So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture) by Donald Keene

So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers (Asia Perspectives: History, Society, and Culture) Reviews

• 
  David

  Loved this. Something interesting on every page. The anticipation of, and responses to, the radio broadcast ending the war were fascinating. Yamada Futaro:
  "While I was listening Professor Hirota on dermatology at the Maruyama Public School, a piece of paper was circulated asking which we thought the most likely content of the broadcast – Armistice? Surrender? Declaration of War [against the Soviet Union]? I unhesitatingly drew a circle above 'Declaration of War'..."
  
  Yamada, who seems the angriest about the defeat, also had this to say:
  "Kyoto survives. It actually annoys me that Kyoto should have survived. It annoys me that the Americans spared Kyoto as a place for their own sightseeing. Most people, however, say they spared Kyoto and Nara as cultural monuments and not as 'playgrounds' for themselves, but in the final analysis, that's what they will become. In other words it shows what a surplus of strength they have, which is all the more annoying. The Soviet Union would probably have bombed Kyoto mercilessly. And if there were an old capital in America, Japan, of course, would not have had the slightest hesitation about demolishing it."
  
  The Japanese Government had censored
  The Tale of Genji!: "A more serious instance was the censorship of Tanizaki's modern-language translation of The Tale of Genji. Permission to print was only granted after he deleted offending chapters – those relating to how a prince, born of Genji's affair with the Emperor's consort, had ascended the throne as emperor."
  A little bit of me thinks
  Jun'ichirō Tanizaki should have kicked up such a stink about this that he'd found himself in prison...
• 
  William2

  This book provides a fascinating perspective on the social and political attitudes of prominent Japanese writers from the start of the Pacific War to the end of the Allied Occupation. Donald Keene was a 23-year-old American naval officer at the time, translating Japanese communiques and interrogating prisoners of war for intelligence purposes. He was on one side of the conflict, while the writers here, some of whom would later become friends and associates, were on the other. Keene is professor emeritus at Columbia University and éminence grise in the west on matters of Japanese literature. A scholar of considerable breadth of inquiry, in So Lovely A Country he has chosen diary entries that reveal the full range of responses to Japan's course of action. These include the rabid jingoism of the day, how many writers were all but forced to write propaganda by a censoring military clique as a means of feeding their families, while for others the war cry was genuine, and what attitudes were during the Occupation. Keene wants the immediate response to events, so all diary entries are contemporaneous. There is no long reassessing view. The book is particularly articulate on the vast sense of shame and loss of face most Japanese felt on surrender. The book is rich and moving in so many unexpected ways, especially on aspects of the day to day life ordinary Japanese. I'm a general reader of nonfiction with an interest in wartime Japan, but by no means a specialist, and the book held me spellbound. Highly recommended.
• 
  Jim Coughenour

  This book is a small gem, gracious and graceful – which is somewhat astonishing, given that it's a narrative collection of diaries from Japanese writers during World War II and the ensuing occupation. Keene has selected excerpts from a small range of excellent writers (not all of them professionals). It's impossible not to be moved by what these diarists suffered: the extremity of hope and deep disillusion, the shame of believing and supporting wartime propaganda, and the unsparing aspect of their observations after defeat.
  
  During the Pacific war, Keene's military responsibilities required him to translate the diaries of killed or captured soldiers (as told in his excellent memoir, Chronicles of My Life.) Here he interleaves his selections with his own quiet commentary, providing cultural and historical context. In another editor's hands, I suspect, a book like this would be a much different experience – but Keene's appreciation for Japanese culture and its people is evident on every page, without the slightest hint of justifying or excusing the fanaticism and cruelty of the war for "Greater East Asia."
  
  Columbia University Press deserves credit as well: this slim book is beautifully designed and printed.
  
• 
  Floodingbrook

  I love companion reads that bring insight into particular primary sources and contextualize a moment so clearly. This work focuses on diaries of well-known Japanese writers to outline the war against the United States (1941-1945). What fascinates the reader here are the firsthand accounts of news reportage, total propaganda about battles and successes to maintain control over domestic masses. But herein is also a diverse field of Japanese voices expounding on this complex moment with very different ideas about what such reportage meant, and how the loss of the war in fact reshaped the cultural forces of Japanese identity. Some interesting Japanese literary voices I learned of are Nagai Kafu, Takami Jun, Yamada Futaro, and to a lesser degree Hirabayashi Taiko.
  
  I learned of this book as the author, Donald Keene is a translator of Dazai Osamu’s No Longer Human. In reading this novel, I became convinced the protagonist’s story was as well a metaphor about Japan’s wartime successes, gradual decline and spiritual death. While Dazai is not strictly covered in this work, an impressive story of Japan during the war in presented by some impressive diarists.
  
  The diary response of Princess Nashimoto Itsuko to the Emperor’s radio broadcast of surrender offers one of the most unique ways to understand the transition truly happening to the Japanese. To lose the ‘kokutai’ or national polity of Japanese essence (an entity of both history and destiny), was a nearly unthinkable occurrence and break of 3000 years of cultural continuity. The emotional outpouring of loss, pain, hardship, helplessness, and bitterness as well as what seems to be familiar with the Emperor’s voice provides one of the nearest examples of royal thinking about Japan as an entity to the ancestors, worship of the Emperor, and a deep-set resistance in accepting Japan’s loss to the Americans, particularly with the egregious acts of atomic weapons.
• 
  kagami

  3.25 stars (6.5/10). This book is so packed full of information and seeds of more information that, even though it took me several months to go through, I think I will go back to it and re-read it at some point in the not-too-distant future.
  "So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish" was not what I expected it to be. I thought it would contain mainly excerpts of the diaries of Japanese writers, and that as a reader I'd be left to my own devices and given a free reign in drawing my own conclusions based on what the diarists wrote. The excerpts are indeed there, but they are somewhat secondary to the author's commentary, as if he is making a statement and using some quotes from here and there to substantiate it. This is how I felt reading the first half of the book. The overall perspective is made even more intriguing, and complicated, by the fact that the author himself was in 1945 an interpreter for the American army in Okinawa. He subsequently became interested in Japan and even made friends with some of the diarists cited in this book.
  The second half, however, grabbed me by the throat, and even though the bits of actual diary were still as short as in the first half, I kept catching myself wishing there was even more commentary from the author. I wanted to know more, much more, about the immediate post-war period in Japan, about the attitudes, policies, changing habits, and anything and everything about this unprecedented epoch in Japanese and world history.
  After reading Herbert Bix's "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan", I came to the conclusion that it was probably a mistake not to punish the emperor for his role in the war (given the consequences in the present). On the other hand, "So Lovely a Country" makes me think that the Japanese people at the time had a strong sense of loyalty to the emperor in particular and an attempt by the American occupiers to lay a hand on him may indeed have been counterproductive - in the immediate aftermath of the war. This is so complex, and the after-effects of the decisions made in 1945 are still reverberating through our world today.
  The diary quotes in "So Lovely a Country" were an invaluable glimpse into the Japanese collective experience of that period, and an inspiration to continue reading on the subject. I've now eagerly transitioned on to John Dower's "Embracing Defeat", one of the works quoted in "So Lovely a Country".
• 
  Brian

  It's a bit hard for me to give this book three stars because it's partially that I had different expectations, but it does say my rating. It is exactly as the title says, and it is an excellent account thereof. I think it suffers somewhat from devoting too much time to explaining the context and not enough to quoting the writers' works, and from a breathtaking pace through time period from pre- to post-war, but it's still illuminating, especially the contrast between the two periods.
• 
  Jim

  Keene is really one of two or three grandfathers in the field of Japanese studies in the English-speaking world. i have some strong and rather well thought-out opinions of the book. Contact me if you are interested.
• 
  Stephen Rowland

  Amazon reviewers don't give this book, based on WWII-era diaries of famous Japanese writers, much love, but I found it thoroughly fascinating.