The Second Phase of War: Youth in U.S.-Occupied Japan

Abstract

Young Japanese people experienced the end of World War II in many ways. Twenty-two-year-old Yamada Taro returned to his home village in Hyogo prefecture in western Japan in the fall of 1945, after having been a Japanese Navy draftee for nearly two years. This must have been an unreal homecoming for him—the Navy had ordered him to go on a “suicide attack.” Before his scheduled last day of life, however, Japan surrendered to the Allied powers. Yamada, who passed away in 2011, left no written reminiscences of his wartime experiences. However, his neighbors and family members recollect him as someone who was never enthusiastic about the war. During a farewell ceremony held in his village for young local men being inducted into the military, all inductees—except for him—customarily performed the “banzai” shouts to show they were happy to fight and die for the emperor. Yamada, instead, looked straight ahead, poker-faced, quietly asking his fellow villagers to take care of the family he would leave behind—his mother and the seven siblings he had been supporting since losing his father during his last year of secondary school.1 While Yamada was adjusting back to civilian life during the U.S. occupation of Japan, Kanai Satoshi, another young man in the same prefecture, was pondering over the future of Seinendan, a youth organization of which he was part. Seinendan originated as a community youth group for men in their teens through mid-twenties but had been incorporated into militarist Japan’s war mobilization scheme. With the war’s end, Kanai was determined to reform and refresh the organization to meet the social needs of the new era.2 Finally, Sato Kayoko was a secondary school student in Tokyo with a distinguished background. Born to an upper-class Christian family, she was fluent in English. At a time when schooling beyond grammar school was unreachable for most children in Japan, she would soon attend an elite high school, with dreams of becoming a schoolteacher.3 There were no personal connections between these three young people, but they did have one thing in common: they were part of the age group that the U.S. occupation authorities in postwar Japan labeled as “youth”; that is, Japanese people in their teens through mid-twenties. In fact, the Japanese government up to World War II had similarly labeled these young people as seinen (youth), connoting that they were the youthful vanguard of the Japanese colonial empire. U.S.-occupied Japan, then, was a unique space in which the Japanese and U.S. conceptions of youth came into contact with each other.