Sata Ineko’s Wartime and Postwar: A Research on Consolatory Visit of the South Seas

Abstract

During World War II, Sata Ineko went to the battlefields three times. After the war, she turned her attention to the problem of war cooperation. Most discussions of Sata’s visits to battlefields have focused on responsibility for war. However, her respective visits to the battlefields in China and Southeast Asia differ due to the different aspects of the battles and her own thoughts at the time. This paper analyzes the novels and essays written by Sata during and after the war, to examine the circumstances of her visit to the battlefields in Southeast Asia and the relation between this visit and the change of her attitude towards women’s liberation. We discover that Sata was unaware that her actions were a kind of war cooperation until her visit to the Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, her women’s liberation philosophy also underwent significant transformations after her visit to the battlefields there. In addition, we determine that when Sata reflected on her own wartime actions, her consciousness of shame towards proletarian literary writers was stronger than her consciousness of sin towards victims of the war.

Keywords

• Ineko Sata
• Visit on the Southeast Asia battlefields
• War Literature
• Women’s Liberation Thought
• War Cooperation