That Distant Country Next Door: Popular Japanese Perceptions of Mao’s China 9780824879549

Citation preview

That Distant Country Next Door

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That Distant Country Next Door Popular Japanese Perceptions of Mao’s China

Erik Esselstrom

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

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© 2019 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Esselstrom, Erik, author.

Title: That distant country next door : popular Japanese perceptions of Mao’s

China / Erik Esselstrom. Other titles: Popular Japanese perceptions of Mao’s China Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018043520 | ISBN 9780824876562 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: China—Foreign public opinion, Japanese. | China—History—1949–1976—Public opinion. | Public opinion—Japan. | Japan—Relations—China. | China—Relations—Japan. Classification: LCC DS740.5.J3 E84 2019 | DDC 303.48/25205109045—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043520 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Cover photo: PRC Minister of Health Li Dequan addressing reporters in Osaka in early November 1954. Reproduced with permission from Mainichi News/Aflo images.

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For Megumi

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Contents

Acknowledgments

/

ix

Prologue

Crossing the Waters

Chapter 1

Welcoming Comrade Li /

Chapter 2

Mao’s Mushroom Clouds

/

Chapter 3

Red Guard Whirlwind /

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Chapter 4

Rediscovering the Continent /

Epilogue

Mourning Mao’s Death

Notes

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20 54

127

164

/ 181

Bibliography / 209 Index

/ 227

vii

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Acknowledgments

THE RESEARCH FOR THIS BOOK began during the spring and summer of 2012, when I held a position as visiting associate professor in the Graduate School of Law at Hitotsubashi University in the western Tokyo suburb of Kunitachi. My gratitude to Professor Aono Toshihiko, for arranging that appointment and making possible a fabulous five months at Hitotsubashi for me and my family, is deep. After brief summer research trips to Tokyo during the following two summers, a short-term Japanese Studies research grant from the Japan Foundation enabled me to carry out the final stages of source collection during a longer stay in the summer of 2015. Without that award, it would have taken me far longer to finish this book. A final trip to Tokyo related to this project was facilitated in 2017 by an award from the Peter J. Seybolt Faculty Fund in Asian Studies at the University of Vermont, an endowment established in memory of a muchrespected colleague and mentor at my university upon his passing in 2012. Additional financial support for the publication of the book came from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the Humanities Center, the Dean’s Office of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of History at the University of Vermont. Valued colleagues in the field of East Asian studies who have sup­ ported me in the pursuit of this project in one way or another include Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Barak Kushner, Laura Nenzi, Kyle Ikeda, Max Ward, and Konrad Lawson. To each of them, as well as to my colleagues in the Department of History and the Asian Studies Program at the University of Vermont, I offer my humble thanks. A special word of gratitude is also owed to Professor Hirano Kenichirō, scholar emeritus of the University of Tokyo and Waseda University. In a holiday-season correspondence several years ago, Professor Hirano encouraged me to persevere in our shared scholarly search for “new perspectives” on the intertwined historical expe­ rience that continues to shape Japan-China relations today. On more than one occasion since getting started on this topic, his comments in that letter

ix

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Acknowledgments

inspired me to keep plugging away at the project and eventually bring this book to completion. The editorial staff at the University of Hawai‘i Press, especially Stephanie Chun and Cheryl Loe, oversaw the completion of the manu­ script and production of the book with great professionalism and care. The anonymous readers for the press also provided tremendously useful suggestions for improvement that in the end made this book a much better piece of scholarship. Portions of chapter 1 appeared in a far shorter and differently orga­ nized essay on Li Dequan’s trip to Japan, “Humanitarian Hero or Commu­ nist Stooge? The Ambivalent Japanese Reception of Li Dequan in 1954,” in The Dismantling of Japan’s Empire in East Asia: Deimperialization, Postwar Legitimation, and Imperial Afterlife, ed. Barak Kushner and Sher­ zod Muminov (New York: Routledge, 2017), 220–235. Additionally, some of the evidence and analysis offered in chapter 3 appeared previously in an article entitled “Red Guards and Salarymen: The Chinese Cultural Revolu­ tion and Comic Satire in 1960s Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 74, no. 4 (November 2015): 953–976. In both cases, that content is reproduced here with permission. Finally, I thank both Megumi, for her enduring patience and support, and our three sons, Kaito, Toren, and Tohma, for always reminding me that whatever I might do in a typical day as their father is vastly more important than anything I might ever accomplish as a professional historian.

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That Distant Country Next Door

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PROLOGUE

Crossing the Waters

S

eptember 25—a day, for Japan and China, that will surely be remembered as a new page in history.” So began an autumn 1972 article in the Japanese women’s weekly magazine Josei Sebun, a brief but lively feature story entitled “A Travel Guide for Office Ladies—You Too Will Soon Be Able to See China!” On that dramatically characterized late September morning, Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei had landed in Beijing, greeted on the airport tar­ mac by Chinese foreign minister Zhou Enlai, to participate in formal talks aimed at reestablishing official diplomatic relations between Japan and the People’s Republic of China. Following the successful conclusion of those meetings, the article continued, “anyone will be able to travel freely throughout the vast expanse of continental China,” something long sought by many in Japan since the PRC’s founding in 1949. Most importantly, as the author next expressed with a sense of hope and excitement, upon the restoration of Japan-China relations that autumn, “the China that was for Japan a distant country next door (chikakute tōi kuni) . . . will soon become a true neighboring nation (hontō no ringoku).”1 Although penned at the time for no purpose greater than enticing young urban Japanese women to imagine the thrill of a journey to the Asian mainland, such phrases assume deeper meaning when considered several decades later from a historical perspective. In particular, as preparations for the resumption of Sino-Japanese diplomacy took shape throughout 1972, popular Japanese print media outlets frequently referred to Mao’s China as chikakute tōi kuni, a phrase I opt to translate as “distant country next door.” Suggesting a simultaneous sense of intimacy and estrangement, it is a jarring juxtaposition of words. Jarring, but deeply appropriate. The nature of the postwar American occupation of Japan and the broader Cold War context within which its legacies unfolded had indeed given rise to a seem­ ingly unnatural distance between these two societies that had experienced deep and relatively consistent political, social, and cultural connections for 1

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Prologue

many centuries. The frequency with which the phrase appeared in 1971 and 1972 suggests that media producers assumed it to be a sentiment that would resonate well with everyday readers in Japanese society. In the pages that follow, the phrase will also function as a conceptual anchor for a brief but (I hope) provocative exploration of popular Japanese perceptions of the Chinese world during the postwar era. To appreciate its interpretive utility, however, both the phrase and the idea of a “distant country next door” must be placed within a broader historical context. Although “island” and “isolation” appear naturally linked in everyday thinking, a flawed logic lurks behind that seemingly obvious association. The waters that bless (or curse) an island with its cartographic identity are just as often a conduit as they are a barrier to contact with other shores. This is especially true with the archipelago we know today as Japan. While still quite often touted as somehow unique because of its centuries-long evolution as an island society, almost everything that has eventually come to be recognized as “Japanese” culture is in fact largely inseparable from the social and political world of the continental mainland bonded to the islands by shared ocean waters. For several hundred years beginning in the third century BCE, an influx of technological innovations from the Chinese world, such as iron tools and wet-field rice agriculture, dramatically transformed the nature of social and economic life in Japan. From the fourth century CE onward, Chinese ideas, too, changed the Japanese political world, as early elites on the islands mastered both the written Chinese language and the philosophi­ cal concepts expressed in Chinese texts. Reaching a peak during the Nara period of the eighth century, when Japanese rulers constructed a permanent imperial capital city modeled after Chang’an, the fantastic urban center of the Tang dynasty, the influence of Chinese civilization upon the early centuries of Japanese social, political, and cultural evolution before the ninth century simply cannot be overstated.2 During Japan’s medieval age, the power of China as a model of politi­ cal organization faded to a degree. For the aristocratic elites who ruled the Japanese world from the city of Heian (present-day Kyoto) from the ninth century until the twelfth century, the Chinese system of imperial statecraft was less important. Of course, Japanese emperors still wielded consider­ able power, but they did so in competition with equally influential aristo­ cratic clans in the capital. Nonetheless, in a cultural sense, China still held a prominent position in Japanese life. The elite men of Heian could recite Chinese poetry, elite women wore Chinese silks, and Chinese religious, philosophical, technological, and medical texts continued to find their way

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across the sea to inspire Japanese scholars always eager to consume new knowledge from the continent.3 The Japanese world drifted even further from its continental origins, politically speaking, after the consolidation of the first samurai state in Kamakura during the early thirteenth century. The character of samurai rule would continue to evolve and become more refined and effective over the course of the next several hundred years, but already by the fourteenth century a stark difference between China and Japan was clear: an immense cadre of scholar-officials, selected on the basis of merit proven through suc­ cess in the civil service examination system, facilitated the rule of powerful emperors in China, while a warrior class anchored in hereditary privilege ruled the Japanese world with almost no regard for the political will of the emperors in Kyoto. Even in a Japan dominated by the samurai, however, the Chinese world still had a part to play. Art, philosophy, and commerce from the mainland continued to cross the sea as they always had, even during the alleged “closed country” period of the Tokugawa shoguns.4 Foreign and domestic crises of the mid-nineteenth century, both on the archipelago and the mainland, sparked a dramatic shift in Japan’s re­ lationship with the Chinese world. From the 1870s, under the direction of the new Meiji state, Japanese ruling elites and everyday people alike turned increasingly to Western Europe and North America as models of “modern” civilization, breaking with a centuries-old pattern in which the Chinese world had always played that role. The ultimate consequences of that shift were, of course, disastrous. Japan’s drive to become a major world power during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to a brutal invasion of the continent and a cataclysmic war with the West. It was the invasion of the mainland by imperial Japanese military forces and the subsequent descent of those forces, facing determined Chinese resis­ tance, into an interminable strategic quagmire that triggered the decision by Japan’s leadership to initiate war with the West in 1941. The war in China could not be continued without access to the natural resources of Southeast Asia, a region under the thumb of the British, French, Dutch, and American colonial authorities. It was a decision that ultimately brought Japanese so­ ciety to the brink of complete destruction during the late summer of 1945. It is fair to say, then, that the Second World War in Asia resulted primarily from a long-term transformation in Japan’s relationship with the continental mainland. In fact, much of the historiography of modern Japan-China relations tends to take the war as a known endpoint and then explore various topics and themes from the late nineteenth and early twen­ tieth centuries to chart retroactively the course of events and interactions

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Prologue

that brought the relationship to its devastating dénouement during the late 1930s and early 1940s.5 For many in Japan today, however, the “war” in “postwar” Japan refers first and foremost not to the war in China but to the ferocious battles fought between the imperial Japanese military and Allied forces led by the United States on islands of the Pacific from December 1941 until August 1945. This is so largely because nearly seven years of Allied occupation, again led by the United States, followed those nearly four years of war, during which the contours of Japan’s domestic politics and foreign relations were profoundly shaped by American cultural idealism and geopolitics. What is more, at occupation’s end, the Americans did not leave. Driven by the geostrategic prerogatives of the Cold War in Asia, the archipelago remained locked in the American embrace after the first occupation person­ nel set foot on Japanese shores, and thousands of US soldiers and their families continued to reside on the islands to facilitate the containment of communism in the region for decades to come. The consequences of this arrangement for Japanese links to the mainland were substantial. Because the United States did not recognize the legitimacy of the Chinese com­ munist regime in Beijing after 1949, neither could Japan. Even after the American occupation ended in the spring of 1952, Japan and the People’s Republic of China would only reestablish formal diplomatic relations twenty years later, in 1972. Moreover, as Peter Duus and Kenji Hasegawa have suggested, “America remained an unavoidable presence” throughout the postwar era not only politically but also culturally. “American fashions, American fads, American pop music, American movies, and American brands continued to mesmerize the Japanese consumer.”6 Both Cold War geopolitics and US hegemonic influence played a significant role in the construction of Mao’s China as a “distant country next door” in the popular Japanese consciousness. While the Pacific may have indeed become the American lake en­ visioned by US officials after the Second World War, with Japan float­ ing securely atop its waters, the character of everyday Japanese attitudes concerning Mao’s China make clear that channels of communication and imagination between the archipelago and the mainland, however disturbed by the storms of Cold War geopolitics, continued to shape interactions and perceptions between the two societies during the early postwar era. That Japanese and Chinese leaders spoke of the restoration of formal ties in 1972 as a revival of two thousand years of friendship that had been unfortunately interrupted by several decades of conflict should remind us of something important. By privileging the past seventy years of US-Japan relations

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over the more than two millennia of China-Japan interactions that came before, the complexities of social conflict and cultural identity in postwarera Japanese society are obscured rather than clarified. The approach taken in this book breaks free of the view, typically advanced in Cold War–cen­ tered narratives of postwar Japan-China relations, that Japan’s continental connections had been ruptured once it was firmly contained within the US geopolitical embrace. By instead unearthing the cultural dimensions of continuity across the 1950s and 1960s and revealing the deep roots of postwar images in prewar perceptions, this book argues that Mao’s China figured prominently not only in the lives and thoughts of Japanese politi­ cians, diplomats, industrialists, and intellectuals but that those more widely publicized opinions took shape within the context of a dynamic and mul­ tidimensional public imagination of the postwar Chinese world.7 In short, this book does not aim to confront dramatically an established interpretive paradigm in Cold War history and advance a radical new understanding of postwar East Asian international relations. Rather, the evidence and analy­ sis put forth here is meant to place an already recognizable diplomatic nar­ rative within a heretofore largely unexamined social and cultural context. Doing so, I will contend, both enhances and improves our understanding of how, between 1952 and 1972, Japan and China rebuilt a state-to-state relationship that had been so viciously torn apart by the traumatic violence of the wartime era. The intellectual journey that produced this book began with a simple question: How did a popular Japanese perception of the Chinese world that facilitated imperial aggression and wartime brutality during the early 1940s become one that embraced both the restoration of friendly diplomatic ties as well as the cultivation of mutually beneficial economic and cultural interactions by the early 1970s? What my several years of research, reflec­ tion, and writing will suggest is an answer in many ways just as simple as the original question: The road from wartime antagonism to postwar friendship was not as stark a transformation as one might have expected. Rather, the history of popular Japanese perceptions of the Chinese world under Chairman Mao is infused with elements of thematic and conceptual continuity linking the prewar, wartime, and postwar eras. In sketching out a portrait of those elements, as revealed in a wide variety of popular media sources of that time, the story of how Japan’s relationship with China was reconstructed after the Second World War can come to include much more than just the trials and tribulations of Cold War diplomacy. In so doing, the history of postwar Japan-China relations can be reintegrated within a much longer history of East Asian cultural interaction and engagement.

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Prologue

From a Popular Perspective The basic contours of postwar Japan-China political and economic relations are well known. During the Occupation period (1945–1952), although the Japanese state had no independent foreign policy, pressure came from the entire political spectrum to restore trade and commerce with China as soon as possible. The US occupation regime, however, was hesitant, and that anxiety was only made worse by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. With the end of the Occupation in 1952, continental commerce had more freedom to grow, but US leaders, still weary of Ja­ pan becoming too friendly with Communist China, imposed limits on the growth of Japanese trade with the PRC. Cultural exchanges nonetheless became more frequent from 1952 through 1958, which further paved the way for closer ties between the two neighbors. Positive trends took a turn for the worse in 1958 when Kishi Nobu­ suke became Japan’s prime minister. Kishi subscribed to a foreign policy orientation focused on closer ties to the United States, making him in turn less friendly to the PRC. Having been detained as a Class A war criminal at Sugamo prison for several years during the Occupation for his role as an elite bureaucrat in Japan’s colonial state in Manchuria, Kishi was also especially unpopular on the Chinese side. Domestic politics in the PRC during the late 1950s also played a part in slowing the development of deeper relations with Japan. With the initiation of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward campaign in 1958, interest in foreign trade dropped as the Chinese leadership under Mao’s direction turned more toward internal economic self-sufficiency. That trend together with anti-Kishi sentiment brought about the suspension of trade with Japan in 1958. The revival of more moderate CCP leadership in 1961 following the disastrous famine unleashed by Mao’s Great Leap Forward saw a resurgence in trade with Ja­ pan. The United States’ deeper involvement in Indochina in 1965, however, and Japan’s complicity in prosecution of the American war in Vietnam via the US-Japan security agreement, exacerbated by a Chinese perception of Japanese prime minister Satō Eisaku’s government as generally hostile to its interests, prevented a full return to the more positive trends in ChinaJapan relations of the mid-1950s. The late 1960s saw even more problems. The escalation of war in Vietnam and the initiation of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution meant worsening relations between the PRC and the United States and, by extension, fewer chances to restore flows of trade and commerce between Japan and China. The subsequent deterioration of PRC-USSR relations

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after 1969, however, shifted trends in yet another direction. By 1970, Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai were entertaining notions of PRC-USA détente as a foil to what both men perceived as an increasingly dangerous Soviet Union. US political elites also came to see Japan’s own economic power by 1970 as a potential threat that merited some precautionary attention. When the United States finally recognized the PRC in 1971, the decision was an­ nounced without any meaningful consultation with Japanese prime minister Satō, a shock that weakened him politically; a new cabinet under Tanaka Kakuei replaced the Satō government in the summer of 1972. Tanaka came to power with the restoration of Japanese relations with the PRC at the top of his agenda, riding widespread popular enthusiasm for such a move. Worth noting is that a wide variety of popular forces pressed for the restoration of Japan-China relations as soon as possible during the early postwar era—China-friendly social movements, leftwing political parties, corporate business interests, even pro-China elements within the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Because the US-Japan al­ liance stood in the way of any official action on that front, as one scholar has put it, political relations between China and Japan “remained frozen by American design” despite connections of commerce and culture in the 1950s.8 Within the realm of formal diplomacy, only after the United States made its move under Nixon and Kissinger was the Japanese state finally free to act. Looking at that twenty-year span primarily through a diplomatic lens, the bipolar dynamics of the Cold War emerge as the driving force that compelled Japanese society in political terms to embrace the US order, effectively cutting Japan off from its continental identity. From that per­ spective, the restoration of official discourse between Japan and the PRC in 1972 marks the initiation of a reorientation of Japanese foreign relations toward the Asian continent. If, however, we look instead at the history of that twenty-year period through the cultural lens of popular consciousness and representation, we see far more continuity than disruption. Defeat and occupation did not isolate Japanese society from the continental East Asian world. As had been the case for most of Japan’s historical experience, people on the archipelago continued to understand and interpret their own social environment through complex and diverse references to the events and ideas then shaping China. As scholars of Tokugawa society have re­ minded us, while the Edo period was an era of limited or entirely absent formal diplomacy, for many years we too readily embraced the notion of an isolated Japanese society under the Tokugawa shoguns. Ronald Toby

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Prologue

and Marius Jansen have shown that everyday Japanese identity was shaped dramatically by interactions with Korea and China in ways the state did not control.9 Postwar Japan is not so smoothly comparable to the Tokugawa era, of course, but Cold War historiography has nonetheless cast an image of an isolated Japan under US hegemony during the 1950s and 1960s that has similarly warped our perception of postwar Japanese interactions with other parts of Asia. From the popular perception vantage point, 1952–1972 can be re­ stored as a vital stage in Japan-China history. This is not to say that the Cold War is irrelevant but rather that everyday views of China had deeper roots and cannot be explained by Cold War factors alone. Taking popular perception into account also enables us to place a diplomatic process within a social and cultural context. Politicians and diplomats act on the interna­ tional stage with deep concern for domestic feelings. This book makes clear that official policy and popular sentiment were not always the same and that ruling elites made their decisions fully cognizant of that difference. While we cannot claim conclusively that popular Japanese perceptions of Mao’s China directly triggered the actions of ruling political elites who orchestrated the normalization of Japan-China relations in 1972, a social history of everyday attitudes concerning the Chinese world during the early postwar era reveals the diplomatic shift of that year to be less dramatic and abrupt than an exclusive focus on Cold War geopolitics would suggest. Indeed, there was a feeling of excitement about a new era in Japan-China relations after 1972, but this was the culmination of popular sentiments that had been evolving since the end of the Occupation era, not an abrupt about-face in public opinion triggered by Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Zhou Enlai, or Tanaka Kakuei. This vantage point is worth taking because during the 1950s and 1960s, the Japan-China relationship, while not free of problems, was gener­ ally less hostile than it is today. During the early Cold War era, the PRC saw the United States as its primary geopolitical enemy, and if Japan was also viewed with some suspicion, that was derived from what Beijing saw as the conservative Japanese state’s role as a puppet in US imperial strategy. While everyday Chinese perceptions of Japan during the 1950s and 1960s are difficult to determine because there was no free media under Mao, we do know what sort of popular perception the CCP wanted to cultivate. This was abundantly clear during the summer of 1960, when the People’s Daily dramatically illustrated Japanese protests against the renewal of the US-Japan security treaty as evidence of popular Japanese hostility both to American imperialism and resurgent Japanese militarism. The CCP used

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its media tools to shape a popular perception of unity between the everyday people of China and Japan against the insidious forces of US imperialism in the postwar East Asian world.10 Since the early 1990s, however, the CCP has nurtured an educational focus on the remembrance of “national humiliation” as something the Chi­ nese people must never again allow. The Japanese invasion of mainland China during the Second World War serves as a vital focal point of this new Chinese nationalism. Working against that trend is a rise in Japanese nationalism since the early 1990s and a concomitant perception in many other parts of Asia that Japanese society is growing more reluctant to reflect sincerely on the mistakes of its wartime past. Behind these problems of historical consciousness, of course, are more pragmatic issues connected to economic and geosecurity rivalries between China and Japan. Still, while it is often suggested that both societies should take a more honest and objective view of their wartime history, a fresh look at postwar history can be equally valuable.11 Postwar Japan-China relations have not been entirely ignored by scholars, but those studies we have in English are comparatively few and rather limited in scope. Generally speaking, extant historical work can be categorized in two ways. First, during the late 1970s and 1980s, historians most often looked at how the Cold War shaped mutual perceptions and policies on political and diplomatic levels.12 Second, since the 2000s most work has focused on the reasons for poor relations since the early 1980s, such as secondary-school textbook controversies, the remembrance of war criminals at Yasukuni shrine, the experience of so-called comfort women in Japanese military prostitution networks, and compensation for forced labor.13 Fortunately, recent work has done more to cast deserved light on the postwar era before the 1980s. Robert Hoppens, for example, has argued that Japanese political elites used China policy during the 1970s as a tool in the redefinition of Japanese national identity.14 In her research on the Chinese side of the relationship, Amy King has persuasively suggested that the Chinese leadership saw Japan as a valuable model of economic development and a source of technological expertise throughout the 1950s and 1960s.15 Valuable developments have also been nurtured in recent Japanese-language scholarship. Baba Kimihiko, in particular, has produced a pair of substantial books that provide a comprehensive overview of Japa­ nese views on Chinese society during the postwar era,16 and collaborative work between other Japanese and Chinese scholars has also brought about much-needed understandings of long-term trends in China-Japan relations that transcend the sharp chronological distinction of 1945.17 Still, while

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Prologue

contemporary observers of Japan-China relations during the early Cold War era recognized the importance of conceptual patterns in popular Japanese perceptions of the PRC under Mao,18 historians of postwar Japan-China relations have been slow to do the same.19 My strategy is to provide an array of examples from a wide variety of popular sources and derive from that evidence meaningful thematic and conceptual patterns. Conceived of not as an exhaustive catalog but rather a carefully selected sampling, the book is concise by intention and design. While I will follow an arc of time from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, my aim is not to craft a detailed chronology. Instead, I have selected four key historical moments through which significant dimensions of postwar Japanese perceptions of Chinese society can be usefully explored and in­ terpreted. The strategy is similar to that employed by Marius Jansen in his exploration of China’s place in the popular imagination of the Tokugawa world and by Joshua Fogel in his identification of long-term core patterns in the China-Japan relationship, in that both scholars use a set of case studies to examine broader themes.20 Similarly, Alexis Dudden has crafted a provocative interpretation of conflict over popular memory and historical apology in Japanese-Korean-US historical consciousness by exploring a concise sampling of key incidents.21 Let me also be unequivocally clear in saying that this is a book about Japanese history insofar as it draws primarily from a source base of Japanese-language materials. Scholars such as Amy King have done much in recent years to enhance our understand­ ing of Chinese perceptions of Japan during the postwar era, and, while I have done so elsewhere, I make no claim to be adding to that body of knowledge here.22 The story I will tell begins in the autumn of 1954. Nine years have passed since Japan’s surrender, but the emergence of the Cold War in East Asia has prevented China and Japan from reestablishing official diplomatic relations. Unofficially, however, interaction between the two neighbors was hardly static. Chapter 1 will examine the visit of Li Dequan to Japan in 1954, the first by any member of the Chinese government after the PRC was founded in 1949. Spurned by some but warmly welcomed by many others, the divided popular reaction to Li’s visit reflects deeper social tensions con­ cerning Japanese national identity during the early 1950s. Next, I examine in chapter 2 the popular Japanese response to China’s first nuclear weapons tests between 1964 and 1967, as revealed in weekly periodicals, newspaper editorials, and popular fiction. While China’s emergence as a nuclear power understandably triggered great anxiety in Japan, evidence also suggests that such fear was at times mixed with satisfaction and even pride that

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an Asian power had broken the Western monopoly on atomic weapons. Japanese reactions to and representations of the Red Guard movement during the early Chinese Cultural Revolution years of 1966–1968 are the focus of chapter 3, and these too defy simple categorization. While some sources suggest disdain for the shortsighted destructiveness of Red Guard fanaticism, others indicate admiration for the passion of Chinese youth to transform their world so dramatically. Chapter 4 then explores what I term the popular “rediscovery” of China through Japanese print media during the period of diplomatic normalization in 1971–1972. Focusing on a wide variety of mass-media sources, I explore the visual and textual motifs by which the Japanese public came to refamiliarize itself with China after so many years of limited popular contact during the Cold War. My primary interest is in the twenty years between the end of Oc­ cupation in 1952 and the restoration of Japan-China relations in 1972. This does not suggest, of course, that popular views of China during the Occupation era are unworthy of study. Because my goal is to examine the arena of popular sentiment during the era of reconstruction in Japan-China diplomacy, however, I draw the line at 1952 because that is the moment when Japan regained the sovereignty necessary for formal diplomatic ties. My choice of topics was also conditioned by the availability of sources that speak to popular attitudes. Events in Chinese society such as the Great Leap Forward or the Sino-Soviet split, for example, as significant as they were for the Chinese world, did not inspire the same degree of widespread popular discussion in Japan as PRC nuclear testing or the Red Guard move­ ment. I have been drawn to those topics that generated the most substantive primary-source record. I have also aimed to engage in two different types of historical investigation in this book: tightly focused microhistorical looks at precise moments in time (Li Dequan’s visit, PRC nuclear weapons tests) and broader macrohistorical examinations of wide-sweeping events (the Red Guard movement, the popular climate surrounding the restoration of Japan-China relations in 1971–1972). All four topics speak to three interrelated ideas. First, a significant perceptual gap between state policy and popular sentiment characterized Japanese views on China between the early 1950s and the early 1970s. Second, this state-society gulf, as well as conflicting views within the arena of popular opinion, reflected deep rifts in postwar Japanese society related both to the legacies of the war and the nature of the postwar settlement be­ tween Japan and its wartime foes. Third, everyday people in postwar Japan routinely filtered these mixed perceptions of contemporary Chinese society through the lens of Japanese historical experience, producing portraits of

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Prologue

Mao’s China that alternated between the nostalgic embodiment of a tradi­ tional past long since left behind and a bold new future the Japanese world had yet to achieve. From the Cold War history perspective, the twenty years between the end of Occupation and the restoration of Japan-China relations in 1972 were an era of absence, limitation, and prevention because US policy stood in the way of political and economic elites in Japan who desired a different form of Japan-China relations. From the vantage point of Japanese popular perception, however, those years become a period of vitality, transforma­ tion, and self-reflection. Moreover, we can better understand the degree to which China was a lens through which Japanese society crafted its own identity and worked out internal struggles over that image. While disputes over China policy between Japanese political factions also reflected in­ ternal conflict, popular views reveal cultural dimensions to that struggle less evident in the public political arena, especially concerning matters of gender and social class. Indeed, to understand what inspired the positive views many in Japan had concerning the PRC during the 1950s and 1960, we must look first at the central crises of postwar Japanese society—a rapid transformation of social norms, the dilemma of the US military presence beyond Occupation, the lingering power of conservative political elites, and the desire for recovery and growth after the devastation of war. In confronting these and many other issues, a positive representation of the Chinese world under Mao served a valuable purpose. Unearthing the Everyday For all that we can learn by tapping into popular consciousness, the methodological challenge is great. How can historians know the thoughts of people from the past who did not write those thoughts down? When one’s aim is to explore the history of popular consciousness, the task must be to learn as much as possible from the sources that do exist. To craft an image of everyday Japanese views of Chinese society during the early postwar era, this book will explore a wide variety of source materials, informed by the underlying assumption that by listening to the voices of seventeen-year-old high-school students and middle-aged salarymen along­ side prize-winning novelists and national politicians, a more representative portrait of popular attitudes comes into focus. Scholars of Japan have long used examples from everyday mass cul­ ture to identify and analyze the ideological contours of various social iden­ tities, with Ron Toby’s work on popular perceptions of Korea as reflected in

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Tokugawa-era woodblock prints, votive shrine tablets, and urban festivals being one especially insightful example.23 William Steele has also persua­ sively argued that the popular sentiment of late-Tokugawa-era commoners concerning the arrival of the Perry Mission in 1853–1854 can be garnered from the broadsheet newspapers of the day. Because “broadsheets were made to please, interest, and entertain, rather than educate and change . . . kawaraban were reasonably accurate representations of important and active sectors of the mental world of Edo commoners.”24 The eminent historian of postwar Japanese society John Dower has carried this approach through to topics in the twentieth century with his analysis of popular at­ titudes during the Occupation era. In reflecting on the historical value of satirical cartoons, for example, Dower maintains: “Although these graphic little jokes certainly constitute one of the most modest and ephemeral forms of social commentary and cultural expression imaginable, in retrospect they capture the flavor of the times with remarkable pungency.”25 Feature stories and editorial essays from Japan’s major daily newspa­ pers are one place to look for a sense of popular attitudes. Beyond newspa­ pers, I also look closely at stories published in mass-market weekly maga­ zines, including those characterized by their primarily comic orientation. In fact, the visual culture of Japanese cartoonists will frequently be explored in the chapters to come, especially the satirical work of Yokoyama Taizō, Kondō Hidezō, and Nasu Ryōsuke. Employing the visual art of political cartoonists, of course, poses interpretive challenges. “If a political cartoon­ ist is an independent thinker, then his work must be used to represent a single viewpoint—popular but not necessarily representative,” one histo­ rian has explained. “If, on the other hand, cartoonists primarily reflect the ideas of the public which they serve, then cartoons themselves can stand in for the voice of the people.”26 A comic artist has individual intentions but also desires wide readership. Moreover, the editors and publishing compa­ nies who make the artist’s imagery public seek to please and retain readers. Therefore, the images and ideas crafted for presentation to a mass audience must convey sentiments that will resonate with that audience. Editorial cartoons are not a direct reflection of popular sentiment, as what is expressed by the image is a sentiment or idea originating in the comic artist behind it. Nonetheless, a cartoonist creates images and text that will resonate with the reading audience—a publisher would have no inter­ est in it otherwise—so those creations can provide insight on popular view­ points. In frequently examining perceptions of China as reflected in comic art, I follow the lead of historians such as Peter Duus, who has suggested, “it is precisely the commonplace qualities that tempt us to trivialize the

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Prologue

cartoon—the simplicity of its language, the directness of its message, and the mechanical character of its production—that make it of such value.” In fact, editorial cartoons, Duus contends, can “provide access to ‘everyday’ reactions to politics that even public opinion polls cannot capture,” and as such they “constitute a vast archive that reveals not only fundamental shifts in political consciousness but also the ebb and flow of political sentiments among the thousands and millions who read them.”27 Public opinion polls, too, are not perfect representations of everyday thinking. The questions posed reflect the interests of the pollsters, not the respondents; moreover, those providing answers might be expressing what they feel should be said rather than what they honestly believe. Even so, polling data can suggest patterns of thinking over time that historians can usefully interpret.28 At times, I also consider the imagery produced by Japanese photo­ journalists. Photography, too, can be carefully unpacked to reveal more than the mere image captured by the camera. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki has explained, “photographers choose their angle of vision and frame their shots, using imagery (as historians use words) in an always-incomplete effort to express their feeling and understanding of events.” Moreover, “they edit their own work, selecting, developing and enhancing the images which most successfully communicate the messages they wish to convey to viewers.”29 So, with photographs as with cartoons, we can look for both what the producer of the image captured visually as well as what that im­ age assumes of its audience. Photographers both reflect and shape popular imagination. The photographer and the publication outlet certainly aim to present an image to the reader that suits its mission. Equally true, however, is that photographers will select subjects believed to be of interest to that audience already, so in that sense it also reflects popular thinking. Just as we must take the editorial cartoon as something that both reflects and influences public opinion, the same care must be taken in ana­ lyzing advertisements. “On the one hand, advertisements draw upon what is generally recognizable and understood by those who will see them—they rely on prevailing assumptions and knowledge,” Ludmilla Jordanova has explained. “On the other hand, they are designed to influence viewers’ behavior, and in the process seek to be original, even trendsetting—to go beyond what is already there.”30 Modern commercial marketing seeks to attract consumers and encourage spending, so advertisements are crafted to convince readers of a given product’s necessity. In 1971–1972, advertisers employed positive associations with China as a marketing tool, and the imagery of China in those advertisements was designed to resonate with their audience’s perceptions of Chinese society.

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All sources have their limitations. Such is the nature of historical research. When we create a portrait of the past, we are crafting not a com­ plete reproduction of historical reality but a mere representation of a small sliver of past experience, albeit one grounded in the logical interpretation of evidence organized in the most effective manner possible. Developing a portrait of popular perceptions is akin to sketching an image of someone you don’t know by examining their tastes in movies, fashion, music, food, and so on, with only an occasional chance to speak to them directly. Per­ haps one piece of evidence alone cannot be taken as a definitive statement, but in the patterns that emerge across a wide variety of examples, signifi­ cant themes can clearly emerge, and the historian can derive interpretive meaning from those themes. The great challenge at hand in taking this approach, however, is how best to formulate a precise interpretive description of “popular” views on a given subject at a particular moment in time. It is a different task alto­ gether if one wants to interpret the views of a particular person. In that case, we can be far more precise and confident in our assessment. But there is a tradeoff there, too. While we can state with more certainty what one individual thought of China, we are left with the problem of assessing how important one person’s views truly are. Alternatively, one can take the approach advanced in this book and sketch a broad portrait of popular views derived from a wide variety of sources. Still, while that might give us a more inclusive and representative image, the degree to which one can draw a precise conclusion about what “everyday” people thought about a specific problem is also highly circumscribed. Which is of more value to the historian, a highly specific argumentative position of questionable interpretive relevance to a larger context or a meaningfully suggestive overview of broad trends and patterns that nonetheless cannot lead one to a precise interpretive conclusion? The choice is a false one, of course, because historical inquiry involves (and requires) both. As attractive as unequivocal assertions can be, multidimensional complexity is what makes history both dynamic and meaningful. Ultimately, what do we stand to gain by looking at popular Japanese attitudes concerning the Chinese world under Chairman Mao? Explor­ ing popular responses to national events reveals valuable dimensions of popular dissent from state-centered positions. The views of ruling elites reflect their interests, and those interests are rarely the same as those of the everyday people whose lives are affected by elite decision making. During the widespread popular demonstrations of May and June 1960 expressing opposition to the renewal of the US-Japan security treaty, for example,

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Prologue

Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke famously dismissed the relevance of urban protesters by claiming that a “silent majority” of everyday Japanese citizens supported his decision to renew the agreement. “I think that we must also incline our ears to the voiceless voices,” Kishi argued, as the demonstrators “we hear now are only the audible voices. That is all.”31 By equating the absence of public vocal resistance with tacit approval, however, Kishi had engaged in a bit of wishful thinking. Exploring popular views on China reveals that even in the absence of direct expressions of anti-US sentiment, suggestions of affinity with and sympathy for Mao’s China embodied an implicit critique of American hegemony. In other words, by looking closely at how the PRC was represented in everyday mass media, the frustrations shared by vocal leftist demonstrators and “voiceless” ordinary citizens can be brought into focus, suggesting a more widespread dissatisfaction with the US-Japan geopolitical embrace than what is indicated by public protest movements alone. In exploring the well-known Anpo demonstrations of 1960, Wesley Sasaki-Uemura’s work has shown that the specific historical moment of conflict between protesters and state authority in May and June of that year must be placed within the larger context of citizen protest during the postwar era. By doing so, the protests can be understood as more than just a reaction to a precise policy issue in the US-Japan relationship. As Sasaki-Uemura contends, “the size and vehemence” of the 1960 Anpo dem­ onstrations cannot be explained by diplomatic history alone; instead, those events “need to be seen as a struggle by ordinary Japanese to consolidate participatory rights in both state and society.”32 I will contend something similar here in connection with the reconstruction of Japan-China relations from 1952 to 1972. While the Cold War diplomatic narrative of normal­ ization certainly must be examined and appreciated, placing it within a broader popular context makes clear that rebuilding relations with Mao’s China involved much more than just negotiating the delicate contours of political and economic engagement between Japan and China during an era of intense US hegemonic power in the postwar East Asian world; the restoration of relations with the People’s Republic of China also involved a process of critical self-reflection within Japanese society whereby percep­ tions of the PRC often reflected contending visions of Japan’s own postwar direction and identity. By looking at popular views and perceptions as revealed in everyday sources, we can also move beyond the immediate Cold War context to see how ideas of the postwar era were linked to larger late-nineteenth- and

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early-twentieth-century patterns. In evaluating the reformulation of JapanUS relations after the war, the esteemed historian John Dower once asked how it was that two societies could move so smoothly from vicious race war to peaceful friendship. Of course, Cold War geopolitics of the day demanded it, but Dower also argued that wartime perceptions on both sides did not disappear so much as they adjusted and adapted to new circum­ stances because “the same stereotypes that fed superpatriotism and outright race hate were adaptable to cooperation.”33 In the same way, when trying to understand how popular Japanese views of China shifted from an era of war to one of peace, the answer is found less in how those views changed than in the degree to which they remained the same. Various such long-term conceptual continuities illustrated in this book include the notion of an advanced Japan versus a backward China, the ambivalent clash in Japanese consciousness between the China of admiration and the China of ridicule, an understanding of China as both Japan’s past and future, the bond of Japan-China unity in the face of Western aggression, and the anxiety in­ duced by a perception of China’s troubles posing a threat to Japanese life. Cultural perceptions such as these were as evident in the 1960s as they were in the 1930s or 1890s, and the cultural approach to postwar Japan-China relations that I pursue here brings these themes to light in a way that stan­ dard political, diplomatic, and economic histories of the postwar era do not. In sum, this book aims to bridge the 1940s to 1970s and demonstrate that the Cold War interlude was not as disruptive as the political/economic narrative leads us to believe. The absence of formal state-to-state relations did not mean the absence of influence; Japanese views of China continued to evolve as they always had. Moreover, popular Japanese views fluctu­ ated between China as backward and barbaric, China as progressive and admirable, and China as a nostalgic reminder of valuable tradition lost. And those fluctuations reflected conditions within domestic Japanese society as much as (or even more than) the Chinese reality they described. Between 1952 and 1972, people in Japan continued to make sense of changes in their world through the lens of Chinese experience. In recognizing this, the preponderance of attention granted to the United States in postwar Japanese society can be tempered by a greater appreciation for the place of Mao’s China in everyday Japanese thinking during the early postwar era. While the influence of the United States has been enormous and undeniable, its power in drawing our gaze has left other dimensions of popular Japanese perceptions of the world during the postwar era insufficiently explored. This book is an attempt not to replace the United States with the PRC but

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Prologue

to restore a bit of balance to our perceptions of postwar Japanese foreign relations by bringing everyday understandings of Mao’s China to a more prominent position in historical narrative and consciousness. It is from the phrase chikakute tōi kuni that I devised the title for this book—That Distant Country Next Door. A recent book on Japanese views of Korea has employed a similar phraseology, but my meaning with this turn of phrase is multilayered.34 The distance in Japan-China relations re­ fers both to the Cold War walls that hindered contact during the postwar era and to the wide gulf in historical consciousness that has come to divide so bitterly the two societies since the end of the Cold War. My hope, however, is that the evidence and analysis presented in this book will remind us of the historical closeness that characterizes the relationship between Japan and China. As I am always quick to remind the undergraduate students in my introductory course on the history of China and Japan, Chinese his­ tory cannot be adequately understood without exploring the connections between Chinese civilization and the societies on its peripheries, including Japan. To a far greater degree, Japanese history cannot be understood at all without examining how the position of the Chinese world in the Japanese political and cultural imagination has evolved since life on the archipelago was first transformed by the arrival of continental technology more than two thousand years ago. Finally, the research behind this book began during a semester spent as visiting professor at a university in the western suburbs of Tokyo. While carrying out my own investigative work, I also taught a graduate seminar entitled “The Politics of History in Contemporary East Asia,” in which I required my students to examine a variety of controversial issues connected to popular historical consciousness in the region, including the Yasukuni problem, legacies of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, and nuclear victim identity. While powerful enough on their own, what made our discussions of these topics even more provocative was that the twenty-two students in the seminar included young people not only from Japan but also from China, South Korea, Taiwan, Myanmar, and Kazakhstan. As there were only two languages with which we all had at least some functional ability, our lessons were carried out using both English and Japanese, depending on which tongue would provide the best expressive capacity at that particular moment. As we neared the end of our semester together, I asked them if it felt strange at all to have a North American scholar guiding them through the sensitive and often highly emotional intricacies of popular historical memory in East Asian society. Somewhat to my surprise, the consensus among them was quite the opposite. My academic and national identity as

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an “outsider” made it easier, they said, to trust my objectivity and reflect on the content of my instruction with an open mind. Moreover, they all more or less agreed that the course we had experienced together could not have been taught as effectively by a Japanese or Chinese faculty member at the university, presumably because neither could have functioned as a neutral investigator. As pleased as I was to know that my “American-ness” had not disqualified me in their eyes from being a valuable source of knowledge, I was nonetheless reminded of the powerful grip that nationalism holds over historical understanding in East Asia and, of course, everywhere else. It is thus my hope that this book can make a useful contribution to the broader and more long-term goal of depoliticizing the past in China and Japan, while offering general lessons of import to anyone with a sincere desire to think carefully and critically about our relationship with the thing we call history.

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CHAPTER 1

Welcoming Comrade Li She gave the perfect impression of a brave and powerful woman. Even her walk, with back straight and head held high, was stately and dignified. —Hitotsubashi University professor Kumano Shōhei, November 19541

Expel the Communist stooge Li! —Rightist flyer posted on a Tokyo street corner, October 19542

I

n the summer of 1966, Japanese society prepared to wel­ come important guests from abroad—the Beatles. Public opinion on the matter, however, was far from unified. For months, heated debates had raged in various venues of popular media be­ tween those who could barely contain their excitement for the arrival of the lads from Liverpool and those who demanded the door be shut in their faces. The dispute had grown so intense, in fact, that Tokyo’s metropoli­ tan police department had begun preparing for the possibility of violent clashes between maniacal fans and vociferous critics of the mop-haired musicians. Some even feared an attack against the Fab Four by their most determined opponents in Japanese society. John, Paul, George, and Ringo finally arrived at Haneda International Airport on June 29 without incident but spent most of their next five days in Japan effectively sequestered in the penthouse suite at the Tokyo Hilton. They left those palatial accommoda­ tions only to perform a series of five concerts at the Budōkan hall, shows that marked the first time a popular music band had been allowed to play in that sacred space, which had been built in 1964 for the multiple martial-arts competitions of the Tokyo Olympic games.3 While the wild public furor whipped up by the Beatles’ 1966 concerts in Tokyo occupies a prominent place in the postwar Japanese historical consciousness, a strikingly similar scenario, one far less well known today, had unfolded in Tokyo twelve years earlier. In that case, however, the con­ troversial visitor was not a band of global pop culture icons from Europe;

20

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it was a middle-aged Chinese woman from Beijing named Li Dequan (1896–1972), the first state official from the People’s Republic of China to set foot on Japanese soil since the “new” China had been born five years earlier, in October 1949. As would be true with the Beatles in 1966, the impending arrival of Li Dequan in the autumn of 1954 was the subject of widespread public debate in Japan for many weeks, and the conversation surrounding her visit was often highly contentious. Li’s formal position in the PRC government, as minister of public health, was somewhat unusual, in that while she was one of the highest-placed women in Beijing, she was not a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Li’s high public profile was rooted instead in her own rich personal experiences as a social activist on issues related to women and family, the international recognition she had cultivated since the end of the war by campaigning for those matters overseas, and her humanitarian work as president of the Chinese Red Cross. Her purpose in visiting Japan was to deliver a comprehensive list of Japanese military prisoners from the wartime era still being held in Chinese custody and provide assurances that Beijing would soon facilitate their safe return to the archipelago. While during the weeks leading up to her trip her Japanese supporters lauded Li’s journey to Tokyo as an epochal harbinger of peace and reconciliation between China and Japan, her opponents launched ven­ omous rhetorical attacks in which Li was dismissed as nothing more than a communist wolf in humanitarian sheep’s clothing. To the Japanese state, however, Li did not officially exist. American support for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime on Taiwan strictly cir­ cumscribed official Japanese diplomacy with the PRC after 1952, since no Japanese cabinet was free to recognize the Chinese Communist regime when the United States would not do so. To understand the significance of her visit, then, one cannot look solely or even primarily to the formal diplomatic record. The focus must turn instead to the realm of popular perception, where Li’s tour stoked strong passions on both sides of Japan’s political divide in the 1950s. Just two years after the end of the occupation, a wide gap between official and popular perceptions of the Japan-China relationship was clearly evident. And, where one stood on the China ques­ tion reflected one’s perception of the very nature of the post-Occupation Japanese state. Just as a pro-US foreign policy orientation was linked to a conservative domestic political stance, a PRC-friendly attitude was most often paired with progressive opposition to the Japanese political establish­ ment. In fact, these were related, as advancing a pro-PRC position typically

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Chapter 1

made one anti–United States, and vice versa. While more often recognized through the experiences of intellectuals and activists, the case of Li Dequan makes clear that these attitudes were just as relevant for everyday people. With state-to-state engagement between Tokyo and Beijing officially impossible, laying the foundations during the 1950s for a path toward the eventual normalization of China-Japan relations became a task left to an array of Japanese civilian activists and nongovernmental organizations. Li Dequan’s visit to Japan in 1954 was one of the earliest and most visible manifestations of this brand of unofficial diplomacy that shaped JapanChina relations during the early Cold War era. In fact, a special issue of Graphic Asahi (Asahi gurafu) in late 1972, produced to commemorate the visit of then prime minister Tanaka Kakuei to Beijing, included a 1954 photo of Li and her Japanese Red Cross hosts in Tokyo as an important example of the early postwar “trailblazers” that ultimately made possible the revival of “two thousand years of China-Japan friendship.”4 This chapter explores the purpose, content, and meaning of Li De­ quan’s 1954 visit to Japan, with a focus on four specific categories of popu­ lar reaction to the Li delegation, using it as a lens through which the social and cultural dynamics of Japan-China relations during the early Cold War era can be better perceived.5 Left-leaning social organizations, intellectuals, and activists saw the Li visit as a valuable step forward in the restoration of China-Japan friendship and East Asian peace—goals threatened in their view by the US-Japan security agreement. For both politically conservative academics and Japanese rightists, however, Li and her companions were little more than a cynical and self-serving front for anti-American agitation and the ideological infiltration of Japanese society by the PRC and the USSR. Beyond the political realm, the popular response to Li’s visit also reflected a struggle over social issues in the Japanese world concerning recovery from wartime trauma and aspirations for greater gender equality. For the thousands of everyday Japanese families who would learn from the Li delegation if their soldier sons, husbands, and fathers would finally be coming home, her visit was a blessing that offered relief from painful uncertainty. Additionally, for many women in Japan, it was not Li’s identity as a peace-loving humanitarian activist or as a shady communist subversive that shaped the response to her arrival. Rather, it was her status a woman holding a high-profile position in the Chinese state that gave her visit to Japan inspirational meaning. Li Dequan provided an example to Japanese women of the deep change in gender roles that had been made possible in the Chinese world, progress yet unrealized in Japan. Li’s position as a minister of state (unofficially) representing the PRC on an overseas mission

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was a reminder that Japanese women had yet to make similar professional and political strides in their own society. While some surely also sought Sino-Japanese unity to counter US geopolitical hegemony in the region, Li’s feminist friends in Japan primarily promoted her as powerful evidence that women could lead the postwar world into a more peaceful era of in­ ternational cooperation. The complex ways by which Li Dequan’s visit to Japan touched these competing social constituencies remind us that the postwar Japanese state was still in the process of consolidating its own legitimacy in 1954 and that the political and social fissures in Japanese life that made such con­ solidation challenging were abundant. The arrival of Li Dequan in Japan serves as a valuable historical moment that we can use to explore the social dynamics of that domestic struggle as it unfolded within the context of the early Cold War in East Asia. In short, within Japanese society during the later autumn of 1954, how one viewed the visit of Li Dequan reflected how one made sense of both the wartime experience and its legacies for the early postwar state. Context and Motivation Japanese popular opinion concerning the Chinese world had been shaped by a variety of factors during the years before Li Dequan’s arrival in 1954. Early in the Occupation era, the harshness of daily life in the smoking ruins of defeat meant that matters of sustenance and survival weighed more heavily on the minds of everyday people than issues of global politics. Still, the ubiquitous presence of American soldiers on Japanese soil dictated that the United States loomed large in the popular consciousness. Within the context of the American occupation, the nature of popular views of China ran a wide gamut, and published works by those who had returned from the mainland after surrender played a key role in shaping everyday perceptions. According to the historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki, feelings of deep regret over the invasion of the mainland were tempered with lingering traces of an imperial superiority complex, and both were mixed with a broadly positive view of the CCP and general feelings of affinity with the Chinese world. An August 1946 public opinion poll, for example, revealed that China ranked third (after the United States and Sweden) when respondents were asked, “with which nation of the world do you feel the most positive sentiments?”6 By 1947, the character of US occupation policy shifted away from radical democratic reform in favor of economic recovery and political stability. This change came at least partly as a response to the changing

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Chapter 1

balance of power in the ongoing Chinese civil war between Mao’s CCP and the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek, as American planners sought to strengthen the arc of capitalist containment around East Asian communism. With the Chinese Communist Party’s victory and the establishment of the PRC in 1949, those ideological lines of domestic political struggle in Japan further intensified. The outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula one year later brought a mixed bag of reactions. On one hand, the possibility of wide-scale regional war erupting once again was terrifying; on the other, US demand for war materiel meant jobs for Japanese workers and a spark of economic recovery for the nation. Despite the ferocity of the Korean conflict and its disastrous effect on relations between the United States and the PRC, public opinion data suggest that many in Japan believed their nation’s relationship with the continent need not also deteriorate. “At the moment, Japan and Communist China have no formal relationship,” one 1953 poll asked. “Do you think it is fine to continue this way, or is this not a good way to move forward?” Only 10 percent of respondents favored a continuation of the status quo, 53 percent claimed the current state of af­ fairs “should not continue,” and another 37 percent were “unsure” of what path forward would be best.7 Despite the formal limitations imposed by the US-Japan security agreement, for Japanese citizens of the early 1950s, relations with the People’s Republic of China after 1949 were arguably just as significant as Japanese connections to the United States (if not more so) for reasons related both to lucrative commercial opportunity and to national security anxiety. To take one relevant example of public opinion, a Yomiuri shinbun poll conducted roughly six months before Japan regained its national sovereignty in April 1952 revealed a strong popular appreciation for the significance of China in early postwar Japanese life. One question asked: “It is said that after the Occupation ends, Japan must decide for itself whom to recognize as the representative state of China, the PRC or Taiwan. Which do you think is best?” While 38 percent chose Taiwan and only 12 percent the PRC, the remaining half of respondents were undecided—hardly a ringing endorsement of Taipei over Beijing. Moreover, when asked, “In order to recover economically after the Occupation ends, do you think Japan should or should not have commercial trade relations with the PRC?” nearly 58 percent said “we should.” Only 10 percent said “we should not”; 35 percent remained unsure.8 Despite the uncertainty of some, clearly the economic importance of continental commerce was understood by most. Beyond the desire to revive economic ties, for thousands of everyday Japanese families the heavy emotional trauma linked to a war that had

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Welcoming Comrade Li

25

officially come to an end on the battlefield in the late summer of 1945 had yet to heal fully even nine years later. While many thousands of demobi­ lized Japanese military men had made their way back to the home islands by one means or another, thousands of others had disappeared into Soviet labor camps in Siberia, and the fate of still more was completely unknown to family members at home.9 True closure to the wartime experience for the Japanese people would continue to be elusive so long as those thousands of missing soldiers remained lost on continental soil, providing an additional reason to favor closer relations with the government in Beijing.10 The global context of fear and anxiety over the proliferation of nu­ clear weapons that infused Japanese public opinion during the mid-1950s was surely a third factor pushing many to desire warmer relations between Japan and the PRC. By 1954, the world had three nuclear powers (the United States, USSR, and United Kingdom), and the weapons developed by then were far more powerful than those unleashed upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Perhaps most infamously, the Castle Bravo test carried out by the United States at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands in early March 1954 dumped radioactive fallout across hundreds of square miles of open ocean, exposing the crew of the Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon Number 5 to potentially lethal doses of radiation. In fact, its crewmember Kuboyama Aikichi died in September of radiation sickness contracted from his exposure to the Castle Bravo test, just weeks before Li Dequan arrived in Tokyo. Moreover, the monster legend of Japanese cinema, Godzilla (Go­ jira), a terrifying beast stirred from his deep-sea slumber by nuclear weap­ ons testing, lumbered onto Japanese shores in October (only on the silver screen, of course), and it was not uncommon to see advertisements for the Toho Studio creature feature in Tokyo’s major dailies on the same page as news stories detailing Li Dequan’s arrival and her plans for touring Japan. Such was the context within which background preparations for the Li mission took shape. While surely Li would not have made the trip to Japan without approval from CCP leadership, the government in Beijing was not directly responsible for sending her. Li’s journey was instead the result of a process that had been unfolding over several years and in which three nongovernmental Japanese organizations had played the key roles: the Japan Red Cross, the Japan Peace Liaison Group (Nihon heiwa renraku kai), and the Japan-China Friendship Society (Nihon Chūgoku yūkō kyōkai). These three groups had worked together in previous years to facilitate a variety of China-Japan cultural exchanges, and Japanese del­ egations including members from all three organizations had traveled to the PRC in 1953 to facilitate the return of Japanese still remaining on the

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mainland.11 In concert with Prime Minister Yoshida’s policy of pursuing economic relations with the PRC, during the early 1950s several Japanese delegations of industrialists and commerce officials also traveled to the mainland. Networks of informal travel between Japan and the mainland were well established before Li’s journey.12 An especially meaningful effort organized by the Japan Red Cross was a campaign to return to the mainland the physical remains of Chinese laborers who had died in Japan during the war.13 Intended as reciprocation for such efforts by the Japanese side, the primary purpose of Li’s visit to Japan was the delivery of a detailed list of names identifying Japa­ nese soldiers still held as prisoners in the PRC in 1954.14 Once received by Japanese officials upon Li’s arrival, Japan’s major daily newspapers quickly reprinted these lists in lengthy feature stories on the Li delegation. Numerous radio broadcasters, too, had the lists read on air, so that eager families across the country might learn of news, good or bad, as soon as possible concerning their missing loved ones. The PRC’s logic for approving the Li Dequan mission must also be understood within the context of larger issues at work in China-Japan rela­ tions after the end of the Allied occupation of the archipelago in 1952. With the US-Japan security agreement in place and the government of Yoshida Shigeru expressing its official recognition of the Nationalist regime on Taiwan as the sole legitimate government of China, Beijing’s foreign policy toward Japan had to adopt a new strategy. In what Zhou termed “people’s diplomacy,” the goal was to cultivate networks of contact and exchange between the people of China and Japan that would eventually lead to for­ mal diplomatic recognition.15 In March 1955, the CCP crafted an internal document formally stating the principles undergirding its Japan policy. Li’s visit to Japan took place several months earlier, of course, but the document nonetheless expressed the framework within which the delegation journey had been approved by Zhou Enlai. It identified five areas of focus in the PRC’s approach to Japan in the absence of formal diplomatic relations: opposition to the presence of US military forces in Japan, desire to improve China-Japan relations with the ultimate goal of formal normalization, se­ curing the support of the Japanese people by expressing sympathy for their plight, pressuring the Japanese government to act independently of the United States, and indirect support for popular Japanese movements against the United States in the name of peace, independence, and democracy.16 Understood in this light, facilitating the return of Japanese prisoners to the home islands by way of the Li Dequan delegation made good policy sense for the Chinese side.17

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Li’s life path toward becoming such a useful player in this three-way diplomatic chess match between Japan, the United States, and the PRC had taken a fascinating variety of twists and turns. Although born in the poor rural province of Hebei, Li was the daughter of reasonably well-todo third-generation Chinese Christian parents. At age sixteen, she entered the American missionary–founded Beiman Girls’ High School in Beijing (Bridgman School) and then studied at the Christian-affiliated (and later Rockefeller Foundation–funded) North China Union College for Women. After graduation, she returned to her former middle school as an instructor and later became involved in numerous social welfare organizations before marrying Feng Yuxiang, the so-called Christian General of China’s warlord era, in 1924 at age twenty-nine.18 Although she had desired to pursue a career in medicine after college and before marrying Feng, at the time Li lacked sufficient financial resources for medical-school tuition. Her com­ mitment to health-related issues, however, especially those pertaining to women and children, was evident in her various activities throughout the late 1920s and 1930s.19 Li turned more intently toward matters of health and social assistance for women during the wartime years. Working first in Shanghai, she later fled to Chongqing after the Yangzi delta came under Japanese control dur­ ing the late 1930s, and there she organized and chaired the China Women’s Federation. At that time, Song Meiling, the wife of Guomindang (GMD) leader Chiang Kai-shek, was working on similar causes, but Li and Song did not coordinate their efforts, apparently reflecting the results of Feng’s fallout with Chiang years earlier. Critical of Chiang but not ardent support­ ers of Mao and the CCP, throughout the wartime years Feng and Li were closest to the left-wing, Soviet-friendly elements of the GMD. During the Chinese civil war of the late 1940s, the pair traveled together to the United States, where Feng continued to criticize Chiang from afar and Li became involved more deeply in the international women’s movement, bringing her into contact with prominent female activists from around the world.20 The Chinese Communist Party reached out to Feng and Li in 1948, asking them to return home to take part in the creation of a new regime. They made the decision to go back to China, but Feng died en route in a shipboard fire on the Black Sea. Li made it home and was appointed minister of public health in the PRC government in 1949, a year later also assuming the position of Chinese Red Cross chief. While Li’s power and influence as minister of public health was limited, her dual role as the head of the Chinese Red Cross increasingly “placed Li in the public eye both at home and abroad,” ultimately making her the “international face” of the

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PRC in any Red Cross–related matter overseas.21 Throughout the early 1950s, Li represented the PRC at international conferences on women’s issues and world peace in locales such as Toronto and Copenhagen. This wealth of global experience made Li one of the most cosmopolitan faces of the new communist Chinese state and a logical choice to head the Chinese Red Cross delegation tour of Japan in the late autumn of 1954. At a welcome reception held in her honor on the evening of October 30, Li delivered a set of remarks that expressed what she hoped her trip to Japan might achieve. Emphasizing ideals of humanitarianism and peace, Li stressed that the Chinese and Japanese people knew well the horrors of war and that only by working together could genuine peace in Asia be attained. To those ends, she promised that the Chinese government would continue to do everything possible in facilitating the return of Japanese civilians still on the mainland. Moreover, she assured her audience that Japanese war criminals would be shown humanitarian consideration and sent back swiftly, before ending with a toast to peace in Asia and throughout the world made possible through China-Japan cooperation and friendship.22 After initiating her tour on that magnanimous note, the Li delegation traveled extensively until the group’s departure on November 12, making visits to multiple cities, including Yokohama, Hakone, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Osaka. At each stop the three Japanese organizations responsible for bringing her organized welcome events, tours, and discussions with lo­ cal citizen groups. On the day after her arrival, for example, Li visited the Japan Red Cross headquarters in Tokyo and attended a reception with families of missing Japanese soldiers (the so-called rusu kazoku). On No­ vember 1, Li moved on to Yokohama, made a brief stop in the seaside town of Fujisawa, and then spent one night in Hakone. The Fujisawa side trip was an especially notable addition to the itinerary, as there she visited the grave of Nie Er, the composer of the PRC’s national anthem, who had in 1935 drowned in an accident near Fujisawa at the age of twenty-three, while visiting his brother. Li headed back to Tokyo the following day to attend a memorial ceremony in Asakusa for wartime Chinese laborers and participate in meetings with representatives from the association of over­ seas Japanese left behind in China. November 3 and 4 were also spent in Tokyo for more meetings concerning problems of Japanese returnees, a dinner with an area association of Chinese merchants, a formal reception hosted by the Japanese Red Cross, a tour of Red Cross facilities in the city, and an evening kabuki performance.23 During that busy two-day stretch in Tokyo, Li also met with members of the imperial family, facilitated by the Japan Red Cross, during which Emperor Hirohito’s younger brothers,

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Takamatsunomiya and Mikasanomiya, expressed to Li remorse for the ac­ tions of Japanese troops in China during the war as well as their hope for the cultivation of China-Japan friendship in the years to come.24 On November 5, the delegation arrived in Nagoya, toured an electron­ ics factory there, attended yet another evening reception, and traveled on to Kyoto the next morning, where they had a meeting with staff members of the Asahi shinbun. November 7 was spent sightseeing in the ancient capital before joining an evening reception hosted by the Japanese Red Cross. The group traveled to Osaka on November 8, where they toured more Red Cross facilities, met with representatives from the Western Japan Association of Families of the Missing (Nishi Nihon Rusu Kazoku Kyōkai), attended a party hosted by an international trade promotion association, and finished the day by enjoying a performance of bunraku, traditional puppet theater. November 10 saw the delegation return to Tokyo for meetings with both the Japanese minister of health Kusaba Ryūen and several lower-house Diet members, followed by an evening reception hosted by the Federa­ tion of Japan Women’s Organizations (Fujin dantai rengōkai). After more

FIG. 1.1 Li Dequan addressing a throng of reporters in Osaka in early November 1954. Reproduced with permission from Mainichi News/Aflo images.

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meetings with Health Ministry officials and Diet members on November 11, Li and her delegation departed from Haneda Airport on November 12, seen off by a section chief from the Health Ministry.25 Missing from Li Dequan’s itinerary, of course, was any formal interac­ tion with high-level members of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s cabinet (with the exception of Health Minister Kusaba) or the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Although she was the first official from the PRC ever to visit Japan, Cold War prerogatives demanded that Li’s presence on the ar­ chipelago not be recognized with any official Japanese government fanfare or ceremony. In fact, it had proved quite a challenging task throughout the summer and early autumn of 1954 simply to have her travel visa approved. So, to understand the deeper meanings of her trip, it is to the lively public response and political debate within Japanese society at large concerning Li’s arrival that we must turn instead. Many of the most significant social and political divisions that animated the early postwar Japanese world are revealed through the voices of both those who enthusiastically welcomed Li with open arms and those who angrily bemoaned her presence. Battling Political Positions Japan’s militarist regime of the late 1930s had cloaked its aggressive encroachment on Chinese sovereignty under the ideological banner of an­ ticommunism, so the ultimate victory of the CCP in the Chinese civil war in 1949 provoked considerable anxiety and fear within postwar right-wing circles in Japan. Not surprisingly, then, grassroots ultranationalist associa­ tions proved one of the earliest and most vocal sources of criticism for the Li Dequan delegation. On the afternoon of October 30, Tokyo police ar­ rested two ultranationalist agitators for unfurling a three-meter-long banner down the chimney tower of the Yūrakuchō Nihon seimeikan building that proclaimed, “Oppose the visit to Japan by Communist bandit Li Dequan!” and then handing out an assortment of anti-Li pamphlets on the street after having descended from their perch.26 The Great Japan Patriotic Party (Dai Nihon aikokutō) led by Akao Bin, along with a handful of lesser-known rightist groups, also pasted the streets of Tokyo with slanderous flyers during the weeks leading up to Li’s arrival. Peddling politically driven hate with phrases such as “Expel the communist stooge Li!” and “Abso­ lutely oppose the invasion of Soviet and Communist Chinese thought!” one rightist flyer even attempted to draw a connection between Li and an infamous episode of wartime violence against Japanese civilians in China by claiming “Li was a perpetrator of the Tongzhou Incident—Remember

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Tongzhou!”27 Beyond the fact that Li’s late husband, Feng Yuxiang, had once commanded Song Zheyuan during the late 1910s and decades later, as a Nationalist general in 1937, that Song had collaborated with Yin Rugeng in carrying out the violence at Tongzhou, how exactly Li’s opponents in 1954 thought it logical to blame her for the notorious Tongzhou Incident (Tsūshū jiken) of July 1937 is unclear. In their unmitigated loathing of Chinese communists, Japanese right­ ists found company with the Nationalists on Taiwan. Chiang’s regime in Taipei lodged strong formal protests with the Japanese government con­ cerning the Li visit, even going so far as to demand that Japanese authorities arrest the ten mission members accompanying Li Dequan and turn them over to Guomindang officials.28 Taiwan’s ambassador to Japan also issued a formal statement of protest days before Li’s arrival, claiming that her Red Cross delegation was nothing more than a Chinese communist plot aimed at rupturing Japan’s diplomatic relations with free nations and sowing divi­ sion between the Japanese state and Japan’s citizens.29 Those high-level diplomatic protests played out far more violently on the ground: physical clashes erupted between Nationalist Chinese students and left-wing Chi­ nese youth at Haneda Airport as Li’s flight touched down.30 The investi­ gative magazine Truth (Shinsō) alleged the existence of a failed scheme by Guomindang political intelligence agents to kidnap Li by forcefully diverting her aircraft while en route to Japan and even went so far as to suggest that Chinese Nationalist agents in Japan had sought to assassinate Li during her tour.31 As Japan Red Cross Section Chief Takagi Takesaburō remembered in a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Li’s visit published months after she had returned to China, the fear that Li might be attacked either by Guomindang assassins or Japanese rightists was very real. In fact, concerns over her safety were so great that the Red Cross organized private security forces with the cooperation of local police; these were present at all of Li’s public events and followed along at every stage of her travels.32 With fears of an assassination attempt running extremely high, one officer identified by the Asahi shinbun only as Inspector Itō described his work on the Li delegation’s protection force as “the most intense security assignment I’ve ever had.”33 Local Taiwanese business owners in Japan were another group that voiced strong opposition to Li’s visit. As the Japan Times reported, a group of pro-Nationalist Chinese merchants chartered a plane to drop sixty thou­ sand anticommunist leaflets on several downtown districts of Tokyo on the eve of Li’s arrival.34 Shūkan asahi described a similar incident that took place in Tokyo’s posh Ginza neighborhood. A carefree shopper walking

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those fashionable streets on October 30 (the day of Li’s arrival) could hardly have failed to notice a large advertisement balloon floating over­ head from which dangled an enormous banner reading “Don’t be fooled by Li Dequan—The Great Alliance of Overseas Chinese Merchants” (Ri Tokuzen ni damasareruna—Kakyō ōdōmei).35 A group of Chinese youth had also been present at the airport at the moment of Li’s arrival to unfurl a large banner reading “Overseas Chinese are not fooled by Communist bandits” while shouting “Keep her out!” at the top of their lungs.36 Such cases of both Nationalist state and resident Taiwanese opposition to the Li visit are suggestive examples of how the struggle for legitimacy between competing factions of the Chinese revolution was still being carried on within Japan long after the end of the Chinese civil war. A feature story in the Shūkan yomiuri published several months after Li’s departure claimed as much by arguing that the real backstory to the entire Li affair was the struggle between resident Chinese in Japan. According to this report, resi­ dent Guomindang sympathizers readily allied themselves with Japanese right-wingers in multiple anti-Li activities, while “Red-friendly” Chinese sought out the support of the Japan Communist Party in organizing pro-Li rallies.37 By far the most extensive critique of the Li visit appeared shortly after her departure, when a conservative Japanese think tank called the Global Democracy Research Institute (Sekai minshu kenkyūjo) published a lengthy, multiauthored study of the Li mission and the dangers it posed.38 The institute’s cofounder and well-known former leftist Nabeyama Sada­ chika opened the volume by warning that Li was just the bait being used to draw in hungry Japanese on an emotional level. The real aim of the CCP in sending her, he suggested, was to shift popular Japanese sentiment away from the United States and toward the PRC and USSR. Nabeyama claimed further that the Li Dequan matter was an important “test case” of how Japan would respond to these sly tactics of Cold War diplomacy. In his view, it would be foolish to lose sight of Japan’s national interests, and alienating the United States by warming up to the CCP would be a dangerous step in the wrong direction.39 Tateyama Toshitada, head of the Japan Life Safety Research Center (Nihon seikatsu mondai kenkyūjo), made similar points in his chapter about the Li mission’s use of emotional pleas to pursue political goals. He also went so far as to suggest that the Li mission members and their security team were in fact an intelligence-gathering crew, pointing out wartime ties between Japanese leftists and certain mission members as evidence of this subversive plot brewing among them.40

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The Waseda University political scientist Yabe Teiji made two main points in his essay about the highly contentious issue of returnee war crimi­ nals: First, Communist China had violated a variety of agreements by hold­ ing Japanese prisoners for such an extended period of time; second, the legal process by which these soldiers were condemned as “war criminals” was little more than victor’s justice applied after the war and according to new rules. So, rather than praising the compassionate humanity of the PRC in returning these men, Yabe argued, Japan should be looking closely at the legal violations of their captivity, as future peace between the two nations depended upon a just settlement of the past war in which both sides received proper judicial treatment.41 Other contributors emphasized in various ways that at its core Li’s visit was nothing more than a Chinese Communist Party propaganda tool aimed at destabilizing US-Japan relations. The China scholar Kamibeppu Chikashi, for example, suggested that recent developments in PRC-USSR relations revealed clearly their joint strategy for eliminating US influence in Asia and fomenting internal dissent between leftist elements and conserva­ tive elites within Japan. The Li visit, he pressed, had to be understood in this context to recognize its potentially dangerous consequences.42 Turning to economic matters, since Li’s visit had also been promoted by numer­ ous China-Japan trade organizations, the Meiji University economist Ōno Shinzō claimed that it was a mistake to believe that only US-imposed limi­ tations on Japanese trade with the PRC were to blame for holding back economic links between Japan and China. Thinking so was to fall right into the PRC trap of intensifying anti-US feeling in Japan. In Ōno’s view, the PRC was to blame because of its own Soviet-style development programs, which did not favor export development. While he agreed that increased trade was a good idea, he pushed the Japanese people to remember that “business is business” and not allow Cold War politics to cloud rational economic judgment and planning.43 In his contribution, the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs China specialist Kusano Fumio turned back to matters of diplomacy in providing a lengthy analysis of a recent speech by Zhou Enlai concerning Japan and its future relations with the United States and Taiwan. The Japanese people, Zhou claimed, could pursue true freedom only if they broke loose from US domination. China and Japan were like brothers, Zhou said, and it was the United States that aimed to damage China-Japan friendship, not the PRC. In Kusano’s view, Zhou’s speech was indisputable evidence that the PRC aimed to make Japan a “stage for the Cold War” (reisen no butai).44

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For most Japanese conservatives, then, Li’s trip was nothing other than communist subterfuge.45 During the autumn of 1954, however, for each voice in Japan that hoped to slam shut the doors on Li Dequan and her Chinese compatriots, there was another that sought to swing them wide open. Weeks before her arrival, numerous publications began priming read­ ers for the event with evocative and complimentary profiles of Li Dequan’s life path and career. Not surprisingly, because it was one the three groups that facilitated her visit, some of the most enthusiastic public support for Li’s tour appeared in the Japan-China Friendship Society’s newsletter Japan and China (Nihon to Chūgoku).46 Multiple issues of the magazine covered the lead-up to her arrival as well as each major event on her itiner­ ary, and many also featured editorial essays by well-recognized doyens of China-Japan relations, including Society Chief Uchiyama Kanzō, the one­ time Shanghai bookstore owner and active postwar promoter of Chinese studies in Japan. One especially illustrative example of the organization’s enthusiasm was a welcome song published on the front page of the paper with lyrics that embodied all they hoped Li’s visit would inspire.47 The final two verses of the tune were especially revealing, as they asked Li upon her arrival to look beyond the legacies of Japanese imperial violence to see the genuine gratitude and joy in the eyes of all Japanese people. In appreciation of her efforts, the Japanese people would promise, the tune concluded, to plant seeds of peace as white and pure as Li’s smile and to cultivate flowers of peace and love throughout the country. Many public intellectuals and writers across Japan also held un­ equivocally positive views of the Li delegation’s tour, but often for more overtly political reasons. In the pages of Shūkan asahi, for example, the Hitotsubashi University professor of Chinese studies Kumano Shōhei, who served as a translator for the delegation at their November 4 dinner at the Tokyo Imperial Hotel, offered a purely anecdotal but nonetheless rosy depiction of Li. “She gave the perfect impression of a brave and powerful woman,” he wrote. “Even her walk, with back straight and head held high, was stately and dignified.”48 Others had seen Li similarly earlier in her career. An attendee at the 1936 International Women’s Day in Nanjing had described seeing Li take the stage to deliver her remarks before the crowd: “She was like a crane standing among chickens.”49 Kumano also fondly recalled Li’s down-to-earth sense of humor at the event, made evident in how she first teased Japan Red Cross’s chairman Shimazu Tadatsugu for being a lightweight drinker and then chided him over his two-to-three­ pack-per-day smoking habit.

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Suetsugu Ichirō, chair of the Japan Youth Health and Welfare As­ sociation (Nihon zenken seinen kai), an organization involved in providing assistance to repatriated soldiers, tackled more overtly political questions in his evaluation of Li’s personal character. Li was not an ideological com­ munist, Suetsugu contended, but a deeply committed humanist. Citing her strong personal convictions and independent spirit, Suetsugu assured his readers that Li was no mere “decoration” (kazarimono) put forth by the CCP as a smokescreen for some more sinister agenda.50 The Shūkan yomiuri weekly came to a similar conclusion. While a feature profile on Li in August warned that it would be naive to turn a blind eye to the likely ulterior motives of the PRC in sending her to Japan, the otherwise wellbalanced and generally positive description of Li admitted that she was no ordinary communist. “In her goal of building an idealistic society,” the article explained, “she is one who represents a harmony between humanism and communism.”51 The well-known journalist Hatanaka Masaharu also voiced strong support for Li’s visit. First, Hatanaka took issue with those critics who argued that Li and the CCP deserved no special thanks for their efforts to repatriate Japanese soldiers. Doing so, as the Waseda scholar Yabe Teiji had contended, was nothing more than fulfilling international expecta­ tions. Hatanaka countered that such a position gave no account at all to the history of Japan’s brutal imperialist conquest of the mainland. Moreover, Hatanaka was equally critical of those who argued that Japan’s efforts to return to China the bones of laborers who died under extreme duress in Japan should be met by equal efforts on the Chinese side to send back to Japan the remains of settlers and colonists. The road to genuine ChinaJapan reconciliation, he claimed, must start from true self-reflection on the disaster of Japanese militarism and the unconditional acceptance of responsibility for it.52 Forces in Japan-US relations were also at work behind the scenes in shaping the formal state response to Li Dequan, according to Hatanaka. He explained that the Japanese government’s refusal to acknowledge Li in def­ erence to the Nationalist regime on Taiwan was also little more than bowing to hegemonic prerogatives of US policy in East Asia. Disregarding popular sentiment for the sake of appeasing American benefactors, he argued, was a betrayal of Japanese democracy.53 Likewise, New Woman (Shin josei) published an enthusiastic welcome to the Li delegation in its November 1954 issue expressing deep gratitude for facilitating the return of Japanese soldiers from the continent. The piece explicitly criticized the Japanese government for its lack of sincere effort on that matter. Japan’s leaders

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had never truly aimed to bring home those citizens left behind, it asserted, because they feared the notion of popular friendship between China and Japan. Cowed by US pressure, the Japanese government instead was hope­ lessly flustered by China’s more sincere attempts to improve relations.54 A domestic political environment split dramatically between left and right during the early 1950s transformed Li Dequan’s arrival in Japan into a rhetorical arena of ideological combat. A Li supporter could quickly attack a political opponent as a lapdog of American imperialism by pointing out the blind obedience behind their anti-Li sentiments. Likewise, A Li critic could just as swiftly critique the naiveté of a pro-Li activist by labeling them a dupe of communist propaganda. For many others, however, Li’s visit meant something much more than politics, and their reactions reveal deeper complexities behind the Li Dequan tour in 1954. Families of the Missing Among the wide variety of political organizations, social elements, and individuals who supported the Li Dequan visit, most natural, perhaps, was the warm welcome offered by the families of Japanese soldiers still missing on the continent. Nine years had passed since Japan’s surrender, but painful uncertainty remained concerning the fate of thousands of husbands, brothers, and sons. As evidenced by the mountains of letters received by the Japanese Red Cross from families across the country in­ quiring about the status of their missing men, the potential information Li brought with her offered hope and relief to thousands of Japanese families, and the profound gratitude they expressed in return for that long-awaited (and hopefully good) news was both deep and genuine. For these “families of the missing,” the geopolitics of the Li mission was largely irrelevant; her visit was a blessing because it offered recovery from the trauma of wartime separation. A photo reproduced in Asahi gurafu captured powerfully the desperation surely felt by many in Japan in depicting a pair of women at the side window of the car transporting Li to one of her Tokyo-area events. “Many people approach Li’s car,” the caption explained, “to speak with her or give her letters as it slows down when leaving and entering the hotels and event spaces where she is staying.”55 The Asahi shinbun also reported that a female student group in Tokyo had organized a “thousand-crane” (senbazuru) origami project in anticipation of Li Dequan’s visit and by the time of her arrival had collected more than twenty thousand examples of the hand-folded waterfowl. With a string of one thousand birds thought to grant the wish for peace of those who did the folding, the cranes were to be

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sent back to China with the Li delegation as a symbol of popular desire for China-Japan friendship along with hundreds of personalized cards reading such things as “please find my missing father.”56 Another common photographic subject that appeared in several major daily papers was the enormous piles of letters sent to the Li delegation care of the Japan Red Cross. Some families even sent letters directly to the Tokyo Imperial Hotel, where Li was staying, in the hopes that she might read them. A few examples of these heartfelt pleas are illustrative. One wife wrote: “My husband who so longed to see the happy face of his oldest son left this world in September 1952,” expressing the tragic pain of a father who died without knowing the fate of his son. Another shared her relentless anxiety by writing: “I’ve given up on hope that my husband is coming home, but without any concrete information there really is not a day that goes by that I can be at ease about it.” One spoke of the difficulty she faced at home: “Without my son here, the fields are growing wilder, and daily life just gets more and more difficult.” When Li heard from the Japan Red Cross about all of the letters, she reportedly promised: “When we go back, we will bring these letters with us, so do not forget to pack them up on the airplane. We will definitely investigate.”57 Many of Japan’s leading daily newspapers frequently ran stories on the emotional dramas experienced by these families upon learning from the Li delegation of the whereabouts of their loved ones. The tale of the Itō Kōichi family, for example, was no doubt easily relatable as an experience to others across the home islands. As told by wife and mother Kimi, the family had been together in Inner Mongolia until the spring of 1942, when worsening security conditions compelled everyone but Kōichi to return to Japan. His intelligence work with the Kantō Army kept him so busy, she explained, that contact was infrequent at best, and after the surrender they lost touch with him completely. While they had once heard from someone repatriated in 1949 that Kōichi was then doing intelligence work for the Guomindang in northern China, the appearance of his name on the Li mis­ sion’s list gave them more hope than ever that they might see their father and husband again. “They have been apart for so long since the children were very young,” Kimi explained, “they hardly know him at all. I can’t wait to get them together again.”58 The story of Saitō Yoshio, who had belonged to a military police (kempeitai) unit in Manchukuo, struck a similar chord. His wife, Natsuko, explained that she had heard from him in late September 1945, when he had been captured by the Chinese Nationalists, but knew nothing about what had happened after that. With the popular interest in returning soldiers at

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the time of Li’s visit running high, the Mainichi ran a story about the Fushun POW detention center in southern Manchuria along with a photograph of some of its prisoners. Daughter Kuniko, who had only been six when she last saw her father, quite remarkably recognized him in the photo, and she and her mother later heard his name read on the radio during a recitation of men on Li’s list from their hometown.59 For every story like these two that appeared in the press, there were surely hundreds of other similar tales across the home islands that were never related in print. The enthusiastic embrace of Li by so many rusu kazoku is thus not difficult to understand; neither is the public relations value of the Li mission to the PRC. An especially poignant feature story on the Li mission, for example, appeared in Housewife Club in December. Entitled “The Husband Who Could Not Return, Back in My Arms,” the article painted Li’s visit in a highly melodramatic light. Li wept as she listened to the families of the missing speak about their long-lost husbands and sons, the piece asserted, and the families in turn shed tears of gratitude when Li’s delegation promised to bring them home. “For the cause of SinoJapanese friendship,” Li is quoted, “there is nothing between China and Japan that cannot be resolved.” The article then concluded on the hopeful note that with Li’s visit, the day had finally come when the footfalls of a brighter age of “coexistence and coprosperity” (kyōzon kyōei) for China and Japan could be heard.60 As compelling as such stories were, some publications also reminded readers that not all those who had been “left behind” in China at war’s end were clamoring to return to the home islands. A photo feature on the Li delegation visit in Asahi gurafu, for example, quoted a Chinese representa­ tive at a gathering of rusu kazoku as explaining: “Among the Japanese still in China there are some 4,700 married to Chinese enjoying a satisfying life. When we talked with them, they did not seem to think that they wanted to break up their families and return to Japan.”61 Chinese officials, of course, would have had compelling political reasons to make such a claim, insofar as saying so promoted the notion of the new China being just as attrac­ tive a place to live as Japan. Such self-serving assertions aside, however, thousands of Japanese who did not repatriate in the 1950s, especially those left behind with Chinese families as children, struggled in the face of dis­ criminatory treatment in China only to face more problems when trying to readjust to life in Japan during the 1970s, after returning to a homeland they hardly knew.62 Nonetheless, the mass events with members of various regional as­ sociations of families of the missing served many purposes, and photos

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from these meetings appeared frequently in Japan’s major daily papers. One example that stands out was a large image captured on the afternoon on October 31 at a reception hosted by the Eastern Japan Association of Families of the Missing (Higashi Nihon rusu kazoku kyōkai). Surrounded by applauding Japanese officials, Li holds in one arm a large bouquet of flowers and in the other six-year-old Kawamura Haruko, the young girl who had just presented Li with that token of appreciation. Haruko, the caption explained, was the granddaughter of Takebe Rokuzō, a former directorgeneral in the Japanese military-dominated puppet state of Manchukuo. In the autumn of 1954, Takebe was still imprisoned for war crimes in Fushun, and the headline text above the photo read as if it was a quote from Li De­ quan promising the adorable youngster, “We will return Grandpa to you.”63 The powerful symbolism of the photograph is difficult to ignore. As the disgraced Takebe sat rotting in prison as punishment for his crimes against the Chinese people, Takebe’s granddaughter was being embraced

FIG. 1.2 Kawamura Haruko presenting Li Dequan with a bouquet of flowers on October 31, 1954. Moments later, Li would lift young Haruko up in her arms and turn to face the grateful crowd of participants at this reception in her honor by the Eastern Japan Orga­ nization of Families of the Missing. Reproduced with permission from Mainichi News/ Aflo images.

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and held by Li Dequan, a representative of the new China that had emerged out of the very devastation wrought by men like Takebe. As little Haruko beams with joy at the thought that her beloved ojii-san will soon return home, Li embodies kindness and strength, both physical and emotional. She was the perfect image of what the PRC wanted to project in Japan at that moment. Of even more significance, if one saw young Haruko as em­ bodying the future of Japanese society, not only was she being comforted by a Chinese official, but that official was also a woman. Sixty years earlier, during the era of the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, woodblockprint images of Japanese military officers clutching Chinese children while Qing soldiers fled in chaotic retreat conveyed a message of China’s future resting in the hands of a strong but benevolent Japan. The photograph of Li Dequan and Kawamura Haruko in 1954 delivered the opposite message. A powerful but magnanimous China now held the future of Japan in its hands, while Japan’s military leaders languished in jail, shamed and defeated. It was as if the fortunes of both nations had been reversed in the six decades between 1894 and 1954. While the gratitude felt by thousands for Li’s aid in returning longlost loved ones was surely immense, a humorous reflection on the frenzied public reaction to Li Dequan’s visit shortly after her departure in early No­ vember by the prolific political cartoonist Yokoyama Taizō suggested that for some women in Japan the return of their husbands from the China front might not necessarily be a welcome blessing (figure 1.3). In the comic, a visibly angry Japanese woman in kimono and traditional wooden platform shoes marches boldly with a flag in hand reading “Oppose Li Dequan!” (Ri Tokuzen hantai!). At first glance the meaning seems obvious; she is most likely a political conservative lashing out at the danger of communist sub­ version. The image title, “Two Husbands,” and the caption spoken by two other women standing just to the rear of the protester, however, reveal the true reason for her hostility to Comrade Li’s visit: “Yeah . . . her husband’s name was on the list of still-living prisoners.”64 In other words, the sign bearer is voicing her opposition to Li not out of virulent anticommunism. Rather, she is infuriated that her long-lost husband might be coming home after all because she has already replaced him with someone else, whom she presumably likes far more! In this sarcastic twist on the grief shared by thousands of rusu kazoku, Yokoyama emphasized a level of meaning in Li’s visit that was important to Japanese women as individuals, not just as wives and mothers. The “good news” that Li brought to this soldier’s wife was met with rage rather than gratitude because it threatened to spoil the new life she had come to enjoy since her “beloved” husband had disappeared.

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Such gendered dimensions of the popular reaction to Li Dequan merit closer examination. Women and World Peace As ironic as it sounds, both US occupation authorities in Japan and the Chinese Communist Party on the continental mainland laid proud claim to many of the same achievements around 1950. Both had carried out land reform aimed at putting fields back into the hands of the farmers who worked them, and both had taken steps to weaken the power of large in­ dustrial producers, in China by seizing assets for state ownership, in Japan

FIG. 1.3 In this Yokoyama Taizō cartoon, the frustrated wife of a missing soldier opposes Li Dequan for her role in bringing her long-lost spouse home again. Reproduced with permission from the Yokoyama family, facilitated by the Yokoyama Ryūichi kinen mangakan.

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by breaking up zaibatsu firms to the benefit of owners of small businesses. On the social front, too, both Beijing and SCAP took similar credit for the advancement of female liberation in the postwar East Asian world. To be sure, the Allied occupation had done much to elevate the social standing and political influence of women in Japanese society by mandating female suffrage through the new constitution of 1947, but the Chinese revolution after 1949 promoted even bolder ideals of gender equality that also reso­ nated powerfully with women in Japan. Indeed, perhaps because no woman held a similarly high-profile position in the Japanese government at that time, Li Dequan’s tour gar­ nered enthusiastic attention from a wide variety of women’s magazines and journals, some feature stories being more overtly political in tone than others. The title page of a late November issue of Household Yomiuri, for example, ran the same large photograph of Li holding Kawamura Haruko at the reception held for her by the eastern Japan “families of the missing” association that had appeared a few weeks earlier in the Yomiuri shinbun. The caption praised the Li delegation for warming the hearts not only of those families but of all Japanese people by providing treasured informa­ tion about missing soldiers and civilians.65 An editorial in the January 1955 issue of New Woman included a collection of photos from the Li visit, all of which depicted adoring crowds of smiling Japanese citizens warmly embracing Li and her colleagues.66 The issue also printed a transcript of remarks given by Li at a dinner hosted on November 10 by the China-Japan Women’s Friendship Society. She began by noting that “though the women of China and Japan have had few chances to meet because state relations are not normalized, the women of China feel sympathy and affection for the women of Japan.” After reviewing how women had struggled under the Chinese feudal order before Liberation, “in the new China,” Li proclaimed, “Chinese women and the Chinese people have become the masters of the state,” a statement met with great applause. She went on to detail the many ways in which women in China had gained equality with men; she also addressed dimensions of improvement in daily life, public health, education, and family services, receiving warm applause when mentioning that the number of childcare facilities in China had increased thirteen-fold under the new regime. The transcript indicates that the most enthusiastic applause from the crowd came when Li said, “We the women of China treasure peace and oppose war.” The claps grew even louder as she continued, “because the women of China know well the bitter pain of war, we know well what it means to respect peace.” Finally, she closed with a call to action that received a

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long ovation: “For the rights of women, the happiness of children and the advancement of all humanity, let us fight together!”67 Beyond the glowing general coverage in numerous women’s maga­ zines, Li’s visit also caught the attention of many high-profile Japanese feminist intellectuals. The prominent peace activist Ishigaki Ayako, for example, published a warm welcome to Li several days before her arrival in Tokyo. Ishigaki fondly recalled meeting Li at the International Women’s Conference in Philadelphia in 1953. According to Ishigaki, they talked late into the night about Li’s life in China, her marriage to Feng, and her Christian values. Ishigaki was also deeply impressed by Li’s down-to-earth humility, strength of personal character, and fundamental human kindness. There could be no one better, Ishigaki asserted, to work on behalf of moth­ ers and children in the new China as minister of public health. In fact, Ishigaki claimed, Li could even rightly be called a “mother of China,” and her visit to Japan was sure to be an invaluable bridge to Sino-Japanese friendship.68 Ishigaki was not Li’s only admirer within the circle of the most widely known female Japanese activists of the day. Of the many photographs that appeared in the Japanese press during the period of Li’s arrival and crosscountry tour, one in particular stands out. Taken at a reception held for Li soon after her arrival in Tokyo and published in both the Mainichi shinbun and the Yomiuri shinbun, Li is seen shaking hands with none other than the writer and activist Hiratsuka Raichō, the founding editor of the influential 1920s feminist journal Blue Stockings (Seitō).69 During the years after sur­ render, Hiratsuka had celebrated the most liberal elements of Japan’s post­ war constitutional order, namely, the institutionalization of female suffrage and the “no war” provision of Article Nine. Quickly disillusioned by the creation of the US-Japan security agreement, however, Hiratsuka founded in 1953 the Federation of Japan Women’s Organizations (Nihon fujin dan­ tai rengōkai), which pledged “to call for the removal of American military bases in Japan and to oppose the manufacture and use of nuclear weap­ ons.”70 Like Li, Hiratsuka had also spent many years working to advance causes related to mothers, children, and healthy family life.71 Because the two shared so many social values and political beliefs, it is little surprise that their paths would cross during the Li delegation tour. Among the many well-attended receptions held to welcome Li De­ quan was an event hosted by the National Federation of Women’s Orga­ nizations on the evening of November 10, a farewell party of sorts, as the Li delegation was scheduled to leave Japan on November 12. Hiratsuka Raichō, the organization’s president, delivered the opening remarks; other

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FIG. 1.4 Hiratsuka Raichō and Li Dequan in Tokyo, late October 1954. Reproduced with permission from Mainichi News/Aflo images.

feminist luminaries in attendance included the organization’s vice presi­ dent Kōra Tomi, the critic Matsuoka Yōko, the writer and activist Ishigaki Ayako, and the poet Fukao Sumako. A poem by Fukao penned in honor of Li was read aloud, and celebratory songs were performed by the Chūō women’s chorus.72 The prominent social critic Maruoka Hideko was also there that night, and she described her experience at the event in the Asahi shinbun. In attempting explain Li’s popularity with so many people in Japan, Maruoka spoke of Li’s “relaxed simplicity” (kata o haranu heitansa) as well as her skill at both speaking and listening. More important, perhaps,

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was that Li stood for a vision of the Chinese state as one on which the full talents of women were appreciated and put to work in transforming the Chinese world.73 A discussion between Li and Hiratsuka published in the pages of Reconstruction (Kaizō) in early 1955 sheds additional light on the meaning of this intriguing encounter between one of Japan’s leading feminist public intellectuals and the prominent stateswoman from the mainland. Provoca­ tively titled “Asia’s Peace through the Hands of Women,” the conversation with Hiratsuka expressing her deep appreciation for the Chinese willing­ ness to extend the hand of friendship even after the pain caused by so many years of war inflicted upon China by Japan. Li responded magnanimously with the suggestion that many Japanese had also suffered terribly during the war and that the time had now come to forget the past and forge a new future of peace. The conversation then turned to more practical matters: Hiratsuka asked Li about the most pressing issues facing Chinese women. Li replied that women and men were now working side by side to build up China’s industrial capacity. Was that because of state demands for labor from the people? Hiratsuka queried. Not at all, Li returned. The Chinese people were united in their support of state goals and gladly gave their labor to achieve the bright future desired by all.74 Two short essays by Li and Hiratsuka then followed this transcribed dialogue. In a piece entitled “The Current State of Chinese Women,” Li described the PRC as a veritable feminist paradise. While women in the new China no longer faced social, cultural, or institutional limits on their personal aspirations, Li explained (with a rosy optimism that likely ex­ ceeded the reality faced by many Chinese women in daily life), this was no time to rest in satisfaction. “Feudal thought” and customs, Li continued, still possessed a strong hold on Chinese women in some regions, so the road to complete liberation was still a long one. Li was convinced, none­ theless, that Chinese and Japanese women could join hands and overcome any obstacle as they pursued peace in Asia and around the world.75 Li had been advocating this sort of representation of the PRC overseas for many years, as her comments at the World Women’s Conference of 1952 suggest. “The women of China’s semicolonial, semifeudal past had no political, economic, or educational power,” Li explained. “We suffered under two kinds of crushing oppression,” until “we succeeded in driving out foreign invaders and destroying feudalism . . . now, Chinese women have become the masters of their country and achieved equality with men. We are people freely constructing a prosperous China.”76 Li went on to give numbers on the dozens of women placed in the top branches of the Chinese states as

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well as the hundreds more working in various levels of provincial and local administrations. While the portrait of life for liberated women in China as crafted by Li during her visit to Japan was not always an honest and accurate representation, such exaggeration is largely irrelevant when we seek to understand how and why Japanese women reacted to Li Dequan in the ways they did. It was image more than reality that mattered. In her essay “Welcoming Mrs. Li Dequan,” Hiratsuka elaborated on the reasons behind her enthusiasm for Li’s trip to Japan. She first recalled their meeting at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo just after Li’s arrival in the capital. Not only was Hiratsuka surprised that Li could attend the event so soon after her long flight, but she also noted how as they first shook hands and spoke for a few minutes, Li looked directly into Hiratsuka’s eyes, never once breaking her line of sight. Doing her best to look right back into Li’s eyes, Hiratsuka recalled saying to her, “You are very welcome here. We have all been waiting for you. With your arrival, I have the feeling that whatever curtains, whatever walls there are between China and Japan have now just vanished.”77 Hiratsuka also noted that very few, if any, Japanese could look that long directly into the eyes of another, and in Li’s dark and sparkling eyes she saw kindness, vitality, and great confidence. Indeed, what had made the greatest impression on her that first day, Hiratsuka wrote, was a short conversation she and Hasebe Hiroko had with Li. Hasebe had visited China previously, and she remarked to Li that the sight of so many young women working had had a deep effect on her. To that comment, Li quickly replied, “That’s true now, but come again in ten years and look at what Chinese women are doing then.” Hiratsuka was struck by the bold hope for the fu­ ture embodied in Li’s words, and those words gave her a somewhat anxious hope for what the future might hold for Japanese society. “When I imagined Japan and the state of Japanese women in ten years,” she wrote, “I felt that I must believe the same thing deep in my heart,” but she admitted feeling less confident about Japan’s future than China’s.78 Hiratuska went on to claim that women of Li’s personal power and presence were exceedingly rare in Japan; she then likened Li to a beautifully weathered stone, both worn smooth and strengthened by many years of battling the waves. With a woman such as Li leading the way, Hiratsuka suggested, women from every part of Asia could make great gains in their pursuit of peace and equality around the globe.79 In remarks Hiratsuka made at a Red Cross reception for Li on Novem­ ber 4, she implied a direct connection between the struggle for world peace

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and the restoration of Japan-China friendship. After expressing the depth of her personal happiness over seeing such a warm reception given to Li in Japan, Hiratsuka explained that the nourishment of friendship between China and Japan had greater meaning for both regional peace in Asia and global peace at large. “The one thing I find profoundly regrettable, how­ ever, is that the two countries do not have formal diplomatic relations.”80 In other words, Hiratsuka was suggesting that the US-Japan alliance was standing in the way of not just regional harmony but world peace. In that same speech, Hiratsuka mentioned Japan’s wartime crimes in China. “Back then when Japanese women had no political power, no ability to influence political life, Japanese mothers sent their own husbands and sons to the battlefield where they inflicted such hardship on the Chinese people for so long. This fact burdens my heart to where there are no words of apology.”81 While Hiratsuka expressed deep gratitude toward the Chinese people for their willingness to move beyond that past and work together with Japan for a peaceful future, she also recalled one moment of awkward silence during a meeting with Li when the two spoke very briefly on military matters. Expressing her concern over the proliferation of armed forces around the globe in 1954, Hiratsuka said to Li, “It seems that China too will begin a military conscription system soon.” A long pause followed, during which Hiratsuka thought perhaps she should have avoided such a sensitive po­ litical topic. “For an independent country,” Li finally answered, “military forces are a necessity.”82 Feminist unity in Japan-China relations was not immune to the prerogatives of Chinese nationalism. In short, while leftist intellectuals and politicians, humanitarian or­ ganizations, China-Japan trade association members, families of missing soldiers, and feminist activists all fundamentally supported Li’s mission to Japan, for women’s rights advocates there was a deeper meaning to Li’s journey. To them, Li’s gender was the most inspiring dimension of her sojourn in Japan because, as a woman pursuing the broader aim of China-Japan reconciliation and global public health, she represented not only a brighter future of regional peace and cooperation but also one in which women would have greater personal freedom and political influ­ ence than ever before, both within East Asian society and beyond. Adam Bronson has identified a similar sentiment in his examination of grassroots liberalism in rural Japan during the early 1950s and the inspiration it took from the “spirit of self-criticism” then sweeping the Chinese world under Mao. While the United States had functioned as a focal point of progres­ sive aspirations during the early Occupation years, he contends, “after the

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establishment of the PRC, China seemed poised to displace the United States as a site of hope for democracy, modernity and the peaceful over­ coming of tradition.”83 Sayonara, Comrade Li Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru did not meet Li Dequan because the Japanese state did not, and could not, formally recognize her as a repre­ sentative of the PRC. But there is another reason for Yoshida’s failure to receive the Li delegation in any official capacity—he had left the country. At the same moment that Li was preparing for her arrival in Tokyo, Yoshida was on his way to the United States for meetings in Washington, DC, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. As the Mainichi reported, Yoshida had made the trip in an effort both to “strengthen the economies of free Asia” as well as nurture “cooperation in the defense against Communist inva­ sion.”84 The irony of this moment should not be missed, for it reflects a core discrepancy between popular sentiment and state policy in Japan during the early 1950s. A significant majority of everyday people in Japanese society welcomed Li Dequan with open arms because her mission spoke to matters close to their hearts: family reunion and emotional recovery from the trauma inflicted by many years of wartime separation. Prime Minister Yoshida and his government, on the other hand, ignored the Li delegation, largely in deference to the Cold War strategic imperatives of the United States. And so it was that while Li traveled across the Japanese archipelago cultivating emotional connections with thousands of Japanese families, Yoshida shook hands and rubbed elbows with US political elites cultivat­ ing his anticommunist alliance with the Eisenhower administration. This captures in microcosm the differing Cold War strategies of ruling political elites in Japan and China. The two-week whirlwind tour of Japan came to an end on November 12, where it had begun on October 30. Among those who came to Haneda International Airport to see Li Dequan and her delegation off were the Japan-China Friendship Society chief Uchiyama Kanzō and the feminist activist Tomochika Ichiko. Numerous groups had gathered around the Imperial Hotel since the previous evening to wish Li well as she prepared to return home; the police presence was heavy around the hotel, with all entrances and exits tightly monitored. A hotel porter commented, “I haven’t seen something like this since Marilyn Monroe’s visit.”85 The Hollywood bombshell had made a trip to Japan in January 1954 with her new husband, baseball slugger Joe DiMaggio, and apparently the far more modestly attired

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and much older Li Dequan sparked as much enthusiasm and excitement as the globally recognizable platinum blonde siren of American cinema. Indeed, the evening of November 11 had seen a fair bit of commo­ tion at the Imperial Hotel. By around 8:00 p.m., roughly 150 Chinese with the Yokohama Chinese Merchants Association had gathered outside with banners and lanterns to wish Li a fond farewell. About forty college-age youths from Zengakuren, Japan’s most recognizable left-wing student organization, soon showed up, singing labor songs. Then, several dozen local police were dispatched to the hotel to keep order outside the main gate. Soon, about forty members of Akao Bin’s Great Japan Patriotic Party (Dai Nihon Aikokutō) arrived on the scene with Hinomaru flags, and two or three of them found their way to the hotel balcony and started tossing anticommunist fliers into the air. The moment was captured by a Yomiuri photographer: the image shows small paper sheets drifting down like cherry blossom petals onto the waiting crowd of lantern-toting Chinese residents and passionately chanting left-wing Japanese students. With all the ruckus outside the main gate, when Li’s group returned to the hotel at around 9:30, they could not use the main entrance and instead came in through the north gate.86 Most assuredly, the scene outside the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York during Prime Minister Yoshida’s visit to the city a few days previous was far less dramatic. When reflecting upon the legacies of Li’s Japan tour, it is worth re­ membering that a central pillar of Zhou Enlai’s so-called people’s diplo­ macy in the case of Japan was to advance the notion that everyday Japanese people had also been victims of the war. It was the irrational aggression of the militarist clique that had led Japanese society to disaster. Notably, this official Chinese narrative overlapped precisely with the historical con­ sciousness carefully crafted by Japanese conservatives and SCAP during the Occupation era.87 As their tour drew to a close, the members of the Li delegation made an effort to reiterate these ideas whenever possible. In a meeting with reporters just before the farewell dinner party hosted by the Japan Red Cross on November 11, for example, Liao Chengzhi was asked what he thought about the reception the delegation had received at the various locales along their itinerary. Liao responded, “what seemed appar­ ent to me each time we were welcomed was the feeling that the Japanese people love peace and detest war.”88 He also made clear that much of what he had seen in Japan was quite impressive. “What did you think of Japanese industry, televisions?” reporters asked. “We want to learn about industrialization. Next year, or the year after, China too wants to begin the production of televisions. . . . It’s a high-priced item, however. . . . We

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are now researching how to popularize it . . . to produce people’s TVs.89 Finally, Liao made reference to his own youthful years spent in Japan in order to reinforce the message of naturally close ties between the Chinese and Japanese people. “What place left the biggest impression on you?” he was asked. “Tokyo. It was like returning to my hometown. I am so happy that this time I came to Japan to work hard for the development of ChinaJapan friendship. Jimbōchō [a Tokyo neighborhood] was just like it was back in the day.”90 Li Dequan expressed a similar sentiment in a newspaper report on the remarks she delivered at the farewell dinner held on November 11. Noting that she did not touch the cocktails, drinking instead club soda and orange juice, the article reproduced her parting words to the enthusiastic group in attendance: “What left the deepest impression on me,” Li explained, “was the kind friendship felt by the Japanese people toward the Chinese people. When we return home, we will express your feelings to all of the Chinese people.”91 The attempt by the CCP to argue that ordinary Japanese people wanted peace was meant to pander to Japanese public opinion but also to convince the Chinese people that friendship with Japan was palatable. Emphasizing class conflict in Japan also further enhanced the legitimacy of the regime on the mainland, by suggesting that the CCP was leading the charge of revolutionary awakening at home and abroad. After returning to China, Li discussed the meaning of her visit to Japan in an editorial in the pages of People’s China (Jinmin Chūgoku), a Beijing-based Japanese-language publication aimed at readers in Japan, which was later reprinted in the widely circulated domestic periodical Central Review (Chūō kōron). More than just a review of her whirlwind tour of the archipelago, Li reflected in this essay on her hopes for a new chapter in China-Japan relations. She assured her Japanese readers that for the Chinese people, their many years of war with Japan were a thing of the past. It was the responsibility of both peoples now to endeavor for the restoration of their two-thousand-year-long relationship of peaceful exchange and interaction. She also tried to assuage any fears of China’s ris­ ing power in the postwar world with a reference to the so-called golden rule of her Christian faith. Japan need not fear aggression from China, because so many years of hardship under foreign invasion had taught the Chinese people the value of the notion that one should “do unto others as you would have done to you.” Finally, she reminded the Japanese public that they and the Chinese people had the same goal—to prevent the resurgence of Japanese militarism so desired by the United States in order to facilitate American control in Asia.92

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By Li’s own admission, then, at least one aim of her delegation was indeed the delegitimation of the US-Japan security agreement, just as many of her critics at the Global Democracy Research Institute had claimed. While Li and her delegation certainly toed the line when delivering the intended message of Zhou Enlai’s “people’s diplomacy,” it would be a mistake to see Li as nothing more than an obedient mouthpiece for Bei­ jing. Zhou gave precise directions to the delegation before their departure, indicating that they were to adhere to his policy of cultivating sympathetic elements within Japanese society by speaking “of friendship and nothing else” during their meetings on the Japan tour.93 While she spoke often of China-Japan friendship, Li just as often went far beyond that theme, espe­ cially when it came to matters of concern to women, children, and family life. It seems likely, too, that the CCP’s approval of Li Dequan’s mission to Japan reflected yet another dimension of the party’s strategy to cultivate a positive image of the PRC in the Japanese popular imagination by rep­ resenting mainland China as a society progressive enough to have women play meaningful roles in statecraft and diplomacy.94 However, viewing the Li delegation visit as little more than a cynical exercise in self-serving diplomatic posturing is to focus solely on why it was sent. When we turn to the matter of how it was received, additional meanings become clear. Li’s visit brought to a boil simmering internal divisions within Japa­ nese society concerning the legitimacy of a Japanese state so closely linked to the United States. For many of those who supported the Li delegation, the Yoshida government was opposing the will of the people by refusing to formally recognize Li and by extension the PRC a whole. In doing so, conservative political elites were abrogating their obligation to Japanese democracy and sacrificing their legitimacy in the process. Li’s detractors in Japan, however, denied the legitimacy of her proclaimed political in­ dependence from the CCP. For them, as for most Cold Warriors in the United States, red was red, and anyone representing a communist regime was nothing more than a mouthpiece of Moscow or Beijing. If the CCP had indeed hoped the Li visit would make Japan a stage for the Cold War between the United States and the PRC, it was then certainly also a stage upon which an important early act in the drama of domestic political strife within Japan, a drama that would unfold with even greater passion by the 1960s, was performed. The evolving conflict within Japanese society over war memory is also evident in the popular reaction to Li’s visit. Her critics often focused on the degree to which the PRC had carried out the illegal detainment and mistreatment of “innocent” Japanese prisoners, emphasizing the suffering

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of Japanese soldiers after surrender rather than the suffering those men had inflicted upon others before being commanded to lay down their arms. Li’s promoters, on the other hand, focused on the remarkably benevolent humanitarianism displayed by Li (and by extension Beijing) in agreeing to return to their families in Japan “war criminals” who had perpetrated outrageous acts of brutality against the Chinese people. In other words, on one side of the Li dispute there was an implicit defense of those men who fought and died for a just war, while on the other there was recognition and acceptance of Japan’s terribly mistaken militarism and aggression and the consequences of both. Seen this way, the shape of popular Japanese con­ sciousness concerning the legitimacy of the entire wartime experience was at stake in the debate over the meaning of Li Dequan’s arrival in Japan.95 There were many ways to interpret the meaning of Li Dequan’s visit to Japan in the fall of 1954. Were one to follow the visit exclusively in the pages of official state archives, much of what has been revealed in this chapter would have remained unseen. The government of Prime Minister Yoshida could not treat her as an official guest of the Japanese state, and thus her Japan tour garnered less attention in the paper trail of official sources. Turning to the arena of popular perceptions, however, the Li visit takes on vastly greater significance. In sum, the multiple layers of meaning within Li Dequan’s 1954 visit to Japan explored here should remind us, if nothing else, that the domestic social divisions in Japan that had found expression in either support for or opposition to continental expansion twenty years earlier were still at work. During the 1930s, of course, it was the Japanese left that had wanted to stay out of China, while the right had aimed to move deeper in. By the 1950s, however, the right wanted out, and the left sought deeper involvement. While the international context had changed, Li Dequan’s 1954 visit stands as a valuable reminder of the influential part still played by popular perceptions of China in the articula­ tion of domestic political debates in Japan. As the historian Robert Hoppens has concluded, the “left-right split over the legitimacy of the postwar state was mirrored in the left-right split on the China problem.”96 Let us remember, too, that stories of Li’s impeding arrival on Japa­ nese shores in October 1954 appeared in Japan’s major daily papers on pages that often also included promotional advertising for new films soon to arrive in Japanese cinemas. One such film was director Honda Ishirō’s Gojira (Godzilla), which opened in theaters that same month. Far more than a mere Saturday-matinee monster movie, the film reflected deep popular unease concerning the lasting effects of American atomic weapons testing in the Pacific during the early 1950s. Ten years after both Li Dequan and

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Gojira shook Japanese society with their respective arrivals on the shores of the archipelago in October 1954, popular sentiment would be shaken again by a troublesome visitor—radioactive fallout from the first atomic weapon detonated by the PRC. As the next chapter will show, Japanese reactions to China’s promotion in October 1964 to the ranks of the world’s nuclear pow­ ers defy simple characterization. As was the case with Li Dequan, popular Japanese perceptions of China’s atomic weapons reveal a complicated re­ lationship with the continent understood best through sources of everyday print media culture rather than formal political and diplomatic rhetoric.

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CHAPTER 2

Mao’s Mushroom Clouds

Hey China, why did you start doing nuclear weapons tests again? Don’t you know the terror of “ashes of death” (shi no hai)? Is it fine with you that death ash will fall not only on China but on other places around the world? Those who feel anxiety after learning of the test are not just we Japanese but people all over Asia who wish for peace. Just as we are ready to forget about the Lucky Dragon incident, because of this regrettable action, we cannot do so. —Twenty-one-year-old shop clerk in Yokosuka, May 19661

Before we criticize, is it not necessary that we think about the following matter? That is, what caused China to go against the current nuclear pow­ ers as well as global popular opinion? —Tokyo municipal city worker, May 19652

W

hen Li Dequan completed her goodwill tour of Ja­ pan in November 1954, Japanese society was firmly on the path toward economic recovery and growth, aided in no small part by the procurement boom linked to the Korean War. Political stability followed, with the consolidation of conservative prewarperiod political parties into the LDP in 1955. With the US-Japan security agreement also in place, which pledged the American defense of Japan in exchange for the ongoing presence of US bases on the archipelago, Japan’s ruling political elites could focus primarily on becoming an economic su­ perpower. The late 1950s, of course, were not free of domestic dissent, and popular opposition to the American military presence on the islands continued throughout the end of the decade. Concerning Mao’s China, while much of the goodwill of the early 1950s had faded by later in the decade, popular Japanese attitudes still firmly favored the pursuit of a restoration in Japan-PRC diplomacy. “At present, the Japanese government states that relations with Communist China will include only commerce and cultural exchange without any 54

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formal restoration of diplomatic ties,” a newspaper poll asked in the fall of 1957. “What do you think about this?” Nearly 60 percent of respon­ dents agreed that “formal diplomatic relations should be restored quickly”; roughly only 14 percent claimed it was fine “to continue things as they are.”3 Additional poll data from 1957 also provides an indication of at least some popular frustration with Kishi’s pro-US stance because of its effect on Japanese relations with the PRC. When asked “What do you think of the Kishi government’s core position that cooperation with the United States is the #1 priority?” 21 percent called it a “good policy,” with only 8 percent labeling it explicitly as a “bad policy.” The most popular response by far, however, was “it cannot be helped,” which fit the mood of 43 per­ cent of respondents. Moreover, only 26 percent agreed that it was possible to “develop smooth relations with communist states like the USSR and PRC” while pursuing cooperation with the United States, and 41 percent claimed it was impossible to do so.4 Such poll numbers suggest that ordi­ nary citizens and political activists alike shared a frustration over the power wielded by US prerogatives over their nation’s continental policy even five years after the end of the American occupation. Widespread dissatisfac­ tion with the terms of the US-Japan security treaty ultimately erupted in mass demonstrations throughout May and June 1960. While the political fallout from violent clashes between students and police that summer cost Prime Minister Kishi his job, his successor, Ikeda Hayato, aimed to calm that summer’s rage with promises of prosperity for all with his “income­ doubling” economic program. By the autumn of 1964, nineteen years had passed since the end of the war, and Japanese society had indeed come a long way since those smol­ dering late summer days of 1945. As the economic wheels of “Japan Inc.” seemed to be picking up ever more momentum, the charred desolation of the immediate postwar years faded further into Japan’s collective memory for the party politicians, policy planners, and everyday people alike, all of whom by then could confidently look forward to better and brighter days ahead. At that moment, nothing represented the extraordinary progress toward recovery made since war’s end better than the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympiad. Never had the Olympic Games been hosted by an Asian metropolis, and Tokyo was poised to demonstrate to the world that the once firebombed capital had been reborn as a spectacular modern city.5 The games opened on October 11, 1964, to great exuberance and fanfare. A rapid series of largely unforeseen political events beyond the archipelago, however, soon cooled Japan’s Olympic fever. First, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted as Soviet premier on October 14. Next, the Labour

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Party defeated the conservative Tories in Britain’s general election on Oc­ tober 15. Finally, and no doubt most significantly for people in Japan, on October 16 the People’s Republic of China successfully detonated a nuclear weapon for the first time. Suddenly, the international sporting event that was meant to propel Japan onto the front pages of the world’s newspapers was forced to make room for an equally, if not more, dramatic form of state-to-state rivalry and competition. The sense of crisis and unpredictability touched off by these nearly simultaneous events around the world was captured visually by the comic artist Ōba Hiroshi at the end of the year. In a two-page cartoon map of the globe, Ōba depicted a Labour Party politician holding his fingers up in a V-for-victory sign over England on one side of the world and the electoral triumph of Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater in the United States on the other. Across the Eurasian landmass was an image of Khrushchev be­ ing pushed out of his chair in Moscow and the bed-ridden Japanese prime minister Ikeda Hayato announcing his resignation because of poor health. In the center of the cartoon world, however, was an image of the Japanese Olympic torchbearer and the Tokyo Olympic flame dwarfed by a far larger mushroom cloud rising over the PRC.6 Yokoyama Taizō captured the senti­ ment well, too, in a single-frame cartoon captioned with the phrase: “A living room where one cannot relax.” In the image, a woman sits at home in front of her television, the Olympic rings on the screen, but jumping out of the top of the set on one side is a peace sign–waving British Labour Party politician, on the other is Nikita Khrushchev falling over on his head, and between them, in place of the antenna, is an atomic mushroom cloud.7 When Mao’s first mushroom cloud billowed above the dry sands of the Lop Nor testing site in Xinjiang province in the late autumn of 1964, one might expect that widespread fear would quickly grip Japanese so­ ciety—fear that China was now equipped to exact terrible vengeance on Japan in retribution for the years of rapacious conquest and occupation the Japanese military had heaped upon the Chinese people a generation ear­ lier. To assume popular anxiety over the potential for Chinese aggression, however, is to apply anachronistically the nationalist passions of the 2000s to the 1960s. To be sure, anxiety was indeed pervasive, but not because anyone feared a vengeful attack by the PRC on the Japanese home islands. Rather, it was nuclear war between Mao’s China and the United States that people in Japan feared most, especially because the US-Japan security agreement would likely place the archipelago squarely within the perimeter of atomic destruction in the region should war erupt. In an interview with the widely circulated magazine Weekly Sankei, Chief Cabinet Secretary

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Suzuki Zenkō addressed that unease by boldly asserting a strong unanim­ ity of popular feeling in Japan concerning the PRC’s mid-October nuclear blast at Lop Nor. “I think the entire country, as the only nation to know atomic destruction, is angry with Communist China for flouting the global hope for an end to all nuclear testing,” Suzuki claimed. “The position of our country,” he went on, “is one of opposition to atomic weapons testing, no matter the country, no matter the place. The government, being of the exact same feeling and transcending party lines, opposes nuclear tests along with all Japanese citizens.”8 An exploration of popular sentiment in response to Mao’s mushroom clouds, however, reveals a society far less unified than Suzuki believed, or perhaps just hoped, was the case. This chapter will explore a wide variety of Japanese responses to the development of nuclear weapons in China during the mid-1960s.9 The insights revealed through newspaper editorials, essays in intellectual journals, features in popular magazines, public opinion surveys, and political cartoons demonstrate that popular Japanese interpretations of China’s nuclear weapons cannot be uniformly categorized. Images of Mao’s mushroom clouds inspired everything from fear and frustration to anger and criticism to pride and hope. As was true with the case of the ambivalent Japanese response to Li Dequan, the mul­ tidimensional elements of popular responses to Chinese nuclear weapons also make clear that events in mainland China are a lens through which domestic struggles within Japan can be better understood. Moreover, it is to the archive of everyday sentiment, not the paper trail of official state discourse, that we must turn to unearth these complexities.10 Shades of Opposition When Li Dequan returned home to the PRC in November 1954, Mao’s China was officially only five years old. For all the devastation wrought by the Korean War and the high price in human and material resources paid by the PRC in holding the United States to a “draw” in the conflict, the war in Korea had also done much to help consolidate the power of the CCP over Chinese life. The mid-1950s became a time of intense anti-US ideology and ongoing pursuit of Soviet models of industrial development. By 1956–1957, however, Chinese society again entered an era of fear and anxiety: Mao turned against intellectuals and technocrats, as well as any other voices of dissent, in the anti-rightist movements of those years. The late 1950s also saw the worsening of PRC relations with the USSR. Numerous disputes between Mao and Nikita Khrushchev fueled

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Mao’s desire to break free from the shadow of Moscow, abandon Soviet industrialization models, and push the PRC forward to national greatness through truly Chinese ideas. Mao’s pursuit of rapid economic development during the late 1950s in the so-called Great Leap Forward instead produced nothing but catastro­ phe for the Chinese people. Famine killed millions, and China’s industrial development was drastically slowed, not intensified. Moreover, relations with the USSR went from bad to worse by 1960. All Soviet advisers were recalled from the PRC, and China was left without a major global ally at a moment when the Chinese people needed international assistance more than ever. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward’s disastrous consequences, more moderate voices within the CCP ascended to positions of real power. With leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping giving more direction to economic policy in 1963 and 1964, the national development aims of the PRC were back on track. Nonetheless, hostile rivalry with the USSR and relentless tension with the United States still drove China’s national security ambitions and fueled the PRC’s desire to become a third option in the global alignment competition of the mid-1960s. The pursuit of atomic weapons was a central part of that aim. The Chinese Communist Party issued an official statement when news of the successful test was released, explaining to the international com­ munity why the People’s Republic had pursued a path of nuclear weapons development when the world at large was trending toward nonproliferation. As reproduced on the front page of Japan’s major daily papers, the party statement claimed that China had no aggressive military ambitions behind its weapons program; the primary aim of the test was to challenge the impe­ rialist position of the United States in East Asia. The United States had long used its nuclear weapons as a threat to intimidate and contain China, the statement argued, but with the PRC’s successful test, that strategy would no longer be possible. By achieving military parity with the West, regional peace in East Asia became more, not less, likely: the United States and its allies would now be forced to treat China with more respect and less naked aggression.11 Although some in Japan found that explanation compelling (as we will later see), the October 16 test elicited widespread criticism within Japanese society, the nature of which varied greatly. For some, the most immediate emotions were sadness and desperation. The Asahi evening edi­ tion on the day after the test, for example, featured reactions from residents of the three sites of Japan’s own nuclear wounds: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Yaizu (Shizuoka), the home port of the fishing vessel Lucky Dragon

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Number 5, which had been exposed to lethal radiation from US atomic detonations in Bikini Atoll in the spring of 1954. From Hiroshima’s resi­ dents came words of terrible disappointment. “No matter how many times we shout about ending nuclear weapons testing, is it all for nothing?” asked one interviewee. The piece also quoted patients from a Hiroshima hospital treating radiation victims who had been joyfully watching the television broadcast of the Olympics the previous night. With heads hanging low after hearing the news the next morning, one is said to have expressed complete exasperation over the PRC’s decision to detonate a blast “even with everyone so vigorously hoping for an end to nuclear weapon tests.”12 The head of a Nagasaki organization of atomic bomb survivors (hibakusha) said of the patients in the Nagasaki radiation sickness hospital: “Everyone learned of it in the morning . . . and now you can feel the heavy mood in every room. . . . Everyone is thinking of the tragedy of that day and the struggle of the nineteen years since.” With their desperation, however, was also determination: “We are not satisfied with the soft response of our government, itself baptized by nuclear fire. We plan to organize a meeting soon and lodge a protest with the Japanese government as well as make a statement directly to the Chinese state.”13 From Yaizu came comments from one of the Lucky Dragon Number 5 crewmembers: “For China as one part of Asia to conduct a test was a huge shock for us who live so nearby . . . for China to develop such a ‘weapon of evil’ while not belonging to the United Nations will surely make the global peace movement more dif­ ficult.” To that sentiment, the widow of crewmember Kuboyama Aikichi, who had died of radiation sickness, added: “Even with the whole world opposing nuclear weapons testing so vigorously up to this point, with this test it all comes to nothing . . . it is really awful that I have to report this sad news to my dead husband at his grave.”14 Other voices expressed frustration with the PRC for basing its geopo­ litical strategy on the development of atomic weapons. A Yomiuri editorial acknowledged a degree of legitimacy behind the three main reasons for the test—to display military strength in resistance to US imperialism, to demonstrate independence from Soviet assistance, and to offer to the Third World a leadership alternative—but nonetheless voiced firm opposition. “From a world peace perspective as well as from a Japan-China friend­ ship perspective, we oppose China’s nuclear weapons test,” the editorial proclaimed. “Would it not be a better policy for the PRC to gain the trust of Asian and African nations through economic diplomacy and take a leader­ ship role in global peace?”15 Kumamoto Yoshitada, writing in the Asahi, offered a similar critique. He first contended that the PRC’s atomic test was

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more a political and psychological event than a military one. By joining what was now a five-power nuclear club, he explained, the PRC would surely see its international influence increase. More countries (some out of fear, others out of admiration) would seek to cultivate connections with Beijing. Concerning the effects of the test on Japan, Kumamoto continued, the key question would be whether Japan should also go nuclear by way of deepening the US-Japanese alliance and by facilitating the placement of US nuclear weapons in Japan. While Kumamoto was noncommittal on that matter, neither was he persuaded by Beijing’s explanations for the test. Being committed to a complete ban on the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the logic that China had developed nuclear weapons only to break the Western monopoly and resist US imperialism was unacceptable. “Could not the PRC have worked for nonproliferation without becoming nuclear?” Kumamoto asked. That the PRC had not done so left him unconvinced that Beijing was truly committed to that goal.16 Anxiety over the long-term implications of the test was another theme. One Yomiuri editorial suggested that the rising technological prow­ ess of the PRC should not be taken lightly. “Even if the meaning of the test in a military sense is small, whether a country can produce a nuclear weapon is one major standard of that nation’s status and dignity.” When the United States produced the first atomic weapon at the end of the Second World War, the massive scale of the Manhattan Project showed the world America’s economic power, technological sophistication, and industrial might. “Does the PRC test now suggest the same thing about China? How high is their level of technological expertise, industrial strength, and eco­ nomic development? Are they already close to producing hydrogen bombs and missiles?”17 A Mainichi editorial also took a long-term perspective to express a similar kind of frustration, mixed with fear, in response to the October 1964 test: In the past, Japan-China relations stood on a foundation in which there was a strong Japan and a weak China, and this became a major factor that invited catastrophe. But in the relationship now offensive and defensive positions have changed, and the situation has become one in which China is strong and Japan is weak. Ultimately, then, would not a Japan-China friendship based on a position of mutual equality be the best way to move forward?18

Reader contributions to Japan’s major news dailies show that the popular responses continued to span a wide range after the PRC’s second

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test of an atomic weapon, in May 1965. Murai Kōichi, a middle-aged city worker, expressed frustration with the PRC for the poor timing of the May 1965 test because it threatened to derail what seemed like promising hints at peace in Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s recent declaration of a three-day cease of air raids on North Vietnam, Murai believed, was welcome evidence of the power that public opinion in the United States can have on policy. The ceasefire, he reasoned, would give the people of Vietnam relief from terror and perhaps give policy makers a chance to think deeply about moving in a better direction: However, at such a critical moment, the PRC carried out a nuclear weapon test in the Takuramakan desert. While one can understand this as a dem­ onstration against the United States, as proclaimed in the PRC’s official statement, the truly regrettable thing is the almost total lack of prudence in doing so. While this action by the PRC is deeply regrettable, we have to put our efforts toward using the bombing halt as a step toward peace. . . . The PRC has to know that this kind of “eye-for-an-eye” nuclear weapon testing can only create a vicious circle.19

In response to the third Chinese atomic weapons test in 1966, the well-known novelist Hirabayashi Taiko expressed frustration and anxiety in a lengthy Yomiuri feature essay entitled “War Cannot Be Deterred with Nuclear Weapons.” China’s nuclear test was larger than anyone had ex­ pected, Hirabayashi began, and it seemed likely that China would have intercontinental missiles threatening to nations both near and distant sooner than anyone had imagined. China’s excuse for the test was to say that the PRC needed to develop nuclear weapons to rid the world of nuclear weapons, but Hirabayashi was unconvinced. Ever since the first country to produce nuclear weapons, the United States, said that its weapons had been made in order to end war, she explained, every other country with atomic weapons have made the same case. But this logic only gave each of those countries the power to kill one another many times over. She then concluded: Neighboring Japan is already facing radioactive fallout, but more than that, the problem is, how will Japan protect itself with such a frightening neighbor next door? When looking now at the cultural rectification going on there, China is a country in which one cannot live individually and where free thought is suppressed. We can only pray that the day never comes when such a severe country defends its policies with the backing of nuclear weapons.20

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As strong as anger with the PRC was for carrying out these tests, for some there was equal outrage for those in Japan who defended the Chinese decision to go nuclear. In 1966, a forty-year-old public school teacher, for example, offered a reaction critical of the Japanese left: In response to China’s nuclear weapons test, our political parties have been expressing a variety of views on the matter. This is a natural thing, considering Japan as a nation with experience as a victim of nuclear attack and with the Japanese people opposed to nuclear weapons testing. But I get the impression that the Socialist Party, more than opposing the Chinese nuclear weapon test, has said that if we consider the background to the development of those weapons, such testing is unavoidable.

While he agreed that it was necessary to examine the background forces shaping China’s weapons program, as the Japan Socialist Party had argued, he also wondered, “does not doing so only more or less legitimize the tests, and then following that logic, lay the foundations for Japan also to become a nuclear weapons power? Instead, I would rather see these party leaders face China and make strong demands for an end to nuclear weapons testing.”21 A Tokyo merchant had an even harsher assessment of Japan’s Com­ munist Party’s response to the tests: The Japanese Communist Party has stated that the PRC’s nuclear weap­ ons tests are the only logical defense of China’s security in the face of America’s imperialist policy of nuclear war. To accept this as true is to see that the JCP is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party and that it has no independent position of its own. If the JCP intends to have any sort of independent voice as Japanese people, even in the face of China’s weapons testing, it must act according to the perspective of Japan and the Japanese people.22

The lay Buddhist organization Sōka Gakkai also launched a blistering attack on the Japanese Communist Party for its statement in support of the PRC’s second nuclear test, in May 1965. Their incomprehensible backing of the Chinese Communist regime in turning a blind eye to the tragedy of Hiroshima, it began, must be called traitorous. In criticizing the CCP first, the editorial labeled as “insane” the explanatory logic that weapons with the capacity to destroy humanity could be produced with the goal

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of world peace in mind. Even more venomous denouncements were then leveled against the JCP. The party’s statement in their mouthpiece maga­ zine Akahata claiming that the PRC had no choice but to develop nuclear weapons in response to US aggression in the Vietnam War was dismissed as “outrageous” and proved nothing other than the JCP’s adept skill at legitimizing evil acts by deflecting all responsibility for them. The essay concluded with the unequivocally damning judgment that by supporting the PRC in its nuclear weapons development, the JCP not only ceased to be “Japanese” but also made itself an enemy of not only Japan but all of humanity.23 A retiree in the Yomiuri editorial letters section offered a similar assessment of the PRC’s Japanese defenders in May 1965. “That radioac­ tive ‘ashes of death’ will arrive in Japan carried by the jet stream has been verified by local studies,” he explained, and “we will all be exposed to the dangers of radioactive fallout.” Expressing his incredulity, he went on, “It is astonishing that there are organizations in Japan that formally state ‘China’s nuclear weapon test is an event to be celebrated for its aid to world peace’ even knowing that ash of death will dump radioactive fallout all over our vegetables, fruits, fish, and milk.” Doubting the true “Japaneseness” of the PRC’s defenders, he concluded, “As these people will be participants in the global conference on nuclear disarmament in August, the world is an odd place indeed. It will not be difficult to find others who question the nationality of these people.”24 Rather than wallowing in fear, frustration, or anger, belittling the achievement was another way to critique the Chinese weapons program and ease Japanese anxieties over its success. An October 1964 Yomiuri article took the position that Japanese scientists need not feel inferior in the wake of the PRC test. Japan has the expertise to make such weapons, the piece explained, but out of good conscience chooses not to do so, and a certain pride can be taken in that decision. Japanese scientists decided after the Lucky Dragon incident, the essay continued, that they would conduct nuclear research only for nonmilitary needs. Moreover, Japanese need not be too impressed with the PRC’s achievement. As one academic expert put it: “To us the Chinese nuclear test has the feeling of being like a ‘child’s prank’ (kodomo damashi). It was something done just for propaganda value as resistance to the United States and USSR . . . so there is no need to take it too seriously.”25 The curious tale of a researcher at the Tokaimura nuclear power facility named Tsukamoto Osamu also hints at the utility of deemphasiz­ ing the significance of China’s atomic weapons program. Tsukamoto had

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disappeared mysteriously in early 1961, some believing that he had com­ mitted suicide by throwing himself into the reactor, where his body would have disintegrated. In the autumn of 1964, however, a rumor spread, based at least in part on his alleged links to the Japanese Communist Party, that Tsukamoto was in fact alive and in China providing assistance to the PRC weapons program.26 A similar story circulated in the summer of 1967, when Taiwanese officials suggested that Japanese engineering experts may have been involved in helping the PRC develop a missile-delivery system.27 Still other reports suggested that Japanese scientists might have played a part, albeit unwillingly, in the acceleration of Chinese nuclear weapons development by way of large quantities of research papers by Japanese scholars being clandestinely smuggled to the PRC.28 What might have given such stories life in the popular media? The idea of fifth-column Japanese giving aid to a threatening foreign power made for provocative news, to be sure. Beyond that, however, rumors of Japanese assistance in Chinese weapons development must also be con­ sidered in light of the fact that many in Japan, and around the world, were surprised by the rapid pace of the PRC’s nuclear weapons program. While a test of some sort was anticipated, there was still shock that the Chinese had done it without help from the USSR, as Soviet technical experts had been called home in 1960 when Beijing’s relations with Moscow reached their nadir. Moreover, many also had taken comfort in the assumption that it would be a decade or so until the PRC would be able to advance from the crude device detonated in October 1964 to developing a delivery system capable of deploying more powerful bombs in a threatening way. The successful detonation of a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb in 1966 and the demonstration of aerial deployment technology in 1967 proved those assumptions wrong, too. As John Dower has argued in the context of Japan’s swift and successful aerial attacks on the British in Singapore and the Americans at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, both British and American commanders insisted that Germans must have been flying the planes, since the accepted (and racist) wisdom of the day was that Japanese were not physically capable of being talented pilots.29 For some Japanese in the 1960s, perhaps, a similar sense of culturally driven underestimation of Chinese technological savvy demanded that such remarkable achieve­ ments could only have been realized with outside, and even specifically Japanese, assistance. In terms of more concrete policy-oriented responses to Chinese weapons testing, for Japan’s conservative political elites, the PRC’s first nuclear weapons test provided ample evidence to back their support of

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the US-Japan security agreement. The journalist Shigemori Tadashi, for example, who had earlier been a prominent leftist intellectual before ex­ periencing ideological conversion during the war, articulated a cautious anticommunist recommendation for how best to deal with the PRC’s new weapon. Not convinced that China’s intentions were more political than military, Shigemori insisted that Japan take the security threat posed by Chinese nukes seriously and not rest in the complacent comfort provided by the US nuclear umbrella.30 The PRC had demonstrated a greater level of technological advancement than anyone had expected. Now, the PRC was sure to use this “nuclear diplomacy” to strengthen its claims in disputes with other world powers. What should Japan do in this new environment? If PRC nuclear weapons continued to destabilize the region, Shigemori suggested, Japan should stand firm in its commitment to the Anpo frame­ work as the best option possible for countering Chinese threats.31 While less alarmist than Shigemori’s commentary, the Foreign Ministry expressed a similar desire to stay the course in terms of USJapan relations in its monthly magazine Global Movements. The article emphasized that the nuclear explosion detonated on October 16 was in fact quite low tech and not at all weapon ready. It would take many years for the PRC to be in a position of actually putting such weapons to use. There was no need, in a strictly military sense, the ministry assured its readers, to be fearful. The test was a political act meant to challenge US and Soviet preeminence as well as stoke fear of a US-PRC conflict to draw other Asian nations to the PRC side, diplomatically speaking.32 The Liberal Democratic Party representative (and future prime minister) Nakasone Yasuhiro also suggested in the pages of Central Review that the US-Japan security agreement was more necessary than ever. If the PRC developed a weapons-capable nuclear device, he argued, US-PRC relations would surely worsen. In that case, Japan could work to help improve US-PRC relations by serving as a mediator. Japan should watch closely the course of PRC-USSR relations, he concluded, but in the short term Nakasone saw no need to change Japan’s security policy, even while acknowledging that a long term, multidimensional Asian antinuclear treaty would be a welcome development.33 For some, then, the PRC’s decision to go nuclear deserved nothing but strong condemnation for its reckless destabilization of the world order. Moreover, the significance of the achievement had been overblown, so Japanese had little reason to fear Chinese power. Finally, an atomic China reaffirmed the propriety of Japan’s alliance with the United States. For others, however, the opposite was true on all three of those matters.

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Shifting the Blame In an October 1964 phone interview with Asahi, the well-known Japa­ nese leftist and China-friendly Beijing resident Saionji Kinkazu claimed to have been quite surprised when he saw the test announcement in a People’s Daily extra. While some outside of China (such as US Secretary of State Dean Rusk) had been hinting that a test was imminent, Saionji saw that as little more than foreign critics stirring up anti-China feelings. What pleased the Chinese public most about the nuclear test, Saionji contended, was not only the pride they could take in the PRC’s technological proficiency but also the belief that because US atomic threats could now be countered, peace had become more likely. Could not the Chinese people understand the feelings of the Japanese as victims of nuclear attack? Saionji was asked. The Chinese certainly understood that feeling and accepted it, Saionji ex­ plained, but nonetheless the PRC needed to develop the weapons to achieve the goals of peace China and Japan shared. Moreover, Saionji argued that nuclear war had not been made more likely by the Chinese test: “I believe the Chinese assertion that atomic weapons were developed not to wage war but to achieve a balance with the West that will make peace more possible.”34 Saionji’s remarks represented another widely shared response to the Chinese nuclear program, one that placed primary responsibility for proliferation on the United States, not the PRC. As the case of Li Dequan made clear, relations with the PRC served as a mirror of political divisions within Japanese society. The PRC’s mid1960s tests played a similar role. The decision by the Chinese leadership to detonate an atomic device came with a cost in the international com­ munity. While criticism from the United States and Soviet Union was to be expected, the 1964 test also “further isolated the country by eroding support among a number of governments and political movements that had once supported the PRC.”35 In the case of Japan, the effect was to confuse more than erode such support. Those on the political left in Japan had long backed both the recognition of Mao’s regime in Beijing and a broad opposition to all nuclear weapons proliferation. Because the CCP had also voiced its support for the abolition of nuclear weapons, it had been possible until 1964 for Japanese leftists to pursue both a pro-Beijing and antinuclear agenda. The October tests at Lop Nor rendered that position untenable. Moreover, many Japanese leftists felt a sense of betrayal by the CCP in the wake of what seemed to be bold-faced hypocrisy in openly opposing while secretly developing nuclear weapons. The challenge then for the left was how best to maintain a pro-PRC position while simultaneously opposing the continued proliferation of

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nuclear weapons. The left-leaning literary journal Shin Nihon bungaku, for example, published a formal statement in response to the October 1964 test that articulated several key ideas common to many of the PRC’s frustrated friends in Japan. In sum, the statement argued that as the one people ever to be subjected to nuclear attack, the Japanese could not forgive the PRC for escalating the global nuclear arms race with new tests. At the same time, however, the Japanese must also recognize that US policy in East Asia had provoked the PRC down this path and that the US-Japan security agreement was a central pillar of that policy. The Japanese thus needed to appreciate their own responsibility for the situation in which they found themselves.36 The prominent Sinologist Takeuchi Minoru elaborated on that position in the same issue of the journal, explaining that “understand­ ing” why the PRC had developed nuclear weapons was not the same as “supporting” that development. In his view, US imperialism and Japan’s conservative state were largely responsible for provoking the PRC’s push toward nuclear tests. So, one could remain antinuclear and pro-China, in Takeuchi’s view, by focusing opposition on the geopolitical order created by the US-Japan security agreement.37 Japan’s Socialist Party shared many of these sentiments in its own statement of response to the Lop Nor test, but the party’s position on the matter was more complicated, in that a party delegation had in fact been traveling through the PRC by invitation of the Chinese Communist Party when the test took place. Needless to say, this left the Japanese socialist delegates in an awkward position. The party issued its formal response to the test in its monthly periodical, beginning with an articulation of four core principles: (1) As a people who have suffered nuclear attack, we completely oppose the PRC nuclear test and oppose all nuclear weapons held by any and all countries. (2) We hope that the PRC will understand that this test has made the world more dangerous and nuclear conflict more likely. (3) We remain firm in our opposition to Japan acquiring nuclear weapons and in our resistance to US bases in Okinawa and nuclear submarines in Japanese ports. (4) For the sake of peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons in the Asia-Pacific region, we support the swift reception of the PRC into the United Nations.38

In explaining those principles more precisely, the statement asserted that while the PRC claimed its test was done to ensure peace (by breaking the US/USSR monopoly on nuclear weapons in Asia), in fact it made it

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more likely that West Germany and Japan would also feel pressure from the United States to go nuclear, in turn escalating rather than tempering trends toward proliferation. Moreover, the party also claimed that by putting its resources into nuclear weapons development, the PRC was sacrificing the development of socialism within Chinese society. Despite those critiques, however, the statement asserted unequivocally that the root cause behind the PRC decision was the US policy of hostility directed at China. For its complicity in the execution of that geopolitical strategy, the Japanese government also bore responsibility for the nuclear tension plaguing the region. So, while the Japanese people would be correct to stand in opposi­ tion to future PRC tests, one could not do that without also standing up against US policy and the Japanese regime that facilitates it. Finally, on the question of how best to move forward, the Socialist Party would address the challenge of PRC nuclear weapons tests by pursuing the normalization of formal relations between Japan and the PRC as well as supporting PRC admission into the United Nations.39 The China scholar and noted CCP sympathizer Niijima Atsuyoshi launched a different sort of critique of the Japanese government’s response to China’s May 1966 test. Because of the volume of personal, cultural, and intellectual exchange between Japan and China and the almost total lack of similar interaction between the United States and the PRC, Japa­ nese perceptions of China, Niijima argued, were fundamentally different from American perceptions. Americans viewed the Chinese of the 1960s as more or less the same as the thugs of the Boxer Rebellion as depicted in the American film 55 Days at Peking. Moreover, the US government had warned the public in advance that a test was imminent, so there was no great sense of shock among the American people. The case of Japan was different, Niijima contended. The Japanese government made almost no effort to warn the public in advance but then quickly attacked the PRC in the immediate wake of the test. Those attacks, according to Niijima, were aimed at destroying the popular image of China as a place of high morals and civilization. The criticisms, however, made no sense. The Japanese state pointed to the danger of “ashes of death” set loose by the Chinese test, but this was deeply hypocritical. The amount of radioactive fallout produced by the PRC’s three small tests since 1964, he explained, paled in comparison to the vastly greater amount of deadly atomic dust created by the dozens of atmospheric tests carried out by the United States since the late 1940s. Niijima concluded that the Japanese state’s criticism of the PRC was in fact an expression of domestic political goals more than an articulation of a foreign policy position. That is to say, attacking the

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PRC for its nuclear weapons program reflected more than anything else the desire of Japan’s ruling elites to worsen popular Japanese perceptions of Chinese society.40 The somewhat two-faced position of the left-wing defenders of China’s weapons program seemed inconsistent, if not absurd, to some, as expressed comically by the cartoonist Ieishi Kazuo. A Yomiuri editorial im­ age of his from November 1964 shows a Japan Communist Party protester at the ocean’s edge holding a double-ended sign—one side is underwater and reads, “Oppose the arrival of nuclear submarines in our ports!” The other end points to the sky, with a placard reading, “Accept the legitimacy of China’s nuclear test.” Both messages are received by puzzled fish below the surface and an equally puzzled Japanese passerby on the shore.41 Kondō Hidezō, too, depicted a clever scene: a student protester holding an “Op­ pose nuclear subs!” sign stands at a pier’s edge, a black US submarine in the distance. The American vessel, however, is dwarfed by an enormous mushroom cloud labeled “China nuclear test.” The frustrated youngster says, “Well, now this doesn’t make any sense” (Yowatta na, rikutsu ni awan na).42 The humor in both cartoons derives from the obvious illogicality of opposing nuclear weapons held by one state while accepting their necessity for another. The voices of everyday citizens as revealed by an array of reader contributions to Japan’s major dailies nonetheless expressed an apprecia­ tion for the wider forces that had driven the Chinese side to this point. Recognizing widespread fear of the expansion of nuclear weapons as well as rising criticism of the PRC after its second test in 1965, a young city employee nonetheless showed some sympathy for the Chinese position by suggesting that “before we criticize, is it not necessary that we think about the following matter? That is, what caused China to go against the current nuclear powers as well as global popular opinion?” He articulated two primary factors: First, that the four nuclear weapon powers oppose any other countries from going nuclear while demonstrating their own power is hardly evi­ dence of a genuine desire to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Second, the United States has in the past proposed a partial nuclear weapon ban treaty, but with the same mouth now states strongly that it is prepared to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. That is an ultimate betrayal of such a treaty and of the people of the world who truly believe in the path of a total ban on nuclear weapons. . . . For the sake of a total elimina­ tion of nuclear weapons from the world, the PRC must be included in

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that discussion. For Japan as the only country ever subjected to nuclear destruction, do we not bear the burden for making strong efforts in this direction?43

Similarly, a thirty-three-year-old company employee from Nagano wrote in 1965: “When the PRC conducted its first atomic weapons test last autumn, many nations strongly criticized it as an affront to world peace. That China has carried out another test, setting aside the hopes for peace expressed by people, regardless of the reasons for it, is a regrettable act that works against global peace and the popular opinion of the world.” The letter writer, however, took a more nuanced and reflective position on the problem: The problem here is, what has the government done since the partial weapons ban treaty to take seriously the will of the people for peace and to construct a peace diplomacy? For example, no matter how one looks at it, our diplomatic stance of more or less supporting the US policy of bombing North Vietnam is incomprehensible. . . . In any case, what we should be demanding strongly from our government is a rethinking of the diplomacy we have pursued to this point and the development of a truly peace-oriented diplomatic position.44

Even after the successful detonation of a more sophisticated and powerful hydrogen bomb in May 1966, some readers were sympathetic and forward-thinking on the matter. A twenty-year-old office worker from Tokyo wrote: In America today there is a rising tide of sympathy toward the PRC. With the creation by Senator Kennedy of a special committee on China and even Vice President Humphrey’s support of that committee, there is some degree to which one can see that US policy toward the PRC might be changing. However, the reason we do not see any development in Japan’s China policy is that the government is easily swayed by official US policy and world opinion and does not really have any ideas of its own. . . . Of course, in the case of Japan there are dimensions in which we cannot, unlike other countries, easily pursue a policy. However, China now is a major nation with the world’s largest population and nuclear weapons. At this moment, then, is it not necessary that Japan in some way open up a dialogue with China and take the first steps toward formal recognition of the PRC?45

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Mao’s mushroom clouds had placed serious strain on the US-Japan security agreement. While Japanese supporters of the Anpo system argued that it was the only reliable defense against regional threats to Japan’s security in the wake of the PRC’s tests, many others contended that Anpo in fact made Japan less secure. The prolific editorial cartoonist Kondō Hidezō captured that sentiment powerfully in a 1966 comic depicting a terrified Japanese figure on the archipelago holding a giant magnet with the phrase “security treaty” (anpo jōyaku) inscribed upon it; the magnet is pulling a speeding nuclear bomb with Mao’s face on its tip directly toward Tokyo (figure 2.1).46

FIG. 2.1 This Kondō Hidezō cartoon depicts Mao as an atomic bomb speeding toward the Japanese archipelago. Reproduced with per­ mission from the Kondō family as facilitated by the Furusato mangakan in Chikuma City, Nagano.

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While one would certainly expect it from members of the political opposition parties, heavy criticism of the Anpo system also came from largely apolitical public intellectuals. The philosopher Mudai Risaku, for example, agreed that China was still years away from the development of deliverable nuclear weapons and that the recent tests were not militar­ ily threatening. He warned, however, that the United States was likely to use the PRC nuclear tests as a justification for deeper encroachment upon the sovereignty of Asian states and the intensification of its militaristic imperialism in the region, much as it was then doing in response to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident of early August 1964. In Mudai’s view, deepening dependence upon the United States and pursuing further remilitarization, precisely what the LDP regime was doing, was the wrong choice in every way. Should US-PRC relations worsen, Mudai contended, the security treaty would make Japan a target of Chinese weapons. The surer path to peace could instead be found in strengthening Japanese sovereignty and independence by repealing Anpo, expelling US bases in Japan, and refusing to support US actions in Southeast Asia.47 The socialist intellectual Kuno Osamu made a similar case. In his reflections on the meaning and import of the PRC’s first nuclear weapons test, Kuno explained that he had always believed two things were neces­ sary for the cultivation of peace in postwar Asia: Japan’s acceptance of full responsibility for the war in China and firm opposition to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For Kuno, the PRC’s tests had made crystal clear a stark choice for the Japanese people when it came to a forging a peaceful future. The nation could follow a path of deepening the US-Japan alliance or instead increase the commitment to regional peace in Asia by turning to deeper relations with China. Like Mudai, Kuno believed that Anpo had made Japan less secure and that the choice moving forward was between the US alliance and peace with the PRC; the two were mutually exclusive.48 The progressive sociologist Hidaka Rokurō laid out a more complex but similar position concerning how the PRC’s nuclear tests should be understood within the context of the US-Japan security agreement and its effects on Japan’s relations with its regional neighbors. For Hidaka, it was essential that the Japanese recognize their partial responsibility for the PRC’s nuclear weapons program. The Japanese people had allowed their archipelago to function as a staging ground for a US policy in Asia that included targeting the PRC with nuclear weapons. Those who had failed to oppose US bases in Japan, according to Hidaka, had no credibility whatsoever in criticizing the PRC’s weapons development strategy. Hidaka made it clear, however, that he still did not support the PRC in their tests,

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although he still felt uneasy about that position. While he had always op­ posed US bases, he had not succeeded in preventing their perpetuation. Does standing firm in opposition but failing to have those bases closed, he wondered, make it appropriate for him to criticize the PRC? Beyond that, Hidaka also connected his unease to Japan’s wartime past. As a fervent believer that Japanese society could not escape its responsibility for the war in China, he asked how Japanese people could in good conscience now live under the protection of US nuclear power—a power used to threaten the Chinese, who a generation earlier were the victims of Japanese aggression. “Surely, someone in such a position cannot claim the right to criticize the PRC for its nuclear program,” he claimed. Even so, Hidaka stated that he would continue to oppose all nuclear weapons and the use of Japan as a US base, but these stances were not to be seen as being in support of the PRC but instead as in the larger interests of peace and the Japanese people.49 The effects of China’s nuclear tests on Japanese regional security and the perception of an impending crisis in the Anpo system featured prominently in a four-question survey of eight expert commentators pub­ lished in the December 1964 issue of the widely circulated current-affairs journal Chūō kōron.50 A theme common to many of the responses was the notion that some alternative to the Anpo framework would be the best way forward in a world with Chinese nuclear weapons. The Hosei University international law professor Yasui Kaoru, for example, suggested that the test would certainly escalate PRC-US tensions but that it also represented a useful turning point for the development of a nonproliferation treaty. In his view, Japan should not respond by opposing the PRC, strengthening Anpo, and seeking greater military capability. Instead, it would be more useful to seek a nonproliferation treaty between multiple nations from a position of independence, support normalization of relations with the PRC and the PRC’s entrance into the United Nations, and perhaps even consider a fourway US-USSR-PRC-Japan regional security agreement to replace Anpo.51 The Democratic Socialist Party representative Nagasue Eiichi ex­ plained that while European nations voiced opposition to the Chinese nuclear tests, they faced no direct threat from Chinese weapons. If, how­ ever, PRC were to use its nuclear influence to inflame nationalist wars in East Asia, the United States would certainly respond by escalating its own military position in the region, in turn threatening Japanese security. In Nagasue’s view, US-PRC relations were historically shallow, but JapanChina relations could be traced back to the very start of Japan’s emergence as an organized society. Japan-China relations thus need not be contained within the bubble of US-PRC relations, according to Nagasue. Instead,

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Japan should do all it can to improve relations with the PRC, and this in turn could facilitate improvement in US-PRC relations. Nagasue also agreed that Japan’s position in the Anpo system needed to be reexamined because it would not protect Japan if the PRC developed missile-delivery technology. Instead, the best way to curb the threat of PRC atomic weapons would be to welcome China into the United Nations and use that forum to cultivate non-nuclear agreements between all major powers.52 Iwasa Yoshizane, an official at Fuji Bank, expressed little anxiety about the immediate danger of Chinese nuclear weapons because a mere test was not the same as a deliverable weapon. After all, West Germany and Japan could easily carry out the same sort of test if either desired to do so. Still, unease in Japan as the only victim of a nuclear attack was genuine and understandable. The bipolar US-USSR system, in Iwasa’s view, was crum­ bling, and it seemed like a five-power system was likely to emerge in its place (the United States, USSR, United Kingdom, France, and China). For Iwasa, the United Nations was best way to guard against any PRC nuclear threat. Moreover, Japan should continue its policy of using economic aid to cultivate good relations in Asia. Japan was the strongest democraticcapitalist system in Asia, according to Iwasa, and should use that status to form good relations with regional states, support the PRC’s admission into the United Nations, promote Japan-China trade and commerce, and play the role of bridge between the United States and PRC. He also suggested that Japan should strive to develop a more independent security position and perhaps move to a multilateral security agreement when Anpo came due for renewal in 1970.53 Oka Masayoshi of the Japan Communist Party took a predictable tone in his comments. US reliance on nuclear intimidation while criticizing the PRC for nuclear testing was farcical, Oka claimed, as it was the US policy of containment against the PRC that had provoked China’s development of atomic weapons. Japan’s US-friendly LDP government was also complicit, he continued, in abetting aggressive US imperialist policy in Asia. Japan needed an independent foreign policy, according to Oka, that could reject US imperialism, recognize the PRC, and open formal relations with Mao’s China (forsaking Taiwan). Moreover, Oka suggested that Japan abandon Anpo, shutter all US military bases in Japan, and instead serve as the center of a new regional security treaty in Asia. Finally, Oka urged the Japanese people, who knew better than anyone the horrors of nuclear war, to seek a total ban on atomic weapons of all kinds.54 To be sure, as Amy King has noted, the “division between the JCP and the JSP over the Chinese nuclear test reflected a deeper tension in Japan over whether to support the Soviet

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Union or China in the wake of the Sino-Soviet spilt.”55 As Oka’s com­ ments make clear, however, the more rigorous support for Beijing voiced by the Japan Communist Party also reflected a greater intensity of antiAmericanism than that found in the Japan Socialist Party. Public opinion polls reveal a wide variety of views on these mat­ ters of national security in the wake of China’s nuclear tests. When asked to select three issues on which respondents wanted the Satō cabinet to apply its strongest efforts, 67 percent indicated a comprehensive ban on nuclear weapons testing. On the matter of restoring formal China-Japan relations, roughly equal portions of 60 percent indicated a desire either to move swiftly to restore formal relations or at least expand commercial and cultural interactions without formal diplomatic recognition. Forty-two percent also supported the admission of the PRC into the United Nations; only 9 percent opposed it. Finally, referring directly to the recent nuclear weapons tests in China, respondents were asked to indicate which would be the best way forward to protect Japan’s peace and security. Only 13 percent stated that the present US-Japan security agreement was sufficient; 23 percent said that moves to strengthen defensive capability within the Anpo framework was best. An almost equal number (30 percent in total) selected either to abandon Anpo and strengthen Japan’s self-defense forces, abandon Anpo while conducting independent diplomacy without a defense buildup, or seek a nonaggression pact between Japan, the United States, USSR, and the PRC.56 One poll, of course, does not represent society at large. But the numbers are indicative nonetheless of popular skepticism toward reliance on the United States alone when it came to matters of Japan’s national security. Making Fallout Funny For the most part, the Japanese public understood that PRC rivalry with the United States was the prime motivation behind nuclear weapons development, not any sort of explicit strategic intention targeting Japan specifically. Moreover, multiple mass-media reports made clear the fact that a successful weapons test was just the first step toward the creation of a delivery system for those weapons. The most immediate fear, then, was not that Chinese nuclear missiles might soon take flight toward the home islands but that radioactive fallout from the Lop Nor testing range would soon be blown across the mainland and fall on Japanese shores. After the first test in 1964, fallout fear became a common theme in the Japanese media. The Mainichi printed a map along with its front-page

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account of the October 16 test depicting the atmospheric jet stream passing over Lop Nor as it carried lethal atomic particles (shi no hai, literally “ash of death”) inevitably toward Japan.57 The Sandee Mainichi returned to the fallout theme two weeks later, with a two-page illustration entitled “The Olympic Rings of Nuclear Fallout,” in which five rings superimposed upon an enormous mushroom cloud represented the five nuclear powers of the day, each with their number of tests indicated (US 265, USSR 132, UK 24, France 5, PRC 1). As the caption explained, the Tokyo games, meant to represent peace and cooperation among the nations of the world, had been overshadowed by the Chinese nuclear test, which had added a fifth member to the circle of nations whose weapons tests indiscriminately polluted the atmosphere with “ashes of death.”58 As deadly serious as fallout could be, however, Japanese cartoon­ ists deftly employed the looming fear of radioactive fallout from Chinese testing as both a purely comedic and politically satirical tool. Taking an overtly political tone in 1964, Yokoyama Taizō mocked the inefficacy of US protection against fallout for its allies in the region with a cartoon image of multiple crouching figures, identified as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indochina, with their hands held over their heads to shield against falling atomic debris from Chinese testing. The caption reads: “Ash of death on Asia in the US sphere of influence” (Ajia no Bei seiryokuken no shi no hai).59 In another comic, Yokoyama later ridiculed the “tolerance and forbearance” (kanyō to nintai) catchphrase of Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato, originally coined as a pithy slogan of encourage­ ment for the Japanese people to endure short-term political struggles for the sake of long-term economic priorities. Yokoyama began the six-panel cartoon with an image of the PRC mushroom cloud, followed by a frame showing radioactive particles falling on the pristine slopes of Mt. Fuji. Frames 3 and 4 repeated the pattern, alluding to an expected second test; frames 5 and 6 depict an angry housewife, her head and shoulders littered with nuclear fallout, storming up to a Japan Self-Defense Force facility gate before shouting at the guard (also covered in atomic dust), “So, is this OK with you?” (kore de ii no?),60 expressing a frustration surely felt by many that asking the people to “endure” exposure to lethal doses of radioactive fallout was asking too much. With a four-panel comic in the newspaper Yomiuri, Yanagihara Ryōhei too made light of fallout fear with a sarcastic take on the coincidence of China’s 1964 nuclear test with the Tokyo games. In the image, an artist asks a passerby if he would consent to being a model for his next sculpture. The passerby agrees, and the sculptor hands him an umbrella and a pair of binoculars. “Oh, so your theme is watching the

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Olympic games in the rain, I see,” the model comments. “No,” the artist replies, “the theme is ‘man on the lookout for nuclear submarines while being pelted by radioactive rain from China.’”61 In response to the PRC’s successful test of a hydrogen bomb in May 1966, cartoonists again effectively used the fear of radioactive fallout to comment upon widespread popular anxiety. Aiming for little more than an innocent (but sexist) giggle, Tazawa Yasuto drew a subway-riding sala­ ryman reading a newspaper headline about the PRC’s test. Upon return­ ing home, presumably very late or very drunk (probably both), he sees a mushroom cloud of anger above his wife’s head and says, “Oh, and you too, Mom!”62 Taking a more distinctly morbid tone, Katō Yoshirō crafted a four-panel strip in which a middle-aged man adjusting his toupee says, “Time for a seasonal hairpiece change.” He takes off his wig, reaches into the top shelf of his closet for a rounded box, and opens it to reveal a nearly bald skull cap with a pathetic number of single strands of hair. “Ahh . . . it’s been a long time since I’ve donned the ‘ash of death’ style,” the man exclaims, a not-so-subtle reference to the thousands of victims of radiation sickness twenty years earlier.63 Ieishi Kazuo referred to the Cultural Revolution then underway in China with a clever pun when reacting to the May 1966 test. In the comic image, a solitary man stands upon the Japanese archipelago holding an enormous electric hair dryer with which he is trying to blow away a dark cloud of atomic dust drifting in from the continent. “Let’s start a seifū undō” (fresh air movement), the figure proclaims, knowing that his readers would recognize the homonymous connection to the term seifū undō (recti­ fication movement), as used by the Red Guards to carry out the persecution of anti-Party elements and capitalist roaders on the mainland.64 In reaction to the PRC’s June 1967 test, Ieishi again played the fallout card but this time also connected it to the fear of US nuclear submarines then causing quite a stir in Japan. Two men stand at the shoreline, Geiger counters in hand, exclaiming, “the Geiger readings are going crazy.” Pointing his wand toward a dark American sub, one says “right here!” The other, with his hand pointing up into a cloud of radioactive dust, replies, “No, it’s over here!”65 One could only laugh nervously, Ieishi suggested, when the threat of radioactive exposure seemed to be coming at Japan from all directions. Satō Sanpei offered a more historically contextualized statement on the 1966 PRC test of a hydrogen bomb in a four-panel strip (figure 2.2). The first shows a Japanese soldier peering through binoculars at a Chinese fighter in the distance under the caption “China of the past” (mukashi no Chūgoku). That panel is connected to the second one, in which an elderly

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Japanese man is telling his middle-aged son about his wartime experiences. The third panel then shows a mushroom cloud on the horizon, with radioac­ tive particles carried away from it on the wind; the fourth shows the same middle-aged Japanese salaryman from the second panel walking to work with umbrella in hand and a thought bubble above his head depicting his fear that fallout-poisoned rain is sure to fall on him later that day.66 The danger of nuclear fallout from China’s weapons tests of the mid-1960s is depicted as karmic retribution for the deeds of the salaryman’s father in China during the mid-1940s. What is most striking about these comic examples is the degree to which sacrosanct imagery associated with the tragic suffering of thousands of Japanese hibakusha (atomic attack survivors) is treated in such a light­ hearted and glib manner. How can we best make sense of this? Humor, of course, often serves well as a defense mechanism, and perhaps there are two interpretations possible for jokes about something as serious as radia­ tion sickness. On the one hand, such humor might represent a morbid sense of resignation to one’s fate. On the other, however, it can be understood as an attempt to overcome fear by mocking it. Either way, the PRC’s atomic tests clearly triggered a complex emotional response from the Japanese public that cartoonists ably captured in their visual satires. To make a joke of something as deadly as nuclear weapons seems on the surface to be a rather crass and inappropriate response to such a dreadful reality. But looking closely at the conceptual dynamics of the humor employed by Japanese cartoonists in the face of an atomic PRC can be a valuable exercise. Humor in the face of danger allows people to allay anxiety. When we take something dreadful and make a joke of it, we render our related fears more manageable. Humor, then, is a defense mechanism. In this case, the most pervasive Japanese fear was that an atomic conflict between the PRC and United States would almost certainly involve the destruction of military bases in Japan. The examples in this chapter show the ways in which that fear could be mitigated. First, one can degrade the power behind the danger. By belittling Mao’s achievement, as is done in some of Kondō Hidezō’s cartoons, the PRC is made to seem less menacing; the fear is calmed when the immedi­ ate threat is minimized. Another approach is to reinterpret the danger as a force that works to one’s advantage rather than one’s detriment. This is what we see in comics by Nasu Ryōsuke, in which Chinese atomic power is cast as something that can enable all of Asia to stand in opposition to American hegemony. A third option is to resign oneself to the inevitability of one’s fate. Solemnly accepting the threat for what it is, one can then

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FIG. 2.2 In this Satō Sanpei car­ toon, a Japanese businessman wonders if rain made radioactive by Chinese atomic weapons test­ ing is karmic retribution for the deeds of his father as a soldier on the continent during the war. Reproduced with permission from Asahi News.

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stop worrying about it, a sentiment expressed clearly in the work of Satō Sanpei and Yokoyama Taizō. Finally, one can seek the path of personal empowerment in the face of danger by ridiculing those in power as an expression of dissent. The multiple examples that fault the Japanese state for its weakness fit this mold. Beyond the danger of fallout from weapons testing, visions of nuclear warfare between the PRC and the United States and the vulnerable posi­ tion of Japan caught in the atomic crossfire also penetrated deeply into Japanese popular consciousness. Even children’s comic magazines made use of Mao’s nuclear weapons as a plot device. An illustrated tale of how the Third World War might erupt in East Asia ran serially through multiple issues of Shōnen Sunday in the late summer of 1966, for example: Chinese submarines launch missile attacks on US base facilities in Okinawa and Yokosuka, to which the United States responds with aerial bombing strikes on the Chinese mainland.67 With neither side willing or able to contain the crisis, this imaginary conflagration ends in the atomic annihilation of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York by Chinese atomic weapons, matched by the utter destruction of Beijing and other major Chinese met­ ropolitan centers by a US nuclear counterstrike. The tragic tale ends with a warning of how quickly the world might find itself in such a disaster. Only twenty-four hours earlier, the people of China, the United States, and Japan had been enjoying their daily lives as always, but now multiple Chinese and American cities lie in smoldering ruin, and “death ash” (shi no hai) is raining on every part of the Japanese archipelago.68 There was nothing at all funny about fallout in this terrifying cartoon fantasy, a reminder that the satirical humor employed by so many comic artists in response to the development of Chinese nuclear weapons was a strategy for coping with deep fear. Fear of Chinese nuclear weapons, however, had many layers, and purveyors of popular print culture were skilled at tapping into those com­ plexities in their work. Ishinomori Shōtarō, one of postwar Japan’s most prolific manga storytellers, began publishing a new series in 1966 called Saibōgu 009 (Cyborg 009). Running for several years in a variety of pub­ lication outlets, Saibōgu 009 featured the exploits of a Japanese cyborg hero (number 009) and his eight comrades in the fight against evil, each one representing a different culture or country of the world and endowed with a special power. Cyborg 002, for example, was an American with the ability to fly at Mach 5; Cyborg 003 and Cyborg 007 were respectively a French girl with superhuman hearing and a British man with the ability to shapeshift at will. Cyborg 005 was a Native American with the strength

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of a thousand men, and Cyborg 008 was an African who, being half fish, could breathe in water. And Cyborg 006 was a short and pudgy Chinese man named Chang Changgu. Chang’s special power? The ability to breathe out from his mouth a devastating three-thousand-degree heat ray.69 Even without a direct quote from Ishinomori explaining it as such, it does not take much of an imaginative stretch to think that China’s recent elevation to the ranks of the world’s nuclear powers played at least some part in the artist’s decision to bless Chang with the terrifying breath of atomic fire. Equally notable, however, was that the flame-breathing Chang was cast not as a villain in Ishinomori’s sci-fi fantasy but as a valuable member of the hero’s team. His superweapon was a boon to Cyborg 009, not a threat, perhaps a reminder that despite its apparent danger, China was still more friend than foe in the Japanese worldview. Celebrating an Atomic Asia That Mao’s mushroom clouds would stir up popular anxiety and incite political debate concerning the US-Japan relationship within the framework of Cold War geopolitics is not all that surprising. It takes deeper consideration, however, to comprehend how Chinese nuclear weapons could also inspire a certain kind of pride and hope within a popular Japa­ nese audience. US media outlets understood, too, that by joining the club of atomic powers, the PRC had made a major statement on the world stage. “Perhaps of even more long-term importance to the future of mankind than the immediate political, psychological and military consequences,” a feature in the New York Times claimed, “was what Peking’s first test signi­ fied to the world’s nuclear club. Put in a nutshell, the explosion in Western China . . . meant that the exclusiveness of the club had been breached.”70 As many Japanese had come to believe by the mid-1960s that the United States had used nuclear weapons against Japan during the Second World War largely for racial reasons, that a fellow Asian power should now pos­ sess that same military capability was indeed a cause for celebration for many on the archipelago.71 A striking example of this sentiment came from the journal Dōkō, in an editorial essay entitled “The Chinese Communist Nuclear Test, Bravo!” Published just days after the October 16 explosion in Lop Nor, the essay explained first that what made the PRC test so impressive was that it took place several years after all Soviet technical assistance had been withdrawn from China. More than anything else, however, the editorial contended that all “colored” peoples of the world should take pride in the fact that

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this terrible weapon was now in their hands, and the psychological shock of this fact on the white nations of the world was enormous. While the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom claimed to seek nonproliferation for the sake of world peace, in fact they wanted to use their monopoly on these weapons to intimidate the rest of the world. With the success of the PRC test, that was no longer possible. The United States has little fear of Chinese nukes because it is so far away, the essay continued, but should Japan be scared because it is so close? Not at all. Why? Because China and Japan share a common racial identity as Asians, and Asians as a people, the essay affirmed, would never unleash such ferocious weapons upon one another. Along with the change in the Soviet regime and the new government in the United Kingdom, this was truly a moment of great and hopeful change in international relations, the editorial concluded.72 The philosopher Mudai Risaku was also explicit in stating his belief that the most significant effect of the PRC nuclear test was that it shattered the monopoly on atomic weapons held by white Europeans and Americans.73 Many Japanese comic satirists expressed similar sentiments in massmedia outlets of the day, stressing a racial dimension to the nuclear prob­ lem. Morikuma Takeshi, for example, sketched a provocative scene after the first PRC test of 1964 in which four large-nosed and round-eyed West­ erners (identified by single kanji characters as England, America, France, and the Soviet Union) stand inside a stately doorway labeled “Atom Club.” Up the steps comes a childlike “China” holding a dainty “nuclear” umbrella of his own, clearly intent on entering the exclusive premises, while the four senior members grumble about this uninvited interloper (iya na yatsu).74 Similarly, Nasu Ryōsuke crafted a clever single-frame cartoon in 1966 that depicts two H-bombs with the faces of Alexei Kosygin and Lyndon John­ son dancing in a loose embrace at an event labeled the “H-bomb cha-cha society” (suibaku chachacha no kai) (figure 2.3). The perturbed look on the faces of the Soviet premier and US president is in reaction to the approach of a new member wearing a Mao cap and bearing a vague resemblance to the Great Helmsman. The caption reads: “A yellow new member has appeared” (kiiroi shinjin arawaru).75 Other editorial cartoonists were less clear in expressing the racial aspect of the events but nonetheless stressed that China’s tests had struck a blow to Western domination of smaller nations by way of nuclear intimida­ tion. Yokoyama Taizō, for example, depicted President Lyndon Johnson clutching an umbrella that had been blown inside out by the blast wave of the PRC’s 1966 test as the smaller nations behind him stand in shock.

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FIG. 2.3 In this cartoon, Nasu Ryōsuke depicts a dance between the thermonuclear-armed leaders of the United States and USSR being rudely interrupted by a new Chinese dance partner. Reproduced with permission from the Yunomae manga bijutsukan.

The caption reads: “Boy, it’s tough for the little ones under the nuclear umbrella.”76 Yokoyama returned to that theme in the summer of 1967 with a piece entitled “To Fear China’s Emergence” (Chūgoku no shinshutsu wo osoreru). In it Johnson and the Soviet premier (it is unclear if it is Kosygin or Brezhnev) bicker with each other in the foreground, both with retracted nuclear umbrellas under their arms (figure 2.4). Slightly behind and to their right stands a China figure, his nuclear umbrella fully opened and an “Arab” compatriot enjoying the shelter it provides.77 The element common to both, of course, is the suggestion that what troubled the West

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most in connection with the PRC’s tests was the realization that an Asian power could now compete on an equal footing and even draw allegiance from other non-Western states. This dimension to how the PRC test would play throughout the rest of Asia was even acknowledged by the New York Times: “One of China’s main arguments in the competition for influence in the underdeveloped countries has been that, like them, it is a nonwhite nation faced with the task of building a modern state out of a primitive peasant society. Last week’s test was a tangible sign of achievement which is bound to make an impact on the ‘non-aligned’ nations.”78 Popular frustration also included the notion that the Western nuclear powers had foolishly underestimated China’s ability to make significant progress in their weapons development program. Kondō Hidezō expressed that sentiment in a cartoon image of Mao riding bareback on a cow, its neck stretched grotesquely upward and its head replaced with a mushroom cloud, with the phrase “Chinese nuclear development” contained within it. The caption reads: “Expect it to move at a snail’s pace . . . America says” (gyūpo no hazu da . . . to Amerika wa iu). Kondō both suggests that the United States failed to take the PRC seriously and expresses at least a touch of satisfaction that this smug American sense of superiority has been proven wrong. By also picturing Mao whipping the poor beast furiously, he suggests that the Chairman has achieved his goals by forcing his under­ developed society to reach his desired level of technological advancement at any cost and by any means necessary.79 It is worth noting as well that some Japanese editorial artists used the same ideas and visual tropes related to Pan-Asian unity in the face of US imperialism that Chinese cartoonists used in the CCP’s media mouth­ piece People’s Daily (Renmin ribao). In mid-May 1966, for example, Nasu Ryōsuke put forth a comic featuring a likeness of President Johnson pro­ claiming to a group of African, South Asian, and Arab observers, as they stand in awe of Mao and his mushroom cloud in the distance: “Look you all, there is nothing to get excited about here” (Shokun, odorku koto wa nai)80 (figure 2.5). Four days later, an image crafted by Qin Zhe expressed an almost identical theme, showing three US military officers, one with LBJ’s face, weeping inconsolably in the foreground while in the distance a throng of Third World peoples celebrate wildly under a banner announc­ ing the PRC’s successful hydrogen bomb test, the scene accompanied by a caption: “A thing of great joy for the people of the world” (shijie renmin de daxishi).81 The cartoonist Fang Cheng contributed something similar with an image of a US military officer carrying the coffin of “American nuclear supremacy” with the aid of British and other Western supporters

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FIG. 2.4 In this Yokoyama Taizō cartoon, American and Soviet leaders argue while China protects the Arab world under its nuclear umbrella. Reproduced with permission from the Yokoyama family, facilitated by Yokoyama Ryūichi kinen mangakan.

as a torrent of tears pours from their eyes, paired with a sarcastic caption: “The ‘rainy season’ has come” (yuji lai le).82 Beyond mass-media pundits, well-respected Japanese Sinophiles also expressed a brand of pan-Asian satisfaction in the wake of China’s first nuclear test, although their enthusiasm was couched within an under­ standing of China’s modern historical experience, which inspired a sense of caution along with excitement. Etō Shinkichi, for example, drew an

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FIG. 2.5 In this cartoon, Nasu Ryōsuke shows US president Lyndon Johnson telling Third World nations not to get too excited about the PRC’s successful atomic weapons tests. Reproduced with permission from the Yunomae manga bijutsukan.

analogy between the PRC’s struggle for national greatness after unification in 1949 to Japan’s own Meiji-era quest after the 1870s. Viewed that way, Etō suggested, the nuclear test of October 1964 should be understood as the crowning moment of achievement in China’s version of the Meiji slogan “rich nation, strong army” (fukoku kyōhei). He also compared the PRC nuclear test of 1964 to Japan’s 1905 triumph in the Russo-Japanese War, in that both were moments of celebratory pride for Asian power in the face of an international arena dominated by Western powers. Etō also warned, however, that Japan became more nationalistic and grew more ambitious

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(and aggressive) after defeating czarist Russia; the danger that China might follow the same path was not to be taken lightly.83 The China scholar and intellectual theorist Takeuchi Yoshimi shared many of Etō’s concerns. Born in 1910, Takeuchi began his study of Chinese literature at Tokyo Imperial University in the early 1930s, and by the late 1940s he had made a name for himself as a preeminent specialist on the Chinese writer Lu Xun. Beyond literary criticism, however, Takeuchi also emerged as an influential postwar theorist on historical relations between Japan and China within the context of Western imperialism and modernity. Much of Takeuchi’s thinking on such problems revolved around the notion that because Japan had mimicked the West in its pursuit of modernization during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereas China had followed a more authentic and indigenous path, Japan’s postwar society was still plagued by the inconsistencies and contradictions unleashed by its slavish obedience to Western frameworks of modernity. A path of develop­ ment rooted more firmly in Asian principles, according to Takeuchi, was both a viable and more desirable alternative.84 Takeuchi’s views on the issue of China’s nuclear tests, then, are con­ sistent with his broader intellectual orientation. As a Japanese and as a human being, Takeuchi explained, the PRC’s nuclear tests were a truly un­ fortunate development, and he firmly opposed them from a purely rational standpoint. On an emotional level, however, Takeuchi admitted that when he heard the news about the first test he thought to himself, “Well done!” (Yoku yatta!). By conducting a successful nuclear weapon test, the PRC had finally stood tall against the Anglo-American world and redeemed itself after decades of humiliation. In a sense, Takeuchi continued, the test rep­ resented the culmination of a traditional Chinese struggle of “sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall” (woxin changdan), that is, persevering through years of suffering in order to achieve revenge for a previous defeat. China had “slept on brushwood” for far longer than Japan had been forced to do, so for Takeuchi one could not help but feel pleased for the Chinese world.85 Like Etō, Takeuchi also pointed out that many Chinese people had sincerely celebrated Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 as a triumph for all non-Western societies, and the Japanese were right to think similarly of China’s 1964 test. The PRC’s technological achievement was one in which all Asian peoples could take pride. Also like Etō, however, Takeuhci reminded his readers that while Japan’s victory over Russia dramatically displayed Japan’s national power to the world, the success of the Meiji transformation ultimately led to the violation of Korea’s national sover­ eignty, something with burdensome legacies still felt in Japan. Likewise,

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Takeuchi continued, the PRC had displayed its power on the world stage, but the CCP must recognize that, along with everyone else, Chinese so­ ciety too would be a victim of radioactive death if those weapons were ever used.86 Despite the admiration expressed by both Etō and Takeuchi, there is also an unmistakable element of condescension embedded within their interpretive insights. Both scholars draw a comparison with the function of the Russo-Japanese War in Japan’s Meiji-era modernization to allay popu­ lar anxiety over the PRC’s nuclear tests; our society experienced a similar moment of national pride, they seem to say, so we need not be overly fearful. Within that comparison, however, there is a judgment of China as lagging behind Japan’s national development. In Etō and Takeuchi’s formulation, a more “mature” Japanese society can see a less advanced China following the path Japan treaded much earlier. Despite the sincerity of both in expressing their pride in China’s achievement, it seems the pride of a parent watching the growth of their child: excited for the youngster’s success but eager to see the scrappy kid avoid mom and dad’s mistakes. Facing Beijing’s Bomb Fear of how Japan might become the battleground for a nuclear con­ flagration between the PRC and the United States was evident in popular print media throughout the late 1960s. An especially dramatic fictional vision of such an apocalyptic scenario appeared in Weekly Asahi in May 1966. “This is an entirely imaginary nightmare,” the opening lines began. “Based on widespread anxiety stoked by China’s recent by China’s recent third nuclear test and traveling forward in time to the early summer of 1970 when the US-Japan security treaty is set to automatically renew,” it continued, “we have crafted a fictional news story that could possibly appear on some media editor’s desk. Imagining too that China became able to station nuclear missiles targeting Japan, what if a nuclear war between the PRC and the United States . . . no, it cannot . . . this is a special story reflecting our desire that this absolutely never come to pass.” The fictional article then takes the voice of a reporter detailing events that unfolded during a single week in late May 1970. It begins on May 18, as anti–security treaty student protests rage around the Diet building and Japan’s major political parties squabble about the matter of support for or opposition to the treaty’s renewal. The next day, treaty renewal is ap­ proved by the Diet, protest demonstrations escalate throughout Tokyo, and word leaks that a splinter faction of the Japan Self-Defense Force (SDF)

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is planning a coup d’état that will bring tanks and soldiers into city streets to restore order. On May 20, a young female student is killed in a dem­ onstration suppression (as had in fact happened in 1960), and high-level diplomatic talks begin concerning political conditions in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War had entered an armistice in late 1966 but then reignited in 1968 after Lyndon Johnson’s reelection, an increase in Vietcong “ter­ ror,” and the resumption of US bombing of North Vietnam. Tensions had then escalated even more in 1969, when a nationalist regime in Thailand put its support behind the Vietcong, Pathet Lao, and the NVA, something the United States firmly believed had been directed behind the scenes by Beijing. On May 21, a twenty-four-hour general strike begins, but the ru­ mored SDF coup does not materialize. Some demonstrators, however, attack a construction company office in Tokyo connected to the fallout shelter building boom that had taken off in recent years. That night, the PRC also broadcasts a statement that China is fully prepared for war with US imperialism. May 22—reports arrive that US spy planes have seen missile-launching equipment on the Shandong Peninsula, and Japanese fishing vessels report sightings of Chinese submarines armed with surface missiles. The next day, May 23, teletype news updates from around the world indicate a crisis spinning out of control: from Seoul—protesters seize the president in opposition to his decision to send more South Korean troops to aid US forces in Vietnam, and the SK army near the DMZ begins to mobilize; from Taipei—Chiang Kai-shek gives orders for war mobiliza­ tion, but soldiers and officers alike refuse to act; from Paris—de Gaulle states that France (which has already withdrawn from NATO) will remain neutral if war erupts between the United States and the PRC but that French economic aid to China will continue; from Moscow—the Soviet leadership announces the closure of shipping routes through Yokohama and begins moving troops from the West to Siberia; from New York—the UN secretary general asks the world to try once more to keep the peace by talking again about PRC admission into the United Nations (resolving the PRC-Taiwan problem); from Beijing—a report that a US YF-12A spy plane has been shot down over Chinese territory; from Washington, DC—“no comment” on the PRC claim concerning the lost plane. Doomsday arrives on May 24, 1970. American F-111 nuclear-armed bombers take off from carriers in the South China Sea and patrol over main­ land PRC territory, and Beijing soon reports that a bomb has been dropped, destroying an entire city. Thirty minutes later, Chinese submarine-based missiles are launched at the USS Enterprise, a nuclear-powered aircraft

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carrier, and it sinks, releasing radiation into the seas around southern Ja­ pan. Another thirty minutes pass: An American hydrogen bomb dropped from an aircraft based in Guam destroys a Chinese naval base in Qingdao. Chinese nuclear IRBMs wipe out US bases in Sasebo, Tachikawa, and Iwakuni. Back in Tokyo, mass protests erupt again outside the Diet, and the feared SDF coup begins! The fictional report then ends with the writer watching “black rain” fall on his office window.87 These were terrifying visions that seemed not so far-fetched to many in the summer of 1966. Crafting imaginative scenarios of atomic warfare between the PRC and the United States and recognizing the precarious position of the archipelago between them was the business of not only fiction authors in popular magazines. Prime Minister Satō Eisaku, who came to office soon after the first Chinese nuclear test in October 1964, charged his cabinet research office with the task of sketching out numerous scenarios of nuclear war in East Asia so that his government could develop a coherent policy in response to the PRC atomic threat.88 Even though twenty years had passed since the nuclear nightmares of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with relations between Beijing and Washington poor and Japan trapped geographically and ideologically in the middle, neither political elites nor everyday people could afford to ignore the danger. When examined in the context of Japan’s postwar diplomatic history as well as within the broader framework of the Cold War in East Asia, the PRC’s first successful test of an atomic weapon in 1964 primarily signi­ fies a definitive moment of change in the international balance of power. When viewed as well from the popular perceptions perspective, additional meanings are evident. An ambivalence of fear and anger over Beijing’s reckless escalation of nuclear danger in the region is mixed with a deep satisfaction that atomic bombs are no longer a Euro-American monopoly. While it is widely understood that a strong antinuclear sentiment ran deeply in postwar Japanese society, everyday reactions to the PRC’s tests reveal the forces that could simultaneously inspire a more positive assessment of Mao’s drive to become an atomic power. In sum, the popular response to the danger posed by China’s nuclear weapons tests falls along three main themes. First, there is the matter of Japan’s historical and contemporary relationship with the Chinese world. In conducting an atomic test, the PRC was both menacing and admirable in Japanese eyes; moreover, China was both advanced and immature at the same time. Second is the ambivalence concerning the postwar geo­ political embrace of Japan by the United States. In the eyes of many, the United States was to blame for putting Japan at risk (both through Anpo

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and because of bombing policy in Vietnam). Finally, we must remember the contours of political and social divisions within Japanese society dur­ ing the mid-1960s. That was a decade during which domestic Japanese identity was in flux. One’s position on PRC nuclear weapons reflected one’s political and social identity in Japanese society. To condemn the tests was to affirm Japan’s victim consciousness; to praise them in any way was to express frustration with Japan’s conservative regime. Critics would label supporters as un-Japanese dupes of CCP propaganda; supporters would label critics as narrow-minded stooges of the US Cold War agenda. To a significant degree, then, popular reactions to Li Dequan in 1954 and PRC nuclear weapons testing in 1964 illuminated the ongoing struggle within Japanese society over the formation of its postwar identity. While it would likely be impossible to verify with documentary evidence, one could comfortably wager that many of those who favored the Li Dequan mission and critiqued the Japanese state for its rejection of her also were those who expressed support for, or at least accepted the basic legitimacy of, the PRC’s atomic weapons program. The common element in both cases was a shared frustration with US policy in East Asia and a common disdain for the conservative Japanese regime complicit in the pursuit of American geopolitical aims in the region. Moreover, as was true in the case of Li De­ quan, the complexity of these sentiments would be difficult to discern in the official state archive of Japanese foreign relations. Only by looking at the archive of popular Japanese perceptions of the Chinese world during the 1950s and 1960s do these meaningful interpretive patterns become clear. While the PRC’s second and third nuclear weapons tests took place in 1965 and 1966, respectively, another dramatic and powerful series of events was simultaneously unfolding on the mainland. The Great Proletar­ ian Cultural Revolution unleashed by Chairman Mao upon both his per­ sonal enemies and Chinese society at large would shake not just domestic life in the PRC but also reverberate across the sea to rattle the popular Japanese imagination. And, much as with the Chinese detonation of atomic weapons, everyday reactions to the Cultural Revolution, and the Red Guard movement specifically, defy simple categorization. While some were be­ mused and others saddened, still more were amazed and impressed by the tumult that had engulfed Chinese society. It is to those reactions and the broader conceptual themes in Japan-China relations with which they interacted that we turn next.

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CHAPTER 3

Red Guard Whirlwind

Family as we understand it in Japan really doesn’t exist in China today. That is to say, loyalty to Mao comes before love for husband or parents. Rather than parents judging children, children, with red book in hand, judge parents. —Fujiwara Hirotatsu, 19661

In China, the sort of bars and cabarets that I love are nowhere to be found. Seven hundred million people over there and not even one bar! —Miki Yōnosuke, 19662

Traveling through that whirlwind, you could say it was like traveling back to wartime Japan and then returning to the postwar world of today. —Ōya Sōichi, 19663

I

n the autumn of 1966, a company president in Tokyo gazed around his workplace, perturbed to see his male employees slacking in various ways—chatting casually with the office secretaries, listening to music at their desks, one man even clipping his toenails. Sitting down to read the newspaper, he spotted a headline about the Red Guard movement in China. Drawing inspiration from the enthusi­ astic passion of those young Chinese students, he wondered aloud, “Why don’t we do this, too?” After selecting a group of young male workers to serve as his office Red Guards, bestowing upon them total authority, he asked them what their first task would be. To his chagrin, they responded by immediately tearing down the sign outside his door reading “Company President’s Office” (shachōshitsu) and renaming it the “recreation room” (gorakushitsu). That done, they tossed out his golf clubs and bonsai tree to make room for a ping-pong table, transforming the office into space for people’s entertainment, not bigwig capitalist frivolity. The boss’s plan for reenergizing his workers had backfired, and his hand-picked Red Guard employees used their newfound power instead to attack his privilege. 92

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This episode was drawn not from the diary of a Japanese office worker during the heyday of the 1960s economic miracle but from a comic magazine that such a rank-and-file salaryman might have been reading as he sat on his commuter train, close to midnight, heading home after yet another fourteen-hour day at his corporate headquarters in Tokyo.4 Dur­ ing the fall of 1966, as the Red Guard movement in China reached its initial apogee, Japanese cartoonists often employed complex references to the rhetoric and action of young Red Guards to craft humorous stories of revolutionary activism in the corporate workplace. These offered the Japanese salaryman a fantasy of rebellion against the forces of inequality, corruption, and exploitation that existed in his world. Employing subtle and complex references to Red Guard actions was an effective comedic strategy, however, only because the average Japanese reader in 1966 was awash in news about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution then sweep­ ing across the mainland. The drama of 1966 on the continent had been building for several years. More than just a demonstration of Chinese power on the world stage aimed at garnering international respect, the PRC’s atomic test of 1964 also suggested that China was well on the road to recovery under the direction of more moderate leadership after the unmitigated disaster of the Great Leap Forward during the late 1950s. As pleased as Mao surely was with his nation’s new membership in the international club of nuclear weapon– wielding states, however, the concomitant rise to prominence of interparty rivals such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping made it impossible for him to rest on his laurels. By 1965, then, Mao began laying the foundations for an assault on his own party first by encouraging rhetorical attacks on lowlevel CCP functionaries and ultimately by calling young Chinese students to violent action in overthrowing reactionaries and counterrevolutionary traitors. As the Cultural Revolution movement gained steam throughout the summer of 1966, Mao’s Red Guards unleashed political terror upon Chinese society at large, and many more than just CCP officials became targets for suppression. In urban centers and provincial villages across the country, arbitrary accusations, ruthless persecution, and mass violence be­ came the norm. While Mao achieved his practical goal of destroying rivals and threats to his authority within the CCP during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution years, the movement he launched eventually swelled beyond even his power to control. After a year of near anarchy in 1968, in 1969 Mao finally turned to employing the armed fist of the People’s Revolutionary Army to suppress the Red Guards, ultimately sending mil­ lions of his devoted student followers to the countryside for “reeducation.”

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The 1960s were a time of social unrest, popular protest, and student activism in Japanese society as well. Beginning with massive demonstra­ tions against the renewal of the US-Japan security agreement in the sum­ mer of 1960, the decade saw frequent expressions of popular opposition to US bases on Japanese soil, American nuclear submarines in Japanese wa­ ters, and Japanese state complicity in the American bombing of Vietnam. Student radicalism reached a dramatic tipping point in 1968 when college youths laid siege to campus buildings at Tokyo University, and a handful of leftwing extremist groups even carried out terrorist attacks within Japan and around the world in 1970. Overall, however, everyday people in Japan during the 1960s focused on nurturing the economic “miracle” of industrial growth and consumer capitalism that Japan’s conservative ruling elites had promised to deliver at the beginning of the decade. The Cultural Revolution unfolding on the mainland thus became a lightning rod for opposite poles of Japanese public opinion. For some, the mindless violence of the Red Guards was typical of historical Chinese barbarism and proof that Japan was a vastly more civilized society; for others, the passionate commitment to radical change expressed through Red Guard action was something to be admired insofar as the Japanese world lacked similar passion. Popular Japanese media played a central part in shaping what everyday people in Japan came to know of the Cultural Revolution and the place of the Red Guard movement within it. The amount of media attention directed toward events on the mainland during the late 1960s was extraordinary, with much of that reporting done on the ground by Japanese travelers to the PRC. One group of Japanese visitors to the continent during the Red Guard whirlwind of the autumn of 1966 stands out in terms of how widely their observations were reported in the domestic Japanese media upon their return to the home islands. The five-man team was led by the prominent social commentator and media pundit Ōya Sōichi and included Miki Yōnosuke, Fujiwara Hirotatsu, Ōmori Minoru, and Kajiyama Toshiyuki. Accompanying the quintet as specialists in media communications were Kotani Masakazu and Hata Yutaka, and these “seven samurai,” as many publications dubbed them, spent roughly two weeks in China in midSeptember 1966, traveling more than five thousand kilometers in total, beginning and ending in Hong Kong. The Ōya group’s exposé on what it had seen of the Cultural Revolution firsthand was widely published in numerous popular magazines, and the scholar Baba Kimihiko suggests it was the most influential unofficial report to shape Japanese public opinion concerning China at that time.5

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The Ōya group made landfall on the continent in Guangzhou on September 10. Later recalling the first days of the trip, Ōya explained the reasons behind it: “We were not invited here by the Chinese side, and we covered the costs ourselves. So our visit was not sponsored by anyone. Free from any economic or ideological obligations, we aimed to get an independent look at the new China.” He went on, “Most other travelers to China to this point are those with prewar or wartime experience there. They come with a great admiration for the old China. We are not so. We’ve come with no preconceived notions. Most Japanese are like us in this way, so we feel a strong sense of responsibility to report back on the true reality of what we see here.”6 As determined as they may have been to deliver an objective and accurate report on events in China, the opening quotes at the head of this chapter suggest that the observations made by the Ōya group were a mixed bag. Fujiwara’s comment is an interpretively meaningful statement about fundamental social differences between China and Japan in 1966, Miki’s frustration with the surprising lack of adequate drinking establishments is little more than a glib punch line, and Ōya’s remark is a revealing comparison of experiences shared, albeit several decades apart, by Japan and China. Astute or vapid, the observations made in the Ōya group’s reports can be as valuable to his­ torians today as they were to everyday Japanese of that time who were eager to learn all they could about the revolutionary whirlwind sweeping across their next-door neighbor. This chapter examines the themes and ideas evident in popular Japa­ nese perceptions of the early Cultural Revolution years in general and the Red Guard movement in particular, as reflected in not only the Ōya group’s report but in a wide variety of mass-media sources.7 At times, Japanese reactions to the situation in China sounded similar to those encountered in the West: shock and dismay over the seemingly mindless destruction and irrational xenophobia erupting on the mainland between 1966 and 1969. Just as often, however, Japanese observers saw more positive dimensions to the Cultural Revolution that tempered the outright and unequivocal denunciation found in many Western accounts. Moreover, Japanese dis­ cussions of the Red Guard movement were often framed within a compara­ tive historical context by which events in China could be rendered more comprehensible by associating them with relevant examples from both the Chinese and Japanese past. In sum, popular Japanese responses to the Red Guard movement and Mao’s Cultural Revolution blended elements of both admonition and admiration, a mix made possible by the ambivalence

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embedded within modern Japanese society’s engagement with a Chinese world seen as both traditional motherland and modern backwater. Rejecting the Fanaticism Tokyo’s major daily newspapers routinely ran front-page stories throughout September 1966 about the thousands upon thousands of young Chinese students converging on Beijing in anticipation of a mass Red Guard rally to commemorate the October 1 anniversary of the PRC’s founding in 1949. Images and analyses of the Red Guards appeared in a wide variety of popular magazines and journals as well, and in all those venues Japanese cartoonists produced a fascinating visual record of popular perceptions of the Cultural Revolution as it unfolded. A common thematic element running through much of that commen­ tary was revulsion toward the fanatical zealotry displayed by rampaging gangs of Red Guards. In the pages of Seikai ōrai, a monthly political af­ fairs magazine, Morikuma Takeshi blasted young Chinese students for their blind loyalty with a cartoon of a Red Guard performing a kowtow before a portrait of Chairman Mao and a caption that read “the all-knowing God” (zenchi zennō no kamisama).8 Echoing Morikuma’s blanket condemna­ tion of the seemingly mindless devotion of so many young Chinese to the Great Helmsman, Yokoyama Taizō, in a single-frame comic from Manga dokuhon, depicted a Chinese and a Westerner as the only two men left on a desert island—the Westerner reading the Bible, the Chinese read­ ing Mao’s little red book.9 In Shūkan asahi, Yokoyama launched another condemnation of the Red Guards as little more than foolish children while simultaneously lampooning the inability of China’s leaders to control their own citizens. In that single-frame comic, a young Red Guard gripping a comically long lance rides confidently atop a smoke-belching dragon while a Sancho Panza–like CCP official follows close behind on a smaller saurian steed of his own. “Mr. Don Quixote, where are you headed?” he asks. “Just shut up and follow me,” the young rebel replies, mocking the absurd degree of power wielded by immature youths over their elders.10 At times, Japanese cartoonists could be downright crude in expressing their bemusement with Red Guard fanaticism. Katō Yoshirō, for example, made light of the Red Guard propensity for name changing in a four-frame strip that began with two Red Guards holding a banner reading “Revolu­ tionary Name Change Movement” and demanding that a shopkeeper tear down his store’s sign. The third frame reveals that the shop in question

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is a proctologist’s office; the final image shows that “Proctology Clinic” (kōmonka) has been replaced with “Revolutionary Great Hemorrhoids” (kakumei daiji).11 Yokoyama Taizō, too, was not shy about employing crude humor, such as his portrayal of a nude female Red Guard literally tearing off her right breast and tossing it aside while shouting, “These things are bourgeois!”12 In both cases, shocking humor is employed to emphasize the shocking extremism of Red Guard behavior. In the comic art of the cartoonist Kondō Hidezō, too, impressions of the Red Guards were often distinctly negative, a mix of baffling incredulity and outright ridicule. In one example deploring the mindless violence of the Red Guards, a towering Chairman Mao reaches out to a crowd of figures made up of nothing but legs and outstretched arms. With a caption reading “Beijing residents—no intellect required” (Pekin shimin—zunō fuyō), the message was clear—Mao’s enthusiastic followers displayed no discernible brain activity in their fanaticism.13 Kondō further reduced the Red Guards to grotesque simian caricatures in a piece captioned “The monkeys of the monkey trainer” (sarumwashi no saru). In it a small chained ape, complete with Red Guard armband and paper, ink, and brush for writing big-character posters, is poked in the eye by an unseen “trainer” with a pole labeled “ban on entering Beijing” (Pekin hairi teishi)14 (figure 3.1). Similarly, in a scene reminiscent of young Tokyo hoodlums shaking down a local store owner for protection money, three child-sized Red Guards, all with Mao’s face, perpetrate separate acts of senseless violence—one knocks over an inkwell while tearing a book labeled “history” in half; a second, with adorable ponytailed hair, upends a dinner table, leaving food all over the floor; the third viciously kicks the ass of a faceless victim. Under the caption “The yakuza punks of Beijing?” (Pekin no chinpira yakuza?) (figure 3.2), Kondō suggests that the capital city’s Red Guards are little more than sycophantic thugs dishing out violence to please their mafia bosses.15 Beyond mere disdain for such thuggery, Kondō also expressed a rather prescient awareness that Mao’s manipulation of Chinese youth for his personal political gain was a potentially dangerous strategy. In one example, three Red Guards dressed in nothing but prehistoric loincloths and Mao caps stand proudly in front of a massive face of the Chairman with spiked “caveman” clubs in hand. Under a caption that reads “Constructing a magnificently savage country” (idai naru yabankoku kensetsu), one sees that Mao’s face is covered with huge dents from the Red Guard’s clubs, the implication being that the irrational and barbaric violence encouraged by Mao will in fact destroy his vision for a new China, producing instead a an

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FIG. 3.1 Kondō Hidezō’s depiction of Red Guards as undisciplined apes. Reproduced with permission from the Kondō family as facilitated by the Furusato mangakan in Chikuma City, Nagano.

uncivilized wasteland (figure 3.3).16 In another example, Mao is standing on stage like a Chinese circus performer with three plates spinning on poles resting on his forehead. He waves a folding fan with the words “Great Cultural Revolution” in one hand while the other helps him keep his bal­ ance. The three spinning dishes, each with one character of the word “Red Guards” (kōeiehi), look ready to come crashing down at any moment. Red Guard action, Kondō seems to suggest, was a gamble that would dazzle the audience but court danger at the same time.17 Ultimately, Kondō’s message was that Mao had nurtured in the youth a potent force that, while effective in the short term, would be a crippling burden down the road, a sentiment

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FIG. 3.2 Kondō Hidezō draws Red Guards as destructive yakuza thugs. Repro­ duced with permis­ sion from the Kondō family as facilitated by the Furusato man­ gakan in Chikuma City, Nagano.

captured sharply in a cartoon titled “Indulgent father and spoiled fat kid” (jifu to himan jidō). In it Mao is shown struggling to shoulder the weight of the morbidly obese Red Guard in his arms; the petulant child shouts and points in the direction he wants to be carried (figure 3.4).18 Kondō made Mao a specific target of his wit in the summer of 1968 with a full-page comic in the political satire magazine Manga. In it Mao parades triumphantly through Beijing, with the Gate of Heavenly Peace and the Temple of Heaven visible in the background, while riding atop a

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FIG. 3.3 Kondō Hidezō cartoon showing Red Guards as club-wielding barbarian cave people. Reproduced with permission from the Kondō family as facilitated by the Furusato mangakan in Chikuma City, Nagano.

downtrodden and red-hooded pony, legs chained together and back bowed by the considerable heft of the portly Great Helmsman. With that image and the caption “When managing the Cultural Revolution, rebellion is im­ possible” (bunkaku shūshū zōhan muri), Kondō cleverly depicts the cruel irony of Mao marching proudly on the backs of suppressed Red Guards in the very location at Tiananmen Square where two years earlier one million Red Guards had gathered to offer praise for the man who was the shining red sun of their hearts.19 Kondō also assumes that his readers will catch his coy manipulation of the popular Red Guard phrase “It’s right to rebel” (zoufan youli 造反有理) into “It’s impossible to rebel” (zoufan wuli 造反

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FIG. 3.4 Kondō Hidezō image depicting Mao struggling to carry his obese Red Guard child in his arms. Repro­ duced with permission from the Kondō family as facilitated by the Furusato mangakan in Chikuma City, Nagano.

無理 / J. zōhan muri), a subtle turn of phrase detectable only because of the orthographic bond shared by the two written languages. More than just an object of ridicule, cartoonists also represented Red Guard fanaticism as a potentially dangerous influence on young people in Japan. Yokoyama, for example, poked fun at the anxiety felt by Japan’s Ministry of Justice at the prospect of a group of Japanese teens traveling to the PRC in 1966 in connection with a Sino-Japanese youth-exchange program. In one scene, standing on the allegorical continent on one side of the water is a Mao-capped official extending a hand of friendship with a neatly wrapped gift of “politics” and “education” behind him; on the

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other side, a Japanese official stops a group of young people from leav­ ing the archipelago, saying, “the souvenirs are terrifying” (omiyage ga osoroshii).20 In another, Yokoyama sketched an image in which a Chinese dragon emerges from the funnel of an enormous tornado labeled “Great Revolution” as young Japanese visitors approach by airplane; a Justice Ministry official warns, “It’s going to be a real problem if you get mixed up in that” (makikomaretara, taihen da).21 In both examples, Chinese fanati­ cism is worrisome not only for the disruption it brings to the PRC but also for its potential to inspire similar sentiments in disgruntled Japanese youth. Along with stoking the flames of fear, however, cartoonists could also employ the image of Red Guard fanaticism to ridicule faults in Japanese so­ ciety. Yokoyama Taizō, for example, depicted Prime Minister Satō Eisaku trying to co-opt Mao’s idea of rallying youth in support of his leadership. Pondering, “I wonder if this will work for me” (kō iu no ga tsukanai ka ne e), Satō walks confidently at the head of a crowd of young female fans carrying a flag that reads kōeihei (好栄兵), the same word phonetically for “Red Guard” (紅衛兵), but using the kō for “like” and the ei of “Eisaku.” Suggesting Satō’s rather pathetic desire to boost his domestic approval ratings, the resulting new definition of kōeihei becomes “soldiers who love Prime Minister Satō.”22 Likewise, another six-panel comic strip by Yokoyama begins with a crowd of Red Guards rampaging through Beijing and then demanding that the shop sign of an “old capitalist-roader fool” (shihonshugi fukkatsu no rōjin baka) be destroyed. A Japanese observer from across the sea defiantly claims, “That sort of thing would never hap­ pen in our country.” He then turns and shouts, “Raise it up higher!” as the viewer sees in the final frame an enormous banner of “capitalism” resting upon the peak of Mt. Fuji, making for a rather wicked bit of sarcastic criti­ cism of Japan’s own fanatical devotion to the ideology of free commerce.23 Despite the dramatic negativity in popular Japanese perceptions of the Red Guard’s fanaticism as reflected in these cartoon examples, statistical data suggests that the social and political turmoil that rocked the continent during the late 1960s did not fundamentally derail the deep push for the normalization of Japan-China relations that had been taking shape since the end of the US occupation. A Mainichi poll, for example, asked respondents in early 1968: “As China is now caught up in the Great Cultural Revolu­ tion, what sort of attitude should Japan take toward the PRC?” Twenty-five percent indicated that Japan should work hard to deepen friendly ties no matter what; another 38 percent said that friendly ties should continue to be cultivated while watching events closely. Taken together, more than 60 percent of respondents saw no reason why the Cultural Revolution should

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pose a serious problem to Japan-China friendship, and only 8 percent of those polled said that under present conditions Japan should avoid all in­ volvement with the PRC.24 In another survey later that year, the Mainichi asked: “Japan and the PRC do not have formal diplomatic relations, and public opinion concerning what sort of policy we should pursue is divided. What do you think?” Forty-two percent agreed that “we should restore relations as soon as possible”; another 37 percent of respondents said “even if formal relations are not restored, we should deepen friendly ties beyond what they are now.” Nearly 80 percent, then, favored deeper involvement with the PRC in the summer of 1968; only 2 percent selected “Because we recognize Taiwan, we should not build friendly ties with the PRC.”25 It would seem, then, that for many in Japan, the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard movement were not so troubling after all. Events that defy logical explanation tend to instill greater anxiety in observers than those that can be more readily comprehended. Perhaps, then, the lack of widespread unease over the potentially destabilizing effects of the Cultural Revolution can be explained at least in part by the fact that, for everyday people in Japan during the late 1960s, a variety of interpretive orientations rendered the Red Guard movement more understandable to the Japanese observer. Victims of Chinese History One way to explain the Cultural Revolution was to cast it as a rec­ ognizable facet of Chinese society with deep historical roots, a view often expressed in both Japanese and Western media. In the introduction to a three-part series on modern Chinese history in Life magazine, for example, the extremism of Chinese youth in 1966 was presented as a logical outcome of China’s historical experience. Within the ancient walls of Beijing, it explained, “the young fanatics of the Communist Red Guard last week were harassing or attacking whatever could be called ‘foreign’ or ‘feu­ dal’—embassies, churches, the graveyard of victims of the Boxer Upris­ ing, art treasures from China’s own past. Within the context of China’s long history, even these bizarre rampages make a kind of sense.”26 The illustrious Harvard University Sinologist John Fairbank elaborated on this interpretation in his contributed essay when he suggested that “two thirds of a century ago, in the midsummer of 1900, the Boxer bands who were officially commissioned to exterminate foreigners in North China were composed largely of peasant youth—and they pursued their ends with the same zeal displayed today by Chairman Mao’s officially commissioned

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‘Red Guards’ in their attack on all things foreign.”27 Two weeks later, the second installment of the Life series delivered more of the same: “The Red Guards, China’s power-drunk young vigilantes, were continuing their dismal work, busily destroying what they termed a ‘relic of the feudal past.’ Willi-nilly, as so often before in its long history, China was in the grip of a major upheaval.”28 Ignoring the specific social context of antiforeignism for the Boxers in 1900 and the Red Guards in 1966, for Life both were merely expressions of the irrational xenophobia so common in China’s long history. In a front-page Mainichi article exploring what impact the Cultural Revolution might have on Japan, the prominent LDP lawmaker Matsumura Kenzō, who had made a high-profile trip to the mainland several years earlier, expressed a similar sentiment. While “on the surface the Red Guard movement really looks like an unusual and sporadic event,” Matsumura contended, “it is an incident like the Boxer Uprising that sometimes erupts in China given the character of the Chinese people.”29 By condemning Red Guard fanaticism and brutality as the logical product of Chinese historical experience, Japanese and American observers alike rendered those per­ secuted during the Cultural Revolution as victims of both contemporary conditions in Chinese society and of Chinese history itself. For the most part, however, the specific victims of Cultural Revo­ lution terror were utterly unknown to Western audiences, just nameless casualties of civil unrest a world away. On the other hand, many of the prominent Chinese writers and scholars of the 1960s who came to be tar­ gets of persecution had deep ties to academic circles in Japan; some were even widely recognizable in Japanese society at large. Perhaps for no case was this truer than the persecution of the famed writer Guo Moruo, who had fallen victim to Red Guard attacks in May 1966. Guo had lived in Japan for many years before the war and had also been married for a time to a Japanese woman during the 1930s. The Sinologist Takeuchi Minoru even noted that because Guo was so well known in Japan, a Tokyo publishing house had made the decision to extend a recent print run of Guo’s collected works in anticipation of the boosted sales the attention his persecution in China had garnered domestically.30 A Mainichi editorial offered an explanation to readers of the multiple factors at work behind the targeting of Guo for “rectification” in 1966. Rectification actions against intellectuals had happened before, in the late 1950s, the essay contended, and they typically involved harsh measures against those labeled as antiparty or antirevolutionary elements. However, because those targeted in recent campaigns had not been driven out of

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their positions, the essay suggested, recent developments, while still harsh, could be seen as steps to correct thought rather than destroy opposition. Moreover, considering recent agricultural disasters and the break from the USSR, rectification measures should be seen as an attempt to bring intellec­ tuals into line and prevent potential criticism of the regime. Also, the piece argued, because of increasing tensions with the United States over Vietnam and worsening relations with the USSR, the CCP likely desired uniformity in political thought in preparation for conflict. The case against Guo was one part of this larger pattern.31 The Asahi took a far less benevolent view. That a man of Guo’s stature and prominence could be targeted, a May 1 editorial essay argued, showed just how severe the current rectification campaign really was. The movement reflected the intention of the CCP to eliminate rival ideologies and elevate Mao Zedong’s thought to the highest level.32 The Yomiuri, too, suggested that while the attacks on Guo were not on par with the persecution of his fellow writer Hu Feng in 1955 (who had been arrested and imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary), they were a serious matter nonetheless.33 The Asahi news editorialist Sugimura Takeshi took a deeper historical perspective on the treatment of Guo Moruo in a longer essay penned for Bungei shunjū. “The most shocking part of Guo’s case,” Sugimura argued, “was hearing that he had to burn all of his books . . . a rash decision that resembles so closely the burning of books by Qin Shi Huangdi.”34 In as­ sociating Red Guard actions with the severe punishments meted out by China’s first emperor two thousand years earlier, Sugimura both recognized Guo’s suffering as especially cruel but also marked it as consistent with Chinese historical patterns. Similarly, a more substantial Yomiuri editorial piece took a long-term perspective on Guo’s case by characterizing the rectification movement in which he was caught up as a historically excep­ tional engagement with “human reformation” (ningen kaizō). The essay recognized that world history was characterized by “numerous examples of powerful ideological and religious movements.” It singled out the cur­ rent situation in China, however, as unique. “The enforcement of Mao’s thought taking place in China today through the creation by political force of seven hundred million Mao Zedongs,” the essay concluded, truly was a historically unprecedented “experiment in human reformation.”35 Guo Moruo, of course, was only one of many thousands of victims of Red Guard terror, and the reactions to the suffering of so many nameless others can be difficult to gauge. A useful and multidimensional source of popular Japanese responses to the everyday victims of Red Guard violence,

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however, appeared in the Weekly Asahi in early 1967. A diverse sample of respondents, ranging from average high-school students to award-winning fiction writers and even a future prime minister, were shown photographs of Red Guard victims, heads hung low and signs hanging around their necks, and asked: “What do you see when you look at this photograph?”36 These reactions to the photographs of Red Guard victims reflect a variety of themes, including sadness, pity, and regret for those being brutalized. But there is also a clear perception of the differences between Japan and China when it comes to explaining Red Guard brutality. For many respon­ dents, these events were possible in China because of centuries-old patterns deeply embedded in Chinese society. In his response to the photos, the famed novelist Ōe Kenzaburō ad­ mitted a basic respect for the ideas underlying Red Guard actions: “For people to take directly into their own hands in one way or another the physical bodies of powerful people is something to be desired, as is a political system in which the people pass judgment on poor state officials and punish them by their own hands.” Taking a comparative historical perspective, Ōe then evaluated the relative merits of political infighting in the Soviet Union and the PRC, explaining that while “Stalin would carry out purges behind the scenes and then make public the reasons for doing so . . . the Chinese Cultural Revolution does not follow this sort of dark logic. While a less clever approach, they follow a more direct method of the people directly seizing enemies and overthrowing them . . . I can recog­ nize the value in that directness.” In sum, while he recognized the dangers of Chinese militarism, Ōe’s assessment of the Cultural Revolution was positive: “Of course, as a Japanese, one can never accept the legitimacy of China’s nuclear weapons tests, and that feeling will never change even a bit . . . but the Chinese revolution is moving forward, and to me this will ultimately have some positive results.”37 Several prominent scholars also offered a variety of historical expla­ nations for what was depicted in the Red Guard photos. The Gakushūin University professor Shimizu Ikutarō, for example, replied, “In a nation’s modernization, there will always come a time that demands extremes of labor from the people. There is a symbolic ideology to support that process, Christianity in Europe, the emperor system in Japan, Stalinism in Rus­ sia, and in China Maoism does the same thing. The struggle in Maoism right now is over escaping the limits of that symbolism and grasping real power.”38 Professor Okuno Shintarō of Keiō University also took a broader historical perspective: “During the Edo period, those convicted of crimes were led around in public humiliation. In China today, where it happens

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without any sort of judicial process, it is even worse.” He went on, “In fact, I came to think of something about three or four years ago in the context of the historical reevaluation of Qin Shi Huangdi. At first, I held the view of him as an emperor who destroyed feudalism and created imperial bureaucracy. But that was too kind. He was more so like, with his burning of the books and Confucian scholars, the direct forerunner of today’s great Cultural Revolution.” Okuno concluded his assessment with a reminder of the duty held by Japanese scholars of China to preserve continental tradi­ tions. “Now the revolution aims to destroy all of Chinese culture. But when the Qin fell, Han scholars restored the classics. The day of restoration will come in China someday, but until then Japanese scholars must carry the burden of protecting orthodox Sinology. This is a great responsibility.”39 The distinguished Sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi took a different ap­ proach. Advocating that Japanese refrain from judgment on the Cultural Revolution based solely on what can be seen from the surface, he con­ tended that “looking back on recent history, Japanese people have put forth a great number of mistaken judgments concerning China. After the First World War, it is accurate to say that a series of prejudices and mistakes continued.” He then concluded, “to make a long story short, during the warlord era in China, Japanese understood the actions of elites driven by money and surface conditions but did not at all understand the behavior of everyday people at a deeper level. The end result was that terrible war.”40 In other words, Takeuchi reminded readers that rash and uninformed assess­ ments of China’s domestic condition in the past had led to utter disaster, so one should not be so quick to reach conclusions about a situation in China not fully understood.41 Others also emphasized that certain peculiarities of Chinese soci­ ety were what made Red Guard violence possible. The writer Kamisaka Fuyuko, for example, said, “I did not feel any sort of shock or unusual reaction. It’s probably because I just returned from a trip to China.” After describing the various forms of Mao worship she saw there, Kamisaka concluded that because of China’s longstanding rough-and-tumble nature, “that kind of persecution, to a degree that we cannot understand, is not such a terrible thing to the Chinese people.”42 Similarly, the head coach of the 1964 Olympic women’s volleyball squad, Daimatsu Hirobumi, who had traveled to Guangzhou and seen firsthand examples of Red Guard persecu­ tion, said, “the Chinese people, more so than others, have no fear of being murdered. Instead, being humiliated in public is their greatest agony.”43 The writer Dan Ikuma, who had traveled to Beijing and witnessed public persecution by Red Guards, responded, “I thought about what Japanese

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would do in the same sort of situation,” before then explaining, “the people of China go to extremes when they argue and fight . . . Japanese group psychology is entirely different.” Dan ultimately ascribed that difference to the trajectories of Chinese and Japanese history. “In Japan, we had a type of ‘cultural revolution’ called the Meiji Restoration,” he contended. “But China did not, so the medieval age just continued as it was. They carry the burden of medieval methods of two hundred years ago in both the persecutors and the persecuted.”44 Ōya Sōichi came to a similar conclusion when he crafted his ultimate assessment of the Cultural Revolution. “There are many things to learn from China,” he admitted, “but as a Japanese one must also see that China’s national character and goals are different. In particular, the most dangerous thing is that a belief in the need for strength and violence has seeped down into every corner of society.”45 Such ominous warnings aside, Ōya nonetheless drew some positive lessons as well from the historical experience that had produced the Chi­ nese revolution. As he explained at the end of his group’s massive report on the Cultural Revolution in Sunday Mainichi: I am neither pro-US nor pro-USSR. Within Japan I am neither an LDP member nor a Socialist Party member. In that sense I have an entirely free perspective. Within the mass-media world, I have also worked as a lone wolf of sorts. It was from that position of total freedom and independence that I came to observe the new China. What met me was a complete shock. By that I mean that I no longer see my own or Japan’s freedom and independence the same way.

Explaining his meaning further, Ōya continued: In the past China was a colonial territory of the Western powers, but now it is completely independent. To the contrary, is not Japan still subservient to the United States? That is to say, Japan must become independent as soon as possible. And it is OK to have the support of Communist China in achieving that goal. In fact, I now have the impression that without relying on China, Japan cannot become independent.46

For Ōya, the historical experience that had produced Red Guard terror had also restored national pride and sovereignty, so Japanese society had something to learn from the Chinese case. And Ōya was not the only one to find some redeeming qualities in the current state of the Chinese revolution.

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Praising the Passion To many in Japan, the Red Guard movement reflected mindless vio­ lence and irrational xenophobia. At the same time, however, the energy and enthusiasm of the Red Guards as they pursued the radical transforma­ tion of their world could also be appreciated, even admired, in late-1960s Japanese society, where such passion often seemed utterly lacking. Take, for example, a high-school student’s letter published in the Asahi shinbun on September 6, 1966. Pondering the dramatic events then unfolding on the mainland, the author observed: “Young people of our generation in China, even junior high-school students, are building a socialist state, identifying and criticizing injustice . . . could it be any more different from our society, where we have so many young people either doing nothing but chasing after school-exam success or just being aimless apolitical monkeys?” While the author conceded that “it is true there are many suspicious things about Red Guard activities,” the letter nonetheless claimed that “when it comes to political matters, we have much to learn from them.”47 Similarly, another student drawn to left-wing student movements in Japan recalled, “in our time, climbing the ladder of social success—reproducing ourselves as a class—was accomplished directly through education. We focused, therefore, on ‘stop the examinations’ campaigns, using propaganda and discussions with students and teachers. . . . We believed in the Maoist line based upon the Cultural Revolutionary idea, which was to transvalue our everyday life through cultural rebellion.” Uninterested in pursuing the path expected of young college students, he explained, “I couldn’t follow my mother’s hopes for me to become a banker; the Cultural Revolution gave me an imagination of what might be possible.”48 When looking for the effect of the Red Guards on social life in Ja­ pan during the late 1960s, one might logically turn first to Japan’s own university student movement of that time, where the Red Guards indeed influenced Japanese thinking. Beginning in June 1968, for example, or­ ganized factions of disgruntled students at Tokyo University occupied campus buildings, erected barricades, and declared those spaces as “liber­ ated zones” as an expression of protest against economic inequality and bureaucratic oppression in the Japanese educational system. As evidenced by graffiti on campus gates reading “It is right to rebel” (zoufan youli/zōhan yūri), the influence of Chinese Red Guard activism on Japanese students was obvious to all.49 A feature story on the campus disturbances in Sunday Mainichi affirmed such association within the realm of public opinion when it described the student protesters as the “Red Guards of Tōdai.”50

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Beyond high-profile public intellectuals, politicians, and media celeb­ rities, the Weekly Asahi feature on reactions to Red Guard victim photos also included the results of a questionnaire put to a sample of high-school students. Drawn from both public and private schools in Tokyo and Kyoto, the 185 responses offer a valuable glimpse of how average Japanese youth viewed the actions of their peers in China. Just over 90 percent of the students polled indicated that they had seen photographs of Red Guard violence, and of those, 95 percent indicated that they possessed some de­ gree of interest in such photos.51 When asked to describe their feelings when looking at the photos, roughly 70 percent indicated “unhappiness” (fuyukai), with one such student explaining, “These are really unpleasant actions. They put forth slogans for a wonderful future, but what they are doing is against basic humanism.” However, 23 percent felt “indifference” (dochira tomo ienai) rather than sadness, and 7 percent claimed to feel at least some degree of “thrill” (tsūkai).52 When next asked if the type of violent rebellion pursued by the Red Guards was possible in Japan or other countries, more than 43 percent indicated that such action was at least conceivable in Japan, while more than 28 percent said it was possible in any country.53 In other words, something that a large majority of high schoolers saw as inhuman and cruel was also understood as not entirely implausible in nations beyond the PRC. When finally asked directly if they would like to become Red Guards themselves, just over 70 percent said no, providing reasons such as: “Think­ ing of Mao as a god, reciting his book, it’s ridiculous.” Another explained, “It’s all a scheme in which Mao has hypnotized the people into making his thoughts their own. To me it’s deplorable that young people like me are engaged in such mindless action. Sorry it sounds mean, but when I read articles about the Red Guards in the paper I want to shout out ‘You idiots!’” Almost 5 percent, however, answered in the affirmative. “Compared to the energy level of the youth of Japan,” one student replied, “youth in China are at a higher level of health. In a society like Japan where people enjoy a stable standard of living, it is difficult to understand Red Guard actions. But I think it is something perfectly logical as an outcome of China pursu­ ing socialist development.” Another said, “I think if only we could apply that kind of energy to society here in Japan . . . but in our circumstances it is not possible.”54 Other comments from the students interviewed give additional reasons why the Red Guards could be admired at least to some degree. “I do not really agree with the way the Red Guards worship Mao,” one clarified, “but in Japan today are there political parties or politicians who follow their hearts? On that matter, I envy the Red Guards and feel

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that something is missing in Japan’s condition.” Another said, “I oppose the actions of the Red Guards, but there is an appeal in the organizations formed by these young people. There is energy in Japanese young people, too, but they have to use it all up in the exam system.”55 The findings of the Shūkan Asahi survey were backed up by the research of Mita Sōsuke, a sociologist at Tokyo University, who conducted interviews with groups of high schoolers from elite public schools, private schools, and techni­ cal schools. Their views were mixed; many found the lack of individual freedom unattractive and the anti-Westernism rather silly and pointless. Concerning political activism, however, many also lamented the relative powerlessness of Japanese students in the political arena. As one technical student put it, when thinking about the condition of Japanese society as a whole in 1966, “The place that really needs Red Guards is Japan.”56 The commitment of the Red Guards to purging the Chinese state of corruption also found a few admirers even among the conservative political elites of Japanese society. An article in Bungei shunjū, for example, “The LDP Red Guards Are Angry,” featured a roundtable discussion with four LDP Diet members who had initiated a campaign against their own party in the fall of 1966. In August of that year, the LDP heavyweight Tanaka Shōji had been arrested after being implicated in the April 1965 Fukibara Indus­ tries financial scandal, ultimately being forced to leave the LDP and give up his Diet seat. In addition, a story broke that the LDP figure Arafune Seijūjō, while serving as transportation minister in 1966, had used his influence to pressure the National Railway to have an express train make regular stops at a station in his constituency. Disgusted with these examples of corrup­ tion and abuse of power within their party, Isurogi Michiyuki, Kujiraoka Hyōsuke, Koyama Shōji, and Sunada Shigetami had launched a movement to clean up the party (shukutō undō), earning them the moniker of “LDP Red Guards” by the magazine’s editors.57 It seems Kujiraoka, however, preferred to think of himself in more distinctly native terms. “When you know what you are doing is correct, it matters not if others criticize you. But, when you are wrong, you have to take responsibility for it. Samurai must have their honor.”58 Perhaps most surprisingly, Red Guard passions also seemed to reso­ nate strongly with by all other measures one of the least “revolutionary” demographic groups in postwar Japan—the corporate salaryman. Anyone familiar with the evening rush-hour scene in Tokyo can easily imagine an exhausted company salesman trekking to the nearest subway station, after a twelve-hour day in the office and a few more hours drinking with his supervisor, and grabbing the latest issue of his favorite comic magazine

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at the newsstand before jumping onto the crowded car. Especially during the latter half of 1966, it would not have been uncommon for him to find comic panels in that magazine that used the imagery and language of the Red Guard movement to lampoon elements of the daily corporate drudgery he was all too familiar with. A set of especially revealing examples appeared in a lengthy section of a late September 1966 issue of the widely circulated magazine Shūkan manga sandee called “Salaryman Red Guards” (Sarariiman kōeihei).59 The segment featured three distinct stories, each by a different cartoonist, which addressed daily life at the three sites known best to the average corporate drone: his company office, his favorite late-night drinking spot, and his home. In the first example, a story entitled “The Quietly Absurd Revolu­ tion” (Shizukanaru tonchin kakumei), Moriyoshi Masateru describes an imaginary takeover of the workplace by pencil-pushing Red Guard office workers. It begins with several panels illustrating the lifestyle of a “one­ man” company president and its many perks—numerous girlfriends, fancy automobiles, even a gold-plated bust of himself at the office—contrasted with the flat salaries of his employees. Then, upon his return to the corporate headquarters after a pleasure trip abroad, the president discovers his office telephone missing. A stern-faced employee explains that because phone costs are too high, it has been replaced with a carrier pigeon. Likewise, his cushy desk chair and even the toilet paper in his bathroom, both deemed too extravagant and uneconomical, have been replaced with a pickle barrel and plant leaves, respectively. His Rolls-Royce and lovely young secretary have been replaced with bamboo stilts and a seventy-year-old hag for the same reasons. When he then checks his office safe and finds that all his stock and bond certificates are missing, his employee explains that they have been distributed evenly among the company’s workers. “We have all become Red Guards!” the elated worker exclaims.60 The revolution continues: the president has his wristwatch and lighter seized as “extravagant” (zeitaku), and when he dares to complain, his mus­ tache is torn from his face, and he is told “criticism is forbidden” (genron fūsa nari). In the final series of panels, the president cowers before the jubilant Red Guards reveling in his total submission to their authority, and Moriyoshi concludes with a line that reads, “and so the peaceful yet absurd revolution at the ‘one-man’ company came to an end.” A Red Guard, however, then grabs the hand of Moriyoshi himself and ties the cartoonist up with a sign elucidating his crimes: “Because this man has written insult­ ing comics about the revolution, he is being punished,” a deliberate and

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obvious reference to well-known scenes of Red Guards in China hanging signs on the targets of their wrath as the victims faced public persecution. In the second story, Suzuki Yoshiji took as his setting the smoky world of late-night pubs and bars frequented by rank-and-file office work­ ers in a contribution entitled “Liberate the High-Class Bars! Beautiful Ladies and Good Drink Belong to Us All!” (Kōkyū sakaba kaihō banzai, bijo bishu mina waga shoyū). It begins with our white-collar hero walking away from a yakitori cart after eating his fill of the delectable skewers and feeling rather contented. Until, that is, he strolls in front of the “High-Class Bar” (Bar kōkyū) and gets a glimpse of how the managerial class unwinds after work. “Damn, the rich have it good,” he shouts. “Let’s make those high-class bars our own!” He cajoles a coworker into joining him, and they rampage through a ritzy club, seizing expensive drinks and tearing the fancy kimonos off the hostesses who pour them. The success of their revolt is then depicted with a series of new signs, such as “Bar Anyone” (Bar daredemo) and “Club Common Man” (kurabu shomin), which have replaced the names of these previously out-of-reach watering holes.61 Our heroes soon notice, however, that what they wanted most—lovely ladies serving them pricey drinks—are nowhere to be found in any of their revolutionized clubs. Setting out to find them, a secret underground elite bar is discovered, and our rebels attempt to enter it, without success. While in the sewers, however, they find inspiration in the city’s vermin and hatch a plan to raise rats and set them loose on this clandestine high-class hide­ away. “The time has come for men and rats to join hands in revolution,” the leader proclaims. A young office lady overhearing his impassioned speech is impressed by his enthusiasm, agrees to help him carry out his plan, and the two then fall in love and marry. As revealed in the final frame, however, it was not the rat army of which he had dreamed but only the “rug rats” of his new family that grow in number, leaving our hero no better off than when his revolt began. The application of Red Guard idealism to Japanese family life served as inspiration for the third story in the feature, a comic tale called “Red Is the Color of Revolution” (Aka wa kakumei no iro) by Kitayama Ryū. While crossing the street, our main character is struck by a car; he has been read­ ing his newspaper and doesn’t notice the red light. Escaping obvious injury, he ponders curiously, “Why does a red traffic signal mean stop? If it’s red, that has to mean advance!” (kōtsū shingō no aka wa, naze stoppu na no ka, aka koso susume de aru beki da). He then spots the red lantern outside a local pub and immediately “advances” inside for a drink. Once inside, he

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takes a casual comment from another patron as an accusation of capitalist revisionism, and a fight breaks out between them. While being pummeled mercilessly, his opponent frantically asks why our hero is getting so worked up. In response, the ersatz Red Guard shouts, “Revolution is violence!” (kakumei wa bōryoku da), no doubt a direct reference to Mao’s famous 1927 aphorism “A revolution is not a dinner party . . . it is an insurrection, an act of violence.”62 Our deluded hero’s young son then finds his dad and tries to convince him to come home. “Mommy is waiting,” the poor lad says, to which his father replies, “Not ‘mommy,’ call her ‘comrade,’ OK, comrade.” Then, after attacking a young couple out for an evening stroll whose bourgeois fashion sense offends him, he is finally taken in and questioned by a police officer. “What’s your address?” the officer inquires. “The East is Red City, Revolutionary Boulevard” (Tōhōkō shi kakumei ōji) he answers, to the officer’s obvious chagrin. While being escorted home by the policeman, our hero spots his boss walking arm in arm with his wife, both dressed smartly for a night out on the town, and then attacks him for being a rotten capitalist. When he finally arrives at his house, his wife asks him where he has been all night, to which he has no response but “Long Live Chairman Mao!” (Mō shuseki banzai). His odd behavior continues at home: he looks at the dresser in their bedroom and says to his wife, “Extravagance is the enemy (zeitaku wa teki da)! Who told you to buy this perfume?” “That’s bug spray,” she retorts. “Liar!” he shouts, “there are no flies or mosquitoes in Communist China!” (uso tsuke, Chūkyō ni wa hae ya ka wa inai), a clear comic reference to the CCP’s own campaigns during the 1950s to rid Chinese society of pests such as flying insects. After exhorting his son to read more Mao and criticizing his wife’s excessive weight as “too bourgeois,” she decides to have a doctor take a look at him. After a quick exam, the doctor assures her, “It’s nothing bad, just something like amnesia. He was likely hit by a car while reading about the Red Guards. If you just shock him with something again, he’ll go back to normal.” Their son brings out a mallet, and the doctor prepares to administer the curative blow, but his wife suddenly stops him. She retrieves a notebook of some sort from their desk, shows it to her husband, and then turns back to the now puzzled physician, saying, “Doctor, he’s all better now.” In the final frame, she explains the curative nature of the notebook: “It’s our debt-ridden family budget record” (akaiji no kakeibō na no). The shock of his miserable household finances has been more than enough to return him to the real world.

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These comic artists crafted humorous (but heroic) stories of Red Guard–like activism in the corporate workplace that offered the Japanese salaryman a fantasy of revolutionary resistance to the forces of inequality, corruption, and exploitation that existed in his world. By portraying him as locked in rebellious combat against the managerial supervisors and cor­ porate CEOs that lived the high life on the fruits of his white-collar labor, cartoonists aimed to provide the salaryman temporary (and imaginary) re­ lease from his daily frustrations as well as a good laugh in commiseration with the millions of other low-level company men who shared his fate. In doing so, the artists also landed more than a few of their own personal jabs concerning the blatant inequities produced by postwar Japanese society’s vigorous and relentless pursuit of rapid growth. Significant, too, is the degree to which precise knowledge of events in China related to the Red Guards and Cultural Revolution, as well as the broader recent history of Mao and the CCP, was necessary to understand and appreciate these comic tales. Much of the humor found in these stories and images would be rendered ineffective in the absence of such familiar­ ity. References to everything from the Red Guards’ street sign alterations, to Mao’s revolutionary aphorisms, to CCP policies like the Four Pest cam­ paign of the late 1950s would fall completely flat before an audience that did not recognize them. Evidence suggests, however, that it was not just abundant knowledge of Chinese conditions that made comic references to the Red Guards effective. For many in Japan, the actions and ideology of the Red Guards had a familiar ring. Japan, too—and not that long ago—had been through an era of intense indoctrination and unbridled fanaticism. Reflections of Japanese History Japanese travelers in China during the early Cultural Revolution years were often struck by the extent to which not only the Red Guards but also everyday people were entirely ignorant of real conditions in the world beyond China. Gomi Mitsuko, who had traveled to Beijing in the fall of 1966 as part of a Japanese artist group tour only to find himself arriving in the midst of the Red Guard whirlwind, had such an experience. The capital city’s art and history museums had been closed by the Red Guards, so the Japanese artists could do virtually none of what they had come to do. They were nonetheless welcomed by Qinghua University Red Guards for a conversation on campus. As their meeting came to a close, one Red Guard explained to the group, “We admire the anti-imperialist struggle of

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the Japanese people.” Expressing pity for what the Red Guards imagined was the relentless suffering of everyday people in Japan, he went on, “Since liberation we have enjoyed a blessed life, but we have not forgotten about the painful hardship of the Japanese people under the pressure of Ameri­ can imperialism and capitalism. We believe that the proletariat revolution will come in Japan, too.” Dumbfounded by their one-dimensional, highly politicized, and wildly inaccurate idea of postwar Japan, Gomi wrote in reflection, “As a Japanese, I once more felt the difficulty of explaining to them Japan’s complex society.”63 Ōya Sōichi noted similarly of his many chats with Red Guards during his weeks in China, “When told that the standard of living in Japan has increased dramatically over the past thirty years, the Red Guards all laughed together at once. They absolutely fail to recognize that reality. They laugh it off completely.”64 Ōya’s team member Ōmori Minoru, too, when reflecting on conversations with everyday resi­ dents in China about world affairs and their reactions to new information, said, “there were so many people with that look on their faces like ‘what sort of strange nonsense are you talking about?’”65 When Japanese commented on the parochial ignorance of so many people in China, however, they often did so with a Japanese historical reference in mind. Indeed, many saw in late-1960s China elements that seemed reminiscent of Japan under the Tokugawa shoguns centuries earlier. While in Guangzhou, the Ōya group met with students from Zhongshan University, including numerous Red Guards, for a wide-ranging conversa­ tion about the Cultural Revolution and global politics. Reflecting on the overall character of the meeting, Ōmori Minoru commented, “The main thing is that they just do not know enough about foreign countries.” Seek­ ing to make some sense of the Red Guard mentality, he suggested that the arrival of an outsider to China in 1966 was something “like when a ‘strange foreigner’ appeared before some topknot-wearing townsman during the ‘closed country’ era” of the Edo period.66 For Fujiwara Hirotatsu, too, interactions with Red Guards stirred up images of Tokugawa society and the window on the West provided by Nagasaki during that age. Speaking of an encounter he had with a pair of young Chinese, Fujiwara recalled: I spoke in English to a young male student, and he responded in fluent Russian. So, we could not talk. I tried again with a young female student, and she seemed to understand . . . but then I got the sense that she was fearful because people are not supposed to speak English. It is a special characteristic of people in an isolated society to desire communication

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with foreigners . . . it’s like they have that same sort of inquisitiveness that takes shape in a closed-off society [such as Japan under the Tokugawa shoguns].67

Hata Yutaka made a different sort of reference to Nagasaki life during the Tokugawa period when speaking of a meeting with the Red Guards of Qinghua University, whom he found to be far more intense than those of Zhongshan University in Guangzhou. Recalling that foreign visitors to Nagasaki were expected to wipe their feet on an image of the Mary and the Christ child (the so-called fumi-e) to prove their indifference to Christian­ ity, Hata noted that Qinghua Red Guards had their own style of fumi-e. Immediately after meeting the students, he claimed, they put to the group the question: “What do you all think when it comes to the US aggression in Vietnam?”68 An answer of anything less than blanket condemnation would have presumably earned one as much suspicion as that put on a European merchant in Nagasaki 250 years earlier who failed to stomp on the holy mother with sufficient zeal. Still other comparisons with Tokugawa society were possible. When thinking about the ideological rigidity of Maoist China, Fujiwara com­ mented: “I get the feeling that the severe conformity and strictness, it’s just like Tokugawa Ieyasu adopting neo-Confucianism to settle down the feudal order.”69 When discussing the class consciousness of Red Guards and the pity felt for young students who could not wear the armband be­ cause of poor family ties, Ōya and Kajiyama, too, saw reflections of Japan’s Edo-period past. “It’s like being the child of a samurai who fought with Tokugawa Ieyasu at the Battle of Sekigahara,” Ōya explained. Recogniz­ ing Ōya’s equation of birth lineage in Red Guard families to the dynamics of samurai households, Kajiyama replied, “So, we can think of the Red Guards as hatamoto,” a reference to those samurai who served as direct retainers of the Tokugawa shoguns and thus enjoyed greater hereditary privileges.70 Drawing such comparisons between Chinese and Japanese histori­ cal experience with one’s Chinese hosts, however, could cause trouble, as Fujiwara Hirotatsu explained in recalling a conversation with a Red Guard: I had mentioned that when I walked into the broad and open area around the grave of Sun Zhongshan I had the feeling like I was walking around the Meiji shrine in Tokyo. Then I just casually said that the Meiji emperor, like Sun, had also launched a bourgeois democratic revolution. Our in­ terpreter directly translated my comments as saying the Meiji shrine and

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Sun’s grave had the same sort of vibe. The Red Guard quickly reacted by saying, “the imperial grave that represents the militarism of the Meiji emperor and the grave of Dr. Sun are absolutely different.”71

Perhaps the Red Guards were not as ignorant of historical events beyond China as the Japanese visitors believed. As frequent as the comparisons between early modern Japan and Maoist China were among Japanese observers, equally common were com­ ments on the clear parallels between Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution and Japanese society during the wartime era. The Mainichi shinbun, for example, ran an extensive five-part series on the Cultural Revolution that provided readers with a broad overview of the movement’s many dimensions.72 The focus in part 4 on Chinese economic policy under the Cultural Revolution, however, offered a telling comparison to Japanese society some decades earlier. “The impact on the people of shouldering the burden for emergency military expenditures in terms of austere en­ durance in daily life and increased production movements,” the editorial explained, “is something that we can surely understand from the experience of wartime Japanese society.”73 Additionally, although the Asahi editorialist Sugimura Takeshi had likened the persecution of Guo Moruo to the policy of thought control imposed in ancient China by Qin Shih Huangdi, he also recognized a historical parallel with Japanese experience. Commenting on the danger of letting the military become a shaping force in cultural matters, he wrote, “when the military throws its weight around on cultural issues, just like Japanese culture under the militarist clique and German culture under the Nazi regime, it all becomes shallow and servile culture.”74 Ōya commented, too, at the end of his group’s two-week sojourn on the continent: “Traveling through that whirlwind, you could say it was like traveling back to wartime Japan and then returning to the postwar world of today.”75 Turning again to the Weekly Asahi feature asking prominent Japanese to respond to photographs of Red Guard violence, the NHK television host Godai Riyako was more self-reflective in her reaction to such photos. “The feelings of the Red Guards are the same as those of wartime Japan,” she explained. “I was in the sixth grade when the war ended. At that time, we were possessed by the same sort of blind devotion to victory at all costs, even death. Because I was raised and educated in that sort of situation, I acted in that way.”76 The LDP lawmaker Utsunomiya Tokuma also saw Red Guard fanaticism as something not so unfamiliar to anyone who had lived in Japan during the wartime years. “The position of China today is

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a wartime system,” he noted. “Subjected to US aggression, of course, and recently pressure from the USSR, too . . . it resembles the mood of once before with ideas such as ‘extravagance is the enemy’ and ‘Until victory, do not want for things.’”77 With a provocative opening claim of “China shaken by a whirlwind, it is just like wartime Japan,” the Asahi shinbun editorialist Takagi Takeo offered a detailed elaboration on the similarities between Chinese society of the late 1960s and Japanese society of the early 1940s.78 “When I look at the condition of China today as the country battles to construct a nationalis­ tic communist state,” Takagi explained, “I cannot help but remember those days in Japan of phrases such as ‘bring to fruition the holy war’ (seisen kansui) and ‘a fireball of the one hundred million as one heart’ (ichi oku ichi kokoro hi no tama).” In both societies, the state aimed to persuade (or enforce) the submission of individual will to the collective goals of the na­ tion. Within that context, speaking out in opposition to official policy was rendered so risky as to be impossible. To be labeled an “antiparty element” in China during the Cultural Revolution, Takagi went on, was the prover­ bial kiss of death. The same was true of wartime Japan, Takagi contended, when scholars and intellectuals merely with overseas experience could find themselves suspected of being US friendly.79 Takagi also drew intriguing ideological parallels between the two social environments. Commonplace wartime Japanese phrases such as “all eight corners of the world under one roof” (hakkō ichiu) and “spread the light of the imperial way” (kōdō hōki) were strikingly similar in spirit to the notion prevalent in Chinese society of Mao Zedong being the leader of world communism, insofar as all Third World nations struggling toward communism could be united under Mao’s leadership. The target of that struggle, namely US imperialism, was also viewed in China in ways that would have been familiar to people in wartime Japan, who had been ex­ horted relentlessly to “fight to the end” (uchite shiyaman) and “utterly wipe out the American beasts” (Bei oni utsumetsu).80 To Takagi, the Chinese idea of xiafang, to send one to the work­ ers or farmers for reeducation, was also something that wartime Japanese society would have understood, as student mobilization for labor during the war years (gakuto dōin) aimed both to supplement industrial strength and infuse a spirit of collective struggle within the urban educated elite classes. Similarly, Takagi argued, a popular Chinese phrase from the Great Leap Forward era, when the PRC sought self-sufficiency above all else, was keji fenggong, meaning “selfless dedication to public duties.” The Japanese phrase messhi hōkō had a virtually identical meaning, which

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during the war was typically phrased as “do not desire things until victory is achieved” (hoshigarimasen, katsumade wa) or as “extravagance is the enemy” (zeitaku wa teki da).81 Takagi drew other comparisons, too, such as the glorification of military service and soldier-heroes. He even compared the neighborhood association groups of housewives in China who enforced state standards in the community to the groups of old Japanese wives wear­ ing monpe and aprons during the war, patrolling the Ginza with scissors and cutting the long sleeves of younger ladies strolling about town. It was not uncommon either for Japanese reflecting on the current condition of Chinese society in 1972 to see ways by which late–Cultural Revolution–era China seemed similar to wartime society in Japan. For example, when asked about impressions given by Chinese fashion, one twenty-two-year-old “office lady” stated that the drab but practical dress of Chinese women reminded her of the way Japanese women looked during the early 1940s.82 Similarly, a fifty-seven-year-old Japanese city official from Gifu who had lived in China for two years, when thinking about how the Chinese state tries to control social behavior, remarked: “In a movie theater before the film begins, a slide appears saying ‘for the parents, for the children, for society, do not have more than two children. Three is too many.’ During the war, Japan was the same way. Before a film began, a message like ‘Keep fighting until the enemy is destroyed’ would be shown on the screen in big letters. It’s just like that in China now.”83 These comparative sentiments are represented well in a final comic example. In a single-frame piece in Heibon panchi, Yanagihara Ryōhei drew a pair of Red Guards parading with a portrait of Mao while a Japanese man in suit and tie looks on disapprovingly (figure 3.5). The image of wartime prime minister Tōjō Hideki appears in a thought bubble above his head as he warns the naive Chinese youngsters, “That whole ‘extravagance is the enemy’ idea, yeah, we had that in Japan, too, a while back.”84 While on one level the cartoon clearly embodies a brand of cultural superiority in its depiction of a mature “adult” Japan chastising a childlike China for its rash and thoughtless behavior, on another it is a notably humble equation of Japan’s own ideological fanaticism of the 1940s with the revolutionary fervor of Chinese society in the 1960s. In other words, Yanagihara was suggesting that Japanese society had been just as irrational and misguided during the war as Chinese society seemed to be then. The frequent equation of Red Guard fanaticism with Japanese wartime ideological indoctrination in the popular sources of the day is suggestive on multiple interpretive fronts. In framing the comparison as an example of Chinese society following a path already taken by Japan,

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FIG. 3.5 Yanagihara Ryōhei cartoon depicting a Japanese observer drawing a compari­ son between Red Guard extremism and Japan’s own wartime fanaticism. Reproduced with permission from the Bijutsu chosakuken sentaa.

for example, there is a suggestion of developmental delay, not unlike that sense of Chinese backwardness articulated in relation to the PRC’s nuclear weapons development. At the same time, however, the shared experience of virulent opposition to Western imperialism reaffirms a notion of common identity. Representations of the Red Guards also functioned as a tool in the assessment of Japan’s own wartime experience. On one hand, when granting legitimacy to Red Guard extremism of the late 1960s by equating it with the Japanese ideological devotion of the early 1940s, Japan’s own disaster in fanaticism is at least in part redeemed as something inspired by pure motives, despite its terrible consequences. On the other hand, when suggesting wartime fanaticism in Japan was no different from the widely condemned Red Guard zealotry of 1960s, Japanese extremism of early 1940s is unequivocally debased and discredited as irrational folly. The Red Guard whirlwind in Mao’s China, then, was a prism through which Japa­ nese intellectuals, activists, and everyday people meaningfully engaged refracted images of their own past. Hideo and the Chairman The record of a discussion between members of the Ōya delegation and Qinghua University Red Guards on September 20, 1966, conveys a sense of the delegation’s frequent frustration with what they perceived as

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the illogicality of Red Guard thinking. Fujiwara first engaged one of the Red Guard student leaders in a discussion about the PRC’s nuclear weapons program. The young revolutionary explained that on the issue of nuclear weapons what matters most is the root of society. While atomic missiles in the hands of America leads to imperialist war, he argued, in China they are used for defense. Somewhat perplexed by that logic, Fujiwara countered that when it comes to science, the method for making nuclear weapons is the same everywhere—the United States, United Kingdom, USSR, China. “In our view,” the student replied, “atomic weapons are not the product of one scientific expert; it is the labor of the masses that made China’s nuclear weapons possible.” Miki later changed the discussion topic by asking about the nature of university study at that time. “As universities have been closed since the start of the Cultural Revolution,” he queried, “have you been studying on your own or not really at all?” “Mao has taught us that what matters most is one’s ideological position and revolutionary thought,” the Red Guard leader replied. “When those things are in order, all else will be fine. Now, we are struggling for ideological correctness.” Less than satisfied, Miki shot back, “In other words, you are not studying in your fields of knowledge at the university.” The Red Guard replied, “What matters now is the struggle for revolutionary thought. When that is done, study in our academic fields will be possible.”85 While Fujiwara and Miki were clearly baiting the students with their provocative line of questioning, the dialogue that ensued showed nonetheless that the Red Guard mindset was an impenetrable mystery to most members of the Ōya group. For at least one Japanese teenager in 1967, however, it made per­ fect sense . . . for a time. His name was Yazawa Hideo. He and his sister, Michiko, had spent their childhood years in China with their parents Kiyo­ shi and Tsugi, and the Weekly Yomiuri published a feature piece on the fam­ ily’s remarkable story in February 1967. Tsugi had gone to Dairen at age sixteen in 1939 as a student nurse, and Kiyoshi had been sent to China in 1944 on military duty. Remaining on the mainland after Japan’s surrender, their children Hideo and Michiko were born in China and raised there until the entire family came “home” together on January 7, 1967. Having spent so many years in China, for Kiyoshi and Tsugi speaking Japanese with others was an adjustment, and the children spoke almost no Japanese at all when they returned to Japan. Although Kiyoshi grew up in Tokyo and hoped to return there to find work, for the time being the family was living with Tsugi’s family in Miyazaki prefecture while the children adjusted to life in Japan and learned enough Japanese to go back to school.

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In his interview with the Yomiuri reporter, Kiyoshi said of the chil­ dren, “from morning to evening, they don’t move from in front of the television. Even when called for dinner, they do not come right away. When I look at those kids from behind, I really think those Red Guards truly had the fever.”86 When the reporter asked Hideo about his feelings upon returning to Japan, with Kiyoshi serving as interpreter, Hideo replied, “It was like I was forced to go back. When you see it as a child who knew nothing at all about his native country, it is only natural that I did not have any warm, nostalgic feelings about it. In fact, I was really uneasy about it until we reached Japan.” What the reporter really wanted to discuss with Hideo, however, was his direct experience with the Red Guards during the autumn of 1966. The family had been living in Neijiang, Sichuan province, and the Red Guard movement first took off in their town in late June 1966. Kiyoshi worked as an electrical technician at the local power plant, earning a com­ fortable salary, so the family enjoyed a relatively high standard of living.87 Hideo participated in Red Guard activities at school and aspired to join the movement formally. Standards for becoming a Red Guard, however, were strict—foreigners, children of landlords, and children of antiparty elements were all excluded—but Hideo was allowed to join a lesser revolutionary cohort.88 Hideo recalled that as the criticism of foreigners peaked, the fam­ ily began to get concerned about their safety. But because they lived their daily lives just as the Chinese did, they never once suffered any sort of persecution. More than anything else, Hideo loved to attend study meetings with his Chinese friends, clutching his little red book. “In the book, the phrase ‘Serve the people’ is what made the deepest impression on me,” Hideo explained. “My dad, who could not understand the ideology of the move­ ment, criticized the Red Guards for their childish mob mentality. But just like my Chinese friends I respected Mao Zedong. When I was selected to join the group of students who would travel to Beijing to see Chairman Mao on October 1, I was so overwhelmed with emotion that my body trembled.”89 Foreigners in China at that time needed official permission from local authorities to travel beyond their residential town. Because the Yazawa family had already been granted permission to return to Japan, Hideo feared that his parents would refuse to allow him to go to Beijing, concerned that it might disrupt their plans to return home. Hideo summoned the courage to ask his dad nonetheless, and to his surprise, Kiyoshi said: “OK, go ahead and do it. Let’s just keep it a secret from the local officials.”

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Kiyoshi remembered, “The excitement for the Red Guards is just like what I felt as a child in wartime Japan who looked up to and admired soldiers. I’ve tried to explain that to my kids, but they cannot quite understand it.”90 Hideo made the trip to Beijing with his Chinese friends and saw the Chairman as he passed in a car during a rally; he felt like even that fleeting glimpse had made the whole trip worthwhile. “Even now,” Hideo explained, “I cannot forget the excitement I felt at that moment.”91 Michiko also made the trip after Hideo had returned, also catching a brief view of Mao as he passed by in a car. The article then explained: “For this brother and sister born and raised in China, to travel with Red Guards to the capital and see Chairman Mao was a thrill greater than anything else.”92 The two siblings next wanted to join a trip to Mao’s birthplace, but the family by then was planning their return to Japan. One of Hideo’s Red Guard friends, having no other parting gift for him, took off his Red Guard armband and gave it to Hideo as a keepsake of his life in China. Hideo’s hands shook as he accepted it; it was something he had wanted more than anything for so long. “It will arrive with our luggage in a few days,” Hideo explained to the reporter. He was deeply disappointed over being unable to show it to him.93 Hideo was very perplexed upon arriving in Japan. “I had heard many things from my father, who learned of what was going on in Japan through a radio he had assembled on his own, but the reality of Japan was so dif­ ferent from anything I had thought, and I was surprised by so many things. I could not even leave my house out of fear.”94 What shocked Hideo most was when an official from Yokohama, who came all the way to Miyazaki to meet them, asked Hideo and Michiko to solve a double-digit multiplication question. They both puzzled over it for a few moments before finally giving an answer, but it was incorrect. The two were then astounded to learn that these were third-grade-level math problems in Japan. “I did not earn the best marks in school in China,” Hideo explained, “but they weren’t that bad either. Now I really understood that I would have to study very hard.” Hideo glanced at the television on the other side of the room and continued, “In China I had rarely seen photographs of any place outside of China, but on Japanese television anyplace in the world was shown. To me everything I see on television is something new.”95 As Hideo and Michiko sat in front of the television, Kiyoshi explained: “Gradually the fever is being cured. They have stopped singing ‘The East Is Red,’ and that little red book they once read every day now is never opened at all.”96 Yazawa Hideo’s story is a fascinating one. For some, the Red Guard movement was a dramatic reminder of how different China and Japan were in the late 1960s. For those who saw similarities, the common elements

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were between the Japan of the 1940s and the China of the 1960s. Yazawa Hideo’s encounter with the Cultural Revolution suggested something in be­ tween. As a teenager in China, he had been as susceptible to the Red Guard fever as any other young person. Being Japanese was irrelevant. Only by returning to the home islands, islands he had never known, did Hideo come to perceive the difference and find his fever cured by the palliative function of postwar Japanese television. For young Hideo, then, the line between China and Japan, as well as past and present, had been difficult to draw. Hideo’s struggle to negotiate between the Chinese and Japanese di­ mensions of his teenage identity is a reminder, too, of the complexity of everyday Japanese views of the Cultural Revolution years. While some observers imposed distance by emphasizing the peculiarly Chinese quali­ ties of the Red Guard movement, others nurtured a sense of familiarity by noting how Japanese society, too, had experienced an age of self-destruc­ tive ideological extremism. Likewise, for some in Japan the brutality and senseless violence of the Red Guards was a sickening outrage; for others, the insatiable zeal for revolutionary change found in Red Guard action was worthy of admiration. Moreover, this tendency toward self-reflection through the lens of Chinese experience during the late 1960s is consistent with patterns in popular Japanese reactions to Li Dequan in 1954 and the PRC’s emergence as an atomic power in 1964. One could reasonably argue, of course, that popular Japanese perceptions of the United States during the postwar era can be mined for historical relevance in a similar way. That some viewed America as a beacon of democracy and freedom while others saw little more than militarism and debauchery is also a reflection of competing forces in the construction of postwar Japanese identity. None­ theless, analyzing popular views of Mao’s China gives us something that exploring perceptions of the United States does not. Views on China dur­ ing the postwar era are embedded within a framework of cultural identity first forged more than two thousand years earlier, whereas perceptions of the United States had little more than a century of historical development behind them. Moreover, as a society derived from those ancient continental origins, for Japanese to reflect on the meaning of Chinese experience is to interrogate personal identity to a far deeper level than what is possible from comparison with the United States. Reflecting upon Japan’s status as a defeated and destitute nation, the postwar-era intellectual Shimizu Ikutarō claimed in 1951 that with dreams of empire crushed, “once again, the Japanese are Asians.”97 Just fifteen years later, however, Ōya Sōichi came to the opposite conclusion. When his fellow traveler Miki Yōnosuke lamented the low standard of living in

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China compared to that enjoyed in Japan in 1966, Ōya countered that such a judgement was unfair. “Japan is in Asia,” Ōya explained, “but it is not Asia. . . it is the edge of the West. If you look at the PRC from the level of Asia,” he claimed, “the quality of life is quite high.”98 What are we to make of the difference between the assessments of Shimizu and Ōya? The Japan of 1966 and the Japan of 1951 were vastly different places, and Japanese perceptions of China were distilled through the social context of those two epochs. By the late 1960s, the distance between China and Japan again seemed to be growing. Five years after Ōya’s comments, however, Japanese society would have the chance to close the gap and rediscover life on the continent in a more direct way. Our next and final chapter will explore that social context and its consequences.

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Rediscovering the Continent

It’s a country where hotel bellboys are called “comrade” . . . a country where men tell women not to wear makeup. I just can’t understand anything about it. I get the feeling that we just don’t know nearly enough about this place. —Thirty-five-year-old Japanese businessman who spent a year living in China in 19711

I was surprised by the poor condition of rural villages. The fields look awful. Young people all leave for the city. In China, youngsters from the city go out to the villages to work in the fields. It is the exact opposite of Japan! —Twenty-four-year-old China-born Japanese who came “home” in 1970, giving his impressions of life in Japan2

S

ince at least the third century CE, China had been the destination of choice for those people on the Japanese archipelago who possessed both the desire and the means to embark on a voyage overseas. In fact, one might even reasonably posit that “foreign” travel and China travel were synonymous in the Japanese mind before the seventeenth century. While the political settlement orches­ trated by the Tokugawa shoguns during the first decades of the 1600s did not dampen commercial flows of goods and products between the Qing Empire and Tokugawa society, from that point forward Japanese as a rule were forbidden to travel overseas. Until the early 1860s, therefore, popular knowledge of Chinese society, such as it was, came largely from books, not personal experiences on the continent.3 From the second half of the nineteenth century until the wartime era, on the other hand, millions of Japanese went to China both as temporary visitors and permanent residents, soldiers and civilians, and this redis­ covery of Chinese society after the long Tokugawa-era travel drought has

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been thoughtfully chronicled and interpreted by scholars such as Joshua Fogel.4 With war’s end, however, defeat and occupation once more pushed the Japanese world toward an era of more carefully controlled bordercrossing activity, Tessa Morris-Suzuki has shown, as Cold War geopolitics demanded that Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, and Taiwanese be clearly labeled with national identities and their regional movements carefully documented by state authorities.5 Moreover, the Japanese state’s inability to recognize the PRC formally because of the US-Japan security agreement meant that for Japanese nationals unencumbered travel to the continent was severely circumscribed. Of course, this is not to say that travel between Japan and the PRC from 1952 until 1972 was impossible; a wide variety of voyages took place during those two decades for reasons related to political engagement, cul­ tural exchange, and commercial promotion. Even so, the everyday citizen in postwar Japanese society had little chance to see China firsthand until the diplomatic path toward normalization between China and Japan gained steam after Nixon and Kissinger opened their arms to Mao’s regime in 1971 and unrestricted travel to China for Japanese once again became a possibility. From the spring of 1971 through the autumn of 1972, then, Japanese print media proffered a wide array of stories, reports, and images aimed at reacquainting the everyday Japanese citizen with the realities of life in Mao’s China.6 The PRC that awaited a new wave of Japanese travelers in 1972 had changed significantly since the Ōya Sōichi group had made landfall for their adventurous sojourn through the Red Guard storm of 1966. While the Cultural Revolution did not reach its unequivocal end until Mao’s death in 1976, by 1970 the worst excesses of the movement had been tamed. The young Red Guards who had stormed across the Chinese landscape carrying out Mao’s revolutionary call to action only a few years earlier had become the Sent-Down Youth who labored by the millions throughout China’s provincial hinterlands in an effort to reorient their revolutionary identity in a less socially disruptive direction. The internal party power struggles that had sparked the Cultural Revolution in the first place, however, had not been entirely resolved. The mysterious death of Lin Biao in 1971, for example, illustrated how one could never rest easy in Mao’s political circle. Lin had been Mao’s closest ally during the early Cultural Revolution years, and many believed he was the most likely candidate to succeed Mao as the country’s supreme leader. The ongoing volatility of the CCP leader­ ship struggles became clear, however, when Zhou Enlai explained that Lin’s orchestration of a coup d’état had been uncovered, and he perished

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in an airplane crash as he tried to flee to the USSR. Despite such domestic political uncertainty, worsening relations with the Soviet Union were si­ multaneously pushing the PRC toward a more moderate position vis-à-vis the United States. By early 1971, Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger were pondering the possibility of closer PRC-US ties that would serve to contain the USSR, a power they both saw as the greater geopolitical threat. With détente finally achieved in the wake of President Nixon’s 1972 journey to China, the hostility and antagonism that had fueled PRC-US relations for more than twenty years since the beginning of the Korean War cooled dramatically, and a new era of still cautious but far more positive engage­ ment emerged. For Japan, while an occasional outburst of popular unrest was not unheard of, the early 1970s largely marked the fruition of postwar-era aims concerning economic recovery and industrial growth. The Japan of 1952, though relieved of the worst desperation of postsurrender life, was still an insignificant bit player in the global economy. The Japan of 1972, however, boasted the second-largest economy on the planet, behind the United States. The world exposition held in Osaka in 1970 also signified to the international community that Japan now stood at vanguard of global technology. While still locked in a geopolitical embrace with the United States as dictated by the US-Japan security agreement, Japanese society during the early 1970s was vastly more prosperous and confident than had been the case twenty years earlier. Accordingly, when the ruling regimes in both nations took initial steps toward the formal restoration of diplomatic ties in the early 1970s, how people in Japan viewed the PRC under Mao on the eve of normalization had also changed in significant ways. This chapter will illuminate and interpret the representative language and imagery that both shaped and reflected everyday Japanese percep­ tions of the Chinese world in 1971 and 1972. Often articulated through the expository framework of what John Dower has called “bridges of language”7—words and phrases coined in a previous historical context repurposed for use in a new setting while still retaining elements of their earlier renderings—my analysis of those perceptions will focus on four core ideas: the continent as a land of untapped commercial opportunity, the lure of unified Pan-Asian resistance to the West, the appeal of revolution­ ary gender dynamics in Chinese family life, and critical reflection on the costs of capitalist modernity. Taken together, the popular evidence related to the everyday Japanese rediscovery of the continent during the early 1970s reveals a complicated engagement with both the ancient roots and the contemporary condition of Japanese cultural and national identity.

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Rediscovery as Opportunity As noted previously, although the Japanese state did not formally rec­ ognize the PRC until 1972, by no means had that made commercial trade between the archipelago and the continent impossible; Japan’s ruling LDP regime had consistently pursued a policy of “separating politics from eco­ nomics” (seikei bunri) when it came to relations with the PRC. Numerous Japanese corporations had been investing in the Chinese economy since the 1950s, and the business lobby had been an influential force in press­ ing the Japanese political establishment to move toward normalization as quickly as possible throughout the postwar era. Nonetheless, the impending reestablishment of formal China-Japan ties in 1972 sparked a new wave of enthusiasm for Japanese engagement in the continental economy during the months leading up to that historic moment. The opportunity presented by a boom in continental commerce was multidimensional. The cartoonist Yokoyama Taizō captured a sense of the excitement for the profit-earning potential of Japanese goods in the Chinese market with an image depicting passengers disembarking from a Japanese airliner in China not as human travelers but as Niigata rice, miso paste, soy sauce, dried plums, and a computer.8 Makino Keiichi offered a similar com­ ment on business opportunities in the new China with a full-page cartoon showing airliners in flight to and from China carrying the caricaturized CEOs of Japan’s leading zaibatsu firms, such as Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Mitsubishi, under the caption “Is there anyone from the Japanese business world who is not going to China?”9 For many in Japan, the revitalization of Japan-China diplomacy was to be welcomed first and foremost because there was money to be made. Some publications also sought to satisfy the desire of everyday people for insight concerning how such expanded commercial relations with the mainland might change daily life in Japan, for better or for worse. The potential impact on everyday foodstuffs was an especially keen concern. A feature story in the Sunday Mainichi, for example, explained that while everyone had heard that meat in China was cheap, only canned meat was possible for import, as there were too many concerns about the safety of unprocessed meat. There was less concern of that sort when it came to vegetables and soybeans, and Chinese tobacco was also said to be lower in nicotine and blessed with a smooth flavor well suited to the Japanese smoker. With additional comments on the avail­ ability and low price of Chinese dishware, the article reflected a hope that perhaps household budgets in Japan might be stretched further with access to cheaper continental products.10

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The China boom in the popular imagination also proved a valuable marketing opportunity, and many Japanese companies took full and effec­ tive advantage. Kirin beer crafted a clever print advertising campaign that suggested its malty beverages could play a role in smoothing out ChinaJapan relations. Following a classical sixteen-character Chinese-style poem format and taking care to use the Chinese phrase nihao in the final line, the ad copy read: “Japan-China friendship (Nit-Chū tomodachi), promotion of understanding (rikai sokushin), a necessary condition (zettai jōken), hello Kirin (nihao Kirin).”11 An advertisement for kappa ebisen, the popular shrimp-flavored crackers, followed, with an image of a Mao-suited Chinese man and business-attired Japanese worker with their arms around each other’s backs. Overhead, the caption: “Renewing friendship after forty years” (yonjū nen buri no nakanaori), while in smaller text underneath the two men: “Look, let’s relax a bit” (ma, kata o harazu ni)12 (figure 4.1). On one level, the ad simply suggests that these crispy shellfish flavor–infused snacks would be the perfect complement to a drinking toast between two

FIG. 4.1 Print advertisement for “kappa ebisen” crackers. Repro­ duced under fair use provisions.

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old friends who have reconciled their differences after a long period of estrangement. The visual contrast between the two figures, however, is also telling; the angle-eyed Chinese and round-eyed Japanese seem to sug­ gest that, despite the recently warmed relations between the two societies, fundamental distance remained between the “Oriental” Chinese and the “Occidental” Japanese. Other ads made a more explicit attempt to market their products as valuable goods that would assist the potential customer in seizing the op­ portunities afforded by this upswing in Japan-China interaction. Two print advertisements for the Asahi Music Service (AMS) company similarly pitched their products as essential items for anyone eager to engage the Chinese world. One was for a “practical Chinese-language lecture series” of cassette tapes, depicted in the ad under the phrase “words are the bridge of friendship” (kotoba wa yūkō no kakebashi). On the opposite page was another ad for the “national songs of China” record album set, featuring the image of a spinning black record emblazoned with the words “Japan-China friendship” (Nit-Chū yūkō) and “cultural exchange through record albums” (rekōdo de bunka kōryū).13 Chinese-language training, in particular, seemed a field likely to experience increased popularity, so the Tōhō gakuen in Tokyo advertised “a new foundational course in Chinese to respond to the demands of a new age.”14 Similarly, an ad for the Chinese Conversation Academy in Tokyo proclaimed in its print promotional material, “Make real the Tanaka-Zhou meeting!” before going on to explain, “The Chineselanguage boom is about to begin! Become one of the Chinese-language elite sooner than anyone else.”15 If one did not have time to attend classes, language-training textbooks could play the same role. Nihao! Chūgokugo was pitched as a fun new foundational text in the Chinese language that would surely prove useful in understanding the China that has “suddenly become a nearby country” (kyūsoku ni chikai kuni ni natta).16 Beyond language proficiency, the need for knowledge of China’s geography was emphasized in a promotion for the seventy-fifth anniversary edition of a Provincial Atlas of Continental China published by the Foreign Affairs Press with the phrase “advance the normalization of Japan-China rela­ tions, know the new China.” Touted as a valuable source of knowledge for newcomers to China, the ad also promised that “for those many thousands of repatriates, this book will also be a tool for both nostalgic reminiscing about the past and learning about the rapid progress of the new China.” In short, “the first step toward Japan-China friendship is knowledge of China,” the ad copy concluded, “and this book is indispensable in that task.”17

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The role one’s company had played in laying the foundations for restored relations in earlier years also proved a useful advertising gimmick. The Bank of Tokyo, for example, proclaimed that “a new age of the yen and yuan” had arrived and that the bank was eager to assist its customers, as business was set to boom. The ad also stressed, however, that the Bank of Tokyo had formed an agreement with the Bank of China in 1958 and had been promoting commerce and trade ever since that time.18 Likewise, Chōri Chemicals pointed out in their advertisement that they had estab­ lished operations in China in 1961, “so China has been our friend for ten years already” (Chūgoku to wa, mo jūnen ki no tomodachi). That record of experience enabled Chōri to be a “bridge between the strengths of both countries” that could take full advantage of the industrial opportunities on the continent.19 Communication technology leaders KDD and NEC pitched similar ideas in their ads by stressing that the satellite reception facilities both had already set up in China proved their credentials as global leaders in bringing people and societies together.20 Even the Liberal Democratic Party of Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei saw the promotional value in using references to Japan-China normaliza­ tion as advertising copy. Above a large print slogan of “Determination and Execution—advancing the restructuring of the Japanese archipelago,” the image of a confident Tanaka was paired with the following brief narrative: “The normalization of Japan-China relations has been realized. Next are our domestic affairs. The restructuring of the Japanese archipelago is for the sake of the hundred million Japanese and their future generations. We are working toward the creation of a prosperous society. Now is the time for determination and execution! Do it together with the LDP.”21 The ad designers even went so far as to play the China “cute” card by melding an adorable panda image into the LDP logo at the bottom of the full-page promotional spot. The implication, of course, was that because Tanaka and the LDP had achieved great success on the foreign policy front, they could be trusted to deliver the same sort of positive results at home. The Isuzu automobile company produced an advertisement that com­ bined elements of both contemporary China branding as well as a vision of the continent that called upon deeply embedded perceptions of China as a vast expanse of untapped economic potential. Beside a photograph of a blue Isuzu dump truck parked on rugged terrain, with container bed raised and a wide blue sky behind it, the title caption read: “Isuzu, flour­ ishing on the immense Chinese continent” (kōdai na Chūgoku tairiku de katsuyaku suru Isuzu). The ad copy then went on to point out that the value of Isuzu trucks, vehicles that had carried out the “great revolution”

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of Japanese transport shipping (dai kakumei, an obvious reference to the Chinese Cultural Revolution), had long been recognized by the Chinese.22 The ad depends for its impact on the popular association made in Japan between endurance and dependability and what it takes to carve a living out of the rough wilds of the Chinese interior. Such language and imagery would likely have resonated just as well with Japanese readers in 1932 as it did in 1972, since the Chinese interior was routinely represented during the early 1930s as “vast empty tracts of fertile farmland” awaiting the bold and adventurous rural Japanese immigrant settler.23 The visual content and rhetorical phrasing of all these advertisements suggest that Japanese companies saw a benefit to be had by employing a positive association between the normalization of Japan-China relations specifically, as well as with Chinese society in general, and the promotion of their products and services. As historical sources, then, such evidence can serve as a useful measure of public opinion. Still, “while it may be tempting to say that advertisements are a kind of index, which enables historians to track what is implicit in the cultures they serve, that is surely too simple,” Ludmilla Jordanova has contended, since “advertisements do not passively reflect what is ‘out there,’ but are in conversation with their environment.”24 Nonetheless, advertising, like comic humor, operates with certain assumptions about its audience to be effective. Without confidence that Japanese consumers would be persuaded by references to enthusiastic engagement with the new China, such imagery and language would surely not have appeared so frequently in advertising copy. For the Japanese company looking to cash in on lucrative commercial possibilities, employees would soon need to travel to the continent to cul­ tivate trade links and seal new corporate deals. Many popular magazines thus offered advice for the eager Japanese businessman in a rush to get a jump on the competition by making a trip to the mainland.25 A lively article entitled “A salaryman must-read—rules for getting on well with Chinese” began by noting that for a Japanese businessman to be success­ ful in China he would need to avoid potentially offensive behavior by becoming familiar with important social customs. Because few people use “name cards” (meishi) in China, the article warned, the Japanese company representative had to be ready to introduce himself with a handshake and a look in the eyes of his Chinese counterpart. It was also suggested that one avoid mixing foreign words into Japanese speech, as the interpreters would both be frustrated by the unclear meaning of such phrases and “wonder why you can’t express yourself in your own language.” A sensitive awareness of the wartime past was also advised: one should not refer to places in

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China with terms used by Japanese during the colonial era. Likewise, the piece suggested that one avoid mentioning dogs. Chinese people quickly associate canine companions with the legacies of colonialism because of the infamous sign in the park in the old International Concession area of Shanghai that read “no Chinese or dogs allowed.” In addition, as much as a Japanese businessman might enjoy playing mahjong and expect that their Chinese hosts do as well, the game is considered as one of the “three evils” of old China, along with opium and prostitution, so it should not be mentioned. Finally, the article admonished Japanese corporate visitors not to leer at women during business dinners or make comments about their appearance. Because women in China work just like men and in many cases hold positions of power and influence, the essay explained, it is best to play it safe and not make any sort of sex-related comments.26 Of course, that male Japanese businessmen would need to be told to avoid this sort of boorish behavior in China suggests that it was a common occurrence back home. Another article filled with valuable advice for the traveler also agreed that one should avoid the use of wartime-era phrases, at which Chinese quickly take offense. Additionally, it was recommended that the Taiwan problem and the fate of Lin Biao were topics best left unmentioned. As a precise example of what not to do when in China, in fact, the article named the 1966 Ōya Sōichi cohort of observers as a group that had made a decid­ edly poor impression on their Chinese hosts. It was not only the unflattering comments on the Cultural Revolution Ōya published when he returned to Japan that angered the Chinese but the behavior of the group’s members while in China. Fujiwara Hirotatsu, for example, got roaring drunk one evening and began to sing the unequivocally inappropriate tune “China nights” (Shina no yoru). The “boob legend” (oppai densetsu) of Kajiyama Toshiyuki, too, was still remembered in China with bitter resentment, the article claimed. As the story went, Kajiyama had brought various items of jewelry with him to China, thinking he could make presents of such things to the lovely young ladies he might meet along the trip. Never in fact hav­ ing such a chance, shortly before the group’s departure Kajiyama offered a pearl brooch to a young hotel elevator girl whose cuteness had caught his eye. She was thrilled at first, but when he reached out to pin it on her chest, she screamed and ran away terrified, convinced that Kajiyama was trying to grope her.27 With the opportunity to travel the continent in a far less restricted way than had been possible during the 1950s and 1960s, popular magazines in 1971 and 1972 were also filled with feature stories about what one could

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see in the new China. One article spoke of China as a place of “enormous area some twenty-six times the size of Japan” that was now like “virgin land opened up” (hirakareru shojochi) before the eager traveler, harkening back once more to rhetoric a Japanese colonial farmer of the early 1930s might have heard as state officials encouraged rural people to emigrate to the end­ less plains of Manchuria before the war. For “women and drink” one could always go to Taiwan, the piece continued, but a tour of mainland China was touted as a chance to see what the “realization of revolution” looks like. Other recommended sites to visit included “Guangzhou, where the world’s businessmen come to meet,” the “lovely street neighborhoods of ‘forest capital’ Beijing,” the “the relics of revolution in Yanan and Changsha,” “Shanghai, transformed from ‘devil city’ to ‘industrial metropolis,’” and even “Nanjing, with its still evident wartime scars.”28 Such feature stories on travel also often included maps meant to reac­ quaint readers with the spatial contours of the Chinese world. These maps are especially useful not so much for their cartographical accuracy but more for what they suggest about Japanese cultural perceptions of Chinese geog­ raphy. As the historian of cartography J. B. Harley has contended, “Maps are a graphic language to be decoded. They are a construction of reality, images laden with intentions and consequences that can be studied in the societies of their time.”29 Decoding the visual elements at work in popular Japanese travel maps of China during the early 1970s reveals a perception of the continent as a place both ancient and modern, exotic and familiar. As one might expect, travel maps often highlighted significant histori­ cal sites that any visitor would likely wish to see. Chief among them were the Great Wall, the Temple of Heaven, and the Forbidden City, but several maps also featured sites newer to the Japanese imagination, such as the Mawangdui archeological site in Changsha, Hunan province. Excavated for the first time in early 1972, maps from October issues of Shūkan posuto, Josei jishin, and Shūkan sankei included an image of a Western Han-dynasty noblewoman in a sarcophagus, one of the most widely publicized finds at that site because her corpse had survived nearly 1,800 years in remarkably good condition. More precise maps depicting distinct cityscapes such as Shanghai also referred to local spots of significance to Chinese historical personalities with strong connections to Japan, such as Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) and Lu Xun. The physical space of China not filled with ancient relics (temples, imperial treasures, palaces) in these popular travel maps was instead demarcated with symbolic imagery of natural resources such as petroleum, grain, and precious minerals.

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Perhaps the most common human figures to appear as decorative elements on such maps were either well-known individuals like Mao Ze­ dong and Zhou Enlai or generic caricatures of young Red Guards or rural farmers. Indeed, depictions of Red Guards were especially striking for the degree to which young revolutionary students were presented as friendly tour guides eager to welcome foreign visitors (figure 4.2).30 When it came to nonhuman figures, of course, nothing was more prevalent than the panda bear. Often shown with a bamboo branch in one hand while waving a warm hello with the other, the panda was the greatest visual cue for a China both exotic and nonthreatening. The depiction of an arriving Japanese visitor at Hong Kong in a Weekly Sankei magazine map is especially telling. The Japanese figure, dressed in a business suit and eyeglasses and with sharply parted hair, is met by his Chinese counterpart in a drab Mao coat and cap. The two are from different worlds, but on the map they greet each other with a warm handshake (figure 4.3).31 One might even read the image as a depiction of the continental motherland welcoming home a young son who had left the countryside for life in the big city long ago. The image of China that took shape in these travel maps offered the Japanese viewer both vibrant excitement and comfortable familiarity. In a roughly two-week journey that included conveyance by both air and rail, a visitor could experience the ancient continental past as well as its revolutionary present. Moreover, Mao and the Red Guards took equal bill­ ing with panda bears and Han-dynasty mummies; on the map, all became homogenized visual referents to a version of Chinese history and society that could entice and not intimidate a potential Japanese visitor. Mao’s China also became a place where one could discover new opportunities as well as reconnect with old traditions. The hometown of Confucius was a spot on the map where the nostalgic tourist could feel the presence of the past, while the vast mineral deposits of the northeast were a shaded region on the map where the adroit industrialist could envision a future brimming with development and wealth. Among those Japanese travelers who made the trip, some were left simply stupefied by what they saw in China. A forty-two-year-old business­ man who visited a zoo in the capital city while spending three weeks in the PRC during the summer of 1972 recalled: So, everyday animals like dogs and cats are on display at Beijing Zoo right alongside rare creatures like pandas. Why? Well, no one would waste food on dogs, cats, little birds, etc., so for an everyday person to keep such as animal

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FIG. 4.2 China travel map from Josei jishin magazine. Reproduced under fair use provisions.

as a pet is unforgivable there. That’s why they are in the zoo. As for the entry fee, there is no distinction for men, women, young, old . . . it’s forty yen for everyone. But, there is a discount for people under 120 centimeters. So a tall kid is penalized, but a short adult gets a favor. Isn’t that sort of discrimination kind of strange?32

A different traveler, however, made some sense out of the zoo admission price enigma. The Fuji Television newscaster Tsuyuki Shigeru, who toured the PRC on assignment in 1972, also noticed a seemingly odd pricing scheme at a zoo in Hangzhou. While adults were charged ten yen and children five, youngsters over 130 centimeters had to pay the same fee as adults. Tsuyuki connected this observation to something he experienced in

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FIG. 4.3 China travel map from Shūkan sankei magazine. © Shūkan sankei, October 17, 1972. Reproduced with permission.

a different context while on his trip. “When I was traveling with a youth swim team, I was invited to a dinner party,” he recalled. At the event, an eighteen-year-old Chinese student near me was very comfortably drinking cup after cup of very strong maotai liquor. In China there is no law about people under twenty being unable to drink alcohol. In Chinese society, more

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so than the matter of actual age, what matters is one’s strength and ability, as it makes up the spirit you can apply to serving the country. And, I think that also explains the pricing of children over 130 centimeters as adults at the Hangzhou zoo.33

In other words, Tsuyuki noticed something mentioned by many other Japa­ nese travelers in China. The age-based social distinctions so prevalent in Japan were rarely found at work in shaping Chinese social interactions. Elements of traditional East Asian culture still deeply embedded in the Jap­ anese world had ceased to play a discernible role at all in Chinese society. While much is revealed concerning Japanese perceptions of China by these writings, some Japanese journalists were more interested in deci­ phering Chinese perceptions of Japan. The Asahi correspondent Nishimura Hidetoshi, for example, while visiting the Beijing Zoo asked one Chinese visitor about his opinions on Prime Minister Tanaka’s visit. “Japanese imperialism inflicted many disasters upon the Chinese people,” the inter­ viewee replied, “but I know the Japanese people have long wanted friendly relations with China. The people of China and Japan must join hands, and if Tanaka’s visit is meant to realize that goal, I am very fine with it. I strongly support the hope of the Japanese people to achieve the normalization of relations with China.”34 Nishimura had a similar experience while visiting Beijing University when he asked a group of students who were study­ ing Japanese why they were doing so. “Japanese can only be used with Japanese people,” Nishimura said. “Don’t you think it would be better to study a language like English that is used around the world?” The students replied: “When it comes to manufacturing, Japan is a more advanced coun­ try than China. We have many things to learn from the Japanese people. And, China-Japan friendship is very important. We hope to play a part in creating friendship between Chinese and Japanese people.”35 As positive as these sentiments seemed, Nishimura also noted that the phrases everyday Chinese people used to express their feelings about China-Japan relations were nearly identical to those used in formal statements by Zhou Enlai and other party officials. He was left feeling like it was difficult to get a handle of the genuine thoughts of everyday people because they tended to parrot official lines.36 Some conversations, however, offered Nishimura a glimpse of more honest feelings. When discussing transportation with his female interpreter, Nishimura mentioned the idea that after relations are restored, Japanese rail engineers could build bullet trains in China, making domestic travel

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far more convenient. She replied in an unmistakably annoyed tone, “yes, that has been said.” Nishimura realized that in the way he had put it, she had detected an air of his belief in Japan’s technological superiority. While he had not intended that, he also could not deny that subconsciously such a sentiment had probably shaped his comment. “The Chinese people are working hard to forget the past,” he concluded, “but if they sense even slightly the idea that a foreign nation is trying to use their country for its own benefit, a strongly negative response will be clear.”37 Another everyday conversation gave Nishimura a valuable hint of a different dimension of popular Chinese perceptions of Japan in 1972. In Beijing, Nishimura was chatting with his Chinese driver and asked, “Has the arrival of a Japanese delegation and media been a subject of conversa­ tion among your friends and family?” “Yes, it has,” he replied. “But, here in Peking,” he continued, “foreigners come quite frequently.” Upon hearing the driver equate Japanese with any and every other “foreigner” coming to China, Nishimura wrote, “I got the feeling that I had been pushed away” (tsukihanasareta kanji datta). “Japanese and Chinese are of a shared cul­ ture and shared race” (dōbun dōshu), he concluded, but “to the Chinese, Japanese are foreigners to the last.”38 While Nishimura’s perception of lingering distance between the Chinese and Japanese people was surely genuine in many ways, a nonetheless powerful sense of shared Asian iden­ tity also shaped popular Japanese attitudes concerning the Chinese world on the eve of normalization in diplomatic relations. Pan-Asian Unity Redux While the Japanese state’s decision to secure the normalization of Ja­ pan-China relations in 1972 is often viewed as a reaction to the unexpected moves by President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger to do the same the previous year, the Japanese public at large had long been prepared for it. Granted, a Mainichi newspaper poll in early summer 1968 indicated that the restoration of relations with China was not necessarily a high-priority matter for many; other international issues seemed more pressing. When asked on which foreign policy matter do you want the government to direct its greatest effort, 55 percent indicated the return of Okinawa, 3 percent said the resolution of the Vietnam War, and only 17 percent suggested the restoration of diplomacy with the PRC (just slightly below 18 percent for the return of the northern territories from the USSR). When asked directly about the matter of Japan-China diplomacy,

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however, 79 percent responded that either relations should be restored right away, or, if not right away, Japan should at least deepen friendly ties with the PRC beyond their present state.39 On the matter of what factor played the greatest role in holding back the widely desired development of better relations between Japan and the PRC, Japan’s geopolitical ties with the United States loomed large in popular thinking. In a May 1970 Yomiuri poll, almost 25 percent of those respondents who sought closer ties with China saw sour relations between the United States and the PRC as the greatest obstacle preventing their frui­ tion, compared to 13.5 percent who pointed to Japan’s ties to the Nationalist regime on Taiwan as the main problem.40 A poll by the Asahi newspaper was even more damning of the detrimental impact of ties with the United States. In it, 64 percent of respondents agreed that it was imperative for Japan to establish formal relations with the PRC, and when asked directly if the US-Japan security agreement was preventing the normalization of Japan-China relations, 55 percent agreed that was the case.41 Some poll data even suggest that over the course of 1972 the im­ provement of relations with the PRC gradually became a higher priority than continuing to cultivate stable ties with the United States. When the Asahi asked poll respondents at the start of the year with which country do you think Japan needs to develop better relations, 33 percent indicated the PRC; 28 percent said the United States.42 By September, the same ques­ tion produced a nearly identical 29 percent for the United States, but those who choose the PRC increased to 38 percent. The reasons for choosing the PRC tended to focus on both the desire for regional peace and economic development as well as the deep cultural and historical ties between Japan and China; reasons for supporting the United States centered on the track record of postwar-era American economic and political support.43 For many, closer ties to the PRC thus meant a chance to break the chains of US dependency. Kondō Hidezō spoke to this idea with a cartoon image in which Prime Minister Tanaka dons a terribly tailored suit, with both arms and legs either too short or too long, while across the front of the garment is emblazoned the phrase “US-Japan security treaty” (anpo jōyaku). The caption below reads: “Well, I was not told to take it off, and if I do I’ll catch a cold.” In other words, the security agreement no longer fits, but Tanaka is reluctant to cast it off for fear of what trouble might befall him for doing so. Moreover, that the PRC had not demanded in any case that Japan turn away from its treaty agreement with the United States, Kondō’s image suggests, created an awkward and perhaps even slightly absurd situation for Japan’s political elite.44 The cartoonist Yokoyama Taizō

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captured a similar sentiment in a single-frame comic entitled “Chinese language boom,” in which a headband-sporting Japanese protester points a finger toward a large-nosed American serviceman while putting to use his newly acquired Chinese-language skills to shout “tsai chen” (zaijian), with the Japanese equivalent sayonara in parentheses, making clear that a new friend in the PRC might make it possible finally to say goodbye to the United States (figure 4.4).45 Ōshita Kenichi crafted an equally provocative image of pan-Asian unity in the postnormalization age by depicting the flagged arms of China and Japan shaking hands around a Northeast Asia–centered globe, with industrial factory smokestacks rising behind the embraced grips. A large

FIG. 4.4 Yokoyama Taizō cartoon showing a Japanese protester shouting zaijian (goodbye) in Chinese to a US soldier. Reproduced with permission from the Yokoyama family, facilitated by Yokoyama Ryūichi kinen mangakan.

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sprouting plant emerges from the soil of northeastern China and Japan, while the worried faces of big-nosed Western observers peek over the ho­ rizon at the scene, described in the caption as “Asia’s new shoots.”46 It was a visual trope reminiscent of Japan’s own imperial rhetoric of the 1940s. At that time, of course, expressions of pan-Asian resistance to the West were often just cynical rhetorical cover for Japan’s own exploitation of other Asian societies. In the context of 1972, however, it was perhaps understood as a more sincere sentiment of genuine shared interests and aims. Indeed, a perception of pan-Asian unity is clear in popular attitudes concerning the normalization of Japan-China relations. When a 1970 Mainichi opinion poll asked directly about the matter of restoring relations with the PRC, 86 percent of respondents agreed that relations should be established right away, as soon as possible, or eventually. For what reasons did those 86 percent give that response? Forty-seven percent said that a huge market was slipping away; only 10 percent said that fear of Chinese aggression was a factor. The largest percentage (50), however, gave as their reason that the PRC was a neighboring country with whom Japan shared a connection of “common culture, common race” (dōbun dōshu).47 That sentiment grew even stronger by 1971: In another Mainichi poll, 83 percent of respondents indicated that relations should be restored either immediately, as soon as possible, or eventually. Of those 83 percent, 49 percent indicated that the necessity of expanded trade was a primary reason behind their desire for normalization, and 53 percent suggested that Japan’s deep historical connections with China as a neighboring country were an important factor driving the push for normalized relations.48 Beyond poll numbers, a similar sense of warm affinity with the Chi­ nese people was evident in many popular sources of the day, especially Japanese descriptions of travel on the continent. A photojournalism spread in the Weekly Asahi, for example, titled “700 million people—their real face,” began with this bright narrative of the photographer’s experiences while traveling in China: A country vast in every direction. In the farming regions from the window of the train car, orderly fields are laid out across the land, and vegetable flowers are in full bloom. New buds emerging from lines of poplar and willow trees. Traveling in China for three weeks in the lovely months of April and May. Everywhere images of Mao, the little red book, and preparations for war; we also felt a sense of confused wonderment. But now with the trip over, what remains in my heart are the rural people’s communes, urban factories, handshakes of friendship with everyday people, and the cherubic smiles of

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small children. At a Beijing middle school a young boy carried my camera bag and aided me in my work for two hours. We could not communicate with words, but I felt so happy as if he was my little brother.49

The author of historical fiction Uezaka Fuyuko, on the other hand, ex­ pressed ambivalence concerning China and Japan’s shared cultural ele­ ments. “In a market one finds things familiar to Japanese like tofu and miso lined up, and you get the feeling of close familiarity as a fellow East Asian” (Tōyōjin), she wrote of her time traveling in China, “but then you feel shocked at the sight of a butchered cat strung up in the meat shop.” Despite such unsettling experiences, Uezaka nonetheless returned to Japan with a positive assessment of Chinese society: “While certainly the standard of living is low . . . the cheerful disposition of the people living that life left a strong impression in my heart.”50 The comforting cultural affinity suggested by a feeling of dōbun dōshu could also lead an eager Japanese traveler or businessman in China down a thorny path of linguistic miscommunication. One magazine feature first warned its readers that many Japanese people think reading Chinese will be easy because their eyes can recognize many characters. Many of the words that look familiar to Japanese nonetheless have different meanings in China. For example, the article explained, the Japanese word tegami (a letter to someone) in China means toilet paper, kisha (steam train) means automobile, shōshin (timid, cowardly) means to be careful, and musume (daughter) often means mother. With a misunderstanding of the term in the Chinese context, the article warned, “you might find yourself hosting an important Chinese client and saying, ‘Your adorable mother must be crawling around all over the place these days.’”51 The goodwill cultivated by the pan-Asian spirit of the day was also a delicate sentiment easily unsettled, as the cartoonist Hashimoto Masaru discovered after going a bit too far with his satirical wit. Above the caption “Japan-China friendship, banzai!” Hashimoto sketched a caricature image of Mao Zedong’s face positioned in the spot where the Meiji-era educator Fukuzawa Yukichi’s portrait would normally be on a 10,000-yen note. What caused him trouble, however, had nothing to do with the Mao-Fukuzawa switch but rather the comical depiction of the Chairman making what the Japanese call an akanbee facial expression—using the two index fingers to push the eyelids backward while sticking out one’s tongue. Hashimoto’s intention as the comic artist was to suggest that the PRC would benefit greatly in a financial sense from the restoration of Japan-China relations because it would lead to a massive influx of Japanese investment, and

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having Mao make the akanbee face on the 10,000-yen note was a way of lightly taunting the Japanese side of the relationship.52 As Hashimoto explained several months later, when the magazine received criticism from some readers over the unflattering depiction of Mao, the parent publishing company retracted the issue. The editorial of­ fice explained that the image was meant to critique the economic motives behind the normalization agreement, not as sabotage of Japan-China friend­ ship. The trouble did not end there. In October, Beijing issued a formal criticism of the image, and the controversy was rekindled. Finally, the magazine printed a public apology in the November 7 issue expressing deep regret for insulting Mao and the Chinese people with Hashimoto’s comic. “Would it have been OK to draw a panda making an akanbee face?” Hashimoto asked sarcastically as he defended his image and warned that satirical freedom was of central importance in a democratic society. 53 The controversy over Hashimoto’s cartoon was a reminder that despite the freeflowing goodwill in Japan-China relations of that moment, sensitivities of national pride had to be kept in mind. The spirit of “common culture, common race” had its limits. Nonetheless, the language of reconciliation between two close neigh­ bors who shared deep cultural ties came into wide popular use in many contexts in 1972. Just as he did during the Cultural Revolution years, Shōji Sadao took the language of a current topic in Japan-China relations and transformed it into a piece of risqué salaryman humor. A sixteen-panel comic story published in Weekly Gendai begins with a middle-aged male office worker staring down at his desk with a sad look on his face. “Are you still in a Cold War with your wife?” a passing colleague asks. “Sure am,” he replies. We next see him walking up his front steps, package under his arm, and then taking off his necktie, his wife sipping tea quietly at a table next to him. Suddenly, he goes to the sink, fills a cup with water, and inexplicably tosses it on his wife. “What the hell are you doing, throwing water on my skirt?” she shouts back at him. The husband then replies, holding a prepared speech, “For the great trouble I have caused, I now express my deep regret. A long era of misfortune has continued between you and me.” The husband’s speech to his angry wife borrows the exact phrasing of the speech made by Prime Minister Tanaka to Zhou Enlai in Beijing in September 1972. “There has been a wide gulf between us,” he goes on, “and we have differences of opinion . . . but let us forgo the small differences and accept what is best for all. We are after all of a shared culture and shared race” (dōbun dōshu). With his wife won over, she goes to get a second sake cup and join him in a toast. After raising their glasses,

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he presents her with a toy panda, with which she is absolutely delighted. His mother-in-law then slides open a door, asking, “So, are you two done fighting?” “We will issue a joint statement later,” the wife replies. “Now, let us get down to closing that gap between us,” and she leads her husband to the bedroom futon.54 The Liberated Chinese Woman Many dimensions of the popular Japanese perceptions of China in 1972 examined so far in this chapter were reflected in a fascinating survey conducted by the magazine Weekly Sankei entitled “This Is How Japanese Young People Think about China.” The feature story provided the answers of fifty respondents ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-six, including high schoolers, college students, office ladies, and salaryman corporate workers to a set of six questions, three of which are especially relevant to the present discussion: “When you hear the name ‘China,’ what is the first thing that comes to mind? When you look at the apparel of people in China, what feeling do you have? After normalization, where would you first like to travel in China, and what do you want to see?”55 Responses to the query about what image first comes to mind when hearing “China” varied widely. Not surprisingly, perhaps, many indicated Chairman Mao or throngs of Red Guards clutching little red books. More than a few others, however, said things such as “China’s enormous land and its 700 million people,”56 or “the mighty Yellow river that has carried with it thousands of years of Chinese history,”57 or “wide open plains and huge mountains.”58 Still others were either remarkably specific or interpretively deep, such as “Chinese poets like Bai Letian and Du Fu and the later Han-dynasty tombs at Mawangdui”59 or “the character for the ‘unification’ (tōitsu) of all without exception into one group.”60 The responses to two of the more mundane questions, about one’s im­ pressions of Chinese fashion and where one would like to travel in China, offered some of the most revealing insights. Regarding clothing in Chinese society, some simply said “drab, unappealing, dreary, dull,” while others read deeper interpretive meaning into the lack of fashion variety. “I get the sense that all seven hundred million Chinese are subjected to total control and there is no individualism,” responded one salaryman.61 “I feel a strong revulsion for so many people wearing the same thing, not because they want to, but because they feel they have to,” replied another.62 Concerning travel destinations, many gave predictable locales such as the Great Wall, the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the natural beauty of Yunnan. More

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imaginative in their thinking, one seventeen-year-old male high schooler replied, “I’d like to ride a horse around the wide-open China plain,”63 a young male businessman said he wanted “to cruise down the Yangzi in a motorboat,”64 and a twenty-five-year-old office lady identified her top sightseeing priority as simply “old books.”65 Among all the survey answers, the comments made by young female respondents were especially telling. One female college student described Chinese clothing as “a highly practical and rational style of dress unlike anything else in the world,”66 while another offered an equally positive sentiment by claiming that “while the clothing seems drab and cheap, I also get the sense that people feel excited about working hard to achieve a more prosperous lifestyle in the future.”67 Taking a position more critical of Japan than China, a twenty-two-year-old female office worker said that while female fashion in China seems “simple,” it was not “boorish and dumb.” She went on, “I don’t think the fashion of Japanese women is all that nice, so Chinese women should stick with their style proudly.”68 Com­ bining her feelings about fashion and possible travel destinations, another female college student said, “I want to put on Chinese clothes, go without any makeup at all, and take a walk along the banks of the Yangzi.”69 Comments such as these suggest that during the early 1970s, just as was true during the Li Dequan tour of 1954, many Japanese women saw in the everyday lives of their Chinese counterparts a freedom and liberty they lacked in their own world at home. In other sources, the contrast between China and Japan concerning gender relations and family dynamics was another popular topic of discussion. Put simply, the image of liberated Chinese women featured prominently in Japanese representations of the new China; she was strong and rugged but also plain and simple. A mani­ festation of great beauty in the unadorned, the Chinese woman was admired and eroticized at the same time. Significantly, the typical Japanese woman was also compared unfavorably to her in many ways. In the pages of Young Lady magazine, Sasaki Hatsuko, who had lived in Tianjin for twenty-seven years before returning to Japan in 1971, offered an extensive set of observations on the daily lives of women in China: The Chinese women with whom I lived daily life are very different from Japanese women. First, in China they do not wear stockings. These days one might see a young girl in a skirt, but for the most part men and women, old and young, wear blue cotton trousers. On top, they wear a cotton shirt. As for shoes, Chinese women gather up old fabric and canvas and make their own

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shoes by hand. Cosmetics can be found in department stores, but lipstick and white face powder are something only seen on brides on their wedding day. No one perms their hair, women in their twenties wear their hair in braids, in their thirties and over in a short cut. Men and women are completely equal, and it is a core principle that women also work. Childcare centers are set up for that purpose. Marriages are almost all based on love, and coworkers give their support to love marriages. Having children outside of marriage is criticized. Men from age thirty and women from age twenty-five are expected to marry, and state policy requires they conceive no more than three children. For that reason, birth-control methods are provided. The women of China work together with men on the premise of building the motherland.70

While she begins by noting matters of appearance, Sasaki quickly turns to deeper issues of social equality. The special attention she gives to mar­ riage based on love and widespread support for women in the workplace suggests that the female reader in Japan would recognize both as elements not so common in her own life. A pair of thirty-something Japanese housewives who each spent roughly two years in the PRC because their husbands had been assigned there offered a glowing assessment of Chinese women in Housewife Lifestyle (Fujin seikatsu). As the spouses of a business executive and diplomat respectively, Mrs. Takikawa and Mrs. Iwasaki both admitted to living in posh accommodations and rarely shopping in local markets, but the lives of Chinese women made a deep impression on them nonetheless. “Women do not use any cosmetics,” Iwasaki noted, “but their natural faces are beautiful. I thought this was really quite grand. When I came back to Japan I felt embarrassed even to wear rings and earrings . . . it really had an impact on me.” Both also spoke of how the sort of gender equality in everyday Chinese society was something that “women in today’s Japan cannot even think of.” Balanced gender expectations along with the avail­ ability of household goods at low prices, both claimed, made the PRC a “heaven for the housewife.” “If not for concerns about my children’s schooling,” Takikawa said, “I’d love to live in China again.” “I recently spent four weeks in Europe,” she went on, “but these days China has many of the best things of Europe, too.” “Many of my neighbors say to me,” Iwasaki concluded, “ ‘China must be scary.’ But, I think Japanese housewives and Chinese housewives know too little about each other’s countries. I’d truly love to see the day come when housewife-level ex­ change is possible.”71

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For some Japanese observers, while the everyday behavior of Chi­ nese women sometimes could be disconcerting, it was also inspirational. A Japanese businessman and his wife who visited China in the summer of 1972 remembered: When Chinese women sit down in a chair, they do so with their legs wide open. Young women, too, everyone does so. Even an actress I met sat down with her knees far apart without a care. It’s because they don’t wear miniskirts . . . if they do wear a dress it is floor length, but just about all the time it is plain cotton pants. The strength and courage of women . . . that’s what comes across from that wide-open leg sitting style.72

A Japanese graduate student in international economics who visited China in August 1972 noted the impressive practicality of the typical Chi­ nese woman: “Chinese women make their panties by hand, you know. They sew it together with thread and cloth they get on their own . . . not much to look at, but since no one is meant to see them anyway, they use red, blue fabric . . . anything. There are probably very few Chinese women who wear white underpants.” A thirty-year-old Japanese woman raised in China who returned to Japan in 1971 similarly commented: When I found out that young women in Japan all wear bras, I was surprised. It gave me kind of a weird feeling. Unmarried women in China don’t wear bras. Only after getting married does a woman wear a bra . . . sort of a way of showing publicly “hey, I am a wife.” Women don’t shave their armpits either . . . so even on hot days no one wears short-sleeve shirts. Nobody wears stockings are camisoles either. It’s because nobody tries to flirt by showing that sort of thing.73

What both sets of observations share is a perception that because what Chinese women focus most on in daily life is doing their part to contribute to society, concerns about fashionable appearance play little part in moti­ vating their everyday actions. A photojournalism feature in the magazine Modern Day (Gendai) ex­ pressed similar sentiments. Next to a shot of three young women washing clothes outside, the caption read: “Chinese women like cleanliness; they make no attempt to attract men with fancy clothing, their dress is modest and frugal. Clothing is abundant, but they still value their items, washing often and patching up tears, so it can be worn for a long time.”74 Elaborat­ ing on what made Chinese women so remarkable, the story represented

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the new Chinese woman as both powerful and beautiful. Opening with an image showing a row of stern-faced young women clutching Kalashnikov rifles, the captioned explained that the Chinese people’s constant state of readiness for war is more than Japanese can imagine. Men and women together train for military action, it continued, and young girls begin with wood rifles from an early age and then use the real thing later. “During training they wear solemn and severe faces, but once training is over there are many kind and graceful daughters among them.”75 In later pages, after a pair of photos featuring young gymnasts training and young girls swim­ ming at the beach—both emphasizing the physical strength and unadorned beauty of the typical Chinese woman—the reader finds a close-up shot on two smiling faces. After noting that without any sort of cosmetics at all women in China look very young, the caption explained, “During our travels we assumed that our female interpreter was a recent college gradu­ ate of twenty-four or -five but were surprised to learn that she was a thirtytwo-year-old mother of a five-year-old son. Women will gladly speak of their age, and unlike in Japan no one judges a single woman of thirty-five to be some sort of old miss.”76 Other Japanese travelers, too, noted the extraordinary natural beauty of the Chinese women they encountered. The writer Nagai Michiko, for example, commented after her stay in China: “The faces of Chinese women who do not use any make up at all . . . they are truly beautiful. They look about ten years younger than they really are. Makes one think that cosmetics really do something awful to one’s skin.”77 Other Japanese observers, however, saw the reluctance of Chinese women to use cosmetics as sad and tragic. A Japanese businessman who had visited in November 1972, for example, noted that it was certainly possible to find luxury goods such as cosmetics and fur coats in department stores but that no Chinese women would purchase such things. He then recalled: I tried to give some Japanese lipstick as a gift to a hotel staffer who had been especially helpful to me, but she refused, saying, “I have no use for such extravagant things.” I got the sense that Mao Zedong’s thought has really taken over deep here. Then, a few moments later, she came back to my room and said, “I apologize for being rude earlier. As you were kind enough to offer me a gift, I will accept it gladly.” Of course, I happily gave it to her. Then, right there in the room she looked at the mirror and began to apply the lipstick, almost seeming to forget that I was there. Then, she quickly turned back to me, said thank you again, and started to wipe off the very lipstick she had just applied, before she then left the room. I felt so sorry for her. Young

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women here want to put on makeup and have fun looking beautiful. But they are afraid that they will be criticized as bourgeois for doing so.78

Some articles in popular magazines were quick to cast a bit of dark­ ness on the seemingly bright lives of Chinese women in other ways as well. Population growth was a keen concern of the party-state in the PRC, of course, which placed great pressure on women to avoid having too many children too soon in their lives. One Japanese visitor to China thus remem­ bered hearing “of a woman who got pregnant with a third child and, fearing that increased household duties would prevent her from contributing to national construction, got an abortion.” Another recalled the story a woman who became pregnant young and fell down the second-floor stairs of her apartment building, suffering a miscarriage: “No one was sure if she fell on purpose, or was pushed, or if it was truly an accident, but she was praised greatly by her neighbors.”79 Despite the occasional tale of sadness and struggle, however, the overwhelming majority of stories about the lives of Chinese women were positive. One term that appeared with remarkable frequency in the print media related to both Chinese women and Chinese society at large dur­ ing the popular Japanese rediscovery of the continent in 1972 was sugao. Literally translated as “unpainted face,” it can also mean “plain, honest, and frank expression,” and as such it is a useful concept for interpreting Japanese views of China at that historical moment. To frame characteriza­ tions of Chinese society and the Chinese people within the notion of sugao was on the one hand to mark China as rustic, ordinary, underdeveloped, and thus lagging behind the postwar-era achievements of the Japanese world. Just as effectively, however, sugao could suggest a more positive associa­ tion of the Chinese world with sincerity, authenticity, and unspoiled beauty, in turn rendering Japanese society by comparison as vapid, superficial, and corrupt. A photograph of a young woman participating in military drills that appeared in a 1972 collection of images by the photographer Mitome Tadao captures the sentiments embodied in so many photos of young Chinese women in Japanese mass periodicals at this moment in Japan-China re­ lations (figure 4.5). With a caption that reads, “With elevated wariness, protect the motherland!” (keikaishin o takame, sokoku o bōei shiyō!), the teenaged girl framed centrally in the shot possesses youthful vigor, natural beauty, and fierce strength.80 Presented to the Japanese reader as someone so strikingly different from a teenage girl in Japanese society of the early 1970s, her image is both shocking and odd but also admirable and even

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FIG. 4.5 Mitome Tadao photograph of a young Chinese woman participating in military drills in September 1971. Reproduced with permission from Mainichi News/Aflo images.

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inspirational. The photograph thus reflects not only popular Japanese per­ ceptions of Chinese women at that moment but Chinese society at large as well. What Is ‘Prosperity’? As Japanese society reached unprecedented levels of industrial capi­ talist modernity by the early 1970s, the rediscovery of China also provided an opportunity to reflect upon the costs of that transformation. In one con­ text, the PRC was seen as quaint, backward, and poor in many ways, but in another it was represented as more sincere, diligent, authentic, and indeed richer in its rustic simplicity than was Japan at the peak of its postwar era of high-speed growth. Admiration for the independent spirit of Chinese society, for instance, was a common theme in many popular magazines. As the members of a Japanese photojournalist team explained in a Weekly Asahi visual feature story, “It is said that China now, after passing through the tumult of the Cultural Revolution era, is steadfastly following a path of progress and advancement. Certainly, the energy and strength of these seven hundred million people are without limit. In the spirit of ‘self-sufficiency’ (jiriki kōsei; Ch. zili gengsheng), they are putting all their strength and dedication toward realizing their potential. We were also taken aback by the consistent admonitions against wastes and extravagance.” It continued, “walking the streets one might see signs of poverty in everyday life,” but the warm­ ness of the welcome the Japanese group received “shows the openness and richness in the hearts of the people.”81 In another photography feature in Weekly Asahi focused on the daily lives of everyday people in Chinese society, one page captured the image of dozens of urban workers in openair truck beds on their way to work, paired with a second image of a city street filled by bicyclists. The caption reads, “Group commuting by truck is important here; China is a country of bicycles, so there is no traffic mess like in Japan. The site of men and women pedaling to work seems fitting for a nation of jiriki kōsei.”82 An especially flattering assessment of China’s industrial capacity and technological prowess was offered in the Monthly Economist, with an article entitled “The Industrial Strength of Seven Hundred Million People—China Built by Self-Sufficiency,” written by Katayama Ichirō, a Takeyama Engineering employee. “The Great Wall built in the time of the first emperor of the Qin, for its technical skill, is a marvel of not just Chi­ nese but world history. That tradition lives in China today, too.” Referring

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to the newly built bridge crossing the Yangzi in northern Nanjing, he went on, “It is the Great Wall of the present day, built over the course of nine years by the labor of more than 50,000 workers and the spirit of ‘selfsufficiency.’ ” Katayama also contended that “the level of technological expertise in China is higher than most in Japan imagine is the case,” and significantly, “this high level of skill is the result of the sweat and muscle of the Chinese people and their slogan of ‘self-sufficiency.’” Drawing ul­ timately a critical comparison with Japan, Katayama concluded: “Theirs is entirely different from the ‘grafted technological skill’ (tsugiki gijutsu) developed by importing technology from overseas in countries such as ours.”83 Japan’s industrial success had depended in large part on the United States for its development, but that was not so with China. Although Soviet support had been substantial during the early 1950s, that foreign aid had dried up by 1960. For Katayama, the PRC’s achievements in 1972 deserved special recognition for their indigenous roots. In describing the historical richness of the Forbidden City and its treasures, Katayama remarked that Chinese relics were “of an entirely dif­ ferent nature than Japanese historical remains.” Moreover, he described a museum of treasures near the palace that had no security measures at all. The museum staff simply closed the door at night and went home, explaining that there were no thieves to worry about. Even if someone stole an item, what would they do with it? It was an attitude he described as “unimaginable in capitalist nations” of the world. Katayama was also struck by the abundant greenery in Chinese cities, noting that since libera­ tion in 1949, two million trees had been planted in Nanjing, and more were being planted every day. “It was something that made me rethink my own country, which had destroyed its green spaces in the name of development.” It was the Chinese people, however, that made the strongest impression on him. “What I felt the greatest admiration for was the heart of the people . . . workers give their all for the sake of the community, and the children are cheerful. . . . I wonder if it is not now too late for us to regain that same kind of purity of heart.”84 Such celebratory features in mass magazines were, of course, not necessarily neutral in their coverage. A special edition of Weekly Post, which promised to provide “sixty problems and answers about today’s China that you will want to know,” was assembled with support of the Japan-China Cultural Exchange Association, a group with an unabash­ edly pro-China agenda. Describing the liberation of Chinese women, for example, the issue explained that the condition of women in the PRC was “completely different from Japan, where it is so common for women, even

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those with real talent, to be burdened with housework and childrearing and relegated to an existence in the living room and bedroom.” Turning to the children of China, it continued, “when you look at the expressions of the children, you can know if the people in a society are happy with their daily life. The expressions of Chinese children are . . . cheerful. In China there is not a single child suffering from thalidomide poisoning or Minamata disease. They are growing up happily under the loving care of the state.”85 As politically motivated as it surely was, the piece nonetheless had the potential to resonate with a Japanese public keen to critique the costs of high-speed growth. The photographer Mitome Tadao also probed meaningful questions about the true character of Japan’s capitalist modernity through his pho­ tographic essays on Chinese society. A widely traveled photojournalist, Mitome made two trips to the PRC as the normalization of diplomatic rela­ tions with Japan was drawing near. The first, which lasted for several weeks in September and October 1971, came about by way of his participation in a Japan-China Cultural Exchange Association group tour; the second was a much longer stay between June and August 1972 at the invitation of Xinhua state media officials in the PRC.86 It is important to note that both trips were facilitated by organizations infused with a strong desire to see Mao’s China depicted overseas in a complimentary light, and it seems unlikely that Mitome, being a left-leaning visual chronicler of Japan to the world, was made uncomfortable by that fact. That Mitome’s photographs were framed to facilitate a political goal, however, does not mean that the images are only useful in determining the aims of the forces behind their produc­ tion. Mitome understood well what sort of imagery would resonate with the Japanese public, and he selected subjects for his photos that he knew would interest his domestic audience. The photos can thus provide insight on popular Japanese perceptions of the Chinese world in 1971 and 1972. One series of his began with an image of young men and children on a Beijing street: “When you walk into a Beijing market you get the scent of real everyday life . . . such a variety of meats, vegetables, and fruits. Everything is not wrapped up and packaged like when you go into a Japanese department store market . . . food is not something to be seen but something to be eaten!” Suggesting that one must honestly question the definition of prosperity when walking down a Beijing street, he explained, “You don’t see leisure businesses or the latest sports cars, but you also do not see lines of poplar tress destroyed by pollution. You see parents and children walking under those trees free from fear of automobile exhaust poison, just chatting leisurely away. Japan in 1972 . . . I think it would be

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wise to rethink the notion of just what ‘prosperity’ really is.”87 Mitome continued developing these themes in other photo spreads for several dif­ ferent magazines. Below a photo in Weekly Post of one of the poplar-lined streets he mentioned in the Sunday Mainichi piece, his captions read, “a dinner out is thirty yen, the commuting rush is on bicycle, there are hardly any cars on the tree-lined streets . . . these are the things I would like to show the Japanese salaryman!” He went on, “in factories, too, where to be sure technology is behind the times, there is far greater care given to the happiness of the workers than in Japan.” He then concluded with the following poignant reflections: “What is ‘prosperity’? What is ‘happiness with life’? When compared with today’s Japan, there are many things in China to make one think about those questions.”88 Along with the comments made by Japanese such as Mitome who traveled to the PRC and discovered ways in which life in Chinese society seemed better than in Japan, the observations of Japanese who had made the opposite journey—returning to a somewhat “foreign” Japan after living for many years on the continent—were equally revealing. In a roundtable discussion between four such returnees published in the Asahi Journal, for example, Ōkubo Ichirō, who had been born in China in 1946 and “re­ turned” to Japan in 1970, claimed that in Chinese cities, “most people just ride bicycles to work. There is no awful commute like in Japan. I mean I have to spend an eighth of my day inside a train now. And, the national rail­ road is still short of money!” Continuing the theme of daily transportation, Okabe Keiji, who had spent thirty years in China between 1942 and 1972, recalled that in China “drivers look out for pedestrians in the road. In Japan, traffic rules say that if a pedestrian walks into a street against a red light and is struck, it is the pedestrian’s fault. In China, red light or not, drivers first take care to notice if there is someone in the street.” Fifty-seven-yearold Yagi Yutaka, who returned to Japan in 1970 after thirty-five years in China, lamented, “when I came back to Japan, I had the strong feeling that Japan was a wasteful society. Things that can still be used are so casually thrown away. Over there it is unthinkable that one would waste two or three hours a day round trip just getting to work and back. And, numerous stores selling the same items are lined up on the same street. In Kanda there are countless bookstores, in Akihabara innumerable electronics stores. Just a ridiculous amount of waste.”89 What many in Japan and elsewhere would see as the free-market wonder of endless choices for consumption, Yagi saw as ludicrous redundancy. Turning to other points of comparison, Ōkubo explained that when he came back to Japan, “I was surprised by the poor condition of rural

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villages. The fields looked awful. Young people all leave for the city. In China, youngsters from the city go out to the villages to work in the fields. It the exact opposite of Japan! All kinds of chemicals are used on crops, too . . . I can’t feel safe about eating it.” Yagi then took the conversation back to matter of interpersonal interactions. “Basic human relations are breaking down here,” he said speaking of Japanese society. “Everyone just lives in their own little shell. Over there (in China), neighbors are always there for one another. When someone is ill, everyone will do something to help.” Ōkubo agreed, adding, “the notion that a local elder could die in hospital and people would not know about it for a month is just unthinkable in China.” Okabe wrapped up the dialogue with an especially insightful and critical observation. “Chinese people often say that the Japanese really are very hard working and diligent,” he claimed. “This is surely true, but the fact that simply working hard does not improve our quality of life is proof that the social structure itself is flawed. But, you know, one’s country is one’s country, so I think we can just live together and try step by step to make things better.”90 A feature story entitled “A Close Examination of the Chinese Sala­ ryman Lifestyle” constructed a sharp comparison of the urban Chinese worker with his white-collar counterpart in Japan to offer a similarly selfcritical conclusion. At the end of the workday, it began, when the Japanese salaryman is heading out to a bar, restaurant, or mahjong parlor, the Chinese salaryman is hopping on his bicycle to pedal home. “In China both men and women work,” the article explained, “so except for children and the elderly, everyone is a salaryman.” With both parents working, “the Japa­ nese way of dad earning money and mom taking care of home is unheard of” in China. “Cooking and cleaning is done by men, too,” it continued, “so the Japanese thinking that only women do laundry and prepare meals is absent.” This did not mean, the article explained, that the Chinese worker had nowhere to go for relaxation after work—there were large public din­ ing halls where he could chat leisurely with friends and coworkers—but there were no cabarets, hostess clubs, or Turkish baths “like in Japan.” When it came to daily life, Chinese families lived in modest apartments near their workplace. By comparison with Japan, monthly income for the family seemed low, but prices for daily goods in China were also far lower than in Japan, with childcare facilities and medical expenses covered by the workplace. Also, unlike Japanese families who were always “chasing after the forefront of consumer civilization,” furniture and appliances in China were very simple. “This might seem an inconvenience to Japanese eyes,” the explanation continued, “but in a system where it is policy to make

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needed goods available to everyone, they don’t have the intense competi­ tion of capitalist industry.”91 To the Japanese salaryman, the article suggested, the life of the Chi­ nese worker seemed like a “totally different world.” The Japanese worker, it contended, aims to earn money to buy land, build a house, give his children an education, and save up enough to care for himself in old age. Indeed, in Japan there was an inexhaustible supply of “stuff” to buy, and money could get one anything at all. There were surely many Japanese then who would look at the Chinese salaryman lifestyle as intolerable. “The Chinese salaryman, however, would see the Japanese salaryman’s life as equally odd,” the article continued. For him the idea of laboring hard toward private acquisition of land and wealth would not make sense. For him, land and property belong to the state and are provided to him when needed. “So, it makes more sense for him to work for the good of the community at large rather than thinking only of himself. The Japanese salaryman’s ‘my home’ dream is nonsense to him.” The piece ultimately concluded with a rhetori­ cal question: “The lifestyle of the Japanese salaryman who works for his individual subjectivity or the life of the Chinese salaryman who lives in a collective labor system—who is happier? Surely that can be a matter only of individual opinion.”92 The incredibly low cost of everyday goods in China also grabbed the attention of the Japanese public. “The thick curtain between Japan and China has been lifted,” one article noted, and the “China now revealed is a country with no taxes, low prices, and little difference between rich and poor.” It went on, “Japanese have incomes some ten times greater than Chinese, but prices in China are one-fifth of what they are in Japan.”93 After presenting an exhaustive table comparing the price of foodstuffs and household items in China and Japan, the article ended by asking, “Prime Minister Tanaka, who achieved the great political feat of China-Japan nor­ malization, how about you do something about prices?”94 To the Japanese public, China seemed a fantasy land of abundance and affordability when it came to the staple goods of everyday life. That this was in fact largely a fantasy vision is irrelevant when the interpretive task at hand is to un­ derstand the logic behind Japanese representations of the Chinese world in 1972. The profound amazement over low prices in China reveals the deep frustration with the high cost of living in an increasingly prosperous Japan, motivating many to ponder the very meaning of prosperity itself. By the early 1970s, Japan had become a first-tier nation once again, and Mao’s China by comparison was no match in terms of industrial power or standard of living. However, the PRC had also become to many Japanese

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a nostalgic reminder of the authentic East Asian values that had been lost in Japan. While vastly more economically developed, Japan could be com­ pared negatively to China in terms of social characteristics nonetheless. In the introduction to a photograph collection published in late 1972 that included hundreds of images from his two trips to the main­ land, Mitome Tadao explained that his purpose in making the journeys was twofold: he was eager to see what Chinese society had come to look like after the Cultural Revolution, and he wanted to travel throughout the northeast to see firsthand the lasting scars of the Japanese military invasion of the continent during the Second World War. In meeting a wide variety of people throughout his travels in China, what made the most lasting impres­ sion on Mitome was the “fierce energy of young people.” As he explained, “to break down divisions between intellectual youths of the cities and vil­ lage youth of the countryside, both interacted with and learned from one another. With the slogan of jiriki kōsei (self-sufficiency) in mind, all joined in with both industrial production and military training.” In summing up his introduction to the photo collection, he reminded his readers that when looking at this China of “young people,” “it is pointless to measure it by Japanese or European notions of being ‘modern.’ One cannot answer the question of what prosperity means (in China) by looking at the amount of automobiles, electric appliances, and leisure facilities.” Truly to understand the new China, Mitome contended, “there is no option but to know the ‘way of thinking’ of the Chinese people.” For those Japanese who failed to do so, “China will remain a distant country.”95 Restoring the New Although Chinese premier Zhou Enlai had studied in Tokyo as a young man during the 1910s, something true of many highly placed CCP members, he was not proficient enough in Japanese to converse with Prime Minister Tanaka unaided. Likewise, Tanaka had no training whatsoever in the Chinese language. The monumental meeting between the two leaders required linguistic facilitation by someone skilled in both spoken tongues. At Zhou’s side, therefore, at every moment of interaction with the Tanaka delegation was a thirty-nine-year-old mother of two named Lin Liyun. Lin had been born in Taiwan in 1933 but later moved to Kobe with her family in 1939, at age six. She then spent a large portion of her educational years in Japan, becoming fluent in the Japanese language along the way. When Japanese reporters traveling with the Tanaka group heard Lin speak,

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however, they were jarred not by the mere fact of her fluency but also by her regional accent, a product of her many years spent in Kobe. So, as the satellite feed brought the scene of Zhou and Tanaka raising glasses for a toast to China-Japan friendship to thousands of households across the archipelago, TV viewers in Japan likely noticed before anything else the distinctive Kansai dialect of Zhou’s interpreter.96 One cannot help but wonder if those Japanese families watching in the greater Osaka area felt just a little closer to Zhou because of it. Indeed, with all the talk of renewed friendship and “common culture, common race,” it is worth wondering how close everyday Japanese people really felt to the Chinese world during the early 1970s. An extensive public opinion poll carried out by the Mainichi shinbun provides some reveal­ ing details on that matter.97 When asked whether Japanese or Americans could better understand the feelings of the Chinese people, for example, 72 percent said Japanese; only 4 percent said Americans. When it came to who, Americans or Chinese, could better understand Japanese feelings, however, the results were evenly split—31 percent Chinese, 32 percent Americans. In other words, the results suggest a belief that while Japanese were far better fit to understand China than Americans, Americans were no better prepared than Chinese to understand Japan. Similarly, 61 percent of respondents also said that between China and Japan, Japan held a more favorable impression among other Asian peoples (8 percent for China), and that number jumped to 70 percent for Japan (3 percent for China) when it came to the question of who enjoyed a more positive image in the European and North American worlds.98 In sum, the responses suggest a popular self-consciousness in which China possesses a far less favorable reputation around the world than Japan but is nonetheless understood better by no one but the Japanese. Questions about daily life in China were also revealing. When asked which of the following items one might find in a typical urban household in China, fountain pens and bicycles garnered roughly 70 percent, while electric laundry and refrigeration took in only 17 percent and 13 percent respectively. Additionally, while 64 percent of respondents identified hydrogen bombs as something available to China, only 50 percent believed that elevators were in use there. It is a perplexing image indeed of a society seen as more likely to deploy thermonuclear weapons than assist someone to the second floor of a building without the use of stairs.99 While such data might indicate the persistence of a wide perceptual gap, the ultimate restoration of Japan-China relations in late September

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1972 was nonetheless welcomed warmly in the mainstream press as a longawaited and historically natural event. A feature story on the event in Asahi gurafu opened this way: With both happiness and deep remorse, Japan-China relations have finally been established. . . . Two thousand years of friendly neighbor relations after an unfortunate disruption of several decades . . . have for the first time been restored. . . . The joint statement of September 29, serving as something that moves beyond the effects of the San Francisco treaty of 1952, and the journey of Prime Minister Tanaka to China from September 25 to 29 charted out a new era in the history of our country (waga kuni no rekishi ni shin jidai o kaku shita).100

A feature story on the Tanaka trip to China in the Sunday Mainichi began in a similar way by claiming that while “reconciliation had long been the hope of the postwar-era Japanese people,” only now could “the people of both nations turn the first page in their new history” (atarashii rekishi no dai-ichi peeji).101 Mainichi shinbun’s political affairs chief Konno Sōji also penned an editorial essay that described the Tanaka-Zhou summit as a moment from which “a new history begins.”102 The frequency of such phrases raises provocative questions about what impact the Tanaka-Zhou meetings had on popular historical consciousness. What did it mean for Japanese publications to speak of a “new history” beginning in September 1972? When the Sunday Mainichi described Tanaka’s visit as “six days that changed history,” what did readers believe had really changed?103 Alternatively, the normalization of China-Japan relations in Sep­ tember 1972 was described as either the first page in a new chapter of China-Japan history or the restoration of a largely peaceful friendship of two thousand years after a century (the 1870s to the 1970s) of tragic disrup­ tion. Which was it, a new chapter or a restoration of past patterns? This is a problematic question because the relationship before 1870 was not just one of (more often than not) peaceful interaction but was also predicated on an understanding of inequality—China as the core regional power, Ja­ pan as a junior player on the periphery of Chinese civilization. While the 1972 normalization of relations certainly could mean the restoration of peace, surely most Japanese would no longer accept a lower status than the Chinese. An Asahi shinbun editorial essay took the long-term view on the place of China-Japan normalization in Japan’s development vis-à-vis the continent. The normalization of relations between Japan and China in 1972 represented an “epochal” moment in Japanese history: for the first

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time, the system of relations between East Asian nations would be based on equality. Even so, the essay also emphasized the need for Japan to regain the trust of its Asian neighbors (shinyō kaifuku) if Japan is to play a serious role in both regional and global peace.104 This new historical moment was still tied to the legacies of the past. Not everyone was convinced that this so-called new age of JapanChina relations was a promise of better times to come. One roundtable discussion on the deeper meanings of Japan-China normalization included the prominent China scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi. Pondering the effects that the restoration of diplomacy between China and Japan would have on the framework of the San Francisco treaty system as well as on the unresolved issues between Japan and the Soviet Union, Takeuchi commented, “Is this something that will finally bring to an end the ‘postwar,’ or instead will it bring a regression to the prewar era? . . . That is the real problem here.” In other words, Takeuchi worried that the new age of China-Japan coopera­ tion praised by other commentators could in fact become a return to the volatile conditions of Asian nations struggling against Western powers.105 Despite beckoning a new age in Sino-Japanese relations and in global politics, Takeuchi suggested, Tanaka’s slogan of “peace and prosperity in Asia” (Ajia no heiwa to hanei) sounded eerily familiar to the wartime era’s “Greater East Asia Coprosperity Sphere” (dai tō-A kyōeiken). Reversing Fukuzawa Yukichi’s famous slogan of the late nineteenth century “leave Asia, enter Europe” (datsu-A, nyū-Ō) into “enter Asia, leave Europe” (nyū-A, datsu-Ō), the article ultimately warned, could be a steep and dif­ ficult road.106 Was the normalization of Japan-China relations in 1972 the beginning of something new or the restoration of something old? What this chapter demonstrates is the significance of both meanings. The relationship that would take shape after September 1972 was surely new insofar as Japan was finally free to engage the PRC in a way impossible when Li Dequan made her trip to Tokyo nearly eighteen years earlier. But Japanese percep­ tions of the Chinese world in 1972 were deeply conditioned by patterns and impressions with roots going back decades if not centuries. Such was the irony of renewing a friendship of two thousand years with a close neighbor that had only recently become a distant country next door.

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EPILOGUE

Mourning Mao’s Death

M

ao Zedong left this world on September 9, 1976. Upon learning of the Chairman’s death, the kabuki performer Kawarasaki Chōjūrō recalled fondly: “The first time I saw him was when I visited China in 1967 at the time of the National Foundation Day celebrations as part of a China-Japan cultural exchange delegation. The smile he showed as he looked down at me from the front of a giant room in the Great Hall of the People is something that still floats in my mind like it happened only yesterday.”1 Kawarasaki’s deeply personal reaction to the death of Mao was not at all unusual in Japan at that moment. The wide spectrum of Japanese responses to the news of Mao’s passing, in fact, provides a valuable source base from which this book’s exploration of China’s place in the popular imagination of postwar Japanese society can reach a useful conclusion. One sentiment captured visually by numerous Japanese cartoonists was the idea that Mao’s death marked the loss of a major world figure, and the composition of the PRC’s flag, with its configuration of one large star surrounded by a grouping of smaller stars, proved a useful visual trope in expressing that notion. Crafting a vision of Mao’s own ascension to the heavens above, the cartoonist Makino Keiichi sketched an image of a giant star from the PRC flag rising into the sky over a caption reading simply “departure” (yuku).2 Nasu Ryōsuke evoked the same imagery, albeit with an opposite sense of movement, through an image entitled “A great star falls” (kyosei otsu) (figure E.1). In it the largest central star on the PRC flag falls to the earth from a flagpole that reaches into the heavens over a China positioned centrally on the globe, allowing Nasu to convey the idea that a historically significant figure has been lost by not just Chinese society but the world as a whole.3 Always the shrewd critic, in his interstellar imagery Yokoyama Taizō could not resist the chance to employ references to dramatic reactions to Mao’s death as a tool for rendering judgment on Japan’s own political elites. Under a sky filled with phrases used to describe Mao in death such as “great leader,” “philosophical giant,” “giant red star,” “huge footprints,” 164

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FIG. E.1 Nasu Ryōsuke cartoon depicting the death of Mao Zedong as the largest star from the Chinese flag falling to earth. Reproduced with permission from the Yunomae manga bijutsukan.

and “giant of the age,” Yokoyama showed a man pointing toward a smaller figure next to him (with a tiny star-shaped head) labeled “politicians of Japan,” while barking at him: “I’m counting on a lot from you!” (shikkari tanomu yo).4 With the caption “little star” (chiisai boshi), Yokoyama’s cartoon suggested that Japan’s political leaders lacked anything even close to the monumental power and influence of a man like Mao. Whatever his faults, Yokoyama seemed to indicate, at least Mao had the boldness to transform the Chinese world. Japanese society should demand the same from its leaders.

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In the days after Mao’s death, feature stories highlighting the com­ ments of prominent political and cultural figures in Japanese society in response to the Chairman’s passing also appeared in most major daily newspapers. A half-page story titled “Mao Zedong from My Viewpoint” in the Mainichi shinbun asked seven people four questions: What image do you have of Chairman Mao? What does Mao Zedong mean to you personally? Have you read some of Mao’s written works? What did you feel upon learning of Mao’s death? The actress of stage and screen Sasaki Ai, after describing her image of Mao as “a great revolutionary,” went on to say, “I first came to know of revolution through the Chinese revolution. Within that context, the greatest figure was Mao Zedong. As an actor, too, I can appreciate his human charisma and appeal, since he was the person to liberate and unify a country of that scale.” The writer Ishimure Michiko saw Mao both as someone “whose ears were attuned to Chinese history and the Chinese masses” as well as a “rather solitary figure . . . a leader, poet, and philosopher.” On hearing of Mao’s death, she felt a profound “sense that an age has come to an end.” Although the emeritus professor of education philosophy at Ochanomizu University Sugō Hiroshi remembered Mao as “the manliest man in the world,” he also stressed that as someone who had transformed gender dynamics in Chinese society, Mao was also “the symbol of sky, earth, and water for women” in China. Praise came even from capitalist stalwart Nakauchi Isao, the founder and CEO of the Daiei store chain, who described Mao as “a great leader who came from the masses” who also possessed “a splendid attitude toward both his officials and the people. A great man with many things to teach.”5 Not all the responses were filled with glowing praise, of course. The novelist Kaikō Takeshi said the first image that came to his mind when he thought of Mao was “blood-stained strife,” and when hearing of his pass­ ing, he thought “the oppressive era of Maoism and Maoist philosophy is over.” Likewise, the former metropolitan police superintendent and Diet member Hatano Akira recalled that when considering Mao, he thought, first, “in a word, great revolutionary,” a phrase he quickly qualified by explaining that for him “great revolutionary” meant someone who had “murdered a great number of people.” Hatano did find something positive to learn from Mao’s legacy, however. Mao Zedong “was someone who put into practice the notion that thought follows from action. On that point, the LDP should learn something. Nothing will come from just talking.”6 Many of the Japanese state officials who had played a part in the normalization agreement of 1972 also offered flattering assessments of

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Mao in other print media outlets upon learning of his death. In the Yomiuri, the former foreign minister Ōhira Masayoshi called Mao “a philosopher beyond measure, a man who could handle anything, but who also had a warmth and humor about him.”7 Ōhira also said of Mao in the Asahi, “the current century has lost one of its greatest figures,” praising him for the scale of his greatness as an intellectual and strategist.8 Then foreign minis­ ter Miyazawa Kiichi said Mao “was one of the great people of this century, perhaps one the last of them,” and “for the Chinese people, Chairman Mao was the wellspring of revolutionary energy.” Former prime minister Tanaka Kakuei described Mao as the “father of new China and its eight hundred million people” whose greatness and leadership made possible the restora­ tion of peace between China and Japan, something of immeasurable value “for Japan, for China, and for all people of the world.”9 Beyond hyperbolic flattery, formal editorial essays often took a deeper historical perspective in their analysis of the meaning of Mao’s life at the moment of his death. In describing Mao’s place in Chinese history, a Yomiuri editorial compared him to Qin Shi Huangdi, the founding emperor of the Qin regime, who had unified China in 211 BC after the long period of disunity during the Spring/Autumn era. Mao Zedong had done the same for China, the essay argued, after a long era of division caused by foreign imperialism. Moreover, in overcoming China’s agricultural, semifeudal, semicolonial society by creating a socialist state, Mao stood as an equal to Lenin, who had destroyed tsarism in the Russian world. In reviewing Mao’s record, however, the editorial concluded: China is a giant country of ancient culture resting upon a history longer than any other in the world. We know what sort of deep plowing is needed to create a popular revolution there. But now the Chairman Mao who held the absolute power needed to carry out such plowing is gone. And the Chinese people made clear in the Tiananmen Incident (of 1976) that they have had quite enough of such deep plowing.10

Despite the praise for Mao’s achievements, there was relief, too, that his time had come to an end. An Asahi editorial essay explained that in the fifty-five years since participating in the foundation of the CCP in 1921, Mao Zedong had brought about great achievements: victory in the war against Japan, vic­ tory in the civil war against the Guomindang, the unification of Chinese society, and the establishment of socialism within the PRC. The essay also

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emphasized the legacies of both “self-sufficiency” and “harsh factional struggle” throughout Mao’s career before concluding that what came next would depend upon the outcome of confrontation between the remnants of the Cultural Revolution faction and the pragmatists in the CCP.11 An editorial piece in the Mainichi also began by placing Mao’s achievements as a revolutionary in creating the PRC on a par with the unification achieve­ ments of the Qin/Han in early China as well as with Lenin and Stalin in the creation of the USSR. After reviewing Mao’s career, the essay then pondered the future with some unease—men of great stature such as Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao had been already eliminated by Mao, Zhou Enlai had passed away, Deng Xiaoping had been criticized, and no one really knew anything about Hua Guofeng. Even so, the essay concluded, chaos was un­ likely, and some sort of collective leadership would probably take shape.12 Akioka Ieshige, a senior Asahi journalist and China specialist, and Kaizuka Shigeki, a historian of East Asia at Kyoto University, also offered assessments of Mao’s historical significance in the Asahi. For Akioka, Mao’s most significant historical achievement was to challenge the bipolar postwar order (United States versus USSR) and bring the Third World to the forefront. “If Marx and Mao could meet today,” he suggested, “when it comes to the matter of world revolution from this point forward, I think Marx would wish for Mao’s judgement and leadership.” Kaizuka began by admitting that it was difficult to say now what Mao’s historical valuation should be, as relevant sources were not available. But he did comment on Mao’s special character as one of China’s historical leaders. As a poet he was an idealist, Kaizuka claimed, but as a politician he was a revolutionary leader who could adapt to changing circumstances and act as a realist. “To hold together a place as large and diverse as China demands an enormous degree of political power,” he continued. One measure of the historical success of Mao’s reign would be the degree to which Chinese society could transition smoothly after his death without descending into disorder. How deeply Chinese society believed in Mao’s vision of continuous revolu­ tion was unclear, Kaizuka added, and the Cultural Revolution had also unleashed serious problems in relations between the CCP, PLA, and state institutions. These were the main challenges to overcome, according to Kaizuka, in the aftermath of Mao’s passing.13 Prominent intellectuals were also quick to offer their views on the meaning of Mao’s passing in various literary and current affairs journals. In a complex piece published in Sekai, Ōe Kenzaburō first recalled his impressions of Mao and what he meant to the Chinese people during his

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own maiden trip to China during the summer of 1960. “Why did I feel such a sense of awe when I saw him?” Ōe recalled. Because “Mao Zedong the individual man structurally (kōzōteki ni) represented all of China and the Chinese people.”14 He explained further, “as one who closely observes things from the perspective of a writer, the will and action of the revolu­ tionary Mao Zedong to bring to fruition the desire for reform of China and the Chinese people made clear to me the concrete meaning of the idea that revolution is an act of imaginative strength.”15 In analyzing Mao’s poetry as something that captured the revolutionary experience of Chinese society, Ōe continued, “the true power of those words can only be understood by the people who shared those experiences.”16 While variations were certainly evident, overall the response to Mao’s death as represented in popular Japanese print media was deeply sympa­ thetic and even compassionate, and this fact did not sit well with some. Tsu­ jimura Akira, a professor at Tokyo University, carried out a formal study of Japanese reactions to Mao’s death by employing statistical analysis of space devoted to Mao’s death in Japanese dailies versus that in other major world papers. Tsujimura found that Japan’s major papers had devoted far more space to the topic than the New York Times, Washington Post, Times (of London), and Le Monde. (Pravda in Moscow had next to nothing.) He also argued that world papers were more purely analytical, while Japanese papers tended to mix emotional eulogizing with rational analysis that in the end rendered the analysis less effective.17 Tsujimura specifically ridiculed those Japanese commentators who claimed that Mao’s death was “a great loss for the world, not only for the Chinese people.”18 Tsujimura pointed out that the USSR and Taiwan were surely celebrating Mao’s death. He looked too at the Sōka gakkai statement of Ikeda Taisaku, who had suggested that Mao’s death was “a great loss of all people of the world who love peace and freedom.”19 “Had Mao ever spoken to the world on behalf of peace?” Tsujimura asked sarcastically. “Was he not the man who pressed for ‘continuous struggle’?” In contrast to the shameless pandering of Japanese leftists, Tsujimura cited French socialists who recognized Mao’s importance but also drew distinctions between their socialism and his.20 Finally, Tsujimura concluded that overall Japanese media reactions to Mao’s death were far kinder than those in the Western press. Perhaps this was the case, he suggested, because of a Japanese cultural notion that when someone dies, the polite thing is to speak of their accomplishments, not their faults. While it was fine for news­ papers to print such eulogies, Tsujimura contended, the media had a greater

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responsibility to society to provide rational and critical analysis in every case. When comparing Japanese papers to Western papers, he concluded, clearly the Japanese media had failed to live up to its duty.21 What accounts for these subjective and emotional reactions from the Japanese side to the death of Chairman Mao that Tsujimura found so disappointing? A summary reflection on the various meanings embedded in popular Japanese perceptions of Mao’s China as revealed in this book can help provide an answer. Meanings of Mao’s China For many in postwar Japanese society, Mao’s China was a reminder of a Japanese past long forgotten. When China developed nuclear weapons in the early 1960s, for example, the PRC on the one hand earned resent­ ment and fear for its provocative militarism. On the other hand, however, by projecting through those tests a vision of Asian power on a global stage until then dominated by the West, for at least some in Japan the achieve­ ment harkened back to the confidence won by Japan’s military victories over Russia in 1904–1905. In ending the Western monopoly on atomic weapons, Mao had led a revival of China in the face of Western imperial­ ism. The comparison between the Chairman and the first emperor of the Qin drawn by several Japanese observers at the time of Mao’s death also emphasized how both men had taken a divided and chaotic Chinese society and fashioned a new order that made China a preeminent power. Mao had done so by ushering in a new age of history in which the order of Western imperialism was shattered and the non-West, led by China, was now able to free itself from domination. In a sense, the Pan-Asian dream of unity in the face of Western imperial aggression that Japan had attempted and failed to realize in the early 1940s had been achieved by the PRC twenty years later. During the Cultural Revolution years, Japanese observers often ridiculed the irrationality of Red Guard fanaticism as evidence of China’s backwardness. But that fanaticism was also interpreted by many through Japan’s own experience with ideological extremism during the wartime era. A Japanese traveler in the PRC who observed a third-grade classroom in 1972 seemed taken aback by the ideological indoctrination at work in Chi­ nese public education. “In a mathematics lesson,” she noted, “this problem came up: 25 US imperialist tanks have invaded, and 20 Liberation Army tanks go out to do battle with them. How many tanks are there all together? The PLA then destroys 18 of the US imperialist tanks. How many are left?”22 While she was perhaps too young to remember it, a nearly identical

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sort of question would have been easy to find in a Japanese schoolhouse during the early 1940s. The invading tanks would have been American then, too, but the courageous fighters destroying the invaders would have belonged to the imperial Japanese army, not the PLA. Cultural Revolution– era anti-American nationalism in Chinese society thus resonated with many people in Japan as a deeply familiar attitude. Recognizing that familiarity at once brought Japanese closer to Chinese society through the appreciation of that common experience even as it also widened the gap between the two peoples, since Japan’s wartime-era virulent anti-Westernism had long since been abandoned. In connecting with China again during the early 1970s, the continent became a place of opportunity for Japanese business and technological expertise but also a reminder of all that Japan had lost by becoming so “advanced” since the end of the war. Because Japan by 1972 was approach­ ing a global economic status second only to the United States, the PRC was seen as quaint, underdeveloped, and in need of Japanese investment (just as had been the case during the 1930s). But there was also an authenticity in China that had been lost in Japan. As Japanese pondered the social costs of their economic “miracle” during the early 1970s, Mao’s China to some was a nostalgic reminder of what Japan used to be. While the Chinese world still possessed traditional values of community identity and group harmony, those ideals had given way to individualism and consumer greed in Japanese society. Rather ironic, of course, is that the Chinese revolution had in fact set out to purge society of traditional cultural practices seen by the CCP as impediments to progress. If Japanese at times viewed Mao’s China as a place reminiscent of what Japan had been decades earlier, some dimensions of Chinese society under the Great Helmsman were also understood as something Japan had not yet achieved. In 1954, for example, Li Dequan was a symbol of com­ munism’s insidious danger to many in Japan, a potent reminder that the liberal-conservative split of 1930s Japanese society was still very much at work during the 1950s. To others, however, Li Dequan embodied a vision of gender equality in politics and society during the first years after the end of the US occupation that far exceeded anything women had achieved in Japan. Her position in China signified that the Chinese revolution had moved beyond anything yet reached on the home islands. To a significant degree, the same sentiment was present nearly twenty years later, as seen in the Japanese print media’s countless commentaries on how liberated women in Mao’s China in 1972 were free from the cultural restrictions that still placed gender-determined limits on the social roles of women in Japan.

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During the Cultural Revolution years, too, some saw in China a fu­ ture Japan had yet to realize. Red Guards acted with passion and purpose, and Mao Zedong seemed to possess what Japanese leadership lacked. He had a bold and imaginative vision and took dramatic action to achieve his goals. While the results of those actions were usually devastating, the com­ parative complacency of Japan’s postwar political elites was nonetheless made starkly apparent by the long shadow of Mao’s revolutionary passion. Perhaps this was also a reflection of frustration with the circumscription of Japanese political decision making by US prerogatives. The PRC enjoyed a freedom to act on the world stage in defense of its own interests that Japan did not. That so many Japanese observers took notice of the energetic Chinese sprit of “self-sufficiency” (jiriki kōsei) suggests at least to some degree a longing for the same sort of spirit in Japan. Which of these contrasting images held more sway in the Japanese world reflected changes that took place within both Japanese and Chinese society from the 1950s until the 1970s. During the early 1950s, both societ­ ies experienced an era of recovery and renewal. Japan was emerging from the disaster of war and occupation and charting a path forward to a new and prosperous future. On the mainland, China was emerging from decades of civil war and foreign invasion and charting a radically new vision of China’s future, restoring Chinese greatness. People in Japan could thus see China as a place that offered a compelling vision of the future—certain dramatic changes in social organization and gender roles desired by many in Japan were already being realized in China. The 1960s, then, were an era of conflicting visions for both societies. In Japan, recovery and reconstruction had become rapid growth, but linger­ ing tensions over the postwar political order fueled fierce conflicts. For China, a path of moderate development took shape after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, and the nuclear test in 1964 marked a major achieve­ ment in the postwar quest for national greatness. However, struggles be­ tween moderates and radicals erupted again during the Cultural Revolution and derailed China’s development. In this context, then, Mao’s China could be seen in Japan as both a society adrift in violent chaos and a place where genuinely revolutionary action was possible. By the early 1970s, the social unrest of the 1950s and 1960s in Japan had been largely smoothed over, and global economic superpower status was within reach. For China, the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution years were over, and some social stability had been restored, but the path to prosperity and power was still long. In this context, Japanese could view the PRC as a place still lagging far behind and thus ripe for Japanese

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development, as had been the case in the 1930s. At the same time, however, as people reflected on what Japan’s economic miracle had failed to achieve or on the cost it had exacted, the PRC could be seen once more as a place that possessed either what Japan lacked or had lost. Mao’s China timewarped in the popular Japanese mind from Japan’s future to Japan’s past. As Japanese pondered the social and cultural costs of their own dramatic rise to postwar prosperity, a China that now lagged behind Japan develop­ mentally became the nostalgic repository of traditional values no longer evident in the highly industrialized Japanese world. The larger lesson to take from this vantage point is that, more than a direct reaction to any particular move by the Chinese side, popular Japa­ nese perceptions of China were a reflection of conditions within Japanese society at any given moment. As Oguma Eiji has observed, “the image of ‘Asia’ for postwar intellectuals provides not only a mirror of Japanese national identity but a reflection of domestic conditions.”23 The same was true of everyday society in the postwar Japanese world, not just in intel­ lectual circles. And the same was true of Chinese society. In fact, this is a lesson applicable to any historical case of how one society perceives a regional neighbor. It is worth noting, too, that these insights are made possible by pull­ ing evidence from sources of everyday life such as daily newspapers, public opinion poll data, political cartoons, comic books, mass-market weekly magazines, photojournalism, maps, product advertisements, and travel guides. Following only the official diplomatic record, the visit of Li Dequan appears as little more than a minor irritant in foreign relations. When exploring popular sources, on the other hand, it becomes clear that a woman whom the Japanese state officially did not see traveled throughout Japan for two weeks and inspired enthusiastic reactions from thousands of everyday people; moreover, the official state response to Li Dequan could not ignore those popular sentiments concerning her visit. Similarly, the official position stating opposition to Chinese nuclear weapons testing was articulated with the full knowledge that at least some in Japan felt both fear and pride in the PRC’s achievement. In fact, some blamed Tokyo and Washington for the crisis more than Beijing. When the Cultural Revolu­ tion erupted in 1966, there was little need for an official Japanese policy concerning the Red Guards, but that hardly means that the Red Guard movement went unnoticed in Japan. Popular society responded to Mao’s Cultural Revolution with a complex variety of interpretations. Finally, the formal restoration of China-Japan relations, once US restrictions had been lifted, unfolded within a cultural environment of curiosity and excitement.

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More than just a diplomatic maneuver orchestrated by ruling elites in re­ sponse to Nixon and Kissinger, it was the final stage in a long process of evolution in popular Japanese perceptions of the continent. In each case, the realm of popular perceptions reveals far more complexity and nuance than is evident in the overdetermined narratives of the state. As valuable as popular views can be, however, the matter of image versus reality must also be kept in mind. When compared to the social and political status of women in prewar Japan, for example, the postwar era seems brighter in no small part thanks to the rights and privileges en­ shrined in the 1947 constitution. Still, how women’s lives are described in legal documents and what women experience in daily life are often vastly different realities. Because many of the limitations and abuses en­ dured by Japanese women before 1945 continued uninterrupted throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the inspiration offered by the perceived liberation of women in Mao’s China was a powerful force in the minds of many Japanese women during the early postwar era. With the phrase “perceived liberation,” of course, I am recognizing that what the Party claimed as the truth of women’s lives in the PRC was often a far cry from the real­ ity experienced by Chinese women in everyday life. However, whether what Japanese women perceived about the lives of women in China was in practice “true” or not is largely irrelevant. This book has aimed to explore and evaluate popular Japanese perceptions of China; Chinese “reality” is less important in that context. Even those Japanese who traveled to China and experienced Mao’s world at firsthand conveyed their perceptions to a domestic Japanese audience in ways that embodied their own personal understanding of the Chinese world as much as (or perhaps even more than) the Chinese “reality” they had in fact observed. Finally, the evidence presented in this book challenges the strangle­ hold enjoyed by studies of Japan-US relations on the history of postwar Japanese society. As noted in the prologue, the Japan-US relationship has undoubtedly been a defining force in postwar Japanese life, which is why so many historians have examined it. By placing China at its rightful place in the center of Japan-US dynamics, however, we come to see a more mul­ tifaceted portrait. Indeed, the popular Japan-US struggle cannot be properly appreciated without bringing Mao’s China into the picture. The conflict over Li Dequan, for example, must be seen in part as a manifestation of the early tensions in Japan-US relations just after the end of Occupation. Japa­ nese reactions to China’s emergence as a nuclear power, too, are largely inseparable from issues in Japan-US relations. To be sure, many people in Japan feared the rise of a nuclear PRC, but that fear was linked to anger

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and resentment toward the United States for provoking China’s decision to pursue nuclear weapons. China’s success in that project was in turn seen by some as a source of satisfaction and even pride, as it signified the end of the white man’s monopoly on atomic annihilation. Furthermore, while a focus on the diplomatic maneuverings of political elites can lead one to posit that the restoration of Japan-China relations in 1972 “was purely a byproduct of changes in the American geopolitical strategy,”24 the emphasis on popular attitudes pursued here demonstrates clearly that the official normalization of state-to-state ties took place within a cultural context conducive to that diplomatic shift. While the internal struggles of postwar Japanese society are most often viewed through the lens of Japan-US relations, Japanese perceptions of the United States were often the flipside of Japanese perceptions of China. What, then, do we gain interpretively by exploring divisions of postwar Japanese society through popular perceptions of PRC rather than through perceptions of the United States? Both nations, of course, were wartime enemies, and an ambivalent relationship with both took shape dur­ ing the 1950s and 1960s. A key difference, however, resides in how the US presence in Japan after Occupation was a lingering reminder of incomplete sovereignty. The PRC could thus serve as an aspirational model in a way the United States could not. Furthermore, postwar struggles in Japanese society refracted through the Japan-US lens are most often rendered as battles between progressive democracy and conservative authoritarian­ ism. Viewing those struggles through the Japan-China lens instead em­ phasizes the ongoing importance of the battle between continental identity and “Western” identity in the postwar world. And while this dimension is already understood as a part of postwar intellectual history, such issues were not the domain solely of academic scholars and literary elites. For everyday people, too, the Chinese world under Mao loomed large, and popular perceptions of the PRC reflected struggles over popular identity. Bridging the Gap More than seven decades after the end of the Second World War in Asia, the relationship between Japan and China is still shaped by the legacies of that devastating conflict. Battles over how best to define the historical reality of the wartime years and commemorate the sacrifices made by those who lost their lives in that maelstrom of murder continue to enflame emotional and political passions on both sides of the sea that separates the two regional powers. When it comes to understanding why

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mutual perceptions between Japan and China today are still so volatile, however, 1989 is in fact a far more useful date to keep in mind than 1945. That year saw two events, one within East Asia and one beyond, that would shape the contours of Japan-China relations in profoundly significant ways. In November, the Berlin Wall came down, and the city’s residents were free to mingle unencumbered by that monstrosity of concrete and steel for the first time since 1961. Seen as the opening move in the collapse of European communism, which would include the USSR by 1991, the fall of the wall also marked the beginning of the end of the entire Cold War era. On the other side of the world some five months earlier, another national capital had experienced a dramatic and transformative event, albeit a far more violent one. During the early morning hours of June 4, the People’s Liberation Army, following the orders of senior CCP leadership, deployed lethal force in clearing Tiananmen Square and the surrounding streets of Beijing of both student protesters and local residents who had claimed the space as their own in May to express their desire for reform in the post-Mao Chinese world. These events changed the nature of relations between China and Ja­ pan in a wide variety of ways. For Japan, the end of the Cold War meant the end of the rationale behind the US-dominated international order in East Asia that had facilitated Japan’s rapid economic recovery and growth since the early 1950s. Moreover, when the Japanese economy crashed during the early 1990s, financial failure and the social strain it produced created even greater degrees of anxiety within a Japanese society no longer sure of its identity. For China, the clash at Tiananmen made clear to CCP leadership that as it pursued even greater degrees of economic reform in the 1990s, the end of socialism as an ideological motivator would require that more potent doses of nationalism be employed instead to bolster party legitimacy in the face of domestic criticism. Throughout the 1990s, then, a socially anxious and economically adrift Japan saw the rising power of China as a greater and greater threat, sparking more conservative elements in Japa­ nese society to press for a resurgence of national pride. Simultaneously in China, as the CCP sought rapid economic growth under the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and his successor Jiang Zemin, the party also sought a focal point for nationalist fervor that might deflect future criticism of the regime as astonishing growth made many in China fabulously wealthy while leaving many others behind. Since the 2000s, this has made for a toxic mixture of forces in the Japan-China relationship; the more Japanese social and economic anxiety fans neonationalist passions for their palliative effect, the more Chinese society is gripped by fervent nationalist pride in

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response to its perception of historical amnesia in Japan. This is a seem­ ingly inescapable vicious circle. How can such intractable struggles over wartime memory be over­ come? Historical problems require historical solutions. As Carol Gluck has contended, past events become history, or “come into memory,” when specific social, cultural, and political forces converge to make it so.25 While both China and Japan during the decades since 1989 have developed a need to represent the Second World War in certain ways, as conditions in both societies continue to evolve, that need can dissipate as quickly as it has developed. Dilemmas of historical memory and representation in East Asia, or anywhere else, can also be confronted and overcome by explor­ ing the past from new vantage points. This book, at least to some modest degree, has aimed to rescue postwar East Asian history—and us—from the destructive effects of the politicized nationalisms of the 1990s and since. By taking a fresh look at Japan-China relations during the 1950s and 1960s, with a focus on popular Japanese perceptions of the Chinese world under Chairman Mao, we can see a far more complex pattern of representations and images than what typically results from the one-dimensional portraits that tend to dominate popular culture in both places today. It is not the business of historians to predict the future. Still, situating present-day problems in a deeper historical context can make clear larger patterns that in turn aid in making sense of tensions that plague East Asian international relations today. As intractable as today’s territorial rows and disputes over wartime memory may seem, when interpreted as current variations on broader themes that have shaped Japan-China relations for decades, if not centuries, we are reminded that Japanese perceptions of China (and vice versa) have changed dramatically in the past in response to altered domestic conditions. And they are likely to do so again. A Japa­ nese society more economically robust and confident will have less need for a self-defensive nationalism that sugarcoats the less-than-honorable episodes in Japan’s past for the sake of cultivating patriotism. Likewise, a more politically liberated Chinese society will rely less on an unequivocal demonization of Japan and other conspiratorial foreign elements to bolster an equally hyperbolic nationalism employed to deflect criticism away from the CCP and increasing economic inequality. Of course, whether that vision represents the Japan and China of ten or fifty years from now is impossible to say. If the past can be taken as any indication of the future, however, there is reason to be optimistic. How likely is it that some poor homeless soul huddled in the smoking ruins of Tokyo in 1945 could have envisioned that

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in thirty years’ time, Japan would possess the second-largest economy on the planet and enjoy one of the highest standards of living in Asia, if not the world? Likewise, the urban Chinese world of the late 1990s, with its booming industrial production, lucrative real estate market, and opulently spending nouveau riche class, would surely have been unimaginable to the teenaged Red Guards of 1968 and even less so to the “capitalist roader” victims of their violence. While history cannot predict the future, histori­ cal understanding can nonetheless help us imagine future possibilities, no matter how unlikely they might seem in the present. Recognizing this dimension of popular views during the Cold War era has value for today. Futagami Shinji of the Asahi News public opinion research office carried out a study of various poll data from 1969–1971 that revealed a significant age-related demographic pattern. According to his calculations, respondents in their twenties demonstrated more positive feelings concerning China than the overall sample population in three key areas: they expressed a stronger desire for improved relations with the PRC than with the United States, they voiced greater fear about the potential of renewed war in Korea or the extension of war in Vietnam, and they showed greater willingness to abandon relations with Taiwan in order to normalize relations between Japan and the PRC.26 In the early 1970s, then, Japanese youth could imagine a future for Japan-China relations shaped by the interests of their generation rather than by the legacies of the past. With that in mind, I return in closing to the lessons I learned from my students in Japan when my work on this project was first taking shape. As mentioned in the introduction, their claim that it would have been more difficult for them to explore sensitive historical topics with a Japanese instructor than it was with me was a sobering reminder of how strongly national identity interferes with historical reasoning. Nonetheless, I drew great inspiration from the sincerity and enthusiasm those students displayed through their participation in our seminar every Tuesday morning that spring. In their honest, courageous, and passionate (but always respectful) interactions with one another, I saw hope that the power of the nation-state to determine the contours of its citizens’ historical consciousness, while still formidable, is slipping. As proud as they each were of their national identities as students from Myanmar, Kazakhstan, Taiwan, South Korea, China, and Japan, they also connected with one another as members of a global youth culture through which they shared interests in music, film, food, and pop fiction. This book has also revealed that even during the peak decades of Cold War–era conflict between the nation-states of East Asia, everyday people still saw ways in which their lives were connected

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to those of people contained within the political borders of ideological enemy countries. The notion of “distant country next door,” then, also carries the mean­ ing that such distance is largely imaginary, fanned primarily by those who benefit most from it. Current debates about how best to improve JapanChina relations (and Japan–South Korea relations) often focus on what sort of official concessions one state should make to the other. It is the ruling elites of both nations, however, who benefit most from the perpetuation of hostile popular attitudes between the two societies. It is thus both illogical and ultimately futile to expect states to solve problems from which they derive a political advantage. In other words, only when there is no such advantage to be gained will those who stoke the fires of hostility cease to do so. Fortunately, the everyday people whom states seek to manipulate possess the means to thwart that manipulation and in turn bring about the change in popular attitudes that make reconciliation with a “hostile” neighbor more likely. By confidently embracing education, interaction, and tolerance rather than beating a cowardly retreat to insular, narrow-minded chauvinism, we render useless the tools of control employed by purveyors of fear and resentment, a lesson worth remembering for far more than just the analysis of contemporary Japan-China relations.

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Notes

Prologue 1. “OL no tame no kankō gaido—anata ni mo mō sugu Chūgoku ga mirareru,” Josei sebun, October 11, 1972, 41–42. 2. An excellent overview of the China-centered East Asian world before the tenth century is Charles Holcombe, The Genesis of East Asia, 221 BC–AD 907 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001). 3. On the place of Song-period medical knowledge in medieval Japanese society, for example, see Andrew Goble, Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan: Buddhist Healing, Chinese Knowledge, Islamic Formulas, and Wounds of War (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011). 4. On perceptions of China during the Ashikaga period, see Leo Shingchi Yip, China Reinterpreted: Staging the Other in Muromachi Noh Theater (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2016). For a brief but rich examination of the same during the Edo period, see Marius Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 5. English-language works on Sino-Japanese relations during the late nine­ teenth and early twentieth centuries are numerous. Two recent examples are Richard King, Cody Poulton, and Katsuhiko Endo, eds., Sino-Japanese Transculturation: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the End of the Pacific War (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2012); and Paula Harrell, Asia for the Asians: China in the Lives of Five Meiji Japanese (Portland, ME: Merwin Asia, 2012). An outstanding recent exception to this pattern that explores the cultural di­ mensions of identity formation in China-Japan relations across the wartime divide is Eric Han, Rise of a Japanese Chinatown: Yokohama, 1894–1972 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Center, 2014). 6. Peter Duus and Kenji Hasegawa, eds., Rediscovering America: Japanese Perspectives on the American Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 6.

181

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Notes to Pages 5–9

7. My approach is similar to that taken by Urs Matthias Zachmann in his careful exploration of Japanese public opinion debates concerning continental matters between the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the stirrings of conflict with imperial Russia in 1904. Citing evidence from high-circulation news­ papers and magazines, leading intellectual essayists, and editorial cartoons, Zachmann found that everyday Japanese attitudes concerning Chinese society at the turn of the twentieth century were far more nuanced and multidimen­ sional than a focus on high politics and diplomacy can reveal. See Urs Matthias Zachmann, China and Japan in the Late Meiji Period: China Policy and the Japanese Discourse on National Identity, 1895–1904 (London: Routledge, 2009). 8. Allen S. Whiting, China Eyes Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 39. 9. Ronald Toby, “Carnival of the Aliens: Korean Embassies in Edo-Period Art and Popular Culture,” Monumenta Nipponica 41, no. 4 (1986): 415–456; Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World. 10. For more on this topic, see Erik Esselstrom, “The 1960 ‘Anpo’ Struggle in The People’s Daily: Shaping Popular Chinese Perceptions of Japan during the Cold War,” Asia-Pacific Journal 10, issue 51, no. 1 (December 2012). 11. A slightly dated but still highly useful overview of the history problem in JapanChina relations is Daqing Yang, “Mirror for the Future or the History Card? Understanding the ‘History Problem,’” in Chinese-Japanese Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Complementarity and Conflict, ed. Marie Soderberg (London: Routledge, 2002), 10–31. 12. As examples, see Chae-jin Lee, Japan Faces China: Political and Economic Relations in the Postwar Era (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Qingxin Ken Wang, Hegemonic Cooperation and Conflict: Postwar Japan’s China Policy and the United States (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000). 13. As just a few of the many available examples, see Marie Soderberg, ed., Chinese-Japanese Relations in the Twenty-First Century: Complementarity and Conflict (London: Routledge, 2002); Caroline Rose, Sino-Japanese Relations: Facing the Past, Looking to the Future? (London: Routledge, 2004); Ming Wan, Sino-Japanese Relations: Interaction, Logic, and Transformation (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2006); Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Yinan He, The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 14. Robert Hoppens, The China Problem in Postwar Japan: Japanese National Identity and Sino-Japanese Relations (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

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Notes to Pages 9–10

183

15. Amy King, China-Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry, and War, 1945–1971 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 16. Baba Kimihiko, Sengo Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō: Nihon haisen kara bunka kakumei—Nit-Chū fukkō made (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2010); Gendai Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō: Nit-Chū kokkō seijōka kara Tenanmon jiken tennō hō-Chū made (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2015). Recent Japanese-language works on China-Japan relations during the Cold War and the normalization of Japan-China relations in 1972 that focus heavily on political history include Kanda Yutaka, Reisen kōzō no henyō to Nihon no tai-Chū gaikō: futatsu no chitsujo kan 1960–1972 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2012); Hattori Ryūji, Nit-Chū kokkō seijōka—Tanaka Kakuei, Ōhira Masayoshi, kanryōtachi no chosen (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shin­ sha, 2011); and Inoue Masaya, Nit-Chū kokkō seijōka no seijishi (Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai, 2010). For similar work by Japanese scholars in English, see Ryōsei Kokubun, Yoshihide Soeya, Akio Takahara, and Shin Kawashima, Japan-China Relations in the Modern Era, trans. Keith Krulak (London: Routledge, 2017). 17. Liu Jie and Kawashima Shin, eds., 1945-nen no rekishi ninshiki: “Shūsen” o meguru Nit-Chū taiwa no kokoromi (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 2009); Tairitsu to kyōzon no rekishi ninshiki: Nit-Chu kankei 150 nen (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 2013). 18. See, for example, Sadako Ogata, “Japanese Attitude toward China,” Asian Survey 5, no. 8 (August 1965): 389–398; Shao-Chuan Leng, “Japanese Attitudes toward Communist China,” Far Eastern Survey 27, no. 6 (June 1958): 81–89. Two classic studies concerning popular Japanese perceptions of Chinese society authored during the years under examination in this book are Takeuchi Minoru, Nihonjin ni totte no Chūgokuzō (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1966); and Andō Hikotarō, Nihonjin no Chugokukan (Tokyo: Keisōshobo, 1971). 19. One recent exception is Zhang Yusi, Kakumei to Panda: Nihonjin wa naze Chūgoku no sutereotaipu o tsukuri dasu no ka? (Tokyo: East Press, 2015). Although Zhang is not a historian by training, the book is firmly grounded in an impressive command of relevant source materials. 20. Jansen, China in the Tokugawa World; Joshua Fogel, Articulating the Sinosphere: Sino-Japanese Relations in Space and Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 21. Alexis Dudden, Troubled Apologies among Japan, Korea, and the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). While not a study in Japan-China relations, Ann Sheriff has followed the same organizational strat­ egy in her study of Cold War culture in Japanese literature and popular media: Ann Sheriff, Japan’s Cold War: Media, Literature, and the Law (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

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22. Esselstrom, “The 1960 ‘Anpo’ Struggle.” 23. Toby, “Carnival of the Aliens.” 24. M. William Steele, “Goemon’s New World View,” in Alternative Narratives in Modern Japanese History (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 5. Gregory Smits has made a similar case more recently in his examination of catfish prints (namazu-e) in late-1850s Edo. Gregory Smits, “Shaking Up Japan: Edo Society and the 1855 Catfish Picture Prints,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 1045–1078. 25. John Dower, “Mocking Misery: Grassroots Satire in Defeated Japan,” in Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan in the Modern World (New York: New Press, 2012), 236. 26. Fiona Deans Halloran, “‘Oppose Everything, Propose Nothing’: Influence and Power in the Political Cartoons of Thomas Nast,” in Drawing the Line: Using Cartoons as Historical Evidence, ed. Richard Scully and Marian Quartly (Clayton, Victoria: Monash University Press, 2009), 3.15. 27. Peter Duus, “Presidential Address: Weapons of the Weak, Weapons of the Strong—The Development of the Japanese Political Cartoon,” Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 4 (November 2001): 995. 28. A brief but useful study of long-term patterns in postwar Japanese public opin­ ion poll data concerning China is Kaku Keikō (Guo Qingguang), “Yoron chōsa ni miru Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō,” Shinbun kenkyū 477 (April 1991): 68–73. A similar but slightly less analytical study is Nishihira Shigeki, “Nihonjin no Chūgokukan henyō,” Jiyū (February 1982): 44–58. A provocative comparative analysis of Japanese public opinion concerning the United States and China during the postwar era is Kojima Kazuto, “‘Bei-Chū’zō no henyō to teitai,” Shinbun kenkyū 246 (January 1972): 28–35. 29. Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past within Us: Media, Memory, History (London: Verso, 2005), 92. 30. Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 174. 31. William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 358n91. Marotti is citing a quote from Kishi as printed in Asahi shinbun, May 28, 1960, and subsequently cited in George Packard, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 245. 32. Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Organizing the Spontaneous: Citizen Protest in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001), 6. 33. John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 302.

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34. Ogura Kazuo, Nihonjin no Chōsenkan: Naze ‘chikakute tōi rinjin’ na no ka (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai shinbun shuppansha, 2016). Chapter 1. Welcoming Comrade Li 1. Kumano Shōhei, “Mono wakari no ii obasan—Tokyo no Ri Tokuzen joshi,” Shūkan asahi, November 14, 1954, 12–13. 2. As cited in “Uō saō no Ri Tokuzen joshi kangei,” Shūkan sankei, November 14, 1954, 18–19. 3. An insightful exploration of the Beatles’ 1966 concerts in Japan is Miyanaga Masataka, Biitoruzu rai-Nichi gaku (Tokyo: DU, 2016). In English, see Carolyn S. Stevens, The Beatles in Japan (Routledge: London, 2018). 4. “Senkushatachi no doryoku no ato,” Asahi gurafu, October 13, 1972, 22. 5. Almost no secondary scholarship concerning the Li visit to Japan exists in English, and only a handful of Japanese historians have looked closely at her Japan tour. The most recent work in Japanese is Ishikawa Yoshimi, Cheng Ma, and Hayashi Shinkō, eds., Ri Tokuzen—Nit-Chū kokkō seijōka no “ōgon no kusabi” o uchikonda Chūgokujin josei (Tokyo: Nihon kyōhōsha, 2017). Other works in Japanese include Hatano Masaru and Iimori Akiko, “Ri Tokuzen hōnichi o megutte Nit-Chū kankei,” Tokiwa kokusai kiyō, March 2000, 1–18; and Ōsawa Takeshi, “Zaika hōjin hikiage kōshō o meguru sengo nitchū kankei— Nit-Chū minkan kōshō ni okeru ‘san dantai hōshiki’ o chūshin toshite,” Ajia kenkyū 49, no. 3 (July 2003): 54–70. The Li Dequan delegation and its visit to Japan is mentioned but not examined closely by Baba Kimihiko in his Sengo Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō: Nihon haisen kara bunka kakumei—Nit-Chū fukkō made (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2010), 147–148. The most recent work on Li and her Japan mission in Chinese is Cheng Ma and Lin Zhenjiang (Hayashi Shinkō), Riben nanwang Li Dequan (Beijing: Zhongguo shuhuikexue chubanshe, 2017). While it does not explore her Japan trip, a nonetheless fascinating and impor­ tant article on Li in English is Kate Merkel-Hess, “A New Woman and Her Warlord: Li Dequan, Feng Yuxiang, and the Politics of Intimacy in TwentiethCentury China,” Frontiers of History in China 11, no. 3 (2016): 431–457. 6. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, “Senryōka Nihonjin no Chūgokukan, 1945–1949,” in NitChū kankeishi no shomondai, ed. Saitō Michihiko (Tokyo: Chūō daigaku shup­ panbu, 1999), 194. 7. “Gaikō seisaku wa do aru beki ka?” Asahi shinbun, June 24, 1953, morning ed., 3. 8. “Kōwa to Nihon no shinro,” Yomiuri shinbun, August 15, 1951, morning ed., 1. 9. Valuable studies on the repatriation of Japanese soldiers imprisoned in the Soviet Union and China are Andrew E. Barshay, The Gods Left First: The

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Notes to Pages 25–27

Captivity and Repatriation of Japanese POWs in Northeast Asia, 1945– 1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Yoshikuni Igarashi, Homecomings: The Belated Return of Japan’s Lost Soldiers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Yokote Shinji, “Soviet Repatriation Policy, US Occupation Authorities, and Japan’s Entry into the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 30–50. 10. The most complete study in English on how the PRC treated Japanese mil­ itary prisoners is Barak Kushner, Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). 11. Ishikawa, Ma, and Hayashi, Ri Tokuzen, 24–26. 12. Ibid., 56–58. 13. A valuable discussion of Japanese efforts to return the physical remains of Chinese laborers is Wang Hongyan, “Chūgokujin ikotsu sōkan undō to sengo chūnichi kankei,” Hitotsubashi ronsō 119, no. 2 (February 1998): 267–283. 14. Ōsawa, “Zaika hōjin,” 58–59. 15. Perhaps the most important Chinese official in charge of executing Zhou’s plan was Liao Chengzhi. See Wang Xueping, “Ryō Shōshi to Chūgoku no tai-Nichi ‘minkan’ gaikō,” in Tairitsu to kyōzon no rekishi ninshiki: Nit-Chu kankei 150 nen, ed. Liu Jie and Kawashima Shin (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 2013), 361–389; Kurt W. Radke, China’s Relations with Japan, 1945–1983: The Role of Liao Chengzhi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 16. Casper Wits, “The Japan Group: Managing China’s People’s Diplomacy to­ ward Japan in the 1950s,” East Asia: An International Quarterly 33, no. 2 (June 2016): 100. Wits cites the memoirs of Zhang Xiangshan, Zhongri guanxi: Guankui yu jianzheng (Beijing: Dangdai shijie chubanshe, 1998), 226. The document was entitled “The CCP Central Committee’s Principles and Plans concerning Policy and Activity towards Japan.” Another excellent article by Wits on similar issues is “Cultural Relations within Sino-Japanese ‘People’s Diplomacy’: Nakajima Kenzō and the Japan-China Cultural Exchange Association,” Sino-Japanese Studies 23 (2016). 17. Adam Cathcart and Patricia Nash, “War Criminals and the Road to SinoJapanese Normalization: Zhou Enlai and the Shenyang Trials, 1954–1956,” Twentieth-Century China 34, no. 2 (April 2009): 89–111. Another excellent treatment of Zhou Enlai and his vision of diplomacy with Japan is Li Enmin, “Shū Onrai to Nihon: Jinteki nettowaaku to tai-Nichi gaikō no tenkai o chūshin ni,” in Tairitsu to kyōzon no rekishi ninshiki: Nit-Chu kankei 150 nen, ed. Liu Jie and Kawashima Shin (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 2013), 309–338. 18. The basic outline of Li’s life course is provided in Nanba Hideo, “Yōkoso kōjūjikai daihyō—Chūgoku jinmin kyūenkai to Chūgoku sekijūjisha ni tsuite,”

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Sekai ōrai 20, no. 12 (December 1954): 100–107; and Takamura Kōichi, “Ri Tokuzen to iu onna—Akai Chūgoku no kurisuchan,” Jinbutsu ōrai 3, no. 10 (October 1954): 36–39. 19. Merkel-Hess, “A New Woman and Her Warlord,” 438. 20. Nanba, “Yōkoso kōjūjikai daihyō”; Takamura, “Ri Tokuzen to iu onna.” 21. Merkel-Hess, “A New Woman and Her Warlord,” 448. 22. Li’s remarks, entitled “Jindō to heiwa no tame ni,” are included in Nanba, “Yōkoso kōjūjikai daihyō,” 106–107. 23. This rendering of the itinerary is based upon Hatano and Iimori, “Ri Tokuzen hōnichi,” 8–9. 24. Ishikawa, Ma, and Hayashi, Ri Tokuzen, 107–108. 25. Hatano and Iimori, “Ri Tokuzen hōnichi,” 8–9. 26. “Entotsu ue de Ri joshi no hoNichi hantai,” Mainichi shinbun, October 31, 1954, morning ed., 7. 27. “Uō saō no Ri Tokuzen joshi kangei,” Shūkan sankei, November 14, 1954, 18–19. 28. “Ri Tokuzen rachi keikaku no shippai,” Shinsō 75 (December 1954): 20. 29. Ishikawa, Ma, and Hayashi, Ri Tokuzen, 83–84. 30. Hatano and Iimori, “Ri Tokuzen hōnichi,” 11. 31. “Ri Tokuzen rachi keikaku no shippai,” 20–27. 32. Takagi Takesaburō, “Ri Tokuzen joshi ikkō hōnichi rakuya banashi,” Rōsai 6, no. 1 (January 1955): 22–25. 33. “Shinpai shita shikaku—Itō keibu Ri joshi mo keiho o kataru,” Asahi shinbun, November 12, evening ed., 3. 34. “Drop Leaflets Protesting Visit,” Japan Times, October 30, 1954. 35. “Yōkoso! Ri Tokuzen da ga, ichibu no myō na ugoki,” Shūkan asahi, November 7, 1954, 12–13. 36. “Ri Tokuzen rachi keikaku no shippai,” 20. 37. “Ri Tokuzen no akai shita—‘Heiwateki sonzai no kage ni tōru nikkyō,’ ” Shūkan yomiuri, February 13, 1955, 64–67. 38. Sekai minshu kenkyūjo, ed., Chūso sengen to Ri Tokuzen no hōnichi (Tokyo: n.p., 1954). Baba Kimihiko (Sengo Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō, 458) notes that the institute was, in fact, cofounded by a group of “converted” Japanese socialists who had become ardent anticommunists. 39. Nabeyama Sadachika, “Tsuide ni kaete,” in Chūso sengen to Ri Tokuzen no hōnichi (Tokyo: n.p., 1954), 1–7. 40. Tateyama Toshitada, “Ri Tokuzen hōnichi no haigo ni aru bōryakushō,” in Chūso sengen to Ri Tokuzen no hōnichi (Tokyo: n.p., 1954), 47–53. 41. Yabe Teiji, “Kokusai dōgi to senpan yokuryū mondai,” in Chūso sengen to Ri Tokuzen no hōnichi (Tokyo: n.p., 1954), 8–11.

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Notes to Pages 33–38

42. Kamibeppu Chikashi, “Chūso kyōdō seimei no igi to yakuwari,” in Chūso sengen to Ri Tokuzen no hōnichi (Tokyo: n.p., 1954), 21–32. 43. Ōno Shinzō, “Bijinesu wa bijinesu ni todome yo,” in Chūso sengen to Ri Tokuzen no hōnichi (Tokyo: n.p., 1954), 12–20. 44. Kusano Fumio, “Shū Onrai genmei no nerau mono,” in Chūso sengen to Ri Tokuzen no hōnichi (Tokyo: n.p., 1954), 33–46. 45. Li Dequan’s visit went largely unnoticed in the American news media save for dismissive comments such as these found in the New York Times: Reporting of her passage through Hong Kong en route to Japan on October 29, a one-para­ graph column filler sarcastically described Li “as head of a ten-member ‘good­ will’ mission.” “Red China Aide in Hong Kong,” New York Times, October 29, 1954. 46. For more on the Japan-China Friendship Association and its principal publi­ cation, Nihon to Chūgoku, see Franziska Seraphim, War Memory and Social Politics in Japan, 1945–2005 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006), 108–134. 47. “Ri Tokuzen obasan o mukaeru uta,” Nihon to Chūgoku, October 21, 1954, front page. 48. Kumano, “Mono wakari no ii obasan,” 12–13. 49. Merkel-Hess, “A New Woman and Her Warlord,” 432. 50. Suetsugu Ichirō, “Watashi no atta Ri Tokuzen no inshō,” Tairiku mondai, March 1954, 30–32. 51. Shūkan yomiuri, August 22, 1954, 47. 52. Hatanaka Masaharu, “Chūgoku kōjūjikai daihyō no rainichi o megutte,” Sekai 107 (November 1954): 92–97. 53. Ibid. 54. “Yōkoso, Ri Tokuzen joshi,” Shin josei 46 (November 1954): 24–25. 55. “Rusu kazoku to hiza o majiete,” Asahi gurafu, November 17, 1954, 5. 56. Asahi shinbun, November 12, 1954, evening ed., 2. 57. “Mune o eguru tangansho,” Mainichi shinbun, November 3, 1954, morning ed., 7. 58. “Yume ka to yorokobu rusu kazoku,” Mainichi shinbun, November 1, 1954, 8. 59. “Yahari chichi wa ikite ita,” Mainichi shinbun, November 1, 1954, 7. 60. Yanagikawa Reiko, “Kaeranu otto o watashi no te ni,” Fujin kurabu 35 (December 1954): 146–152. 61. “Rusu kazoku to hiza o majiete,” Asahi gurafu, November 17, 1954, 4. 62. Rowena Ward, “Japaneseness, Multiple Exile, and the Japanese Citizens Abandoned in China,” Japanese Studies 26, no. 2 (September 2006): 139– 151; Narangoa Li, “Japanese Orphans from China: History and Identity in

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a ‘Returning’ Migrant Community,” East Asian History 25/26 (June 2003): 141–160. Another valuable treatment of this subject is Lori Watt, “No Longer Hikiagesha: ‘Orphans and Women Left behind in China,’” in When Empire Comes Home: Repatriation and Reintegration in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). 63. “Ojiisan wa okaeshi shimasu yo,” Yomiuri shinbun, November 1, 1954, morn­ ing ed., 7. 64. This cartoon appeared in Shūkan sankei, November 21, 1954, 40. 65. “Ri Tokuzen joshi,” Katei yomiuri, November 21, 1954, 3. 66. “Heiwa to yūjō no okurimono—Ri Tokuzen no hōnichi arubamu,” Shin josei 48 (January 1955), 9–12. 67. “Shinai na Nihon no otomodachi,” Shin josei 48 (January 1955): 14–15. 68. Ishigaki Ayako, “Ai to jindō o tsuranuku,” Asahi shinbun, October 27, 1954, 2. 69. The photo appeared in the English-language Japan Times as well, but with the relatively mundane caption of “Women Leaders Meet: Mme. Li Te-chuan, President of the Communist Chinese Red Cross Society who arrived here on Saturday night, was met by Mrs. Raicho Hiratsuka, President of the Japan Federation of Women’s Associations, at the Imperial Hotel yesterday.” 70. Hiratsuka Raichō, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist, trans. Teruko Craig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 313–314. While not related directly to the Li Dequan visit, an ex­ cellent study of the global postwar women’s movement and its links to pacifism is Karen Garner, “Global Feminism and Postwar Reconstruction: The Word YWCA Visitation to Occupied Japan, 1947,” Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (June 2004): 191–227. 71. Hiroko Tomida, “The Controversy over the Protection of Motherhood and Its Impact on the Japanese Women’s Movement,” European Journal of East Asian Studies 3, no. 2 (September 2004): 243–271. 72. “Ri joshira kakomi yūshoku kai,” Yomiuri shinbun, November 11, 1954, morn­ ing ed., 7. 73. Asahi shinbun, November 12, 1954, evening ed., 2. 74. Li Dequan and Hiratsuka Raichō, “Ajia no heiwa wa fujin no te de,” Kaizō 36, no. 1 (January 1955): 65–67. 75. Li Dequan, “Chūgoku fujin no genjō,” Kaizō 36, no. 1 (January 1955): 67–70. 76. Li’s address at the World Women’s Conference of 1952 as recorded in Kōfuku to heiwa no tame ni—Sekai fujin taikai hōkoku ketsugi shū (Tokyo: Go-gatsu shobō, 1954), 87. 77. Hiratsuka Raichō, “Ri Tokuzen joshi o mukae shite,” Kaizō 36, no. 1 (January 1955): 71.

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78. Ibid., 72. 79. Ibid., 73. 80. Hiratuska Raichō, “Ri Tokuzen o omukae shite,” Ajia josei kōryūshi kenkyū 5 (July 1969): 9. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 10. Despite this tense moment, when remembering her meetings with Li years later, Hiratsuka recalled, “If I had to say in a word my impression of Li Dequan . . . I got the feeling that she was not so much a politician, but an educator, a great teacher. She could take the feelings of others to heart but still explain herself with confidence.” 83. Adam Bronson, One Hundred Million Philosophers: Science of Thought and the Culture of Democracy in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016), 136. 84. “Kyōsan shinryaku bōei ni kyōryoku—Yoshida shushō, Nichi-Bei kyōkai yūshokukai de ensetsu,” Mainichi shinbun, November 6, 1954, evening ed., 1. 85. “Ri joshira kesa kikoku,” Yomiuri shinbun, November 12, 1954, evening ed., 2. 86. ‘Teikoku hoteru mae de sayū ryōha kisei,” Yomiuri shinbun, November 12, 1954, morning ed., 7. 87. He Yinan, “Remembering and Forgetting the War: Elite Mythmaking, Mass Reaction, and Sino-Japanese Relations, 1950–2006,” History and Memory 19, no. 2 (2007): 47–49. 88. “Manibitai kōgyōka,” Yomiuri shinbun, November 12, 1954, morning ed., 7. 89. Ibid. Italics added. 90. Ibid. 91. “Nihon no yūjō arigato,” Yomiuri shinbun, November 12, 1954, morning ed., 7. 92. Li Dequan, “Nihon hōmon no tabi kara kaette,” Jinmin Chūgoku, January 1955, 11–14. Published under the same title in Chūō kōron 70, no. 3 (March 1955): 208–212. 93. Wits, “The Japan Group,” 106. Wits takes this quote from the memoirs of Wu Xuewen, Liao Chengzhi yu Riben (Beijing: Zhonggongdangshi chubanshe, 2007), 159–160. 94. For an exploration of how the PRC aimed to shape a more progressive image of Chinese women domestically, see Zheng Yangwen, “Women’s Liberation in China during the Cold War,” in The Cold War in Asia: The Battle for Hearts and Minds, ed. Zheng Yangwen, Hong Liu, and Michael Szonyi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 119–146. 95. For more on the place of soldiers in the construction of Japanese national identity during the early postwar years, see Sandra Wilson, “War, Soldier, and Nation in 1950s Japan,” International Journal of Asian Studies 5, no. 2 (July 2008): 187–218.

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96. Robert Hoppens, The China Problem in Postwar Japan: Japanese National Identity and Sino-Japanese Relations (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 43. Chapter 2. Mao’s Mushroom Clouds 1. “Heiwa ni somuku Chūgoku kaku jikken,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 16, 1966, morning ed., 4. 2. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken o ureu,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 24, 1965, morning ed., 3. 3. “Kishi naikaku ni tsuite,” Mainichi shinbun, September 16, 1957, morning ed., 1. 4. “Kishi naikaku no gaikō o dō miru?” Yomiuri shinbun, September 16, 1957, morning ed., 1. 5. For more on this topic, see Paul Drubie, “Phoenix Arisen: Japan as Peaceful Internationalist at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics,” International Journal of the History of Sport 228, no. 16 (November 2011): 2309–2322; Sandra Wilson, “Exhibiting Japan: The Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and Expo ’70 in Osaka,” Historical Research 85, no. 227 (February 2012): 159–178. 6. Untitled cartoon by Ōba Hiroshi, Bungei shunjū (December 1964): 86–87. 7. Yokoyama Taizō cartoon, Shūkan asahi, October 30, 1964, 14. 8. “Chūkyō kara no ‘shi no hai’ wa?” Shūkan sankei, November 2, 1964, 16. 9. In his enormous study of postwar Japanese views on China, Baba Kimihiko devotes a few pages to the description of popular reactions to Chinese atomic weapons testing in 1964–1967. See his Sengo Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō: Nihon haisen kara bunka kakumei—Nit-Chū fukkō made (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2010), 225–226. His focus there is primarily on the problems caused by the tests for those in Japan who had been trying to advance a more positive perception of the PRC during the early 1960s. 10. A fascinating discussion of popular Chinese perceptions of American atomic weapons during the early postwar era is Henrietta Harrison, “Popular Responses to the Atomic Bomb in China, 1945–1955,” Past & Present suppl. (May 2013): 98–116. 11. A complete English translation of the PRC’s October 16, 1964, statement is available as appendix A in John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 241–243. 12. “Atarashii ‘shi no hai’ mo kyōfu,” Asahi shinbun, October 17, 1964, evening ed., 11. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken o ureu,” Yomiuri shinbun, October 11, 1964, morn­ ing ed., 2.

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Notes to Pages 60–66

16. Kumamoto Yoshitada, “Chūgoku no kaku jikken,” Dōmei, December 1964, 78–81. 17. “Chūgoku no genbaku,” Yomiuri shinbun, October 18, 1964, morning ed., 3. 18. “Chūkyō no kaku bakuhatsu ni kōgi suru,” Mainichi shinbun, October 18, 1964, morning ed., 5. 19. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken o ureu,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 24, 1965, morning ed., 3. 20. Hirabayashi Taiko, “Kaku de sensō yokuhi dekinai,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 16, 1966, morning ed., 4. 21. “Heiwa ni somuku Chūgoku kaku jikken,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 16, 1966, morning ed., 4. 22. Ibid. 23. “Chūgoku kaku jikken e no kōgi—Fukakai na Nikkyō no seimei,” Daibyaku renge 170 (July 1965): 58–59. 24. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken o ureu,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 24, 1965, morning ed., 3. 25. “Genbaku, sore o tsukuranai hokori,” Yomiuri shinbun, October 18, 1964, morning ed., 14. 26. “Nihonjin ga Chūkyō kaku bakuhatau ni kyōryoku shita to iu uwasa,” Shūkan manga sandee, November 25, 1964, 92–95. 27. “Chūgoku suibaku jikken no nazo o toku,” Shūkan asahi, July 7, 1967, 145. 28. “Chūgoku e nagareta Nihon no genshikaku shiryō,” Shūkan gendai, January 1, 1967, 22–27. This article also referred to the case of Tsukamoto Osamu and his unexplained disappearance as further evidence of possible Japanese collusion in the development of Chinese weapons programs. 29. John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 102–105. An insightful discussion of rumor in Mao’s China is Steve Smith, “Fear and Rumor in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s,” Cultural & Social History 5, no. 3 (2008): 269–288. 30. Shigemori Tadashi, “Kaku kurabu hairi suru Chūykō,” Shūkan Nihon keizai, October 1964, 6–7. 31. Shigemori Tadashi, “Chūkyō no kaku gaikō to Nihon no bōei,” Shūkan Nihon keizai, November 1964, 8–9. 32. “Chūkyō kaku jikken no imi suru mono,” Sekai no ugoki, December 1964, 10–13. 33. Comments from Nakasone Yasuhiro in “Chūgoku kaku jikken to Nihon no anzen hoshō,” Chūō Kōron, December 1964, 184–185. 34. “‘Kaku jikken’ de senshinkoku no nakama iri,” published phone interview with Saionji Kinkazu, Shūkan asahi, October 30, 1964, 3–4.

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35. Amy King, China-Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry, and War, 1945–1971 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 169. 36. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken to wareware no tachiba,” Shin Nihon bungaku, January 1965, 155. 37. Takeuchi Minoru, “Chugoku kaku jikken to Nihon chishikijin,” Shin Nihon bungaku, January 1965, 124–134. 38. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken ni kōgi suru,” Gekkan shakaitō, December 1964, 5–12. 39. Ibid. 40. Niijima Atsuyoshi, “Kaku jikken no imi—Seifū no imi,” Ekonomisuto, May 31, 1966, 23–24. For a brief overview of Niijima’s career and thought, see Yoshihiro Kuriyama, “A Japanese ‘Maoist’: Niijima Atsuyoshi,” Asian Survey 16, no. 9 (September 1976): 846–854. 41. Yomiuri shinbun, November 9, 1964, morning ed., 3. 42. Yomiuri shinbun, May 23, 1966, morning ed., front page. 43. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken o ureu,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 24, 1965, morning ed., 3. 44. Ibid. 45. “Heiwa ni somuku Chūgoku kaku jikken,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 16, 1966, morning ed., 4. 46. Yomiuri shinbun, October 30, 1966, morning ed., front page. 47. Mudai Risaku, “Chūgoku kaku jikken to anpo taisei,” Gendai no me, December 1964, 22–31. 48. Kuno Osamu, “Chūgoku no kaku jikken ni chokumen shite,” Sekai, December 1964, 33–37. 49. Hidaka Rokurō, “Chūgoku no kaku jikken to zenmen kinshi e no michi,” Sekai, December 1964, 47–58. 50. There were two parts to this feature segment in the December 1964 issue of Chūō kōron: “Chūgoku kaku jikken o meguru Ajia josei,” 164–178; “Chūgoku kaku jikken to Nihon no anzen hoshō,” 179–186. 51. Comments from Yasui Kaoru in “Chūgoku kaku jikken to Nihon no anzen hoshō,” Chūō kōron, December 1964, 179–180. 52. Comments from Nagasue Eiichi in ibid., 180–181. 53. Comments from Iwasa Yoshizane in ibid., 181–182. 54. Comments from Oka Masayoshi in ibid., 182–183. 55. King, China-Japan Relations after World War Two, 170. King’s assertions on this point are drawn from secondary Chinese-language studies, not original Japanese sources. 56. “Satō shin naikaku ni nozomu,” Mainichi shinbun, December 14, 1964, morn­ ing ed., 1, 4.

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Notes to Pages 76–85

57. “Chūkyō, tsui ni kaku bakuhatsu,” Mainichi shinbun, October 17, 1964, morn­ ing ed., front page. 58. Sandee mainichi, November 1, 1964, 20–21. 59. “Meroko-san” comic, Shūkan manga TIMES taimusu, October 31, 1964, 41. 60. “CC jōshi” comic, Shūkan manga sandee, November 11, 1964, 35. 61. “Kyō mo ichi nichi” comic, Yomiuri shinbun, October 21, 1964, evening ed., 11. 62. Tōhō keizai (June 1966). 63. “Mappira-kun” comic, Mainichi shinbun, May 11, 1966, evening ed., 7. 64. Ieishi Kazuo comic, Yomiuri shinbun, May 10, 1966, evening ed., 1. 65. Yomiuri shinbun, June 20, 1967, evening ed., 2. 66. “Fuji santarō” comic, Asahi shinbun, May 13, 1966, evening ed., 10. 67. “Tokubetsu shōsetsu—Dai sanji sekai taisen,” Shūkan shōnen sandee, August 7, 1966, 190–191. 68. Ibid., 106–11. 69. A chart describing all nine characters and their superpowers can be found in “Saibōgu 009 to hachinin no nakamatachi,” Shūkan shōnen magajin, October 16, 1966, 23. The other two characters were Cyborg 001, a Russian baby with superintelligence, and Cyborg 004, a German man with hands that could trans­ form into gun barrels and blades. 70. Hanson W. Baldwin, “China’s Bomb: Grave Problems Posed for West,” New York Times, October 18, 1964, E3. 71. Sadao Asada, “The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches: Japanese and American Perceptions of the Atomic Bomb Decision, 1945–1995,” in Living With the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 173–201. 72. “Chūgoku kaku jikken wa appare!” Dōkō, October 21, 1964. 73. Mudai, “Chūgoku kaku jikken to anpo taisei,” 24. 74. Morikuma Takeshi cartoon, Seikai ōrai, December 1964, 116. 75. Nasu Ryōsuke cartoon, Mainichi shinbun, May 10, 1966, evening ed., 2. 76. Yokoyama Taizō cartoon, Asahi shinbun, May 11, 1966, morning ed., front page. 77. Yokoyama Taizō cartoon, Asahi shinbun, June 25, 1967, morning ed., front page. 78. “China’s Bomb—and World Impact,” New York Times, October 17, 1964, E1. 79. Kondō Hidezō cartoon, Yomiuri shinbun, May 18, 1965, morning ed., 1. 80. Mainichi shinbun, May 12, 1966, evening ed., 2. 81. Qin Zhe editorial cartoon, Renmin ribao, May 16, 1966. 82. Fang Cheng editorial cartoon, Renmin ribao, May 14, 1966. The US-based East Asian scholar Chalmers Johnson expressed a more nuanced understanding

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Notes to Pages 87–92

83. 84.

85.

86.

87. 88.

195

of the PRC’s atomic test, one that would have resonated with many readers in Japan. “Now China has paid her initiation fee into the world’s most exclusive club. The explosion on October 16 of her first atomic device will have a great psychological impact on the other underdeveloped nations of the world, and this in turn will help China to break out of her American- and Russian-imposed isolation.” Johnson went on to explain that China’s successful test “ought to persuade Americans to think again about the meaning of the Chinese revolu­ tion and the tempo of change in the Orient.” He continued, “It is easy to say, as every American political and military figure does when talking about China’s atomic progress, that a Chinese bomb means nothing in terms of the present balance of power. It probably doesn’t. . . . What is harder for American lead­ ers to admit is that China is succeeding in its drive to become, not just an­ other ‘transitional society,’ but a Great Power.” Chalmers Johnson, “China’s ‘Manhattan Project,’ or, How Mao Learned to Love, and Build, the Bomb,” New York Times, October 25, 1964. Etō Shinkichi, “Chūgoku kaku jikken to Nihon no heiwa,” Ushio, December 1964, 44–52. Richard Calichman, What Is Modernity? The Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 149–165. This part of the book is a translation of Takeuchi’s essay “Asia as Method,” upon which my brief de­ scription is based. For another succinct and insightful overview of Takeuchi’s ideas on China and his influence in the early postwar era, see Robert Hoppens, The China Problem in Postwar Japan: Japanese National Identity and SinoJapanese Relations (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 47–51. Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Shu Sakunin (Zhou Zuoren) kara kaku jikken made,” Sekai, January 1965, 72–79. For a superb elaboration on the function of the woxin changdan concept in modern Chinese history, see Paul Cohen, Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Takeuchi, “Shu Sakunin (Zhou Zuoren) kara kaku jikken made.” An insight­ ful discussion of Takeuchi’s views on China is Suzuki Masahisa, “Takeuchi Yoshimi no Chūgokukan,” Ajia taiheiyō kenkyū 31 (October 2006): 3–16. “Kasō Bei-Chū kaku sensō ka no Nihon,” Shūkan asahi, May 27, 1966, 16–21. Kishi Toshimitsu, “Chūgoku kaku jiken to Satō seikenki ni taiō ni kan suru ikōsatsu—1960 nendai no naikaku chōsashitsu kaku hoyū kenkyū o chūshin ni,” Waseda daigaku Ajia taiyō kenkyūka kiyō 30 (September 2015): 21–39.

Chapter 3: Red Guard Whirlwind 1. Quoted in “‘Arya, rakkyō kakumei da’ Ōya kōsatsugumi ga mita Chūgoku no genjitsu,” Shūkan yomiuri, October 14, 1966, 12–19.

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Notes to Pages 92–97

2. Quoted in ibid. 3. Conversation between Ōya and Kajiyama in “Ōya Sōichi kōsatsugumi no Chūkyō hōkoku,” Sandee mainichi, October 20, 1966, 115. 4. Shōji Sadao, “Howaito karaa kōeihei,” Shūkan manga TIMES taimusu, October 1, 1966, 20–27. 5. Baba Kimihiko, Sengo Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō: Nihon haisen kara bunka kakumei—Nit-Chū fukkō made (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2010), 248–249. 6. Comments made by Ōya in “Ōya Sōichi kōsatsugumi no Chūkyō hōkoku,” 22–23. He also noted with a laugh, “None of us have been in postwar China. So we are calling ourselves the Communist China Virgin Traveler Study Tour.” 7. Baba Kimihiko deals with the early years of the Cultural Revolution in chapter 4 of his Sengo Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō. The discussion there is wide sweeping, but no single topic receives in-depth analysis. A more substantial analysis of Japanese reactions to the Cultural Revolution is Fukuoka Aiko, Nihonjin no Bunkaku ninshiki: rekishiteki tenkan o meguru “honshin” (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 2014). In English, a brief examination of how the Cultural Revolution in­ fluenced Japanese writers and intellectuals is Shi Ge, “China’s Cultural Revolution and Japan’s Intelligentsia: Kazumi Takahashi’s Humanistic Sensibilities,” Comparative Literature Studies 52, no. 1 (2015): 65–79. An excellent exploration of how Maoism was understood and consumed around the world during the late 1960s is Alexander C. Cook, ed., Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The impact of Maoism on postwar leftist intellectuals in Japan is examined in J. Victor Koschmann, “Mao Zedong and the Postwar Japanese Left,” in Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought, ed. Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Knight (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1997), 342– 364; and Curtis Anderson Gayle, “China in the Japanese Radical Gaze, 1945– 1955,” Modern Asian Studies 43, no. 5 (September 2009): 1255–1286. 8. Morikuma Takeshi cartoon, Seikai ōrai, September 1966, 117. Morikuma fol­ lowed that image the next month with another comic showing a female Red Guard wielding an enormous spiked club but rigged with ropes to a giant mari­ onette cross clutched by Mao, all positioned next to a caption reading “dolls on strings” (ayatsuri ningyō). Seikai ōrai, October 1966, 117. 9. Yokoyama Taizō cartoon, Manga dokuhon, October 1966, 73. 10. Yokoyama Taizō cartoon, Shūkan asahi, October 15, 1966, 75. 11. Mainichi shinbun, August 24, 1966, evening ed., 7. 12. Yokoyama Taizō cartoon, Manga dokuhon, November 1966, 112. 13. Yomiuri shinbun, August 13, 1966, morning ed., 1. 14. Yomiuri shinbun, October 25, 1966, morning ed., 1. 15. Yomiuri shinbun, August 23, 1966, morning ed., 1.

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16. Yomiuri shinbun, August 26, 1966, morning ed., 1. In another cartoon under a caption reading “love him to the bone” (hone made ai su), five toddler-sized Red Guards cling to the chairman, two in his arms, two on his legs, and one reaching up to him from the ground. Their five heads, however, have been replaced by five spherical bombs with fuses lit and smoking, on which the five characters for “Red Guard requisition order” (kōeihei yōkyū) are written. Yomiuri shinbun, August 30, 1966, morning ed., 1. Again, Kondō suggests that by encouraging Red Guard action Mao has unleashed forces beyond his control that will ultimately lead to his own downfall. 17. Yomiuri shinbun, October 18, 1966, morning ed., 1. Yokoyama expressed a similar idea with an image of the outstretched arms of Beijing gently placing a tiny Red Guard down in a field of windswept grain stalks, above the cap­ tion: “Now, you are a good kid, so go back home for the fall harvest” (ii ko dakara, aki no shūkaku ni kaerinasai). Asahi shinbun, September 17, 1966, morning ed., 1. 18. Yomiuri shinbun, September 25, 1966, morning ed., 1. 19. Kondō Hidezō cartoon, Manga, July 1968, 31. 20. Asahi shinbun, September 9, 1966, morning ed., 1. 21. Shūkan manga TIMES, October 1, 1966, 39. 22. Asahi shinbun, September 6, 1966, morning ed., 1. 23. Yokoyama Taizō cartoon, Shūkan shinchō, September 3, 1966, 29. 24. “Gendai no shomondai ni tsuite,” public opinion survey, Mainichi shinbun, January 1, 1968, morning ed., 1, 4. The survey was conducted between December 1 and December 3, 1967. 25. “Nihon no heiwa to anzen,” public opinion survey, Mainichi shinbun, June 21, 1968, morning ed., 1, 4; and morning ed., July 1, 1968, 1, 8, 9. The survey was conducted between June 14 and June 15, 1968. 26. Life, September 23, 1966, 61. 27. John King Fairbank, “A Nation Imprisoned by Her Own History,” Life, September 23, 1966, 74. 28. “Red Guards Put China’s ‘Four Olds’ to the Torch,” Life, October 7, 1966, 40. 29. “Chūkyō no bunka daikakumei—Nihon e no eikyō o saguru,” Mainichi shinbun, August 31, 1966, morning ed., 1. 30. Takeuchi Minoru, “Kaku Matsujaku no jiko hihan to bunkaku kakumei—hōi sareru Chūgoku rekishigaku,” Asahi jaanaru, May 22, 1966, 12. A rigorous and dense analysis of the literary work by Guo Moruo that came under scru­ tiny during his persecution in 1966 is provided by Yamauchi Yū, “Shōka no jidai: bunka kakumei to Kaku Matsujaku,” Gendai no riron, December 1966, 22–37. Yamauchi was a graduate student at Kyoto University at the time of publication.

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Notes to Pages 105–108

31. “Kaku Matsujaku shi no jiko hihan,” Mainichi shinbun, April 30, 1966, morn­ ing ed., 5. 32. Kaku Matsujaku shi jiko hihan no haikei,” Asahi shinbun, May 1, 1966, morn­ ing ed., 3. 33. “Chūgoku no bungei senpū—Kaku Matsujaku jiken o megutte,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 2, 1966, evening ed., 7. 34. Sugimura Takeshi, “Aru Chūkyō kanbu e no tegami,” Bungei shunjū, July 1966 (special issue), 143. 35. “Chūgoku no senpū undō ni omou,” Yomiuri shinbun, May 9, 1966, morning ed., 2. 36. The feature story was entitled “Kono ‘ichi mai no shashin’ o dō miru ka?” Shūkan asahi, February 24, 1967, 16–25. 37. Comments made by Ōe Kenzaburō in ibid., 16. The brash and brazenly neo­ nationalistic Mishima Yukio was less subtle in his views. “If I were made to stand in that position,” he explained, “I would have died fighting before that point. My apologies to those who were victimized that way, but led around in shame like that . . . I would never let it happen.” Despite his bravado, however, Mishima was ultimately on Mao’s side. “I don’t know how things are going to play out in China from here, but I want to see the anti-Soviet Mao-Lin group win the struggle. If their opponents win and join hands with the USSR, that would be awful. Because there is just no telling what the USSR might do.” Ibid., 17. The progressive author Sata Ineko was more sympathetic in her re­ action to photos of Red Guard victims. “I recognized China as a place that brought a people’s revolution,” she said. “So, for me the Cultural Revolution is painful to see.” To Sata, the Cultural Revolution was a struggle between top leaders, but everyday people were paying the heaviest price. “If the leadership has problems,” she continued, “I want to see them work it out properly.” Ibid. 38. Comments made by Shimizu Ikutarō in ibid., 18. 39. Comments made by Okuno Shintarō in ibid. 40. Comments made by Takeuchi Yoshimi in ibid. 41. Nagano Shigeo, president of Fuji Steelworks, shared Takeuchi’s sentiment. “Because it is a neighboring country,” he replied, “we cannot just ignore it. But to act without knowing the reality of the situation there is the most danger­ ous thing. The key thing here is that this is a country of eight hundred million people that has nuclear weapons, and the fact is this sort of irregular situation cannot be expected to go on for five or ten years.” Ibid. 42. Comments made by Kamisaka Fuyuko in ibid., 22. 43. Comments made by Daimatsu Hirobumi in ibid. 44. Comments made by Dan Ikuma in ibid.

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45. Comments made by Ōya in “Ōya Sōichi kōsatsugumi no Chūkyō hōkoku,” Sandee mainichi, October 20, 1966, 122. 46. Ibid., 120. 47. As quoted in Mita Sōsuke, “Nihon no kōkōsei wa kōeihei o dō miru ka,” Chūō kōron 81, no. 11 (November 1966): 204. 48. Recollections of Sabu Kohso, a teenage student in the early 1970s, as cited in Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 140–142. 49. See Oguma Eiji, “Japan’s 1968: A Collective Reaction to Rapid Economic Growth in an Age of Turmoil,” Asia-Pacific Journal 13, issue 11, no. 1 (March 23, 2015). 50. “Natsuyasumi mo nai ‘kaihōku’ Yasuda kōdō,” Sandee mainichi, August 4, 1968, 16–21. 51. “Kono ‘ichi mai no shashin’ o dō miru ka?”, 23. 52. Ibid., 24. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 24–25. 55. Ibid., 25. 56. Mita Sōsuke, “Nihon no kōkōsei wa kōeihei o dō miru ka,” 205. 57. “Jimintō no kōeihei wa okoru,” Bungei shunjū, December 1966, 112–118. 58. Ibid., 114. 59. “Sarariiman kōeihei” feature in Shūkan manga sandee, September 28, 1966, 13–31. 60. Moriyoshi Masateru, “Shizukanaru tonchin kakumei,” part of the “Sarariiman kōeihei” feature. 61. Suzuki Yoshiji, “Kōkyū sakaba kaihō banzai, bijo bishu mina waga shoyū,” part of the “Sarariiman kōeihei” feature. 62. Kitayama Ryū, “Aka wa kakumei no iro,” part of the “Sarariiman kōeihei” feature. 63. Gomi Mitsuko, “Watashi wa kōeihei to toron shita,” Sandee mainichi, October 2, 1996, 17–19. 64. “‘Ōya kōsatsugumi’ hōdankai—kōeihei senpū o gairoku suru,” Shūkan asahi, October 15, 1966, 37. 65. Conversation between Ōya, Ōmori, and Fujiwara in “Ōya Sōichi kōsatsugumi no Chūkyō hōkoku,” Sandee mainichi, October 20, 1966, 40. 66. Comments made by Ōmori in ibid., 36. 67. Comments made by Fujiwara in ibid., 73. 68. Comments made by Hata in ibid., 102. 69. Comments made by Fujiwara in ibid., 39.

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Notes to Pages 117–120

70. Conversation between Ōya and Kajiyama in ibid., 73. 71. Comments made by Fujiwara in ibid., 72. 72. “Bunka daikakumei no gekiryū,” part 1, Mainichi shinbun, August 27, 1966, morning ed., 1; part 2, Mainichi shinbun, August 28, 1966, morning ed., 1; part 3, Mainichi shinbun, August 29, 1966, morning ed., 1; part 4, Mainichi shinbun, August 30, 1966, morning ed., 1; part 5, Mainichi shinbun, August 31, 1966, morning ed., 1. Part 1 covered historical background information on the nature of the movement. Part 2 looked more precisely at the rectification movement and its targets during the summer of 1966, including Guo Moruo. The third part explored the rise of Lin Biao and the PLA as major players in Chinese politics, with a focus on the potential implications for regional secu­ rity of unity in military, political, and ideological energy in the PRC. Part 5 was an examination of the potential impact of the Cultural Revolution on the nations and peoples of Southeast Asia, including overseas Chinese communi­ ties and Taiwan. 73. Ibid., part 4, 1. 74. Sugimura Takeshi, “Aru Chūkyō kanbu e no tegami,” 142. 75. Conversation between Ōya and Kajiyama in “Ōya Sōichi kōsatsugumi no Chūkyō hōkoku,” 115. On discussing the wartime past with the Chinese side, Ōya commented that he wanted to see traces of Japan’s military presence in the area but was told “according to Mao’s thought, we speak no more of the past and look forward to the future. So, we will focus on showing you how we are building that new future.” When thinking about why the Chinese don’t want to talk about the war, Ōya remarked: “For us it’s like how we don’t like to talk about the years spent under MacArthur and the US occupation.” He also compared the Chinese attitude about the wartime past to the Koreans, whom he found to be far less accommodating. Ōya claimed that the Koreans refused to forget anything. Chinese society, however, had the maturity to let go of the past, whereas Koreans just keep stirring it up. Fujiwara then added with a laugh, “It’s like when your wife keeps mentioning again and again about the time when you cheated on her.” Ibid., 40. 76. Comments made by Godai Riyako in “Kono ‘ichi mai no shashin’ o dō miru ka?”, 23. 77. Comments made by Utsunomiya Tokuma in ibid., 20. 78. Takagi Takeo, “Ryū no hige ni sawatta otoko,” Bungei shunjū (August 1966): 106–112. 79. Ibid., 109. 80. Ibid., 110. 81. Ibid., 111.

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82. “Nihon no wakamono wa Chūgoku o kou kangaete iru,” Shūkan sankei, October 17, 1972. 83. “Watashi wa mita! Shirarezaru Chūgoku no shimin seikatsu,” Josei jishin, September 9, 1972, 46–53. 84. Heibon panchi, September 12, 1966, 3. 85. “Ōya kōsatsugumi to kōeihei no daitōronkai,” Sandee mainichi, October 16, 1996, 12–19. 86. “Boku wa kōeihei datta—Chūgoku kara hikiageta shōnen no taiken,” Shūkan yomiuri, February 9, 1967, 70. 87. The history of Japanese technical experts such as Yazawa Kiyoshi in post­ war China is explored in Rowena Ward, “Delaying Repatriation: Japanese Technicians in Early Postwar China,” Japan Forum 23, no. 4 (2011): 471–483; and Daqing Yang, “Resurrecting the Empire? Japanese Technicians in Postwar China, 1945–49,” in The Japanese Empire in East Asia and Its Postwar Legacy, ed. Harald Fuess (Munich: Iudicium, 1998), 185–205. An early but still valuable study on this topic is Donald G. Gillin and Charles Etter, “Staying On: Japanese Soldiers and Civilians in China, 1945–1949,” Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 3 (May 1983): 497–518. 88. “Boku wa kōeihei datta,” Shūkan yomiuri, February 9, 1967, 71. 89. Ibid., 72. 90. Ibid., 70. 91. Ibid., 72. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 73. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid. 97. As quoted by Oguma Eiji in his “The Postwar Intellectuals’ View of Asia,” in Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History, ed. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (London: Routledge, 2007), 200. Originally from an essay by Shimizu published in Chūō kōron in January 1951. 98. Conversation between Miki and Ōya in “Ōya Sōichi kōsatsugumi no Chūkyō hōkoku,” 50–51. Chapter 4: Rediscovering the Continent 1. “Watashi wa mita! Shirarezaru Chūgoku no shimin seikatsu,” Josei jishin, September 9, 1972, 46–53. 2. “Chūgoku no shomin seikatsu,” Asahi jaanaru, October 6, 1972, 13–17. Part of a special article collection entitled “‘Nit-Chū shin jidai’ o toraeru shiten.”

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Notes to Pages 127–133

3. On this topic, see Ōba Osamu, Books and Boats: Sino-Japanese Relations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Joshua Fogel (Portland, ME: Merwin Asia, 2012). 4. Joshua Fogel, The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862–1945 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Joshua Fogel, Maiden Voyage: The Senzaimaru and the Creation of Modern Sino-Japanese Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Joshua Fogel, “Japanese Literary Travelers in Prewar China,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, no. 2 (December 1989): 575–602. Tanizaki Juni’ichirō, one of the Japanese travelers examined closely by Fogel, is explored by Atsuko Sakaki in “Japanese Perceptions of China: The Sinophilic Fiction of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 59, no. 1 (June 1999): 187–218. 5. See Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Controls in the Postwar Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 6. The basic course of diplomatic exchange around the normalization issue is well known. See, for example, Takakazu Kimura, “China Policy in the Last Years of the Satō Cabinet: Focus on the Debate within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” Japan Forum 24, no. 4 (2012): 451–469. Another concise and useful over­ view of the diplomatic maneuvering that preceded normalization in 1972 is Kazuhiko Togo, “Japan’s Foreign Policy under Détente: Relations with China and the Soviet Union, 1971–1973,” in The Cold War in East Asia, 1945–1991, ed. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2011), 180–212. 7. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: The New Press, 1999), 168. 8. Asahi shinbun, January 28, 1972, morning ed., 5. 9. Jitsugyō ne sekai, October 1972, 5. 10. “Nit-Chū fukkō de anata no seikatsu ni wa?” Sandee mainichi, October 15, 1972, 44–45. 11. Kirin beer advertisement, in Shūkan gendai, November 1972. 12. The ad appears in the Sundee mainichi, October 15, 1972. I have also seen it in numerous other print outlets of that time. 13. Shūkan asahi, October 1, 1972, “Chūgoku no subete” special edition, 28, 29. 14. Shūkan gendai, September 26, 1972. 15. Advertisement for Chūgoku kaiwa gakuen, Yomiuri shinbun, September 26, 1972, morning ed., 1. 16. Sundee mainichi, October 29, 1972. 17. Shūkan sankei, October 17, 1972. 18. Shūkan asahi, October 1, 1972.

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Notes to Pages 133–142

203

19. Chōri chemical company advertisement, in Shūkan asahi, October 1, 1972, “Chūgoku no subete” special edition, 87. 20. KDD advertisement, in Shūkan Yomiuri, October 7, 1972. The NEC ad ap­ peared in the Asahi shinbun, September 30, 1972, morning ed., 6. 21. Shūkan asahi, December 15, 1972, 109. 22. Full-page advertisement in Sundee mainichi, October 15, 1972. 23. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 334. 24. Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 174. 25. Many of the articles filled with travel advice remind me of the Edo-era publica­ tions aimed at aiding travelers in Tokugawa society. See Constantine Vaporis, “Caveat Viator: Advice to Travelers in the Edo Period,” Monumenta Nipponica 44, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 461–483. 26. “Sarariiman hitsudoku—Chūgokujin to tsukiau hō,” Shūkan sankei, August 25, 1971, 41–44. 27. “Chūgoku ryokō tabuu shū,” Shūkan bunshu, September 25, 1972, 44–47. 28. “Chūgoku kankō tettei gaido,” Shūkan sankei, August 25, 1972, 46–51. 29. J. B. Harley, “Texts and Contexts in the Interpretation of Early Maps,” in The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 36. 30. Travel map in “Chūgoku e no hajimete no tabi,” Josei jishin, October 28, 1972, 69. 31. Travel map in Shūkan sankei, October 17, 1972, 73. 32. “Watashi wa mita! Shirarezaru Chūgoku no shimin seikatsu,” Josei jishin, September 9, 1972, 46–53. 33. Tsuyuki Shigeru, “Kono me de mita Chūgoku josei no seikatsu,” Fujin seikatsu, December 1972, 196–200. 34. “Chūgoku taishū no Nihon imeeji o Pekin no machi ni saguru,” Shūkan asahi, October 10, 1972, 23. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 24. 37. Ibid., 25. 38. Ibid., 24. 39. “Nihon no heiwa to anzen,” Mainichi shinbun, June 21, 1968, morning ed., 1, 8, 9. 40. Yomiuri shinbun, May 31, 1970, morning ed., 1. 41. Asahi shinbun, June 23, 1970, morning ed., 12. 42. Asahi shinbun, January 3, 1972, morning ed., 7.

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204

Notes to Pages 142–149

43. Asahi shinbun, September 18, 1972, morning ed., 2. 44. Yomiuri shinbun, September 26, 1972, morning ed., 2. 45. Asahi shinbun, January 27, 1972, morning ed., 5. 46. Mainichi shinbun, September 29, 1972, evening ed., 4. 47. ‘Chūgoku ni tsuite,” Mainichi shinbun, April 30, 1970. 48. Mainichi shinbun, October 18, 1971, morning ed., 1, 6. 49. “Nana oku ni hitobito—sono sugao,” Shūkan asahi, May 28, 1971, 8–9. 50. Uezaka Fuyuko, “Watashi no mita Chūgoku,” part of a photojournalism fea­ ture story entitled “Hirakareta tairiku—Chūgoku,” Fujin seikatsu, May 1972, 69–72. 51. “Dōbun dōshu datte konna ‘otoshi ana,’” Shūkan yomiuri, October 14, 1972, 40–43. 52. Hashimoto Masaru, “Nit-Chū yūkō banzai!” cartoon, Ekonomisuto, September 26, 1972, 13. 53. Hashimoto Masaru, “Mō Takutō ga akanbee shite naze warui?” Gendai no me, February 1973, 238–244. 54. Shōji Sadao, sarariiman senka comic, Shūkan gendai, October 19, 1972, 82–83. 55. “Nihon no wakamono wa Chūgoku o kou kangaete iru,” Shūkan sankei, October 17, 1972, 54–60. 56. Comment from Towa Sawako, age 24, office worker, in ibid., 57–58. 57. Comment from Otsuka Sayuri, age 25, office worker, in ibid., 59. 58. Comment from Matsumoto Yoko, age 24, office worker, in ibid., 57. 59. Comment from Sanada Susumu, age 25, businessman, in ibid., 59. 60. Comment from Araki Tatsu, age 22, businessman, in ibid. 61. Comment of Naka Jin, age 25, businessman, in ibid., 60. 62. Comment of Komatsu Teruyuki, age 25, businessman, in ibid. 63. Comment of Nishimura Toshinari, age 17, high-school student, in ibid., 54. 64. Comment of Tabata Saburōji, age 24, businessman, in ibid., 60. 65. Comment of Otsuka Sayuri, age 25, office worker, in ibid., 59. 66. Comment of Gotō Kumiko, age 22, university student, in ibid., 56. 67. Comment from Towa Sawako, age 24, in ibid., 57–58. 68. Comment of Kobayashi Kayoko, age 22, office worker, in ibid., 58. 69. Comment of Gotō Kumiko, age 22, university student, in ibid., 56. 70. A sidebar segment entitled “Chūgoku josei ari no mama” within the larger ar­ ticle “Nit-Chū kōryū to danzetsu no hyaku nen zenshiryō,” Yangu redi, October 9, 1972, 23. 71. “Watashitachi ga mita Chūgoku no shufu no gurashi,” Fujin seikatsu, January 1972, 236–238.

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Notes to Pages 150–161

205

72. “Watashi wa mita! Shirarezaru Chūgoku no shimin seikatsu,” Josei jishin, September 9, 1972, 46–53. 73. Ibid. 74. “Sugao no Chūgoku josei—bijin heishi kara kōen no abekku made,” Gendai, May 1972, 11–33. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. “Watashi wa mita! Shirarezaru Chūgoku no shimin seikatsu,” Josei jishin, September 9, 1972, 46–53. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. The photo was published with this caption in Mitome Tadao and Awazu Kiyoshi, eds., Document Chūgoku: Mitome Tadao shashin hōkoku (Tokyo: Shufu to seikatsusha, 1972); it also appears in Mitome Tadao, “Tanaka-san mo minakatta Chūgoku no sugao,” Shūkan posuto, October 20, 1972, 17. 81. “Nana oku ni hitobito—sono sugao,” Shūkan asahi, May 28, 1971, 8–9. 82. “Chūgoku no shimin seikatsu sunappu,” Shūkan asahi, September 24, 1971, 8–9. 83. “Nana oku nin no kōgyōryoku—jiriki kōsei de kizuita Chūgoku,” Gekkan ekonomisuto, October 1972, unnumbered pages. 84. Ibid. 85. Shūkan posuto, April 1, 1971, special ed. 86. Mitome Tadao and Awazu Kiyoshi, eds., Document Chūgoku: Mitome Tadao shashin hōkoku (Tokyo: Shufu to seikatsusha,1972), unpaginated preface. 87. Mitome Tadao, “Yutakasa to wa nan darō,” Sundee mainichi, January 9, 1971, 11–16. 88. Mitome Tadao, “Tanaka-san mo minakatta Chūgoku no sugao,” Shūkan posuto, October 20, 1971, 5–17. 89. “Chūgoku no shomin seikatsu,” Asahi jaanaru, October 6, 1972, 13–17. Part of a special article collection entitled “‘Nit-Chū shin jidai’ o toraeru shiten.” 90. Ibid. 91. “Chūgoku no sarariiman o tettei kōsatsu suru,” Shūkan gendai, October 5, 1972, 26–29. 92. Ibid. 93. “Pekin to Tokyo—bukka ga koumo chigau no ha?” Shūkan josei, October 14, 1972, 176–178. 94. Ibid. 95. Mitome and Awazu, Document Chūgoku, unpaginated preface. 96. A short feature story on Lin Liyun can be found in Sandee mainichi, October 15, 1972, 40–42.

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206

Notes to Pages 161–167

97. ‘Chūgoku ni tsuite,” Mainichi shinbun, April 30, 1970. A complete summary of the data from the May 1970 Mainichi poll, along with some brief analysis of the results, is available in Mainichi shinbunsha, “Nihonjin no Chūgoku kan” Gekkan yoron chōsa (June 1970): 59–69. Tokyo University professor Tsujimura Akira also published a lengthy study of the May 1970 Mainichi Shinbun poll results in “Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō: sesshoku to imeeji to no kankei” Ajia Kootarii (July 1970): 118–138. 98. “Chūgoku ni tsuite,” Mainichi shinbun, April 30, 1970. 99. Ibid. 100. “2000-nen no yūkō o kaifuku,” Asahi gurafu, October 13, 1972, 3, 15–26. 101. Tsuji Kengo, “Tanaka hō-Chū no 118 jikan,” Sandee mainichi, October 15, 1972, special ed., 24. 102. “Atarashi rekishi ni hajimari,” Mainichi shinbun, September 29, 1972, evening ed., 1. An article a few days earlier had spoken of the normalization of ChinaJapan relations as something that marked the “ending of one hundred years of misfortune” (hyakunen no fukō ni kugiri) between the two neighbors. Mainichi shinbun, September 25, 1972, evening ed., 2. 103. “Rekishi o kaeta muika kan,” Sunday mainichi, October 15, 1972. 104. “Nit-Chū seijōka to Nihon no shinro,” Asahi shinbun, September 30, 1972, morning ed., 1. 105. “Nit-Chū kokkō kaifuku to wa nani ka,” Chūō kōron, October 1972, 102–115. 106. “Nit-Chū fukkō o yorokonda Nihonjin, kenen shita Nihonjin,” Shūkan gendai, October 12, 1972, 28. Epilogue 1. “Mō shuseki no shikyo o itamu,” Asahi shinbun, September 10, 1976, morn­ ing ed., 3. 2. Yomiuri shinbun, September 10, 1976, morning ed., 5. 3. Mainichi shinbun, September 10, 1976, evening ed., 2. 4. Asahi shinbun, September 11, 1976, morning ed., 5. 5. “Watashi ni totte no ‘Mō Takutō,’Mainichi shinbun, September 10, 1976, morning ed., 22. 6. Ibid. 7. “Kanashimi to tsuioku no kakukai,” Yomiuri shinbun, September 10, 1976, morning ed., 2. 8. “Mō shuseki no shikyo o itamu,” 3. 9. Ibid. 10. “Atarashii shakaishugi o tsuikyū shita Mō shuseki,” Yomiuri shinbun, September 10, 1976, morning ed., 9.

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Notes to Pages 168–178

207

11. “Mō shuseki no shikyo o itamu,” 5. 12. “Mō shuseki no seikyo o itamu—Chūgoku, kakumei no dai ni sedai e iko,” Mainichi shinbun, September 10, 1976, morning ed., 5. 13. “Mō Takutō shuseki no rekishiteki hyōka,” Asahi shinbun, September 10, 1976, morning ed., 7. 14. Ōe Kenzaburō, “Kokoro o hirogerare yo—Mō Takutō no shi ni yosete,” Sekai, November 1976, 200. 15. Ibid., 202. 16. Ibid., 203. 17. Tsujimura Akira, “Mō Takutō no shi to Nihon no hannō,” Shokun, November 1976, 105. 18. “Kanashimi to tsuioku no kakukai,” Yomiuri shinbun, September 10, 1976, morning ed., 2. 19. “Mō shuseki no shikyo o itamu,” 3. 20. Tsujimura Akira, “Mō Takutō no shi to Nihon no hannō,” Shokun, November 1976, 104. 21. Ibid., 111. 22. “Watashi wa mita! Shirarezaru Chūgoku no shimin seikatsu,” Josei jishin, September 9, 1972, 46–53. 23. Oguma Eiji, “The Postwar Intellectuals’ View of Asia,” in Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History, ed. Sven Saaler and J. Victor Koschmann (London: Routledge, 2007), 211. 24. Akira Iriye, China and Japan in the Global Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 124. 25. Carol Gluck, “Operations of Memory: ‘Comfort Women’ and the World,” in Ruptured Histories: War, Memory, and the Post–Cold War in Asia, ed. Sheila Miyoshi Jager and Rana Mitter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 47–77. 26. Futagami Shinji, “Yoron chōsa kara mita wakai sedai to Chūgoku/Ajia,” Asahi Ajia rebyū, June 1972, 88–95.

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Bibliography

Primary Sources Popular Magazines, Journals, and Major Newspapers Asahi jaanaru 朝日ジャーナル [Asahi journal]

Asahi shinbun 朝日新聞 [Asahi newspaper]

Chūō kōron 中央公論 [Central review]

Doyō manga 土曜漫画 [Saturday comics]

Fujin seikastsu 婦人生活 [Housewife lifestyle]

Heibon panchi 平凡パンチ [Heibon punch]

Josei jishin 女性自身 [Women’s own]

Josei sebun 女性セブン [Women’s seven]

Mainichi shinbun 毎日新聞 [Mainichi newspaper]

Manga 漫画 [Comics]

Manga dokuhon 漫画読本 [Manga reader]

Sandee mainichi サンデー毎日 [Sunday mainichi]

Seikai ōrai 政界往来 [World affairs]

Sekai 世界 [The world]

Shūkan asahi 週刊朝日 [Weekly asahi]

Shūkan gendai 週刊現代 [Weekly gendai]

Shūkan heibon 週刊平凡 [Weekly heibon]

Shūkan manga sandee 週刊漫画サンデー [Weekly comic Sunday]

Shūkan manga TIMES 週刊漫画TIMES [Weekly comic TIMES]

Shūkan posuto 週刊ポスト [Weekly post]

Shūkan sankei 週刊サンケイ [Weekly sankei]

Shūkan shinchō 週刊新潮 [Weekly shinchō] Shūkan yomiuri 週刊読売 [Weekly yomiuri]

Tenbō 展望 [Outlook]

Yangu redi ヤング レデイ[Young lady] Yomiuri shinbun 読売新聞 [Yomiuri newspaper] Zen’ei 前衛 [Vanguard]

209

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Bibliography

Public Opinion Polls (ordered by date) “Gaikō seisaku wa dou arubeki ka?” [What should be done about foreign policy?]. Asahi shinbun, June 24, 1953, morning ed., 3. “Kishi naikaku no gaikō o dou miru” [What do you think about the foreign policy of the Kishi cabinet?]. Yomiuri shinbun, September 16, 1957, morning ed., 1. “Kishi naikaku ni tsuite” [Concerning the Kishi cabinet]. Mainichi shinbun, Sep­ tember 16, 1957, morning ed., 1. “Naigai no ugoki to kokumin no kanshin” [Foreign and domestic trends and the people’s concerns]. Yomiuri shinbun, September 29, 1961, morning ed., 1. “Satō shin naikaku ni nozomu” [Hopes for the new Satō cabinet]. Mainichi shinbun, December 14, 1964, morning ed., 1, 4. “Gendai no shomondai ni tsuite” [Concerning problems of the present day]. Mainichi shinbun, January 1, 1968, morning ed., 1, 4. “Nihon no heiwa to anzen” [Japan’s peace and security]. Mainichi shinbun, June 21, 1968, morning ed., 1, 4, and July 1, morning ed., 1, 8, 9. “Chūgoku ni tsuite” [Concerning China]. Mainichi shinbun, April 30, 1970, morn­ ing ed., 1, 11–13. “Nit-Chū kaizen, heiwa kenji” [Japan-China improvement, holding onto peace]. Yomiuri shinbun, May 31, 1970, morning ed., 5. “Kokumin wa kou miru” [The people see it this way]. Asahi shinbun, June 23, 1970, morning ed., 12. “Kokumin wa kou miru” [The people see it this way]. Asahi shinbun, September 21, 1971, morning ed., 2. “Jiji mondai” [Current affairs]. Mainichi shinbun, October 18, 1971, morning ed., 1, 6. “Ichiban nakayoku shitai kuni” [The nations with which you most want to improve relations]. Asahi shinbun, January 3, 1972, morning ed., 7. “Nit-Chū yūkō, kitai takamaru” [Japan-China friendship, rising expectations]. Asahi shinbun, September 18, 1972, morning ed., 2. “Jiji mondai” [Current affairs]. Mainichi shinbun, September 21, 1972, morning ed., 1. Journal Articles and Magazine Feature Stories “2000 nen no yūkō o kaifuku.” Asahi gurafu, October 13, 1972, 3–21. “Anata ni mo mō sugu Chūgoku de mirareru.” Josei sebun, October 11, 1972, 41–44. Andō Hikotarō. “Kindai Nihonjin no Chūgokuzō.” Chūō kōron 79, no. 7 (July 1964): 104–113. ———. “Pekin nikki.” Chūō kōron, October 1966, 214–232. “Anpo to Nit-Chū.” Gekkan yoron chōsa, August 1970, 38–51.

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“Arashi no naka de minshū wa nani o kangaete iru ka.” Shūkan gendai 9, no. 6 (February 1967): 126–130. “ ‘Arya, rakkyō kakumei da’ Ōya kōsatsugumi ga mita Chūgoku no genjitsu.” Shūkan yomiuri, October 14, 1966, 12–19. Asano Akira. “Chūkyō no senpū undō—Kaku Matsujaku shi no jiko hihan o chūshin ni.” Kaikakusha, July 1966, 15–18. “Bakuhatsuteki ni ureta ‘Mō Takutō goroku’ ninki no himitsu.’” Heibon panchi, December 19, 1966, 106–109. “Bei-Chū kaku sensōka no Nihon.” Shūkan asahi, May 27, 1966, 16–21. “Boku wa kōeiehi datta—Chūgoku kara hikiageta shōnen no taiken.” Shūkan yomiuri, February 9, 1967, 70–74. “Bunka kakumei o kō rikai suru.” Asahi jaanaru, October 16, 1966, 15–25. “‘Bunka kakumei’ to wa nani ka.” Ekonomisuto, September, 9, 1966, 14–27. “Chūgoku e nagasareta Nihon no genshikaku shiryō.” Shūkan gendai, January 1, 1967, 22–27. “Chūgoku e no hajimete no tabi.” Josei jishin, October 28, 1972, 66–69. “Chūgoku kaku jikken o meguru Ajia josei.” Chūō kōron, December 1964, 164–178. “Chūgoku—kono ‘tōi rinjin’ no sugao.” Shūkan posuto, January 15, 1972, 183–191. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken ni kōgi suru.” Gekkan shakaitō, December 1964, 5–12. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken to Nihon no anzen hoshō.” Chūō kōron, December 1964, 179–186. “Chūgoku no sarariiman seikatsu o tettei kōatsu suru.” Shūkan gendai, October 5, 1972, 26–29. “Chūgoku no shomin seikatsu.” Asahi jaanaru, October 6, 1972, 13–17. “Chūgoku suibaku jikken no nazo o toku.” Shūkan asahi, July 7, 1967, 140–147. “Chūgoku suibaku jikken no nerai.” Shūkan yomiuri, June 30, 1967, 122. “Chūgoku no bussan wa koko de kaemasu!” Josei sebun, October 25, 1972, 154–157. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken to sono shōgeki.” Asahi jaanaru, October 25, 1964, 12–19. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken to wareware no tachiba.” Shin nihon bungaku, January 1965, 155. “Chūgoku no shonen shojo.” Shūkan asahi, October 1, 1972, 3–13. “Chūgoku ryokō tabuu shū.” Shūkan bunshun, September 25, 1972, 44–47. “Chūgoku suibaku jikken yotsu no nazo.” Shūkan yomiuri, July 6, 1967, 115– 117. “Chūgoku to fukkō naru.” Shūkan sankei, October 13, 1972, 16–27. “Chūgoku wa doko ni iku?” Gendai no me, November 1, 1966, 131–149.

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“Chūgoku wa hatashite kyōi ka?” Chūō kōron, November 1966, 178–187. “Chūgoku wa mada ‘ōkikute yowai kuni’?” Shūkan Asahi, October 15, 1966, 46–49. “Chūgoku, yonbanme no kaku hoyū kuni ni.” Chū-san jidai, August 1967, 98–101. “Chūkyō de nani ga okotte iru?” Sandee mainichi, June 26, 1966, 18–23. “Chūkyō kaku jikken appare!” Shikō, October 1964, 6–7. “Chūkyō kaku jikken no imi suru mono.” Sekai no ugoki, December 1964, 10–13. “Chūkyō kara no ‘shi no hai’ wa?” Shūkan sankei, November 2, 1964, 16–17. “Chūkyō wa ren’ai mo kasei ni naru?” Shūkan manga sandee, September 28, 1966, 38–42. “Dōbun dōshu datte, konna otoshi ana.” Shūkan yomiuri, October 14, 1972, 40–43. Doi Akira. “Watashi no mita kōeihei.” Shūkan shinchō, February 18, 1967, 100–101. Etō Shinkichi. “Chūgoku kaku jikken to Nihon no heiwa.” Ushio, December 1964, 44–52. Fuji Masaharu and Shiba Ryōtarō. “Mō Takutō no iru fūkei.” Tenbō, November 1976, 52–76. Fujishima Udai. “Kōeihei to kataru.” Asahi jaanaru, October 16, 1966, 10–14. “Gekidō suru Chūgoku.” Shūkan asahi, special ed., October 15, 1966. Gomi Mitsuko. “Watashi wa kōeihei to toron shita.” Sandee mainichi, October 2, 1996, 17–19. Hashimoto Masaru. “Mō Takutō ga akanbee shite naze warui?” Gendai no me, February 1973, 238–244. Hata Yutaka. “Ōya kōsatsugumi Chūgoku taizai nichiroku.” Gendai no me, November 1, 1966, 164–175. Hatanaka Masaharu. “Chūgoku kōjūjikai daihyō no rainichi o megutte.” Sekai 107, November 1954, 92–97. “Heiwa to yūjō no okurimono—Ri Tokuzen no hōnichi arubamu.” Shin josei 48 (January 1955): 9–12. Hidaka Rokurō. “Chūgoku no kaku jikken to zenmen kinshi e no michi.” Sekai, December 1964, 47–58. “Hirakareru shojochi—Chūgoku kankō tettei gaido.” Shūkan sankei, August 25, 1972, 46–51. “Hirakareta tairiku—Chūgoku.” Fujin seikatsu, May 1972, 69–72. Hiratsuka Raichō. “Ri Tokuzen joshi o omukae shite.” Kaizō 36, no. 1 (January 1955): 70–73. ———. “Ri Tokuzen o omukae shite.” Ajia josei kōryūshi kenkyū 5 (July 1969): 8–10. Ishigaki Ayako. “Ai to jindō o tsuranuku.” Asahi shinbun, October 27, 1954, eve­ ning ed., 2.

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Index

advertising: as historical source material,

14; related to Japan-China normal­ ization, 131–134 Akao Bin, 30, 49 Akioka Ieshige, 168 Anpo (US-Japan security agreement),

6, 16; related to Chinese nuclear

weapons, 54, 56, 65, 67, 71–74, 94;

related to Japan-China normaliza­ tion, 128, 142 Arafune Seijūjō, 111 Baba Kimihiko, 9, 94 Brezhnev, Leonid, 83 cartography: as related to China travel, 136–139 Chiang Kai-shek, 21, 24, 27, 31, 89 Daimatsu Hirobumi, 107 Dan Ikuma, 107–108 Deng Xiaoping, 58, 93, 168, 176 dōbun, dōshu (“common culture, common

race”), 141, 144–146 Dower, John, 13, 17, 64, 129 Dudden, Alexis, 10

Duus, Peter, 4, 13–14 editorial cartoons: as historical source material, 13–14. See also Ieishi Kazuo, Katō Yoshirō, Kondō Hidezō, Makino Keiichi, Morikuma Takeshi, Nasu Ryōsuke, Ōshita Kenichi, Satō Sanpei, Tazawa Yasuto, Yanagihara Ryōhei, Yokoyama Taizō

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 48 Etō Shinkichi: views on Chinese nuclear weapons, 85–88 Fairbank, John K., 103 Fang Cheng, 84 Federation of Japan Women’s Organiza­ tions (Fujin dantai rengoku), 29, 43 Feng Yuxiang, 27 Fogel, Joshua, 10, 128, 202n4 Fujiwara Hirotatsu, 92, 94–95, 116–117,

122, 135

Fukao Sumako, 44 Futagami, Shinji, 178 Global Democracy Research Institute

(Sekai minshu kenkyūjo), 32, 51 Gluck, Carol, 177 Godai Riyako, 118 Godzilla (Gojira), 25, 52–53 Gomi Mitsuko, 115–116 Great Japan Patriotic Party (Dai Nihon

aikokutō), 30, 49 Guomindang, 27, 31–32, 37, 167 Guo Moruo, 104–105, 118, 197n30 Harley, J. B., 136 Haseagawa, Kenji, 4 Hasebe Hiroko, 46

Hashimoto Masaru: controversy concern­ ing Mao cartoon imagery, 145–146 Hata Yutaka, 94, 117 Hatanaka Masaharu, 35

Hatano Akira, 166

hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor), 59, 78 227

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228 Hidaka Rokurō, 72–73 Hirabayashi Taiko, 61

Hiratsuka Raichō: interactions with Li Dequan, 43–47 Hoppens, Robert, 9, 52 Hu Feng, 105 Hua Guofeng, 168 humor: related to atomic fear, 78–80 Ieishi Kazuo, cartoons: related to Chinese

nuclear weapons, 69; related to the

Cultural Revolution, 77 Ikeda Hayato, 55–56, 76 Ikeda Taisaku, 169

Ishigaki Ayako: impressions of Li Dequan, 43–44 Ishimure Michiko, 166

Ishinomori Shōtarō, 80–81 Isurogi Michiyuki, 111

Iwasa Yoshizane, 74 Jansen, Marius, 8, 10 Japan-China Cultural Exchange Associa­ tion (Nit-Chū bunka kōryū kyōkai), 155–156 Japan-China Friendship Society (Nihon

Chūgoku yūkō kai), 25, 34, 48,

188n46 Japan Communist Party, 32, 62–64, 74–75 Japan Life Safety Research Center (Nihon

seikatsu mondai kenkyūjo), 32 Japan Peace Liaison Group (Nihon heiwa

renraku kai), 25 Japan Socialist Party, 62, 67–68, 75 Japan Youth Health and Welfare Associa­ tion (Nihon zenken seinen kai), 35 Jiang Zemin, 176 jiriki kōsei (“self-sufficiency”), 154, 160,

172 Johnson, Lyndon B., 56, 61, 82, 86, 89 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 134 Kaikō Takeshi, 166 Kaizuka Shigeki, 168 Kajiyama Toshiyuki, 94, 117, 135 Kamibeppu Takashi, 33 Kamisaka Fuyuko, 107

6852_Book_V3.indd 228

Index Katō Yoshirō, cartoons: related to Chinese

nuclear weapons, 77; related to the

Cultural Revolution, 96 Kawarasaki, Chōjūrō, 164 King, Amy, 9, 10, 74 Khrushchev, Nikita, 55–57 Kishi Nobusuke, 6, 16, 55, 184n31 Kissinger, Henry, 7–8, 128–129, 141, 174 Kitayama Ryū, manga: related to the Red

Guards, 113 Kondō Hidezō, cartoons, 13; related to

Chinese nuclear weapons, 69, 71,

84; related to the Cultural Revolu­ tion, 97–101; related to Japan-China

normalization, 142

Kōra Tomi, 44 Korean War, 6, 24, 54, 57, 129 Kosygin, Alexei, 82 Kotani Masakazu, 94 Koyama Shōji, 111 Kujiraoka Hyōsuke, 111 Kumamoto Yoshitada, 59 Kumano Shōhei, 20, 34 Kuno Osamu, 72 Kusaba Ryūen, 29–30 Kusano Fumio, 33 Liao Chengzhi, 49–50, 186n15 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 7, 54, 72,

74, 104, 111, 118, 130, 133, 166 Life magazine, 103–104 Lin Biao, 128, 135, 168 Liu Shaoqi, 58, 93, 168 Lu Xun, 87, 136 Lucky Dragon Number 5, 25; in connec­ tion with Chinese nuclear weapons,

54, 58–59, 63 Makino Keiichi, cartoons: related to JapanChina normalization, 130; related to Mao’s death, 164

Maruoka Hideko, 44

Matsumura Kenzō, 104 Matsuoka Yōko, 44 Miki Yōnosuke, 92, 94–95, 122, 125 Mikasanomiya, 29

Mishima Yukio, 198n37

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Index

229

Mita Sōsuke, 111 Mitome Tadao, photography: related to Chinese women, 152–153; related to positive views of Chinese society, 156–157, 160 Miyazawa Kiichi, 167 Morikuma Takeshi, cartoons: related to Chinese nuclear weapons, 82; related

to Red Guards, 96 Moriyoshi Masateru, manga: related to Red Guards, 112–113 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, 128 Mudai Risaku, 72, 82

Dequan, 36–37, 39, 43; related to Red

Guard violence, 106 public opinion polls: as historical source

material, 14; views of China in 1946

and 1952, 23–24; views of China

in 1957, 54–55; views of China in

mid-1960s, 75; views on Cultural

Revolution and Red Guards, 102–103,

110–111; views on everyday life in

China in 1970, 161, 206n97; views on

Japan-China normalization, 141–142,

144, 178, 206n97 People’s Daily (Renmin ribao), 8, 66, 84

Nabeyama Sadachika, 32

Nagai Michiko, 151

Nagasue Eiichi, 73 Nakasone Yasuhiro, 65 Nakauchi Isao, 166

Nasu Ryōsuke, cartoons, 13: related

to Chinese nuclear weapons, 78,

82–84, 86; related to Mao’s death,

164–165 Nie Er, 28 Niijima Atsuyoshi, 68, 193n40 Nishimura Hidetoshi, 140–141 Nixon, Richard, 7–8, 128–129, 141, 174

Qin Shi Huangdi, 107, 118, 167 Qin Zhe, 84 Qinghua University, 115, 117, 121

Ōba Hiroshi, 56 Ōe Kenzaburō: reaction to Mao’s death,

168–169; views on Red Guards, 106 Oguma Eiji, 173 Ōhira Masayoshi, 167 Olympic games (Tokyo 1964), 55–56 Oka Masayoshi, 74–75 Okuno Shintarō, 106–107 OL (office lady), 1, 113, 120, 148 Ōmori Minoru, 94, 116 Ōno Shinzō, 33 Ōshita Kenichi, cartoons: related to Japan-

China normalization, 143–144 Ōya Sōichi, 92, 94–95, 108, 116–118,

125–126, 128, 135 photography: as historical source material, 14; related to Japan-China normaliza­ tion, 150–154, 156; related to Li

6852_Book_V3.indd 229

Red Cross (Chinese), 21, 27–28 Red Cross (Japanese), 22, 25, 26, 28, 31,

34, 36–37, 49 Red Guards, 11, 77, 92–94, 96–100,

102, 104, 107, 109–118, 120–121,

123–125, 128, 137, 147, 172–173,

178, 197n16 Right-wing Japanese nationalism, 30–32 rusu kazoku (families of the missing), 28,

29, 36–40 Saibōgu 009 (Cyborg 009), 80–81, 194n69 Saionji Kinkazu, 66 Sasaki Ai, 166

Sasaki-Uemura, Wesley, 16

Sata Ineko, 198n37 Satō Eisaku, 6–7, 90, 102 Satō Sanpei, cartoons: related to Chinese

nuclear weapons, 77 seikei bunri (“separating politics from

economics”), 130 Shigemori Tadashi, 65

Shimazu Tadatsugu, 34

Shimizu Ikutarō, 106, 125–126 Shōji Sadao, manga: related to JapanChina normalization, 146–147 Sōka Gakkai, 62, 169 Song Meiling, 27 Song Zheyuan, 31

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230 Steele, William, 13

Suetsugu Ichirō, 35 Sugimura Takeshi, 105, 118 Sugō Hiroshi, 166 Sunada Shigetami, 111

Suzuki Yoshiji, manga: related to Red

Guards, 113 Suzuki Zenkō, 56 Taiwan: in connection with Li Dequan’s

visit, 21, 24, 26, 31–33, 35; as related

to Japan-US-PRC relations, 64, 74,

76, 89, 103, 128, 135–136, 142, 160 Takebe Rokuzō, 39 Takagi Takesaburō, 31 Takagi Takeo, 119–120 Takamatsunomiya, 29

Takeuchi Minoru, 67, 104 Takeuchi Yoshimi: on Chinese nuclear weapons, 87–88; on the Cultural Revolution, 107; on Japan-China normalization, 163

Tanaka Kakuei, 1, 7, 130, 160, 167 Tanaka Shōji, 111 Tateyama Toshitada, 32

Tazawa Yasuto, cartoons: related to Chinese nuclear weapons, 77 Toby, Ronald, 7, 12 Tokugawa period, 3, 7–8, 10, 13; compari­ sons with Cultural Revolution era in China, 116–117, 127, 203n25 Tokyo University, 94, 109, 111, 169

Tōjō Hideki, 120 Tomochika Ichiko, 48 Tongzhou Incident (Tsūshū jiken): Li De­ quan’s alleged connection to, 30–31

6852_Book_V3.indd 230

Index Tsujimura Akira, 169–170 Tsuyuki Shigeru, 138–140 Uezaka Fuyuko, 145 Utsunomiya Tokuma, 118 Uchiyama Kanzō, 34, 48 Vietnam, 6, 61, 63, 69–70, 89, 91, 94, 105,

117, 141, 178 woxin changdan (“sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall”), 87, 195n85 Yabe Teiji, 33, 35 Yanagihara Ryōhei, cartoons: related to Chinese nuclear weapons, 76; related to the Cultural Revolution, 120–121 Yasui Kaoru, 73 Yokoyama Taizō, cartoons, 13; related to

Li Dequan, 40–41; related to Chinese

nuclear weapons, 56, 76, 82–83, 85;

related to the Cultural Revolution,

96–97, 101–102; related to Japan-

China normalization, 130, 142–143;

related to Mao’s death, 164–165 Yoshida Shigeru, 26, 30, 48–49, 51 Yoshimi, Yoshiaki, 23 zaibatsu, 130

Zengakuren, 49

Zhongshan University, 116–117 Zhou Enlai, 1, 7–8; in connection with

Li Dequan, 26, 33, 49, 51; and

Japan-China normalization, 128–129,

160–161, 168

2/11/19 5:10 PM

About the Author

is associate professor of Japanese and Chinese history at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Crossing Empire’s Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia. ERIK ESSELSTROM

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