Embrace Defeat
During the Occupation, it became clear that some Japanese felt that the public was too enthusiastic about prospects of a democratic government. In 1948, there was a government purge of Communist and Socialist officials after rising street protests for better living conditions. Ultranationalists and wartime politicians were also jailed or stripped from their positions by the Occupation and the Japanese bureaucracy until Occupation ended.
A major point of disagreement, which continued into the student protest movement of the 1970s, was the remilitarization of Japan and the eventual US – Japan Security Pact (Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan, known as Anpo). Signed by the first Prime Minister after WWII, Yoshida Shigeru, this treaty made Japan reliant on the US for its security. American officials set the precedent by developing bases and stockpiling arms to help the US during the Korean War (1950-1953). General MacArthur’s fear of the labor movement was also a fear that Japan would fall to the Communists.
Even as it went against the spirit of Article 9, arming Japan and establishing what turned out to be permanent bases, was seen as necessary by the US. The irony was that America leaned on and installed former members of the Imperial War cabinet, sometimes convicted war criminals, to implement this policy. These largely conservative politicians accepted this because (1) even with a new Constitution, the pre-war, wartime structure of the bureaucracy and organs of power would remain largely intact; (2) the focus of the country was squarely on economic growth; (3) they had the power to ensure that Communist and ultranationalist forces would not gain control of the country.
However, on the intellectual foundation of their own Constitution, the antiwar, pro-democracy movement continued in Japan and protested many times against the call to modify or eliminate Article 9 and against the use of military bases for US military operations, such as the Vietnam War.
Pro-Democracy Advocate
Oe Kenzaburo (1935-) is different than most, if not all, of the writers surveyed so far in that he was a committed social activist. His early major work Hiroshima Notes (1965) documents the nuclear bomb explosion over that western Japanese city. He continued anti-war, anti-imperial activism (he refused the Imperial House’s Order of Culture, its highest honor) and is threatened by ultranationalists in the country. He was threatened after publishing a short story about an ultranationalist who assassinated the chairman of Japan’s Socialist Party in 1960, a story based on true events. He also was sued for libel for his nonfiction work Okinawa Notes, which documented the forced suicides of Okinawans by Japanese military generals before and during the Battle of Okinawa.
In both his fiction and nonfiction, Oe’s concern is primarily the individual in society. He writes two types of novels: (1) more overtly social about the conflict between rural and urban or nationalist and open segments of Japanese society and (2) a fictional form of his story about the burden, responsibility, and then fulfillment raising his real-life autistic son Hikari. Both types of novels tackle “what do we owe each other?” in a more overt way than the work of other writers, especially Hagiwara or Akutagawa, who mostly process their individual experience of the world as impressed upon them. Wrestling with the external obligations was something Oe could not avoid based on historical and individual circumstance.
Power to Bear
His most powerful novel is the A Personal Matter (1964). The narrator has a similar backstory to the author: a literary type coping with the birth of a child with an intellectual disability. Although it is not technically a shishosetsu, Oe uses the techniques of that traditional Japanese form to probe the disgust that the narrator has towards himself and that he transfers to his child. The heightened pace based on the tunneling nature of the self-inquiry rises and his deadline to make a decision reaches a stunning conclusion when he accepts the child as his own.
Oe himself says that he faced a similar dilemma. At that time, he visited a Red Cross hospital serving atomic bomb survivors who had been neglected and a doctor’s “forbearance” –a talisman at the end of A Personal Matter— and “[He] was encouraged about [his] own son.” For a man whose father died in World War II, and for whom the emperor’s address upon surrender and the Occupation of his small country town was life-changing, the political and personal were always intertwined.