Soldiers Alive - The strange case of an anti-war novel written by a pro war author

"The sweating, dust-covered soldiers marched, accompanied by countless swarms of circling flies."

Soldiers Alive is possibly the strangest book I've read so far in terms of the context of its writing and publishing. I'd heard of the book several years ago on lists of great anti war novels. That technically isn't true though I have a hard time believing it doesn't fit on the list after reading it. I also saw a brief blurb about this being the fictionalised account of the rape of Nanking. Thankfully that isn't true either. By that I don't mean I've bought into Japanese revisionism, that crime did happen, nor do I wish to downplay or minimise it, its just that.... well I really don't want to read a book about mass rape and massacres. The book is about a military unit on the march to Nanking though, and it ends shortly after the fall of the city, but no mass rape or beheading contests take place within the pages.

Curiously though the unit does commit multiple atrocities everywhere else in China they're stationed. And none of its hidden, on the contrary its stated that violent acts against the civilian population are pretty common experiences in the invasion of China. This is the oddity about Soldiers Alive, its treatment of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and the Japanese occupation of China is so negative that I don't believe a Chinese nationalist author could do better. Yet Ishikawa Tatsuzo was not only Japanese but a pretty staunch militarist whom believed in Japan's quest to dominate Asia.

When Japan renewed its expansion into China in 1937 one of the ways the government sort to stoke patriotism within its people was to encourage writers to create novels and short stories glorifying the IJA and the Emperor. They even created a special unit of approved writers who were allowed to tour the battlefields and early settlements. Ishikawa was one of those writers, but despite his political agreements with the government and its war aims he came to a dangerous conclusion the standard propaganda line the government was pushing in regards to the war on China was incorrect and potentially very dangerous.

Officially the war was being fought for the salvation of brother race, the Chinese army was being routed at every turn, IJA casualties were light and the civilians were welcoming the Japanese as liberators from the corrupt KMT leadership . Those were in short lies, well, ok, the KMT did have a serious problem with corruption and cliques but the rest of it was extremely inaccurate. The IJA won most of its engagements with the Chinese army, yes, but they were very messy victories. Often the Chinese army would give such stiff resistance that the IJA was constantly delayed and suffered far higher casualties then anticipated. If a village was supposed to be captured within a day of fighting, it would take two or three days to capture, and that was with reinforcements or use of superior artillery and airpower. And usually the Chinese army instead of being routed would withdraw tactically and move to a new defensive position a few miles away, or go to ground and fight as partisans. Instead of a series of decisive manoeuvres in the field, the IJA lurched from one battle to the next.

And as for being beloved by the Chinese civilians, well partisan attacks were a frequent danger in the rear. Indeed acts of resistance behind the lines by Chinese civilians were so common its become part of the post war right wing narrative and is used to retroactively justify the brutal repression of the Chinese population.

Ishikawa saw this was all false and attempted to correct this by publishing an accurate account of the war. And in so doing he effectively condemned the whole adventure. I cannot stress this enough, this is one of the most damning accounts of a war and the conduct of an army I've come across not written as a deliberate attack on militarism.


Consider the following passage

"Screaming shrilly like a lunatic, Hirao thrust his bayonet three times into the woman's chest. the other  soldiers joined in, stabbing her at random. in little over ten seconds, the woman was dead. flat as a layer of bedding, she lay spent on the dark ground; a warm vapour, thick with the smell of fresh blood, drifted upward into the flushed faces of the frenzied soldiers."

The young woman (called ku-niang by the soldiers, it means girl but they're using it as slang more akin to prostitute only without any intention to pay) was butchered because she had the bad luck to mourn the death  of her mother who had been killed by a stray bullet when the fighting moved onto her families doorstep. Hirao faces no consequences for stabbing a woman to death because her crying annoyed him and this is not the only time members of the unit engage in such behaviour. 

Unsurprisingly the authorities were not pleased with this pro war propaganda. In addition to its literary merits Soldiers Alive is incredibly revealing, an accurate account of a conflict is inherently condemnatory even when penned by a militaristic author.