Speaking from the Site of Defeat: Shohei Ooka and the Ethics of War Experience, 1940s-1960s

Speaking from the Site of Defeat: Shohei Ooka and the Ethics of War Experience, 1940s-1960s

Shohei Ooka's literature begins with the question of what kind of words those who have experienced war can use to take on that experience. The severity of his works stems not from an anti-war philosophy or criticism of war, but from a thorough reexamination of the extreme conditions of human beings, such as hunger, fear, and self-preservation.

Ooka experienced defeat and POW experience on the Philippine front at the end of the Pacific War. Under the Japanese military, which had collapsed as an organization, soldiers were not part of the nation, but were thrown out as starving individuals. Ooka refused to mythologize or glorify this reality and tried to write about it as a fact. What is depicted in "Captivity" and "Wild Fire" is not courage or loyalty, but the question of how far one can fall in order to survive.

Immediately after the war, Japanese society moved toward reconstruction without fully summing up its responsibility for the war, but Ooka did not rest on the laurels of victimhood, but turned his gaze toward the self, including the possibility of perpetration. His attitude toward looting, deprivation of corpses, and even cannibalism was a refusal to separate the war as an extraordinary event.

From the 1950s to the 1960s, while postwar democracy and social realism became mainstream, Ooka depicted his war experiences in a style that shuttled back and forth between record and introspection, without bringing to the fore the language of ideas and movements. The calmness with which he leaves the judgment of right and wrong to the reader creates a strong ethical tension.

As the memory of the war faded during the period of rapid economic growth, Ooka's literature continued to be meaningful as a resistance to oblivion. His stance of continuing to tell his story without offering either heroism or redemption embodies the ethics of the war experience in postwar literature.