ERIC R. LOFGREN  

        
        DEMOCRATIZING ILLNESSES:  UMEZAKI HARUO, CENSORSHIP, AND SUBVERSION 

THE CRITICAL RESPONSE to the war-related literature published in Japan in the decade immediately following its surrender in World War II has been characterized by an anti-war bias. However, the Pacific War is not the only battle one sees played out on the pages of these texts. Indeed, a secondary battle—often unanticipated, frequently unintentional, and always unacknowledged—between the text and the ideological stance of the American Occupation that followed Japan’s sTurrender pervades these works. Recognition of the mechanisms by which this battle is waged, and the technologies it sustains or threatens, offers an alternative mode in which to consider these texts.

This essay examines the early, war-related works of Umezaki Haruo (1915-1965), a Japanese author whose short stories written in the half-decade following Japan’s surrender are often overlooked by the critical mainstream. It focuses on the sign-function of wounds and illness within the context of the ideological forces of censorship and democracy central to the American Occupation to illuminate the struggle to create a democratic self in response to a decidedly undemocratic environment. That the texts seem to appease the censors while simultaneously establishing a democratic space within which to re/configure the deracinated military self reflects an instability of both written word and subject position that has not been recognized in studies of Umezaki’s works to date. This understanding leads, in turn, to a greater appreciation of the broad implications of the "anti-war novel" and the unusual terrain within which such a protest might take place.

Umezaki Haruo is representative of a generation of postwar authors, called the sengoha. He was educated during the years of increasing militarism leading up to the Pacific conflict, he had not published significantly prior to the end of that war, and he had been conscripted at a relatively advanced age. As is the case with his peers, the ways in which Umezaki’s Occupation-era texts created and recreated the self have many ideological and political implications born of the historical instance of their creation and their critical reception, interpretation, and consumption. I shall limit the present discussion to an examination of the intersection of the literary representation of illness, broadly defined; the Occupation-sponsored ideology of democracy, furthered through extensive censorship; and the configured self that emerges to question and subvert that limiting force of censorship in order to create a truly democratic literature.