午夜剧场

Last year, I published the results of my research from the past few years as a single-authored book, "Literature of Propaganda: Expressors Under the Second Sino-Japanese War" (Kyowakoku). It started from a simple question, but as I researched the Second Sino-Japanese War, I felt deeply that war needs no justification. Despite lasting eight years starting from the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and mobilizing a maximum of 850,000 troops, the purpose of why this war was being fought remained ambiguous until the end. According to the logic of the Japanese side, the Chinese people were supposed to be future partners in "construction," so it was impossible to clearly define who they were even fighting against. In short, the Second Sino-Japanese War was a war that was extremely difficult to explain or represent, even for those who wanted to push it forward.

What is interesting, however, is that on the other hand, this war was also an "expressed war" on an unprecedented scale. As the first total war experienced by Imperial Japan, the military and government learned techniques for controlling public opinion and the media, despite experiencing several failures. Power can decide what to show and what not to show. Power can also induce media companies to cooperate voluntarily through the distribution of information as a commodity. Many expressors, including literary figures, journalists, painters, and filmmakers, went to the front lines, and newspapers intensified their reporting wars. The expressions of Japanese soldiers on the battlefield were conveyed to the people on the home front through newsreels. Many accounts of soldiers who experienced the actual battlefield were also published. There, while questions about the war itself were suppressed, many stories were spun that found meaning in devoting oneself to the battlefield. Wartime sexual violence and bullying within the military were naturally subject to censorship, and people who enjoyed the spectacle of a controlled and bleached war were exposed to a massive amount of words emphasizing the "bond" between the front lines and the home front, becoming accustomed to being forced to endure and prioritizing the official stance of wartime.

However, words are cruel things. Humans can only live within their era, but spoken words remain somewhere and will eventually be read by someone. My current work is to scoop up and re-receive the words of people who lived through the era of war from the vast ocean of literature and materials. In the words that survived the war, the echoes of words that did not remain are also engraved. I believe this society should think more seriously about the meaning and horror of that fact.