Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. viii, 302 pp. (Illustrations.) US$35.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-17770-2.
When the Great Japanese Empire ceased to exist in August 1945, its borders—stretching from New Guinea to Alaska—instantly shrank to the shores of the Japanese archipelago. The soldiers and civilians who had expanded and defended the empire, however, could hardly return home as swiftly as the imperial boundaries shifted. The majority of over six million Japanese subjects repatriated in the months after the war’s end, but for thousands of others the way home was long. As the nation slowly picked itself up from the ravages of war, there remained hundreds of thousands of Japanese stranded in the snowy plains of Siberia, the caves of the Pacific Islands, and the jungles of Southeast Asia.
Yoshikuni Igarashi’s Homecomings is a poignant investigation of the delayed repatriations of these “lost soldiers” from various outposts of the erstwhile empire, and what they meant for post-World War II Japanese society. The book presents a patchwork of soldiers’ stories woven together by the thread of their struggles to reintegrate into postwar community. Igarashi organizes this rich material around the lives of five former servicemen who found themselves trapped in the past. Their peregrinations were unique, yet also revealing about the travails of many thousands of Japanese and other soldiers in the World War II. Igarashi’s analysis of the cultural milieu in which the straggling soldiers found themselves upon return to the “new Japan” is penetrating, and his accounts of these soldiers’ odysseys come alive in the diverse material he draws from. Homecomings will be an important addition to the recent wave of histories of imperial aftermath, the expanding literature documenting the “human flows” in the wake of the second global conflict in East Asia.
In seven core chapters, Homecomings follows the hardships endured by those Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) servicemen for whom the war did not end in August 1945, and the twisted paths along which they retraced their way back home. In chapter 1, Igarashi introduces the book’s analytical framework. He dissects seminal cinematic works that relate the repatriates’ struggles to reintegrate into postwar society, Kurosawa Akira’s Stray Dog and Gosho Heinosuke’s Yellow Crow. The remaining six chapters can then be split into two by an imaginary line on the empire’s map, dividing it into “north” and “south.” Thus chapters 2, 3, and 4 document the former imperial servicemen’s travails in and return from “the north”: the puppet kingdom of Manchukuo in northeastern China, and the cold brutal expanses of Soviet Siberia. Chapters 5, 6, and 7, in contrast, retell the stories of Yokoi Shōichi in Guam, Onoda Hiro’o in the Philippines, and Nakamura Teruo (a.k.a. Shiniyuwu/Li Guanghui) in Indonesia. All of these paths eventually come together in postwar Japan.
What warrants the inclusion of these seemingly opposite experiences in a single volume? What did the soldiers scattered across the face of the erstwhile empire have in common except the IJA uniforms they once wore (and continued to wear, as Onoda did)? It is true that before their return to postwar Japan, the soldiers’ experiences differed greatly. The captives in Siberian camps endured hardships in brutal conditions, breaking their backs at worksites with little equipment or nutrition, whereas the stragglers in the southern islands mainly lived as hermits, devising their own survival in isolation from the outside world.
It is Igarashi’s analysis of the returnees’ post-repatriation lives, his examination of how domestic media and society represented them, and the repatriates’ own attempts to influence these representations that bind the book together. Homecomings maps the repatriates’ journeys in a postwar cultural landscape, laying bare the contrast between the sanitized domestic views of the war and the raw experiences of the stragglers. Looking into a range of multi-layered cultural products and employing symbols that reflect Japanese society’s complicated relationship with its past, Igarashi obviates the gulf between the home society that has “moved on,” and the “lost soldiers” who simply cannot leave the past behind. Most poignantly, the book demonstrates how the returning soldiers often became passive instruments in this process of sanitizing the past: “Being a repatriated soldier is no longer an incurable or hard-to-treat illness but a condition that one can conquer through willpower” (27).
There are bound to be challenges when a single volume addresses a history that spans so many years as well as miles. The “northern” chapters contain some facts that are difficult to verify. Chapter 3 puts the number of Japanese captives and casualties in the USSR at “between 700,000 and 800,000 prisoners and more than 100,000 deaths” (81). The exact number of captives and deaths is notoriously difficult to pinpoint—even Soviet archival documents contradict each other—and often changes depending on how you count. Still, the consensus based on Soviet archives puts the number of prisoners between 594,000 and 640,000, and the deaths at around 60,000. Besides numbers, there are other minor inaccuracies; thus on page 55, Igarashi dates the Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration at November 1954, whereas it was in fact signed on October 19 , 1956. And while it is very difficult to accurately summarize such a complex event as the Siberian Internment in a single chapter, Igarashi’s otherwise balanced representation tends at times to favour the traditionally emotional depictions of “Siberia” as nothing but a realm of extreme suffering. For example, Igarashi cites Shimizu Ikutarōs’s simplistic idea about fear as the root of Japanese compromise vis-à-vis the USSR (105). This rules out the possibility that many Japanese—Siberian captives or domestic leftists—might in fact have been attracted to the Soviet ideology and way of life. Dozens of applications for Soviet citizenship written by Siberian internees, now kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, testify that there were in fact those who viewed the Soviet Union not as hell on earth, but as a “workers’ paradise.”
These issues cannot overshadow the importance of the book and its contribution to the growing body of work on the transnational entanglements in the wake of Japan’s imperial collapse and its remaking as the United States’ most important ally in East Asia during the Cold War and beyond. This eloquent volume will no doubt become a work to which diverse audiences—scholars, students, and general readers with an interest in the complex events of the past—will turn repeatedly to draw lessons about modern Japan’s pained relationship with the vestiges of its failed empire.
Sherzod Muminov
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
pp. 820-823