An Inscrutable Silence

In Germany today, a new generation of writers is turning back to examine the horrors of the Nazi past and painfully exploring the guilt that they feel all Germans must share in some degree for their part in it (TIME, Jan. 4). But in that other Axis partner, Japan, writers are strangely silent on the subject of the war years.

Placing the Blame. In the Japanese view, the atomic bomb was an expiation of their war guilt. With the two explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan was transformed from aggressor into victim. There are innumerable mediocre books on the bomb. There is almost no fiction examining Japan's responsibility for Pearl Harbor.

But Japanese writers feel that they have less reason than the Germans to feel guilty about the war. In their view, the Japanese war was more of the old-fashioned imperialist sort, which most nations have from time to time engaged in. They point out that there was no thought control on the scale of Hitler's Germany and no knocks at the door in the night. The brutalities of the Bataan Death March and their notorious prison camps are shrugged off as inherent in warfare. After all, they argue, these sins cannot be compared with the Nazis' deliberate policy of genocide. "The Japanese are inherently incapable of committing cruelties on such a mathematically inhuman scale," says Critic Kenzo Nakajima. During the war, many writers found it easy to sympathize with the aim of driving the "white imperialists" out of Southeast Asia. Many happily ground out propaganda, though they are embarrassed to recall it now.

Since V-J day, only a handful of novels have seriously dealt with the war. Even those tended to put all the blame on the militarists. This point of view was expressed in a savage novel of barracks life, Zone of Emptiness, by Hiroshi Noma (1956). The zone is, of course, military life, which has sealed out all civilized behavior. In the barracks, depravity is the norm: hypocrisy, bribery, sadism. Soldiers are driven to fanaticism by fear of their superiors. No escape is possible. "You can't trust anything," says a soldier. "Everything here is an optical illusion."

The Roots of Fanaticism. In two isolated novels, two novelists tried to deal more directly with the causes of the war. "People are saying now that it was army pressure that made them cooperate in the war," says the hero of the novel Homecoming (1955). by Jiro Osaragi. "The excuse is true, so far as it goes. But how contemptible of a human being to have to make it." Author Osaragi traced the causes of the war to the peculiar "insensitivity" of many Japanese, the "dull opaqueness" that marks "a relentlessness that suffocated others."

In Fires on the Plain (1957), which has been made into a grim movie recently released in the U.S., Author Shohei Ooka attempted a serious study of the fanaticism of the Japanese soldier. Its hero Tamura kills senselessly in the last months of the war in the Philippines. But the more revulsion he feels, the more fanatical he becomes. "All voluntary actions were forbidden to me," he reasons. "I, who had voluntarily robbed a human life of the compulsion whereby it lives, had condemned myself to an existence based entirely on compulsion--the compulsion of moving ineluctably toward my own death." Because Tamura shows no mercy to himself, he can show none to others. But at the point of utter degradation, Tamura at last finds his will. While other surviving Japanese turn to cannibalism, Tamura balks and takes a bitter pride in refusing the flesh of another human. At long last, he is able to utter the words that come so easily to people in a free world: "No one can make me do what I do not want to do."

The Japanese are now concentrating on sex and sensibility in their novels (Junichiro Tanizaki's The Key, Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), and the emotions of a single person interest them more than the entire Pacific war. "We are grass eaters here," says one Japanese writer good-humoredly. "So meaty a subject as war guilt is physically incompatible with us."

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