Drawing on firsthand experience, this section explains how wartime education was not uniformly militaristic, and how Japan’s defeat, occupation, and purge directives radically reversed social hierarchies. It explores why those elevated by postwar purges—and left-wing sympathizers in particular—came to portray prewar Japan as uniformly dark and oppressive.

2017-06-14
The following is a continuation of the previous section.
The postwar left.
During the war, former middle schools included military training, since some students were being prepared to become officers.
However, it was not the case that everything was dominated by militarism.
When I entered middle school in 1943, the battlefield had already shifted far away to areas around the Solomon Islands.
Even at that time, we were still using an English textbook called The King’s Crown Reader, which had a British crown printed on its cover.
Britain was Japan’s enemy nation.
This was the era when Singapore had been renamed Shonan Island.
The textbook contained sentences such as, “Tom’s father is a banker. He gets up at seven, eats coffee and bread, and goes to the bank at nine.”
Despite the war being at its height, when the teacher entered the classroom for English class, the class leader would say, “Stand up.”
When everyone stood, he would say, “Bow.”
After everyone bowed, he would say, “Sit down.”
Everyone would then take their seats.
That was how the lesson began.
English textbooks with overtly militaristic content did not appear until 1944.
In my own sense, the war truly began only after Saipan fell.
Until then, it felt as though “there is a war going on somewhere,” and “Japan must always be winning.”
Then, in 1945, the air raids on Tokyo began.
That is why the memory that “the war was terrible” comes from the final year alone.
Without the memory of that final year, I think the war might have felt relatively carefree.
However, because the memory of that year is so intense, the prewar period came to be regarded as dark and evil.
What was most shocking of all was the occupation.
For the first time in more than two thousand years of history, Japan was occupied by a foreign power.
In that sense, it was unavoidable.
The people felt relieved that the war was over.
Then the Tokyo Trials began.
At the same time, purge directives were issued.
The purge directives frightened the population directly, independently of the Tokyo Trials.
Anyone who had been in a military school or held even a modest position of authority became subject to the purges.
A clear example is a man who later became governor of the Bank of Japan and was known as the “emperor of banking.”
His name was Hisato Ichimada.
At the end of the war, he was serving as something like the Osaka branch manager and had only just become a director of the Bank of Japan, at the very bottom of the hierarchy.
Under the purge directives, all senior figures in major institutions were removed on the grounds that they had been connected to the war.
As a result, at the Bank of Japan, everyone from the governor downward was purged, except for Ichimada, who had been the most junior director.
Thus, people who had previously been complete nobodies suddenly rose to positions of power.
“Third-rate executives” were born all across Japan.
For this reason, those who rose thanks to the purge directives did not regard prewar Japan as a good place.
They said the postwar era was better.
Naturally so.
Tenant farmers and resident Koreans also said the postwar period was better.
There were no taxes, and they would not be arrested for black-market activities, so it was an ideal situation for them.
Above all, the most important group to say that the postwar period was good were leftists.
The Communist Party itself had been almost completely wiped out and was not a major issue, but sympathizers had spread very widely.
To be continued.