Japanese Visual Culture by Macwilliams Mark Wheeler

Author:Macwilliams, Mark Wheeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317466994
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The Rejected Narrative About the Tragedy of War

While heroic war tales were dominant, they were not the only war manga available to young postwar readers. There were other stories about the ground war that emphasized its pain and tragedy. One such story is Shinji Nagashima’s Shiroi kumo wa yonde iru (The White Cloud Is Calling), which was first published in 1956. It details the hard lives of children who had been left orphaned by the war. Another important example is Sampei Shirato’s 1958 work, Kieyuku shōjo (The Vanishing Girl), about a life-and-death struggle of a young girl exposed to radiation from the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima. Other examples of this story type are those by the famous manga artist Shigeru Mizuki. He depicted the war mainly from the infantry’s perspective with tales conveying its sorrow, pain, and stupidity.1 One particularly famous work of his (item 23 in Table 8.1) is Shiroi hata (The White Flag, 1964). It recounts the brutal realities of the “no surrender” policy for infantry soldiers. Raising a white flag to surrender was almost unheard of in the war. Mizuki’s story tells of a commander who decides to surrender in order to give his wounded soldiers a chance to retreat. It raises questions about what exactly counts as true bravery—fighting to the death or retreating to live.

Another poignant example is the short work by Sampei Shirato, Sensō sono kyōfu no kirōku (The War Records of Terror, 1963), dealing with starvation and cannibalism on the front line.2 It tells of a tormented Japanese army veteran who struggles to explain to his children why since the war he has refrained from eating rare fish meat, and it directly addresses one of the horrors that many front-line Japanese soldiers experienced. Even some of the heroic air combat manga discussed earlier had their critical side. Tetsuya Chiba’s Shidenkai no taka, for instance, is not just another adventure tale, but also challenged the justification of going to what amounted to a foolish war. Although they were written early in the postwar period, antiwar narratives of this type were rarely published at that time (Natsume 1997, 56). Shigeru Mizuki himself has testified that he had great difficulty getting these kinds of stories published because the magazine editors were rarely interested in them (Hirabayashi 2000, 72–73). These stories, deemed unacceptable by the publishing world, became the rejected narratives of that time.

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