Gender, Class, and Race in Occupied Japan

Interviewer's introduction: Sheltered in a woods of bamboo, ginkgo, and maple, the artists' rambling Japanese-style farmhouse is separated from the Maruki Art Museum by an uncluttered garden, through which a few colorful Japanese chickens roam freely. A two-story modern concrete and tile structure, the museum was built to house and display their words. They are widely known as "the painters of the atomic bomb."

Iri was born in 1901 and Toshi, his wife, in 1912. They rushed to Hiroshima three days after the atomic bomb exploded because Iri's family lived there. What they saw then, and a fear that there would be no visual record of what actually happened, led them to begin painting the A-bomb experience. While each is individually a well-known artist, their collaboration, mixing his Japanese-ink-and-paper style and the Western oil-painting and portrait traditions in which she was trained, has produced a series of huge multipanel mural paintings, mounted without rigid frames or permanent backing for ease of transport.

Over the years, their concern over mankind's cruelty has led them to paint not just the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but among other horrors, the Nanking Massacre, Auschwitz, and the Minamata mercury-poisoning disaster. A new painting about the crushing of the Chinese students at Tiananmen Square had just been completed when we spoke.

IRI: It wasn't that they rounded you up and threw you into prison for not painting. We didn't want to do that kind of painting. We did oppose the war, but we never ended up in a detention cell, and we never went to jail. I guess we didn't do much to oppose it, since many were taken to prison by the police.

IRI: Our painters' group was called the Art Culture Society. Fukuzawa Ichirō was its head. He was an outrageous man. Today, if we talk negatively about the Emperor, his mood sours. Yet in those days, he was actually imprisoned. Spent years inside.

TOSHI: Most of those in the Art Culture Society didn't do war paintings. Mr. Fukuzawa got arrested. He was kept in a police cell for more than a year. He probably couldn't resist any more. He ended up painting a large picture of the "Annihilation of the Americans and British." I am sure he was the kind of person who knew what art is.

TOSHI: Graduates of art school were immediately called up by the military and ordered to paint for and cooperate with them. They never had time to oppose the war. They marched directly from student life into war work, and school education itself had been directly tied to the military. When told to paint something, they were already painting before they were thinking. Those military men came to us and asked us to paint, too. When we told them we couldn't, they said "You're really oddballs."

When people were imprisoned, they were beaten up, treated horribly. If they couldn't bear it anymore, they might end up painting pictures of the annihilation of America and Britain. I feel it would be enough, then, if they just said "I'm sorry, sorry for what I did." You can't help it during wartime. But none of them have said that. None have shown that kind of pure-heartedness. What they did with utmost sincerity was wrong, but they couldn't avoid it. Now they feel embarrassed about it. If only they'd say it, they could go on, paint their next painting.

TOSHI: We didn't resist. At least not enough to be thrown into a cell. We didn't resist openly. We lived in a place called Atelier Mura—Atelier Village. A person who had gone to America and made a lot of money there before his return built these for artists. We lived in Pantheon Number Three. Our unit was really damp. We tried to dig an air-raid shelter there, but it filled with water. We finally decided that if anything ever happened, we'd just pull up our tatami and hide underneath them.

Painters who had hometowns and native villages to return to began to leave Tokyo. Before long, people who were not actually painters came to live there. One faucet was shared by four families. The faucet across from our place was where everybody came to get their water. Some people painted war paintings, some didn't. There were all kinds, but we never really quarreled over it. I remember a sculptor making a statue of a pilot soldier. I didn't think there was anything bad about it. In fact, I didn't think about it at all. Most of us were equally poor, so we could understand each other's feelings. That's why we didn't really quarrel. Even if you don't paint war art, you could feel good for those who did. It was good for them. I find that very interesting. You didn't think, "Their ideology is wrong"; you just felt happy they could eat.

A woman in our unit became friendly with a policeman. She began living with him. It was right near us. Policemen must be awfully clever, or else people gave him things, because they lived very well. They came to the faucet to wash their rice. We could hear the sound of them washing white rice.

I'd gone to the Soviet Union. I think it was 1941. Afterwards I did an exhibit of my Soviet sketches. We used to carry our paintings on a cart from our Pantheon all the way through the Hongo district, down the steep hill toward Ueno. That cart practically pushed us down the hill as we stood in front of it. Most people had given up trying to show their art, but we were tenacious. People we didn't know would ask us, "Where are you going with your cart?" "We're holding an exhibit of our paintings," we'd answer. "Where?" "At the Seiryūsha," we'd shout. Sometimes they'd even come.

We held many such exhibits right up until the most terrible of the air raids. It wasn't true that everybody ran away from Tokyo. People came to see our paintings from all over. People hung in almost to the last moment. The war gradually approached. It comes closer and closer to where you are, but you can't uproot yourself, move out of the way. Finally we did move to Urawa, in Saitama, where we grew sweet potatoes. We had quite a harvest. I remember inviting people from the Art Culture Society to come eat potatoes with us. Being farmers kept us busy. We didn't really paint much.

TOSHI: Painters always want to paint something. If they ordered you to paint, most painters probably would, even war paintings. That kind of decision determined whether you collaborated in the war or not. For instance, Fujita Tsuguji ended up painting for them, but he was such a brilliant painter that if you look at his The Day of Honorable Death on Saipan, you can almost imagine this is a painting opposing the war. The truth comes out, presses forward in the picture. The Final Attack on Attu is the same. His war paintings show the misery of war. It seeps out. I sometimes wonder whether or not he really did paint those to sing the praises of war.

IRI: I lived thinking a notice might come at any moment. One of our friends, Aiko, was younger than me. He was a truly stouthearted man, but so gentle to others. We held a send-off party for him when his red paper came. We told him, "You're such a good painter. Everybody knows that. Say, `I'm a great painter,' when you go in the army." We told him he'd be assigned to paint for the unit commander. There was lots of work for painters in the army. Painters got officer treatment, even those who weren't very good at painting, if at least they knew how to boast. But Aiko wouldn't say these things. He went to the front lines, fell ill, and died in a field hospital somewhere.

TOSHI: Don't you remember the man with the saber who came to suggest to us that we'd be better off if we painted war paintings? His saber clanked along. "Don't be hesitant. Don't delay. Paint war pictures." That was how he talked to us. He came to the Art Culture Society office. It was difficult not to paint under such circumstances, with such "encouragement."

IRI: Looking back on it now, it all seems a lie. In war there's no food. Maybe it was different for real farmers, in the countryside, but people like us really had nothing. Everything disappeared. People actually died of starvation. I was brought up in the countryside near Hiroshima. I was quite good at catching fish in rivers, and could tell immediately whether there were fish in a stream or not. When we evacuated to Urawa there were several small rivers, but no fish at all. Even fish disappeared.

TOSHI: I ate snails. I found them and ate them. I found them crawling along the fence. I grabbed them and brought them home. I made a charcoal fire. I still had some charcoal then. I put them on a screen over the fire. They crawled away. I guess they were hot. I caught them and put them back, roasted them, and ate them.

There wasn't any salt. The salt ration had stopped. Evacuees from Tokyo didn't know anyone in the area. You couldn't find anyone who'd share some rice with you. People with kimonos were better off. You could bring one to a farmer's house, and ask to exchange it for rice. But I didn't have anything, nothing to offer.

TOSHI: I don't know anybody who was ever able to exchange a painting for rice. I didn't even try. However, I was asked to illustrate passages written by a leading author, Niwa Fumio. I was to accompany him to the South Seas. I was told I would have a good life. You'll be sending those back to Japan, they said. They'll be in print. They asked me point-blank. I thought to myself, "I'm really in trouble now. How can I refuse?" I found a doctor among my relatives and asked him to certify that I wasn't physically fit to go overseas. He agreed. So I got a lung infection and avoided going. If you didn't respond favorably to the "request"--the order--from the military, you'd end up "unpatriotic," a traitor.

At the end of the war, people were crying, "Boo-hoo, boo-hoo," when they heard the Emperor's words. Tears didn't come to me. I just thought, "The war's ended. With this, the air raids will stop." I don't think I was particularly happy, even about that. It didn't occur to me that I'd narrowly escaped death. I didn't have that thought.

"WE WOULDN'T PAINT WAR ART"

by Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi

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