A BOY CALLED H: A Childhood in Wartime Japan
By KAPPA SENOH
Translated from the Japanese by John Bester. Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International, 2000. 528 pages, $28

Peter Siegenthaler

For much of the postwar era, Japanese have referred to the years from 1931 to 1945 as the "valley of darkness," and a veil of obscurity covered their memories of this period of militarism and conflict. Discussion of those years only began in earnest in the late 1980s, with the death of the long-reigning Showa emperor in 1989 and the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, in 1995, providing specific occasions for commemoration. Publication in major newspapers of short features and letters-to-the-editor, such as those included in Frank Gibney's Senso: The Japanese Remember the Pacific War, as well as extended dramatizations such as A Boy Called H by set designer and travel writer Kappa Senoh, reveal the often agonizing process of bringing into public debate memories of life on the front lines and at home in those deeply troubled times.
Semiautobiographical, Kappa Senoh's A Boy Called H brings a refreshingly human face to experiences that up to now have been available in English only as short vignettes or in academic histories. The story begins in the mid-1930s, as Japan's military factions were consolidating power and their aggression was largely confined to the Chinese mainland. Through the eyes of a schoolboy known simply as H, the reader sees many of the central dynamics of life on the homefront. Mobilization for war work, shortages of food and fuel, self-censorship that blocks expression of all doubts about the war: these are people's daily realities. The narrative continues through the declaration of hostilities with the United States, the initial Japanese victories, the shift in the military balance in 1942 and early 1943, and Japan's final crushing defeat in 1945. As it concludes, H has just reached adulthood and is struggling to find his footing in a newly rebuilding nation.
Set in Kobe, on Japan's Inland Sea, Senoh's story best conveys events as they were experienced in H's urban neighborhood. In this narrative, militarism enters gradually into the average resident's consciousness. As the fighting expands from the Chinese front to engulf nearly all of East Asia, conscription reaches deeper into the populace, taking less and less qualified men to become soldiers. The Neighborhood Association, at first mostly a conduit for rationed goods and government propaganda, is eventually mobilized to extinguish incendiary bombs dropped during air raids. The book reaches a crescendo with an extended passage describing American raids in early 1945 that destroyed much of Kobe's central city. "Next to the bathhouse on the north side," H observes while surveying his block after the most damaging raid, "a blackened barber's chair lying on the ground among the ashes showed where the hairdresser's had been; on the south side of the same bathhouse lay a large refrigerator, pitifully deformed by the flames. . . . It was an eerie scene, with the houses in the neighborhood all vanished and a deathly hush prevailing."

H's descriptions will resonate with the memories of many wartime residents of Japan, and yet he is by no means presented as an "average" Japanese. The son of Christian parents, his father a tailor whose clientele before the war included many foreign businessmen, H is a troublesome child and a rebellious teenager. While still in elementary school, he buys paste wholesale to sell at a profit to his fellow students in art class, attempts to trick paying customers into letting him see a traveling peepshow, and repeatedly asks upsetting questions of the adults around him. As a middle-school student he sketches his hands on the back of examination answer sheets and leaves the fronts blank, refuses to remain in the same room with teachers known for punishing students with fists and slaps, and sneaks into movie theaters in defiance of the Guidance League, the official overseers of public morality.
His parents as well are apparently out of step with Japanese public opinion, but one of the great strengths of the book is its ability to convey both a general tendency to disbelieve the government's assertions about the war and the ordinary citizen's inability to give public voice to any dissent. H's father, Morio, is a thoughtful reader of the news who astutely sees through the government's presentation of events, but as the climate of war deepens, he is less and less able to thread his way through official doublespeak and his neighbors' tendency to treat doubters as traitors. When his father declares in late 1940 that he cannot understand the complicated political dynamics of the time, H grudgingly allows the evasion but has a prescient thought: "One thing [H] did know . . . was that the number of matters one 'didn't properly understand' was steadily increasing."
Immensely popular when it was published in Japan in 1997, A Boy Called H brings home the feel of the war years as few other presentations have been able to do. The narrative itself is engrossing, with varied and finely drawn characters and a keen eye for the telling detail. Memoirs of such weighty events written so long after the fact are problematic as historical documents, and Senoh's book has been criticized for its lack of historical rigor, but we can be thankful that whatever his book's shortcomings, Kappa Senoh's precise observations and generous spirit help bring into the light events long held in darkness.

Peter Siegenthaler is a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. His articles on Japanese tourism and the preservation of traditional crafts have appeared in Andon: Shedding Light on Japanese Art and The CUHK Journal of Humanities.