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David M. Rosenfeld. Unhappy Soldier: Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War II Literature. Lanham:Lexington Books, 2002. 200 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-0365-4.

Reviewed by Laura L. Neitzel (Department of History, Brookdale Community College)Published on H-Peace (February, 2005)

Hino Ashihei (1907-60), the subject of DavidRosenfelds important new book, Unhappy Soldier:Hino Ashihei and Japanese World War II Litera-

ture, is Japans most famous-turned-infamous writerof World War II fiction. Three best-selling books that

he wrote during the Sino-Japanese war, titled simplyand repetitively, Wheat and Soldiers (Mugi to Heitai,1938), Soil and Soldiers (Tsuchi to Heitai, 1938), andFlowers and Soldiers (Hana to Heitai, 1939), were ac-claimed by popular audiences for their depictions ofthe joys and travails of the noble and self-sacrificingJapanese soldier on the battlefield. After Japansdefeat, however, Hinos fame quickly became a lia-bility: he was purged by the Allied Occupation forpromoting the war through his writing and labeleda cultural war criminal by a prominent member ofJapans literary establishment. In the years follow-ing the end of the war, Hino and his writings were arecurring focus of writers and intellectuals in a seriesof debates that sought to come to terms with theirown war responsibility. How Hino negotiated the di-vide between war and postwar, and between fame andinfamy is the subject of Rosenfelds book.

In Japans postwar literary history, Hinos nov-els, along with those of authors such as Ozaki Shiroand the poems of Takamura Kotaro, have been dis-missed by critics as belonging to the barren yearsof Japanese literature. During the war, members ofthe literary establishment were mobilized to supportthe war effort with their writing. Taken on tours of

the battle fronts of China and Asia on government-sponsored trips, they then helped sell the war on thehome front with their depictions of Japans war forthe liberation of Asia. Like all other publications inwartime Japan, their writing was subjected to strictregulation and censorship. Writers were forbiddento portray enemies sympathetically or Japanese im-perial soldiers negatively. They were not allowed todepict the Japanese army losing a battle or to de-scribe war crimes.[1] Thus compromised by censor-

ship and complicity with the wartime state, workssuch as Wheat and Soldiers have been viewed as em-barrassments to Japans literary history. Only warfiction produced after 1945for example, novels suchas Fires on the Plain (1957) by Oka Shohei, which

took a much more critical stance toward the warhavebeen counted as serious literature in postwar Japan.

Hino Ashihei, the man and writer, has been re-membered almost exclusively for his wartime beliefs,as portrayed in his literature. Donald Keene, in hisclassic work on modern Japanese literature, predictedthat Hinos reputation is unlikely to improve withtime. He will probably be remembered as the archety-pal war writer.[2] Contributing to this reputationwas an essay that Hino wrote in September 1945, onemonth after Japans defeat. Unlike many other au-thors and intellectuals, who immediately embraced

the ideals of the American victors or immediately re-turned to liberal or communist beliefs that they hadrenounced during the war, due to pressure by thewartime government, Hino responded to defeat andoccupation with vehement defiance. In an essay, ti-tled Unhappy Soldier and published in the AsahiShinbun, Hino defended the actions of the soldiersand by extension himselfarguing that the hope forthe reconstruction of Japan lay in the spirit of theheitai (soldiers) (p. 62). Hinos immediate post-war stance has contributed to his reputation in somecircles as an unrepentant apologist for war; accord-ingly, he has been reviled by the left and, in recent

years, revived by the right. But the greater tendencyin the decades since the end of World War II, Rosen-feld notes, has been to absolve and dismiss Hino as anave supporter of the war, his involvement forgivendue to his moving depictions of and sympathy for thecommon man. Rosenfeld suggests this forgiving at-titude toward Hino mirrors the way many Japanesepeople have coped with the problem of their own warcomplicitybelieving that they had been among itsvictims and, like Hino, had squandered their nave

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yet genuine loyalty to the state and emperor in anill-fated, misguided, and mistaken war.

Whether as victim or villain, Rosenfeld insists

that none of the prevailing understandings of Hinoand his work do justice to their complexity. He arguesthat a broader reading of Hinos writing across the di-vide of 1945 is necessary to understand this compli-cated man. He focuses especially on the novels Hinoproduced after the war and on the copiousparatextsaccompanying his writingsthe forwards, afterwards,and commentaries to his wartime and postwar novelswhich were revised with each new edition. Rosen-felds close readings of paratexts are especially fasci-nating as they trace Hinos changing interpretationsof his works and their meanings over time, and createa much more nuanced understanding of Hinos atti-

tudes toward the war and his own participation in it.Rosenfeld presents a Hino Ashihei who spent the fif-teen years between the end of the war in 1945 and hisdeath by suicide in 1960, critically re-examining thewar and his role in it, and struggling to come to termswith the radically changed intellectual environmentof postwar Japan. Rosenfelds introductory chapteralso suggests that a rereading of Hino can lend insightinto the making of postwar national memory. Memo-ries of the past, Rosenfeld reminds us, are constantlyreworked in the present in response to new social,cultural, and political contexts. Hinos paratexts of-fer an intriguing way to trace this process of subtlebut constant reinterpretation as it was undertaken bythis controversial literary figure.

In his analyses of Hinos novels and paratexts,Rosenfeld returns often to two issues which were ofobvious concern to Hino: his position as a writerand the proper readings of his work. In his nov-els, especially, Hino employs what Rosenfeld calls adoubled consciousness. Most of his works of fictioninclude a novelist character, a thinly disguised Hinowho constantly comments on his own position vis-a-vis other characters or looks at himself through theeyes of others. Rosenfeld describes a scene from Soil

and Soldiers in which the Hino character listens tothe soldiers sing a song about home as they sail to-ward the front in China. He self-consciously notesthat it might seem inappropriate for the novelist to

join in, but in the end he cannot resist the sen-timentality of the moment among the soldiers andfinds himself singing, tears streaming down his face(p. 1). Rosenfeld suggests that Hino uses scenes likethis one to try to resolve tensions between his own po-sition as a privileged literary persona and his project

of writing about ordinary soldiers. Fighting againstprevailing impressions of novelists and literary fig-ures as either leftist or alienated aesthetes, Hinos

self-positioning, Rosenfeld suggests, was necessary toestablish himself as the authentic voice of the sol-dier. Although Hino came from a working class back-ground and wroteproletarian fiction early in his ca-reer, there was still no denying that his position as awriter afforded him certain privilegesincluding beingremoved from active duty in order to write about thewar in the safety of his study.

Another striking example of Hinos doubled con-sciousnessis from his last novel, Before and After theRevolution (Kakumei Zengo, 1960). This time Hinodescribes an encounter at the end of the war betweenthe novelist character, Shosuke, and a soldier who

suddenly asks him if he feels any war responsibility:We read your books enthusiastically, but now thatI think about it, it was all rubbish; you swindled us.You wore a soldiers uniform, but you were just a toolof the militarists. What about it? Shosuke couldntanswer (p. 131). This fictionalized incident is per-haps a response to the criticisms that Hino faced afterthe war, some of which he responded to with defi-ance. But the fact that Hino places this indictmentin the mouth of a soldier supports Rosenfelds argu-ment that he also experienced self-doubt and guiltabout his wartime writings and their effects.

Hino was also concerned with how his texts shouldbe read and attempted to control those readingsthrough the commentary in his paratexts. Rosenfeldnotes that he was especially concerned during the warthat his soldier trilogy not be read as shosetsu, orworks of fiction, but as kiroku, or records of events

just as they happened. This lent an impression of

these works as authentic and unmediatednot the cre-

ative work of a novelist, but the transcriptions of a

soldier in the field. Hino would reverse this posi-

tion after the war when he insisted on the fictional

nature of the works. Rosenfeld interprets this re-

versal as Hinos attempt to distance himself from

the wartime project by insisting that the stories hewrote were largely products of his imagination. After

1945, Hino distanced himself from the wartime state

in other ways as wellinsisting that his work had been

subjected to censorship and contending that he had

been critical of the military command during the war.

Especially notable is a long passage that Hino claimed

was excised from Wheat and Soldiers that describedthe brutal execution of three Chinese soldiers. Nowritten versions of the censored passages survived

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the war, but Hino reinstated them from memory intopostwar editions of his books. Rosenfeld is more will-ing to take Hino at his word concerning the authen-

ticity of the reconstructed passages and Hinos claimsof criticism during the war than this reviewer. Rosen-felds desire to redeem Hino is the primary weaknessof the book.

Overall, Unhappy Soldier is a wonderful book. Itis a welcome contribution to specialists of Japaneseliterature and postwar history, as well as to schol-ars generally interested in issues of war responsibil-ity and memory. To scholars of Japanese literature,one of the books most appreciated contributions willbe Rosenfelds analyses of the often arcane debatesaboutwar responsibilitywithin the postwar literaryestablishmentdiscussed most recently in J. Victor

Koschmanns important book, Revolution and Sub- jectivity in Postwar Japan (1996). Rosenfeld does asuperb job of contextualizing these debates and mak-ing them relevant to the broader intellectual historyof postwar Japan. To students of Japanese postwarhistory, this book will serve as a case-study of theway one man negotiated his wartime past. It res-onates with other recent works on postwar memorysuch as Yoshikuni Igarashis Bodies of Memory: Nar-ratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945-

1970 (2000). Both works show that the problem ofJapans wartime past is not a question of whether ithas been rememberedindeed, it has not been forgot-ten or swept under the rug as many have suggested.Rather, it is a question of how it has been remem-bered and understood over time. Both books alsoemphasize how memories of the war were inflectedthrough the experience of Occupation, often produc-ing great distortions and contributing to notions ofJapanese victimhood.

Rosenfeld argues that Hinos work, especially hispostwar writing, deserves more attention and criticalacclaim that it has received. Two novels, especially,merit greater attention: Before and After the Revolu-tion, mentioned above, and Youth and Mud (Seishun

to Deinei, 1950). Youth and Mud is situated in thefinal, desperate year of the war and describes one ofthe worst land battles of the warthe battle of Im-phal in Burma. Rosenfeld suggests that this novelwas Hinos attempt tosubverthis wartime writings;that it was the book he really wanted to write duringthe war. Whether one accepts this interpretation ornot, Rosenfeld convinces us of the literary importanceof this book that describes a senseless battle in whichalmost all men were lost and no ground gained. Un-

like Hinos wartime books, this one is highly criticaland filled with scenes that would never have survivedthe wartime censors. It depicts the Japanese military

command blindly sacrificing soldiers lives to a hope-less cause. It describes war crimes committed by indi-vidual soldiers as well as homoerotic situations amongthe soldiers. In this and many other novels writ-ten after 1945, Rosenfeld notes, Hino abandoned theunified first-person narrative style that marked hiswartime writings, writing in a more fragmented man-ner and from multiple perspectives. Rosenfeld readsthis as evidence that Hino had lost hiswartime confi-dence in transcendent truth, a national narrative that

justified the war and the unavoidable cruelties thatwar produced (p. 76). Rosenfelds insightful analy-ses, illustrated with excerpts from Hinos texts, make

one wish more of Hinos works were available in En-glish translation. Wheat and Soldiers was translatedby Ishimoto Shidzue in the 1930s but is no longerin print. An excerpt of Soil and Soldiers (translatedEarth and Soldiers) is available in Donald Keenes an-thology of modern Japanese literature and has manypotential uses in undergraduate survey courses.[3]

As mentioned above, the single weakness of Un-happy Soldier is Rosenfelds tendency to try to re-solve Hinos contradictions. Hinos claims of wartimeresistance fail to convince as do Rosenfelds sugges-tions, in his final chapter, that Hinos wartime nov-

els betrayed ambiguity about the war in their will-ingness to depict Chinese victims sympathetically inplaces. These are small gestures when measuredagainst the overall tone and message of the wartimeworks. Rosenfelds great accomplishment is showingus a man who was complex, often self-contradictory,and filled with ambiguities. Until his death, Hino de-fended his beloved soldiersalthough in his postwarworks he recognized the atrocities some committedand began writing of them as individuals rather thana collective unit. He was bitter until the end aboutbeing purged after the war and about his treatmentby members of the literary establishment, many of

whom he accused of opportunistic hypocrisy for soquickly abandoning their wartime beliefs after defeat.Yet his postwar writings suggest that he experiencedprofound doubts about the war and even guilt abouthis own participation in it. He continually defendedhis wartime writings, even as he reclassified, edited,and enhanced them in postwar editions. Mappingthese contradictions is Rosenfelds most importantcontribution and ultimately more useful for under-standing how Hino Ashihei, like many people in post-

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war Japan, sought to come to terms with a wartimepast rendered problematic by defeat.

Notes

[1]. Donald Keene, ed., Dawn to the West:Japanese Literature in the Modern Era (New York:

Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984), p. 918.

[2]. Ibid, p. 926.

[3]. See Donald Keene, ed., Modern JapaneseLiterature: An Anthology (New York: Grove Press,1956), pp. 357-365.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Laura L. Neitzel. Review of Rosenfeld, David M., Unhappy Soldier: Hino Ashihei and JapaneseWorld War II Literature. H-Peace, H-Net Reviews. February, 2005.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10204

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