Читать книгу Japan's Total Empire - Louise Young - Страница 16

3 War Fever

Imperial Jingoism and the Mass Media

After the story broke of the military clash at Fengtian on September 18, 1931, the news of the latest action on the China continent commanded the headlines for months. War songs set fashion in popular music and battlefield dramas filled the stage and screen. None of this was completely new, of course, for war booms had accompanied earlier imperial wars against China (1894–1895) and Russia (1904–1905). Moreover, just as those war booms had profoundly influenced cultural developments, the Manchurian Incident war fever marked a turning point from the era christened “Taish demokurashii” to what Japanese called the “national emergency” (hijji) of early Shwa.

Many currents flowed together to produce the sea change of the early thirties. Policy makers turned to military methods to contain the rise of Chinese nationalism in the Northeast. Withdrawing from the League of Nations in 1933, statesmen led the nation into an era of international isolation and on a collision course with rival imperialists. Politically, this period marked the end of party-run cabinets and the dying gasp of the organized left. The war set off a rapid military buildup and the foundation of what was called the quasi-wartime economy. War fever promoted the militarization of popular culture and encouraged the proliferation of social organizations for total war. These changes collectively constituted the formation of a new military imperialism.

Popular Japanese stereotypes of the “dark valley” of the 1930s conjure up images of a militaristic police state which exercised unlimited powers of political repression to coerce an unwilling but helpless populace into cooperating with the army's expansionist designs. One of the key subplots in the dark-valley version of the 1930s concerns the deliberate deception of the Japanese people through expurgated and even mendacious news reports of the military events on the continent. The role of the press and publishing industry in the governmental disinformation campaign is usually explained by reference to the notorious Peace Preservation Law of 1925, which gave the Home Ministry widespread powers of arrest and censorship. A closer look at the reaction of the mass media to the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident, however, reveals some inaccuracies in this picture of a press muzzled by government censors and publicizing with great reluctance the official story of Japan's military actions in Manchuria. In fact, without any urging from the government, the news media took the lead in promoting the war. Publishing and entertainment industries volunteered in cooperating with army propagandists, helping to mobilize the nation behind the military occupation of Northeast China. They did so, in large part, for a very simple reason: imperial warfare offered producers of mass culture irresistible opportunities for commercial expansion and profit.

Such a phenomenon was certainly not unique to Japan. As John MacKenzie has documented for the case of Britain, and others for the United States and France, the mass media throughout the industrial world played key roles in stimulating military imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹ This literature raises many important and knotty theoretical issues concerning the relationship between imperialism and popular culture, three of which have particular bearing on Japan's war fever. First, what did it mean for the politics of empire that the mass media began, in increasingly sophisticated ways, to mediate the relationship between government and public? The mass media provided a key channel for the dissemination of government propaganda to the public. At the same time, it became a means for the government to gauge public reaction to events and policies, and hence, a conduit for the expression of what was being defined as “public opinion.” Inserting itself between government and people, the media's treatment of current events often changed the political significance of those events for both sides.

A second issue that arises in these media studies is how we understand the cultural construction of empire when our analysis of newspapers, movies, and other organs of the mass media limits us to the production rather than the consumption of mass culture. Historians of imperial popular culture speak of “the popular image of empire” and “national myths,” phrases that imply a unity in the public perception. Their studies persuasively demonstrate that the myths of the American frontier or British Christian militarism were imperial constructions produced for and consumed by a mass audience. And yet, what does “popular” mean when we cannot know how stories were read or movies interpreted by the consumers of imperial culture? Moreover, given that newspapers and film companies tailored their products to a consumer market, how much of the popular vision of empire was determined by the media itself and how much was shaped by consumer demand?

Third, this literature on mass media is concerned with how to fit media representations of a particular instance of military imperialism into a broader interpretation of imperial ideology. Whether in the heroic narrative, the stirring speech, or some other form, representations of empire building appealed to audiences in terms of morality and of necessity, for such are the conceptual categories through which societies justify military aggression. And since imperial ideologies are constantly evolving, the question becomes: What was new and what was not-so-new in the imperatives articulated in the moment? In other words, how much did the call to action in Japan's war fever of the early 1930s owe to the accumulations of a venerable imperial tradition, and how much was the product of the historical moment itself?

This chapter makes no claims to resolve these questions in all their complexity. They do, nevertheless, inform an attempt to draw out the broader significance of the imperial jingoism that animated Japanese popular culture during the Manchurian Incident. Like imperial war fevers in Europe and the United States, Japan's war fever of the 1930s revealed the relationship between an expanding marketplace for cultural manufactures and the rise of jingoism as a key force behind military imperialism.

THE NEWS WAR

In 1931 the news of war in Northeast China first spread through the press. On the morning of September 19, just hours after the Kwantung Army secretly detonated the railway track and led the assault on the Chinese military base in Fengtian, early editions throughout the country reported that Zhang Xueliang's soldiers had attacked the Japanese Army. On the front page of the nation's leading daily, the Osaka Asahi, Japanese read that “in an act of outrageous violence [bgyaku], Chinese soldiers blew up a section of Mantetsu track located to the northwest of Beitaying [Military Base] and attacked our railway guards. Our guards immediately returned fire and mobilized artillery to shell Beitaying. Our forces now occupy a section of the base.”

In the following days and months the reports continued, with different news organs striving to be the first to greet their audiences with the army movements of the previous day. Newspapers vied to scoop the daily progress of the Kwantung Army as they tracked its course in September step by step, recording the occupation of Fengtian, Jilin, and other cities along the South Manchurian Railway as well as the removal of Zhang Xueliang's forces to the city of Jinzhou in southwestern Manchuria. Papers battled to break the news of the aerial bombing of Jinzhou in October, the occupation of the northern city of Qiqihar in November, and the ground assault on Jinzhou in December. Headlines competed to announce most dramatically the occupation of Harbin in January, which gave Japan command of all the key Manchurian cities. In February audiences read rival accounts of the marines landing in Shanghai to quell anti-Japanese demonstrations in the Japanese concession; and in March they learned from contending sources that an independence movement had culminated in the founding of the new state of Manchukuo. For six months, the news war over Manchuria consumed the media and their reports gripped the nation.

Why did war fever break out in 1931? Why did it start with a news war? Part of the answer lies in the state of Japan's highly developed and very competitive commercial news media. Because of its level of development, the rise in demand for news from the Manchurian front spurred competition for the expanding news market. This in turn stimulated technological innovation in newspaper production as well as the diffusion of a new medium of communications, radio. Competition, technological innovation, and market expansion became key forces behind the imperial jingoism that suddenly engulfed Japan.

The press provided an excellent conduit for disseminating news of war to what was, by 1931, a highly literate and overwhelmingly newspaper-reading public.² The middle and upper classes had long provided the core readership for an expanding newspaper industry, but by the 1920s, the habit had spread to the laboring classes in urban and rural Japan. Thanks to a universal compulsory educational system in place since the 1870s, literacy rates were high among even the most economically marginal groups. For example, of the predominantly male population of day laborers in a Tokyo slum in 1922, 92 percent of the single residents and 89 percent of the heads of household could read and write.³ For people that could not afford to subscribe, newspapers were available in bars, restaurants, barbershops, and at the meeting houses of local youth groups and reservist associations. Readership was, of course, higher than subscriber rates, and it is clear from the limited survey data available that subscriber rates themselves were high and rising. For example, 80 percent of 659 worker households surveyed in the Tokyo working-class neighborhood of Tsukishima in 1919 subscribed to newspapers; 18 percent took two or more papers.⁴ Similar surveys of Tokyo working women (nurses, teachers, clerks, typists, shop attendants, and tram workers) revealed that 88 percent subscribed to a paper. In a Kysh mine, about half the workers surveyed subscribed, and in farm villages near Tokyo the subscriber rate was 87 percent.⁵

From its beginnings as a political press in the 1860s, the modern newspaper industry had expanded rapidly into a collection of mass-circulation news organs in the 1890s and 1900s. By 1911 there were 236 newspapers nationwide and the 7 largest dailies had circulations of over 100,000.⁶ This process accelerated in the 1910s and 1920s, as the number of journals and newspapers registered under the newspaper law rose from 3,123 in 1918 to 11,118 in 1932. By 1927 the circulation of the nation's 2 leading dailies, the Osaka Asahi shinbun and the Osaka Mainichi shinbun, were over a million, and 9 other dailies boasted circulations of between 100,000 and 500,000⁷

Increasingly, the newspaper industry was an instrument of national integration. The expansion of the railway and the stimulus of two wars had spurred the expansion of the large dailies outside their metropolitan markets of Osaka and Tokyo. In 1909 only 31.5 percent of the Osaka Asahi's circulation fell within the Osaka city limits; of the remaining 68.5 percent, 14 percent went to Kyoto, 12 percent to the neighboring Hygo prefecture, 10 percent to Shiga, Wakayama, Mie, and Nara prefectures in the Kinki region, 7 percent to Ishikawa, Fukui, Toyama, Aichi, and Gifu prefectures in the Chbu region, and 6 percent to the southern island of Kysh.⁸ By 1923, 70 percent of Tokyo's newspaper production was sold outside the city.⁹

Yet even though the metropolitan press had penetrated provincial cities and villages by the end of the Taish period, in many areas a resiliant provincial press proved able to resist the incursions of metropolitan cultural institutions. Indeed, the rapid development of the Osaka and Tokyo papers was matched in the provinces with a flourishing local press. Most provincial cities supported several newspapers; prefectural and regional papers complemented their numbers. For example, Toyama prefecture on the Japan Sea coast produced, in addition to 26 regional periodicals, 3 daily and 2 evening papers.¹⁰ When the metropolitan papers tried to take over the provincial markets, in all but a few districts, such as Saitama and Kana-gawa which bordered the big cities, the local press was able to withstand the challenge.¹¹ This was accomplished in large part by imitation of metropolitan technologies of marketing and production, something which often required mergers and other institutional restructuring. Another key factor aiding the survival of the local press was the growing tendency to subscribe to more than one paper. A 1930 nationwide survey of 13,688 youth groups found that each group took an average of 3.3 newspapers; almost 50 percent were local papers.¹²

Through the diffusion of mass marketing technology as well as the development of national markets for the metropolitan dailies, the growth of the newspaper industry fostered the formation of a nationally integrated mass culture. This meant that news coverage of events of national significance like the Manchurian Incident was disseminated quickly throughout the country. It also guaranteed a degree of uniformity of coverage, as competing papers picked up each other's stories and imitated new marketing techniques. Most of all, it meant that by 1931 Japan was a nation of news hounds. In upper-, middle-, and working-class households, in urban and rural Japan, men, women, and even children informed themselves of the events of the day through the commercial news media. Thus it was natural that the press became the medium through which the influence of the Manchurian Incident first penetrated the home front, infecting Japanese society with war fever.

For the press, the war fever offered great opportunities for market expansion. With urban markets largely saturated, the goal at this stage was a more thorough penetration of the rural market. Historian Tyama Shi-geki described the inroads made in his own village at the time: “My father's family were farmers. Before the Manchurian Incident we had not taken a paper, but after articles about the local unit began to appear and articles about the war-dead in our village came out almost everybody began to take the newspaper, even tenant farmers.”¹³ The drive to expand circulation was pursued, as in earlier imperial wars, through innovations in format, production, and marketing techniques. During the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, the enormous expansion of the newspaper market had been accomplished by the increased use of, first, illustrations and, later, photographs to accompany news stories from the front, the merging of “hard” (political) and “soft” (entertainment) journalism, the switch to advertising as a primary source of revenue, and other changes.¹⁴ Now, the Manchurian Incident news war ushered in an era of high-speed news production.

Leading the way were the Mainichi shinbun and Asahi shinbun news-paper chains.¹⁵ Both Osaka-based with various fairly independent regional editions, their respective flagship papers—the Tokyo Asahi, Osaka Asahi, Osaka Mainichi, and Tokyo Nichinichi—dominated the national news market.¹⁶ The four large dailies deployed recently purchased fleets of airplanes and cars, and mobilized the latest printing and phototelegraphic machinery in their drive to win the news war. The Osaka Asahi had demonstrated dramatically the potential of airplanes to accelerate the delivery of news when it flew a photograph of the bombed-out train in which Zhang Zuolin was killed in 1928 from Seoul to Osaka, reaching the streets within twenty-four hours of the explosion.¹⁷

In 1931 and 1932, both companies used their airplanes to shuttle teams of correspondents and equipment back and forth between Japan and Manchuria. On September 20, the Osaka Asahi boasted it had already “put several planes into operation and dispatched 8 special correspondents” to the scene.¹⁸ By November 15, the Asahi had sent at least 33 special correspondents to Manchuria, and by January 1, the Mainichi chain had sent 50.¹⁹ Of course, long before airplanes, newspapers sent special correspondents to cover important stories. During the Sino-Japanese War in 1894–1895, for example, sixty-six newspapers sent a total of 114 reporters, 11 artists, and 4 photographers to China.²⁰ But the advent of the airplane changed the news-gathering process, extending the possible scale and speed of coverage.

The wedding of new technology with older practices was apparent on the production end as well, reflected in the Manchurian Incident “extra” [ggai) war. Just as they sent correspondents to cover the earlier imperial wars, newspaper companies had used extras to break stories from the front. Now, victory in the race to break the news was decided by two new machines, the high-speed cylinder press and the wire photograph transmitter. With their capital advantages, the Asahi and Mainichi dominated the field in this new technology. Together with the news service Dents, they imported the nation's first telephotograph machines in 1928.²¹ Between their four Osaka and Tokyo papers, the two newspaper companies owned 74 of the nation's 108 high-speed cylinder presses in 1930.²² Hence, the Asahi and Mainichi were able to overwhelm smaller papers through sheer numbers of costly extras—sometimes putting out two separate multipage extras between the morning and evening editions—and by featuring the latest photos from the front. Writing in late October 1931, one observer commented that “after the opening of the extra war…all the papers put out extras. However, after the initial extras, the subsequent editions were not news so much as photographs. Therefore, the extra war was dominated by the two large papers, the Asahi and the Mainichi, and the rest were left to look on from the sidelines.”²³

Unfortunately for the large dailies, their weaker competitors were not the only contenders in the news war of 1931–1932. No sooner had the fighting broken out on the continent, than the newspapers found themselves face to face with an upstart rival in the battle for the “scoop”: radio. The fierce competition between radio and newspapers was a new development. Since its founding in 1926, Japan's national broadcasting monopoly, Nihon hs kykai (NHK), had taken a back seat in news production and concentrated its efforts on pursuing an educational mission. NHK relied on the newspaper companies and wire services for their news; in return for a free supply of this information, it surrendered editorial rights and left the press to break all the stories. In 1930, however, in a move to get out from under the shadow of the press, radio began to contract directly with the wire services for news, retaining the right to edit their own stories.²⁴ During the Manchurian Incident, NHK moved aggressively to carve out a new position for itself in the news industry.

Radio competed with the press by increasing their regular news programming from four to six times a day, as well as through rinji nysu—special unscheduled news broadcasts, or news flashes. This device was first employed, appropriately, to scoop the big dailies on the events of September 18. In a special report that interrupted the early morning calisthenics program, a six-minute news broadcast broke the story of the “clash between our railway guards…and the (Chinese) First Brigade….”²⁵ On speed alone, rinji nysu gave radio a strong advantage in the news war. NHK pressed the advantage home, broadcasting rinji nysu seventeen times between September 19 and 30 alone.²⁶

The number of new radio contracts rose rapidly during the national crisis. After the initial investment in the receiver (10–30 yen for a crystal radio set, 50–100 yen for a vacuum tube set), monthly rates were lower (at 75 sen) than the 1 yen per month it cost to take a newspaper. Nevertheless, the receiver represented a significant financial outlay for all but the very wealthy.²⁷ This made the growth in radio contracts all the more striking. At the end of 1930, 778,948 households, or 6.1 percent of the population contracted to receive radio broadcasts. By the end of 1933, this number had risen to 1,714,223 households, or 13.4 percent of the population, an increase of almost a million ratepayers in three years.²⁸

At this stage, radio listening tended to be an urban practice. NHK estimated in 1934 that 36 percent of urban households had radios while only 6 percent of rural households did. But urban was not restricted to metropolitan: a substantial share of radio-listening households lived outside of Osaka and Tokyo. Of course, the higher the concentration of population, the higher the percentages of radio listeners. By 1935, 49.8 percent of Tokyo and 36.3 percent of Osaka households owned a radio, as did 26.8 percent of Kyoto-city households. Heavily urban prefectures such as Aichi (with the city of Nagoya), Hygo (with the city of Kobe), and Kanagawa (with the city of Yokohama) also boasted rates of 23.9 percent, 22.9 percent, and 23.7 percent, respectively Moreover, even in the distant prefectures of Miyagi in the northeast and Fukuoka in the southern island of Kysh, high numbers of listeners in the prefectural capitals pushed the prefectural averages up to 12.3 percent and 12.4 percent, respectively.²⁹

The news war between radio and the press quickly escalated from the supply of speedy and sensational “emergency news” to reporting in the form of a public spectacle. Newspapers, of course, had long been in the ibento (event) business. Like the “new journalism” of late nineteenth-century Europe and the United States, the Japanese press had begun in the 1890s to sponsor a variety of events in order to increase reader involvement and expand their market. By the end of the Meiji period, newspaper readers throughout the country were accustomed to seeing newspapers sponsor fundraising drives for victims of disaster or distress, contests and lotteries, and concerts, exhibits, lectures, and sporting events.³⁰ All these techniques had been used to great effect during the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars. During the Manchurian Incident, newspapers inundated the much larger market with all the traditional ibento, plus a new one: newsreel screenings.

Asahi and Mainichi newsreels that tracked the occupation of Manchuria, stage by victorious stage, filled public halls and packed city parks. Although both newspaper and film companies had made sporadic attempts at producing regular film news during the 1920s, newspaper company footage of the Manchurian Incident brought newsreels into widespread use for the first time. As fast as new film canisters could be flown in from Manchuria, the Asahi and Mainichi screened the newsreels in city parks in Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, and Tokyo, and circulated the films for additional showings in department stores, elementary schools, and elsewhere throughout the country. In Osaka, for example, the first installment, “The Military Clash between the Japanese and Chinese Armies” opened September 21—just three days after the clash began—and required several showings a night to accommodate the crowds. An account of the onset of the campaign for northern Manchuria, “The Nen River Battle-Front” proved to be the city's favorite for November, playing for 20,000 spectators on a single night. Five thousand stood outdoors on a chill January evening to watch marching columns of Japanese soldiers “Entering Jinzhou.”³¹ Since the free newsreels were a marketing tool, they were shown widely outside the urban areas, particularly in rural districts where the large dailies hoped to expand circulation. In Aichi prefecture, for example, between September 1931 and September 1932, the Osaka Asahi screened newsreels at 102 different locations. At least 46 of these were shown in county districts.³²

An equally enthusiastic reception for traveling lecture series and exhibits of military paraphernalia rewarded the big dailies with popular acclaim. On November 25, the Osaka Asahi touched off a lecture boom with a three-day lecture series on “Reports from the Battlefield,” with special correspondents lecturing to full houses in Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto, and Nagoya on their impressions of conditions on the front. A December 3 session drew a crowd of 6,000 in Osaka, and a report in Tokyo on the invasion of Jinzhou in January inspired standing ovations and three banzais for the Asahi from the enthusiastic crowd. Encouraged by the response to the Jinzhou lecture, the Asahi expanded the number of stops on its itinerary, sending the speakers to engagements in the cities of Yokohama, Yokosuka, Chiba, Sendai, Fukushima, Wakamatsu, Niigata, Nagaoka, Takada, Mori-oka, Hirosaki, Aomori, Akita, Yamagata, and Kanazawa.³³

The large department stores offered space to both the Mainichi and Asahi newspaper companies for exhibits held in November and December of military paraphernalia commemorating the Manchurian Incident. After opening in Tokyo, an exhibit of “Souvenirs of the fierce campaign to take the Fengtian Beitaying” sponsored by the Tokyo Asahi went on to tour seventy locations to the north and west. In Tokyo, a city of 5 million, exhibit goers numbered 11,000 daily, while the national grand total topped 600,000. Beginning September 21, the Osaka Asahi sent an exhibit of “Manchurian Incident Photographs” throughout western Japan, and in November they treated audiences to “Anti-Japanese Posters from China.”³⁴

Not to be outdone, NHK busied itself making radio an indispensable partner to the imperial pageantry of the Manchurian Incident. In the process, NHK pioneered new techniques which became a hallmark of broadcasting in the 1930s and 1940s. The most spectacular of these was the live broadcast—simultaneous radio coverage from the scene of an event. In 1931 and 1932, NHK began participating in public ceremonials throughout the country with great frequency, involving themselves in troop send-offs and welcome parades, funerals, military reviews, collection drives, and armament christenings. Like the photograph, the live broadcast closed the distance gap and made the event immediate for the listening audience. Just as the first widespread use of battlefield photography during the Russo-Japanese War had illustrated the potential of photojournalism, the first radio war demonstrated the power of broadcast communications.

Radio's live broadcasting of military ceremonies changed the local character of these events, greatly enhancing their appeal and news value. The first of the live broadcasts was a three-city air-defense drill conducted by Kobe, Kyoto, and Osaka on November 11, 1931. By the end of the year NHK had participated in three mass military funerals broadcast from Nii-gata and Sendai, and five send-off ceremonies from Hiroshima's Ujina Wharf. During the following year, radio audiences could tune in to live broadcasts on the average of once a week. The fifty-three live broadcasts included three prayer ceremonies held at Yasukuni, the national shrine where dead soldiers were enshrined as military gods; one air-defense drill; the “Fourth Memorial Service for the War Dead of the Sendai Unit of the Second Division” from Sendai City as well as thirteen other funerals; seven welcome parades, including the “Victorious Return of the Second Division” from in front of Sendai Station; two send-offs; twenty airplane christenings; three weapons-donation ceremonies; and an “Evening of Battle Stories Commemorating the Glorious Victory” from Tokyo's Hibiya Public Hall on June 29.³⁵

NHK also developed live broadcast programs for troop entertainment. In a spectacular advertisement for their newly established radio link-up with Manchuria, NHK mobilized storytellers, singers, minstrels, comedians, and other popular entertainers to participate in an “Evening of Entertainment for Our Brothers in Manchuria.” Broadcast live from Tokyo Playhouse on October 30, the “Evening of Entertainment” proved such a success that ten new programs were produced by January 24, 1932.³⁶ In this way, NHK used the war to market their newly developed news services, competing with the press by innovating and expanding news production.

The war-mongering behavior of radio and press in 1931–1932 was a predictable reaction to the pressures of a well-developed commercial market for news; the media sensationalized the war because consumers bought more papers and radio contracts that way. But as in the earlier imperial war booms, their actions resulted in a transformation of the news market as well. In the wake of the Manchurian Incident, the Asahi, the Mainichi, and NHK emerged as the clear leaders in a more national news market, helping to define a nationally unified response to the military crisis in the empire. As the actions of the news media revealed, the commercial relationship between the mass media and the public created a positive feedback loop in the production and consumption of media products on the theme of war, and served to inflate the Manchurian Incident war boom.

This dynamic formed an integral part of the phenomenon of jingoism. War, by this time, was known to stimulate technological leaps in fields of medicine, weaponry, and heavy industry As Japan's experience in the war fever of 1931–1933 suggests, this also applied to developments in the mass media. The rise in demand during the Manchurian Incident provided an opportunity for the press and radio to test market innovations in format, invest in technological improvements, and put into practice new sales techniques. Such advances built upon the foundation of a well-developed national news market. The technological and commercial developments of the 1920s primed the news industry for a growth spurt once the right market conditions presented themselves. Responding energetically to these opportunities, the mass media infected the country with war fever. Essential to imperial jingoism, then, was the process of innovation and expansion in the mass production of an industrialized mass culture.

UNOFFICIAL PROPAGANDISTS

Led by the news media giants, an increasingly one-dimensional interpretation of the events in Manchuria expanded into other areas of mass culture. Books, magazines, movies, records, and other forms of popular entertainment took the sense of national crisis primed by the press and radio, and infused it with the boisterousness of a carnival, as Manchuria became the theme for vaudeville acts, Kabuki tragedies, and even restaurant menus. This cultural deluge constituted a second dimension of the imperial jingoism of the Manchurian Incident. Mass-culture industries flooded their marketplace with Manchurian-theme products, and in the process disseminated a specific package of information and a set interpretation of events on the continent. Manchurian-theme products glorified military action, heroized the colonial army, and extolled the founding of Manchukuo. Telling and retelling the epochal moments of the Sino-Japanese conflict in every conceivable cultural form, the mass media helped shape public memory of the Manchurian Incident. When representations of Manchuria moved from the factual, if selective, reportage in the news to fictionalized dramatizations on stage and screen, the complex realities of the military occupation were reduced to the simple and sanctifying patterns of myth.³⁷ The saturation coverage, the winnowing out of key stories that rendered symbolically the justice of Japan's war aims, and the multimedia representations of these stories all were defining characteristics of imperial jingoism.

As was true for the press, jingoism was nothing new for the publishing and entertainment industries. From the emergence of mass magazines to the birth of modern drama, the development of the mass-culture industries was profoundly influenced by the cultural production of the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars.³⁸ In the decades between the earlier imperial wars and the Manchurian Incident, mass production of the enbon (yen book) brought the price of books down, and the publication of the entertainment magazine Kingu broke records for magazine circulation.³⁹ At the same time, popular entertainment was revolutionized by the emergence of the film and recording industry. Like the technological advance of the press in the twenties, these developments profoundly influenced the scale of imperial jingoism, magnifying its impact on Japanese society.

Another factor behind the greater contagiousness of the Manchurian Incident war fever was the new reach of the mass culture industries. Distribution networks in place by the end of the Meiji ensured that mass culture produced in the metropolis reached urban and rural audiences throughout the country. The history of the penetration of the rural market by metropolitan book and magazine publishers paralleled that of the press. The provincial trade of the Tokyo-based publishing industry was handled by seven major distributors, all established between 1890 and 1912.⁴⁰ Unlike publishing, where separate companies handled distribution, the early movie theaters were underwritten by such film-importing and production companies as Nikkatsu and Tenkatsu. From the establishment of Japan's first movie theater in the Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo in 1903, the number of movie theaters grew rapidly. In 1912 the 164 first-run movie-halls nationwide were concentrated in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yokohama, and Nagoya, while over half of Japan's prefectures still had no theater. Less than ten years later all prefectures had at least one theater, and the numbers of first-run theaters had risen to 694. Of these, 86 were in Tokyo, 54 in Fukuoka prefecture, 47 in Hokkaid, 39 in Osaka, and 34 in Shizuoka; the remaining prefectures had an average of 10 each.⁴¹ Both the investments in the machinery for mass production and the growth of nationwide distribution systems in the 1920s meant that once the publishing and entertainment industries caught the war fever, they spread it farther, faster, and more dramatically than during the earlier campaigns against China or Russia.

Hard hit by the depression that had devastated the economy since 1929, the entertainment and publishing world looked upon the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident as manna from heaven. Charting trends in the book industry, a publisher's yearbook reported that “brisk sales of books on Manchuria have breathed new life into an utterly stagnated publishing industry,”⁴² Although before the occupation only specialty publishers like the South Manchurian Railway (Mantetsu), the China-Japan Culture Association (ChuNichi bunka kykai), or sakayag shoten had handled books on the subject, with the new demand for books on Manchuria, mainstream publishers took to the topic with élan. Together, Nihon hyronsha, Jitsugy no Nihonsha, Heibonsha, Shinksha, and other publishers brought out more than 500 titles on Manchuria in 1932 alone. Tokyo's largest bookstores Sanseid and Tkyd described a “deluge of publications on the Manchurian problem” and a “flurry” of “orders from outside Tokyo for Manchurian books.”⁴³

The Tokyo Metropolitan Library Readership Survey, used by all the publishers’ yearbooks as the benchmark for popular tastes, gives an idea of what sort of merchandise was moving off the shelves. Among the most read books of 1932, for example, were Understanding New Weapons, The Army Reader, and The Navy Reader; the celebrated account of a female journalist at the front, Along with the Army in Male Attire; and the immensely popular story of the three soldiers who exploded themselves in the line of duty, The Unswervingly Loyal Three Human Bombs (plus The Heroic Five Human Bullets). In the field of juvenile literature, children's favorites of 1932 and 1933 included Our Army, Our Navy, Our Airforce, and Our Army and Navy—National Defense Reader for Young People; a biography of the Russo-Japanese War hero Admiral Nogi; Battleship Stories for Children and War Stories for Children; A Young Person's Guide to the Airforce and Air Battles; a book on Inspirational Tales of Patriotism for Little Boys and Girls; and the children's version of The Three Human Bombs.44

Just as booksellers promoted militarism for profit, popular magazines opened their pages to army spokesmen in order to capitalize on the Manchurian fever. Special issues brought out in 1932 and 1933 featured a spate of articles on “the Manchurian problem” from a pro-military perspective. Rekishi koron (History Forum) published a “Manchuria-Mongolia” issue in April 1933, with articles tracing the “special relationship” between Japan and Manchuria back to premodern times. In addition to a grisly column of hearsay from the front, “Tiny Tales of the Manchurian War,” Bungei shunj (Literary Chronicle) ran a special Manchurian section from March through May of 1932.⁴⁵ Even such unlikely sources as the pulp magazine Hanzai kagaku (Criminal Science) found a way to bring army experts on board. In an issue devoted to “The Manchurian-Mongolian Lifeline,” editors commissioned an army general to write a feature on “The Judicial System and Punishment in Manchuria”⁴⁶

The publishing giant Kdansha turned its empire of high-circulation magazines into a cheering gallery for the Kwantung Army. Although they had little to say on the subject before October 1931, after that date Kdansha magazines like Kingu (King), Yben (Eloquence), Kdan kurabu (Story Club), and Shnen kurabu (Boy's Club) were filled with such articles by corporals and majors as “The Loyal and Brave Japanese Spirit—How Our Soldiers Meet Their End” and the posthumously published “Bandit Pacification Diary”⁴⁷ In 1932, Shnen kurabu brought out a “Man-churian Incident” issue in February, a “ready-to-mail Manchurian Incident commemorative postcard supplement” in March, a “Patriotism” issue in April (featuring the Manchurian Incident fundraising campaign and a paper model of an airplane “now flying the Manchurian skies”), a “Navy” issue in May, and an“Airforce” issue in June. Military celebrities became regular contributors with articles like “The Last of Him” by Major General Sakurai Tadayoshi, author of the Russo-Japanese War classic Nikudan (Human Bullets) and subsequently the head of the army's propaganda division, the shinbun han.48 Army Minister Araki Sadao frequently appeared in popular magazines, including a piece in Fujin kurabu (Women's Club) on “The National Emergency! The Mission of Japanese Women!”⁴⁹

Suddenly, the languorous jazz rhythms which had been the rage only weeks before were replaced by a boom in gunka (war songs). Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese war period classics came back into vogue; as the Asahi Yearbook explained, “the current hostilities have given the population a new appreciation of old favorites.”⁵⁰ Record companies brought out a string of war songs including “Arise Countrymen” (Okiteyo kokumin), “Ah, Our Manchuria!” (Aa waga Mansh), “The Imperial Army Marches Off” (K-gun shinpatsu no uta), “Attack Plane” (Bakugekiki), and “Manchurian Maiden, My Manchurian Lover” (Mansh no rabaa Mansh musume).⁵¹

The furor on screen and stage was, if possible, even more intense. For the first six months of 1932 theaters and moviehouses filled their bills with such productions as The Glittering National Flag, The First Step into Feng-tian—South Manchuria Glitters under the Rising Sun, The Four Heroic Human Pillars, and The Gallant Bugler.52 Movie companies encouraged conscripts to take a positive view of their call-up in the films The Mobilization Order, Sentar Goes to the Front, and Go to the Front, Boys! As Screen and Stage wrote of Go to the Front, Boys: “Our home villages are facing an unprecedented crop failure. But this is nothing to the crisis facing the Japanese empire…. In this spirit, this movie follows the story of infantry private Aoki Sentaro, who goes to the front with a brave heart, happy to die for his country.”⁵³

The crisis in the empire, the heroism of battle, and the glory of sacrifice were the messages of the Manchurian Incident theme products that poured forth from Japan's culture industries, dominating the mass media in 1931 and 1932. These messages dovetailed beautifully, of course, with what the army wanted its public to hear about the Manchurian Incident. But the culture industries needed no arm twisting to advertise the army's cause: they became unofficial propagandists because crude militarism was all the crack. Audiences flocked to watch the dramas of death in battle; consumers bought up the magazines commemorating the glories of the empire. “Empire” was a fad, and such cultural fads were the rice bowl of the mass media.

Critical to the effectiveness of this informal propaganda was the popular conviction that what audiences were viewing was live history. Songwriters and dramatists lifted their material straight from the pages of the newspaper, moving from fact to fiction without skipping a beat. In dramatizing history as it unfolded, they shaded the line between news and entertainment and presented audiences with a pseudohistorical version of the events on the continent. The production of what today might be labeled “infotainment” was, at the time, another conspicuous feature of imperial jingoism. Rendering the brutality of war in the comforting conventions of melodrama and popular song, the entertainment industry obscured the realities of military aggression even as it purported to be informing audiences about the national crisis.

Newsreel screenings sponsored by the big dailies had already begun the process of transforming history into an entertaining public spectacle. Widespread shooting on location by movie companies further blurred the line between fact and fiction. All the film studios sent actors and technicians to do double duty in Manchuria, entertaining the troops one day and shooting film the next. Companies used on-location shots as a selling point in films like Ah! The Thirty-eight Heroes of Nanling, shot in Fengtian and Changchun. Tkatsu Studios filmed much of their heroic accounts of the Nen River and Qiqihar campaigns on location, films they called Japanese Cherries—The Fallen Blossoms of North Manchuria and Love in the Frozen Plain.54 Productions such as The Great Army Parade and Manchuria March dealt with the Manchurian Incident in the manner of an entertainment review. Each scene depicted an emblematic moment—the Chinese execution of the Japanese captain Nakamura bringing tensions to a head in June 1931, the occupation of Fengtian in September, and Japanese diplomats defending military action in the League of Nations in October. Shochiku, Tokatsu, and Shinko film studios each brought out their own version of Manchuria March, taking the theme music from the prize-winning hit song of the same name.⁵⁵ Such productions turned the epochal moments of the Manchurian Incident into nationalist metaphors, symbolically rendering the takeover of Northeast China in the familiar language of imperial mythology. How new events were assimilated into established myths of a heroic Japan standing tall against Western bullies and easily routing the cowardly Chinese is a question that awaits more considered treatment later. The point to take here is that by raising public awareness of the Manchurian empire through the dissemination of a fictionalized history, the entertainment industry became an agent of imperial myth making.

In its myth-making capacity, the entertainment industry created a gallery of Manchurian Incident heroes out of army reports on the outcomes of successive military operations. Kawai Pictures sensationalized the battlefield death of Captain Kuramoto (posthumously promoted to major) in The Big-hearted Commander Captain Kuramoto, while Tokatsu Films memorialized his bravery in Ah! Major Kuramoto and the Blood-stained Flag.56 The story of Private Yamada, captured by the Chinese during a reconnaissance mission and later rescued by a Korean interpreter, was made into the movie Scout of North Manchuria, the play The Occupation of Qiqihar, and recorded on the Victor label as the minstrel chant “Private Yamada and Mr. Tei.”⁵⁷ All seven Japanese movie companies produced versions of the sensational suicide of Major Kuga Noboru, who was apotheosized by Shink as The Perfect Soldier, by Kawai as The Yamato Spirit, and by Tokatsu as an Embodiment of the Way of the Warrior.58 Injured and left behind when the Japanese force withdrew after the first failed assault on Shanghai, Kuga was taken prisoner by the Chinese. After he was released, he returned to the battlefield where he had fallen. He then shot himself to expiate the shame of capture. Announcing Kuga's suicide on April 1, 1932, Army Minister Araki Sadao praised Kuga's martial spirit: “Soldiers of the Imperial Army go to the battlefield to win or to die. Choosing the course of death, Major Kuga displayed the highest military spirit. We will treat him as a battlefield casualty, honoring him as if he died in battle.”⁵⁹ Even the death of an Osaka Mainichi newspaper reporter in the course of covering the front became the stuff of heroic drama. Nikkatsu Pictures’ The Blood-stained Pen glorified the daring and zeal of the reporter when he rushed off behind enemy lines to pursue a scoop. Describing his martyrdom, Screen and Stage wrote that he was struck down by an “enemy of unparalleled violence.”⁶⁰

The mass media had helped create the heroes of Japan's earlier imperial campaigns, though the numbers that crowded the Manchurian Incident heroes gallery overwhelmed the human icons of the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars. The scale of military mobilization was, of course, much larger in the earlier campaigns. Yet the reduced number of real participants in 1931–1933 seemed to call for a multiplication of those singled out for cultural distinction. This was due in part to the fact that it was easier to glorify death when there was not much of it. Audience appetites for battlefield heroics would dull after war spread and casualty lists mounted, but in 1931 the loss of a son or husband to a new war on the continent was still an abstraction for most Japanese. A second reason for the multiplication of heroes in the Manchurian campaigns was the growth of the mass media since the earlier wars. In the cultural marketplace of 1931 there were more producers and more consumers, and hence, more competition and more chaos. In the effort to sell their products, cultural manufacturers created as many heroes as the market would bear, competing with one another to depict acts of zealous bravery and sensational death. Ultimately, the commercial initiatives of the mass media did more than army propaganda to define and popularize military heroism in the Manchurian Incident. The army provided the source of information from the battlefield, but the media told and retold these stories, imprinting heroic deeds onto public memory through repetition in song, print, and on stage. In this way media publicity gave cultural authority to the sacrifice and martyrdom of the celebrated. Had they been unsung, men like Kuga and Kuramoto would have remained anonymous.

Though entertainers spread their eulogies around during the Manchu-rian Incident, not all deaths were celebrated equally. Another conspicuous feature of the imperial jingoism of the early thirties was the emergence of heroes and superheroes. The sensationalizing of the “three human bombs” (or bullets), the soldiers who were blown up in the line of duty during the assault on Shanghai, cast all other new heroes into shadow The army publicized the three deaths as a conscious act of suicide, claiming the young men had sacrificed themselves to explode a section of wire fence impeding the army's advance. Various rumors circulated at the time contradicting the army's account. Some said the three had died because their commanding officer cut the fuse too short or because he had given them the wrong type of fuse; others suggested that the men attempted to abandon the mission but their commander ordered them to follow through. And it was quietly pointed out that something was amiss with the official report because three other soldiers accompanied the mission and were able to return unharmed.⁶¹ Soon this all became immaterial because the “three human bullets” boom in the mass media gave popular authority to the army's version of the event.

Throughout March, “three human bullets” productions swept the entertainment world. The Screen and Stage reported that “Tokyo's theaters, including all the major houses…are filled with ‘three human bullets’ plays. The story has been dramatized in every form, from shinpa (new school) to kygeki (classical drama).” No fewer than six movie versions were produced in March alone, and at vaudeville reviews at places like the Horie Dance Hall, the chorus line kicked their heels to the “Three Human Bullets Song.”⁶² Record companies brought out a string of “human bombs” songs, which were multiplying due to song contests in the Asahi, Mainichi, Shnen kurabu, Rekdo, and other newspapers and magazines. Yamada Kosaku, founder of the Tokyo Philharmonic, collaborated with Koga Ma-sao, king of popular song, to produce one prize-winning version.⁶³ This, though, was overshadowed by the poet Yosano Hiroshi's version, which proved by far the most popular of the “human bombs” songs.⁶⁴ Before long, even “human bullets” products appeared on the market. Entrepreneurs from the dead men's home towns began selling “three human bullets sake” and “three human bullets bean paste candy,” and an Osaka department store dining room showed questionable taste in offering a “three human bombs” special: radish strips cut to simulate the explosives tube and butterburs representing the “human bombs.”⁶⁵

Like previous media fads, the “three human bullets” craze did not last long. By the summer of 1932, the entertainment world had turned its attention to the opening of the Japanese Derby, a rash of love suicides, and the Japanese victories at the Los Angeles Olympics. Interest in Manchuria picked up again the following winter, however, with the release of the League of Nations’ Lytton Commission Report on the Sino-Japanese conflict and the League debate over the legitimacy of Manchukuo. Responding to the Lytton Commission's criticism of Japanese actions and the increasing certainty that Japan was losing the war of words to China, a flood of articles denounced European and American interference in Japanese affairs. Although this second media boom was as transitory as the first, the impact of war fever in the culture industries long outlasted the headlines. Media sensationalism flooded popular consciousness with images of war and empire. Such jingoism was important because it became unofficial propaganda for empire. Marketing militarism, the mass media helped mobilize popular support for the army's policy of military aggression against China, and in the process influenced foreign policy and the politics of empire.

MASS MEDIA MILITARISM AND THE CENSORSHIP QUESTION

In the context of the early thirties, this militarism in the media represented a dramatic shift from the previous decade, during which the mass media had achieved a reputation for championing pacifism and international cooperation. This raises the provocative and controversial question: How can we account for the media's conversion to militarism in the wake of the Manchurian Incident? In the argument thus far, media activism has been ascribed to the mercurial nature of the cultural marketplace, situating jingoism in the string of media fads that punctuated the cultural history of the 1920s and 1930s. Taking a different position on this question, the explanation of the volte-face one hears most frequently in Japan is that this was a forced conversion: government censorship silenced media criticism of the army and prevented the expression of liberal sentiment. But both of these arguments provide only partial explanations. Newspapers and magazines were necessarily responsive to consumer demand, but editorial decisions were also driven by political and ideological beliefs. Government certainly began to tighten censorship during the Manchurian Incident, a process which intensified over the course of the decade. But in the early thirties, it was still possible for editors and directors to evade government censorship had they wanted to. Thus, the explanation for the media's conversion to militarism must also be sought in the political convictions of editors and journalists: they wrote articles in support of the Manchurian Incident because they believed army policy was justified.

Before jumping on the Manchuria bandwagon, producers of mass culture rode the Taish fashions in urban culture. As magazine publishing entered a new era of circulation growth after World War I, leading journals such as Ch kron and Kaiz became champions of the movement for universal suffrage. In the early twenties, left-wing books made good business sense. A printing of 10,000 copies which sold out in two days of the second volume of Shimada Seijir's Chij (Earth) and reputed sales of over 1 million copies of Kagawa Toyohiko's Shisen 0 koete (Overcoming the Struggle) taught publishers the meaning of the term besuto seraa (bestseller). Both books depicted the injustice of urban poverty and championed the struggle against the degradation and exploitation of the working class. When Kagawa was arrested for his involvement in a Kobe strike in 1920, demand for his book rose, boosted by full-page newspaper ads which dramatically announced the author's arrest.⁶⁶ The triple media hit of 1929, “Tokyo March” (Kikuchi Kan's serial novel first published in the magazine Kingu, then made into the movie whose title song sold 250,000 records), glorified the consumer culture of Tokyo's Ginza, with its department stores, jazz halls, cafes, and crowds of modan gaaru (modern girls) strolling the tree-lined streets.⁶⁷ Thus, mass-culture producers were equally capable of responding to popular interest in democracy, social justice, or consumerism, as they were to an enthusiasm for military imperialism.

In the press, a long-standing policy of championing disarmament and a “soft line” toward China had earned the Asahi and Mainichi newspapers the enmity of the army and made its editors the target of physical assaults by right-wing organizations.⁶⁸ Prior to World War I, the large dailies had supported government expenditures for armaments and applauded the performance of the armed services in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars. But beginning with the navy's involvement in the Siemens bribery scandal of 1914, a succession of blunders brought the military under increasingly stinging editorial attacks. Both papers sharply criticized the Siberian Intervention of 1918–1922. The army's insistence that the reporters assigned to accompany the troops onboard ship quarter themselves in the stables with the horses probably did nothing to improve the newspapers’ view of the expedition.⁶⁹ When the first proposals for reductions in the military budget were voted down in 1921, the newspapers took up the disarmament cause, denouncing the “tyranny of military influence” in politics. They applauded Japan's signature to the Washington Naval Limitation Treaty in 1922; they cheered the subsequent elimination of four army divisions and abandonment of plans for warship construction.⁷⁰ More damage was done to the army's reputation when news of the murder, in 1923, of fourteen socialist and labor activists by army officers and military police leaked out. The victims had been arrested during the chaos after the Tokyo earthquake. Though the army banned all coverage of the murders, the Osaka Asahi defied army censorship to release an extra reporting the news.⁷¹ The army's China policy invited yet more criticism from the press. When General Tanaka Giichi's cabinet dispatched troops to Shandong in 1927 and 1928 in a show of force against the Northern Expedition of Jiang Jieshi's Nationalist Army, the papers called for diplomacy instead of strong-arm tactics. The Tokyo Nichinichi refused to accept the army's version of events during the second Shandong Expedition in 1928, when fighting broke out between Chinese and Japanese troops at Jinan. An editorial called on the government to “tell the truth,” and protested the subsequent troop reinforcements.⁷²

After more than a decade of criticizing army excesses and advocating diplomatic solutions to the “China problem,” the Asahi and Mainichi papers made a dramatic volte-face in 1931. Close on the heels of September 18, Asahi managers resolved that “though the newspaper remains in favor of disarmament,” in the interests of “unifying public opinion behind the army,” the paper would not “criticize or oppose in any way military action or the military itself.” In a more mean-spirited vein, Mainichi editors decided their paper would treat China “as an enemy country” and therefore refrain from using “titles and honorifics for Chinese nationals.”⁷³ In practice, reports wired in by special correspondents in the field came straight “from the lips” of Kwantung Army spokesmen. As one contemporary described the situation, “not only did virtually all the coverage from the front take a hard-line slant,” but reports from Tokyo journalists “gave preferential treatment to army information.” Moreover, journalists in the rest of the country were “following suit.”⁷⁴

There were a number of factors operating to shape these decisions. Undoubtedly the government maintained a vigilant attitude toward press coverage of the Manchurian Incident and applied pressure to run pro-government articles. Editors were similarly influenced by the commercial opportunities of the war fever to give pro-military coverage of the Manchurian Incident. But neither government repression nor market pressures can entirely account for the alacrity and enthusiasm with which Mainichi and Asahi editors embraced the army's policy in Manchuria. In the twenties, they had genuinely opposed the Shandong Expeditions, but they just as sincerely regarded the occupation of Manchuria in a different light. While it may seem politically inconsistent to criticize the army one day and then endorse military expansionism the next, both positions were consistent with a commitment to the empire. In other words, it was possible to favor economic and diplomatic methods of protecting Japanese interests in the 1920s and yet perceive, in 1931, the need for a show of force in Manchuria. In short, editors committed themselves to unifying public opinion behind the occupation because they were convinced that the army was right.

Changes in radio programming and the initiation of a public-education campaign by NHK mirrored the support given by the national dailies to the army's position. During the year following the Manchurian Incident, NHK broadcast 279 lectures and educational programs on Manchuria, including special programming aimed at women and children. NHK began this public-opinion crusade very quickly, squeezing in 4 lectures in the last days of September. Peaking in December with 40 scheduled programs, NHK hosted military men as the most frequent speakers on their public-education programs. Moreover, the civilian contributors featured, such as political firebrand Mori Kaku and right-wing scholar Yano Jin'ichi, were hardly neutral observers in the foreign-policy debate over Manchuria.⁷⁵ Mori, for example, represented the extremist wing of the hawkish Seiykai party, and had acquired a reputation for his unrestrained attacks on the “pusilanimous” tactics advocated by Minseit party doves. A close associate of General Tanaka Giichi, the symbol of a “positive” China policy, Mori himself was a firm advocate both of military expansionism on the continent and of a greater role for the army in domestic politics. Like Mori, Kyoto University professor Yano Jin'ichi was a long-time proponent of a stronger Japanese presence in Manchuria and went to work for the Kwan-tung Army as a propagandist for Manchukuo in 1932.

In contrast to the press, radio support for the army did not represent a shift in position, for NHK was too new to have acquired a track record on military policy. Since the founding of the NHK network in 1926, NHK was technically privately owned and managed. Government regulations, however, subjected radio to strong state controls and made it virtually an instrument of the Communications Ministry. Even so, before the Manchurian Incident NHK had not taken an active role in news reporting, nor was it used as a vehicle for political propaganda. The political and ideological role of radio was not yet fixed, and many sought to reverse the course NHK seemed to have embarked upon in 1931. The Minseit-led cabinet objected to the broadcast of Mori Kaku's speech in November 1931 and was outraged when Mori deviated from the preapproved script to make an attack on cabinet policy. Leftist intellectuals were dismayed by radio's new direction, complaining, as in a petition by novelist Nogami Yaeko, of “radio serving as an organ of state since the start of the war…arranging events in a montage of mistaken ideology.'

To criticisms of Nogami and others, a manager of the Osaka branch of NHK replied, “those on the left often say that Japanese broadcasting is trying to fulfill its foremost function as an organ for the diffusion of reactionary thought. If one looks at the relationship with supervisory state officials, the scope of the limits on broadcast contents, etc., one cannot disagree with this observation, but it is only the organization and the system which foist [upon radio] varied functions favorable to a reactionary course—it is certainly not inevitable that we must advance along this road.”⁷⁶ These words underscored the limitations of state controls. It was clear that NHK was feeling pressure from certain factions in government, but as the Osaka manager pointed out, the ultimate decisions were in hands like his. In institutions that were run by individuals and split into factions, the structure itself could not guarantee a particular outcome. Following their own inclinations, NHK managers charted a pro-army course for radio to applause from some and jeers from others. Though they may have wanted to keep the pro-army faction in the government happy, it was undoubtedly the standing ovations from the public that really made the difference.

The conversion of popular entertainment from the frivolity of the moga flapper to the drama of the campaigns in Manchuria was a different case once again. Dominated increasingly by fashion, mass culture had become a world of buumu (booms) which changed from season to season. Hence, it was not surprising that “like a see-saw,” the rise of kiwamono (sensational) and gunjimono (militaristic) products was accompanied by a fall in keik, or proletarian, culture.⁷⁷ But unlike such Taish fads as yo-yos or pulp fiction which eventually regained popularity, the proletarian culture movement never revived. In large degree this was the result of a campaign of repression against left-wing publications waged by the Home Ministry. In addition to press and publication laws giving wide postpublication censorship powers, the Home Ministry was empowered by the Peace Preservation Law of 1925 to arrest anyone criticizing private property or advocating changes in the national polity (kokutai). In principle this gave the government a virtual carte blanche to repress all anti-government expression. In practice, however, the instruments of suppression were wielded selectively against such organizations as the Proletarian Arts League (Ninon puroretaria geijutsu dmei) and the Proletarian Cinema League (Pu-rokino). Though these laws tended not to be applied against mainstream publishers and companies, the negative examples of the left-wing organizations doubtless had a chilling effect.⁷⁸

In any case, the left-wing artistic community required little muzzling on the Manchurian question, for few spoke out against the occupation. Far from it, many artists reacted like Yosano Akiko, the nation's most famous pacifist. Akiko and her husband, Hiroshi, produced numerous poems and songs celebrating the military occupation. Early in her career, Akiko had caused a sensation with the anti-Russo-Japanese War poem “Brother Do Not Give Your Life.” Addressed to her youngest brother, her poem demands: “Did our parents make you grasp the sword and teach you to kill? For you what does it matter whether the fortress of Liishun falls or not?” But in 1932, while her husband penned “three human bullets” lyrics, Akiko published “Citizens of Japan, A Morning Song.” In it, she urged Japanese troops on “through sufferings a hundredfold” to “smash sissified dreams of compromise.” Unlike the Russo-Japanese War poem, which had condemned the waste of human life in battle, Akiko's new poem glorified the heroic death of a soldier who “scatters” his body, “purer than a flower, giving life to a samurai's honor.” Akiko's change of heart was apparently inspired by a trip to Manchuria in 1928, courtesy of Mantetsu. After a forty-day journey throughout the country, she returned to Japan impressed with Manchuria's progress under Japanese stewardship and convinced of the justice of Japan's colonial mission.⁷⁹

Had they wished, it would have been possible in 1931 and 1932 for journalists and editors to express anti-war sentiments. The press and publication laws made Japan sound like a police state, but in reality they were notoriously difficult to enforce. The postpublication censorship system's key weapon, the ban on circulation, was usually thwarted by the efforts of publishers to sell the offending merchandise before police arrived to confiscate it. In 1932 the confiscation rate of banned newspapers was estimated at 25 percent, and for books and magazines, 13.7 percent.⁸⁰ Newspapers defied Home Ministry prepublication warnings 262 times in 1931 and 1,080 times in 1932. The major papers were among the offenders.⁸¹ During the Russo-Japanese War, though Yosano Akiko's poem and other anti-war publications such as the Heimin shinbun came under a storm of protest from other journalists and publishers, government censorship laws failed to prevent publication and sale.⁸² What happened in 1905 was true for 1931 as well.

Looking back, the Asahi newspaper tried to explain its own volte-face as a case of official repression. The company history reported that “freedom of expression was not permitted after the outbreak of the Incident.…With the explosion at Fengtian, in a single stroke the nation entered a quasi-wartime situation and the press was completely silenced.”⁸³ In fact, critical comments managed to get through the censor's net. In the most striking example, throughout the fall and winter of 1931–1932, forums for liberal and left-wing intellectuals such as the journals Ch kron and Kaiz were filled with skepticism toward the war fever. Ch kron's October 1931 editorial opposed sending troops to Manchuria, stating that Japan's ultimate goals could not be gained by force, and accusing elements in Japan of exploiting minor conflicts in Manchuria to impose an aggressive policy. Though Home Ministry censors warned Ch kron's editors not to repeat such sentiments,⁸⁴ the November edition featured an article by Marxist Inomata Tsunao on “Monopoly Capitalism and the Crisis in Manchuria and Mongolia.” When this was banned outright,⁸⁵ editors blunted subsequent criticism of the Manchurian Incident in later editions. But though they softened the language, the criticism of government policy still came through in a December article on the inevitable damage the occupation would do to Japanese-Western relations. Moreover, a January article disputed the army's claim that the occupation of Manchuria was necessary for the self-defense of treaty rights.⁸⁶

Articles in Kaiz took an equally critical position, denouncing the self-serving news war and criticizing the Asahi and Mainichi for their obsequious attitude toward the military.⁸⁷ In the same November issue, journalist Got Shinobu called the military action in Manchuria a “two-fold coup d'etat,” in the first instance against the Chinese government and in the second against the Japanese Minseit cabinet and the pacifist policies of Foreign Minister Shidehara.⁸⁸ As late as April 1932, Kaiz printed an article by Tokyo University professor and renowned liberal intellectual Yanaihara Tadao, criticizing the short-sightedness of trying to overcome Chinese nationalism with military measures.⁸⁹ Clearly the army had its critics, and liberal journals were printing their opinions.

Especially in September and October of 1931, local papers affiliated with the Minseit political party also published harsh criticisms of army policy. For example, the Fukui nipp reported on September 24:

In view of the recent friction in Sino-Japanese relations it is easy to imagine the state of tension of both our troops and the Chinese Army. That two skittish armies stationed, as it were, cheek to jowl should clash is not particularly surprising or even momentous. Indeed it is nothing more than a local incident, but it has created such an enormous impact because of the general foreboding of war among the populace….

The army has been hammering incessantly on the theme of protecting rights and interests in Manchuria and is constantly recounting the details of [the murder by Chinese of a Japanese army captain in] the Nakamura Incident. As they are stirring up a sense of enmity toward China in dark corners and in the open sunlight we suddenly hear the unfortunate news of the clash between Chinese and Japanese troops. And we may expect, momentarily, the startling announcement of war between the two, like a sudden thunderclap in a clear blue sky. The question is—has the Incident gone that far?⁹⁰

Although the editor of the Fukui nipp was remonstrated by the military police for the paper's imputation of a military conspiracy, the article went to press and people read it just the same.

Ishibashi Tanzan, editor of the influential economic journal Ty keizai shinp and long-time advocate of a “little Japan” foreign policy, also used his journal to argue that Japan should “abandon special rights and interests in Manchuria” (Manm hkiron) throughout the early months of the Manchurian Incident. Just as he had criticized military action in China in the past, in the fall of 1931 he spoke out against “the completely mistaken” idea that the “country will die without Manchuria,” arguing that there was no “profit in turning China and the Western powers into Japan's enemies.” Observing that the “military action was contrary to the intent or the liking of the cabinet,” Ishibashi suggested that the situation in Manchuria posed no real “national threat” and denounced the army for flaunting “the authority of the cabinet.”⁹¹

Although opposition to the occupation was strongly voiced in the Ty keizai shinp and elsewhere, such sentiments stood little chance of penetrating the storm of pro-military reports unleashed by radio and the national press. In the end, the voice of opposition was not silenced by government repression; it was drowned out by the mainstream news media. This, then, was the third dimension of imperial jingoism. Propaganda and censorship are usually regarded as instruments of the state, used to shape and control public opinion. Imperial jingoism, however, is the product of unofficial propaganda and private self-censorship. In Japan's case, imperial jingoism was responsive to government direction, but never perfectly controlled by it. Driven more directly by the opportunities for technological and commercial advance at a time when the national crisis stimulated demand for Manchurian-theme products, the mass media promoted the war on its own volition and in its own interests.

DEFEND THE MANCHURIAN LIFELINE!

The war boom of 1931–1933 constituted a critical period in the ideological construction of empire. On the first anniversary of the Manchurian Incident, the chief of staff of the 3d Division, Colonel Inuzuka Hiroshi, observed how much things had changed since the beginning of the war. “At first there were quite a few Japanese who judged the army as if it were on trial. Consciousness of Manchuria was nil.”⁹² Yet within six months it had become all-consuming. Manchuria became a “lifeline” for which no sacrifice was too great.

The path from indifference and ignorance to nationalistic obsession was trod, for many ordinary Japanese, by skimming the daily news, listening to popular songs, or reading favorite magazines. The self-appointed educators in the mass media took to their task with enthusiasm, setting forth a popular catechism on “why we fight.” This catechism explained the concurrent events in Manchuria within a framework of imperial ideology that was, by 1931, well developed. And yet the action in Manchuria was undeniably a departure from policies pursued in the 1920s. New conditions demanded new explanations. Thus the imperial myth making of the early 1930s assimilated fresh elements into old stories, reconstructing imperial ideology to make room for Manchukuo.

The first response to the popular catechism on “why we fight” became the battle cry of the Manchurian Incident: Mamore Mansh seimeisen! (Defend the Manchurian lifeline!). The term lifeline was coined by diplomat and Seiykai politician Matsuoka Ysuke in an impromptu Diet speech in January 1931.⁹³ Picked up by the daily press in the early days of the fighting and spread throughout the mass media, the catchphrase quickly took hold of public imagination. The term lifeline expressed the visceral and organic sense of connection between Japan and its Manchurian empire. Japan's fate was bound to the Northeast because Manchuria was vital to Japan's survival.

This sense of dependence on Manchuria had grown on Japanese in the course of a twenty-five-year proprietorship. By 1931, Mantetsu and the Kwantung Leased Territory, like Taiwan and Korea, were regarded as part of Japan. Such proprietary feelings carried with them a whole complex of Japanese attitudes toward their empire. From the beginnings of empire in the Meiji period, Japanese had come to look upon the empire as part of their national identity. Japan was, after all, imperial Japan. From the same period, moreover, Japanese had been taught that their national survival depended on the possession of an empire, that Japan had expanded in self-defense. As the rise of organized Chinese nationalism seemed to imperil Japan's hold over Manchuria, the threat was understood in this broader context. Yet lifeline was a new term applied to Manchuria. As such, it spoke to a recently developed sense of embattlement in the Northeast. The term's popular appeal also reflected the newfound importance Japanese accorded something they had previously taken for granted. Thus, images of the Manchurian lifeline in the mass media drew on a new sense of connectedness between the ordinary citizen and this faraway place on the map. The connection was drawn in personal terms both historic and immediate, resurrecting memories of the Russo-Japanese War—also fought on Manchurian soil—and tapping the anxieties of a people in severe economic distress.

Memories of the Russo-Japanese War confused the war's aims with its subsequent peace settlement. Coming back into currency, the old slogan about the “payment of 100,000 lives and a billion yen in blood and treasure for Manchuria” implied that Japan had fought Russia in 1904 over Manchuria. As a writer for the popular magazine le no hikari (The Light of the Home) expressed it, “Japan fought both the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese wars, buried 100,000 souls in the Manchurian plain, and risked the fate of the nation to gain the rights and interests we now hold in Manchuria. These are the victory prizes [kessh] won with the priceless blood and sweat of the Japanese race.”⁹⁴ Forgetting that it was in fact the struggle for control over Korea that had precipitated the war and that Japan had gained its Korean colony as a result of the victory, Japanese in the 1930s somehow felt that Manchuria comprised the sole compensation for this past sacrifice, immeasurable in both personal and national terms.

By any reckoning, the Russo-Japanese War was a costly and painful experience, and it cut much deeper than the nation's first imperial war with China. The soldiers that were mobilized numbered 1,088,996, almost five times the number that fought in the Sino-Japanese War; another 945,395 went to the front in noncombat roles. The war left 81,455 dead (six times the Sino-Japanese War) and 381,313 wounded. At 1.8 billion yen, it was nine times as expensive, and costs were offset with heavy borrowing in foreign and domestic financial markets and a host of new taxes.⁹⁵ These sacrifices were repaid with a stunning victory over one of the world's great powers. To Japanese at the time, this victory turned their country into a great nation (taikoku) and signaled Japan's “advance into the ranks of the world powers.” But as Carol Gluck notes, the war was also viewed in terms of the “humiliating peace” that followed.⁹⁶ When the government accepted terms that fell far short of what people were led to expect, their sense of disappointment and betrayal was expressed in urban rioting against the peace treaty in 1905. The bitterness that accompanied the aftermath of war, the postwar depression, the war debt, the return of war-mutilated men, and the emptiness left by those who did not come back all bequeathed to public memory a sense of ill usage and uncompensated sacrifice. In the war fever of 1931, both the triumph of the victory and the bitterness of the peace were projected onto the Manchurian lifeline.

A popular revival in Russo-Japanese War songs and the dramatization of the epochal moments of the war on stage and screen recalled the giddy sense of pride felt when Japanese saw their nation catapulted into the forefront of international prestige and power. Tokyo theaters brought out stirring dramas like For the Fatherland (Sokoku no tame ni) and Kabuki tragedies such as The Gold-buttoned Soldier (Kinbotan no heitai).97 General Nogi, the Russo-Japanese War hero who had conducted the bloody assault on Liishun and later stunned the nation with his suicide after the death of “his Emperor,” was exalted in children's biographies and minstrel songs.⁹⁸ Tokyo's Meijiza Theater produced a “General Nogi” play in January 1932, and Kawai Pictures opened Remember General Nogi! (Omoidaseyo Nogi shogun) the following month.⁹⁹ Other war heroes like the martyred “military god” Commander Hirose were eulogized in children's songs and stories. The boys’ magazine Shnen kurabu accompanied an illustrated account of Hirose's final glorious hours with a paper construction set representing the Tokyo statue of Hirose. As the magazine described this “stirring” memorial to the great man, “the longer you look at it the more humbled you feel by his nobility.”¹⁰⁰ The boom of Russo-Japanese War theme products reconnected Manchuria to the victory that had startled the world and gilded the “lifeline” with the reflected glory of the earlier campaign.

At the same time, the resurrection of elegiac Russo-Japanese War songs like “Sen'y” (Comrade) called to mind the human cost of the war, shading images of the Manchurian lifeline with bitter memories of death and sacrifice:

Here, many hundreds of leagues from home,

The red setting sun of distant Manchuria

Shines down on a stone at the edge of a field,

Beneath which my friend lies.

It grieves me to think of the brave hero

Who only yesterday headed the charge—

Ruthlessly setting upon the enemy

I wonder, will he sleep well here?

At the height of the battle,

I raced blindly to the friend

Who had been at my side

As he fell suddenly,

The flag with him.¹⁰¹

Even before its resurgence in popularity during the Manchurian Incident, “Sen'y” had made phrases such as “red setting sun” (akai yhi) and “hundreds of leagues from home” (koko wa mikuni o nanbyaku ri) common epithets for Manchuria. Revived in 1931, “Sen'y” reminded Japanese of the importance of defending their foothold in Northeast China. Representing Manchuria as the site of loss, the place where fathers, brothers, and comrades in arms died in heroic sacrifice, the “Sen'y” revival strengthened the sense of connection that the lifeline was coming to represent. Manchuria must be defended, for it was all that the Japanese had left of the loved ones they mourned.

Such personalized narratives of loss were linked, invariably, with sacrifice for the nation. In “Sen'y” this was conveyed by the reference to the flag. In “Manchuria March.” the hit song of 1932, it was suggested with a verse that made Manchuria into a national monument to the Russo-Japanese War dead:

Look over at the war memorial!

There the bones of our heroes,

Dead in the war between Japan and Russia,

Are long buried.

Stained with a red river of blood,

The evening sun shines upon it,

Soaring high over the endless plain.¹⁰²

Here the personal loss of a comrade in arms was generalized to the national loss of “our heroes.” Their interment transformed Manchuria into a national (family) graveyard, while the “river of blood” marked Japan's claim to Manchurian soil. Identifying Manchuria with the Russo-Japanese War, songs like “Manchuria March” made the lifeline into a metaphor for shared sacrifice and provided a blood claim to Manchurian territory.

Such blood imperatives to defend the Manchurian lifeline were also phrased in terms of a blood debt to the Russo-Japanese War generation. Employing a familiar Confucian vocabulary of familial obligation, appeals to the blood debt circulated in the mass media in 1931–1933 suggested that the young owed it to their parents to protect the Manchurian empire. A reader's poem (senry) published in the popular magazine Kingu depicted service on the Manchurian battlefront forging a special bond between father and son: “Remembering Manchuria with a full heart/he leaves the warmth of the fire/to see his first born off to Manchuria.”¹⁰³ Such words implied that the Manchurian Incident was, in effect, a replay of the Russo-Japanese War. This, of course, was an absurd suggestion, for engagement with an ill-equipped and poorly financed warlord force (most of which was not resisting Japanese occupation militarily) was in no way comparable to facing the full strength of the tsar's army and navy. Poetic license aside, the point of such appeals was to elicit a reenactment of the outpouring of patriotic sacrifice for which the Russo-Japanese War was also remembered.

Public memories linking the Russo-Japanese War to the Manchurian Incident fashioned Manchuria into a generational lifeline, connecting past and present and passing the burden of guardianship from father to son, from one generation to the next. A tribute to the first war dead published in Kingu singled out Captain Kuramoto for special mention because of such a family connection: “First the father in the Russo-Japanese War and now the son in the present incident, their heroic bones abandoned to the elements on the Manchurian plain.”¹⁰⁴ The notion of a generational lifeline also resonated with the doctrine of the family-state, the idea that all Japanese were part of one national family under the paternity of the emperor. Legally sanctioned in the Meiji constitution and promoted through the educational system, its moral prescriptions of “loyalty and patriotism” called for obedience to emperor and nation as an expression of familial piety. The idea of blood debt evoked in the Manchurian Incident war fever wedded patriotic duty toward this metaphoric national family with the personal feelings of obligation toward friends and family.

In addition to these popular images of a line of blood and spirit that indebted the living to the dead and bound them to defend Manchuria, the lifeline came to symbolize an economic umbilical chord as well. Unlike the Russo-Japanese War images, the language of economic security was a new addition to the imperial lexicon. Since before the turn of the century, apostles of empire advocated the promotion of Japanese shipping to and trade with Korea and China, pointing to the links between commercial competitiveness and international prestige.¹⁰⁵ But at that stage the economic importance of empire was conceived in terms of export markets. When the experience of World War I taught military planners the value of colonies as import markets, Japanese began to evaluate the empire as a resource base for industrial production.¹⁰⁶ This new appreciation of colonies as a source of strategic imports was reinforced by the initiation of large-scale rice imports from Korea and Taiwan after the rice riots of 1918. For the first time, Japan was dependent on the colonies for domestic food consumption.

The mass media discourse on Manchuria in 1931–1933 defined the lifeline in this new economic language of empire. Articles in best-selling magazines like Kingu and le no hikari called Manchuria a “bottomless treasurehouse,” referring to its “unlimited land” and “inexhaustible resources.” In short, it was the “key to the national economy.”¹⁰⁷ In the newly popularized vision of Northeast China, the empire was represented in terms of a resource base necessary for Japan's economic security, or even its economic survival. For a people mired in depression, the image of an economic lifeline was a powerful symbol, speaking to their hopes of an elixir as well as their fears of a fall.

An illustrated map in Kingu showed Manchuria as a cornucopia of resources. From the ground emerged heaps of iron ore, glinting mountains of gold, and smoky piles of coal. The endless plain teemed with livestock: galloping horses, lowing cows, roaming camels, and grazing sheep. The rich earth yielded soybeans, cotton, wheat, sorghum, barley, and countless other grains. When Japan unlocked the treasurehouse, these articles optimistically predicted, abundance would wash over Japan's shores.¹⁰⁸

An essay entitled “The Resources of the Manchurian-Mongolian Warehouse” explained to readers that Manchuria represented a “new paradise [shintenchi] for Japanese industrial expansion” and held endless tracts of “land waiting to be cultivated.” Quantifying Manchuria's bounty, the article described a natural wonderland that was “the world's leading producer of soybeans,” and generated every year “10 million koku of wheat,” “36 million koku of sorghum,” “2.7 million head of cattle,” “3.5 million horses,” “4.6 million sheep,” and other vast amounts of produce and livestock. Manchuria was a great underground reservoir of “the builders of civilization—iron and coal”; a wealth of timber awaited the razing of Manchuria's “expansive virgin forests.” Summing it up, the author declared, “Manchuria-Mongolia is a truly boundless natural field [kbakutaru ten-nen no yokuya] now waiting to be exploited.”¹⁰⁹

The maps, the cartoons, and the statistics brought home to readers that Manchurian resources were the key to their livelihood and their prosperity. At the same time, they popularized an embryonic notion of imperial autarky. Stressing Japan's poverty of resources and dependency on imports from Europe and the United States, the media introduced fears of economic blackmail into the language of imperialism.¹¹⁰ In such a world, control over Manchurian resources represented a safeguard of Japanese independence.

The “lifeline” was a metaphor with many resonances. It was appealing as a rallying cry in 1931 because it effectively tapped public memories of the imperial past and at the same time spoke to the economic insecurities of the present. Joining past to present, the construction of Manchuria as a lifeline wove new themes into the existing fabric of imperial ideology. Older notions of a blood debt and the sense that Japanese had paid dearly for their empire in the Northeast were joined to newer conceptions of the economic imperatives of empire for the survival of an industrial nation. The images of the lifeline thus bound Manchuria to Japan within an organic definition of empire: Japan could sooner lose Manchuria than a person could survive the evisceration of a vital organ. Manchuria was being culturally reshaped into the heart of the empire.

COWARDLY CHINESE AND WESTERN BULLIES

The redefinition of the ties that bound Japan to Manchuria was only one of the themes that emerged out of the imperial jingoism of the early thirties. The call to arms also invoked in Japan the idea of racial “others,” the categories of people against which Japanese constructed their own national identity. From the Meiji period, Japanese had conceived of international relations within a hierarchy of race, culture, and power. Acutely sensitive to Japan's place in the system, they looked upon their burgeoning empire as a manifestation of superiority over other Asian countries and a project of “catch-up” with the West. As Japanese imperialism entered a new phase in the 1930s, the imperial discourse on self and other became more overtly chauvinistic, expressing race hates and race fears vociferously. While their troops were overrunning Manchuria, the Japanese told themselves: we fight because we are better than the Chinese and because we are not afraid of the West. In these fictionalized battlefield encounters, Japanese projected inferior qualities onto racial others to accommodate a more aggressive and confrontational style of empire building.

Resentment that Chinese dared to snatch from Japanese hands the precious Manchurian lifeline was quickly transformed into victory euphoria as news of the fall of city after city came in over the wires. These seemingly effortless victories unleashed a wave of self-congratulatory articles about the drubbing Japan was giving China and about the ineptitude of the Chinese soldiery. The point of reference for this outpouring of abuse was the first Sino-Japanese War. As Donald Keene has shown, the war of 1894–1895 marked a turning point in Japanese views of China. Throughout most of Japanese history, China was held as an object of emulation; Chinese civilization was revered as the wellspring of Japanese culture. And although cultural reverence for China was shaken by the specter of China's humiliation during the Opium War and new competing cultural models from the West, as late as 1890 the visit of the Chinese fleet to Japan inspired fear and respect. All this changed, however, in the course of a war that engendered for China a passionate contempt and hatred.¹¹¹

The ferocity of the war hates did not completely erase the centuries-old tradition of venerating China, embedded in a variety of Sinified artistic, philosophical, scholarly, and other cultural practices. Japanese attitudes toward their erstwhile model of civilization remained filled with ambivalences and contradictions. The scorn showered on the Chinese national character in 1931–1933 represented a new stage in the project of reconciling these ambivalences: producers of Japanese culture seemed determined to wipe out lingering feelings of cultural debt with a concentrated burst of vituperation.

Popular representations of the occupation labored to cast the Chinese in the worst possible light. Incessant boasting about the “200,000 Chinese against 10,000 Japanese” took no notice of Jiang Jieshi's widely advertised nonresistance policy. Transforming this statistic into an index of China's martial deficiency, popular magazines gave rise to a sense that each Japanese soldier was worth twenty of the enemy's.¹¹² As major military targets such as Fengtian and Jilin were occupied virtually without bloodshed, magazines like Shnen kurabu transformed voluntary withdrawal, voluntary disarmament and other forms of nonresistance into cowardly and disorganized retreats. Resurrecting Sino-Japanese War images of Chinese cowardice, stories about the Incident invariably showed Chinese soldiers in the act of “bolting,” “escaping,” “running off,” “hiding,” or, as the favorite phrase had it, “fleeing pell-mell like scattering spider babies” (kumo no ko chirasu y ni nigemadotte imasu).113 Hearsay from an unidentified “eyewitness” reported the witness's surprise to see “officers creep out from under the floors” when the Japanese Army “set fire to the Chinese barracks to smoke-out hiding enemy soldiers.” Such stories provided the evidence that nurtured the legend of the Chinese coward.¹¹⁴

The notion that the enemy did not fight fair added another dimension to the picture. One article on “The Chinese Soldier in Manchuria” explained that “bandit soldiers” were “just like flies, no sooner do you drive them off but they come right back out again.” This construction of the enemy as outlaw did not date to the Sino-Japanese War, but drew rather on vocabularies of repression in Korea. Just as military authorities in Korea blamed “thieves and criminals” for stirring up anti-Japanese riots in 1907–1909 and “lawless elements” for the March 1 uprising of 1919, in Manchuria in 1931, the Chinese enemy was likened to “a gang of thugs.” Worse still, continued the article, were “soldiers out of uniform,” “nuisances” who disguised themselves as ordinary Chinese and sneaked about causing trouble. “Because the Chinese Army loses if it fights in an open and sportsmanlike manner,” concluded the author, “it uses this cowardly method to harass the Japanese Army.”¹¹⁵

Ultimate proof for this judgment was provided, according to popular wisdom, by China's appeal for League of Nations mediation in the Sino-Japanese dispute. A cartoon entitled “The Contest between the Monkey and the Crab over Manchuria” rearranged events to show that China attempted diplomacy only after it lost the war. The cartoon used a popular Japanese folktale about a farsighted crab and a greedy monkey to tell the story of the Sino-Japanese dispute. The original tale begins with a trade; the monkey talks the crab into surrendering a rice cake in exchange for the monkey's persimmon seed. The monkey eats the cake; the crab plants the seed; and the real trouble begins when the crab's carefully tended garden bears a fine, fruit-laden persimmon tree. It is at this point that the cartoon picks up the story, picturing the monkey (China) attempting to steal the fruit of the persimmon tree (South Manchuria) belonging to the crab (Japan). After knocking down several business-suited crabs, the monkey starts chopping at the tree with an ax. At this point the long-suffering crab “finally exploded” and “shoved the monkey's red behind.” The next frame showed a tearful monkey complaining of his mistreatment to the “animal conference.”¹¹⁶ This was the sequence of events that structured the popular narrative of the Manchurian Incident. In the words of a schoolboy the moral of the story was: “Japan is good at war. China didn't win so they brought the issue to the League of Nations.”¹¹⁷

This unflattering portrait of the Chinese character was rounded off with an account of easy corruptability Again, this image was not a Sino-Japanese War construction, but had emerged in the course of the teens and twenties and reflected as much on the Japanese inclination toward corruption as it did on the putative dishonesty of the Chinese. Bribing their way through a string of warlord allies, Japanese agents in China sold their patronage for the biggest concession and sold out their erstwhile clients when a better offer came along. Perceived, ironically, as an indication of Chinese venality, the actions of Japan's China hands became the basis for a reevaluation of the Chinese national character. The mercenary theme was given wide play in 1931–1933. An article on “ordinary crimes of bribery and betrayal” illustrated the character of the Chinese soldiers with a drawing of two Chinese warlords, one with a giant “money” magnet pulling the army off the other warlord's weaker magnet. The accompanying text read, “Civil wars occur often in China but it is rare for these conflicts to be resolved by a decisive military victory. Rather, victory is decided through one side purchasing the betrayal of the enemy with money.…According to Japan's code of war it is shameful to allow yourself to be bought off by the enemy” but Chinese change sides “the minute they are handed some money”¹¹⁸

Moreover, just as Sino-Japanese War writers had contrasted Japanese progress with Chinese backwardness, during the Manchurian Incident Japanese took pride in their own patriotism and derided the self-absorbed indifference of the Chinese masses to the fate of the nation. The popular travel writer Got Asatar frequently commented on the absence of national feeling among the Chinese. “Chinese coolies,” wrote Got in 1932, “are happy to build sandbags for the Japanese Army because they can get money for it. The next day they sit atop the sandbags, drinking sorghum wine and watching their own soldiers being destroyed by the Japanese, saying ‘Wow! Look at that!’”¹¹⁹

Drawing on paternalistic vocabularies from the colonial experience in Korea and Taiwan, magazines and newspapers drew a careful distinction between the cowardly and corrupt Chinese soldiers and those they called the “good people” (rymin). As a schoolboy expressed it, “Japan isn't fighting all of China. Just these evil soldiers.”¹²⁰ During the pacification of Korea in 1907, a general in charge observed that the upper classes were the real enemy because “the lower class has been oppressed by officials and the upper class and will come to see Japanese officials as protectors of the people.”¹²¹ Similar constructions of oppressive officials and underclasses in need of Japanese rescue emerged in descriptions of the Manchurian Incident. Some accounts showed rymin welcoming the Japanese Army as liberators, grateful to be rescued from the clutches of “marauding bandits” and “venal warlords.”¹²² In “Battlefield Story,” one Japanese soldier declared that although he spared no mercy toward the “vile Chinese soldiers,” the “pathetic sight of innocent rymin or a starving child” moved him to give up his own rations.¹²³

In spite of such distinctions, as stories circulated by returning soldiers conveyed to the home population, actually telling enemy from friend in the war zone was a difficult problem. One magazine discussion among Manchurian Incident veterans devoted considerable time to this issue. “Even though we are told not to kill rymin, you just can't tell them apart,” confessed one soldier. Another added, “You wouldn't believe the number of Chinese who are really soldiers. You can basically consider anyone on the street in Manchuria a plainclothes soldier. They say in Jinzhou alone there were more than 300,000 of them.” Under these circumstances, the soldiers explained, they had developed a simple technique for telling friend from foe: “When you see someone coming you put your gun on them. If they cry or run away, they're rymin. If they put their hands up, you know they're soldiers in urban dress.” But as one personal anecdote demonstrated, you could never be too careful.

Everybody thinks that only men are plainclothes soldiers. But there are women, kids…all kinds.…Once a young woman of twenty-two or twenty-three came up to me looking very friendly. There in front of her house stood a crippled old grandmother, again smiling in a friendly way; naturally I thought they were rymin. But then I had a bad feeling about one of them and I shouted out a warning. The old woman ran hobbling off. I strip searched the girl…she couldn't understand me so I gestured with my hands.…Underneath her clothes she was wearing two pairs of panties. Hidden inside, sure enough, there was a pistol. I did not want to kill her but she tried to hit me with the gun and that was why she died. She said something abusive before she died. Afterwards I felt sorry for her but at the time if I did not handle it right I would have been done for. I was provoked.¹²⁴

Such words revealed the intensity of the fear and mistrust that Japanese directed at Chinese in occupied Manchuria. The anecdote recounted the story of an atrocity: the murder of a Chinese woman. It communicated to the home front the bullying and terrorization of the civilian population that was standard operating procedure during the occupation; Chinese life was held cheap. The matter-of-fact retelling of this story in a popular magazine showed that to the soldiers, the editors, and probably the audience, the murder was unexceptional. In this way, the brutality of imperialism made its practitioners brutal, both the soldiers who actually wielded the bayonettes and the cultural consumers who took part vicariously in the violence.

In the context of the war fever, the assault on the Chinese national character helped reconstitute the idea of “China” in the Japanese popular imagination. As they had over and again in the past, Japanese reworked the symbolic meaning of their relationship with China, a country that had in elemental ways given shape to Japan's own culture. In the latest phase of this process, the new imperialism of the 1930s refigured the Chinese “other” in several ways. The new racial contempt for China produced by the war fever helped to cover over any lingering sense of cultural debt that stood in the way of empire building on the continent. Moreover, by fostering race hates, the new views of China portrayed in the mass media inured people to the brutality of imperial warfare and accustomed them to hearing about increasingly violent encounters with Chinese. Since the Meiji period, pejorative racial depictions of China had provided a foil against which Japan constructed its own national identity. To this end, the disparaging racial portrayals of the Chinese soldiers that circulated in the early 1930s represented indirect encomiums to the Japanese character, helping reforge a national identity appropriate to a more aggressive military imperialism. Go-fast imperialism, in short, required high-growth racism.

This process also affected images of Japan's other salient “other”: the West. Thus, while tall tales of Chinese cowardice circulated and Japanese congratulated themselves on their own legendary military prowess, strong criticism from the West invoked shrill denunciations of outside pressure and assertions of seigi, or the righteousness of Japan's actions. Like the outpouring of hostility toward China, the force of this reaction emerged out of a long history of ambivalence toward the West. From the time of Perry's gunboats, as the nation fought and maneuvered to gain entry to the Western club of great powers, Japanese had both feared and admired the West. The eighty-year-old relationship was productive of a host of insults and accolades, and Japanese were acutely sensitive to each. Popular representations of the League controversy of 1931–1933 drew on this catalog of grievances, even as the outrage masked long-standing desires for Western approval and fears of diplomatic isolation. But as Japan moved to occupy Manchuria in the teeth of Western opposition and isolate itself diplomatically by withdrawing from the League, this paradigmatic shift in a foreign policy posture led to a fundamental reconstruction of the idea of the West.

Scores of articles in such unlikely sources as the farm-household magazine le no hikari gave a blow-by-blow account of the Sino-Japanese controversy in the League. While glossaries of new terms explained the meaning of “extraterritoriality,” the “nine-power treaty,” and the “Kellogg-Briand Pact,” and told readers that the popular nickname for the Lytton Commission Report was “lack of understanding” (ninshiki busoku), reports on the diplomacy of the Manchurian Incident exaggerated the extent of international hostility.¹²⁵ Long experience with racial discrimination by Europeans, Americans, and British colonists in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand led Japanese to interpret Western diplomatic opposition in racial terms. “From first to last the League did not flinch from its anti-Japanese stance,” reported le no hikari. “This is the predictable outcome of the current control of the League by the white race.”¹²⁶ Although the sense of racial isolation was nothing new, its inflation into a seemingly insurmountable obstacle was. During the Paris Peace Conference that followed World War I, Japanese diplomats had pushed hard for the inclusion of a racial equality clause in the covenant of the League of Nations. Their defeat evoked much anger in the Japanese press, but bitter feelings were tempered by victory on the two key conference demands: recognition of Japanese acquisition of former German rights in China's Shandong province and the Pacific Islands.¹²⁷ In the past, the racial gulf between Japan and the Western powers was regarded as an aggravation to be countered by skilled diplomacy. In 1931, it became the explanation for the failure of Japanese diplomacy.

The specter of a solid phalanx of white powers united against Japan led to gloomy scenarios of economic blackmail and worse. An article analyzing the diplomacy of anti-Japanism explained that the League resolutions of the fall of 1931 “treated Japan just like a burglar…and isolated poor Japan from the world.” Although sanctions had never been seriously discussed at the League, the mass media imagined a worst-case scenario and reported that council resolutions censuring Japan's actions threatened the country with an “international economic blockade if she did not withdraw her troops.”¹²⁸ In such day-by-day micro-reporting of the events at the League, a new picture emerged of Japan's relationship with Western powers. Since its founding, Japanese had felt proud of their membership on the League Council: Japan was a player in the great power club. In the context of the early thirties, this image changed. Now the League became an institution controlled by white powers who bullied and isolated Japan.

The reformulation of Japan's relationship with the Western powers in a framework of confrontation and hostility was reinforced by a flood of images of an impending conflict between the United States and Japan. A boom in war-scare literature with titles like “If Japan Should Fight” were filled with portentous references to “war clouds in the far east” and warned that it was only a matter of time before the “unavoidable clash between America and Japan.”¹²⁹ In 1932 alone, seventeen books and thirty-six articles in leading journals appeared on the subject of a coming war with the United States. War scares had been a reoccurring feature of the Japanese-American relationship since before the turn of the century, and the twenties had witnessed two of them. Both the 1919–1921 and the 1924–1925 scares were set off by a combination of naval rivalries and tension over American legislation against Japanese immigration. Though the announcement in May 1932 that the U.S. Atlantic Scouting Fleet would be stationed in the Pacific helped trigger a new war scare,¹³⁰ the real source of Japanese-American antagonism in 1932 and 1933 was Japan's invasion of China. In the past, predictors of war had imagined such a conflict might arise from the struggle for naval supremacy in the Pacific or racial antagonisms. Now a battle for control over China was included in the hypothetical landscape of war.

While war-scare literature exaggerated the Western threat, at the same time popular magazines seemed to spare no effort to deflate public fears of reprisals. In this way the thinly veiled anxiety behind the anti-Western bluster manifested itself in a contradictory tendency first to inflate the extent of the threat and then to minimize its significance. Participants in an illustrated roundtable discussion on Japan's withdrawal from the League in the April 1933 issue of Kingu dismissed the war bogey. “I cannot imagine sanctions leading to war,” an army officer was quoted as saying. Another participant pointed out that since the United States was dependent on Japanese imports it would never apply sanctions. A cartoon illustration of a worried Uncle Sam trying to work out the costs of sanctions on an abacus was accompanied by the explanation, “to lose Japan's silk imports would mean a tremendous shock to the American textile industry.” Another drawing, noting that a loss of the Japanese cotton market would “cause a drastic fall in cotton prices and hurt farmers which make up half the American population,” symbolically rendered American suffering in the image of a mother, breasts bursting, watching in agony as her infant suckled contentedly at his own bottle. The caption read: “The country that imposes economic sanctions is the one who suffers.”¹³¹ These cartoon images conveyed the message that Japan's trading relationship with the United States implied interdependency. If Japan, like the infant, was vulnerable, then so was the more powerful American economy.

Such discussions incorporated new ideas of autarky and economic warfare into imperial rhetoric. In the past, fears of diplomatic isolation had rested on the specter of military coercion. Now they included economic pressures as well. Turning rhetorical somersaults to quell fears of outside pressures, the same Kingu journalist argued that even if the United States applied sanctions, with a few substitutions and “national will,” overcoming trade dependence on food, oil, cotton, and so forth “would not be difficult.” This point was driven home with the cartoon of a farmer seated at a traditional Japanese meal of fish, soup, and rice, and turning his back on an elegant Western-style repast. “Self-sufficiency is plenty” announced the smiling farmer.¹³²

A special feature asking “What will happen to Japan after it withdraws from the League?” answered comfortingly that “Japan will not suffer in the least. The one that will suffer is the League itself.…Japan's withdrawal will cause the League to lose power and influence.” Moreover, Japan's isolation would not last, for “before long one of the great powers will adopt a policy of allying with Japan. The white powers in the League united against Japan, but they have divergent interests. Even the U.S. and England, which now seem to be fast friends, are in fact at great odds with one another. It is extremely disadvantageous for great powers with interests in the Far East to look on Japan as a permanent enemy. Therefore they will use every opportunity to draw closer to Japan in the future.”¹³³ In fact, concluded one observer, the only effect of withdrawal would be to liberate Japan. In a cartoon illustrating this point, a Japanese samurai used his sword of “righteousness” {seigi) to sever the chain tying him to an iron ball representing the League of Nations.¹³⁴ Such language telegraphed a message of defiant isolationism, conveying to the Japanese public the virtues of Japan's withdrawal from the Western club of imperialists.

In mass-media coverage of the diplomacy of the Manchurian Incident, the alternating inflation and deflation of the Western threat was mirrored by a depiction of Japan's foreign policy posture as powerless and reactive, then defiant and strong. Illustrating the reactive face, one cartoon showed Japan and China on the League of Nations boat. As China labored to steer the boat toward the shoals of “withdrawal,” Japan frantically tried to keep the boat away from the shoals.¹³⁵ At the same time, the recurrent image of a solitary Japanese soldier standing guard, his bayonet held aloft, expressed a mood of grim bravado. Accompanying one such illustration, the Kingu poem “Attack Us Head On” captured the sense of defiant isolationism with which popular writers greeted the news that the League had voted against Japan in February 1933:

We stood against forty-two

And were defeated.

What is defeat, we are just!

That is right, that is right,

We are just.

Enemy, if you come, attack us head on.

Attack us head on!¹³⁶

In illustrations and songs like these, the mass media conveyed a powerful set of messages to their audience concerning the current foreign crisis. Sanctioning Japan's new diplomatic isolation, the mass media depicted the nation driven by forces beyond its control: Japan was compelled to take a stand—and would stand alone. At a stage in which diplomatic repercussions of the invasion of China remained at the level of moral censure, the mass media told a story of Japan single-handedly taking on a mighty host of Western armies. The choice of military metaphors to represent a diplomatic conflict was a highly significant element in the reimagining of the West. As their government was shifting gears into go-fast imperialism, Japanese began to prepare themselves for the possibility of war.

Neither anti-Western bombast nor derision of the Chinese was new to Japanese imperial rhetoric, but they came together with an explosive force and all-inclusiveness in the new xenophobia of the early thirties. It is important to add, however, that the continued popularity of such Western cultural imports as movies, music, and literature placed certain limits on the usefulness of anti-foreignism as a strategy for mobilization. Moreover, Japanese imported not just finished products, but the cultural forms that produced them. Adapting Western forms, they incorporated them into native practices. Like the cultural borrowing from China that had occurred over the centuries, Western influence could not be expunged by a burst of hostility. For a heavily Sinified and Westernized Japan, criticism of the Chinese and Western other quickly ran into criticism of the self. In the Western case particularly, contradictions between the new images of racial confrontation and the continued embrace of Western culture led to a series of private and government initiatives to eliminate Western cultural influence, culminating in the prohibitions on certain styles of dress and loan words during the Pacific War.¹³⁷ And, like the outbreak of war itself, these campaigns against Western decadence were anticipated in the reimagining of the West that took place during the Manchurian Incident war fever.

THE HEROIC SELF

While rehguring racial others to accommodate the new realities of empire, mass-media images of the Japanese self redefined the meaning of patriotism to fit the new era. This was accomplished through the outpouring of Manchurian Incident bidan, or “tales of heroism,” in the press, popular magazines, and on stage and screen. A traditional form of moral storytelling that celebrated doing good deeds, bidan rendered the Incident in the light of personal experiences. These fictionalized experiences of imperial warfare were shaped, like the real ones, by gender. Hence one genre of bidan celebrated male heroism on the battlefield, while another eulogized female sacrifice on the home front. Together, these war-fever bidan reformulated the idea of patriotism in two striking ways.

The first of these concerned the extraordinary preoccupation of battlefield bidan with death. Death provided the dramatic center of the stories, and patriotic heroism was defined by martyrdom through death. In pursuit of the martyred hero, bidan exaggerated incidents of battlefield death in the Manchurian Incident. Although casualties during some engagements were high, there seemed to be many more bodies littering the fictionalized field of battle. The 2,530 total Japanese military deaths in the Manchurian Incident (compiled between September 1931 and July 1933) constituted a tiny fraction of those killed in the earlier wars. It certainly did not prepare people for the slaughter that was to come: 185,647 were killed in the China War between 1937 and 1941.¹³⁸ The comparatively low death tolls of the Manchurian Incident permitted the storytellers in the mass media to glibly kill off their heroes in large numbers. Much like hyperbolic accounts of the Western pressures on Japan, these depictions of untold carnage in battlefield bidan unwittingly prepared the nation for the days to come.

The second element in the reformulation of patriotism related to the idea of sacrifice for the nation. In 1931, vocabularies of sacrifice could draw on any number of venerable traditions. The virtues of self-sacrifice for family and village were stock in trade for rural agrarian improvers; ef-facement of individual desires for the collective good constituted a pillar of Confucian morality. Bushid (the way of the warrior) exhorted sacrifice on the battlefield for men, and the official prescription of female virtue, rysai kenb (good wife, wise mother), urged sacrifice to the family for women. But this impressive tradition was matched by the equally venerable idea of individualistic competition, emerging from Meiji dreams of rising in the world and Darwinian metaphors of a struggle for survival.¹³⁹ In the 1920s, both the growth of consumer culture and the increasingly fierce competition for middle-class educational and employment opportunities favored the latter doctrine of self-improvement and personal success. As factory workers were demanding better pay and tenant farmers lower rents, the calls to obey social superiors and sacrifice for the collective good fell increasingly on deaf ears.

The Manchurian Incident bidan rescued this embattled tradition of sacrifice. Relating experiences of both soldier and housewife, bidan told Japanese that uncommon valor on the battlefield and extraordinary sacrifice on the home front were the highest expression of national virtue. Ironically, such appeals to sacrifice were framed, not in homilies about Japanese groupism, but in the language of personal glory and individualistic competition. Since it is frequently argued that group psychology and ideologies of collectivism played a key role in the mobilization of support for war and fascism in the 1930s,¹⁴⁰ it is worth underscoring the individualistic and competitive dimensions of imperial mythology in the early 1930s.

Among the crowd of martyred manly heroes that jostled for attention was Regimental Commander Koga Dentaro. As part of the “mopping-up” operations following the occupation of Jinzhou in early January 1932, Koga's cavalry regiment had occupied the walled city of Jinxi, southwest of Jinzhou. After a large “bandit” force attempted to retake Jinxi, Koga determined, against orders, that he would mount his own attack. Impatient for action, he was unwilling to stand guard over the city and wait passively for reinforcements. Leaving a platoon of some 21 men at Jinxi to guard the flag, Koga took the remaining 130 men with him to attack a force of over 1,000. Although Koga's forces soon found themselves in desperate difficulties, upon hearing that the flag-guarding platoon was in danger, Koga split his forces again, taking half to rescue the flag and leaving the rest to “hold off the enemy.” In the end this reckless course of action accomplished nothing and cost the regiment virtually all its officers, leaving Koga and 11 others dead and 19 wounded.¹⁴¹ Yet Koga became one of the most celebrated heroes of the Manchurian Incident. His story was the subject of a naniwabushi chant on the Polidor label, of Tkatsu and Shink movies, and was staged by the famous Tokyo Kokuza Theater.¹⁴² Told and retold countless times in every popular entertainment medium, the Koga bidan glorified his actions as those of the archetype of military heroism.

In an illustrated version published in the boy's magazine Shnen kur-abu, “Ah! The Imperial Flag Is in Danger,” the suicidal attack on the “bandit army” (which had multiplied into a force of 5,000) was depicted as an act of courage and daring. Without mentioning Koga's insubordination, Shnen kurabu narrated the bidan as a series of glorious last stands at Jinxi. At each stage another band of Japanese soldiers—cut off from their comrades and hopelessly outnumbered—fought to the death to protect the flag. While the story exalted sacrifice for the nation (in the symbol of the flag), it did so by celebrating individual acts of heroism. In sequence, each of these last stands grew more dramatic and heroic. They were, in effect, a kind of competition: the reader moved up the tournament ranks, finally witnessing Koga's triumph—the most glorious act of heroism.¹⁴³

This spirit of competitive sacrifice set Manchurian Incident bidan apart from their predecessors. The principal heroes to emerge from the Sino-Japanese War were Harada Jkichi, who scaled the Gembu gate and let the Japanese forces into Pyongyang; Kiguchi Khei, the bugler who blew the forward charge with his dying breath; and the unknown sailor who extinguished a shipboard fire and died asking whether the enemy ship was yet sunk. These stories celebrated the gallantry of the conscript soldiers who composed the new Japanese army and who became the heroes of the Japanese masses.¹⁴⁴ Unlike the Koga story, which eulogized a series of futile acts of bravado, the Sino-Japanese War stories depicted sacrifice that positively affected the outcome of the war. Thus, Harada Jkichi became a hero when he helped the army occupy Pyongyang, while Koga sacrificed himself and his men trying to retake a flag (and a city) that his own reckless impatience had placed in danger.

Although the heroes of the Russo-Japanese War—Nogi Maresuke, Tg Heihachir, Tachibana Shta, Hirose Takeo, and the emperor himself—were, like Koga, all officers, their stories celebrated different qualities of great leadership. Hirose Takeo, for example, was heroized for his paternal benevolence when he was killed searching for a missing sailor under his command. Similarly, the Meiji Emperor was honored for expressing his concern for his troops and his subjects in an alleged 7,526 poems written during the war. In the stories that circulated about Hirose and the emperor, Russo-Japanese War heroes were portrayed as paragons of solicitude.¹⁴⁵ In contrast, Koga's cavalier attitude toward his soldiers’ lives suggested that good leadership had nothing to do with compassion but required, conversely, ruthlessness and a steely indifference to battlefield losses. In the daring, even foolhardy Koga great leadership was defined as the willingness to take risks; concern for his troops would have interfered with this quality of leadership. Heroes of the Russo-Japanese War were also risk-takers, but combined daring with tactical expertise. Thus, Tg Heihachir and Nogi Maresuke were famed for being brilliant officers who commanded key campaigns of the war—Tg defeating the Russian Baltic fleet and Nogi leading the siege of Lüshun. In contrast, Koga managed to bungle an assignment of guard duty in a minor operation. But this did not matter, because Manchurian Incident bidan redefined the meaning of heroic leadership, celebrating daring instead of skill, and bravery rather than wisdom.

Both the Sino-Japanese War stories, which focused on the heroism of the fighting man, and those of the Russo-Japanese War, which highlighted the heroism of leadership, depicted heroic sacrifice as part of a collective effort. Whether the story concentrated on the officer and his men or the soldier and his unit, the context of action was the army group that drove purposively and inexorably toward victory In the Sino- and Russo-Japanese war bidan the image of the Japanese group was harmonious, a fighting organism united in mind, spirit, and purpose. In contrast, the narrative in the Koga bidan split the group into pieces, atomizing acts of heroism into a series of independent, uncoordinated operations. Each man fought to be the one who saved the flag; each strove for a more sensational act of sacrifice than the last; each sought a more heroic death. In the process the meaning of patriotism shifted from sacrifice for the group to the competitive strength of the individual.

Like other battlefield bidan, Koga's story conveyed the message that sacrifice through death was the only path to virtue. Unlike the earlier war heroes, many of whom survived their campaigns, no hero of the Manchu-rian Incident outlived his moment of glory. Rendered with images like “crimson-stained snow” and the “glittering face of death,” or by the traditional metaphor of a “fallen cherry blossom,” death was transformed in these bidan into a symbol of poignant beauty.¹⁴⁶ The Shnen kurabu version of the Koga bidan departed from this convention and described Koga's last moments under the caption “The Command That Was Vomited with Blood.” This decidedly unbeauteous yet arresting image of Koga's dying visage left the reader with a brutally powerful visual impression. In Koga's story, man was transformed to hero at the moment of death. It was in death that Koga earned his posthumous title, idaina hitobashira (a great human sacrifice). Sacrifice in the line of duty provided both the dramatic climax to and the aesthetic heart of Koga's story. Koga's last moments saw him hit and fallen, only to raise himself on his sword point to issue the forward order.

The Commander looked so bad that the others stood blankly for a moment. Then suddenly, he was lurching up from between the bodies and they could hear his voice crying out mightily:

“Save the flag! Forward, forward!”

As he cried out blood spurted from his mouth and he slid to the ground. But again he pulled himself up on his sword point and forced out a raspy cry,

“Forward, forward…”

He continued thus three or four times more, falling and rising, rising and failing, till finally, face down on the grass, he moved no more.¹⁴⁷

In bidan, the moment of death was also the moment of victory. In Koga's story, this occurred when the flag was saved by one of his lieutenants. “Face dripping with enemy blood like some hideous red devil,” Lieutenant Oyadomari demanded, “the flag, how is the flag?” Upon learning it was safe with the platoon, Oyadomari gasped out his final words: “Safe? It's safe?…I…I…if the flag is safe then I can die.” While the others looked on, tears “cascading down their cheeks,” Oyadomari toppled over, secure in Japan's victory.¹⁴⁸ In this equation of victory with death, battlefield bidan yet again interwove the themes of personal glory, death, and patriotism. Thus, in saving the flag for his country, Oyadomari died even as he achieved his moment of personal glory. Strikingly absent from depictions of the heroism of men like Oyadomari were acts of bravery to save the lives of comrades, protect the platoon, or otherwise sacrifice the individual for the good of the group. Rather than promoting ideologies of groupism, these stories did precisely the opposite; the paeans to individual valor and the competition for heroic martyrdom called for patriotic sacrifice through appeals to personal glory and in ideological language of individualistic success.

While battlefield bidan showed manly young soldiers demonstrating their virtue by dying at the front, a separate genre of home-front bidan glorified the heroism of their female counterparts. National and local newspapers stirred up a bidan boom with a flurry of articles on acts of great personal sacrifice to support fundraising campaigns and other aspects of the war effort. In a typical example, an Osaka paper published the heartrending story of the donation made by a female textile worker. Although supporting two children and an aging parent on her paltry earnings, she managed to scrape together three yen (nearly a week's wage) to send to the front.¹⁴⁹ The point was not that the money helped anyone. The end result of such gestures was usually left vague, for the moral of the story was to convey the nobility of the sacrificial gesture itself.

Like the battlefield bidan, inspirational tales of home-front virtue made the degree of loss into a measure of national virtue. The greater the sacrifice, the greater the virtue. The story of an impoverished tenant farmer's wife published in Fujin kurabu illustrated one of the myriad female acts of virtue.¹⁵⁰ And like the Koga bidan, her story conveyed the nobility of sacrifice through the language of individualistic competition. The account began as an old woman arrived at a local police station with what was at the time the large sum of twenty yen. Donating the money to the war effort, she refused to give her name or have her generosity acknowledged in any way; but one of the policemen discovered who she was and learned of her tragic circumstances. Like the Osaka textile worker and thousands of other home-front heroines whose deeds were celebrated in newspapers and magazines, the story of the sacrificial act was framed in discovery. Though she had modestly sought anonymity, the reward for the farm wife's action was its revelation and that moment of fame granted by the spotlight of the mass media. In this way patriotic sacrifice was represented as a path to fame and glory, the route to patriotic stardom.

One of the main points of the story of our heroine was that throughout her long and sad life, she had staunchly refused to be a burden to others. When her second son was drafted and her husband and eldest son debilitated by illness, she was left with a fifteen-year-old daughter and a seventy-four-year-old mother to tend the farm. Still, she declined to accept any charity from the village authorities, saying, “Thank you for your kindness but it is an honor for my son to discharge his patriotic duty. No matter how difficult things are for us I cannot accept any money.” This refusal to accept community support flew in the face of the homilies of mutual aid delivered by agrarian-minded bureaucrats and ideologues for community voluntary organizations. No helpful neighbors leap in to help with planting or harvesting. Instead of surrendering to the harmonious group spirit of the village community, our heroine labors valiantly alone, solitary martyr to the national cause. Such narratives were entirely self-referential, constructing patriotic sacrifice as an expression of individual will rather than group spirit.

Moreover, in a reversal of the logic of the family-state, the nation was not represented as a metaphorical family, but rather the family as a metaphorical nation. Service to the nation was carried out within the family unit. In the farm wife's story, acts of patriotic sacrifice are inspired by the example of other family members. When her second son returned from a tour of duty in Manchuria on the eve of the Manchurian Incident, he too fell ill. Learning from his sickbed of the outbreak of war between Japan and China, he fretted that he could not be there “fighting the bandits and giving his life for his country.” Hearing this noble sentiment, his mother was moved to tears and could not rest until she made a gesture for the soldiers in Manchuria. Thereupon she took the entire family savings of twenty yen and donated it to the war cause. Significantly, such gestures did not aim to help one another but rather to make a grander display of patriotism—a game of suicidal one-upmanship in which each family member strove to outdo the other, competing for the greatest gesture of sacrifice.

By exaggerating personal demonstrations of patriotic sacrifice, such bidan promoted a peculiar vision of home-front support. Instead of exhorting people to work harder in order to increase domestic production in a time of crisis, the farm wife's story depicts the gradual evisceration of the household, leaving it a crippled, unproductive shell. After she disposed of the family savings, the farm wife's second son's condition worsened. On his death bed he took his sister's hand and apologized for being a worry to his family. “If only I could have died in Manchuria like my friend Okamoto,” he lamented. Conveying his dying wish that his sister “do something for the nation” in his place, the boy's final words were: “Goodbye Manchurian Garrison Army banzai!” In keeping with her brother's deathbed wish, the sister volunteered her services as a nurse at the front. This left the farm wife and her aged mother alone to support two invalids. The story concluded with the farm wife making her daily pilgrimage to the local shrine to pray for the safety of the imperial army. If every Japanese farm family followed this prescription for patriotic action, the nation would starve. Rather than promoting some vision of the nobility of tilling the soil and keeping the home hearths burning, this story is about a farm wife who allows her family farm to run to ruin while she and her family, one by one, succumb to the allure of Manchuria. All the glory is vested in Manchuria, patriotism projected onto the empire. At the end of the story, the farm wife ritually renews her gesture of patriotic sacrifice through prayer, still lost in a Manchurian dream.

Spinning tall tales of self-sacrifice, such home-front bidan created the domestic female version of battlefield heroes like Major Koga. In the contest to see who was the biggest martyr, pathos outshone pathos, tragedy overshadowed tragedy, and sacrifice outdid sacrifice. In this way the Manchurian Incident bidan boom promoted a new competitive-style patriotism that revived the virtue of sacrifice by making it a route to personal glory and success.

The bidan boom was but one symptom of the imperial jingoism that helped transform both the form and content of Japanese popular culture in the early 1930s. Beginning with the news media, a commercialized mass-culture industry took the opportunity—as it had in the past—to capitalize on the war in the interests of increasing circulation. In the process of using the war fever to expand the market for cultural manufactures, the mass media grew more technologically sophisticated and achieved a more thorough penetration of the national market. Such developments in the technologies and institutions of the culture industry helped contribute to the difference in scale between the war fever of 1931–1933 and the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese war fevers of an earlier age. In the intervening years between Japan's initial wars of empire and the Manchurian campaigns, the media had become progressively more mass. With mechanization and the shift toward mass production in newspaper, book, and magazine publishing, as well as the emergence of new media like radio, cinema, and records, the vehicles of imperial propaganda became infinitely more sophisticated. In this sense, massification gave to the media the power to constitute, to unify, and to mold a national opinion on imperialism.

The military imperialism initiated on September 18, 1931, spawned a new set of images of the Manchurian empire, and in the process helped transform the content of Japanese popular culture. Part reinvention and part new construction, the popular catchphrases on why Japan must fight became part of the active vocabulary of empire building. Although the ceasefire of May 1933 was followed by anti-insurgency military operations in Manchuria, mass media production of imperial propaganda never again achieved the intensity of those early years. This high-growth phase of cultural production created the first building blocks of the cultural edifice of Manchukuo, in which people at home learned to live and breathe their new empire. Appealing to people through narratives of familial obligation, xenophobia, consumerism, and competition, the first imagining of Manchukuo helped reshape the cultural practices of Taish democracy into Shwa militarism.

As this chapter has shown, the mass media played a central role in stimulating the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident war fever and mobilizing support for the new military imperialism. But powerful as it was, the media did not single-handedly bring about the shift away from a foreign policy supporting cooperation with Europe and the United States, disarmament, and economic imperialism in China. Reinforcing the transforming impact of the mass media were the activities of a host of other agents of empire, for military expansion in Manchuria also suited the interests of aspirants to political power and social status. It was their activities, which are the subject of the next chapter, that made Manchukuo into the policy of the government and the empire of the masses.

1. John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). On American imperialism and popular culture, see Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), and Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation; and on France, see William H. Schneider, An Empire for the Masses: The French Popular Image of Africa, 1870–1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982).

2. For newspaper readership and the expansion of the publishing market geographically and sociologically, see Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 169–174, 232–233.

3. The same survey shows much lower literacy rates for women: 63 percent of single women and 55 percent of women supporting households could not read. The data was originally reported in Tky-shi, Tky-shinai no kichin yado ni kansuru chsa (1923). Cited in Yamamoto Taketoshi, Kindai Nihon no shinbun dokushas (Hsei daigaku shuppankyoku, 1981), pp. 220–221.

4. The original survey was conducted by Naimusho eiseikyoku, Tky-shi Kybashi-ku Tsukishima ni okeru jitchi chsa hkoku (1921). Cited in Yamamoto Taketoshi, p. 225.

5. The survey of Tokyo working women was carried out by the Tokyo metropolitan government in 1924; nine hundred women were interviewed. The survey of miners was conducted at the Ashio copper mine in 1919; 1,200 households were interviewed. The farm village survey included forty-eight households and was carried out in 1934 by the Imperial Agricultural Association (Teikoku nokai). Since the village was located on the outskirts of Tokyo, subscriber rates were probably higher than the national average. The three surveys are discussed in Yamamoto Taketoshi, pp. 229–240.

6. Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, p. 171.

7. Yamamoto Taketoshi, p. 412.

8. Ibid., p. 273.

9. Minami Hiroshi and Shakai shinri kenkyjo, Taish bunka, 1905–1927 (Keis shob, 1987), p. 121.

10. Michael Lewis, Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 35.

11. Yamamoto Taketoshi, p. 271.

12. The original survey is: DaiNippon renmei seinendan, Zenkoku seinendan kihon chsa (1934). Cited in Yamamoto Taketoshi, p. 242.

13. Tyama's remark was made in a roundtable discussion on the Manchurian Incident originally published as “Manshu jihen gojunen no zadankai,” Keizai (September 1981). Quoted in Eguchi, jgonen sens no kaimaku, pp. 107–108.

14. D. Eleanor Westney, Imitation and Innovation: The Transfer of Western Organizational Patterns to Meiji Japan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 180–206, and Donald Keene, “The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and Japanese Culture,” in Donald Keene, Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture (Tokyo: Kdansha International, 1971), pp. 259–299.

15. I am indebted to Eguchi Keiichi for pointing out to me the central role of the big dailies in whipping up the war fever. See his “Mansh jihen to daishinbun,” Shis, no. 583 (January 1973), pp. 100–103.

16. The Osaka Asahi and Osaka Mainichi had long held the national lead in circulation figures, but not until the 1920s did their Tokyo editions overtake the decisive lead of the Hchi shinbun. The campaign to take over the Tokyo market followed both companies’ transformation from limited partnerships into joint stock companies after World War I, and was empowered by huge increases in capitalization. For example, Mainichi's capital rose from 500 thousand yen in 1919 to 5 million yen in 1924. For circulation figures of the major Osaka and Tokyo dailies, see Yamamoto Taketoshi, p. 412. For an account of the Mainichi and Asahi campaign against the Hchi shinbun, see Minami et al., Taish bunka, p. 127.

17. Ikei Masaru, “1930 nendai no masu media: Mansh jihen e no tai o chshin toshite,” in Miwa Kimitada, ed., Saik Taiheiy sens zen‘ya: Nihon no 1930 nendairon toshite (Sseiki, 1981), p. 144.

18. Minami Hiroshi and Shakai shinri kenkyjo, Shwa bunka, 1925–1945 (Keis shob, 1987), p. 262.

19. Abe Shingo, “Mansh jihen o meguru shinbungai,” Kaiz (November 1931), PP-36; Eguchi, “Mansh jihen to daishinbun,” p. 100.

20. Westney, p. 192.

21. Minami et al., Shwa bunka, p. 258.

22. Ikei, “1930 nendai,” pp. 143–144.

23. Abe Shingo, “Mansh jihen o meguru shinbungai,” Kaiz (November 1931), PP- 36–37.

24. Ikei, “1930 nendai,” pp. 146–147. For founding of NHK see Gregory J. Kasza, The State and Mass Media in ]apan, 1918–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 72–101.

25. Ikei, “1930 nendai,” p. 146.

26. Ibid., p. 148.

27. The price of a receiver was prohibitive for most working-class people, who often earned less than 1 yen a day. The monthly salary of a maid, for example, was 15 yen. It was within reach for some white-collar employees, such as an assistant clerk at the Communications Ministry who earned 56 yen per month. Prices and wages from Kdansha, ed., Shwa e no kitai: Shwa gannen-3 nen, vol. 1 of Shwa nimannichi no zenkiroku (Kdansha, 1989), pp. 143, 149, 151, 153.

28. Nihon hs kykai, Nihon hsshi, vol. 1 (Nihon hs kykai, 1961), p. 281. Once interest in radio was boosted by battlefield coverage during the Man-churian Incident, numbers of new radio contracts continued to rise. Total contracts in 1934 were 1,979,000; in 1935, 2,422,000; in 1936, 2,905,000; in 1937, 3,584,000; in 1938, 4,166,000; and in 1939, 4,862,000: Kdansha, ed., Nitch sens e no michi: Shwa 10 nen-12 nen, vol. 4 of Shwa nimannichi no zenkiroku (Kdansha, 1989), p. 169.

29. Other prefectures with more than 10 percent of radio-listening households included Nara, Hiroshima, Okayama, Gifu, Ishikawa, Saitama, and Chiba: Kdan-sha, Nitch sens e no michi, pp. 32–33.

30. Westney, pp. 187–190; Yamamoto Taketoshi, pp. 313–319.

31. Eguchi, “Mansh jihen to daishinbun,” pp. 100–103; Ikei, “1930 nendai,” p. 171.

32. Eguchi Keiichi, “Mansh jihen to minsh din: Nagoya-shi o chshin toshite,” in Furuya Tetsuo, ed., Nitch sensshi kenky (Yoshikawa kbunkan, 1984), pp. 141–143-

33. Eguchi, “Mansh8 jihen to daishinbun,” pp. 100–103.

34. Ibid., p. 102.

35. Nihon hs kykai, Rajio nenkan: Shwa 8 nen (Nihon hs shuppan kykai, 1933), p. 69. Program schedules in Ikei, “1930 nendai,” pp. 149–152.

36. Ikei, “1930 nendai,” pp. 167–168.

37. For a stimulating discussion of myth making and imperialism, see Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, pp. 1–48.

38. See Keene, pp. 259–299; Minami et al., Taish bunka, p. 128; and Gluck, japan's Modern Myths, pp. 135–136, 150, 171–173.

39. Before Kingu, best-selling magazines had circulations in the 250,000- to 260,000-issue range. Kingu doubled this. Yen books: Minami et al., Shwa bunka, pp. 287–301; Kingu: Minami et al., Shwa bunka, pp. 303–305.

40. The seven were Tkyd, Hokuryd, Tkaid, Ryomeid, Uedaya, T-seid, and Bunrind.

41. In 1926 there were 1,056 theaters nationwide, or one theater per 60,000 people: Minami et al., Taish bunka, pp. 122–123, 128–129.

42. Sg shuppan nenkan (Tosho kenkykai, 1932), p. 963.

43. Shuppan nenkan (Tkyd, 1933), pp. 2, 465–484; Sg shuppan nenkan (1932), p. 963.

44. Shuppan nenkan (1933), pp. 85–89; Shuppan nenkan (1934), pp. 87–91.

45. Sakurai Tadayoshi, “Mansh issun shita hanashi,” Bungei shunj (March 1932), pp. 44–46.

46. Lieutenant General Sat Kiyomasa, “Mansh ni okeru shih seid to kei-batsu,” Hanzai kagaku (March 1932), pp. 72–81.

47. Tanihagina Haruo, “Chy Nihon no tamashii: waga shhei no saigo o kataru,” Kdan kurabu (April 1933), pp. 112–124; Mizuno Gon'ichi, “Thik shuki,” Kingu (July 1933), pp. 303–313.

48. Sakurai Tadayoshi, “Kare no saigo,” le no hikari (August 1932), pp. 211–215.

49. Araki Sadao, “Hijji! Nihon fujin no shimei,” Fujin kurabu (April 1933), pp. 110–113.

50. Asahi nenkan (Asahi shinbunsha, 1933), p. 675.

51. Other popular songs included “Mansh jinei kyoku” (Manchurian Camp Song), “Ajia kshin kyoku” (Asia March), “Mamore Manm seimeisen” (Defend Our Manchurian-Mongolian Lifeline), “Mansh jihen kouta” (Manchurian Incident Ditty), “Daixx shidan no Manshyuki o okuru uta”(Manchurian Send-off Song), “Aa Mansh no uta” (Oh! Manchuria), “Rikusentai no uta” (Marines Song), “Sk ressha” (Armored Train), and “Gunji tantei no uta” (Military Spy Song): see Asahi nenkan (1933), p. 675; Rekdo (February 1932), pp. 78,112, unpaginated advertisement; Rekdo (May 1932), unpaginated advertisement. For lyrics to several of these songs see Hamano Kenzabur, Aa Mansh (Akimoto shob, 1970), pp. 116–120.

52. The productions discussed here are drawn from the movie and play listings in Eiga to engei, 1932–1933. Citation of entertainment reviews and advertisements in this magazine is complicated by the fact that many of the listings are unpaginated and/or lack a title or heading. References to Eiga to engei will therefore be cited as follows: Name of movie or play (with English translation in square brackets): title of review article (where available), title of magazine, date of publication, and page numbers (where available). Kagayaku kokki [The Glittering National Flag]: Eiga to engei (January 1932), p. 31; Kyokujitsu kagayaku Minami Mansh: Hten ichibanj [The First Step into Fengtian: South Manchuria Glitters under the Rising Sun]: “Sens eiga,” Eiga to engei (April 1932); Hitobashira yonjshi [The Four Heroic Human Pillars]: Eiga to engei (May 1932); Ykannaru rappa [The Gallant Bugler]: “Gendaigeki,” Eiga to engei (June 1932). Other titles included in the film listings were Shanhai sensen yonjri [One Hundred Miles on the Shanghai Front]: Eiga to engei (May 1932), p. 16; Mansh kaishingun [The Great Manchurian Campaign]: Eiga to engei (April 1932); Seik daishugeki [The Great Air Assault]: “Gunji eiga,” Eiga to engei (June 1932).

53. Sentar Mansh shussei [Sentar Goes to the Front] and Shshrei [The Mobilization Order]: “Sens eiga,”Eiga to engei (April 1932). Ikeyo wagako [Go to the Front, Boys!]: “Gunji eiga,” Eiga to engei (June 1932).

54. Aa Nanrei no sanjhachi yshi [Ah! The Thirty-eight Heroes of Nanling]: Eiga to engei (January 1932), p. 32; Hokuman no rakka: yamatozakura! [Japanese Cherries! The Fallen Blossoms of North Manchuria] and Tgen ni fuku ai [Love in the Frozen Plain]: “Tkatsu eiga,” Eiga to engei (March 1932).

55. Rikugun daikshin [The Great Army Parade]: Eiga to engei (June 1932); Mansh kshinkyoku [Manchuria March], play version/Tky gekijo,” Eiga to engei (January 1932); Mansh kshinkyoku [Manchuria March], movie version: “Kabata eiga,” Eiga to engei (March 1932), p. 26.

56. Ninj chtaich Kuramoto tail [Captain Kuramoto, the Big-hearted Commander] and Aa Kuramoto shsa chizome no gunki [Aa! Major Kuramoto and the Blood-stained Flag]: “Sens eiga,” Eiga to engei (April 1932).

57. The movie Hokuman no teisatsu [Scout of North Manchuria]: Eiga to engei (January 1932), p. 22; the play Chichiharu nyj [The Occupation of Qiqihar]: Eiga to engei (February 1932), p. 44; the song “Yamada itthei to Teisan” [Private Yamada and Mr. Tei]: Rekdo (February 1932), p. 74.

58. Bujin no seika: Kuga shsa [Major Kuga: The Perfect Soldier] and Yamato damashii: Kuga shsa [Major Kuga: The Yamato Spirit]: Eiga to engei (May 1932), p. 16. Bushid no seika: Aa Kuga shsa [Major Kuga: Embodiment of the Way of the Warrior]: “Gunji eiga,” Eiga to engei (June 1932).

59. On media sensationalism of Kuga's suicide, see Eguchi, Jgonen sens no kaimaku, p. 150. For Araki's statement, see ibid., pp. 157–158.

60. Chizome no teppitsu [The Blood-stained Pen]: “Sens eiga,” Eiga to engei (April 1932).

61. According to Eguchi Keiichi, questions about the official version were raised in The True Story of the “Three Human Bullets,” written by a soldier of the same unit. This book was banned by Home Ministry authorities, but, as discussed later, a large fraction of censored publications slipped through the police net. In 1965 former Major General Tanaka Rykichi admitted in a television interview that the deaths were due to the officer's miscalculation of the length of the fuse: “If the officer giving the order would have made the fuse cord one meter long, those boys could have blown up the wire mesh and returned to safety.” Eguchi, Jgonen senso no kaimaku, pp. 144–145, 154–157.

62. Eiga to engei (April 1932), frontispiece; “Sens eiga,” Eiga to engei (April 1932), p. 18.

63. Asahi nenkan (1933), p. 6yy.

64. Eguchi, Jgonen sens no kamaku, pp. 156–157.

65. Ibid., p. 157.

66. Minami et al., Taish bunka, pp. 233–235.

67. Minami et al., Shwa bunka, p. 472.

68. For the enmity of the army, see Eguchi, Jgonen sens no kaimaku, p. 105; for the right-wing attack on the president of the Asahi, see Chamoto Shigemasa, Sens to jaanarizumu (San'ichi shob, 1984), pp. 168–169.

69. After indignant protests by their editors to the Army Ministry, the reporters were furnished with cabins. Chamoto, p. 198.

70. Jansen, japan and China, p. 360, and Fujiwara Akira, Nihon gunjishi, vol. 1 (Nihon hyronsha, 1987), p. 164.

71. Chamoto, p. 222.