4.4 The “Ōshima Memos”: Record of a Think Tank for Navy Moderates
It is now evident that the political activities of the Kyoto School during the war were even more involved—and even more filled with ambiguity—than was previously thought. Ōhashi Ryōsuke discovered and published in 2001 some wartime notebooks of Ōshima Yasuma, a student of Tanabe’s (Ōhashi 2001). These notebooks document in detail secret meetings regularly held by Kyoto School members at the bequest of the Japanese navy between February 1942 and just before the end of the war. While on the one hand the existence of these secret meetings demonstrates an even more intimate connection between the Kyoto School and the military than was previously known, on the other hand it is crucially significant that they were in cooperation with a certain moderate faction of the navy, a faction that was opposed to the extremists that dominated the army. There had long existed a considerable tension between the bellicose arrogance of the army and the comparatively more moderate and worldly stance of the navy. As the politically more powerful army was setting a war-bound course for Pearl Harbor, some reticent navy officials evidently petitioned the Kyoto School to shed light on the political situation from their “world-historical standpoint,” presumably in order to sway public sentiment in a more prudent direction.
In short, the “Ōshima Memos” help reveal how the Kyoto School found themselves in a position where they were called on to fight a “war of thought” on two fronts: against Western imperialism, they felt called on to delineate a world-historical role for Japan in freeing itself and other Asian peoples from colonization and exploitation by the Western empires; and, against Japanese ultra-nationalism, they felt that it was up to them to convince the public and the military of the illegitimacy of an imperialistic response to Western imperialism.
Ōshima Yasuma had himself published, in 1965, an often overlooked account of these meetings under the title, “The Pacific War and the Kyoto School: On the Political Participation of Intellectuals” (Ōshima 2000, 274–304; also see Horio 1994, 301ff.). In this article, Ōshima summarized the evolving purpose of the secret Kyoto School meetings in three stages: In the very first meetings (which apparently took place prior to those documented in the recovered notebooks), the main theme was “how to avoid the outbreak of war.” Since war in fact broke out very soon thereafter, the theme quickly switched to “how to bring the war to a favorable end as soon as possible, by way of rationally persuading the army.” To do this they reportedly agreed that it would be necessary to overthrow the cabinet of Tōjō Hideki. However, according to Ōshima, all criticism of Tōjō and the army had to be expurgated in the discussions published in the pages of Chūōkōron, and the statements of the Kyoto School had to be “veiled in two or three layers of cloth” in order to avoid censorship and persecution. Towards the end of the war, the theme of the secret meetings is said to have changed to that of “how to handle the postwar situation.”
Among these three themes only the second is recorded in any detail in the notebooks that were recently discovered and published by Ōhashi as the “Ōshima Memos.” Although there may well have been preliminary discussions on how to avoid war, more explicit references to overthrowing Tōjō Hideki, and more lengthy discussions about postwar issues, these do not in fact show up in the recovered notebooks. Nevertheless, the “Ōshima Memos” do show us a more detailed and uncensored account of the Kyoto School’s “war of thought” on two fronts during a tumultuous and tragic time of what was, in fact, Japan’s imperialistic response to Western imperialism.
