This Scorching Earth

This Scorching Earth (1968)

". . . the best novel written about the occupation of Japan."

The Allied Occupation of Japan was more than an amazing military operation; it also was an created one of the most singular civilizations in modern history. It was made up of some of America's best minds and some of its worst, of some genuine idealists and some who simply 'never had it so good,' of some real altruists and some who rapidly got drunk on their new power. It was an astonishing and often terrifying little empire, a typical American small-town created in the middle of the largest city in Asia.

Now as dead as those of the Medes and the Persians, this remarkable if transient civilization deserves the brilliant historian it has found in the author of this explosively satiric novel. The story of a day and a night in the lives of some of the people who made the Occupation the mixed thing that it was, it silhouettes the Westerners against the background of Japanese, the occupied people -- and shows them all swept up in "the greatest cultural collision of modern times."

It is an historical novel, but it is not often that history gets such a shot in the arm as it does in this controversial, sometimes infuriating, often hilarious and always stimulating novel.

Where Are the Victors (1986)

The Allied Occupation of Japan was more than a military operation. It was an amazing collision of cultures, and it created one of the most singular civilizations in modern history. It was made up of some of America's best minds and some of its worst, of some genuine idealists and some who simply "never had it so good," of some real altruists and some who rapidly got drunk on their new power. It was an astonishing and disturbing little empire, a typical American small town created in the middle of the largest city in Asia.

This remarkable if transient civilization deserves the brilliant historian it has found in the author of this satiric and compassionate novel. The story of a day and a night in the lives of some of the people who made the Occupation the mixed thing that it was, it silhouettes the Westerners against the background of the Japanese, the occupied people -- and shows them all swept up in "the greatest cultural collision of modern times."

This moving, hilarious, critical, and deeply felt work well deserves its reputation as "the best novel written about the Occupation of Japan."

This Scorching Earth (1968)

Preface

This book is well over ten years old, having been written some time before it was first published in 1956. I started it almost twenty years ago when the Occupation was still on and I was a member of it. From these sketches and stories came the idea of this novel.

The original title was Where are the Victors?, from the final line of an old Japanese poem describing a forgotten battlefield. This had seemed to me appropriate to my subject, suggesting as it does the paradox (which I did not then know was a commonplace) that the winner of a war is also in some measure the loser.

What I wanted to show (I thought) was the coursening that victory brings any victors and, at the same time, the new virtues (undefined) that adversity presumably visits upon the vanquished. Actually, I was showing something else. I was furious at the Occupation for its treatment of the Japanese.

And what strikes me about this first novel, now that I read it again, is the amount of hate in it. I lash out, vicious, prejudiced, bristling with ill-will. Such hate as this is healthy enough but (as reviewers at the time pointed out) it limits the book as a novel. But then, though the title-page still calls it one, this book is not really a novel at all.

It is rather a connected series of portraits of people and places during those few years which saw the greatest head-on cultural collision of modern times. I happened to be there and I sketched what I saw. That I saw the Japanese as casualties, not of war but of the Occupation, one could call the bias of the historian as well as the inclination of the novelist. The lasting interest of the book, in so far as there is one, is that it is a personal document from the period. As a sanguine note in the first edition expressed it: "I hope my history is true enough for all who experienced the event to say: this is it -- this is how it was."

That little note is missing from this new edition because, in addition to its one truth, it contained a number of falsehoods -- ones such as "most of the events and all of the characters are creaters of my own imagination. The suspicious will search in vain to find themselves and people they knew. And rightly so because this 'novel' is innocent of even the most rudimentary character creation -- these are snap-shots of real people.

[ Omitted -- graph about where characters are and what they are doing at time of writing. ]

It is they who give the book whatever veracity it contains and it should be dedicated to them. That they do move around in a sometimes lifelike manner is indicated by their being occasionally recognized; that some of the situations are likewise lifelike I learned when people came up to tell me that they too had been at the Madame Butterfly catastrophe which concludes the book -- for that is the single section of the novel that I made up.

Donald Richie
Tokyo, 1967

Where Are the Victors (1986)

Preface

In this year of the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and at the beginning of the Allied Occupation of Japan, I am pleased that my 1956 novel about this latter event is being reissued -- and is appearing for the first time under its original title.

Back then it was perhaps felt that Where Are the Victors? was too provocative a title, since it seemed to suggest that the losers were not entirely vanquished. Also there was the implication that the winner of a war is also in some measure the loser.

Now, forty years later, one often hears people wondering just who won the Pacific War anyway. What I had thought to be a paradox has become a commonplace. Japan's winning of major postwar economic battles has made many forget its wartime military defeats.

Perhaps this is the reason that interest in the Occupation period continues. People wonder what happened and why. This is also perhaps why my novel, originally wirtten as novelistic journalism, is now read as history.

It is reliable, as far as it goes. It is a connected series of portraits of people and places during those few years which saw the greatest head-on cultural collision of modern times. I happened to be there and I sketched what I saw. But I did not see everything. The bias of the journalist and the inclination of the novelist left lots out.

Strange -- this world was so alive when I was writing of it in 1948. And the Occupation was still going on when I was finishing this book in 1953. There are histories, to be sure, and artifacts in archives, but this book is perhaps all that remains to describe the texture of life during this Occupation, what it "felt" like.

And so I now wee, though I did not know it at the time, that I was really writing history, that I was in a way -- a biased, partial way -- preserving this strange, infuriating, admirable Allied Occupation of Japan.

Donald Richie
1985

This Scorching Earth (1968)

What am I doing here
where my people unleashed
the age of horror,

sowing the plague
that will kill us all?
Can I be loved?

     -- Lindley Williams Hubbell

Where Are the Victors (1986)

The cities in ruin
The land made waste,
Foxes and badgers now
Where armies once fought.

Where are the vanquished? Where are the victors?

     -- Early Chinese Poem