THE BREAKING JEWEL
By MAKOTO ODA
Translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 136 pages, $49.50 (hardcover), $16.50 (paperback)

reviewed by Ronald Suleski

American soldiers called them banzai charges: Japanese soldiers would appear from island jungles and, in the face of the Americans' withering small-arms fire, charge forward to certain death. As they ran, they yelled "Banzai!," part of the phrase tennôheika banzai (ten thousand years to the Emperor). Incredulous American infantrymen could only understand these charges as suicide attacks, but the Japanese soldiers felt they were carrying out gyokusai, literally, the breaking of a jewel. They were smashing a precious young life, their own, for the sake of honor and loyalty to Japan.

Under the militarism of the 1930s and 1940s, performing gyokusai was an ideal, just one example of Japan's stubborn refusal to admit defeat. And it was not possible to challenge the ideal in public. By the 1960s, when novelist and social activist Makoto Oda was in a very public phase of his career, raising critical questions about glorifying death in the name of the emperor had become possible. Although the reticent nature of Japanese society still served to inhibit full public disclosure, former soldiers of the imperial Japanese forces were publishing accounts of their wartime experiences, and aging veterans were relating their combat stories, of blood, stench, infections, and near starvation, creating a fuller account of what had taken place in combat zones during the war years.

Oda's novel The Breaking Jewel is set in the South Pacific island of Peleliu in the early 1940s. American forceswith hundreds of ships and aircraft, thousands of troops, and devastating firepowerare massing offshore for an assault on the island. The few thousand Japanese troops there have been told to defend the island to the death. There are no additional supplies of food or ammunition scheduled, no reinforcements to expect, and the only air cover they can hope for will come from the few Zeros hidden under camouflage. The novel explores the mental struggles of Sergeant Nakamura, Corporal Kon, and the men in their squad as thoughts of honor and exhaustion, patriotism and personal loss, resolve and almost certain death in combat wash over them. All the while, they outwardly preserve their soldierly bearing and sense of military discipline.

In the course of examining the idea of gyokusai, Oda exposes some themes that would have been considered seditious to mention during the war. He explores the relationship between Corporal Kon, who is actually a Korean and thus a colonial subject of the Japanese Empire, and Sergeant Nakamura, who takes for granted the privileges he enjoys by virtue of being a "real" Japanese. Kon is determined to prove himself as worthy as any native-born Japanese, yet he cannot help but ask why the Koreans, who theoretically are also subjects of the Japanese emperor, are forced to recite pledges of loyalty to the emperor while Japanese in the home islands are assumed to be naturally loyal. Another once-taboo topic Oda raises is that of comfort women, Korean and Japanese girls forced to provide sex for members of the Japanese military. Public awareness of their plight became widespread only in the 1980s. These facts of daily life for thousands of Japanese servicemen during the war never made it into print while the military was in charge.

The book reads like a firsthand recollection of combat, but Oda, born in 1932, was a boy of about twelve during the events described in this novel, which was published in Japan in 1998. Oda is probably best known to Americans for his social activism against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1965, he organized the very dynamic Beiheiren (Peace for Vietnam Committee). It put together some of the most effective antiwar demonstrations in Japan and helped American deserters find asylum in neutral countries. His long-standing concern for the pernicious effects of blind nationalism, so thoughtfully explored in The Breaking Jewel, led him naturally both to his Beiheiren visibility and to his antiwar essays, published in Japan in the early 1970s. Although strongly critical of the United States because of its military involvements in Asia, Oda rather likes the cultural freedom to be found in America, and over the years he has accepted several visiting professorships at American universities.

Donald Keene, America's foremost expert on contemporary Japanese literature, was in the Pacific Theater in 1943 and witnessed some of the gyokusai charges described in the book. His strong memories and bewilderment at the time over these tactics were among the reasons he decided to translate this novel. Neither Keene nor Oda can fully endorse, as, equally, they cannot completely dismiss, the values and pressures that forced so many Japanese combat troops into such a final, all-or-nothing sacrifice. A fascinating dialogue between Keene and Oda about the practice of gyokusai appears in Oda Makoto et al., Watakushi no bungaku: Rogosu no taiwa (My Literature: Dialogues about Logos), published by Shinchosha in Tokyo in 2000, in which Keene recalls how the Japanese soldiers so determinedly attacked the Americans and Oda ponders how they so resolutely destroyed their own lives.

This is a novel that is intellectually engaging. It portrays the stranded Japanese soldiers psychologically coming to terms with the mayhem and destruction that relentlessly advances toward them. But at the same time, it also contains exciting accounts of battle action, where the soldier just acts because there is no time to consider the mental or emotional values that propel him forward.