ's order to "convey the voice of the people," NHK began broadcasting the radio program *Gaito Rokuon* (Street Recordings). To let people feel freedom of speech for themselves, the voices of ordinary citizens would be delivered to the living room. While stating explicitly that it used no statistical methods, the program conducted its own opinion surveys. A survey on what people thought of the new constitution, carried out from November 1946 to May 1947, produced the following results.

Think it goes too far 25%Think it is appropriate 50%Think it is not enough 15%No opinion 10%

These are quite interesting results: a quarter felt it "goes too far," and half called it "appropriate." As for the 15% who thought it was not enough, that means they wanted a new constitution still more radical and more democratic. Earlier I wrote that a brisk GHQ was accepted in comparison with the packhorse government. With the new constitution too, I suspect the sense of expectation — that democratization was coming and a new age with it — outweighed any sense of it being imposed.

Still, this is strange if you think about it. Japan's acceptance of equality and freedom was distorted. Equality was excessively equal, and freedom was simplified. There is no way democracy could be understood on that basis. But interestingly, Japanese society had a tendency to intensify through a certain kind of frenzy and excess, enough to cancel that out.

I will discuss these later, but on the foundation of this expectation and this intensification, it also looks as though people bet on a nation built on science and on children.

A nation built on science

Science is a precious common property of humanity, and it should by no means remain the exclusive possession of a small number of specialists. It is precisely out of an atmosphere in which all people love science and all people cooperate in the development of science that truly outstanding scientists are born, and it is only under such an atmosphere that the sound development of science can be expected.

*Science Classroom, vol. 1* (Kagaku kyoshitsu), Tokyo Imperial University Faculty of Science Staff Union, Tōyō Shokan, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

From around the middle of the Meiji era, smashing superstition became a boom. By 1897 the smashing of superstition was being shouted about. Superstition is, in the end, a lie. As a result of lies being disliked, fewer people were able to enjoy fiction, and the king of entertainment works was the kodan shorthand book, written up in the guise of telling a true story.

Meiji people also liked efficiency and rationalization. In 1904 there were people arguing that since machines would develop before long, teaching women sewing should be stopped.

To pour effort into sewing alone, as an absolute skill, as is done today, while abandoning and ignoring other duties — nursing methods, childcare methods, the things most necessary for a woman — is something I find hard to judge. This is being lost in an old dream, not yet properly awake, clinging to habit.

*The Meiji Household* (Meiji no katei), Watanabe Chikuin, Maekawa Bun'eikaku, 1904 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Sharp-edged Meiji people disliked clinging to habit. Why, in spite of that, the inefficiency of government offices was left alone is a mystery, but add rationalization to the smashing of superstition and you get science.

Science in daily life was often talked about. It was not anything grand — more on the order of measuring the water needed for a bath and eliminating waste. Underwear should be cotton; wool resists dirt and retains heat well; use naphthalene to keep out insects — with about this much scientific knowledge, life will get easier, Tanahashi Gentaro preached to housewives. (*Improving Daily Life* (Seikatsu no kaizen), by Tanahashi Gentaro, Kyoka Dantai Rengokai, p. 39, 1925 (https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/964130/1/17))

These currents continued through the war. Under "cultivating the scientific spirit" and "improving daily life," the smashing of superstition became a slogan.

At this juncture we must boldly break free of an irrational, unscientific way of living, and as one hundred million of one mind, the whole nation as one body, plan the rationalization of life for the sake of the country, cut out every waste, strive on the one hand to increase production, and on the other economize consumption so as to meet the state's demands.
What most obstructs the rebuilding of today's life is superstition, which comes from a poverty of scientific spirit.

*A Study of National Living Costs* (Kokumin seikatsuhi no kenkyu), Andō Masakichi, 1902-1948, Kōjimachi Sakai Shoten, 1944 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

In this way, from the middle of the Meiji era, many people had been running about trying to make scientific knowledge part of the body. This was a consistent movement. Yet, strangely, when the defeat came, a great many people began to say that this defeat had been caused by a lack of scientific thinking. Such talk is found all over the prefaces and afterwords. Reading matter for children held that because Japan's science had remained superficial, the country had rushed into war.

Japan's science up to now was thought to have made extraordinary progress on the outside, but in truth it was no more than decoration. It was also crude. That is why Japan's science had reached a dead end.
How could such science make our lives happy?! Because of mistaken science, deluded science, Japan in the end committed the irrecoverable blunder of war.

*The Life of Edison* (Ejison den), Kawabata Isao, 1905-1982, Chōbunkaku, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

What is the correct science they speak of? In the preface to *A Method for Repairing Radio Faults* (Rajio koshoshuriho), edited by the editorial department of Kagaku Kensetsusha, Kagaku Kensetsusha, 1946, the following passage appears.

To understand this radio, the thing most familiar to us as one application to daily life of the wireless technology at the leading edge of science, and to apply it most skillfully, it is first of all necessary to actually do everything oneself, by one's own power.

*A Method for Repairing Radio Faults*, Kagaku Kensetsusha, Kagaku Kensetsusha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Not understanding in one's head, but thinking for oneself and moving one's hands. Read quickly it looks like nothing much, but "it is necessary to actually do everything oneself, by one's own power" is an atmosphere that had been drifting about since the middle of the Meiji era, and *Our Practical Science* (Watashitachi no jissen kagaku), Tomizuka Kiyoshi, 1893-1988, Shakai Kyōiku Kyōkai, 1950 (https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1169454), by Tomizuka, introduced earlier, also contains this.

Please check it once, and again. Please verify it yourself. Until you are satisfied.
If you lack that and can only rely on theories others have dug out — as most people have up to now — then you have no choice but to swallow things whole, with no distinction between lies and truth. And so you are easily saddled with mistakes and made a fool of, and because the essential and the trivial do not come into focus, you easily apply things in wildly wrong ways. If you have acquired the ability to dig things out on your own, then by contrast you can sniff out that "something is fishy here," and you understand how to temper an application, so you are spared great waste.

In 1948 Tomizuka Kiyoshi was purged from public office, but perhaps anticipating it, he had shifted the focus of his activity early on to writing science books for general readers. Tomizuka himself, however, explained his reason for writing children's books as follows.

"I intend to quit the unrewarding, boring work of being a university professor — it's like fiddling with the twigs and leaves of a tree, not work that deals with the roots — and devote myself to writing fairy tales like this. I'll keep putting these out one after another, so, everyone, let me join your company. Please be good to me."

His enthusiasm was genuine, and he "did the illustrations, and the cover of the book too, all by himself, while he was at it." This also had the meaning of Tomizuka showing children an example.

What you think is good, what you think must be done — even if you're laughed at a little, isn't it fine to go ahead and do it? My hair may be white, but my heart hasn't aged — I may even be younger than you lot — so I'll go right ahead. It's not been half a month since I took up illustration, so of course it's poor. But watch: I'll get good at it soon enough. Every single day, on the train, anywhere at all, I'm sketching. Let's have a contest, you and I, over who improves faster.

*Uncle's Adventures* (Ojisan no boken), Tomizuka Kiyoshi, Shinrosha, 1948 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Excessive if you like, but this is the flip side of expectations placed on children, and not only Tomizuka but many authors spoke in prefaces and afterwords of their expectations for children.

hopes for the children

With the country defeated, the ones most to be pitied are the children. But the ones who give the most hope are also the children. A guilty feeling that says "I'm sorry," and a reliance that says "I'm counting on you," well up together in the heart, so that one both watches them steadily and wants to pick them up in one's arms.

*The Heart of Nurturing* (Sodate no kokoro), Kurahashi Sozo, 1882-1955, Shimizu Shobō, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

This too is a kind of happy-go-lucky attitude, but there were a great many adults who said to children: we failed, so we're leaving the future to you.

As the trees on the mountain grow bigger day by day, so must you grow steadily too.
As the trees on the mountain fulfill an important duty, so must you carry through your own duty.
As the trees on the mountain protect the country, so must you join your strength together and defend our Japan to the end.
This is what I earnestly wish to ask of you all.

*The Trees of Japan* (Nihon no ki), Ozu Shigerō, Dai Nippon Yūbenkai Kōdansha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Why did expectation turn toward children? For one thing, there was the reality that adults were already hopeless.

The ones we can place the most hope in, in postwar Japan, must be the children. Those at middle school and above will, whatever we do, have the smell of the education up to now soaked into them; but since it has not yet sunk deep into the pupils of the national elementary schools, I think that true education can be made out of these small people. And I think that only when these people have grown up will a truly rebuilt Japan be seen. To guide these small people skillfully in the right direction — that must be the great responsibility of those of us whose work involves children.

*The Fishes' Sports Day* (Osakana no undokai), Hatano Isoko, Kokumin Tosho Kankokai Co., 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

For another, the center of the war's sacrifice had been the young. So the will arose that we must protect the children.

Through four years of war, it was the young men who fought most earnestly. And it was also from our youth that the war produced the greatest number of victims.
The chief causes of the loss of young lives during the war were combat and tuberculosis. The war dead for the whole period of the war were announced as about 500,000 and the air-raid dead as about 260,000, but over exactly the same period an enormous number of young people, no fewer than these, died of tuberculosis.
Now that the war is over and peace has come, we may consider that if only tuberculosis is prevented, the health of Japan's young people is more or less guaranteed. It is in truth the young who will overcome the hardships after the defeat and rebuild a new Japan. Feeling the responsibility for the defeat, out of hot tears of bitter regret, I vow to protect these precious young people.

*Youth and Tuberculosis* (Seinen to kekkaku), Kondō Kōji, 1910-1990, Iwanami Shoten, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

As an expression of this expectation, the one I found most symbolic is the afterword to this fairy tale.

So all of you, please become strong children who do not complain.
And along with that, please be kind to people.
If you do, then before long kindness will overflow and fill all Japan.
Let us make the new Japan a Japan where people are kind to one another.
Let us make it a Japan with not the least complaint.
Who is going to do it?
It is all of you.
The children of the days to come.

*Just One Thing: A Fairy Tale* (Tatta hitotsu), Mizutani Masaru, 1894-1950, Kyōyōsha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

Making "a Japan with no complaint" takes time. "The one who is going to do it" is not me. "The children of the days to come" will do it — which is about as happy-go-lucky and irresponsible as it gets. How much help such encouragement from adults was is unclear, but among "the children of the days to come" there did emerge great people who tried to do it and left behind results above a certain level.

Of course adults were not only happy-go-lucky and irresponsible. They hurried to build an environment for children.

These intentions already existed during the war. There were adults who kept worrying about the decline in children's academic ability, because study time had shrunk under the student labor mobilization. In March 1945, in *The Properties of Electric Current* (Denryu no seishitsu), Asano Toru lamented that "to master physics comfortably with a tired head is truly no easy thing. And yet the present state of Japan is that we must dare to do it," and, considerate of his students, wrote: "I have added exercises to each chapter. Solving them with a tired head may be troublesome, but I think it would be well to test your strength after taking ample rest, on a holiday or the like."

This feeling is, most likely, genuine. The war ended, and the student mobilization ended with it. Adults tried to do something about the decline in academic ability. In an age when printing conditions made it impossible to set copy for complex figures, a great many handwritten reference books were published. There was a feeling that they had to be delivered as soon as possible.

However, the people who rushed such books into print had, broadly speaking, two sorts of motives. One was simply that they wanted children to study.

Postwar Japan will have to make agriculture, industry, everything, far more scientific. But because of labor mobilization and the commotion of air raids, students have hardly studied at all. The scientific cultivation of students is far inferior to what it was before the war.
Can this be allowed?
With food shortages, housing shortages and transport shortages, school lessons cannot be received satisfactorily either.
But whatever happens, I want students to study. For the sake of Japan's future, I especially want them to study science.

*An Introduction to Differential and Integral Calculus* (Bibun sekibungaku nyumon), by Sakairi Toshio, Tōkai Shobō, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

During the war, for various reasons, I imagine you middle school students were unable to study properly. Now, in mathematics the early part, which is its foundation, is what matters; just as branches and leaves cannot grow thick if the roots are not firm, so if you leave the early parts of mathematics half done, there is no way you can understand the difficult parts further on. So you middle school students, in order to make up for the decline in ability during the war — and since it will be the foundation of your studies from here on — must make a great effort at self-study. For that, a book that can be understood well even reading it alone must be necessary.
This book was written as a self-study text for lower-grade middle school students. I meant to make a mathematics book that would not stiffen your shoulders, but it did not turn out quite as I hoped. Still, I would be glad if this book proves even a little help to your study. Japan from now on must make agriculture, industry — no, even daily life — scientifically rational and efficient. As a first step in studying science, please study numbers properly first. For Japan's future, let us at least fatten up our heads.

April 6, 1946, the author>*An Introduction to Algebra* (Daisu nyumon), by Sakairi Toshio, Kasumigaseki Shobō, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The other was simply that it was profitable.

After the defeat, "with students' own awakened love of learning, with demobilized students and students repatriated from overseas entering school, the competition ratio for admission rose sharply." This was because "the entrance examinations for higher schools, which had been subdued during the war, this year abruptly threw off their lukewarm subdued quality and became fierce competitive examinations." These were the sort who wanted to get into the soon-to-overheat examination industry ahead of everyone else.

*Collected Entrance Examination Questions for All Higher Schools, Technical Colleges and University Preparatory Departments: Japanese and Chinese Classics volume, 1946* (Zenkoku koto gakko, senmon gakko, daigaku yoka nyugaku shiken mondaishu), [written by Gakushūkan], Gakushūkan, 1946 (https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/13339786/1/3)

Boys and girls of peaceful Japan!! Please look squarely at the true state of Japan today. Postwar Japan must, as a peace-loving people, contribute to world peace and at the same time strive to build a scientific Japan. The start of cultivating this scientific spirit is children's arithmetic. Do not forget this strength!! and this heat!! with which my beloved children have studied in deadly earnest. In the world of the idler, where the white light of earnest life does not burn, neither the worth nor the brilliance of a human life worth living can be discovered.
My wish is that you, as boys and girls of peaceful Japan, begin from this very moment a fine and earnest advance in the pursuit of truth.
This now!! This boyhood and girlhood!! will never come back before your life again.
Never forget this now!! that departs forever!!

*Correct Solutions in the New Arithmetic* (Shin sanjutsu seikai), preface by Ogura Kinnosuke, by Yamashita Kanehide, Kōbun Shoin, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

It gives "the building of a scientific Japan" as its stated aim, but at the end of the book it frankly writes that the purpose of the book is to have readers "rejoice from the bottom of their hearts — a pass! I'm through!"

As an unusual intention, there were people who meant to make scholarship into something substantial.

In Japanese universities the divisions between faculties and departments are far too distinct, and it is practically impossible to enroll in and study two departments or faculties at the same time. Because of this, scholarship that belongs in between two departments is not adequately taught, and consequently I think there is a danger that progress in such fields will fall behind. Biochemistry is one such case. Those who graduate from a university chemistry department feel various inconveniences in biochemical research because of a lack of biological cultivation, and those who graduate from zoology or botany departments because of a lack of chemical cultivation. Moreover, at the higher schools and the like where such people teach, the present state of things must be that biochemistry is not correctly taught. Not only that: among books bearing the titles "Biological Chemistry" or "Biochemistry" there are not a few that treat the organic chemistry of the constituents of living bodies, or that are chemistry textbooks serving as preliminary knowledge for the study of medicine. So I resolved to try to write, as plainly as possible, what biochemistry has to be. This small volume is the first appearance of that plan.
In closing I add that I owe much to the advice of Yagi Yasuo, Bachelor of Science, who is constantly engaged in research together with me, and of Murakami Edahiko and Sato Satoru, Bachelors of Science, and I express my thanks.
January 1946, in Nagoya, Egami Fujio

*The Chemistry of the Living Body* (Seitai no kagaku), by Egami Fujio, Dai Nippon Shuppan, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

It is the preface to a textbook, but it amounts to a critique of the university system.

Because the divisions of faculty and department are rigid, education in the intermediate fields does not come about. Those who take degrees eventually go on to teach at higher schools, so it is not transmitted to the next generation either. "One" such field is biochemistry. There are books titled "Biological Chemistry" or "Biochemistry," but their contents are the organic chemistry of the constituents of living bodies, or chemistry for those going on to medicine. The name exists, but there is no substance. This book is written not to show "what biochemistry is" but "what it has to be." "This small volume," written "as plainly as possible," is "the first appearance of the plan" to get people to understand "what it has to be." The fact that he expresses thanks to the collaborators "constantly engaged in research together with me" also conveys a refusal to behave as an authority. Egami later became one of the people who led biochemistry.

So there were all sorts of intentions. Even so, it is surely certain that there was a feeling that the environment for children and young people to learn in had to be put in order as fast as possible.

Wanting to protect children and raise them well is instinctive, and such a movement may be only natural. But the defeat was an abnormal situation. The adults, in a frenzy over democracy and a nation built on science, had decided that this was how they would rebuild. Naturally they tried to convey those two things to children as well. The way they spoke was at times franker than the way they spoke to adults.

*A New History of Japan* is the typical example.

Foreword
The people who have governed the country of Japan up to now expounded Japanese history in whatever way was convenient for keeping the people down, and made the people believe it.
During the war in particular, they taught that only the Japanese were descendants of the gods, a race superior to all others in the world, and that for Japan to rule the whole world accorded with the will of the ancestral gods — and thus made the people wage war. I think this way of thinking is wrong whether Japan wins or loses the war.
There are many peoples in the world, and every people has its superior points and its inferior points. It is exactly like the way every human being, whoever he is, has his strong points. If the structure of the society that a people has built is bad, bad people take power and lead the whole toward the bad. And then the whole becomes hated by the world.
If the structure of society is good, culture flourishes and it can also serve the progress of the world. In every country of the world there are many people continuing a hard struggle to make society better. We must first join hands and exert our strength so that Japan becomes a country that does not commit the errors it has committed until now. And then, binding ourselves firmly together with other people of good will, we should like to strive to rid human society of war, of poverty, of the bullying of the weak, and of barbarism, and to build a peaceful world.
To make Japan better we must know Japan's true history. And I think it is more important than anything to trace the causes that led Japan to today's outcome, and to strive to remove them.

Afterword
By order of the Allied Powers, every part of the old structure that would get in the way of becoming a new, peaceful, democratic country is being reformed. The military, which thought the lives of the people worth next to nothing and used all its energy for war and more war, and the zaibatsu, which thought nothing of the poverty of the many and backed that aggression for their own profit, have completely lost their form by order of the Allied Powers.
And the Emperor of the watchword "for the sake of the Emperor," which this military and these zaibatsu used to carry out aggression and to throw the people into places of death, has himself declared that he is a human being and has come down among the people. He is not some thing called a manifest deity (akitsukami), which nobody could make out as a human being or not. You know that a new constitution has been made and it has been made clear that the sovereignty of the state rests with the people.
But however democratic the form becomes, it will not do if the contents do not match. It is we who must make the contents match. It was the same at the Meiji Restoration: people who have sucked the sweet juices under the old structure will try somehow to smash the new. We must confront such people in earnest and strive so that we never again fall into such a wretched state.

*A New History of Japan* (Atarashii Nihonshi), Nihonshi Kenkyukai (1945), Nihon Kagakusha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

There were plenty of arguments that we lost the war because we lacked scientific thinking, but here he states flatly that it "is wrong whether Japan wins or loses the war." There is no superiority or inferiority among peoples. If the structure of society is bad, bad people take power and lead the whole toward the bad — so what must be fixed is not the heart but the structure; that too is clear. Since there are people who try to build such a structure, we must know Japan's true history and trace the causes of the defeat so that it does not happen — he speaks frankly to children. Citing the Meiji Restoration and saying that those who sucked the sweet juices under the old structure will try to smash the new is a light prediction of the future, and unfortunately it turned out exactly so.

I feel this piece of writing is a fine thing. The writer himself, at the moment he wrote it, must really have thought so. But as this person grew older, he came to profit within the structure, and became a person who tries to smash the new. Human beings change.

Connected, and yet

The mood of a democratic Japan and a nation built on science that I have been tracing here was not something suddenly born out of the defeat. It was firmly connected to what came before the war.

Prewar Japan had these three things:

• The smashing of superstition and the pursuit of rationality
• Egalitarianism
• Pointless enthusiasm, excessive reaction

I want to look at how these three work together, using an example a little removed from the defeat.

In prewar Japan, from the Meiji era through the war years of Showa, getting up early became a boom several times over. In an age when longer working hours meant higher productivity, rising early and getting to work was a good method. Early rising also contributed to something else modernization required: spreading the habit of acting according to the clock.

How did the three points above operate in this phenomenon?

Through "pointless enthusiasm," people appeared who blew bugles at three in the morning and woke up the entire neighborhood. It escalated, and by 1918 there was a young man who blared his bugle at three in the morning and infuriated the villagers. (*Early Rising* (Hayaoki), Yamamoto Takinosuke, 1873-1931, Rakuyodo, 1918 (https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/933030/1/139))

Worse, the venerable Ishikawa Rikinosuke, known as a legend of early rising, got up at one in the morning. He also did work along the lines of contracting to rebuild villages, and at the offices of the villages that hired him he would bang on a board at one in the morning to rouse the staff, and wake the students at three. The logic that "old Ishikawa is up at one, so getting up at three is nothing" simply passed unchallenged. (*Early Rising*)

And because of "egalitarianism," the important people got up too. All sorts of people were waking their neighbors with conch shells and bugles, until finally a village "pursued rationality" and installed a siren.

Rising at dawn by siren: at five in winter, four in summer, and three at rice-planting time, when the village office siren sounds, every last villager rises, gathers in front of the village headman's house, and divides up the work to go out on the joint pest-extermination detail.
*Behold This Cooperation: Examples of the Network of Excellent Practice*, Headquarters of the National Spiritual Mobilization, 1940, p34［URL補完待ち］

To modern eyes this may look like conformity pressure, but if anything the siren was the democratization of the alarm clock. In a village with few events, it was only natural that everyone got excited when a siren went up. Enthusiasm of the sort "I hear the guys in the next village are getting up at five — then we'll make it four!" arises perfectly normally. If a mysterious machine that anyone could use to teleport were installed in the neighborhood, most people would move around like mad; it is the same principle of behavior.

I want to introduce one more case, one I myself am not confident is even true. In the Meiji era there was something like a tacit understanding that the frail, coddled children of the peerage could not endure ordinary school life, and so went on to the Gakushuin. Exploiting this, there existed an exam-beating strategy: if a commoner's child deliberately went to the Gakushuin instead of a normal middle school, the level around him would be low, and he could get into the Imperial University without much effort. In fact, Meiji-era guides to further schooling say outright that if you enter the Gakushuin you can make it to the Imperial University with room to spare (*Revised Guide to Schooling at Public and Private Schools of All Kinds* (Kankoshiritsu shogakko kaitei shugaku annai), Uemura Sadako, Hakubunkan, 1904, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/812652/1/22).

It is true that when a vacancy opened up, commoners could enter the Gakushuin. The route from Gakushuin to the Imperial University also existed. Setting aside whether any child actually did this, it was a theoretically feasible method, and at the very least, in other countries of the same period there was no environment in which some child of no discernible origin could slip into a school attended by the sons of the aristocracy. But Japan was "egalitarian," so there was nothing strange about a commoner's child entering the Gakushuin. Overwhelming equality, one might call it. Hacking the system to get into the Imperial University is "rational," and it is only natural that the "pointless enthusiasm" of the fever for getting ahead would produce children who did outrageous things by any means available — these elements backed up that overwhelming equality, and as a result, movement between social strata occurred.

Freedom is not understood

Japan had an excess of equality, but freedom was not much understood. As a result, some people concluded that since this was democracy and there was freedom, they could do whatever they liked.

One sees the spread of a bad custom in which the words "free" and "democratic" are misunderstood or willfully distorted into meaning indiscipline and license, and each person behaves selfishly without a second thought.

*Advocating Self-Government to Save the Nation* (Kyukoku jichi no teisho), Tsukui Tatsuo, Gendōsha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

I touched lightly on the fact that democracy was also treated as a gag, and a 1949 textbook takes up the problem of middle school students running wild with democracy as their shield.

There are people who say nothing but selfish things — democracy, democracy — and never consider anyone else's position. However much you call it democracy, there is an order of elder and younger, and there are distinctions in the duties of one's post. If we forget courtesy as human beings and snarl at each other, it becomes no different at all from animals fighting.

*New-System Secondary Japanese, for First Year (2)* (Shinsei chuto kokugo), by Oki Nobuo, Shinkō Shuppansha, 1949 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The understanding and handling of freedom was this crude.

Fukuzawa Yukichi, in *An Encouragement of Learning*, holds that the difference between freedom and selfishness lies in whether one causes trouble to others. Drinking heavily and living dissolutely on your own money may feel like it causes no direct trouble to anyone. But a child who sees that behavior may come to admire heavy drinking and dissolution. And if those children grow up and start drinking heavily and living dissolutely, national strength weakens. That is the boundary between freedom and selfishness. Learning is necessary in order to judge this correctly. If the people pursue learning, compete freely, and gain independent, self-sustaining lives, then Japan too can become an independent, self-sustaining, respectable nation... that is the argument, but it is a bit too complicated.

Equality can be simply summed up as "everyone is the same." But freedom is harder to simplify than equality, and there were many strata the concept of freedom never reached. In the tally of frequent words, "freedom" appearing 127 times while "equality" appeared a mere 4 times shows this distortion well. Freedom, which had been kept under guard, was unbanned and talked about vigorously; equality, which had been prized all along, had become something not worth mentioning at this late date.

The three prewar elements went on existing after the defeat, in changed form. "Pointless enthusiasm" turned toward the acceptance of democracy, and everyone had democracy on their lips. "Egalitarianism" changed shape into the phrase "each and every citizen," which I will discuss next. "The smashing of superstition and the pursuit of rationality" was connected to the nation built on science, and much the same things were said about making daily life scientific and rational as had been said during the war.

Here we come back, a little, to the question at the start. The Japanese immediately after the defeat had not reflected on colonial rule. But a different sort of reflection does exist. The reflection that they had been deceived because they lacked a scientific spirit, and that they lost because they had been deceived. That reflection about being deceived joined up with the atmosphere of pursuing rationality that had continued since Meiji, and became an attitude of "checking for yourself," of "actually doing everything by your own power."

Daily life, science, and entrance exams

What is a scientific life, what did adults try to teach children, how did the people doing the teaching see the mistaken science education of the prewar years, and how did they think it should be improved? Reading this out of the prefaces gives the following.

The historian of science Sugai Junichi criticized short-sighted practicalism and spoke of a science education fit for a new age.

• "Short-sighted" practicalism will never produce genuine science education
• Touching in detail on the depth of a problem and its crucial points, and arriving at a thorough understanding, is the science education fit for a new age
• The positive attitude of tackling a thing yourself without looking at the explanation is precisely the "scientific" attitude

(*The Science of Weight* (Omosa no kagaku), Sugai Junichi, 1903-1982, Shimizu Shobō, 1946 (https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1138922/1/6))

The physicist Nakamura Seiji held that the prewar view of education had been terribly mistaken.

• In physics, they tried to give middle school students the "discipline" meant for training specialists
• High school students were treated as a memorization subject for the sake of advancing to the next school
• Training in observing and judging things scientifically was neglected

Science education, he says, is something that "should proceed with the aim of raising the level of the common sense of the general public," and to that end it should provide "training in observing and judging things scientifically" and "a help toward forming the habit of physically observing and thinking about the matters each person sees and hears close at hand in daily life." That was the ideal.

*Physics of Experience* was originally titled *Physics of One's Surroundings*; he began writing it in October 1943 and finished it in a little under a year, but it burned in the air raids in August 1945, and between evacuation and illness he could not write, so that the book took from May 1947 to the end of August 1950 to complete. He wrote this book because he wanted people to form the habit of experiencing and savoring physics through everyday events. (*Physics of Experience* (Taiken no butsuri), vol. 1, Nakamura Seiji, Kawade Shobō, 1951, https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1369769/1/6)

There were many books written along these lines. On the other hand, the exam war continued from before the war. Reference books for exam preparation were also printed in huge quantities.

Students of the whole nation, burning fiercely with the spirit of rebuilding the homeland!! What must we, who have experienced defeat as a reality, now rise up and do? It goes without saying: we must make our Japan into a nation of everlasting peace, create a high culture, and contribute to all humanity throughout the world. (...) At the same time, in view of the entrance examinations for higher schools, which have lately grown extremely fierce and seem to place particular weight on the physical sciences, we have appended, so far as possible, problems likely to be set in the future together with their solutions, thereby contributing to the building of your real ability and doing everything to safeguard, in due course, the laurels of breaking through the entrance exam.

*A Study of the Physical Sciences for the Laurel Crown* (Eikan bussho no kenkyu), Gakushūkan, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

It must mean there were children who accepted the defeat quickly and aimed at a new course. But this also meant emphasizing "problems likely to be set in the future" and treating science as a "memorization subject."

The goal carried over from before the war, the unification of daily life and science, was connected through. But there was no education for learning a science rooted in daily life. Nor was there the leeway to build one.

Meanwhile, the entrance exam system did exist. So the exams were made more advanced.

This failure was visible to the people involved too. Tomizuka Kiyoshi, who never stopped preaching the spirit of reasoning things through, wrote, in a book of handicrafts for children, a conversation between Takeo, who wants to skip further schooling and work in a factory, his mother, who opposes it, and his father, who takes his side.

"Up to now, credentials have been what counted. Japan was terribly formalistic, wasn't it. But from now on, even Japan will gradually become a place where real ability counts. You can't go on forever without feeling the wind from abroad, wearing the ceremonial dress of feudalism."
"Even you, Father, saying such things and taking Takeo's side?"
"No, I'm not taking his side on purpose. It's the reason of the thing. I think it might be interesting to let Takeo do as he likes. Why? Because I know too much about the inside of education. Six-three-three system, colleges, whatever they call it — for now the contents are the same old lip-service education. As long as the likes of us haven't died out, this isn't going to be reformed. And that being so, even if you slave away and get through university, it won't amount to much."

*My Handicrafts: Devices That Move* (Boku no kosaku: ugokasu kufu), Tomizuka Kiyoshi, 1893-1988, Sa-e-ra Shobo, 1948 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The school system had changed, but "the contents are the same old lip-service education" — so wrote a man who knew the inside story of education, in a children's book. What Tomizuka put into his books for children was aimed at this:

What I aimed at was one thing only: to breathe in "the feeling of reasoning things through, thinking them over well, actually investigating and verifying, and then doing them" (the spirit of reason and evidence). There's no lie and nothing hidden. That's the whole trick.

*Uncle's Adventures* (Ojisan no boken), Tomizuka Kiyoshi, Shinrosha, 1948 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

There must have been children who read the books of Tomizuka and others and acquired the spirit of reason and evidence. There must also have been many people who connected learning directly to living and contributed to reconstruction. But those things happened to individuals; they did not become a system. This story connects straight to each and every citizen.

Each and every citizen

There are set phrases like "each and every citizen thinks for himself" or "thinking of it as one's own problem."

I have never seen "each and every citizen" in Meiji-era documents. It probably began to be used during the war, in the sense of "let us raise the physical strength of each and every citizen, save money, build up national strength, and win the war." After the defeat, out of reflection on the wartime years in which self-sacrificing service had been encouraged, each and every citizen was required to act only after thinking. Concretely, it was used the way the following preface uses it.

Everyone! To realize democracy in Japan, what matters is that each and every Japanese, regardless of wealth or age, first become an honest, diligent, kind, well-mannered, respectable human being. And it is necessary that each Japanese be trained as a good individual who holds ideals, cherishes hopes, and takes responsibility seriously.
This is, so to speak, the awareness of democracy. And where this awareness always advances from individual awareness to social awareness, and develops further into national awareness, there exists the shining human civilization of democracy.

*Studying Democracy* (Demokurashii no benkyo), Nakano Gorō, 1906-1972, Meguro Shoten, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The sense is that democracy can be realized by individuals becoming upright. The constitution, too, was to be made flesh and blood by each and every person, in order to make Japan respectable.

It would be no exaggeration to say that at present there is no constitution in the world as fine as this one.
Yet however fine a constitution is made, a country will not improve by the constitution alone.
If a country became good merely by relying on a good constitution, no country anywhere would have any trouble.
Only when each and every citizen makes this fine constitution his own blood and flesh, so that the spirit of the new law flows into every corner of daily life, will a fine Japan be born for the first time.

*Lectures on the New Constitution* (Shinkenpo no kogi), Onishi Hachiro, Institute for Research on Civic Education, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

If each and every citizen thinks and acts, things will work out somehow... a thoroughly optimistic and bright idea. *The Story of the New Constitution* (Atarashii kenpo no hanashi), edited by the Ministry of Education, Jitsugyō Kyōkasho, 1947, is the Ministry of Education's commentary on the constitution, and it is unbelievably bright and brimming with rightness.

As long as we are human beings, we are all the same. There cannot be, above human beings, some more exalted human being, nor, below human beings, some baser human being. Nor is it the case that men are superior to women, or women inferior to men. If we are all the same human beings, then there is no reason to be discriminated against in living in this world. The absence of discrimination is called "equality." And so the constitution, together with freedom, lays down this equality.

And then "each and every citizen thinks for himself" is emphasized.

Each of you is one of the Japanese people. Unless each and every one of the people becomes wise and becomes strong, the people as a whole cannot be wise or strong. The source of the country's strength lies in each and every one of the people. And so the country clearly recognizes the strength of each and every one of these people, and firmly protects it.

The following sentence is bright enough to be dazzling.

Everyone, the new constitution is a constitution made by the Japanese people, a constitution of the Japanese people. From here on, let us keep this constitution and make the country of Japan prosper.

It is a bit too idealistic, and it also reflects the political situation of the time, but there is no doubt that it is a fine piece of writing of a kind. I cannot help feeling it is writing that could only be produced because the atmosphere of the age pushed it along.

Let me also include a passage from *Democracy* (Minshushugi), edited by the Ministry of Education, Kyoiku Tosho, 1948. Here the attitudes of Japanese people in the past are criticized.

Some may answer that it is obvious a person should respect himself. But in Japan up to now, how many people have debased themselves and been content to live in submission to power? Unable even to assert what they believed to be right, saying "when unreason prevails, reason withdraws" and "wrap yourself around whatever is long," how long have they gone on swallowing their tears? That is less a failure to respect oneself than an attitude of making a slave of oneself without any hesitation.

And, as in *The Story of the New Constitution*, the importance of each and every person thinking for himself is spoken of.

There is no guarantee that people will not appear who, changing their methods and changing their goods, try somehow to make their own ambitions real. What should be done to break such ambitions? There is one method to break them. It is for all the people to become politically wise. It is to become able, rather than being told by others and moving as told, to discern by one's own judgment what is right and what is not. Democracy is "government for the people," but if you cannot judge for yourself what "government for the people" is, you cannot be called a citizen of a democratic nation. Each and every citizen thinks for himself and decides matters by their own will.

Considering the present state of things it feels odd that the state was asserting this sort of thing, but at any rate there was an age when it was believed, to the point of light-headedness, that individuals could learn and judge correctly.

What deserves attention is that these are statements worked out by contrast with the past. Because they had "lived in submission to power," that tragedy occurred. Therefore "each and every citizen must think for himself and decide matters by their own will." And for that, "first of all it is necessary to actually do everything by your own power," and "if you have acquired the ability to search things out on your own, then conversely you can also sniff out that 'something's fishy here,' and you understand how to adjust when applying it, so you are spared great waste." That is the logic.

However, each and every citizen has a great weakness. "The repentance of the hundred million," which became a kind of buzzword, is also each and every person reflecting.

During the war, each and every one of the people, every last one, painted for themselves a vision of expanded territory, the development of the Yamato race, and abundant resources, and not only cooperated with the leaders in selfless absorption in a mistaken ideology, but the number who took the lead by example and acted positively of their own accord can by no means be called small.

*An Alarm Bell to the Electorate: A Guide to Voting in the First General Election Toward Democratic Politics* (Senkyonin e no keisho), Numinesha, Numinesha, 1946 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

The structure in which criticism, rather than heading for the cause itself, is dispersed toward the whole people, comes out clearly here. And no mechanism was built to tally and scrutinize what "each and every person thought." Reflection stayed dispersed, existing individually, and democracy remained at a vague understanding. These did not become systems. The same thing happened here as with making daily life scientific.

There is one similar case involving "each and every." It is one-person-one-research.

Proposed by Yamashita Nobuyoshi in the early Showa years, the idea was to advance civilization by having each human being hold one research topic. After the defeat, Yamashita wrote the following.

In light of one's innate individuality, and working it out from one's circumstances and situation, one selects some single path, the thing that is one's own, and pours all one's energy into it. This is called one-person-one-research.
The old age too had its excellent one-person-one-research. But most of it was one-person-one-research done merely for oneself. So it became a secret art, an oral transmission, a thing handed down to a single heir, and was of no use to the world. One-person-one-research in the new age is, from the start, one-person-one-share for the sake of the homeland and for the sake of one's native region.

*Building a New Japan and Building a New Native Region* (Shin Nihon kensetsu to shin kyodo kensetsu), [Yamashita Nobuyoshi], Ehara-sensei Memorial Movement Committee, 1948 National Diet Library Digital Collections ↗

There were principals who forced the submission of research results and so on, and it seems it sometimes drifted into formalism, but in the field of agriculture this movement contributed to raising production and spreading new techniques. I was also able to confirm the existence of local-history studies produced as one-person-one-research projects. Unfortunately I could not find a book that served as the culmination of one-person-one-research, but it certainly contributed to the development of regional culture. Here too, however, no mechanism for acquiring research methods was built, and it converged into free research projects. As rates of going on to higher schooling rose, there appeared high school students who "regard free research as a burden for entrance exams."

There is a piece of writing I remembered while writing this. Nakae Chomin's “There Is No Philosophy in Japan”. Let me summarize the parts that seem relevant, at the end.

We are quick to grasp the reason of things, we ride the currents of the age and shift along with them skillfully, and we have nothing stubborn in us. That is why the Meiji Restoration was accomplished with almost no blood shed, and why the three hundred lords vied with one another to hand over their domains and their political power. We discarded old customs lightly, and hesitated not at all in reforming things along Western lines. This too we could do because we had a flexibility that follows reason and does not fear change.

Turn these merits over, and they become a flighty shallowness. They become the weakness of a feeble will that cannot carry things through. They become the cause of our being unable to produce a philosophy of our own, of politics without principle, of party struggles without continuity. Here too lies the reason we stop at small cleverness and small dexterity and cannot establish any great work. It is precisely because we are rich in common sense that we cannot transcend common sense.

Chomin wrote this in 1901. And in 1945 the same thing happened as in the Meiji Restoration. Because there is no philosophy of one's own, one can write "there is no constitution in the world as fine as this one." Because principles have no continuity, one can rejoice that from today it is the age of English. Because one cannot transcend common sense, one prints books in the burned-out ruins. The things Chomin listed as defects were, just as they stood, the conditions for reconstruction. This is going to start sounding preachy, so I will refrain from turning it over.

And still the books came out

It is sometimes said that prewar and postwar are severed, that things started over from zero, but that is a bit of a stretch. Prewar and postwar are strongly connected. Even "the repentance of the hundred million" was a connection carried over from the war years.

Originally I began reading prefaces and afterwords in order to look for reflection. The form of reflection I was looking for — reflection on the harm done by colonial rule and wars of aggression — I did not find. What I found instead was a strange brightness standing on top of grief and fear, the new signboards of democracy and science, expectations placed on children, and an inward-facing reflection on "ourselves, who were deceived." Reconstruction began not from reflection but from expectation.

This is an obvious conclusion, and as I wrote at the beginning, with manuscripts, stereotype plates, and printing houses all burned, people put out books. There was someone who wrote up a pamphlet from memory, and someone who protected an entrusted manuscript to the end. There was someone who finished writing a story for the sake of a child clutching a fairy-tale book with a scorched cover. Whatever they were thinking, the act of writing, printing, and sending it out into the world is common to them all. A person in a state of collapse cannot put out printed matter. The publications of this period are themselves proof of survival and of expectation.

What I thought, having read a huge quantity of material, was something simple: that a great many people were alive. This is an impression born of passing a biased body of material through the filter of my own subjectivity. So on this site I have left not only my interpretation but also the data and a route to the original texts. If you feel like it, I would like you to read the originals. You may think something different from what I thought, or you may not.