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Reorienting Empires

Hanama Tasaki’s War Guilt and U.S.-Japan Relations

THROUGHOUT THE 1950s, popular writings in the United States presented Hawai‘i and Japan as part of the American strategic defense system against the growing threat of communism in Asia. Hawai‘i was a “rampart of the Pacific,” as one writer put it, while others described postwar Japan as a “bulwark” or a “far eastern citadel.”¹ In each rendering, the people inhabiting these sites of U.S. occupation not only protected American interests against communist encroachment but also were on the vanguard of propagating freedom and democracy to the Asian mainland. Hawai‘i was especially important in this regard when publicized as a multiracial democracy that showcased American acceptance of ethnic minorities to nonwhite peoples overseas. Immigrant and native-born Japanese Americans proved crucial to both locations’ positioning within the geographic and ideological struggles between the United States and the Soviet Union. As U.S. citizens, the Nisei in particular withstood distrust from the white mainstream during World War II and became a model of loyalty and patriotism to the American cause. Postwar fiction and historical studies about Hawai‘i depicted them as ready and willing to contribute to the nation’s security in troubling times.² Meanwhile, Nisei soldiers serving in the U.S. occupation forces as well as businessmen, journalists, and others traveling or working in Japan were touted as cultural ambassadors who could demonstrate to their ancestral homeland the benefits of living under liberal democratic principles.³

One figure who attracted popular attention at this time, but in a very different way, was Hanama Tasaki, a Hawai‘i-born Nisei who lived in postwar Japan. Although forgotten today, he enjoyed a short-lived renown for his antiwar novel, Long the Imperial Way, which appeared on the American market in August 1950. The story focuses on the intense emotional and physical struggles of a young Japanese soldier, Takeo Yamamoto, who serves in China during the late 1930s. Takeo’s life in the Imperial Army consists of great suffering and brutality. He not only endures harsh military discipline from his superiors but also must participate in the large-scale violence inflicted on the Chinese in both northern and southern provinces. The text traces in bildungsroman fashion Takeo’s developing moral conscience as he sporadically embraces, but then rejects, the empire’s expansionist aims and the perpetual warfare promised for its soldiers and civilians.⁴

Tasaki based Long the Imperial Way on some of his own experiences. The son of Issei laborers, he spent most of his youth in Maui and attended McKinley High School in Honolulu, where he participated in its citizenship club. He enrolled briefly at Oberlin College and then at the University of Hawai‘i, and worked in California for a year alongside Japanese American farmers. But something else came to occupy his attention. Roused by Japan’s rising power and influence in East Asia, and angered by haole (white ruling elite) prejudice in Hawai‘i, he traveled to his ancestral land in 1936 to enlist in the Imperial Army, which stationed him in China.⁵ He later became a reporter for the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and the Domei News Agency, followed by combat tours in the South Pacific during World War II. Tasaki gained notice for his English-language skills and in 1942 translated for publication the Imperial Rescript declaring war on the United States and Great Britain. After the war, the veteran earned his keep as a livestock farmer, a toy maker, and a refuse hauler in Japan. While recuperating from tuberculosis, he began working on Long the Imperial Way to relieve his “guilt complex” wrought from the carnage that the Japanese military unleashed on the rest of Asia.⁶

The author privately published his English-language work in 1949, offering it to Tokyo bookshops that catered to the U.S. occupation forces. He labored in obscurity until an American officer, who appreciated the novel’s merits, sent it to the Boston-based publisher Houghton Mifflin. The company then released the book a year later to widespread critical acclaim in the United States.⁷ Reviewers hailed Long the Imperial Way as one of the first major works of fiction emerging from postwar Japan. The New York Times listed it as one of the top 275 books of the 10,000 titles published that year. A Chicago Daily Tribune critic went further, including it on his “Ten Books of the Year” list. Another columnist likewise praised the work’s qualities in the Saturday Review of Literature. As one sign of the novel’s mass appeal, Reader’s Digest distributed Tasaki’s text as part of its Condensed Books series. Several enthusiasts even compared Long the Imperial Way to such classics as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948).⁸

A Japanese novel set in China, written by a Japanese American for a mainstream American audience: given this unusual mix of the book’s topic, its author’s background, and its reception history, Long the Imperial Way presents both challenges and opportunities for contemporary evaluation. Perhaps due to the author’s Nisei origins, Asian American studies scholars claim Long the Imperial Way as an important, underappreciated work. Indeed, the title occasionally appears on lists in overview essays that call for broader or different ways to analyze Asian American literature.⁹ Yet the novel has attracted little to no critical attention, even with the recent emphasis on transnational approaches to interpreting texts.¹⁰ Part of the difficulty in assessing Long the Imperial Way lies in its lack of discernible themes that relate to the experiences of Asian Americans. Unlike seminal Japanese American works published during the postwar period—Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 (1946), Toshio Mori’s Yokohama, California (1949), Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (1953), and John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957)—Tasaki’s narrative makes no mention of the Issei and Nisei. In fact, Long the Imperial Way provides no commentary on American life and culture. Nowhere does the main protagonist Takeo Yamamoto even long for a chance at the good life in the United States. The text addresses only Takeo and his squad’s three-year ordeal in China, charting their disaffection through the mundane and terrifying aspects of military life: marching, scavenging for food, serving on guard duty, skirmishing against guerillas, engaging in all-out battles, and enduring discipline from superiors. No character among them is a Nisei fighting in the Imperial Army. Complicating matters of classification, both Tasaki and Long the Imperial Way migrated across the Pacific, but in opposite directions—he to Japan, his work to the United States—testing more conventional definitions of a “minority writer” creating “ethnic literature.”¹¹

Yet, if Long the Imperial Way is not quite Asian American literature, it does reveal important issues concerning the field. For instance, we can see how transpacific movements, shaped by the overlapping imperial histories of the United States and Japan, affected the novel’s production, distribution, and reception.¹² Author and text in this way align with Susan Koshy’s concept of “minority cosmopolitanism.” As she observes, “The topography of literary production and consumption has been transformed as writers and texts travel . . . and writers’ locations, audiences, and subject matter resist ready alignment.”¹³ Here, Koshy argues for the significance of works that address, reconfigure, and result from contacts beyond national borders. She contends as well that such relations are “grounded in the experience of minority subjects,” from which writers are conscious of “the constraints of primary attachments, such as family, religion, race, and nation.” But they can still convey “the disruptions and asymmetries of intercultural encounter while sustaining an openness to its transformative possibilities.”¹⁴ This position seeks to avoid romanticizing transnationalism as a way to exceed or ignore social, political, and racial boundaries by recognizing the levels of institutional pressures enacted on artists from minority backgrounds. At the same time, minority cosmopolitanism valorizes opportunities in cultural expressions that can extend the range of writing beyond those limitations.

Such is the case and more with Hanama Tasaki and Long the Imperial Way. As an ethnic minority coming of age in the United States, the author was familiar with the racial constraints enacted on him, even in the multicultural environment of Hawai‘i. Yet his service in the Imperial Army as a Nisei (another kind of minority in different circumstances) placed him in a position to oppress other civilian populations, much to his later regret. Interviewed by the New York Times in 1950, Tasaki expressed hope that his work would contribute to “a freer exchange of artists, writers and intellectuals” between Asia and the United States. He suggested, too, that these cultural interactions could prompt more peaceful international relations as well as an Asian renaissance of the arts.¹⁵ Like most of the populace in postwar Japan, Tasaki suffered from remorse for, and disillusionment about, what the militarist state imposed at home and abroad. He sought absolution by writing Long the Imperial Way, which provided “an outlet for the strong yearning for beauty which replaced the great void after the war.”¹⁶ But the novel went beyond a search for personal redemption through artistic endeavors. Long the Imperial Way also disclosed to American readers the broader entangling legacies of war and empire building in Asia, detailing the levels of power an imperial state could exert over its citizens, soldiers, and colonial subjects. Just as important, the work exposed the extent to which these populations could oppose, alter, or adapt to this authority, suggesting that it was neither constant nor totalizing.¹⁷ By fictionalizing the disastrous effects of ruling other lands, the novel further posed implicit warnings that some reviewers applied to the U.S. military intervention in Korea and to the continuing occupation of Japan. We can then perceive the author as an important interlocutor in U.S.-Asia relations, outlining through his work the destructive practices of Japanese militarism for a nation reasserting its own influence in the Pacific theater.

The book publicity on Tasaki’s Hawaiian upbringing and postwar career in Japan played a vital role in helping readers comprehend these overseas issues. His positioning as a minority cosmopolitan writer relied on his malleable “Japanese” and “American” identities that incorporated, destabilized, and shifted between both categories. His status as a “Japanese/American” author was thus complicated by its varying degrees of indeterminacy. He was “not quite American” due to his alienated racial identity and his tours of duty with the Imperial Army. But he was also “not quite Japanese,” having been born and raised in Hawai‘i. Tasaki negotiated these cultural worlds by engaging the “absent presence” of his Nisei subjectivity that book reviewers were complicit in reproducing.¹⁸ That is, Tasaki and the promotional material about Long the Imperial Way selectively masked and acknowledged aspects of his life story, especially regarding his ethnicity and U.S. citizenship. This hybrid status in turn raised larger, troubling questions about race, empire, and Tasaki’s national loyalties, in light of his military service. Even then, he aspired to transcend these issues through his postwar plea for expanding universal rights based on liberal democratic ideals. He thought that this desire could work only if the United States abandoned its aim to impose its values unilaterally and allowed other nations to develop in their own ways. But he still advanced this position from within a liberal framework that downplayed U.S. empire-building efforts, part of which began in Hawai‘i. In this way, Tasaki and his novel performed valuable, yet problematic, cultural work for an American public wrestling with its new place and power in the world.

Hawai‘i provided an important context for the absent presence of Tasaki’s Nisei identity, marking both the visibility of U.S. race relations and the invisibility of American imperial ambitions. Alongside works about Hawai‘i published in the early Cold War period, Tasaki’s biography for the book’s marketing reinforced an emerging narrative about how the islands’ Japanese Americans contributed to building and strengthening a democratic society, despite the previous wartime suspicions against them. Yet the concurrent debates over admitting Hawai‘i as a state revealed public concerns about assimilating racial Others into the white mainstream. In response, supporters of statehood hoped that Hawai‘i’s inclusion in the United States would show the world how readily the nation accepted ethnic minorities and countries with nonwhite citizens. This stance was crucial to contest Soviet propaganda about American racism. Tasaki’s Hawaiian rearing, as detailed in the promotional material, aligned with these latter priorities. Although the author apparently had rejected the bounty and values offered in Hawai‘i to fight for imperial Japan, he now posed as an unwilling conscript caught up in the torrents of war, a theme that pervades Long the Imperial Way. Tasaki and his American background, however, presented challenges to book reviewers who described him as a Japanese writer, even though they acknowledged his birth as a U.S. citizen. This matter coincided with how critics deflected charges of American empire building in the Pacific. They did so by highlighting the author’s democratic upbringing in Hawai‘i and how it contributed to his anti-imperialist portrayal of Japan’s wartime aggressions.

Another component of transpacific relations that Tasaki addressed was the U.S. occupation of Japan. Readers praised Long the Imperial Way as a rare ethnographic account that humanized the Japanese as victims of militarism and empire building who needed American guidance to point them in the right direction. This depiction corresponded with the broader efforts among U.S. policy makers to gain public support for the Cold War alliance between the United States and Japan. But Tasaki later problematized how this relationship would work. His sequel, The Mountains Remain (1952), portrays the veteran Takeo Yamamoto returning to a defeated Japan after surviving the South Pacific campaigns. Although the book later came out in several different languages, American critics mainly ignored it. The Mountains Remain sold poorly in the United States, perhaps because it presented the central character pondering multiple options to reconstruct his devastated nation, rather than relying simply on U.S. leadership. The second novel also disclosed Tasaki’s further cosmopolitan leanings, from which he dramatized the debates in Japan among reformers and traditionalists, capitalists and communists, Christians and secularists, among others. But the timing of the novel’s appearance in 1952 may have worried American readers, given the uncertainty over the directions Japan might take after resuming its sovereignty when the occupation officially ended.

In many ways, then, Tasaki’s novels provoked responses that both legitimized and critiqued attempts to contain communism through a U.S. presence in the Pacific. American readers recognized the significance of the author’s work, conferring Long the Imperial Way in particular with cultural resonance because the text addressed a variety of their fears and aspirations about influencing a geographic expanse that Japan once controlled.

A Nisei amid Two Empires

Hanama Tasaki and other Nisei who journeyed abroad traversed the boundaries between Japanese and American imperial exploits in the Pacific. Diverse reasons impelled this population to venture outside the United States and its territories during the early twentieth century. Many sought educational or employment opportunities in Japan, or in regions under its colonial dominion such as Korea and Manchuria. National and ethnic pride conveyed by Issei parents likewise contributed to the sense that their futures and fortunes coincided with those of fellow Japanese on the other side of the Pacific.¹⁹ Racial prejudice in Hawai‘i and on the U.S. mainland motivated these migrations too. Alien land laws, immigration restrictions, denial of naturalization opportunities, housing and employment discrimination, and other exclusionary practices only exacerbated the feeling that the Issei and their progeny would find life difficult within a hostile white nation. More than a few Nisei were sojourners who went to Japan for their education or for prospects in business, journalism, and other occupations, but they eventually returned to the United States. Presenting aspects of “migrant nationalism,” to use Mae Ngai’s phrase, they admired Japan’s show of strength in Asia while retaining the legal and cultural attachments of their American lives. This sense of belonging to two worlds was not inherently stable and coherent, but flexible in how it informed ethnic minority communities’ sense of themselves. People’s national loyalties overlapped and shifted over time when defining their experiences. Even before the Pacific War erupted, however, maintaining this complicated in-between state was no longer viable. Nations compelled them to choose sides.²⁰

Whether an individual served in the armed forces for the United States or for Japan in World War II became the linchpin for determining a Japanese American’s allegiance that reverberated well into the postwar era. Hawai‘i-born Nisei who fought for the United States in the 100th Battalion and those from the mainland who comprised the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (which later absorbed most of the 100th) have received both popular and scholarly attention, partly because their decorated wartime heroism adhered to the romance of ethnic minority devotion to the American nation, despite the discriminatory practices they faced. As volunteers and draftees, the Nisei serving in these segregated detachments under white officers gained considerable notice for their courage and accomplishments on the battlefields of North Africa and Europe. That the U.S. government imprisoned Japanese Americans because of suspected wartime loyalties to imperial Japan, and that many of the mainland Nisei were fighting totalitarianism overseas for a nation that held their friends and families behind barbed wire, only added to the allure of their patriotism and sacrifices.²¹

After the war, many Nisei veterans and their supporters believed that service in the U.S. military helped to recuperate the image of Japanese Americans as a whole. As Monica Sone wrote in her 1953 memoir, Nisei Daughter: “The birth of the Nisei combat team was the climax to our evacuee life, and the turning point. It was the road back to our rightful places.”²² The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) also publicized these soldiers’ heroic deeds. Yet, at the war’s onset and afterward, the JACL was a controversial organization within Japanese American communities. The association’s leaders, attempting to make the best of the bad situation of removal and confinement, offered assistance to the federal government, in spite of their doubts. The league’s moderate-to-conservative bent also alienated more progressive voices that critiqued its stances as unrepresentative of all Japanese Americans. That the organization notified U.S. intelligence agencies about certain persons it suspected as disloyal did not help its image.²³ But the JACL argued that the Nisei veterans’ wartime loyalty and sacrifices legitimated the fight for Cold War civil rights. Mike Masaoka, the executive secretary of the JACL and a 442nd veteran himself, promoted their model minority image to press for rights long denied to them in housing, employment, and education. Nisei veterans became politically active in other areas, especially in Hawai‘i, where they challenged the white establishment’s hold on the islands by running for local, state, and federal offices. Working with U.S. congressmen and other government officials, Masaoka boasted in 1953 that “the record of the 442nd has been more responsible than any other argument for the corrective and remedial legislation which persons of Japanese ancestry have gained” since the end of World War II.²⁴ This struggle included obtaining U.S. citizenship and property rights for the Issei, securing small amounts of financial reparations for the losses incurred by the confinement, and calling for Hawaiian statehood. To Masaoka and others in the JACL, the Nisei’s military service bolstered their political and moral authority to correct the prewar restrictions on Japanese Americans and the adverse effects of their wartime experiences.²⁵

Articles, editorials, and other news features that catered to mainstream audiences highlighted how the Nisei GIs, like the Japanese American populace in general, displayed such admirable traits as adapting to demanding circumstances, showing fidelity in the face of suspicion, and expressing forgiveness of those who wronged them. By focusing on the good behavior of those imprisoned in the camps and especially on the military service of the Nisei, however, many publications excused themselves from examining the broader political and structural reasons for the mass incarceration and other longstanding prejudices against Japanese Americans. Reader’s Digest, for instance, privileged the 442nd’s exploits over the sufferings and grievances of the larger Japanese American population to emphasize the themes of heroism and sacrifice. One writer for the magazine observed in 1956: “The conduct of the evacuated Japanese and, above all, the superb military record of the Nisei [italics original] had brought about a reversal in the feelings of most other Americans toward them.”²⁶ Underlining the martial success of one ethnic minority while downplaying prejudicial state power reinforced the standard by which others succeeded or failed as individuals to overcome obstacles. In this way, Reader’s Digest revealed the wartime racist frenzy against Japanese Americans as incidental to, rather than embedded within, the nation’s principles, history, and social structures.

Downplaying racial prejudice in the United States through the Nisei soldiers also helped the postwar nation’s overseas objectives. The servicemen provided reassurance in trying times by closing the credibility gap between American ideals and the nation’s discriminatory practices toward minorities. “In a day when democracy seems to be diplomatically on the defensive,” the Saturday Review of Literature noted in 1947, “it is heartening to find proof of its vitality” in Hawai‘i, where Japanese Americans participated fully in daily life, and with the example of the 442nd Regiment. Arguing that the growth of communism endangered democratic societies, the magazine presented the Nisei’s loyalty and service as proof of the nation’s fairness and acceptance of a diversified populace. But their war record became the primary allure of democracy’s strength. As the article noted, “The thing above all others that lifted the Japanese-Americans from the undeserved abyss of hatred and mistrust was their military record.”²⁷ Others connected the new perception of Japanese Americans with the new direction in U.S.-Japan relations. Viewed through a Cold War lens, valorizing the Nisei soldiers and transforming Japan into an anticommunist ally served to allay American anxieties about world affairs. In 1957, Christopher Rand reported in the New Yorker on the rising popularity of Japanese Americans in light of Japan’s new role in the Pacific. “In general,” he wrote, “the [N]isei, the first crop of real Japanese-Americans, appear to stand well with the public at large, partly because of their fine war record, and partly . . . because of the recent switch in American sentiments toward Japan.”²⁸ Like others, Rand invoked the 442nd as representative of the entire Nisei population, correlating military service with U.S. citizenship. For the author, the Nisei GIs offered a more compelling face for public consumption than the discriminatory past from which they arose.

Hollywood also contributed to these perceptions of the Nisei’s martial sacrifices for the United States through the MGM production Go for Broke! (1951). Released during the Korean War as a way to link past and present patriotic efforts, Go for Broke! was one of the few films that even mentioned the wartime confinement, although it never showed the prison camps themselves. Instead, the war picture valorized the bravery and professionalism of ethnic minority soldiers who remained committed to the nation, from their training on the home front to their overseas campaigns in Europe.²⁹ The main reason for this focus was that initial attempts at portraying Japanese Americans in the camps ran up against U.S. propaganda efforts during the Cold War. As the film’s producer, Dore Schary, admitted years later, what he and his production team learned about the mass incarceration “was so shocking and depressing we felt that in the early years of the Cold War . . . [the topic] would be a disservice.”³⁰ Larry Tajiri, writing for the Pacific Citizen in 1955, noted more frankly that federal officials “reportedly feared such scenes would be exploited by the Communists in the cold war, particularly in Asia where the Kremlin and the Chinese Reds had used the story of the mass evacuation of Japanese Americans as Anti-American [sic] propaganda.”³¹ Showcasing the Nisei soldiers became more strategically viable, particularly when advancing American political and military objectives in Asia. In a 1951 letter to Defense Department personnel involved in cooperating with MGM, Schary emphasized the potential overseas appeal of Go for Broke! “Since it is quite likely that we may have Japanese regiments fighting on our side in some future upheaval, I think this picture has definite morale and defense values.” A film about Japanese Americans fighting for the cause of democracy, he assumed, would benefit how the Japanese saw their own contributions to containing communism in the Pacific. Other Hollywood producers also recognized the film’s political importance. William Gordon, an executive at Universal Studios, congratulated Schary: “The film should be of tremendous value in the Far East as an object lesson in our democratic process.”³²

Japanese Americans themselves helped to broadcast how crucial the Nisei’s postwar service in the U.S. military was for international relations in the Pacific and, more specifically, for relations with Japan. Part of this strategy was to validate their contributions to, and their model citizenry within, the United States to promote a sense of national belonging. They also saw themselves as potential transpacific mediators between the two nations. Much of the ethnic press reported on Japanese leaders’ statements about the Nisei soldiers in this manner. Visiting the United States in 1951, Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru thanked “the ceaseless effort of the Japanese Americans to have the American public better understand the Japanese.” He recognized the Issei and Nisei for the financial and material aid they sent to their ancestral land as it recovered from the wartime devastation. But more than anything else, he declared, the patriotism and sacrifice of the Nisei soldiers during World War II was “the prime factor” in transforming American attitudes toward Japan.³³ Other Japanese officials shared Yoshida’s expressions of gratitude for American generosity and forgiveness in light of these contributions toward advancing reconciliation and friendship. In 1950, the Pacific Citizen reported that the governor of Tokyo, Yasui Seiichiro, entertained eighty veterans from the 442nd who made up part of the U.S. occupation forces. At the gathering attended by four hundred Japanese statesmen, Governor Yasui “praised the achievements of the Nisei GIs in World War II and declared them an important factor in American-Japanese relations.” In 1951, the Japanese vice-minister of foreign affairs, Kusaba Ryuen, noted while visiting Hawai‘i the GIs’ influence on overseas relations: “The Nisei soldiers . . . gave the people of America and her Allies a new concept of persons of Japanese ancestry.” Kusaba even credited the Nisei’s military service with contributing to “the favorable peace treaty given Japan.”³⁴

Nisei living abroad also accentuated these international ties. George Kiyoshi Togasaki, the president of the English-language Nippon Times, a Tokyo-based daily, wrote in 1952 about the effect that Nisei soldiers and linguists in the U.S. forces had on the occupied Japanese. For Togasaki, the Nisei in Japan did more than act “as a liaison force between the conqueror and conquered.” He cited “the psychological effect on the Japanese population of the sight of soldiers of Japanese ancestry in American uniform.” This exhibition of American ethnic inclusion undermined the “race war propaganda” of the Japanese militarists.³⁵ Implied in this argument was that a multiracial democracy was superior, both in social and martial terms, to those that assumed the legitimacy of racial hierarchies. Togasaki avoided mentioning how racial segregation and other forms of discrimination remained alive and well in the United States. Nor did the topic of the mass confinement arise in his work. But he may have understood how these issues would undermine his argument and his sense of ethnic pride in what Japanese Americans were accomplishing overseas. That the United States accepted soldiers of color willing to serve their nation was to him a valuable model for Japan in the workings of American democracy.³⁶

Hanama Tasaki and others like him, however, presented another side of the story. The veteran was among approximately five thousand Nisei who left home to enlist in the Japanese military before and during World War II. But much is unknown regarding his specific feelings about, or experiences in, the China campaigns, the Pacific War, and afterward.³⁷ In interviews later in his life, Tasaki did recall incidences that informed his youth. Although involved with citizenship activities in high school, he distinctly remembered the racial slights his parents encountered in Hawai‘i that only served to remind him that his family did not belong. Tasaki was also impressed by the “spiritual strength” of the Issei he met in California and by Japan’s ideals in the 1930s for the “Yamato race” to lead a pan-Asian coalition.³⁸ All of these issues contributed to his joining the ranks of the Imperial Army. This action later resulted in Tasaki’s loss of American citizenship, according to the 1940 Nationality Act, when he served in the military of another nation-state. This act, however, did not necessarily foreclose the possibilities for regaining one’s citizenship. Several hundred Nisei who fought for Japan’s armed forces succeeded in reclaiming their former legal status as American citizens after World War II. Many had been visiting family or tending to other affairs in Japan at the war’s outbreak and were then conscripted for duty. To regain their prior standing, they argued that, under Article 503 of the Nationality Act, their U.S. citizenship was still valid if a foreign state forced them to fight against their will. The federal government acquiesced in most cases because it could not disprove the claims of those individuals who said they served under duress. No evidence suggests that Tasaki ever filed papers concerning this matter, and the reasons why he did not are lost to history. Like the majority of Nisei veterans of the Imperial Army and Navy, he remained in Japan for the rest of his life.³⁹

This personal history lent a unique perspective to Tasaki’s work. The author’s literary intervention in postwar American culture emerged from an interstitial state, one that changed over time. Tasaki initially was “not quite American” because of his alienated Nisei identity in the United States and his involvement in the Imperial Army during the 1930s. The ensuing loss of his American citizenship settled the issue legally, if not culturally. Overlapping this period, Tasaki was “not quite Japanese” because he was never fully accepted in Japan due to his Hawaiian background. What also separated him, at least from other postwar Japanese authors, was that the bilingual Tasaki wrote his novel in English.⁴⁰ Tasaki thus contributed to a “Japanese/American” sensibility in several ways. In terms of nationality, his being “not quite American” and “not quite Japanese” only reinforced his indeterminate standing among U.S. readers, even though they viewed him mainly as “Japanese” because of his ethnic background. But his occupying of two worlds and yet neither also applies to how he approached his work. In one sense, Long the Imperial Way aligns with the literary strategies seen in postwar Japanese writings that sought to confront a militarist past. At the same time, Tasaki interrogated the underpinnings of the Japanese imperium through his embrace of American liberal democratic ideals. This cross-cultural scheme, in turn, affected how U.S. reviewers interpreted the author and his text in expansive, but also limiting, ways regarding issues of race and national belonging.

Book critics offered a variety of opinions when considering the boundaries and the transgressive nature of Tasaki’s accomplishments. Edmund Fuller, a Chicago Daily Tribune reviewer, credited the writer’s birth in Hawai‘i and his American education for producing a noteworthy novel in English. “But,” the critic proclaimed, Tasaki “is a Japanese.”⁴¹ Fuller arrived at this conclusion by citing the author’s understanding of the Japanese people as evidenced in the novel. Other columnists followed this lead. The assertion that Tasaki was Japanese only, however, also suggested a desire to resolve for readers a potentially confusing problem about race and loyalty. Asian Americans in the United States, as Cindy I-Fen Cheng observes, were “perpetual foreigners-within” during the Cold War, a view accentuated by international events that created “two Chinas” and “two Koreas.” This geopolitical condition heightened suspicion against Americans of Chinese and Korean ancestry, whether they were communist sympathizers or not.⁴² The nation’s anxieties about communist expansion and infiltration, visualized here through race, also affected Japanese Americans after their mass imprisonment. Addressing doubts about their loyalty, Nisei community spokespersons and others assured those in the white mainstream of Nisei “Americanism” and their ability to assimilate. Given the trauma of mass incarceration, many Nisei during and after the war continued to emphasize their cultural fitness within a nation still ingrained with racial animosities.⁴³

Tasaki was ill suited for this narrative because he recalled a past that complicated beliefs about Nisei loyalties. Thus his presence in the public sphere presented difficulties for those who wanted to make sense of Long the Imperial Way. Most reviewers chronicled the novelist’s American upbringing, which made up more than half of his lifetime by 1950, when he became a public figure. But they curiously avoided characterizing Tasaki as a Nisei. Convenience, ignorance, or discomfort may have led some book critics to locate the author as a national subject in Japan. Intentionally or not, this interpretation simplified Tasaki’s transpacific story as well as elided the racial prejudice against Japanese Americans in the United States.

Some did wrestle with the meanings of Tasaki’s unusual status. Whereas Fuller and others saw Tasaki’s identity as fixed within national borders, one Nisei critic saw it as more fluid. In 1952, Tajiri publicized Long the Imperial Way in the Pacific Citizen. Assessing the literature produced by Nisei up to that time, he reported on Tasaki’s personal history, but appeared confounded on how to classify the work. He clarified that “Tasaki’s point of view . . . is that of a Japanese, rather than that of an American who goes to Japan.” Like the Chicago Tribune reviewer, Tajiri conceded the author’s Japanese identity, one rooted in the novel’s production and perspective. Yet he differentiated Tasaki from other Japanese writers, noting that “his education in the United States . . . has given him the facility to express that point of view in English, something which none of Japan’s recognized novelists is able to do.” Tajiri struggled to define Tasaki as a “Nisei writer,” but at least sensed the cosmopolitan qualities the author disclosed in being “not quite American” and “not quite Japanese.” This uncertainty may have contributed to Tajiri’s regret that Nisei readers ignored Long the Imperial Way.⁴⁴ He offered no possible reasons for this avoidance, but the novel may have raised troubling thoughts among potential Japanese American audiences because Tasaki had fought for Japan. Those with lingering allegiances to their ancestral land still attracted suspicion because they undermined the wartime story of Nisei patriotism to the United States.⁴⁵

The need to establish Japanese American loyalty becomes apparent in the example of Bill Hosokawa, who also critiqued Long the Imperial Way for the Pacific Citizen. Unlike Tajiri, he avoided calling Tasaki a Nisei, despite acknowledging the subject’s American background. Hosokawa did consider Long the Imperial Way an “excellent novel.” But instead of recommending it for the Nisei, he advocated a version of the text for Japanese readers. “It would be revealing to the bulk of the Japanese masses,” he wrote in 1950, “who are convinced their soldiers were noble knights in white armor.”⁴⁶ A translation eventually appeared, but the text gained little notice in Japan, perhaps because it reminded audiences too much about the Imperial Army’s shameful past in China. Yet, as members of the JACL during the 1930s, both Hosokawa and Tajiri embraced the idea of Nisei as transpacific cultural interpreters between the United States and Japan. For them, being pro-Japanese was also being pro-American. They saw no inconsistency in this position, viewing it as simply contributing to better relations between the two nations. By the 1950s, however, Hosokawa was particularly influential in rewriting the Nisei in several works as being completely American, a position also advanced by the JACL.⁴⁷ Tasaki and his novel most likely presented an inconvenient reminder about a more dynamic and intricate past regarding Japanese American experiences. Hosokawa, like Fuller beforehand, wanted to stabilize Tasaki’s identity and label his work as simply “Japanese.” In this case, Hosokawa perceived the work as better suited for markets in Japan in order to reform mistaken beliefs there and as a chance to distance himself from his prior ideals.

Mainstream writers in the United States were more often concerned with transforming Japan into a model ally in the Pacific theater than about Nisei abilities to assimilate at home, especially when public venues began depicting them as model minorities who had supposedly recovered from their wartime imprisonment and made successes of their lives. Standard periodicals such as the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest, Collier’s, Life, and others enlightened millions of their subscribers throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s as to the extent to which a former enemy could shun its militarist past and take to democratic values and practices.⁴⁸ These evaluations of Japan were noteworthy because of its value as a bastion against communism. At the same time, writers understood the ongoing suspicions among the public and called for relinquishing prior wartime anger against Japan to make this new partnership work. In May 1949, as communist forces gained control of China, a Collier’s editorialist observed that this development “will compel us to change our policies, our opinions and feelings about Japan.” As a result, the author declared, “Hates must be forgotten” between the two nations. The State Department encouraged this view. As deputy under secretary for political affairs in the Eisenhower administration and as a former ambassador to Japan, Robert Daniel Murphy acknowledged the past hurts and furies generated from World War II. He noted in 1954 that when thinking of Japan, “we are reminded of Pearl Harbor, of Bataan, of Japanese abuse of war prisoners.” Retaining such memories into the Cold War era, however, undermined American interests abroad. “Wherever there is a bitter memory—and there are many—the Communists work to keep old wounds smarting, old hatreds alive.” Murphy urged Americans to stop resuscitating the wartime past and to accept the reality of working with Japan because of its importance as a Pacific ally. That the secretary felt compelled to address these hard feelings against Japan suggests that the State Department took them seriously, dreading how they might subvert diplomatic relations.⁴⁹

Whatever the costs of these new global realignments, Collier’s magazine in 1956 summarized the stakes at hand: “A Japan harnessed to Russia and Red China could lure what is left of independent Asia into the Red camp and tip the scales fatally against the West. A prosperous Japan on the side of the free world remains a valuable ally.”⁵⁰ But at this point, the extent of its adaptations to U.S. power was still unclear to American audiences. They did recognize that Japan was in the midst of difficult transitions. The magazine continued: “The new Japan is fermenting a mash of new ideas and old customs . . . mixing political democracy with feudal loyalties.” Even so, the political climate there was difficult to discern. “The nation that once meekly did what a handful of leaders told it to,” the writer surmised, “is now outspokenly divided on every major issue.” With the contentiousness of a more democratic process now supplanting a hierarchical system, Japan revealed something troubling to Americans. Its newly acquired independence meant that no one in the United States could predict the direction the Japanese would take, or the consequences of their actions. The Collier’s writer expressed hope that American ideals and policies would benefit a new ally, only to fret, “Japan is on her feet—but headed where?”⁵¹

Other cultural commentators also continued to reveal their misgivings and anxieties about how this new junior partner would proceed in its international relations, especially should a rebuilding Japan fall victim to Soviet and Chinese influences. Two factors contributing to this uncertainty were concerns expressed over Japan’s veterans and about U.S. postwar empire building. At times, these worries overlapped with one another. Depicted in American popular culture as subhuman beasts during the Pacific War, soldiers from the demobilized Imperial Army were often bedraggled men who returned to a devastated nation and met with derision for their defeat. Americans began sympathizing with the ordinary troops, separating them as the “good Japanese,” who were deemed capable of reform, as opposed to the “bad” militarist leaders, such as Tojo Hideki, who had steered them into such degraded circumstances. By acknowledging the common soldiers’ humanity, Americans could then maintain hope for converting Japan into a worthy ally. The forlorn condition of these veterans, however, failed to assuage some U.S. reporters’ ambivalence about Japan and its now-wrecked military.⁵²

This view became evident in descriptions of veterans resuming their rural and urban lives in postwar Japan. Life magazine in 1945 portrayed a nameless veteran-farmer, representing a majority of his kind, as a product of a timeless agrarian culture. Once the war ended, this man “humbly settl[ed] again into his immemorial place in the village” and became “grooved in the involuntary Shintoism of his past.”⁵³ These signifiers of feudal tradition, the writer suggested, emphasized a social stability that would counter any radical change, such as the introduction of communism. But the implied fear was that these ancient proclivities might also check the spread of democracy and modernity in Japan. The journalist Darrell Berrigan likewise noted in 1947 for the Saturday Evening Post his mixed feelings about unemployed veterans in the cities. On the one hand, more than a few Japanese began challenging the older generations’ restrictive ways and called for democratic reforms. On the other hand, numerous desperate men in Tokyo “are filled with hate,” Berrigan observed. “They hate Americans for defeating and humiliating them. They hate Japanese society for the lies the civilian population so blindly swallowed.” Searching for steady work, many joined gambling rings or became black market thugs to make ends meet. They indulged in the “spirit of rebellion” amidst a “peaceful [U.S.] occupation.”⁵⁴ Berrigan presented this situation as destabilizing to a benevolent, nonimperial U.S. presence in the Pacific. Taming the remnants of Japan’s armed forces while aiding its citizenry to rebuild was supposed to demonstrate U.S. magnanimity. That discharged soldiers wandered the streets in organized gangs complicated attempts at transitioning Japan into a firmer democratic ally.

The unease about former Japanese soldiers gained further traction once the Korean War began, a sentiment noted in James A. Michener’s The Voice of Asia (1951). In this collection of essays, the popular author recorded his travels throughout the region as he interviewed people from all walks of life about their views on U.S.-Asian relations. His purpose was to inform American audiences about the importance of understanding and retaining overseas allies. Michener condensed his uncertainty about the Japanese military into one chilling portrait of the veteran Masao Watanabe. Of all the interviews conducted with diverse peoples throughout the Pacific, the author announced, “I remember his most unforgettably.” The old soldier appeared to Michener as “rugged, lean, tight-lipped and steel-eyed” with a “peaked cloth cap drawn tight about his bullet head.” Such vivid prose painted the veteran as war incarnate. Michener initially wanted to know the extent to which the Japanese accepted their defeat by the United States. Watanabe detailed how he found his calling in the military and admitted that the sole reason why he accepted Japan’s surrender was because of the emperor’s declaration. Otherwise, he “was quite prepared to die” in his nation’s defense if American troops had invaded. If nothing else, Watanabe reinforced Michener’s notion of a dedicated, experienced soldier who lived for war.⁵⁵

But Watanabe turned the tables on the author, chiding Michener about U.S. intentions in Asia. As the veteran explained, the Japanese “would never have been kicked around in Korea the way you [Americans] have been.” Still dedicated to combat, he further declared, “We could be doing your fighting for you.” Watanabe even guaranteed better results since the Japanese could draw on their own prior experiences when occupying Korea.⁵⁶ He played on American postwar anxieties about losing Japan and the rest of the Pacific to Soviet dominion by implicitly linking his nation’s past designs in Asia to the present aims of the United States. Sooner or later, the old soldier opined, Americans would have to allow Japan an army again to help battle the communists. In this broader view, Watanabe intimated that from earlier confrontations over territorial expansion the Japanese knew something about fighting the Russians, and the Chinese too. A stunned Michener wondered to his subject if the United States could entrust the Japanese with a military force, given their history of imperial desires and destructiveness in the region. The veteran responded, “Probably not . . . [but] to prevent a flood you must build dikes. . . . You’ll have to trust us.”⁵⁷ In Michener’s account, Watanabe was an unreconstructed militarist who saw how the political winds had shifted. Containment strategy, or “building dikes” against the flood of communism, exacted a cost for Americans. In this bargain, the former soldier viewed the United States as a temporary means by which Japan could regain control of its own destiny. As U.S. political and military leaders considered rearming Japan to help secure the Pacific theater against communism, these deliberations proved unsettling to Michener and likeminded others because of their continued doubts about a new ally. The author concluded The Voice of Asia by disavowing American intentions to create an empire in the Far East, claiming instead that a U.S. presence there would guarantee better, more cosmopolitan relations with Asian peoples. Yet the idea of turning Japan into a militarized stronghold discomforted him, given its past actions and the growing U.S. commitments overseas.⁵⁸

Although most Americans denied that the United States engaged in empire building, several mainstream columnists visiting Japan expressed apprehension over developments that invoked visions of imperialism, especially in light of the U.S. occupation. At the same time that the United States preached the benefits of democracy to the Japanese, the American military government extended its power and influence throughout Japan, controlling political, social, and economic developments there. The disparities between the occupiers and the occupied were readily apparent in the early stages. Food and medical shortages, bombed-out neighborhoods, and other hardships stemming from the war were still daily constants for numerous Japanese. Many had to engage in the black market for necessities. Others peeked into windows of American PX (Post Exchange) shops and commissaries, longing for such “luxury” items as soap, shoes, and cigarettes. That the U.S. military staff members, the occupation troops, and American civilians lived in segregated quarters, dubbed “Little America” in downtown Tokyo, only heightened the lifestyle differences. They hired domestic servants for their families, renamed streets and buildings, and repeated in public notices and private settings the most famous official phrase of U.S. domination in Japan, “By order of the Occupation Forces.” The literal and figurative signs of the American military presence were everywhere seen and felt.⁵⁹

In 1949, Stewart Alsop noted in the Washington Post that the material well-being of the occupiers “created an almost unbridgeable chasm” between Americans and Japanese. Much of this demonstrated power and influence on the everyday lives of Japanese civilians undermined U.S. prospects in the Pacific, while reinforcing communist propaganda about American imperialism. The prevalence of Coca-Cola, steak dinners, cocktail parties, and golfing trips for American use in Japan only accentuated the exclusionary, rather than the democratizing, character of the United States. “Twentieth Century American Japan,” Alsop opined, “has a little in common with Nineteenth Century British India.” Compared to earlier empire building, the U.S. occupation provoked anxiety, given that Americans supposedly desired to extend democratic ideals abroad. Alsop admitted that a military occupation was a relationship of disproportionate power and understood the need for such displays over a conquered nation and its people. Yet the journalist was troubled by the military’s discriminatory practices, declaring that “the way in which Japan is now being governed by the United States is profoundly politically unhealthy.” Helen Mears, writing for the Saturday Evening Post in 1950, agreed with this assessment. The “conspicuous privilege” of Americans living in Japan was not sending the appropriate message about U.S. intentions to the rest of the world. Instead, the United States gave “the communists occasion to charge that we live like conquering imperialists,” she remarked.⁶⁰

Other American observers offered disquieting portraits of U.S. expansionism, as seen by the Japanese. Demaree Bess, an editor for the Saturday Evening Post, noted the gap in perception between Americans and Japanese with regard to the occupation. Traveling to Japan in 1952, he observed that Americans “don’t feel that our present relations with the Japanese are imperialistic.” Yet, when talking to the Japanese, he noticed that most thought that “America’s relationship to Japan is even more imperialistic” than the Soviet attempts to dictate to its communist satellites. This reasoning was based on how the United States “abandoned . . . efforts to reform Japan almost overnight when communist aggression in Korea alarmed us.” In other words, Americans appeared less concerned with enacting democratic policies in Japan than with militarizing the Pacific to protect U.S. interests. In 1954, another Post reporter interviewed a Japanese veteran who, like Hanama Tasaki, began his career with the Imperial Army in China during the 1930s. The ex-soldier recalled his days on the Asian mainland with nostalgia: “That was a good life, as good as you Americans had it here during the occupation.” Shocked by this comment, the Post correspondent elaborated that the veteran gave “no indication that he sees any difference between the Japanese occupation of China and the American occupation of Japan.” For these writers, American disavowals of empire building were insincere at best when the U.S. occupation conjured images of British, Russian, and Japanese colonizing efforts.⁶¹

Aloha, Empire

As an Imperial Army veteran born and raised in Hawai‘i, Hanama Tasaki offered a narrative salve for American anxieties about Asia in general and about Japan in particular. Portrayals of his early life in the publicity materials for Long the Imperial Way meanwhile served to downplay U.S. racism and efforts at empire building. The novel’s first-edition dust jacket included the author’s biography, which revealed a childhood spent in a multicultural paradise, wherein Tasaki reminisced about his youthful days on the islands, “shrouded in a mist of romanticism,” when he played on beaches “with children of every race imaginable in an atmosphere of total understanding and friendship.” This illustration of a liberal, multiethnic society cast Tasaki as a product of a tolerant and generous nation. Even as a colonizing presence, the United States supposedly nourished the blossoming of a diverse humanity in its annexed territories, offering a simpler, more fulfilling life amid a tropical New Eden. The framing text of Tasaki’s childhood memories of Hawai‘i thus personified what readers of Long the Imperial Way could fancy as a captivating moment in the history of U.S. expansion that coincided with the nation’s Cold War aims. It was a vision that emphasized the value of a racially harmonious democracy while ignoring the realities of a racially dystopian empire.⁶²

However imagined and marketed, Tasaki’s version of Hawai‘i was a rose-colored rendering that disregarded the islands’ more complex history and his own family’s encounters with racism. In the book publicity, the author submerged any memories or grievances about racial prejudice in Hawai‘i, which had contributed to his volunteering for duty in the Imperial Army in the first place. The Cold War most likely played a vital role in this self-depiction. Airing the complex motives that affected how Japanese Americans defined their loyalty or disloyalty might have disrupted mainstream audience expectations and threatened sales of Long the Imperial Way, given the patriotic fervor of the times.⁶³ Yet Hawai‘i was not immune from racial discrimination, though it took different forms compared to the U.S. mainland, particularly in light of how the Japanese were treated and contained on the West Coast. Missing in Tasaki’s recollections was any mention of a white-ruled plantation system backed by the United States and built on a racial hierarchy that exploited a multiethnic labor force. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the islands’ white business and political elites sought to control the Japanese population. Targeted for surveillance were Japanese-language schools, Buddhist temples, and Japanese-language newspapers. White leaders also depicted striking Japanese laborers in the 1920s as a racial menace and a national security threat when the workers demanded higher wages. Planters initially desired to “Americanize” Japanese laborers to reinforce their loyalties but then became flummoxed when these hands asserted their rights on the basis of American principles. In 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, the U.S. government began considering the detention of any Japanese immigrant or American citizen who had contacts with Japanese abroad. In this manner, the white ruling elite questioned the loyalty of the Japanese long before any bombs exploded at Pearl Harbor.⁶⁴

Yet the idealized, Cold War version of Hawai‘i aligned with what American statesmen wanted to convey globally, as they attempted to fashion anticommunist alliances, especially with developing nations inhabited by nonwhite populations.⁶⁵ For U.S. policy makers, Hawai‘i was not only a strategic military location in the Pacific but also a site from which to project liberal democratic values to peoples in Asia. In this broader scheme, however, white Americans would have to either confront or dampen their own prejudices. Racists focused on the idea that granting Hawai‘i statehood would open Congress to multihued representation and thus signal the end of American civilization. Others countered that including Hawai‘i would advertise U.S. goodwill toward the rest of the world. In 1950, when Long the Imperial Way appeared amid the start of the Korean War, a variety of popular periodicals accentuated this point. Regarding the Hawaiian population, “what more logical intermediaries to carry an understanding of U.S. democracy to the Orient?” asked a Business Week editorialist. Hawai‘i, as Collier’s noted, “is a model of a harmonious living-together by diverse races and cultures.” Supporting statehood for this territory was important as well because it “stands on the threshold of the Orient and on the political front line of American democracy.” Otherwise, added the Christian Century, if the United States rejected Hawai‘i from entering the Union on the basis of racial prejudice, “Communist propaganda can be counted on to make the most of . . . white self-interest in its appeal to the peoples of Asia and Africa.”⁶⁶ The islands’ importance to a reconstructing Japan was especially significant in this regard. General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in occupied Japan, also favored Hawaiian statehood because he felt it would set an example for the Japanese about the benefits of democracy.⁶⁷

Fiction writers, historians, and others in the early postwar years published a number of books on the Japanese in Hawai‘i to showcase them as a model minority ready to assimilate into the mainstream of American society. Novels and nonfiction about Hawai‘i often portrayed the islands as a vibrant democracy in which people of different backgrounds interacted in a peaceful manner. Many of the postwar histories about Hawai‘i begin with December 7, 1941, and how the attack on Pearl Harbor became a flashpoint for assessing the racial progress made from a plantation economy to a multiethnic democracy that disclosed Japanese American patriotism. In John Rademaker’s These Are Americans: Japanese Americans in Hawaii (1951), the islands “show clearly that the American way of life is so vital, satisfying, and attractive to the people who live [there] . . . that they gave their wholehearted support to its defense and its preservation when it was threatened.”⁶⁸ Many of the accompanying photographs in Rademaker’s work present the islands’ Nisei population in regimented group poses that evoke their contributions to the war effort. Pictures of uniformed soldiers predominate, but other portraits include agricultural workers in the fields, children at their school desks, or workers in offices. A politics of respectability, in which propriety and productivity are cherished, is apparent in the photographs. The subjects’ clean and pressed clothing, attentive body postures, and smiling or determined facial expressions reveal their aspirations to fit into mainstream American life. Thus, even as the book highlights a society that values diversity in racial backgrounds and in cultural practices, its key visual narrative suggests that Japanese Americans were, and would continue to be, followers and models of established order.⁶⁹

Two fictional works on Hawai‘i by Japanese American authors, Shelley Ota’s Upon Their Shoulders (1951) and Kazuo Miyamoto’s Hawaii: End of the Rainbow (1964), offer other accounts of Japanese immigrant and native-born experiences that culminate in World War II and afterward. Both works confront the harsh racial realities that Japanese laborers initially encountered. As in the postwar histories of the islands, the novelists also chart the sense of racial progress made through the protagonists’ assertion of rights and their improved access to education, employment, goods, and services. Regarding the almost two thousand civilians transported to the U.S. mainland for confinement, each text focuses on their endurance and forgiveness. Upon Their Shoulders presents the character Dr. Noda, a curmudgeonly Issei immigrant with sympathies for Japan, who gets arrested and shipped to a prison camp in Arizona. After the war, he returns to Hawai‘i with a new appreciation for the United States because of his incarceration on the mainland. “He rather enjoyed the whole interlude,” Ota writes. “Once they had been settled in Arizona, it had not been bad at all. Not bad at all.” Part of this transformation was due to sympathetic War Relocation Authority (WRA) administrators that Dr. Noda realized were doing their best for the inmates’ benefit. In Hawaii: End of the Rainbow, Miyamoto’s take on the confinement of Hawaiians is similar. A Nisei soldier visits his grandfather in an Arkansas camp, wherein the GI is uneasy about his imprisoned family members while he serves his country. But Seikichi Arata assures his grandson, “We are not bitter about our lot.” He does “not . . . blame the United States government” because the confinement of the Issei and Nisei is “for the security of the nation.” The grandfather’s reasoning, in which he justifies state power and dismisses camp hardships as an understandable necessity, then helps the young soldier realize his own sense of duty. The responses of these forgiving model minority characters thus reassure white readers that U.S. wartime practices against Japanese Americans were not so much racist as actually favorable to their postwar assimilation.⁷⁰

Like the fictional characters in Ota and Miyamoto’s novels, Tasaki portrayed himself as a person whose principles stemmed from the liberal, multiethnic environment of Hawai‘i in which racial equality had evolved. To do so, he refashioned his past when Long the Imperial Way first appeared. One storyline from the book’s publicity focused on the author’s decision in 1936 to travel to Japan. Rather than recounting his desire to enlist in the Imperial Army because of the racial prejudice his family faced in Hawai‘i, he now reported that he had intended “to throw himself bodily into the progressive movement” in Japan to challenge the militarists. The army, however, allegedly conscripted him against his will to fight in China.⁷¹ As in his remembrances of a childhood spent on Hawaiian beaches, Tasaki’s account of his journey to Japan suggested a romanticized past that exhibited an early dedication to combating tyranny, one nurtured by his Hawaiian upbringing with American ideals and citizenship. Aside from helping to publicize Long the Imperial Way, this strategy also had a broader transpacific context that may have influenced Tasaki’s version of events when living in postwar Japan. Revisions of intent were commonplace among the defeated Japanese, in which a traumatized populace rechanneled its everyday language to invent pasts that now accentuated democracy and antimilitarism. This practice in effect warded off feelings of disorientation and aided in adapting to the new circumstances of the U.S. occupation.⁷²

Unaware of the author’s original aims in Japan, several reviews of Long the Imperial Way emphasized this revised aspect of Tasaki’s background because it presented a simple but powerful theme: an earnest individual fighting against the machinery of totalitarianism.⁷³ The narrative’s allure in this manner corresponded with the broader precepts of a Cold War universalism advanced by U.S. policy makers, social scientists, and cultural producers. This set of ideals assumed that nations shared similar desires in maintaining the dignity of individuals through liberal democratic systems to counter repressive institutions supported by the Soviet Union. But this vision entailed unilateral action from Americans. That is, presumably higher-based Western civilizations, of which the United States was now the preeminent power, would uplift more primitive, authoritarian, or otherwise ideologically misguided societies through several progressive stages of political and economic development. Later known as “modernization theory” in the early 1960s, this scheme depended on supplying overseas aid and management to integrate developing nations into the American fold and to contain communist advances within said nations. But it also conjured older imperial desires to access and dominate these realms.⁷⁴ To Americans, Japan was already modernized in its urban-industrial growth, but was still stuck in feudal ways, having lacked the liberal democratic values to halt its march toward militarism and a catastrophic war. From this standpoint, readers of Long the Imperial Way valued the novel because it offered a window into the unwanted world of the Japanese imperial past and of a Soviet-dominated future, when modernizing forces could run amok without proper guidance. It was then up to Americans to spread their ideals and practices abroad to both developed and developing states that, as potential anticommunist allies, knew no better.

Press coverage of Tasaki’s education in Hawai‘i and on the U.S. mainland supported this metanarrative. As an American-educated author, Tasaki appeared well situated to explain Asia to U.S. readers and to act as a possible agent for American interests in Asia. Asked in a New York Times interview about the sources of inspiration for his writing, Tasaki responded that he saw his novel as “a hopelessly complicated maze of a million influences, both Eastern and Western.” His was a transpacific work that sought to bridge the cultural divide between the United States and Japan. As I discuss below, Long the Imperial Way corresponded with the themes and narrative strategies familiar to postwar Japanese writers when critiquing their nation’s prior militarist ambitions. Developing his answer further, however, Tasaki emphasized that “the greater happiness of individuals, the scientific curiosity, the cleanliness, [and] the respect for fair play” were the main Western tenets that guided him.⁷⁵ If Americans hoped to transfer their ideals to postwar Japan and to the rest of Asia to thwart communist objectives, then Tasaki presented an example for how his rearing in Western principles informed his resistance against a repressive regime.

Yet Tasaki drew on the cultural capital gained as a Nisei in Hawai‘i and on the U.S. mainland to suggest that adopting American values and practices encompassed more than simply exporting democracy to Asia. He continued in the interview by chastising Western powers that had set the pattern for Japan’s colonizing efforts in East Asia. “I did not like Western colonialism,” he asserted, “more so, because I was raised in the tradition of the American fighters for independence.” Invoking the revolutionary founders, he highlighted how his education affirmed the cherished values of American society and culture. But Tasaki proceeded beyond a naïve celebration of these ideals, imploring the United States to adhere to its founding principles and censuring any postwar colonial presence in developing nations. “I am for the early independence of all Asiatic countries,” he concluded. Tasaki in this way cautioned the United States and its European allies not to repeat the mistakes of imperial Japan. As a former soldier who participated in occupying other peoples and nations, he knew something about “the inhumanities to which mankind can stoop” in denying freedom to those who desired it. This language corresponded to a lesser extent with his experiences in the United States and its territories as a Japanese American who strived for opportunities, yet encountered discriminatory obstacles. He remained silent about this part of his past for reasons previously mentioned, intimating instead that the changing geopolitical circumstances were neither simple nor straightforward. Asia still required a U.S. presence to contain communism in Korea, he noted, especially because of its proximity to Japan. Tasaki confessed to watching “with alarm the inroads which the very system of absolute government, which I have come to detest with a burning hatred, is making into our beloved Asia.”⁷⁶ The author thus presented himself as both idealist and pragmatist. He advocated freedom for developing nations, but also supported U.S. involvement overseas, including its provisional occupation of Japan, to hold communism at bay. His underlying message, however, was full of foreboding: the United States was the only anticommunist safeguard in the region, but it had to mind the path taken by imperial Japan.

Reading the Imperial Past and Present

The struggles of Takeo Yamamoto, the young protagonist in Long the Imperial Way, showcase the author’s intentions to reorient, if not contest, the objectives of empire. Drafted by the Imperial Army, Takeo presents a sympathetic figure caught in a system that transforms ordinary men into trained killers. His title is First-Year Soldier, signifying his lowly position as a new conscript in the army. He must attend to the orders of the Privates First Class, the Reserves (previously discharged privates who have been called up again for service), the noncommissioned officers, the company and battalion leaders, and up the chain of command. Since the Imperial Army requires unquestioning loyalty to the emperor, its hierarchy of personnel emphasizes a set of rituals and regulations that appear at odds with Western military traditions. Takeo and his fellow conscripts must bow to the east, toward the Imperial Palace, memorize and recite the Imperial Rescript, and suffer constant physical punishment from superiors. A farm boy with an elementary school education, Takeo endures the military environment, hoping to earn enough money to buy an ox to ease his parents’ workload in the fields back home. But his loyalties toward family, together with the terrors of warfare he encounters, progressively subvert his sense of duty to nation and empire. Takeo’s altered consciousness thus prompts him to resist the idea of sacrificing his life for the emperor’s glory. Moreover, the young soldier questions the nature of his service and favors his parents over the emperor as the ultimate source of his moral sensibilities.

American reviewers interpreted Takeo’s experiences through two intersecting approaches: as an ethnographic study of the Japanese military and as an exercise on Cold War universalism that underscored his resistance to this authoritarian institution. Tasaki’s rhetoric of liberal humanism throughout the text supported this view, in which the Imperial Army stood against individual freedom and potential. “Shells of the warm, constructive individuals they were born to become,” Tasaki notes, “the men lived unhappily within a perversion which tried not to recognize the ethics, constructiveness, and fair play their souls constantly hungered for in their relations with their fellow men” (39). This wording replays the author’s statement to the New York Times that emphasized his commitment to Western ideals and to his anti-imperialist advocacy for Asia. Readers focused more on the former point than on the latter because their cultural embrace of universalism made the notion of an American empire invisible to them. Applying liberal values abroad meant denying efforts to place Asians within reach of another military force that benefitted another imperial power.⁷⁷ Tasaki, however, was well aware of the disparities between American ideals and practices, just as his experiences in the Imperial Army shattered his former beliefs about Japan’s purposes and capabilities in Asia. Writing Long the Imperial Way was Tasaki’s method of filling these moral fissures within his mind. Thus his Nisei subjectivity, hiding in plain sight in its espousal of democratic principles, achieved creative expression in part through Takeo Yamamoto’s pacifist yearnings.

In light of Tasaki’s lessons about imperial desires, reviewers of his book employed ethnographic and universalist themes to justify the U.S. military presence in the Pacific, though a few expressed doubts about this strategy. This uneasy mix of interpretations arose from anxieties sparked by the Korean War and by the unknown extent of postwar Japan’s willingness to integrate into an American-led alliance. The New York Times columnist and playwright Harvey Breit recognized these thematic links, remarking in his August 1950 review of Long the Imperial Way: “Because of what is happening in Korea today, because of what happened in Japan yesterday, because of the inscrutably tragic problem that the entire Far East has presented and still presents, this reporter considers the first novel to come to us out of Japan since World War II an arresting and serious event.”⁷⁸ The text’s significance for this reviewer lay in its ability to speak to pressing political issues. Breit emphasized how past and present merged, relating Japanese imperial aggression in Asia to the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Implied in this comparison was that the United States had to intervene in another Pacific war to fight against a totalitarian system, this time communism. The reviewer’s use of the phrase “inscrutably tragic problem,” however, served to reinforce the prevalent Western stereotypes of the “inscrutable Orient” that contrasted against a supposedly rational, benevolent, democratic West. Asia presented a burden to U.S. interests, Breit suggested, requiring the nation’s continual involvement and guidance. This orientalist view justified U.S. objectives in the Pacific. As the book critic intimated, military intervention was required to bring potential Asiatic chaos to an American-led liberal democratic order.

Other reviewers took a different tack. The fiction writer Monroe Engel agreed with Breit’s assessment but blamed uninformed Americans, not “inscrutable” Asians, for the perilous situation evolving overseas. He noted in Commentary that Long the Imperial Way “does something at least to pierce our ignorance of the Orient, an area in which it becomes increasingly evident that our ignorance is catastrophic.”⁷⁹ The novelist Merle Miller, who evaluated Tasaki’s book for the Saturday Review of Literature, sounded ambivalent too. Few U.S. leaders, he claimed, “ever succeeded in understanding the Japanese—or, as is now more than ever apparent, the Chinese.”⁸⁰ Miller thought that Long the Imperial Way might contribute to rectifying this problem of unfamiliarity with Asia and its peoples. Whichever way literary critics felt about the U.S. handling of developments in the Far East, they valued the novel for its important insights that they felt Americans should heed.

Tasaki’s reflections purportedly helped Americans better comprehend how the Japanese thought and behaved in their imperial endeavors, as well as how they might act in their postwar relations with the United States. That Takeo Yamamoto resolves over time to fight for his family, and not for the emperor, “makes the famous banzai charges more intelligible,” admitted one columnist for The Nation. Ray Falk added in the New York Times that Tasaki “makes us understand (almost accept) without excusing the primitive behavior of the Nipponese soldier.” In the Chicago Daily Tribune, Edith Weigle remarked that Long the Imperial Way “made the Japanese soldier understandable to the occidental,” contributing such valuable insights that it circulated in paperback throughout U.S. Army post exchanges in Japan. Many in the occupation forces, she reported, “read [the novel] with tremendous interest.” The assumption here was that erstwhile enemies could surmount their cultural and historical differences through Tasaki’s literary work. The United States could then proceed with its universalist, “nonimperial” objective of transforming Japan from its formerly “unintelligible” or “primitive” state into a liberal democratic nation.⁸¹

Long the Imperial Way in this sense corresponds with what Yoshikuni Igarashi calls “a drama of rescue and conversion” that U.S. policy makers created as an official narrative in their relations with postwar Japan. The underlying intent was to project how the United States “rescued” Japan from its militarist government and “converted” it into a democratic polity under American leadership.⁸² Several reviewers of Long the Imperial Way invested in this story line, reading Takeo Yamamoto as a figure caught in the grind of Japanese imperialism and as a representative of postwar Japan. The influential New York Times critic Orville Prescott observed that Takeo was not so much a developed individual character as he was “a representative of his kind,” a common soldier who symbolized the simple desire to survive and to free himself from the oppressive environment of Japanese militarism. A writer for the Christian Science Monitor further applied American concerns for rescuing postwar Japan to the novel’s protagonist: “We can only hope that with sympathetic, understanding guidance the wilderness experience of Takeo and those like him will not be unduly prolonged.” Another likewise claimed in the Washington Post: “In Takeo’s yearning . . . lies the hope for a new Japan.” Critics thus imagined this character as a broader illustration of Japanese aspirations, foiled in the imperial past but supported by the United States in the postwar future.⁸³

Takeo Yamamoto thus represented the “good Japanese” in the postwar American mind-set. In this broader context, Long the Imperial Way contributed to an expanding body of literature, films, and other cultural forms that marked changing sensibilities in the United States toward the Japanese as being more human and capable allies. Takeo’s exploits and suffering for moral knowledge led reviewers to accept the notion that all war is hell, even for the Japanese. Prescott noted that the conscripts, “in their long-suffering patience, in their homesickness, in their dislike of war and their corruption by the brutalities of war, seem like any soldiers.”⁸⁴ A critic for the Washington Post noticed that “Takeo and his comrades have no resemblance to buck-toothed monsters” that dominated U.S. wartime publicity about Japanese soldiers as brute killers.⁸⁵ These new sentiments toward Japan coincided with the political necessities of forming new multinational relations in the Pacific. Long the Imperial Way, then, presents possibilities for transforming a militarist Japan when Takeo questions his loyalty to the emperor. Once he begins interrogating the ideals behind emperor worship and the causes of war, Takeo discloses to readers his readiness to follow other (read “American”) forms of governance.

Hanama Tasaki later provided a less certain perspective on Takeo’s imagined willingness to adhere to U.S. objectives, challenging the degree to which Americans could read this character as a good Japanese. Tasaki’s only other novel, The Mountains Remain (1952), also written in English and published by Houghton Mifflin, is a sequel to Long the Imperial Way that portrays Takeo’s return to Japan after the Pacific War. Along with family, friends, and acquaintances, the veteran navigates through the tumultuous years of U.S. occupation, debating the influences of democracy, Christianity, the black market, women’s rights, land reform, and communism, as the Japanese attempt to restart their lives. Americans in this story are barely mentioned background figures; their authority is invisible but apparent. Here, Takeo’s loyalties are determined not by international or ideological alliances but by personal relations among fellow Japanese. He befriends an aristocratic family whose patriarch, Count Imayama, disdains labor unions and land redistribution, even as his daughter Michiyo marries Takeo the struggling farmer, representing the possibilities for a new Japan.

The novel presents the American occupation and its dictates as confusing to the Japanese, to the extent that they create their own meanings from their own interests. “Everything that stressed equality and was radically new seemed like communism” to Michiyo’s mother, the countess, “unless an American said it or gave his blessing to it. Then it was ‘Occupation policy.’” Michiyo herself converts to Christianity and bases her notions of fairness on her newfound faith, which Takeo later adopts. At another point, Takeo describes to friends his capture by U.S. forces while fighting in the Philippines, where he met Nisei soldiers who tried to help, but failed, when teaching him and other prisoners about American ways. “There were some Nisei who came to talk to us about democracy,” Takeo recollected, “but I did not understand much.” This brief moment serves to undercut the postwar narrative of Japanese Americans as a model minority who could guide Japan to becoming a model ally with a better awareness and acceptance of U.S. objectives. In these instances, the Japanese instead respond with varying degrees of comprehension or curiosity. They then decide among themselves what the best approach to an issue might be, while negotiating around the American presence in their country. Yet the author’s multilayered view of postwar Japanese opinion was not so much about the occupation’s effectiveness as it was about the release of new social and political forces in Japan with which the characters had to contend.⁸⁶

Indeed, amid these myriad sentiments expressed in The Mountains Remain was the contentious topic of communism, which a few protagonists espouse. Takeo sympathizes with two other Imperial Army veterans, one a former prisoner of the Soviets who became a communist while in their custody, and another who is a communist labor leader whom Takeo hides from occupation authorities. Although Takeo listens sympathetically to these figures’ arguments, his camaraderie with them is based more on their shared military service and sufferings. The novel concludes with Takeo accepting, but still weighing, the strengths and weaknesses of each character’s position. Like postwar Japan itself, he is trying to find his own way. At the same time, the author attempts to portray his main protagonist in a manner that would attract American readers: Takeo becomes a small landowner and a Christian, two features that ensured against communist seduction. But the text attracted little attention in the United States, perhaps because it presented no memorable American characters, or because the unsettled ending played into the distrust of Japan’s intentions, particularly regarding communism. Either way, U.S. critics and audiences ignored The Mountains Remain.

Long the Imperial Way offered clearer answers for readers: the obstacles imposed by the Japanese military prevented Takeo from realizing the full extent of liberal democratic ideals. The institutionalized violence exacted on the mind and the body, and how this power translates into empire building, is apparent throughout the text.

How the army permeates every soldier’s consciousness is on display throughout Long the Imperial Way. The novel opens with Takeo Yamamoto standing guard on the plains of northern China, pondering the ideal of sacrificing one’s life for the emperor. Thoughts of death have preoccupied him since his initial experiences at the front. From prior engagements, he recalls seeing mangled corpses and escaping death himself in several instances. Yet he cannot come to grips with his own possible end. Comforting himself by humming patriotic songs and recalling slogans from a magazine he once read, Takeo suddenly determines, “He would die for the Emperor!” (8). Alone in his musings, the young soldier congratulates himself on reaching this point of assurance after giving “free rein to his power of thinking.” “Like so many people . . . whose thoughts are usually dominated by the necessity to obey or to be servile to others,” the author writes, “Takeo felt a sharp exhilaration when he found himself thinking out a problem under his own free will.” His fears thus calmed, Takeo finds meaning in the destruction that surrounds him because of “the conclusion he had reached under his own free volition” (9). This repetitious phrasing of “free” thinking, will, or volition, however, cues readers that Takeo’s reasoning is faulty. Although the youth thinks that he voluntarily offers his life to the emperor, the Imperial Army has already preordained the outcome when it drafted Takeo for service.

The author further notes that, once a person becomes a soldier, “his life as an individual ended when he took off his civilian clothes and put on his uniform.” “From that moment on,” he continues, a soldier’s “body and soul belonged to the Emperor” (11). Yet, as discussed below, body and mind also work together, however ineffectually, to resist or reconfigure the empire’s bidding. That the Imperial Army transforms an individual’s body through martial clothing is only the first phase of domination. Soldiers receive training in obedience through a Foucauldian nightmare of discipline and punishment that reinforces the military hierarchy. For any blunder committed in dress code, weapons maintenance, saluting, or other oversight, Takeo’s superiors administer quick, painful slaps to the offender’s face. The author explains that punches with fists would be more physically agonizing, but this administration of pain is not the slap’s intent. Instead, “slaps with the open hands” and “the great noise they made [were] a powerful demoralizer.” This punishment broke any individual will; it “ate into one’s heart and squeezed it each time” (33). No slapped soldier could resist such demeaning strikes because insubordination would mean a death sentence. The intent of this grueling punishment is to harden the Imperial Army’s men to destroy the emperor’s adversaries without questioning orders.

The novel’s critique of the Imperial Army coincided with the conditions of writing in postwar Japan, from which many realized and rejected the prior excesses of a militarist state. What the author Tamura Taijiro described in the late 1940s as a “literature of the flesh” became a favored method among several Japanese intellectuals to interrogate the imperial past through the body. “‘Thought’ has, for a long time, been draped with the authoritarian robes of a despotic government,” Tamura contended, “but now the body is rising up in opposition.”⁸⁷ Because the state controlled information through propaganda and censorship to overwhelm people’s consciences, the body became a site of resistance and liberation after the war. In its hunger, fatigue, and sexual desires, the body was the only vessel of reality understood by a perplexed, angry, and desperate populace. Set against a collapsed totalitarian mind-set, the body’s assertion of individuality became for the “flesh writers” the basis for democratic struggles to attain more utopian possibilities.⁸⁸

Another way postwar Japanese authors confronted the consequences of imperialism was through what David C. Stahl characterizes as a “literature of survival.” The works of Ooka Shohei, especially his novel Fires on the Plain (1951), highlight the psychological trauma of outliving the war with only one’s guilt intact.⁸⁹ Ooka, like Tasaki, was a veteran who sought consolation in writing to allay his feelings of remorse. The protagonist in Fires on the Plain, Private Tamura, is a consumptive released from his squad to die alone during the Leyte Island campaign in the Philippines in the last days of the war. The narrative focuses on not only the hardships of surviving the conflict but also the workings of memory—its construction, selectivity, uncertainty, and evasions—that the soldier struggles with from a mental hospital in postwar Japan. The text explores the sufferings of the body, including scenes in which some of the troops on Leyte descend into cannibalism. But Ooka focuses more on the existential meanings of this shocking act and on searching for God’s presence. However different in approaches, the “literature of the flesh” and the “literature of survival” overlap in their accounts of the physical and mental torments enacted by the empire on its subjects. In this way, postwar Japanese novels depicting soldiers’ sufferings, such as Ooka’s Fires on the Plain or Takeyama Michio’s The Harp of Burma (1946–1948), are more artistically accomplished and philosophically engaged than Long the Imperial Way. Yet these works never match Tasaki’s ethnographic detail about life in the Imperial Army.

Long the Imperial Way’s portrayal of the Imperial Army’s activities in China, especially its disciplinary cruelties performed on its soldiers, proved instructive for Americans. Examined from a broader perspective, the text was one among many venues that helped them to realize the potential difficulties in steering postwar Japan away from its hierarchical, militarist tendencies and toward the universalist bounty offered by the United States. Cringing at the Japanese army’s treatment of its troops, one reviewer noted that the novel revealed “what a tremendous mental chasm lies between Japan’s old order and western democratic traditions.” Prescott remarked that obedience to the emperor “was born of a culture which had never acknowledged individual rights, which was permeated with ancient feudal ideas and new fascist ideas.”⁹⁰ Prescott indicted Japan’s ancient and modern propensities toward authoritarian rule and indicated that it would behoove the United States to reform these tendencies if the Japanese were to join a more liberal democratic world order. Trumpeting the superiority of Western culture, he valorized the power of free individuals over the oppressive and “alien” culture of Japan. Yet The Naked and the Dead, released two years before Long the Imperial Way, provided readers with a brutal portrait of American GIs and their crazed leaders in the Pacific War. Critiquing Mailer’s novel in 1948, Prescott noted that the fictionalized soldiers presented “a bitter comment on American civilization,” from which they emerged as “frighteningly primitive, barren of ideas and ideals, a sad reflection on the social system that left them so intellectually immature.”⁹¹ Here, the critic’s argument against Japan blinded him from his own previous remarks when making cultural comparisons between Asians and Westerners during wartime. Even then, apprehension about the Japanese arose from this postwar sanctimony: the persistent cultural differences between the two nations would make it harder for Americans to assimilate Japan into their political and economic orbit.

The hope presented in Long the Imperial Way lay in the example of Takeo Yamamoto. Although reared in an autocratic culture, he yearns to live his own life and recoils from the harsh demands of the Imperial Army. The constants of mud, fear, and death impel Takeo throughout the campaigns in northern and southern China to experience a “gradual but pronounced” transformation in his moral intuition. “He had started out with a pure, unadulterated desire to perform his patriotism to his Emperor,” the author observes, “and, in the performance of it, he had also tried to find a means to accomplish his filial duties to his aged parents” (274). By his second year in the army, Takeo strains to link his obligations to the emperor with those to his parents as intense combat duties persist. He sees officers commit strategic mistakes in battle and his comrades die because of these orders. He observes with horror and disgust how the new recruits endure, like he did, the slapping and screaming from superiors. He begins to recognize that, despite his training to kill them, the Chinese enemy consists of struggling farmers like him. All of these incidents and realizations serve the emperor’s will according to the logic of the Imperial Army. But the young soldier “knew that his parents could never condone many of the things which he was forced to perform or witness unrestrainedly at the front in the name of patriotism” (275). Takeo’s parents are subordinate to the emperor, as is everyone else in the empire’s organic hierarchy. Yet, in the young soldier’s mind, they prove a superior source of morality and devotion to a higher being. The emperor exists for Takeo only through the military discipline and destruction he encounters. His parents, then, become for him the wellspring of moral principle and thus of his humanity.

Tasaki traces in other instances how the soldiers’ dedication to the emperor, while apparent, is also inconstant. It waxes and wanes in their thoughts, leading them to focus instead on their families back home, especially when facing the dangers of combat. Two related scenes disclose how invoking the emperor appeals to the troops’ courage but fails to sustain their understanding of patriotism. Sailing for southern China from the northern provinces, the men celebrate on deck the emperor’s birthday with a speech and with full-throated cheers of “Banzai!” Absorbed in the moment, Takeo sees the sun, which the emperor symbolizes, rise from the transport’s view of the horizon and experiences an “almost supernatural exultation” (242). One of the men even declares, “At a time like that, you don’t care if you die!” (238). The soldiers afterward descend into the ship’s hold and rid themselves of ceremonial dress, considering the import of their upcoming sacrifices. Some wonder if the emperor has ordinary instincts and desires like them. Perhaps if they could frame their sovereign in a more compelling and personal way, their expected loyalty would make sense to them. The attempts to comprehend the emperor in human terms, however, fall short. “If it were left to our own free will,” says Private Hirata, the scholar among them, “no one will come to the front.” His assertion, clarified by the dread of impending casualties, situates patriotism with involuntary actions. Defying edicts and rituals that emphasize loyalty to the emperor, he posits that they are actually serving their homes and families. Put in this manner, Takeo more comfortably asserts, “I am really fighting for my folks at home” (244). The others nod in agreement. The troops do not contest, so much as alter, the official intentions of the imperial state by prioritizing their personal ties to family rather than to the emperor. Important as well, they feel no disloyalty or shame in admitting this point to one another.

The soldiers’ longing for compassion sometimes includes the Chinese natives they encounter, suggesting the broader sufferings caused by military occupation. Takeo’s fictionalized perspective thus differentiates Long the Imperial Way from other postwar Japanese writings that avoid confronting the army’s maltreatment of civilian populations. In Japan best sellers about the Pacific War focused more often on the noble yet tragic or senseless deaths of Imperial Army soldiers than on the casualties they caused.⁹² In the case of Long the Imperial Way, Tasaki’s authorial empathy may have been another postwar realization, along with his newfound antimilitarism, that helped to alleviate his war guilt. The work nonetheless garnered praise from the overseas press regarding its cosmopolitan inclusion of Chinese viewpoints and memories of the war. One report compared Tasaki to the writer Lin Yutang, both being cultural interpreters between East and West. Another mentioned the London-based author S. I. Hsiung (Xiong Shiyi), who exclaimed about Long the Imperial Way, “What [a] hell of a book!” The quote even appeared on the front cover of the 1951 British edition of the novel.⁹³ This admiration for Long the Imperial Way is notable, considering the relative silence in other postwar literature from Japan regarding the Imperial Army’s culpability.

Rather than transforming into obedient, merciless killers, Takeo and a few others often sympathize with those whom they are colonizing or fighting. An aged Chinese woman, who reminds Takeo “of his own mother at home,” cries in protest when the army appropriates and abuses her donkey (19). Takeo’s thoughts and memories of his family, which counter the imperial state’s efforts to control him, serve as a moral standard for his behavior when he tries to compensate the elderly woman with his food rations. Later, when his friend Miki disobeys orders to stay away from a restricted Chinese brothel, the kempei (military police) catch and beat him for his offense at its headquarters, nearly killing him. Miki floats in semi-consciousness, battered and bleeding in his jail cell, while listening to incarcerated Chinese suspects in other rooms as the kempei thrash and interrogate them. Hearing “the wailing of the tortured natives and the screaming of their tormentors,” Miki “felt a closer kindredship with these natives than he had ever felt before” (173). The private commiserates with those whom he allegedly must subordinate, asserting his humanity through this shared pain. In this case, the empire’s supremacy, embodied in the fists and boots of the kempei, is too entrenched to challenge in any physical sense. But in Miki’s mind, the regulated boundary between imperial soldier and colonial subject temporarily vanishes.

The soldiers at one point even think the natives may have the better situation in the war, highlighting how empathy forged from brutalizing conditions has its limits. Takeo reflects on being an occupier of a foreign land as opposed to being occupied by an invading force. “It is better to be a non-combatant in a conquered nation than to be a soldier in a winning army,” he asserts to his comrades (287). His superior, Third-Year Soldier Oka, agrees, observing that at least the natives are free from military discipline, long marches in foul weather, guard duty on cold nights, and fierce, deadly combat. Takeo continues the argument: unlike soldiers serving abroad, natives have their own homes, no matter how devastated, and their families nearby, no matter how poor. As part of the Imperial Army, however, he fails to consider the natives’ possible fear of the Japanese and their relief when the troops avoid damaging their villages or hurting the inhabitants. They strategically offer tea to the passing army, “for they seemed to have decided that it was better to do so than to have the soldiers rummaging roughly through their homes” (286). Yet, in his fatigue and distress, Takeo can articulate only the desires shared between combatants and civilians: a home, a family, and being left in peace.

Lest any soldier think that similar racial features between enemies make for better comprehension of Japan’s colonizing efforts, Takeo dismisses the idea. His friend Kan, who is the most exuberant in his patriotism among the group, acknowledges the horrors involved in combat. Like Takeo beforehand, he notes, “The old men and women we saw in the [Chinese] villages are exactly like the ones we see in our own country villages.” Kan suggests that the situation might be different if the Japanese fought white soldiers, a comment that predicts the approaching engagement with Americans. He implies that a racial conflict would stir the troops more effectively in their willingness to serve. Takeo rebuffs this nonsense, remarking, “Whomever we fight, it is the same. A war is a war” (352). The young conscript rejects not only war but also the foundations of it. He resists the idea behind Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a euphemism that structured its “anti-imperial” efforts to unite the region under its auspices to fight Western colonialism.⁹⁴ Takeo’s opposition to further war implies that what the Imperial Army procured from Asia is similar to what the Western powers had taken years earlier. Battling European or American armies after enduring the China campaigns would be no different. Only devastation, guilt, and sorrow would ensue. From this perspective, the text’s pacifist tone may have assured U.S. readers that Japan as a whole could renounce its militarism. But this point also reinforces Tasaki’s cautioning the West in newspaper coverage of his novel to shun the cycles of imperial conquest in the postwar era.

The text’s argument for a common humanity among occupiers and the occupied was timely, provoking readers’ sensibilities about the Korean War. What the Japanese aggression in China recalled was that the United States might follow suit in Korea, despite whatever differences of circumstance or intent. One episode from Long the Imperial War that would become familiar to American GIs focuses on the destruction of a Chinese village that communist guerillas control. Takeo’s company takes fire from this site and advances on it, discovering women, children, and the aged cowering in a nearby ditch. Meanwhile, the Chinese guerillas retreat to the countryside. With commanders who are intent on punishing anyone perceived as aiding the enemy, Takeo and his colleagues receive orders to burn the village, even though some realize that the civilians were innocent in this engagement. Fleeing the conflagration alongside newly created Chinese refugees, several soldiers consider the implications of their actions. “They shouldn’t let us burn villages,” one grumbles. “They shouldn’t let us fight wars,” another responds (112).

The American public learned from news reports about similar circumstances in Korea. A Life magazine feature that appeared in August 1950, the release date of Long the Imperial Way, detailed such atrocities. The correspondent observed that the United States had occupied South Korea for several years now. Yet, without further understanding of conditions in Korea, military involvement would not only “court final failure but also . . . force upon our men in the field acts and attitudes of the utmost savagery.” These actions already included “the blotting out of villages where the enemy may be hiding; the shooting and shelling of refugees who may include North Koreans.” Incurring civilian casualties adversely affected how the United States could justify its presence in East Asia, given how Soviet publicity already framed American troops there as a destructive imperial menace. In 1951, the Christian Century noted “the failure of our propaganda to match that of the Communists in reaching the minds of the Koreans,” in part because of the “grandiose promises that we were in no position to fulfill.” One significant reason lay with “the habit of our troops . . . of looting as they took over towns and villages.”⁹⁵

Long the Imperial Way intensified these concerns for Americans at home. As Miller observed in the Saturday Review, Tasaki’s “great war novel shows that the soldiers of Nippon fighting in China ten years ago suffered the same sensations and torments that our own soldiers are undergoing today in Korea.”⁹⁶ In this case, sympathy for Takeo and his fellow soldiers overcame the racial and national divides between the United States and Japan because of the Korean War. Miller empathized with Japanese soldiers as victims rather than as perpetrators of empire, given what American GIs were enduring only five years after the end of World War II. The larger desire among U.S. officials and cultural spokesmen was that the Japanese, because of their revealed humanity, would integrate more willingly into a larger anticommunist alliance. Miller’s reference, however, suggested a cautionary tale about asserting imperial power: that American troops, like the Japanese before them, would be caught in a maelstrom of continual misguided conflict. Public opinion polls on the Korean War’s early stages validated this position. One showed that 50 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. government was doing a “poor job” in its relations with Asia, particularly with Korea and China. Only 17 percent thought the government was doing a “good job,” and 21 percent marked a “fair job.” Survey results at the war’s conclusion revealed little change in public attitudes. Looking at their polling in 1953, a group of Cornell University sociologists observed, “Instead of consensus, we have partisanship—in place of conviction and faith, we have divided opinion and doubt.”⁹⁷

Tasaki’s novel reflected these feelings in its critique of waging dubious and dispiriting warfare. Proceeding into his third year of service, Takeo realizes the futility of fighting and even of controlling territory. “The enemy had been routed,” the author observes, “but, as usual, only routed, though the papers at home made capital news of the ‘victory.’ Months had then followed of interminable and wearing combat with guerillas” (347). Tasaki’s insertion of “as usual” serves as an Orwellian warning that, despite a short-lived dominance of the field, “victory” is still elusive, like the enemy itself, requiring further military commitment. The final chapter heightens the absurdity of this point when Takeo and his company return to Japan, parading through an unnamed city to their barracks, followed by cheering civilians. They listen to speeches by officials who declare that the nation may invest in future confrontations. Both the governor and the division commander intone the same words to the assembled troops: “The world situation is growing tense,” a nod to the impending inferno of World War II (366, 371). Readying the men, the dignitaries address the sanctity of the body, one that sacrifices itself for the larger body politic. “Take good care of your bodies and always keep your personal affairs in good order” for any imminent conflict, the governor advises (371). Takeo, however, becomes enraged as the speeches continue, using his body to express discontent, a character development strategy encouraged by the postwar Japanese flesh writers. Waiting for the discharge service to begin, he relieves himself in the direction of the ceremonial gate that fronts the barracks. This violation in conduct “was a bold act of defiance,” notes the author, but the officers themselves are restless and overlook the sacrilege (364). Then, as the governor’s words start to blur in Takeo’s mind, the young soldier “felt almost like vomiting” (372). This juxtaposition between speeches that glorify empire and Takeo’s urinating and desires to throw up emphasizes the body as a site of resistance. Takeo’s physique, in actions that punctuate his developing anti-imperialist stance, rejects the notion of serving again as he defiles the grounds on which his training began.

Americans appreciated the impact Long the Imperial Way left on their views of the evolving relationship between the United States and East Asia. Alongside its literary significance, the novel offered them an intricate look at Japanese imperialism that corresponded with and challenged American postwar endeavors framed by a universalist righteousness. This perspective derived in part from a selective, intertwined process of public interpretation and Tasaki’s self-promotion that relegated his Nisei past to an acknowledged yet absent presence. But the work also made the functions and inclinations of empire more discernible for some U.S. readers troubled by their nation’s overseas ventures. As a Japanese/American writer fashioned by two empires, Tasaki sought in turn to reorient both, linking one’s prior activities in China with the other’s future in Japan and Korea. That receptive audiences in the United States debated his text in light of their nation’s involvement in another Asia-Pacific war reveals the cultural scope as well as the artistry of Tasaki’s novel. In this context, his was a tremendous, yet now overlooked, achievement from the early Cold War era.