War Responsibility. More than sixty years after the end of the Asia-Pacific War, arguments over war guilt and war responsibility remain a large source of contention in postwar Japanese foreign relations and in international images of postwar Japan. In the 1980s, Japanese feminist scholars became increasingly concerned about what their mothers and grandmothers did during the wars and the extent of their support for or complicity in the war effort. Japanese women—and civilians in general—were victims of fire-bombs and atomic bombs, but Asian women had been victims of Japanese aggression. At first, it was far easier for Japanese women to sink into victimhood than face what Japanese militarism had done overseas and at home.

Women’s Complicity. Japanese women were not policy makers in the 1930s. They were not diplomats or government bureaucrats. They did not make the final decisions that led Japan into war against its Asian neighbors or Western colonial powers in East Asia. They committed few war atrocities, though they may have vaguely heard about them or observed them. Protest was impossibly difficult. In the 1930s, few dissenters were able to avoid tenkō—public recantation of leftist views and declarations of loyalty to the exiting regime. What, then, does complicity mean or imply in the case of Japanese women? That nurses, journalists, and entertainers on or near the battlefield turned their heads? That, at home, suffragists, labor sympathizers, and birth control activists were not simply muzzled but in fact were coopted? That both privileged and ordinary women used their positions to bargain with the state—to gain recognition and status for themselves and for women generally? To put the question more harshly, were they not merely passive dupes? In a sense, Japanese women were already implicated in Japan’s earlier drive for empire in Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria, although again they were not the policy makers. Colonial women were not necessarily regarded by Japanese women as part of a larger victimized sisterhood. We are here probing not simply loyalty and sacrifice during wartime but the extent of Japanese women’s understanding, support, and glorification of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War.

Patriotic Activities. On the homefront, virtually all married Japanese women were organized into various kinds of patriotic activities. Some of these groups had begun in the early 1930s as volunteer efforts by housewives to send off or to welcome home troops back at railway stations or docks, to provide comfort kits, or to make one thousand stitch talisman belts. Such groups were soon taken over by military officers and re-programmed as nationalistic support groups on behalf of Japan’s holy war. By 1942, all women belonged to the Greater Japan Association of Women (Dai Nippon Fujinkai). It is important to remember, however, that all homefront Japanese were organized into one or more patriotic societies: literary figures, artists, cartoonists, actors and film directors, wrestlers, for example. A few outstanding women, such as suffragist Ichikawa Fusae, held high positions in formal propaganda organizations. Other leading feminists, including Oku Mumeo, wrote essays and gave talks, enjoining women to give loyal support to the Japanese state. Takamure Itsue, a pioneer in the writing of Japanese women’s history, did not openly protest Japan’s imperial adventures. Best-selling novelist Hayashi Fumiko was sponsored by a leading Tokyo newspaper when she journeyed to wartime China in early 1938, close to the time of the Nanjing Massacre, but gave no hint of Japanese misbehavior in her published reports. She and Yoshiya Nobuko went back to China later that year, the only two women appointed to a prestigious Pen Brigade to visit the battlefront. Hayashi lived for a time in Japanese occupied Borneo and reworked her experience there into a later novel; she seems not to have questioned Japanese aggression. Yoshida wrote popular domestic novels and girls stories which were suffused with patriotism. Sato Ineko, a proletariat writer, joined the Greater East Asia Literary Conferences. Among prewar women literary giants, Miyamoto Yuriko, whose husband was in prison for Marxist thought, was among the few who escaped with only a modicum of complicity. As singers, dancers, theater and film stars, Japanese women did their share in official propaganda outlets. Takarazuka, the all-female troupe, performed patriotic shows at home, depicting pride in empire and conquests, and took them overseas to entertain the troops and Japanese residents.

Neighborhood Associations and War Plants. Ordinary housewives were part of mandatory neighborhood associations (tonarigum)—small groups of ten families. Here, they not only engaged in sewing projects or helped in distributing rations but also moved into public roles as air raid wardens, crime and fire-fighters, or lookouts for traitors or spies. Some took it upon themselves to scold other women who dressed too ostentatiously, used cosmetics, or favored Western hair and dress styles. Feminists encouraged women’s participation in the associations for a number of reasons: as a way to improve their lives at the local level, to gain leadership experience, to give public service, and to experience a modicum of power.

At first, in 1937, the Japanese government was captive of its own idealization of Japanese women, in particular the maternal body, and did not urge them to replace men in the labor force. As the Pacific War progressed and more men left for military service, this attitude changed. At first, young unmarried women, including junior college students, were mobilized for war work—to sew parachutes, make munitions, or labor in aircraft plants. In 1944, a revised labor law with penalties was passed to expand the work force. Although well over four million women answered the various calls, many voluntarily, the figure is proportionately less than in the United States or Britain. Not surprisingly, they were paid lower wages than men for comparable work. Poor women had always worked in farms, mines, and mills. What was new at this time was the recruitment of women of the middle and upper classes, even geisha, to work in war factories. Women war workers were heroicized in one of director Kurosawa Akira’s earliest films, The Most Beautiful, 1944. A stirring film (Kurosawa married one of the stars), it was also well-made propaganda. Invariably, it is left out of retrospective Kurosawa film festivals. Japanese girls and women were also given training by military officers to help defend Japan during a possible invasion. Despite the many visuals illustrating military training for women, is difficult to believe that it was realistic or would have been effective.

Gyokusai. Toward the end of the war, official propaganda encouraged gyokusai (shattered jewels). In the ultimate sacrifice, civilians as well as soldiers should be ready to die in mass suicide rather than surrender. However, at Saipan in the summer of 1944, more Japanese island residents surrendered to Americans (30,000) than jumped off cliffs with their children (6000), though the numbers who did commit suicide were ghastly. We now know that many of them were Okinawan. In the battle of Okinawa, spring 1945, girls and young women died in cross-fire, in caves, and in forced suicides, believing they were engaged in glorious sacrifice and learning too late the betrayals of war.

Defeat and Occupation. The next question is how ordinary Japanese women, struggling daily to make ends meet, dealt with—or could have dealt with—the ethical and philosophical issues raised by the Asia-Pacific war in the aftermath of defeat. Almost immediately, the Patriotic Women’s Association was disbanded for ultra-nationalism. Several leaders expressed remorse. A few high profile women were purged from political and public life, such as suffragist Ishikawa Fusae and physician Yoshioka Yayoi. In Occupation Headquarters, Lt. Ethel Weed and her colleagues in Women’s Affairs, Civil Information and Education Section, encouraged the re-emergence of older feminist women’s organizations but also promoted new democratic clubs and a Japanese version of the League of Women Voters. Occupation documents do not, however, reflect wide-ranging discussions by women about war responsibility, war guilt, and atrocities. In fact, women were at first inclined to disbelieve evidence that Japanese troops—their sons, husbands, fathers, cousins—could have committed such barbarities. On the other hand, Japanese women were rarely to be found among those accused of war crimes. None were tried at the International Tribunal in Tokyo. At least two Japanese women were in Class B and C trials, and their complicity was grisly. They were accused of taking part in vivisection experiments on captured American airmen in a Kyushu hospital in 1945.

Women’s Responsibility. As a way of denouncing the past without quite facing up to Japanese aggression, Japanese women addressed the need to remake Japan into a peaceful, cultured, and democratic society. However, only a few women were welcomed as equals into early postwar intellectual and pacifist societies organized by men. The case was different in the leftist literary world where several women writers denounced Japanese militarism. If women had difficulty having their say in prestigious journals edited by men—such as Bungei Shunju (Spring and Autumn Annals) or Ch?? K?ron (Central Review), they had outlets in a wide range of simple to sophisticated women’s magazines. Scholars have so far given more attention to the contents of women’s magazines of the prewar period or of recent times than to the Occupation years. There is much yet to be learned.

Novelist and essayist Miyamoto Yuriko was a leading force in the revival of an important leftist literary group in 1946, Shin Nihon Bungaku (Literature of New Japan), which published its own magazine, but was closely monitored for Marxist leanings by Occupation censors. Her friend Sato Ineko, a proletariat writer who returned to her Marxist inclinations, was also on the watch list. Women of all backgrounds avidly supported the new peace and equal rights constitution of 1947. Increasingly, they became involved in pacifist movements which were spearheaded by women, such as Mothers for Peace in the mid-1950s. Male novelist Ooka Shohei, an embittered survivor of warfare in the Philippines, took it upon himself, or rather had his lead character in Fire on the Plains (1951), ex-Private Tamura, make a sweeping statement rebuking the entire human race: “All men are cannibals; all women are whores.” What did it mean? Was Tamura insane? How did women react to this, if at all?

Over the years, Japanese women, as a group, have opposed revision of the postwar Constitution. The war in Iraq has only somewhat shaken their resolve. Recently, Diet member Yamaguchi Yoshiko, once a young star of wartime propaganda films (known to Americans as Shirley Yamaguchi during a brief Hollywood career), championed the cause of comfort women (Korean and Asian women forced to provide sex to Japanese troops) but advocated private reparations rather than government compensation. From the opening days of the Occupation to her death in 2005, atomic bomb poet Kurihara Sadako consistently spoke of Japan’s war guilt while voicing sorrow over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Atomic bomb muralist Akamatsu (Maruki) Toshiko embarked on an intellectual and spiritual journey from obsession with the suffering of Japanese to embracing a larger vision of responsibility for human and environmental atrocities in the twentieth century, including those committed by Japan. The debate over women’s complicity in the Asia-Pacific War is far from over. Equally important is the extent to which younger generations of Japanese remember and study the Asia-Pacific War.