Tamura Taijurō, established writer when drafted at age 29 in 1940 by the Imperial Japanese Army, served almost five years in the China theater, rising to the rank of sergeant. After Japan’s surrender, he was caught there another year until repatriation was arranged in February 1946. It would be hard to believe that he had any illusions about Japan’s "holy war" in China. Certainly, as his postwar writing reveals, he was witness to many horrors and knew first hand that young Korean women were made to service sexually the Japanese military near the battle fields. He would be obsessed by their story in later years and become famous in the Occupation years as the leading author of nikutai bungaku, literature of the body (also translated as literature of the flesh).

Tamura was born in Yokkaichi City, Mie Prefecture in 1911. His undergraduate years were spent in Tokyo at Waseda University, where he graduated from the French Department in 1934. He gained a modest reputation as a writer and became editor of Keio University’s coterie literary magazine in the years of Japan’s increasing aggression in China and the drive of the Japanese Army to convert Manchuria into total empire. In the summer of 1938, he made a trip to the Chinese mainland, possibly as a member, although this is unclear, of an official literary brigade to observe and entertain Japanese troops. This was in the aftermath of the outbreak of total war between China and Japan in the fall of 1937 and the subsequent Nanjing Massacre. The commissioning of literary and cultural figures to tour colonies or battle areas was a frequent practice of Imperial Japan. Writers, actors, filmmakers, journalists, dancers, artists, musicians and comedians were among those who answered the call. In 1939, Tamura traveled again, this time in Manchuria and also in North China. Back home, he was briefly in trouble with the Japanese police for alleged leftist activties. Early the next year, February 1940, the Imperial Japanese Army caught up with Tamura and conscripted him for duty in the ongoing but increasingly unsuccessful China War. This was almost a year and a half before Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and entry into World War II as an ally of the Axis Powers. For Tamura, there would be no escape, no respite from military service; indeed, he may have endured one of the longest continuous tours of duty of any professional writer in the ranks of enlisted men of the Japanese Army.

Among Tamura’s first attempts in late 1946 to return to his former career, he published an army story, Nikutai no akuma (Devil of the Flesh), and wrote an essay in which he extolled, in his words, “the truth and honesty of nikutai, the body or flesh, as opposed to the delusions of shisō, thought or ideas.” The following year he became famous and also wealthy with the publication of Nikutai no mon (Gate of the Body or Gate of Flesh), a short novel which was soon converted into a popular play. Not as well known until recently is his novella, Shunpuden (Biography of a Prostitute), also written in 1947. It is the first postwar by a Japanese (and perhaps by any author) to feature the subject of comfort women—once written off as prostitutes but now usually called military sex slaves. When Tamura tried to publish the story in the April issue of a new and prestigious journal of serious fiction, Occupation magazine censors were alarmed and suppressed it in its entirety, apparently for its open references to Korean comfort women on the North China battlefield. Shortly afterward, this story appeared in a book of Tamura’s collected stories entitled Shunpundin, but this time stripped of any open references to Korea or to the Korean origins of the so-called prostitutes. Possibly Tamura and his publisher, stung by the magazine suppression, had become cautious and engaged in self-censorship. Whatever the reason, the new version of the story did not bother Occupation book censors, and the collection passed. At this point, Japanese discrimination against the large resident Korean minority in Japan, punctuated by Korean counter demands for equal treatment and civil rights, had become a serious issue in Occupied Japan, as were the efforts to repatriate Koreans, especially suspected Communists, back to their divided home country. A story such as this might conceivably provoke demonstrations by Koreans and disturb public tranquility. The suppressed version and related correspondence are in the censorship files of the Gordon W. Prange Collection, University of Maryland Libraries; a few complimentary documents are at the National Archives, College Park, Maryland. Shunpuden has been translated in full by guest editor Eleanor Kerkham.

Tamura continued to publish erotic and sometimes sensational stories about thieves and prostitutes or women of the night, usually to good circulation and profits He also provided a rationale for such literature in various essays. His writing in this period on sex and sexuality was masculinist. It was from the special angle or point of view of a writer who had served far too long on the battlefield and had found some semblance of relief from comfort women and even, in his mind, formed a special relationship with them. Otherwise, the protagonists in his postwar stories were always Japanese men and women. Although the Occupation was a mutual racial experience, he and others did not, and indeed could not easily or effectively, tackle the subject of sexual fraternization between Japanese women and Occupation soldiers. And perhaps Japanese sexuality and masculinity in the transition from war to peace was in fact his main interest. Otherwise, Tamura can be identified conceptually with the buraiha group of writers, the circle of so-called decadents who questioned or scoffed at conservative morés and values. He was not, however, a representative writer of the culture of trash, kasutori bunka, a world of pornography, nudity onstage, and gender exploitation which was already firmly rooted in Japan’s popular culture of the 1920s and reborn in more flamboyant forms in Occupied Japan.

Tamura’s censored “Biography of a Prostitute,” meantime, attracted the attention of Japanese filmmakers. After several revisions of the screen script, the film was released in its final version with all of the (Korean) comfort women changed into professional Japanese prostitutes or bar women. There were later and equally unfaithful movie versions of the same story. Tamura himself turned to other activities in the 1950s but returned to the sex slave theme in 1963 with an extraordinarily graphic and brutal story entitled “Insects,” (Inago) which was again about the lives of young Korean comfort women in China. Even though his work served as an exposé, for many decades, the story of Japan’s wartime military sexual system remained obscure and sublimated. It was brought to life again as a world wide political and civil rights issue in the early 1990s by the elderly surviving Korean comfort women themselves, forcing belated, reluctant and qualified admissions of responsibility from the Japanese government.