SHOWA 1939-1944: A HISTORY OF JAPAN - SHIGERU MIZUKI

The Japan reading continues. This is sort of a three-for-one, with it being both a book by a Japanese person, about Japan, in a quintessential Japanese style, in this case Manga. I’m not a big Manga or Anime guy but it does seem to be an important part of Japanese culture and Mizuki is apparently famous and respected in the field. Weirdly, the Lawrence Public Library only has this one volume of his SHOWA series, which is 8 volumes total. As you can tell from the years, this issue is almost exclusively about the war. Mizuki served in WWII, and this book weaves together his personal experience of the war alongside broader history. Interestingly, the parts of the book that feature Mizuki himself are drawn the most cartoonishly, even though Mizuki has actual memories of these events, while the larger, historical stuff, like the Battle of Midway, which Mizuki did not personally see or serve in, are drawn very realistically. And quite well, the drawings in this book, especially the splash pages of fighter planes, are uniformly excellent. Mizuki depicts himself (again, cartoonishly) as quite bumbling and incompetent. He’s a bad soldier, uninterested and unsuited for military life, and spends most of his time doing the worst sort of grunt work and getting slapped around by his hyper-militaristic superiors. There’s an interesting sub-plot where he befriends natives on a South Pacific island he occupied for a while. The drawings of the natives, when depicted in the cartoony style and not the realistic one, do draw from racist american cartoons (especially in the lips) which is unfortunate but could be read as an unintentional commentary on the spread of racism around the world and the connection between racism and imperialism. On the imperialism note, this book walks a strange line w/r/t Japanese atrocities in WWII. My understanding is that the conduct of the Japanese army in WWII is still a very controversial subject in Japan. Mizuki does make reference to Nanjing and other atrocities committed in China (for which they, the Japanese, take signifigantly less flack for, in the West, than Germany, despite very similar conduct) though he doesn’t dwell on them at all and they’re seen as peripheral. At one point he writes a weird aside which explains that he doesn’t understand why Gen. Homna was hanged for the Baatan death march since it wasn’t the general’s fault that the Philipines are hot. Likewise with the comfort women, who are said to be doing their sacred duty (this phrase is in quotations in the book, I’m not sure how to read this. Does Mizuki mean those to denote irony, as in “sacred duty” is the official line but you and I know it’s bullshit? Or does he mean it as a direct quote from propaganda? I do not know, especially since the quote is obviously english translated from the Japanese), are mentioned briefly a few time but we don’t dwell and Mizuki claims to have never visited one. Overall, this was an interesting, quick read. It’s always interesting how a country views itself. As a Southerner, I’m always interested in the ways losers remember wars. I’m always interested in the ways Japan (and Germany) came late to the colonialism game and tried to make up for lost time. I’m not sure I’d read this whole series, though I am disappointed it didn’t go all the way through the end of the war. It seems weird to me to chop of the last year of the war the way the publisher (author?) did. 1945 Enola Gays