Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita

Abstract

Reviewed by: Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita Simon Partner (bio) Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945. By Samuel Hideo Yamashita. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2015. xii, 238 pages. $29.95, cloth; $29.95, E-book. Samuel Hideo Yamashita’s Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 offers many insights into the wartime experiences of Japanese housewives and children, city dwellers and farmers, civilians and servicemen. Yamashita draws on his long experience with wartime diaries and letters: he has collected 160 diaries, translated (according to his website) 65 of them, and included several in a fine anthology, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). Many more are featured in this book. However, the reader who is looking for a comprehensive account of daily life in wartime Japan—if we understand daily life as the everyday experiences of a broad cross-section of the population—will be disappointed. The book contains three interesting chapters on the broader picture of daily life in wartime Japan (these chapters—1, 2, and 7—would have made more sense grouped together in my opinion). However, the remaining five chapters focus on two special groups—450,000 evacuee children sent with their teachers into the provinces, and a small group of kamikaze pilots—and one special day: August 15, 1945. These are fascinating topics which certainly involved “ordinary” people (if such a category actually exists—one of the strengths of this book is its vivid portrayal of unique personalities). But they [End Page 189] by no means represent the range of daily life experiences of Japan’s 70 million people during the eight years from the “China Incident” to Japan’s surrender, or even during the five years explicitly covered by the book. There is by now a considerable body of work in English (and much more in Japanese) on civilian Japanese experiences of World War II. Yama shita has drawn liberally on some of the classic works in English (e.g., Thomas Havens’s Valley of Darkness and John Dower’s essay “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police”1), though without actively engaging with (or even mentioning) these influential works in his text. But he could also have drawn on an extensive historiography that encompasses some of the complexity of wartime experience in a modern society. These include works on art and music; boys’ and girls’ education; men’s and women’s labor; consumption and saving; clothing; rural life; women and childrearing; military conscription; and government propaganda and censorship; not to mention the experiences of almost three million Japanese civilians living in Japan’s formal and informal empire.2 That said, the three topics covered by Yamashita’s chapters on daily life—neighborhood mobilization, food security, and modes of resistance—are all interesting, albeit limited by his heavy reliance on diaries and his limited use of other available primary and secondary sources. The basic outlines of the stories of mass mobilization, neighborhood associations, food rationing, and food scarcity are well documented, and Yamashita does little more than summarize existing research. But his diaries offer vivid illustration of what these conditions meant in practice for urban Japanese [End Page 190] families. For most, their enthusiastic embrace of the war effort bumped up against the harsh realities of burdensome obligations, stress and exhaustion, shortage and hunger, fear for their own and loved ones’ safety, and, eventually, the prospect of invasion and defeat. The diaries also illustrate the diversity of responses to the war situation, from the protected comfort of a wealthy journalist, to the wholehearted efforts of middle-class housewives, to outright defeatism. Indeed, the chapter on popular resistance is to me the most interesting in the whole book, revealing as it does the determination of many people to preserve a private space in their lives separate from their country’s “total war,” even as they collaborated outwardly with the war effort. It is fascinating to me that the same diary genre that for some was a coercive space in which they felt obliged to represent themselves as aspiring “splendid citizens” was...