Parallel Participation Histories and Gendered War Memory in Postwar Japan

Participant and perpetrator war memories are often highly gendered. This is clear in the life histories of Yamaguchi Yoshiko (1920-2014), one of postwar Japanese cinema’s most glamorous actresses, and Tamura Taijiro (1911-1983) a prolific post-defeat novelist. During Japan’s expansionist Asia Pacific War the two had crossed paths in Manchuria, Tamura as a soldier in the Japanese army, and Yamaguchi posing as Chinese actress Ri Kōran in the pro-Japanese Manshu Eiga film studios. The meeting inspired Tamura’s 1947 novel Story of a Prostitute (Shunpuden), and Yamaguchi was cast in the title role of a heavily censored film adaptation in 1950 (Escape at Dawn/ Akatsuki no dasso, dir. Taniguchi Senkichi).

Yamaguchi subsequently discussed her role in Japan’s war in Manchuria at great length in the public sphere. Playing sex worker or collaborator characters in Japan and Hollywood, as a daytime television host, and in her political career as Diet member and spokesperson for the Asian Women’s Fund, Yamaguchi endlessly invoked her memories of her own participation in Japan’s war effort as a glamorous but cautionary tale. By contrast, Tamura fictionalized his war memories, focusing on female victim protagonists and largely eliding his own voice. The parallel histories of Tamura and Yamaguchi raise important questions about the gendering of participant war memories. Does the popular association of female-gendered experience with victimhood soften personal histories of war participation? Are women collaborators judged less harshly than their male counterparts?  This paper approaches these questions through the life histories of two high-profile figures in postwar Japan.