Author: Samuel Parkinson Porter
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13:
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For Japan's seven million soldiers and sailors, peace and the opportunity to return to civilian life proved elusive in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the "Unfinished War," I argue that the demobilization of Japan's military was protracted and incomplete, and that public hostility toward former servicemen and Occupation policies prevented veterans' successful reintegration and rendered them marginalized members of postwar society. This dissertation seeks to understand what happened to this generation of servicemen after Japan's surrender. Bewilderingly, Japanese and Western historians have largely erased this generation from the history of postwar Japan and the Occupation's efforts to demilitarize Japanese society. However, demilitarization was a process fundamentally predicated on transforming a generation of servicemen into civilians as much as it was about education, social and political reform. Only by reinserting the story of demobilization into the history of postwar Japan is it possible to understand how Japan abandoned militarism and ultimately embraced pacifism. For millions of Japanese servicemen in mainland Asia, there was no clean break between wartime and postwar. Suffering from manpower shortages, the Allies delayed the demobilization of millions of servicemen for up to three years in China and Southeast Asia for use as forced laborers and auxiliary soldiers to suppress communist and anti-colonial insurgencies. Between 1946 and 1948, the majority of overseas Japanese servicemen returned to Japan and underwent the process of demobilization. To the horror of many servicemen, Japanese citizens treated them with hostility and often blamed them for defeat and their wartime suffering. Widespread antimilitary sentiment, fear that servicemen were prone to criminality, along with Occupation policies aimed at isolating veterans from civil society, led to the ostracism of veterans from public life, and disastrous rates of unemployment and poverty. Consequently, by 1950 when the Japanese government declared demobilization to be complete, most veterans felt disillusioned by their failure to reintegrate, and remained excluded from mainstream society. I conclude my study by arguing that Japan's demobilization was left incomplete and even partially reversed, as not only were hundreds of Japanese soldiers still fighting in China as organized units until 1949, but the Japanese government also coercively remobilized thousands of veterans and civilians for service in the Korean War. Using a wide range of primary materials including, Occupation intercepts of Japanese veterans' mail, diaries, Kenpeitai and civil police reports, and the Imperial Japanese Army's internal demobilization reports, my dissertation uncovers the postwar voices and lives of Japan's seven million veterans.
