The Image of “Chinese Girl” in Japanese War Literature: Taking Tatsuzo Ishikawa, Ashihei Hino and Hiroshi Ueda as examples

Abstract

Taking the representatives of Japanese war literature during the Anti-Japanese War as examples, and combining gender studies and analysis on post-colonialism and text, this paper interprets the images of “Chinese girl” in Tatsuzo Ishikawa’s Soldiers Alive, Ashihei Hino’s Hana to Heitai and Hiroshi Ueda’s Koujin. The sexual violence suffered by Chinese women revealed in Soldiers Alive has brought trouble to the writer, while Ashihei Hino was warned by the army department about the description of Chinese women in Hana to Heitai, in which the communication and love between the Japanese army and local women shown coincide with the Japanese policy of “propaganda and comfort”. Hiroshi Ueda is a famous “solider writer” as Ashihei Hino. In his war novel Koujin, Chinese women are also portrayed as being full of “smiles” and kindness to Japanese soldiers. So Chinese women in the Anti-Japanese War were deprived of their national consciousness, thought and resistance, thus becoming “others” without any threat.