Li Kaihang, lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages of Donghua University and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History of Fudan University
"The Biography of Tsurumi Shunsuke", [Japanese] Kurokawa Creation, translated by Xia Chuan, Guangxi Normal University Press, July 2021, 592 pages, 88.00 yuan
In the summer of 1942, the ship Grippsholm, laden with Japanese expatriates, staggered across the Pacific Ocean. The cabins are divided into six classes, the highest of which is the imperial Japanese dignitaries, including the ambassador to the United States, and the lowest level is home to many international students. The reason why they returned home with their ships was because after the outbreak of the Pacific War, the United States and Japan became enemies, but according to the Geneva Conventions, the two sides could still exchange aliens through neutral countries. Thus, the Gripsholm sailed via South America to the East African city of Lourenço Maguires (a Portuguese colony). There, there are also American expatriates from Japan waiting to be exchanged.
In the cabin at the bottom, there was a small, thin, rat-faced young man with glasses. He had just received his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Harvard University and was celebrating his twentieth birthday on board. His sister Kazuko Tsurumi was also on board. Because of the war, she had to terminate her doctoral program at Columbia University and return home. The two brothers and sisters are now trapped in an unknown fate.
Left: Shinpei Goto; Right: Yusuke Tsurumi family photo
Tsurumi was born into a bureaucratic family. In 1922 (taisho 11th year) when his younger brother Shunsuke was born, his maternal grandfather Goto Shinpei was the president of TakushoKusho University (successively serving as civil affairs officer of the Governor-General's Office of Taiwan, president of Mantetsu, minister of letter delivery, minister of the interior, minister of foreign affairs, and the seventh mayor of Tokyo City, and enjoyed the title of second earl of the first rank of the lord), and his father, Tsurumi Yusuke, as the chief of the general affairs section of the Railway Provincial Transportation Bureau (successively a member of the House of Representatives, a cabinet administrative secretary, and a minister of health and welfare, enjoyed the first class of the Medal of Merit), met in Guangdong with Sun Yat-sen, who had just established a political power. The name "Shunsuke" derives from Goto Shinpei's close friend during his tenure as president of Mantetsu, Governor Itō Hirobumi of North Korea. Ito's milk name is said to be "Shunsuke". For Goto, the name is not only a tribute to an old friend, but also a hope for the family's descendants. Ironically, when Shunsuke grew up, he not only failed to become a prime minister-like figure as his elders expected, but instead stood against politicians and bureaucrats, becoming an intellectual known for his liberalism and democracy.
Cover of the original Japanese text
In his new book, The Biography of Toshisuke Tsurumi (the number of pages only indicated in the following citations), author Kurokawa Reveals the wonderful transformations in Tsurumi Shunsuke's life. In fact, the author has a deep relationship with the master. As early as the Vietnam War, Kurokawa's father and Shunsuke were anti-war "comrades-in-arms". Since then, Kurokawa has known Aboutsuke. Later, the two studied and taught at the prestigious Doshisha University. After kurokawa graduated, he began working as a commentator and editor for The Science of Thought, which Shunsuke founded. Perhaps feeling that the person in front of him would surely shine in the history of Japanese thought in the future, Kurokawa had the idea of establishing a biography of Shunsuke very early on. In the course of these decades of contact, Kurokawa has been consciously collecting materials from Shunsuke. Only in this way can we see in the book the vivid details of Shunsuke's fifteen-year-old sexual encounter, what photos are on the bedside table, and what he loves to eat. What is even more valuable is that although the two are intimate, Kurokawa always keeps a distance from Shunsuke in the book, barely boasting of any credit to Shunsuke, but restoring the details as much as possible like a documentary. The book deservedly won the 2019 Daifō Jiro Award for its nonfiction work.
As many scholars have pointed out, postwar thinking and the "experience of war" are inseparable (Yoshiaki Fukuma: ""Fighting Body" の戦後史: Generation, Upbringing, イデオオロギー", Chuo Kokushinsha, 2009). During his time in the United States, Tsurumi Shunsuke generally lived a free and loose life. At Harvard, he enjoyed the best educational resources of his time. His teachers were Bertrand Russell, author of A History of Western Philosophy, Edwin O. Reischauer, the postwar ambassador to Japan, and Serge Elisséeff, a Russian student of Natsume Soseki and fluent in six foreign languages. His reading is also very complex. Although he was forced by life and needed to go to the library to make money, in general, his student life in the United States was carefree.
Russell, Reischor and Ye Lisui
However, such days ended with the outbreak of war. Without waiting to return to Japan, shunsuke Tsurumi immediately felt a change in atmosphere as soon as Lorenzo-Maguis boarded the Japanese ship. The expatriates were required to visit the imperial palace every day, sing the "Emperor's Dynasty", read the Emperor's edicts, and so on. As soon as the ship arrived at the port of Yokohama, the expatriates were immediately scrutinized by the gendarmes. Seeing this, Tsurumi Shunsuke couldn't help but sigh: "Japanese society is even more terrible than American prisons." In fact, shortly after the outbreak of the Pacific War, he was put in a U.S. prison. At that time, his biggest concern was how to complete the la carte graduate thesis. Harvard University then demanded that the prison authorities give him the conditions to write in the name of academic freedom. In the end, he completed his thesis "on the toilet" and passed the defense in prison.
After returning to Japan, the first thing Tsurumi Shunsuke did was to undergo a conscription medical examination. Although he suffered from tuberculosis and a clear shadow in his lungs, he was still designated as "second class B", qualified, and was immediately incorporated into the navy and sent to the South Sea. He was given the task of listening to the Shortwave radio stations of the Allies and making daily "newspapers" of the declared results and damages, the food situation, and the morale of the soldiers for the reference of the field commanders. This is because relying solely on information sources from the Japanese base camp will bias us to believe news that unreasonably exaggerates the results of the war and will not be able to help formulate a reality-based battle plan. In addition, some miscellaneous things, including comfort women, also need to be handled by him, for example, he has received orders to "go buy a condom". The absurdity of the war is evident from this.
Shunsuke Tsurumi worked as a naval interpreter in Java
To this inexplicable war, Tsurumi Shunsuke has always been very indifferent. He did not have the "touch" of his contemporaries Takeuchi after the outbreak of the Pacific War. The Takeuchi people, feeling guilty about the invasion of China, tried to solve their moral anxieties by going to war with the United States (Zi'an Xuanbang, "What is the "Modern Chaoke"", translated by Dong Bingyue, Life Reading Zhixin Sanlian Bookstore, 2018, pp. 93-108). But Tsurumi Shunsuke only thinks, "I myself am an anarchist in my heart, so I don't support any country in this imperialist war." When he heard his father praise the Pearl Harbor attack as "blowing a divine wind," he couldn't believe it—he didn't think there was a chance of victory for Japan from the start. He wrote in his battlefield notes: "At the end of this war, at that time, my war against the United States began. Their race-snobbishness, self-satisfiedness, materialism & capitalism, spiritual uniformitarianism, disregard of other cultures [racial conceit, self-satisfaction, materialism and capitalism, spiritual homogenization, disregard for other cultures]. In other words, he doesn't care about this immersive reality of war, he chooses a battlefield of culture. In this sense, he belongs to what John W. Dower calls "embracing defeat" (Embracing Defeat: Post-World War II Japan, translated by Hu Bo, Triptych Bookstore, 2008).
In the early summer of 1944, Tsurumi Shunsuke returned to Japan for convalescence at the end of the year after completing surgery in Jakarta due to worsening tuberculosis in his chest wall. During his recuperation, the situation in Japan became increasingly critical. Soon, he lay in atami's hospital bed and was defeated. Although he escaped the conscription of the Japanese army, he could not escape the "conscription" of the US army. After the U.S. military occupied Japan, they found out that he was a graduate of Harvard University and immediately asked him to work as a translator for the U.S. military. Reluctantly, he also got paper from this job, which was a controlled item at the time, and started the dream magazine "The Science of Thought".
In 1951, Shunsuke Tsurumi was in Kyoto
The Science of Thought editorial board began with seven people: Toshiyuki Tsurumi, Kazuko Tsurumi, Mitsuo Taketani, Kiyoko Takeda, Shigehito Toruhito, Maruo Maruyama, and Kei Watanabe. Mizuo Taketani was engaged in atomic bomb research at the Riken Institute of Chemistry during the war, but was suspected of having anti-war ideas and was arrested twice. When Maruyama was studying at Ichigo High School, he was arrested and detained for listening to Hasegawa's idle speeches held by the Materialist Research Association, and has been under the surveillance of the high police ever since, and has personally experienced the Hiroshima nuclear explosion. In addition to the physicist Kei Watanabe, the Tsurumi siblings returned to China with Kiyoko Takeda and Shigeru Toruhito on an expatriate exchange ship. Everyone discussed it together, and soon the focus of the inaugural issue was on the issue of "language". This is because the postwar Japanese were not only on the ruins of reality, but also because of the overwhelming number of wartime lies and mistrust between people, Japan became a "moral scorched earth" ("Democracy" and "Patriotism": Nationalism and Publicness in Postwar Japan: Eiji Koma, Dahui Huang et al., Social Sciences Academic Press, pp. 20-54). Tsurumi Shunsuke himself had seen firsthand how the commander did not believe the battle reports of the Tokyo base camp when he was in the army.
In addition, for him, the performance of his father, Yusuke Tsurumi, before and after the war was also a good object of observation. His father had previously been a member of the debate department while studying at Tokyo Imperial University, and had since gone through political party elections to become a member of parliament, and in 1932 he had a special visit to the Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels (but unsuccessfully asked to see Hitler), so he can be said to have a lot of experience in political propaganda. After the war, he also confidently went to participate in democratic elections under the auspices of the United States, after which he was dismissed from public office. This phenomenon forced Tsurumi Shunsuke to become suspicious of "mass communication" as a means of "propaganda":
The modern mediums of mass communication are radio, television, film, these things, but they only began to be used in all parts of the world in the 20th century, and this will have a particularly huge impact on the thinking of people in the second half of the 20th century. I think there are two aspects of mass communication in the 20th century: the aspect of conveying the same idea to countless people at the same time, and the aspect of using sound, picture, text and other communication information at the same time. ...... Until now, our mental life has relied on words. However, this proficiency in the use of words was eliminated by film and television. It will then become very difficult for everyone to think thoroughly about this matter for themselves. In that case, I think the characteristics of the 20th century should have been the emergence of mass communication as a resistance to the spontaneous thinking of the masses.
Toshisuke Tsurumi questioned whether mass communication promoted the free communication of information or hindered the exchange of ideas, which made his academic starting point different from the elite field of intellectual history that Maruyama Maruo was concerned about ("Maruyama 眞男の時: University・Intellectuals・ジャーナリズム", Chuo Koshin Shinsha, 2005, pp. 301-302), but very popular. For example. He spent a lot of effort to study comics, cross-talk, popular novels, etc. that belonged to the category of mass culture, and was full of curiosity about the "everyday" (History of Mass Culture in Post-War Japan, 1945-1980), Sichuan Education Publishing House, 2016). Kato commented on Monday, "The uniqueness of his articles is often expressed in the tension between everyday language and the language of thought, touching on the development path of everyday conversation and developing careful thinking. It is not too difficult to write lyrical prose in Japanese, but it is not easy for everyone to create a style of thinking in Japanese. Obviously, Tsurumi's essay is a major contribution to modern Japanese prose. (Introduction to the History of Japanese Literature, translated by Ye Weiqu and Tang Yuemei, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 2011, 486 pp.)
Masao Maruyama Yo takeuchi Yoshi
In 1954, Tsurumi Shunsuke presided over the very famous "Turning Research". He wanted to see: "Most of the people who were known as liberals, pacifists, and socialists in their youth during the war advocated the dignity of the state system and denied European and American culture. What happens to these people after the coming defeat? And the fact is, "Japanese soldiers and civilian personnel, especially in China, robbed, cheated, raped, killed, and committed violence for no reason," and "the Japanese who did these things now return home one by one, become loving fathers at home, and live the same life as before." (245-246, 263)
His concern with the question of "turning" is not to accuse and embarrass these people, but to feel that "if we call the phenomena of the turn that took place in Japan from 1931 to 1945 all the notoriety of 'betrayal,' we will lose the opportunity to discover the truth from error." I think the value of studying 'turning' is that the true part of the error is more important to us than the truth contained in the truth; of course, the premise is that there are real words in the truth. If we can define the truth contained in errors more carefully, we will have a sense of direction in searching for truth through mistakes" (Shunsuke Tsurumi, A History of Japanese Spirit in The War Period, 1931-1945, translated by Qiu Zhenrui, Beijing Daily Press, 2019, pp. 18-19).
In other words, having experienced war, he understood how delicate the personal situation was in a specific historical environment. During the war, he kept asking himself, what if he was ordered to kill people? Sick and frail and quickly withdrawn from the front, he was saved from such a cruel choice in reality, but the problem tormented him for the rest of his life.
In 1960, a massive security struggle broke out. This is partly because it was only fifteen years after the end of the war, and Kishi Nobusuke, who signed the edict to wage war against the United States, was about to forcibly pass the agreement, which aroused the extreme disgust of the people, and on the other hand, because the popularity of television deepened the sense of common destiny of the whole of Japan (Shunsuke Tsurumi, "What the War Left Behind: An Interview with Shunsuke Tsurumi of the Postwar Generation", translated by Qiu Jing, Peking University Press, 2015, pp. 187-192). At that time, Takeuchi had met with Kishi Nobusuke on behalf of the cultural people group, but it was still to no avail. Afterwards, he resigned from the Tokyo Metropolitan University faculty on the grounds that he could not become a civil servant in an irresponsible cabinet.
Shunsuke Tsurumi followed Takeuchi's footsteps and not only resigned from the university faculty, but also joined the march. He criticized: "If we consider that these LDP MPs are the parties who have forcibly pushed Japan to wage war against China and the United States over the past fifteen years, we will feel that what they are doing today is extremely natural, and it is a historical irony that the country that used to be a ghost animal, the United States and Britain, is now going all out to kill its compatriots in the flesh, and to send gifts to the former." In view of the fact that the police have already killed the female student of the University of Tokyo, Tomoko Birch, he has even considered his own life and death, "From my own emotional point of view, it was good to decide to die there at that time." Didn't feel scared. Very scared in previous wars. I couldn't stand dying for that nasty, unbelief purpose of war, so I was very scared. But when it comes to security, it's more in tune with its purpose than the war, so it's okay to die."
During the "anti-security" struggle, Tsurumi Shunsuke was taken away by the police.
In the end, Kishi nobusuke resigned as prime minister after forcibly passing the security treaty, ending the matter. In order to appease the national mood, the successor Prime Minister Isamu Ikeda formulated the famous "National Income Doubling Plan", and Japan entered a period of rapid economic growth. However, the negative impact of the security treaty is not over. Because it imposed obligations on both sides to support each other in a state of war, Japan became a logistics base for the U.S. military after the outbreak of the Vietnam War. The war was unpopular in both American and Japanese societies, and protests broke out on both sides. During this period, Tsurumi Shunsuke left Tokyo to become a professor at the School of Journalism at Kyoto Doshisha University. There he organized the "Viet Thanh Pyi" (peace for Vietnam!). In addition to demonstrating at the U.S. consulate, the Citizens' and Cultural Groups have also actively launched operations to rescue deserters from the United States, South Korea, and Japan. The author's father, Tsunehiko Kitazawa, was at this time the head of the "YuePing Union" bureau. The "Yue Ping Lian" lasted for a total of eight years, and he later recalled: "I was surprised to be able to carry out such a movement in Japan. I think that a Japanese person with such a low evaluation can actually do such a thing. I think it's really good to do it. It's really tiring though. (The Interview, p. 265)
After entering the 1970s, the Japanese people's memory of the war gradually faded. The "economic power" gradually replaced the "defeated country" and became the new self-understanding of the post-war generation of Japanese. Perhaps out of some concern, Tsurumi Began writing A Spiritual History of Japan During the War, reviewing the disasters and horrors of the war period. He recalled that since the news of the "Manchuria Incident," the "Shanghai Incident," the "Indochina Incident," and the "Great East Asian War" had been scattered and scattered, Japanese society was subjectively prone to think that these were individual acts of combat, and only after the defeat did it gradually realize that these wars were in fact interrelated. This division of the war period was precisely the means by which the ruler paralyzed the people (History of The Spirit, p. 114). After the war, Tsurumi Shunsuke first used the term "fifteen years of war" to merge the two wars into one, revealing the integrity of the process of Japan's foreign aggression and expansion (Keichi Eguchi, "History of Japan's Fifteen Years of Aggression", translated by Yang Dongliang, Jiangsu People's Publishing House, 2016, pp. 1-3). He was obsessed with the struggle for security because he was acutely aware that as long as Kishi nobusuke opened this mouth, bureaucratic power would expand itself endlessly.
This article is partially referenced
On the other hand, the war against a weak Japan and a strong United States was inconceivable both then and now: "I had the youngest staff officer at the time, Hayaburo Hayaburo of the Army, and Takahashi Fu of the Navy personally confirmed that when I asked whether Japan had a chance of winning the war against Britain and the United States, they could not give a positive answer. Despite receiving only such negative predictions from staff officers, the Pacific War broke out. The reason for its claim is that the oil stock will soon be exhausted, and if the war is delayed, it will be even more unfavorable to Japan. The rationale behind this judgment is that efforts to fight the general war, which have been going on for a decade, cannot be halted by the blows to government institutions. (History of Spirituality, p. 42)
Maruo Maruyama, who had carefully analyzed the investigation report of the Tokyo trials, found that the ignorance of the Japanese leaders was not only surprising to the Japanese people, but even to the allied prosecutors: "The declaration of war on the United States was not based on a careful analysis and consideration of the world situation, the state of the productive forces, and other domestic conditions, but rather by the powerful figures who did not even know about the Munich Agreement and the concentration camps, and who had a surprising lack of international knowledge, decided to implement it in a very inconsistent state of mind." "They cannot control the means according to a clear sense of purpose, and the exercise of force as a means expands little by little until they also have a purpose." So much so that when these people in power were sent to the trial court as war criminals, they felt that the war was inexplicably fought and that they had no responsibility. (Mamao Maruyama, Thoughts and Actions of Modern Politics, translated by Chen Liwei, The Commercial Press, pp. 83-125)
In his later years, Shunsuke Tsurumi
In his later years, Tsurumi Shunsuke actively participated in many political activities, the most important of which was the "Nine-Point Society". After the end of the Cold War, Japan's right-wing forces have risen, and calls for constitutional amendments have become increasingly loud. As fewer and fewer Japanese people lived through the war, the tragic memory of the war gradually faded. Young people were drawn to narrow nationalism, and many of the insightful people, represented by Shunsuke Tsurumi — including Kenzaburo Oe, Monday Kato, and Tsumehara — felt the need to take steps to protect the peace constitution and prevent right-wing leaders from amending article 9 of the constitution, which renounced war as a clause of state rights. In Tsurumi Shunsuke's view, war and nationalist lies are always closely linked, "the leader has always provided the people with the opposite information on the gap in military and economic strength between Japan and the hypothetical enemy, resulting in himself falling into a situation of self-deception." It is very difficult for the leaders of the state to maintain self-awareness from the constant deception of the people" (History of Spirituality, pp. 42-43). This is undoubtedly the best motto he left to the Japanese after the war.
Editor-in-Charge: Shanshan Peng
Proofreader: Luan Meng