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The Enlightenment emphasis on the ontological priority of the individual has had far-reaching effects. We value the fruits of individual reason, inalienable rights, the social contract, democracy, and capitalism. But this legacy has also provoked significant and often legitimate criticisms. Critics cannot be pigeon-holed as representing any peculiar partisan, ideological, or religious background. The earliest European critics, such as the Romantics, warned against the tyranny of reason or, like Edmund Burke, deplored the disparagement of history, tradition, and national particularities. Hans Georg Hamann, a devout Christian friend of Kant, argued against him from a faith perspective. As Enlightenment ideas spread to other parts of the world, such critiques spread and broadened as well, continuing into the 20th century. In India, Gandhi raised troubling questions about how scientific and technological development displaces concern for moral and religious truth. In Japan, Nitobe, a Christian, considered the dangers of a society in which one's own rights and freedoms trumped the needs of the broader society. Many non-Westerners saw colonialism and World War I as belying Western pretensions to possess a superior civilization, able to define the "good life" for all humanity.
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The leaders of the 1868 Meiji Restoration in Japan drew heavily on Western models to reorganize domestic society and politics after two centuries of seclusion, yet criticized these models on the basis of a close reading of Western thinkers. A conservative critique of Enlightenment liberalism, borrowing from European debates as well as drawing on Shinto and Confucian concepts, lay at the heart of the 1889 Meiji Constitution. By the time Japan sat among the victors at Versailles in 1919, bolstered by earlier triumphs in the Sino- and Russo-Japanese wars, the long-isolated nation had become a significant regional power. Japanese conservatism seemed vindicated by its success.
And yet, much to the chagrin of conservative leaders, liberal influences increasingly threatened Japan's conservative social and political order in both domestic and foreign affairs. Individualism and materialism, labor unrest and calls for unionization, campaigns for woman suffrage, the rise of party politics—all such developments challenged the priority traditionally assigned to society and state. China's Republican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the fall of other monarchies during the World War I—these posed challenges for the aristocratic and monarchical nature of the Japanese state. The United States became liberalism's chief proselytizer and prime embodiment: Woodrow Wilson, heir of Kant's hopes for perpetual peace, unilaterally proclaimed that the war would "make the world safe for democracy." The engagement by certain portions of the Japanese population with various versions of these liberal ideas and their implications stirred intense domestic debate in the 1930s. And the conservative reaction to this challenge led Japan straight into World War II.
This background provides some context for the private reflections of Japanese soldiers sent to die for their country in the Pacific War. In Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney presents translated excerpts from diaries of seven student-soldiers. Three were tokkotai ("Special Attack Force"), that is kamikaze, pilots; two other pilots were shot down on more routine scouting and bombing flights; and two were army officers who lost their lives on the ground in China. These soldiers are representative of those who had been drafted from universities and were "extraordinarily well-educated." They had studied Latin and two modern foreign languages, reading classical writers such as Plato and Aristotle and major 19th- and 20th-century figures from Japan and the West, often in the original languages. Ohnuki-Tierney counted 1,400 books mentioned in her partial readings of three soldiers' diaries. Astoundingly, another scholar who studied one of the soldiers estimates that he may have read over four thousand works. The diaries these soldiers left behind were thus highly literate, providing a window into their authors' conceptual and political worlds as they faced imminent death.
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