TY - JOUR
AU1 - Pennington, Lee, K
AB - Abstract Japan’s armed invasion of China in July 1937 catalyzed the creation of new welfare services for the rapidly escalating number of Japanese disabled veterans. Among those reforms was the emergence of public and private marriage mediation services that aimed to introduce potential brides to disabled veterans and create independent households for men with severe war injuries. Acting through the Greater Japan Disabled Veterans Association and Patriotic Women’s Association, the Japanese state established formal procedures for arranging such marriages. Concurrently, private matchmakers created marriage mediation services expressly for disabled veterans. Public and private marriage mediation efforts sought the multifaceted rehabilitation of disabled veterans and contributed to total war mobilization on the Japanese home front. In the process, wartime marriage mediation for disabled veterans reinforced contemporary social customs and gender norms by positioning women within married households to support their husbands. However, women possessed an extraordinary degree of personal agency because their consent was needed to produce marriages intended to benefit wounded servicemen and the war effort. This essay examines the origins of marriage mediation services for Japanese disabled veterans as well as popular wartime depictions of such endeavors and their female participants. War wounds sometimes cause marriages to fall apart, but in some cases, as in Japan during the Second World War, they can also draw spouses together in the first place. Takagiwa Masaji, a horribly burned veteran of the fighting in China, married Itō Rikuko after employing private marriage mediation (kekkon assen) services created specifically for disabled veterans.1 On May 4, 1939, Takagiwa wed Itō at a modest ceremony held at a Shintō shrine in Osaka. That day, the couple’s mediator, Obata Ai, of the No-Fee Marriage Consultation Center for Disabled Veterans, embodied the nascent ethos of military protection (gunji hogo) by removing a throng of uninvited guests from the premises. To Obata’s displeasure, when the wedding party arrived it was met by dozens of unfamiliar people—the nuptials, which had been previously announced in local newspapers, had unexpectedly become a public attraction. An hour before the service began, Obata marched out and planted herself in front of the gawkers. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “Today’s ceremony is absolutely not a carnival sideshow!” In a last-minute attempt to provide her clients with as ordinary a wedding as possible, Obata admonished the crowd to disperse. Yes, she conceded, Takagiwa’s facial scars drew attention, but he and Itō deserved respect from “us compatriots on the home front.” Dejected, most of the onlookers drifted away and left the wedding party alone. Obata let two women stay after they told her that they too wanted to find disabled veterans to marry.2 Promoted by the government and overseen by local entrepreneurs and national military support associations, marriage mediation became a novel solution for a growing problem faced by Japan during the late 1930s: a steadily increasing contingent of ex-servicemen with severe war-related impairments and disabilities. Domestically extolled as a “holy war,” Japan’s violent invasion of China and the Asia-Pacific region brought with it an unprecedented casualty crisis at home.3 Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sailors went overseas to the front lines, and large numbers of wounded men returned to Japan with battered, bloodied, and bent bodies. In response, public (kanmin, or “officials and the people”) and private (minkan, literally “among the people”) actors embraced new “military protection” measures designed not to ensure physical safety but to stabilize the financial livelihood of severely disabled veterans and ease their reintegration into society. While the state devised fresh measures for supporting disabled veterans, private communities organized as well, sometimes under the direction of the administration. Military protection did not mean sequestering disabled veterans away from society or sheltering them from its uncertainties. Rather, military protection used preferential treatment (yūgū) to put ailing men into unremarkable social spaces and provide them with lives made as ordinary as possible. An innovative way for state and society to “Protect Wounded Soldiers Who Protected the Country!” (kuni o mamotta shōhei mamore), as one wartime slogan blared, was to find them brides. At the time, most marriages in Japan were arranged affairs, and to this day people regularly consult professional “go-betweens” (nakōdo) as part of the marriage process. Folding marriage mediation into military protection programs did not undermine these established social customs—disabled veterans simply became a newly targeted clientele of matchmakers. Marriage mediation, like the broader framework of military protection initiatives within which it rested, focused on the holistic rehabilitation of such men. Above all other concerns, marriage mediation exemplified the widespread desire to help disabled veterans by paving their way toward self-sufficiency as smoothly as possible. Marriage, it was argued, safeguarded disabled veterans in their daily lives by helping them build up the spiritual (seishinteki) fortitude needed to rally themselves for their medical, social, and vocational self-rehabilitation. From mid-1938 onward, that task found expression in the phrase “recovery and duty” (saiki hōkō). For a disabled veteran, this term meant that it was his responsibility to muster his capabilities and thereby bring about his return to an active, productive life. As such, marriage provided injured ex-servicemen with therapeutic space within which they developed the strength of will needed to overcome grievous battle injuries and “get back to work.” The purpose of marriage mediation was to make disabled veterans a part of society, not to separate them from it. Concurrently, marriage mediation for disabled veterans had an overtly patriotic objective in mind—namely, total war mobilization. In late summer of 1937, neither Japan’s government nor its people expected the hostilities in China to continue for long. By early 1938, however, the conflict had become a protracted war and the state intensified its efforts to rallying imperial subjects behind the nation’s fighting forces. Military protection endeavors aided total war mobilization by rousing the masses to support servicemen and their families and honor the sacrificing of life and limb “for the sake of the nation” (okuni no tame ni). Imperial subjects of all sorts participated in mobilization ventures that ranged from scrap metal drives to air defense drills. In this context, marriage mediation drew women into the war effort by having them assist in the reintegration of disabled veterans into civilian society. This goal was achieved by returning wounded men—whenever possible—to a workforce affected by the mustering out of able-bodied male laborers for active-duty military service. In the process, the spouses of disabled veterans personified the conventional belief that the key contribution a woman could make to society was to become a “good wife and wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo), an idea that gained traction in Japan following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Marriage mediation furthered total war mobilization by turning disabled veterans’ homes into spaces where wives were respectably patriotic by facilitating the medical, social, and vocational recuperation of their husbands. Moreover, being married to a disabled veteran defended conservative social mores by positioning women alongside men who needed military protection services. Symbolically, marriage mediation created “good wives” (and hopefully “wise mothers”) as well as nation-minded imperial subjects out of both sexes. There appears to be a historiographical gap when it comes to gender and Japanese veterans. English-language scholarship that examines the links between disabled veterans, gender, and rehabilitation generally excludes Japan.4 Brian Craig Miller illustrates how amputee veterans of the American South relied “on women to provide continued medical care, emotional support, and other basic functioning” both during and after the US Civil War.5 Jeffrey S. Reznick details the “culture of caregiving” that existed on the British home front during World War I, particularly in regard to the “crisis of masculinity” experienced by wounded servicemen.6 Jessica Meyer demonstrates that the paucity of official records of women coping with the realities of living with psychologically disabled British men during and after World War I contrasts with popular literature of the era that depicts wives’ noble endurance of conjugal woes.7 Kate Macdonald has also scrutinized mainstream British literature of World War I to show how wartime magazine fiction affected the experiences of the disabled veteran by “affirming his masculinity as the hero of a romance” and “maintaining social norms about women’s behaviour.”8 Research surrounding veterans and gender since World War I is plentiful, too, particularly regarding American veterans. Susan M. Hartmann inspects “the crucial role of woman’s fidelity in bolstering the morale of retired soldiers” of World War II. Martin F. Norden and Andrew J. Huebner explore depictions of married and unmarried disabled veterans found in wide-release films like Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and The Men (1950).9 Recently, Beth Linker has called for medical and disability historians to align their methodologies in ways that “focus on our overlapping similarities rather than carving out differences.”10 Such an approach informs the work of anthropologist Zoë H. Wool, who has studied “how gender, sexuality, and life worth living get nested within each other and routed through soldiers’ actual flesh,” while assessing US veterans recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center during the early twenty-first century.11 In Japan, a few researchers have written about marriage mediation, most notably Namase Katsumi and Takayasu Momoko, but rarely with regard to how marriage mediation fit into the larger terrain of military protection efforts.12 This essay first examines the emergence of marriage mediation services for Japanese disabled veterans before analyzing wartime depictions of marriage mediation aimed at convincing women to marry men with serious war injuries. In the process, the limits of war mobilization in Japan come to light because recruiting brides for disabled veterans hinged on obtaining women’s consent to enter into arranged marriages. As Benjamin Uchiyama notes about munitions workers in wartime Japan, “the social impact of the war years for Japanese [imperial] subjects was quite varied,” and for many people the war gave them “an opportunity to escape limitations” established by social and cultural norms, including prevailing beliefs about gender practices.13 Women played consequential roles in wartime Japan, maintaining active presences both inside and outside the home as participants within the national war effort. Miyao Tsuyoshi, a bureaucrat within the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, stated in July 1939 that “The China affair has not only changed the normal home life of the people, but has brought the Japanese woman out from the shelter of her home to take an important part in the activities of the home front.”14 Indeed, as shown by Nishikawa Yūko, Sandra Wilson, and other scholars, the organized support of women helped to shape the character of the war as a shared experience throughout the home front.15 As such, with new opportunities available to women outside traditional gender roles, the marriage mediation movement illustrates the extraordinary agency possessed by women in wartime Japan, who were targeted by patriotic mobilization campaigns to become brides for disabled veterans. Despite widespread public and private appeals to marry disabled veterans, potential brides maintained the right of refusal to participate in this undertaking by electing not to marry wounded ex-servicemen “for the sake of the nation.” Still, a cohort of women did choose to support the war effort, as well as veterans-in-need, by engaging in arranged marriages for disabled veterans. In some cases, parents pressured their daughters to marry. Other women participated in marriage mediation as matchmakers, work that provided them the opportunity to pursue a variety of personal, professional, and patriotic goals. The “Spouse Problem” of Disabled Veterans Still common today, marriage mediation constituted a routine practice in mid-twentieth-century Japan. Prewar and wartime Japan featured a patrilineal family structure in which marriage was undertaken primarily to perpetuate a family (kazoku) rather than to endorse mutual affection between individuals. Families pragmatically sought to preserve their name and resources by only accepting socially and economically appropriate people into their fold, as the first step toward producing a legitimate heir. Marriage was readily recognized as a transaction between families, with brides being drawn into the households (setai) of grooms (and out of their natal homes) for the benefit of the groom’s family. Alternately, a groom could be legally adopted by his in-laws and take their surname in order to maintain his bride’s family line. Preexisting affection between bride and groom often had little meaning or low importance, as it was believed that feelings of love could materialize over time. Simply stated, preserving the household often trumped the allegedly “self-centered” pursuit of romance. Depending on one’s point of view, in prewar and wartime Japan, a “love marriage” (ren’ai kekkon)—in contrast to an arranged one—would have been regarded as brazen, disrespectful, improper, odd, desirable, or perhaps wishful thinking. Even now, Japanese individuals and families often employ a go-between or matchmaker to help them find not only suitable spouses but also middle ground with potential in-laws.16 A conventional go-between assists by arranging a miai, or a meeting between promising brides and grooms and sometimes between their family members as well. In many instances, a miai involves introducing what Kalman D. Applbaum calls “proper strangers,” or persons with “some basis for association,” because both persons are known by the go-between and exhibit some sort of imagined compatibility.17 Prior to 1947, the personal preferences of children seeking spouses were not always considered when parents or other heads of households arranged miai. Women under the age of twenty-five and men under the age of thirty had little nuptial agency as Japan’s prewar Civil Code specified that they needed parental consent to marry.18 Then and now, multiple miai might be required to identify a “proper” bride or groom. At times, unmarried couples use miai while seeking sanction from disapproving relatives. As Ezra Vogel notes, go-betweens take on the associated responsibilities of introducing spouses (or families), negotiating to remove doubts about a feasible union, bargaining to make all parties satisfied, and ceremonializing marriages by sanctioning them.19 Go-betweens can be informally or professionally procured, but the successfully married couple is obliged to reward them for their services and expected to maintain ties with their matchmaker. Moreover, if marital discord emerges in the future, the couple can call on the go-between to help them overcome their issues.20 Because of the ubiquity of arranged marriage in Japanese culture and society, adapting marriage mediation for the benefit of disabled veterans seemed commonsensical in many ways. In late 1937, Japan’s Home Ministry acknowledged the existence of a so-called “spouse problem of unmarried disabled veterans” (mikon shōi gunjin no haigusha mondai)—large numbers of seriously wounded ex-servicemen were having difficulty finding brides.21 Why did the state begin to pay attention to the marriage woes of disabled veterans at that particular time? For one, Japan’s community of disabled veterans was increasing in size. In July 1937 a surge in hot confrontations between Japanese and Chinese armed forces reignited hostilities that had been simmering since the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Within five months, Japanese presence in China increased to six hundred thousand men.22 With so many boots on the ground and a steadily expanding combat zone, Japan’s military casualties rose sharply. According to one tally, over forty thousand servicemen were either killed or wounded between August and November 1937.23 The number of wounded men repatriated and subsequently discharged from military service in late 1937 is difficult to calculate with precision. Between January 1938 and June 1939, the Greater Japan Disabled Veterans Association (Dai Nihon Shōi Gunjinkai) (hereafter, Disabled Veterans Association), a group that facilitated pension increases for disabled ex-servicemen, saw its membership rise from thirty thousand to fifty thousand men.24 Many newly disabled veterans were younger, presumably single men who had been drawn into military service via conscription. Japan already had military assistance (gunji fujo) services for disabled veterans in place when the “China Incident” began, but those measures did not address conjugal matters. The general contours of military assistance have been detailed elsewhere, but a few features salient to marriage mediation are worth noting.25 First, the legal basis for state-funded relief rested in the Military Assistance Law, designed to benefit the immediate households of disabled veterans, not just individual aid recipients. Second, the government managed a Wounded Soldiers Institute (Shōheiin) that offered accommodation to men whose dire injuries impeded their independent vocational livelihood. However, veterans virtually shunned the Shōheiin because residents had to surrender the bulk of their military service pensions, leaving them with little money to share with their families. Only thirty-nine disabled veterans lived there in 1937.26 Third, Japan’s military assistance services had been influenced by various relief measures adopted in Europe and North America during and after World War I. By the early 1930s Japan’s government had come to acknowledge that effective military assistance required preparing a disabled veteran for years of productive self-sufficiency. Moreover, there was little doubt that providing aging disabled veterans with housing and limited vocational rehabilitation services at the Shōheiin was ineffectual. Rather than separate disabled veterans from family and society, in the mid-1930s, the state determined that assistance ought to embed those men within both settings in order to ensure their autonomy and productivity. Recognizing the importance of the family as Japan’s fundamental unit of personal and national stability also helps to explain why the state began to consider the matrimonial woes of disabled veterans. As Jordan Sand argues, the reconceptualization of domestic space played a significant role in the cultural and social modernization of Japan from the 1880s onward as “political leaders and legal scholars formulated modern state structures around the family.”27 The so-called “Japanese family system” of modern times resulted from a national family register apparatus supported by legal and civil codes and substantiated in the 1920s by Japan’s first national census. During the 1930s one of the most influential voices about the significance of the family was sociologist Toda Teizō of Tokyo Imperial University, who frequently wrote about the role of the family system in Japan. In July 1939, the English-language periodical Contemporary Japan published Toda’s perspective on how both family and marriage held different meanings in Japan and the West. Unlike in Europe and America, where marriage created independent families with roots in two existing families, in Japan “the marriage of a woman to a man derives its importance from its promise of perpetuating the family group,” which as noted earlier could be that of either spouse.28 Additionally, when a family head dies, a designated successor from the next generation of family members becomes responsible for maintaining the family’s livelihood. It is this generational renewal, Toda contended, that maintained the integrity of the Japanese family system. Such views had become mainstream in Japan by the mid-1930s. Thus, the unmarried disabled veteran became problematic not solely with regard to his individual circumstances but also as a dilemma for his family’s posterity. Granted, during the 1930s, most of Japan’s conscript troops were second- or third-born sons who usually did not become heads of multigenerational extended families. However, the family line was still in jeopardy—in 1883, the military ministries replaced conscription exemptions for first-born and only sons in favor of conscription deferments.29 Now, under the lengthening shadow of the escalating war in China, it became conceivable that future heads of families might become disabled if called up for active-duty military service. Conscription deferments ultimately evaporated in December 1943 when the military ministries needed more servicemen to construct a defensive perimeter around Japan.30 Preserving the stability of one’s family required generational replenishment, which by extension, also sustained the nation (kokka, literally the “family state”). “The fortunate husband and wife will enjoy a life of affection and harmony,” Toda asserted, “but the main thing society expects of them is that they bring up children who will be faithful members of the family and also maintain, through the family, a tradition of loyalty to the State.”31 Although disabled veterans suffered from various sorts of qualifying impairments within Japan’s pension system, not all were rendered impotent by their injuries. Still, the state did regard a veteran as “disabled” when extreme testicular trauma left him unable to father children.32 Marriage favorably—and optimistically—positioned disabled veterans to perpetuate both their families and the nation through acceptable procreation. In this way, the “spouse problem” of unmarried disabled veterans had adverse consequences for the welfare of the nation because being single undermined the bedrock of Japanese society: the family. Unlike disabled veterans, Japanese society-at-large did not seem to have a spouse problem in 1937. In fact, the number of officially recognized new marriages in Japan proper jumped from 549,116 unions during 1936 to 674,500 unions during 1937 (the annual average from 1926 through 1937 was 523,770 marriages per year).33 No comprehensive statistics are known to exist that calculate the marriage rate of disabled veterans in Japan during the war years. Even so, by early 1938, the state registered sufficient worry about unmarried disabled veterans to include the spouse problem within its rationale for revising existing military assistance programs for war-wounded servicemen. The spouse problem of disabled veterans may have been more imagined than actual, but it harkened to concerns about the family and affectively resonated with contemporaneous worries about the livelihood and mindsets of wounded military casualties. To be sure, not all disabled veterans were single men, but there seemed to be enough of them unable to find brides that public and private actors began working as matchmakers for their behalf. Military Protection and Patriotic Matchmakers By November 1937, the war had become more destructive and drawn-out than anticipated, which prompted the state to broaden its military assistance services for wounded servicemen. In two initial stages, the government reconfigured military assistance to include “protection measures for disabled veterans.” During the first phase (November 1937 through January 1938), the Home Ministry identified program areas needing adjustment, which the new Welfare Ministry reexamined after it began operations in January 1938.34 When discussing the preferential treatment of disabled veterans by society—one of the areas to be improved—the ministries noted that addressing the spouse problem would enable the “preservation of [disabled veterans’] lifestyles.”35 However, acknowledging a problem and fully committing to solving it are two different things. In mid-January, Welfare Ministry bureaucrat Hotta Takeo characterized the matrimonial woes of disabled veterans as “a ‘delicate’ yet serious issue.” Hotta cautioned, though, that marriage concerns were difficult to resolve by government intervention and it would be “most appropriate” for the issue to be handled by personal consultation centers (shinjō sōdanjo) instead.36 In its subsequent report on recommended protection measures, the Welfare Ministry stated that lifestyle preservation should take place via “guided assistance” from consultation centers designed to address multiple sorts of predicaments. Included among the issues to be taken up by these centers was the spouse problem.37 The second phase of early reforms (April through December 1938) saw the development of “protective” services for disabled veterans, during which formal marriage mediation initiatives began to take shape. In April, the Welfare Ministry established a Wounded Soldiers Protection Agency (Shōhei Hogoin) charged with overseeing revitalized services for disabled veterans. In order to improve popular attitudes about disabled veterans, the Shōhei Hogoin worked with other governmental bureaus to orchestrate public relations campaigns and events that featured positive depictions of war-wounded men, specifically by positioning their presence as everyday occurrences on the home front. In May, the state revised its procedure for officially designating a wounded soldier as a disabled veteran. It did so by expanding the set of symptoms used to assess whether or not the degree of a serviceman’s injuries made him eligible to receive an increase to his annual military pension (i.e., a disability increase). When a serviceman was determined, after examination, to have possessed one or more injuries found among eight sets of symptom grades, the state then recognized him as a disabled veteran. He thereby received an increased annual pension and gained membership to the Disabled Veterans Association.38 The expansion of military protection was a key element of total war mobilization in Japan. In addition to the new Welfare Ministry, various bureaucratic contrivances telegraphed the state’s mounting interest in mustering society for the war effort. In August 1937, the Home and Education Ministries jointly established a Central League for National Spiritual Mobilization that combined local and national voluntary organizations in order to coordinate their military support activities. Concurrent to the expansion of military protection, on April 1, 1938, the state enacted the National General Mobilization Law, which gave it control over human and physical resources deemed essential for the war effort. Meanwhile, the Home Ministry and the Central League for National Spiritual Mobilization reached out to neighborhood associations during 1938, entrusting them with managerial tasks previously handled by government offices and making local supervisors responsible for mobilization campaigns conducted at the community level.39 This is not to say that the state directly began to control local society. As Sally Ann Hastings points out, “The common assumption that civilian bureaucrats organized the ordinary citizens as handmaidens of the military is simply not borne out by the evidence.”40 Rather, the state encouraged—later compelled—local leaders to coordinate local administrative affairs once its attention shifted to orchestrating the war.41 As wartime diaries show, Japan’s government certainly brewed an atmosphere of total war mobilization but did not bewitch the public under a spell of mindless submission.42 From April onward, voluntary associations played an active role in military protection programming by establishing personal consultation centers, which the Welfare Ministry hoped would provide disabled veterans with matrimonial advice and other services. Starting with the Disabled Veterans Association, the Shōhei Hogoin convened workshops for groups that offered consultation services to military households. The first of these meetings took place in Tokyo in early December, where 103 counselors gathered from regional Disabled Veterans Association offices.43 Fujiwara Takao, head of the Shōhei Hogoin’s Planning Office, began by explaining the term “military protection” for the benefit of attendees. “The objective of military protection for disabled veterans,” stated Fujiwara, “is for husbands to return to their pre-mobilization conditions” [italics added]. This process was to occur first through medical care aimed at their mental and physical rehabilitation and then by using their restored minds and bodies to establish them as “social and economic actors” through means other than pension payments.44 Fujiwara noted that consultation centers run by the Disabled Veterans Association and other “private” organizations enabled the preferential treatment of disabled veterans by society, with the spouse problem specifically identified as an issue that the centers helped to tackle.45 Fujiwara and other officials characterized groups like the Disabled Veterans Association as “private” entities, but by mid-1938 Japan’s most consequential military support organizations had become only quasi-private affiliations. Japanese society featured numerous local- and national-level charitable organizations that fell outside the purview of governmental aid. According to one analysis, 248 local associations nationwide were assisting servicemen-in-need during 1933–1934 alone.46 These groups featured discretionary memberships, often defined by sex (i.e., men’s associations or women’s associations) or shared interests. In February 1934, the Army, Navy, and Home Ministries aligned military support services nationally by asking Japan’s ten largest voluntary associations catering to distressed servicemen to form a Central Committee for Military Assistance. The following month, committee members began coordinating their activities vis-à-vis official military assistance measures. Increasingly, the state began to supply sanctioned organizations with grants to help pay for their undertakings, which blurred the lines between public and private identity. Their rosters may have been compiled from “among the people” (minkan, or privately) but the state partially funded their offices and operations. Tasking the Disabled Veterans Association and other organizations with managing personal consultation services kept the state from having to devise its own immediate solution to the spouse problem. From its start in 1936, the Disabled Veterans Association benefited from financial support from the Army and Navy Ministries. It incorporated in September 1938 and fell increasingly under state direction, but its membership remained restricted to disabled veterans. The association acted as a character-building support group, and its consultation centers featured disabled veterans of previous conflicts assisting veterans of the ongoing war in China. In June 1939, the Disabled Veterans Association adopted a manifesto called the “Five Principles for Disabled Veterans” (Shōi Gunjin Gokun), which articulated the core tenets the group sought to instill among its members. The guidelines were: Disabled veterans will cultivate their spirit and overcome their physical difficulties. Disabled veterans will bring about the realities of “recovery and duty” through their own power. Disabled veterans will value dignity and display the virtue of humility. Disabled veterans will stiffen their resolve and be prudent in the ways by which they conduct themselves in life. Disabled veterans, in light of their personal honor, will serve as models for the people.47 Here, the state’s professed goals of lifestyle preservation and preferential treatment for disabled veterans were on display—the Disabled Veterans Association sought not only to raise the morale of its members but also to present themselves to society as aspirational figures. Canonized in the “Five Principles” was a key turn-of-phrase subsequently intoned ad nauseam by backers of marriage mediation. The phrase “recovery and duty” originated from a poem collected by the Shōhei Hogoin in June 1938 when it sponsored a poetry competition for wounded servicemen recuperating at military hospitals. The poem saiki hōkō kagayaku Nippon won first place out of nineteen thousand entries.48 Literally translatable as “recovery and duty, shining Japan,” the slogan’s embedded four-character formulated expression saiki hōkō connotes “returning to action” or “getting back to work” after the healing of one’s wounds (saiki), and performing their “duty” or obligations to society (hōkō) (figure 1). Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide “Recovery and Duty, Shining Japan,” a pair of photographs from the September 28, 1938, issue of Photographic Weekly Report. The large caption at the upper left is the poetic slogan that introduced the term “recovery and duty.” In these paired photographs, the idea of disabled veterans literally returning to active duty for the war effort is illustrated by Takayama Sakuji (shown standing at the right), an Imperial Japanese Army pilot who sustained a war injury in 1935 that cost him his left hand (his artificial forearm is framed by dotted outlining in both photographs). The text box points out that Takayama was able to overcome his injury and resume his duties as a military pilot. The photograph at left shows Takayama piloting an airplane with the aid of his artificial arm. Source: “Jūgo Kōen Kyōka Shūkan; 10-gatsu itsuka kara 10-gatsu 11-nichi made,” Shashin shūhō 33 (1938): 6. Collection of the author. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide “Recovery and Duty, Shining Japan,” a pair of photographs from the September 28, 1938, issue of Photographic Weekly Report. The large caption at the upper left is the poetic slogan that introduced the term “recovery and duty.” In these paired photographs, the idea of disabled veterans literally returning to active duty for the war effort is illustrated by Takayama Sakuji (shown standing at the right), an Imperial Japanese Army pilot who sustained a war injury in 1935 that cost him his left hand (his artificial forearm is framed by dotted outlining in both photographs). The text box points out that Takayama was able to overcome his injury and resume his duties as a military pilot. The photograph at left shows Takayama piloting an airplane with the aid of his artificial arm. Source: “Jūgo Kōen Kyōka Shūkan; 10-gatsu itsuka kara 10-gatsu 11-nichi made,” Shashin shūhō 33 (1938): 6. Collection of the author. Along with the Disabled Veterans Association, the Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujinkai) played a leading role in marriage mediation services for disabled veterans. Founded in 1901, the Aikoku Fujinkai’s all-female members cast themselves as the mothers and sisters of war-wounded servicemen. Although its family-centered values did not blunt the group’s wartime activities, its class composition did: the organization’s urban, upper-class background quickened its eclipse as Japan’s premier patriotic organization for women. By late 1937 the Osaka-centered National Defense Women’s Association (Kokubō Fujinkai), with members from all socioeconomic classes, became the country’s dominant patriotic women’s group, with over 6.8 million members.49 Still, the Aikoku Fujinkai boasted over 3.3 million members nationwide during 1937, making it one of Japan’s largest patriotic women’s groups. Both organizations ranked among the ten inaugural members of the Central Committee for Military Assistance.50 These two groups actively supported wounded servicemen and their families, but marriage mediation figured more prominently within the Aikoku Fujinkai’s agenda. Marriage mediation jibed with the Aikoku Fujinkai’s “household strengthening” mission, which stemmed from its conservatism. Working with the Central League for National Spiritual Mobilization, in February 1938, the group began asking women to demonstrate patriotism and devotion to family by participating in miai with disabled veterans. Miyao Tsuyoshi, a Tokyo Metropolitan Government official, later claimed that a young woman in the city of Gifu became the first person to answer that call by “declaring her determination to become the ‘two legs of [a] warrior’ who was receiving medical treatment at the First Army Hospital in Ushigomé, Tokyo.”51 By year’s end, the Aikoku Fujinkai was offering formal marriage mediation services.52 The Disabled Veterans Association and the Aikoku Fujinkai brought “proper strangers” together by having the former direct marriage-minded disabled veterans to the latter’s group offices, where staff members spoke with them about potential spouses. Matchmaking services remained locally based—men from a given area were paired with women from the same region. According to the Aikoku Fujinkai, marriage mediation provided a “bright departure towards ‘recovery and duty’” overseen by “suitable brides.”53 It is perhaps unsurprising that women became directly involved in the matrimonial affairs of unmarried disabled veterans, as professional and amateur female caregivers already frequented the bedsides of war-wounded men. Women on the home front visited recuperating wards housing seriously injured casualties, hoping to provide patients with comfort and cheer. Similarly, the Aikoku Fujinkai, National Defense Women’s Association, and other women’s groups sent countless delegations of well-wishers to military medical facilities during the war. Japan Red Cross Society (Nihon Sekijūjisha) nurses served at Imperial Japanese Army medical facilities, ranging from line-of-communication hospitals to hospital ships plying the seas between mainland Asia and Japan. Those nurses were first and foremost professionals dedicated to the healthcare needs of their patients, but as essayist Okada Teiko commented in her 1943 memoir Hospital Ship War Report (Byōinsen jugunki), they were also young women. In her view, Japan Red Cross nurses entered “the most important phase of a woman’s life” (i.e., marriageable age) just as they were being mustered for duty.54 Japan Red Cross nurses’ first responsibility was to return men to fighting shape, but occasionally romantic feelings developed between patients and their caregivers. These and other instances of institutional interaction between male patients and female caregivers often produced organic romantic relationships that did not require formal mediation services to result in wedlock (in other words, “love marriages”). Materials used by the Disabled Veterans Association and Aikoku Fujinkai are difficult to find within the surviving historical record of wartime Japan. Even so, basic marriage mediation practices can be gleaned from existing publications of the early 1940s. A central mechanism was for applicants to submit dossiers that counselors used to match them with prospective partners. Disabled veterans gave the following details: military rank; type and degree of injuries (likely based on the state’s official materials used to determine disability increases to annual pensions); degree of functional difficulties (e.g., limping, etc.); overall state of health; occupation; income level; age; prior marriages (if any); an overview of financial assets, including the amount of his disability pension and any debts; religion; education level; career history; a character statement; a list of hobbies and interests; a statement about personal beliefs; an account of family circumstances; a statement about thoughts on married life; a statement about hopes for the future; a photograph; and any additional materials he cared to supply.55 Female applicants provided a shorter list of details: overall state of health; occupation; age; prior marriages (if any); an overview of financial assets; religion; education level; career history; a character statement; a list of hobbies and interests; a statement about personal beliefs; an account of family circumstances; a statement about thoughts on married life; a statement about hopes for the future; and any other materials she chose to share.56 Aikoku Fujinkai staff members conducted the actual pairing, participated in wedding ceremonies, and provided gifts to brides, such as mirrored vanity stands bearing the Aikoku Fujinkai crest (figures 2 and 3). Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide “Good Companions for Life; Good Brides for Wounded Soldiers,” an image collage from a commemorative album of photographs celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Aikoku Fujinkai. The layout includes four photographs from mediated marriage wedding ceremonies, plus a photograph of the commemorative mirrored vanity stand gifted to brides by the Aikoku Fujinkai (lower left corner). Source: Aikoku Fujinkai, Aikoku Fujinkai 40-shūnen kinen shashinchō, 46. Collection of the author. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide “Good Companions for Life; Good Brides for Wounded Soldiers,” an image collage from a commemorative album of photographs celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Aikoku Fujinkai. The layout includes four photographs from mediated marriage wedding ceremonies, plus a photograph of the commemorative mirrored vanity stand gifted to brides by the Aikoku Fujinkai (lower left corner). Source: Aikoku Fujinkai, Aikoku Fujinkai 40-shūnen kinen shashinchō, 46. Collection of the author. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide “From Marriage to Happy Homes,” an image collage from a commemorative album of photographs celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Aikoku Fujinkai. The layout includes two circular photographs showing a recently married couple and their newborn child. The central right photograph shows a social gathering held at the Aikoku Fujinkai’s main office in Tokyo as part of the same couple’s nuptials, and the central left photograph shows a similar celebration held at the Aikoku Fujinkai’s main office in Korea. The caption states that the Aikoku Fujinkai has successfully arranged 251 marriages since January 1939 (the commemorative album dates to February 1942). Source: Aikoku Fujinkai, Aikoku Fujinkai 40-shūnen kinen shashinchō, 47. Collection of the author. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide “From Marriage to Happy Homes,” an image collage from a commemorative album of photographs celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Aikoku Fujinkai. The layout includes two circular photographs showing a recently married couple and their newborn child. The central right photograph shows a social gathering held at the Aikoku Fujinkai’s main office in Tokyo as part of the same couple’s nuptials, and the central left photograph shows a similar celebration held at the Aikoku Fujinkai’s main office in Korea. The caption states that the Aikoku Fujinkai has successfully arranged 251 marriages since January 1939 (the commemorative album dates to February 1942). Source: Aikoku Fujinkai, Aikoku Fujinkai 40-shūnen kinen shashinchō, 47. Collection of the author. What was the scope of this early period of matchmaking, and how many marriages took place? Ostensibly, interested persons could turn to any consultation center run by either the Disabled Veterans Association or the Aikoku Fujinkai for marriage mediation services. Since these centers were found in the organizations’ branch offices, with branches located in every prefecture in Japan, marriage mediation services evidently existed throughout the country. By 1939, there appears to have been specific marriage consultation centers for disabled veterans run by both groups. An August 1942 essay about marriage mediation states that at that time the Disabled Veterans Association had twenty-three centers, while the Aikoku Fujinkai managed seventeen.57 And the initial number of marriages? The New Order of Marriage (Kekkon shintaisei), an edited volume of essays published in June 1941, included a chapter on the effort to marry disabled veterans. There, Hagino Kensuke claimed that the Aikoku Fujinkai’s main office in Tokyo arranged seventy marriages between July 1937 and December 1940, while Aikoku Fujinkai branch offices finalized roughly thirty marriages during the same period. The number of applications received by the Aikoku Fujinkai’s Tokyo office rose from thirty-two female and sixteen disabled veteran applicants during 1938 to 130 and 121 respective applicants during 1939–1940.58 A contemporaneous booklet issued by the Aikoku Fujinkai divided the 1939–1940 figures according to the point of origin of those 251 applications and stated that the average age for male applicants was 26.3 years, while that for females was twenty-six years (table 1).59 These totals were modest, but the endeavor was still in its infancy. As the war wore on and the spouse problem of disabled veterans remained a constant concern, interest in arranged marriages grew. In this way, marriage mediation for disabled veterans became a routine feature of the social landscape of wartime Japan. Table 1 Number of applicants for marriage mediation as tallied by the Aikoku Fujinkai Head Office in Tokyo (January 1939 through November 1940) Institutional recipient of submitted applications . Number of male applicants . Number of female applicants . Total . Aikoku Fujinkai Head Office (Tokyo) 31 82 113 Provisional Tokyo Number Three Army Hospital 86 23 109 Gunji Hogoin — 17 17 Disabled Veterans Association 1 — 1 Unspecified institutions 3 8 11 Total 121 130 251 Institutional recipient of submitted applications . Number of male applicants . Number of female applicants . Total . Aikoku Fujinkai Head Office (Tokyo) 31 82 113 Provisional Tokyo Number Three Army Hospital 86 23 109 Gunji Hogoin — 17 17 Disabled Veterans Association 1 — 1 Unspecified institutions 3 8 11 Total 121 130 251 Notes: These figures do not include applications received by Aikoku Fujinkai branch offices. The Gunji Hogoin succeeded the Shōhei Hogoin in July 1939; both agencies managed general services consultation centers in home-front military hospitals such as Provisional Tokyo Number Three Army Hospital. Source: “Mōshikomi betsu,” in Aikoku Fujinkai, Shōwa 15-nen no Aikoku Fujinkai o kaiko shite, n.p. Open in new tab Table 1 Number of applicants for marriage mediation as tallied by the Aikoku Fujinkai Head Office in Tokyo (January 1939 through November 1940) Institutional recipient of submitted applications . Number of male applicants . Number of female applicants . Total . Aikoku Fujinkai Head Office (Tokyo) 31 82 113 Provisional Tokyo Number Three Army Hospital 86 23 109 Gunji Hogoin — 17 17 Disabled Veterans Association 1 — 1 Unspecified institutions 3 8 11 Total 121 130 251 Institutional recipient of submitted applications . Number of male applicants . Number of female applicants . Total . Aikoku Fujinkai Head Office (Tokyo) 31 82 113 Provisional Tokyo Number Three Army Hospital 86 23 109 Gunji Hogoin — 17 17 Disabled Veterans Association 1 — 1 Unspecified institutions 3 8 11 Total 121 130 251 Notes: These figures do not include applications received by Aikoku Fujinkai branch offices. The Gunji Hogoin succeeded the Shōhei Hogoin in July 1939; both agencies managed general services consultation centers in home-front military hospitals such as Provisional Tokyo Number Three Army Hospital. Source: “Mōshikomi betsu,” in Aikoku Fujinkai, Shōwa 15-nen no Aikoku Fujinkai o kaiko shite, n.p. Open in new tab Recruiting Brides and Rehabilitating Grooms It appears marriage mediation for disabled veterans enjoyed the full support of the popular press. Military protection initiatives begun by the Shōhei Hogoin in mid-1938 included public relations and moral suasion campaigns designed to boost societal appreciation of war-wounded servicemen. As in other modern-day wartime societies, wounded servicemen played comity-rousing roles in Japan during World War II.60 Print culture frequently pitched marriage mediation to women; among men, the concept seemed to need less selling. The mass media was rife with depictions of Japan Red Cross nurses, apron-clad members of various patriotic associations for women, and mothers stoically sending sons to the front lines. As shown in the scholarship of Wakakuwa Midori, “wife, mother, and preserver of households and morality” became the cultural mantles that war fashioned for Japanese women during the 1930s and early 1940s.61 Even before the creation of the Shōhei Hogoin, “beautiful tales” (bidan) of wartime selflessness included stories of real-life female protagonists, particularly within periodicals geared toward women. Frontline nurses, bereaved mothers, and virginal maidens sending gifts to soldiers featured in the set of illustrated poems titled “Home Front Bouquet” published in the November 1937 issue of Housewife’s Friend (Shufu no tomo), while the next month Ladies’ Club (Fujin kurabu) regaled readers with “The Husband Took Up a Gun and the Wife Became a Nurse to Wounded Soldiers! An Interview with an Honorable Household that Went to the Front as a Married Couple.” Spouses of wounded men also ranked among the roster of stock characters. To give but one example, an article titled “Supporting the Wives of Ill Soldiers” appeared in Housewife’s Friend in May 1938 and admonished readers to empathize with such women.62 Marriage mediation for disabled veterans fit neatly within this cultural terrain. Barak Kushner notes that “propaganda poured from a multiplicity of official and nonofficial venues,” obfuscating the origins of many cultural manifestations of total war mobilization.63 The state certainly wanted positive depictions of married life with disabled veterans, as well as other military protection objectives, but found it did not always need to instruct producers of culture to promote its desires. After all, war-related content attracted audiences and sold copies—at least until mid-1943, at which point the war’s strains began to overshadow its allure. Marriage mediation benefitted from features in popular magazines that pragmatically emphasized the need to solve the spouse problem. There, testimonials by actual wives and advice given by professed experts celebrated the patriotism of women who married disabled veterans. Such writings often contended that sincerity and thoughtfulness were more crucial than nationalistic sentiment when committing to spend one’s life with a disabled ex-serviceman. In their words, a woman must possess self-assuredness should she choose to marry a severely wounded man. The experiences of women who married disabled veterans regularly appeared in women’s journals; an early example ran in Housewife’s Friend in July 1938 and centered on the wife of a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Taguchi Tokiko made the case for marrying war-wounded men by describing her life with her husband Nitarō, a former Imperial Japanese Army infantryman injured during the siege of the Russian stronghold at Port Arthur. Caught in an artillery bombardment, Nitarō was carried to a field hospital where military doctors surgically amputated his right leg above the knee. Three months after Nitarō returned to his home village in Fukushima Prefecture, Tokiko overheard him lamenting that people seemed to have forgotten him. Tokiko reminded readers that rural communities faced dire straits in those days because the war drew men away from farming households smarting from years of bad harvests. As such, hard times left folks with little leeway for performing charitable acts. Moved by Nitarō’s plight, Tokiko decided “I will marry him, thereby in addition to supporting his body, I will be a cane for his spirit, and comfort him.” Doing so entailed rejecting an existing proposal from a wealthy family in town and having to “cut through my parents’ opposition,” but she did so without harboring any illusions that life would be easy as Nitarō’s wife. Tokiko and Nitarō married in 1906. Marriage narratives like this typically contained unforeseen successes; in Tokiko’s case, she and Nitarō opened a stationery store wisely located outside an elementary school. As the only such shop in town, the couple accumulated money and founded a small sericulture venture with Nitarō’s brothers. Their business boomed after the start of World War I, during which Japan’s export-driven economy benefited by supplying Great Britain and her allies with strategic matériel, including silk. Within a few years, their sales spread to three other prefectures. By then, Tokiko had given birth to three sons and two daughters. Now in her 50s, Tokiko had started attending National Defense Women’s Association meetings, where she urged women to marry “those pitiable figures with honorable war wounds acquired for the sake of the nation.”64 The message conveyed by her experiences was clear: be determined, be resourceful, be patient, and life with a war-disabled husband might be better than expected. Wives of recently disabled veterans also recounted their circumstances. Ladies’ Club introduced readers to Murase Mieko in its March 1939 issue. In December 1938, Mieko, a nurse living in the city of Gifu, was summoned to her rural hometown by her parents; upon her arrival, Mieko’s father greeted her with “Your mother and I talked and there is something we want you to think about.” An official from the Disabled Veterans Association had visited town and discussed a twenty-four-year-old man in Tokyo named Murase Hiroshi who had lost both his legs in China. Bedridden, unmarried, parentless, and with no relatives to depend on, Hiroshi seemed hopeless. “Will no one become the wife of this pitiable hero?” the speaker implored. Mieko’s father, a disabled veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, thought of his daughter and encouraged her to marry Hiroshi. “But, it’s your life,” he insisted. “Consider it and give us your response.” According to Mieko, that night she dreamed about carrying a marble statue up a hillside. As the load became heavier, she noticed that the statue on her back had no feet. “I can’t let the statue fall,” she thought, “I’m carrying it for the sake of the nation.” She mustered her resolve and the burden became easier to bear. Mieko woke, sobbing “I want to become a cane for legless [Hiroshi] and offer myself as his hands and feet!” Two days later, Mieko met Hiroshi at a miai held at the Army Medical School in Tokyo, where she declared her intention to become his wife (regrettably, the article does not relay Hiroshi’s immediate reaction). In January 1939, with the help of the president of the Aikoku Fujinkai, the couple wed at the home of the Disabled Veterans Association official who mentioned Hiroshi to Mieko’s father.65 Mieko comes off as being rather impulsive, but she justified her decision by framing it as a patriotic act. Although it does not focus on arranged nuptials, the book-length memoir Record of My Love (Waga ai no ki) of November 1940 depicts Japan’s best-known wartime marriage involving a disabled veteran.66 Author Yamaguchi Satono, a Japan Red Cross nurse, met her husband Suenobu when he was recuperating at a military hospital in Tokyo. Satono’s account of her pre- and postmarriage mindset provided informal counsel to women curious about marrying disabled veterans. The memoir begins with her initial encounter with Suenobu in April 1939 when she delivered to him a telegram announcing his mother’s death. Suenobu’s life had been transformed in China’s Shandong Province one year earlier when he sustained a spinal injury that resulted in paraplegia.67 His life changed again when Satono informed him that his sole surviving parent had died. By that point, Satono had served as a Japan Red Cross nurse for three years and ministered to many patients, but she was especially moved by Suenobu’s compounded dislocations and attracted by his affable personality. Over time she determined to marry him and assist him through life, and the couple courted casually for months. Structurally, Record of My Love resembles a diary, with Satono’s entries chronicling her deeds and thoughts. Early on, while visiting her family home after pledging herself to Suenobu and resigning her commission as a nurse, Satono transcribes a letter she sent to Suenobu in Tokyo immediately after her parents consented to their marriage. The letter confirms and justifies her decision to marry. In it, Satono tells Suenobu that people will likely call their union a “sacrificial marriage” and assume that patriotism drove her to marry him. However, “I do not think of myself in any way as becoming a sacrifice for you,” she writes. “If there are no feelings of love, then why get married on a whim?”68 She confesses that her mother is worried about the situation, and tactfully states her concern the couple will not have a “regular marital relationship” because paralysis has left him unable to engage in sexual intercourse. “I believe that the power of spiritual love is stronger than that of physical love,” she asserts, before describing her plan to spend the next day with her father, buying ceremonial wedding garments for Suenobu and herself.69 Satono is determined—as shown by her mindset and her letter’s casual transition from one topic to the next—for Suenobu to regard their marriage as being as ordinary as possible. The couple wed in August 1939. Satono’s memoir brims with practicality, making it the sort of portrayal that matchmakers would have wanted their clients to read. Within its pages, Satono defends her decision to her co-workers, enlists a military doctor for support, and stands up to her parents. She is levelheaded, pragmatic, informed, and hopeful, doubtlessly thanks to her nursing background. Not only is Satono free from delusions, but her memoir also documents the routine challenges of living with Suenobu. She changes bedpans, contends with his mood swings and crises-of-confidence as a writer, and goes without luxury goods. Because of its realism and patriotism (and Satono’s quiet yearning, which resonated with Japanese cultural sensibilities), Record of My Love became a wide-release film in November 1941. Both versions of Satono’s “beautiful tale” conclude with Suenobu better integrated into ordinary life thanks to the efforts of his self-sacrificing, wise wife.70 Her narrative hinged on love, rather than calculated matchmaking, but established that young women who choose to marry disabled veterans should do so with their eyes wide open. Understanding the motivations of matchmakers is harder to detail. One surviving perspective is that of Obata Ai, the sexagenarian go-between from Osaka who in 1939 guarded the wedding of Takagiwa Masaji and Itō Rikuko. Obata’s 1944 biography states that she developed her sense of duty during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. Then, seventeen-year-old Obata begged her parents to let her become a Japan Red Cross nurse. Rebuked, she knelt before her family’s Buddhist altar that night and chopped off her hair, vowing to enter a nunnery. Consternated yet impressed by his daughter’s resoluteness, Obata’s father took her to Osaka Red Cross Hospital to enroll her in its nursing program, but because she was under age twenty, she was too young to enlist. Ten years later, during the Russo-Japanese War, Obata again declared her desire to care professionally for servicemen and in 1905 became a Japan Red Cross nurse. For twenty-four years, “without missing a day,” Obata worked for the Japan Red Cross Society, eventually becoming director of nursing at Osaka Red Cross Hospital, a post she retired from in 1929. Afterward, she remained with the organization by serving on its governing board for the Osaka region.71 At some point in late 1938, Obata visited Kanaoka Army Hospital in Sakai (a port city located to the immediate south of Osaka) at the behest of its head nurse. The nurse asked her to speak with a suicidal patient named Ihara who was not responding to attempts to dispel his despair. Ihara had such extreme facial mutilations that his jaw nearly unhinged whenever his bandages came undone. After meeting Ihara, Obata informed the nurse that he suffered from spiritual pain caused by his physical injuries and that “Even if his wounds heal, without the spirit of ‘recovery and duty’ he will remain a disabled veteran forever.”72 One week later, Obata returned to the hospital after hearing that Ihara had attempted to kill himself. Obata coaxed Ihara to allow her to examine his injury—“from beneath the right ear to the jaw the flesh of the wound looked like a split pomegranate and had turned a noxious reddish black”—then she looked him in the eye and said “Ihara, this is an honorable wound.” During their conversation, Obata asked Ihara if he were married, thinking his family might help to cheer him. Ihara replied that he had been engaged before being conscripted but it ended after his wounding. Suddenly, the soldier in the next bed chastised him, stating that at least Ihara could rely on his parents, and to Obata’s surprise patients throughout the sick ward began taunting Ihara. “Are all those men unmarried?” Obata asked the head nurse, who said yes. At that point, Obata realized her next undertaking: finding wives for disabled veterans in order to promote their spiritual healing.73 After a few months of protracted negotiations with city officials, Obata opened the No-Fee Marriage Consultation Center for Disabled Veterans (Shōi Gunjin Muryō Kekkon Sōdanjo) on February 5, 1939.74 She promptly received ten applications from veterans as well as women and married her first couple on April 11. Her second union was that of burned veteran Takagiwa and Itō, who wed in early May. Takagiwa and Itō were already in love before they consulted Obata—Itō met Takagiwa in 1938 when she visited him in the hospital as part of a National Defense Women’s Association delegation—but facing opposition from Itō’s mother they enlisted her to negotiate on their behalf (legally, Itō needed her mother’s approval to marry). Earlier, Itō’s mother told her daughter “I consented when you said you wanted to minister to someone injured for the sake of the nation because that’s a very fine thing to do, but marriage is an entirely different thing!”75 Itō’s mother later confided that she worried about her daughter’s happiness, the visibly jarring nature of Takagiwa’s injuries, and the thought of the couple living (i.e., struggling) together for thirty or more years. Obata countered that Itō had considered such matters and that choosing whether or not to marry should be her own decision to make.76 Resistance is often futile in situations involving love and war, and Obata prevailed after arguing that marrying disabled veterans constituted a “national need.”77 In effect, Obata not only championed Itō’s genuine feelings of affection for Takagiwa but also chastised Itō’s mother for not sanctioning their union. Within a year, Obata had arranged twenty marriages, and by that point, Takagiwa and Itō had given birth to their first child.78 Until at least September 1944—the publication date of her biography—Obata continued placing disabled veterans within marriages conducive to their physical, spiritual, and social rehabilitation. While limited in scope, her privately managed enterprise in Osaka rivaled the successes of marriage mediation services offered by larger, state-supported groups. In mid-1939, around the same time Obata married Takagiwa and Itō, the state once again restructured its military protection agenda, contributing to an increase in the number of publicly arranged marriages for disabled veterans. Female Agency and Wartime Marriage Mediation The Welfare Ministry practically and symbolically expanded its military protection agenda by restructuring the Shōhei Hogoin in mid-July 1939. Known thereafter as the Military Protection Agency (Gunji Hogoin), Japan’s government placed support services for active-duty servicemen and war-bereaved families on par with its initiatives for war-wounded soldiers and sailors. As a result, consultation centers managed by Gunji Hogoin affiliates like the Servicemen’s Support Association and local home-front service associations (jūgo hōkōkai) started promoting marriage mediation.79 Moreover, the Gunji Hogoin established a national network of sanatoria, vocational training facilities, and other sorts of “protective” facilities for military casualties and their families, programs they began to promote at military hospitals. Thus, the state acquired a variety of new venues through which it advocated the marriage mediation services orchestrated by the Disabled Veterans Association and the Aikoku Fujinkai. It appears that Gunji Hogoin offices largely attracted women interested in marriage mediation, while consultation centers at military healthcare facilities like Provisional Tokyo Number Three Army Hospital catered to predominantly male clients.80 Public marriage mediation services seemingly underwent few (if any) major administrative changes following the establishment of the Gunji Hogoin. The unrelenting war in China brought the ongoing accumulation of military casualties, and the widening of official military protection services via a reconfigured Gunji Hogoin points to the gravity of the situation facing disabled veterans. On June 3, 1941, the Gunji Hogoin’s Support Bureau—the division that managed moral suasion programming and oversaw the Disabled Veterans Association—issued a notice to prefectural and local actors responsible for military assistance services. The memorandum called for not only increased efforts to promote marriage mediation but also “correctly advancing knowledge about disabled veterans” among “the general public, especially women and girls of marriageable age.” Additionally, the Gunji Hogoin encouraged private marriage consultation centers for society-at-large to cater to the needs of disabled veterans and to open “in necessary locations” consultation centers especially for wounded servicemen.81 Despite this entreaty, it does not seem that general marriage mediation enterprises began offering tangible services for disabled veterans. Nonetheless, preexisting consultation centers continued to handle inquiries. According to a Gunji Hogoin report dated March 1943, the Disabled Veterans Association’s approximately 750 branch offices conducted 2,308 consultations about marital matters from June 1941 through May 1942.82 To be sure, not all of those discussions concerned marriage mediation, but the topic presumably arose with some degree of frequency. Regrettably, the historical record of wartime Japan has not divulged the number of marriages successfully arranged by public entities after mid-1942. According to the Central Social Welfare Association, a research board that published annual reports detailing social welfare affairs in Japan, 1,091 mediated marriages for disabled veterans took place between April 1941 and the end of June 1942.83 This tally included 249 unions arranged by the Disabled Veterans Association, 199 by home-front service associations, 80 by the Greater Japan Women’s Association (Dai Nihon Fujinkai), and 563 by sixteen prefectural and private marriage consultation centers located throughout Japan (including Obata Ai’s free clinic).84 Whether these thousand-odd marriages represent a high point, low point, or annual average in relation to the remaining years of World War II remains a matter of speculation.85 However, public military protection services and private military assistance efforts continued for the war’s duration, with some public endeavors remaining in place—at least briefly—after Japan’s defeat by the Allied Powers in August 1945. Despite the paucity of quantitative evidence about marriage mediation, Japan’s wartime publishing industry provided marriage mediation-related content into the early 1940s. On the cover of its October 1, 1941 issue, Photographic Weekly Report (Shashin shūhō) ran a tinted photograph of a young disabled veteran in white hospital robes performing pull-ups beside a smiling young woman wearing a gaily patterned kimono. Inside, a double-page spread titled “Brides for Disabled Heroes” introduced the couple shown on the cover as Lt. Kobayashi and Matsubara Teruyo (both pseudonyms) (figure 4). Seven staged photographs established the trajectory of their experiences as marriage mediation clients: (1) Matsubara visiting a soldier convalescing in a military hospital; (2) Matsubara discussing marriage mediation with her parents; (3) Matsubara registering for marriage mediation at her local Aikoku Fujinkai branch office; (4) Matsubara seated at a sewing machine as she studies how to become a seamstress; (5) an official at Provisional Tokyo Number Three Army Hospital showing Matsubara’s photograph to Kobayashi; (6) a miai between Matsubara and her parents and Kobayashi and two hospital officials; and (7) Matsubara and Kobayashi spending time together in a flower garden (hanayome, the term for “brides” used in the feature’s title, literally meaning “flower brides”).86 Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide “Brides for Disabled Heroes,” a double-page spread from the October 1, 1941 issue of Photographic Weekly Report. The images progress from the top to the bottom left corner of the right page, then continue to the bottom right corner of the left page, then flow from top to bottom left. Source: “Shōi no yūshi ni hanayome o,” 2–3. Collection of the author. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide “Brides for Disabled Heroes,” a double-page spread from the October 1, 1941 issue of Photographic Weekly Report. The images progress from the top to the bottom left corner of the right page, then continue to the bottom right corner of the left page, then flow from top to bottom left. Source: “Shōi no yūshi ni hanayome o,” 2–3. Collection of the author. The depiction in Photographic Weekly Report of Kobayashi and his fiancée Matsubara is clear-cut and cheerful. Kobayashi displays a positive countenance, and the only suggestion of a possibly long-term impairment or disability manifests in a photograph of him standing with a cane. Matsubara seems devoted as well as pragmatic, as shown by her recognition that she may need to embrace an economic role away from home by working as a seamstress. At all stages of the marriage mediation process, Matsubara takes action by initiating procedures, preparing for the future, and participating in the selection of her groom. The same issue of the magazine ran another story about married life with a disabled veteran in a follow-up feature about amputee veteran Futakado Nakao, his wife Kyōko, and their infant daughter Reiko. A pleasant-looking family living in Hiroshima Prefecture, the couple appears in photographs that show Kyōko helping Nakao to dress, working with Nakao in the family’s tofu shop, and writing a letter for him.87 Taken together, the depictions of marriage mediation procedures and married life with a disabled veteran that appear in these official visions demonstrate the agency of women. Additionally, the practical attainment of “recovery and duty” by disabled veterans thanks to spousal support is made evident in images that show Nakao working for a living alongside his wife. A new challenge faced by marriage mediation for disabled veterans as the war moved into the Pacific and new battlefronts after the Pearl Harbor attack of December 1941 was the growing consensus that Japanese society-at-large faced an emerging population crisis exacerbated by the war. As more and more men went overseas, larger numbers of soldiers and sailors began dying abroad. Public and private voices began to discuss with greater concern a different kind of “spouse problem” now facing young women at home—namely, that there were not sufficient numbers of able-bodied men for them to marry. After assessing the trajectory of population trends vis-à-vis wartime demographic developments, in April 1941 the Welfare Ministry established within itself a new Population Bureau that aimed to raise the nation’s population to 100 million people by 1960.88 Later that year, ministry-run marriage consultation centers were operating in Tokyo and attracting more than twenty inquiries each day, and in early 1942, the Tokyo Prefecture government began offering not only matchmaking services but also cash gifts to couples who wed.89 Soon, other groups followed suit by creating marriage consultation centers for their own purposes. For example, in August 1942, the Tokyo Industrial Patriotic Association opened a marriage bureau “to help young industrial workers emerged in wartime production to find suitable brides.”90 In effect, public and private marriage mediation services for disabled veterans began contending with competition from other self- and nationally minded interest groups that sought female candidates for wartime marriage mediation. Another far-reaching development of concern was the economic mobilization of women outside the home to augment a workforce depleted by military conscription. As in other national contexts, World War II realigned gender norms within Japanese labor practices as women filled in gaps caused by the absence of young male workers. Miyake Yoshiko shows that the mustering of Japanese women outside of the home for wartime work, whether as members of patriotic labor corps (aikoku hōkokukai) or as industrial and other sorts of laborers, remained a fraught undertaking.91 Doing so undermined the household-centered nationalism trumpeted by not only the state but also women’s organizations like the Aikoku Fujinkai. Still, the demands of maintaining production in critical industries such as munitions caused the reconfiguration of ostensibly sacrosanct social beliefs. The concerted drafting of women into industrial worksites did not accelerate until March 1944, but even before then, the war provided young women with multiple opportunities to be outside of the home. Total war presented Japanese women with the opportunity to become more than “good wives and wise mothers,” and the gender tectonics that accompanied the war further enabled young women not to be drawn against their will into arranged marriages with disabled veterans. Conclusion The marriage mediation movement illustrates the limits of total war mobilization, as well as its ingenuity. At no point were young women forced to marry disabled veterans. Rather, there were some social customs that war mobilization had to respect, one being the private nature of family management. Without question, some young women and their guardians felt pressured by duty, patriotism, or shame to participate in marriage mediation. However, although it may have been dutiful and patriotic to marry a veteran wounded “for the sake of the nation,” it was also financially and socially risky. Recognizing such, young women and their parents did not unilaterally throw caution to the wind and blindly heed the call of public and private advocates of marriage mediation. Some women embraced the opportunity to help disabled veterans by becoming their wives, as shown by Murase Mieko, whose parents nudged her to marry an amputee veteran. In instances like hers, extenuating circumstances often played an important role—recall that Mieko’s father was a disabled veteran of the Russo-Japanese War, and she herself was a Japan Red Cross nurse and thus inclined to assist servicemen in need. Other women, some already married, some not seeking to be married, facilitated marriage mediation by orchestrating it. This group included Aikoku Fujinkai marriage counselors and Obata Ai of the No-Fee Marriage Consultation Center for Disabled Veterans. Still, wartime writings clarify that women interested in marriage mediation often had to contend with and convince apprehensive parents. Itō Rikuko’s mother caved in to the pressure exerted by Obata and ultimately allowed her daughter to marry Takagiwa Masaji, while decades earlier, Taguchi Tokiko “cut through” the opposition of her parents in order to marry Nitarō. In contrast to conventional forms of arranged marriages, women involved in marriage mediation with disabled veterans seemingly wielded greater agency and autonomy because their willingness was required to maintain ordinary households for men with exceptional war injuries. Public and private matchmakers acknowledged the agency of young women, as well as the necessity of securing the consent of parents. At all times, women were encouraged to make informed, rational decisions when entertaining the thought of marriage mediation. In February 1941, an article in the Japan Times & Advertiser, an English-language newspaper, quoted Hagino Kensuke of the Gunji Hogoin as saying that “young girls who have made up their minds to become wives of wounded soldiers must examine their minds closely to see if their resolution is not thickly coated with sentimental love, which is so common to young girls of marriageable age, and which will fade away so easily as time speeds on.”92 One year later, another Gunji Hogoin bureaucrat noted within an edited volume of essays about wartime marriage that the Army had begun restricting female visitors from the sick wards of home-front military hospitals. Why? Allegedly, some young women were being swept up by “female longings towards white-robed heroes” and “temporary emotions and sympathy,” leading to imprudent marriages with disabled veterans.93 Parental counsel may have helped to tame hasty decision-making on the part of eager young women, but the misgivings of parents likely also neutralized or complicated some hoped-for couplings. Hagino noted that one young bride had to convince her parents that women who married disabled veterans were not characteristically unattractive, desperate for love, or simply scheming to get their hands on their husbands’ increased pension payments. “The parents who hold such a foolish idea are rather few in large cities,” Hagino concluded, “but if you go into the country, you will see a number of people who regard marriages between young women and wounded soldiers with a feeling mixed with contempt and curiosity. Therefore, such an idea must be eliminated from the minds of all parents in Japan as soon as possible.”94 Educating the public about the realities of married life with a disabled veteran remained a key undertaking of public and private go-betweens, to the point that most discussions about marriage mediation that appeared in the wartime mass media were pitched toward convincing potential brides and their parents to accede to such unions. Lastly, examining wartime marriage mediation endeavors for disabled veterans reveals not only the limits of total war mobilization in Japan during World War II but also the contours of contemporaneous views of people with disabilities in general. It is worth pointing out that ex-servicemen with acquired physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities were identified as viable clients for preferential matchmaking services, but nonmilitary people with disabilities—congenital or otherwise—did not garner similar attention from the state or society. Marriage mediation sought to integrate disabled veterans into society but did not advance the belief that civilians with disabilities deserved the same opportunities as able-bodied people. As it so happened, remaking deep-seated views in Japan about disability and instituting equal treatment for people with all sorts of disabilities required national defeat and occupation by foreign powers. Many listeners and readers helped me to improve this article, which first appeared as a research presentation delivered at the March 2017 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies held in Toronto, Canada. Special thanks are due to Kirsten Ziomek, Aaron W. Moore, Benjamin Uchiyama, and Louise Young, as well as the audience in Toronto. Cameron Penwell and Eiichi Ito at the Asian Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and Komatsu Yumiko and the staff at the Shōkeikan archive in Tokyo graciously extended valuable research support. My colleagues in the US Naval Academy History Department deserve particular thanks for providing thoughtful advice during and after a works-in-progress seminar held in November 2017. I also want to thank Martina Salvante and an anonymous reviewer for the Journal of Social History, both of whom helped me to clarify my points. And, years ago, Allison Alexy thoughtfully encouraged me to investigate the interactions between Japanese disabled veterans and their wives. This article relates the perspectives of its author alone and should not be construed to represent views held by the US Department of Defense, the US Navy, or their constituent institutions. Footnotes 1 In this article, Japanese surnames appear before given names; citations for works written in English reflect the naming order used in those materials. 2 For this account, see Kodera Shōzō, Ai no kiroku: Shōi gunjin ni yoseru jun’aiki (Osaka, 1944), 87–90. Takagiwa and Itō have pseudonyms in Kodera’s book; their actual names—used in this article—are found in the newspaper article “Shinsei e no sutāto; Junjō otome Rikuko-san to yakikizu yūshi; Kuru yokka iyoiyo hare no kekkon shiki,” Ōsaka mainichi shinbun, April 29, 1939, morning edition, 5. 3 Voices throughout Japan characterized the war against China and the Allied Powers as a battle of principle meant to protect Asia from Western cultural, economic, and political hegemony. According to a Japanese wartime primer on contemporary vocabulary first published in June 1943, “A holy war (seisen) is a noble and correct war based on righteousness, or in other words, one that does not have the acquisition of territory or resources as its objective but rather develops from moral purposes.” In actuality, guidance (i.e., control) by Japan was seen as the way to counter direct and indirect Western influence in the region. For the definition, see Noda Teruo, Senji shingo jiten (Tokyo, 1943), 111. 4 Published works in English about Japanese World War II veterans include Tetsuya Fujiwara, “Japan’s Other Forgotten Soldiers,” in Japan Since 1945: From Postwar to Post-bubble, ed. Christopher Gerteis and Timothy S. George (London, 2013), 122–40; Janice Matsumura, “State Propaganda and Mental Disorders: The Issue of Psychiatric Casualties among Japanese Soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78, no. 4 (2004): 804–35; and Lee K. Pennington, Casualties of History: Wounded Japanese Servicemen and the Second World War, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University (Ithaca, NY, 2015). 5 Brian Craig Miller, Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (Athens, GA, 2015), 9. 6 Jeffrey S. Reznick, Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (Manchester, UK, 2004), 10. 7 Jessica Meyer, “‘Not Septimus Now’: Wives of Disabled Veterans and Cultural Memory of the First World War in Britain,” Women’s History Review 13, no. 1 (2004): 117–38. 8 Kate Macdonald, “The Woman’s Body as Compensation for the Disabled First World War Soldier,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 10, no. 1 (2016): 54, 66. 9 Susan M. Hartmann, “Prescriptions for Penelope: Literature on Women’s Obligations to Returning World War II Veterans,” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5, no. 3 (1978): 231; Martin F. Norden, “Resexualization of the Disabled War Hero in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 23, no. 2 (1995): 50–55; Andrew J. Huebner, The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008), 74–76. 10 Beth Linker, “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History: A Survey of the Fields,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87, no. 4 (2013): 535. 11 Zoë H. Wool, “Attachments of Life: Intimacy, Genital Injury, and the Flesh of the U.S. Soldier Body,” in Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium, ed. Veena Das and Clara Han (Berkeley, CA, 2016), 400. 12 Namase frames marriage mediation in terms of the eugenics movement active in Japan during the 1930s and early 1940s; see Namase Katsumi, “15-nen Sensō-ki ni okeru ‘shōi gunjin no kekkon assen’ undō oboegaki,” Momoyama Gakuin Daigaku nyūmon kagaku 12 (1997): 325–42. Takayasu focuses on schools for disabled veterans’ brides (shōhei hanayome gakkō) that aimed to teach lucrative skills such as seamstress work that would supplement household income; see Takayasu Momoko, “Senjika ni okeru shōi gunjin kekkon hogo taisaku: Shōi gunjin to sono tsuma ni motomerarete ita mono,” Jendā shigaku 5 (2009): 51–65. 13 Benjamin Uchiyama, “The Munitions Worker as Trickster in Wartime Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 76, no. 3 (2017): 656. 14 Tsuyoshi Miyao, “Our Women in the Emergency,” Contemporary Japan 8, no. 5 (1939): 643. 15 See Nishikawa Yūko, “Japan’s Entry into War and the Support of Women,” in “Gender and Imperialism,” special issue, U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English Supplement 12 (1996): 48–83; and Sandra Wilson, “Family or State? Nation, War, and Gender in Japan, 1937–45,” Critical Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2006): 209–38. 16 For a sense of the popularity and inventiveness of marriage mediation in contemporary Japan, see Andrew McKirdy, “Kanagawa Woman Finds Success in Crowdfunding Matchmaking Quest,” The Japan Times, May 19, 2017, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/05/19/national/social-issues/kanagawa-woman-finds-success-crowdfunding-matchmaking-quest/#.WcLvXq2ZOQ4. 17 Kalman D. Applbaum, “Marriage with the Proper Stranger: Arranged Marriage in Metropolitan Japan,” Ethnology 34, no. 1 (1995): 37. 18 This situation changed upon the May 3, 1947, enactment of the postwar Constitution of Japan, which states, “Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis. With regard to choice of spouse, property rights, inheritance, choice of domicile, divorce and other matters pertaining to marriage and the family, laws shall be enacted from the standpoint of individual dignity and the essential equality of the sexes” (Article 24, Constitution of Japan). 19 Ezra Vogel, “The Go-Between in a Developing Society: The Case of the Japanese Marriage Arranger,” Human Organization 20, no. 3 (1961): 115–19. 20 Vogel, “The Go-Between in a Developing Society,” 119. 21 The earliest occurrence of the phrase that I have found is within a Home Ministry report dating to January 1938, which was the recommendation of an advisory committee that studied disabled veterans affairs during December 1937; see “<Besshi> Shōi gunjin hogo taisaku toshite kōkyū subeki jikō,” reprinted in Shōi Gunjin Hogo Taisaku Shingikai, ed., Shōi Gunjin Hogo Taisaku Shingikai gijiroku, dai-1-go (Tokyo, 1938), 21–22. 22 Edward J. Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853–1945 (Lawrence, KS, 2009), 197. 23 Nihon Shōi Gunjinkai, Nitchū Sensō, Taiheiyō Sensō no senshōbyōshazu to jittai ni kansuru chōsa hōkokusho (Tokyo, 2004), 33. 24 For the thirty-thousand-man membership as of January 1938, see “Dai-1-kai sōkai gijiroku,” in Shōi Gunjin Hogo Taisaku Shingikai gijiroku, dai-1-go, ed. Shōi Gunjin Hogo Taisaku Shingikai, 4. For the increase to fifty thousand members by June 1939, see the transcript of a radio broadcast about the Disabled Veterans Association that aired on June 2, 1939, later published as “Dai Nihon Shōi Gunjinkai no katsudō,” Hōsō nyūsu kaisetsu 62 (1939): 12. 25 For extended discussion of public assistance programs for disabled veterans established before July 1937, see Pennington, Casualties of History, chap. one. 26 The facility was founded as the Crippled Soldiers Institute (Haiheiin) in 1908 and renamed the Shōheiin in 1936. For the annual residential population through 1941, see the table “Hyō 1: Haiheiin, Shōheiin nyūinsha no iten,” in Yano Shin’ichi, “Shōi gunjin ryōyōsho no rekishi: Toku ni Hakone Ryōyōsho o chūshin toshite,” Odawara chihō shi kenkyū 20 (1997): 46. 27 Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, 2003), 21. 28 Teizo Toda, “Characteristics of the Japanese Family,” Contemporary Japan 8, no. 5 (1939): 618. 29 D. Colin Jaundrill, Samurai to Soldier: Remaking Military Service in Nineteenth-Century Japan, Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University (Ithaca, NY, 2016), 164–65. 30 Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army, 232–33. 31 Toda, “Characteristics of the Japanese Family,” 619. 32 See the table “Onkyū hō shikō rei” (May 27, 1938, revision) in Shōi gunjin hogo kankei reiki, ed. Shōhei Hogoin (Tokyo, 1939), 308–9. 33 See the table “Dai-40-hyō: Kon’in kensū (naichi),” in Jinkō seisaku no shiori: Tōkei sūji kara mita Nihon no jinkō, ed. Kōseishō Jinkō Mondai Kenkyūjō (Tokyo, 1941), 60. Japan’s Welfare Ministry attributed the 1937 spike to the widespread reporting of common-law marriages and unspecified effects of the China Incident (61). Emperor Hirohito ascended the imperial throne in 1926, inaugurating Japan’s Shōwa Era (1926–1989). 34 Pennington, Casualties of History, 148–52. 35 In a confidential report commissioned by the Home Ministry in December 1937, an external committee identified five areas needing improvement. Three of those areas—medical care, education, and occupations—targeted programs for disabled veterans themselves, while the other two areas, respectively, focused on the preferential treatment of disabled veterans by society and moral suasion directed toward society. The discussion shifted to the jurisdiction of the Welfare Ministry, which took up the task of evaluating the Home Ministry committee’s bare-bones recommendations. For a detailed account of these developments, see Pennington, Casualties of History, 139–46. For the Home Ministry report, see “<Besshi> Shōi gunjin hogo taisaku toshite kōkyū subeki jikō,” 21–22. 36 “Dai-1-kai tokubetsu iinkai gijiroku,” in Shōi Gunjin Hogo Taisaku Shingikai, ed., Shōi Gunjin Hogo Taisaku Shingikai gijiroku, dai-1-go, 41. 37 “Shōi Gunjin Hogo Taisaku Shingikai tōshin” (dated January 17, 1938), reprinted in Shōhei Hogoin, ed., Shōi gunjin hogo kankei reiki (Tokyo, 1939), 381–88. 38 For an overview of such undertakings, see Pennington, Casualties of History, chap. five. 39 See Thomas R.H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (New York, 1978), 39–43; and Pennington, Casualties of History, 151–52. 40 Neighborhood associations found in villages, towns, cities, and metropolitan areas were local affiliations that predated the war years and relied on household heads to coordinate community initiatives that ranged from street sweeping to waving off conscripts as they departed for military training. For the quotation, see Sally Ann Hastings, Neighborhood and Nation in Tokyo, 1905–1937 (Pittsburgh, 1995), 197. 41 Thomas R. H. Havens points out that the autonomous nature of neighborhood associations and their vaunted self-reliance undermined control from above; he writes, “the old social customs extolled by the state [and practiced by local associations] set limits on how fully it could control people’s lives, even in the midst of total war.” See Havens, Valley of Darkness, 43. 42 Samuel Hideo Yamashita cautions that perusing wartime Japanese diaries requires readers to “locate them in a specific time and place and understand them as a product of that time and place,” and that the historical context of those writings was fashioned by the state; see Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 (Lawrence, KS, 2015), 6. But, as illustrated in private diaries, the state’s direction of the people was not absolute. For selections from wartime diaries kept by everyday people on the home front, see Samuel Hideo Yamashita, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (Honolulu, 2005). 43 Shōhei Hogoin, “Shōi gunjin sōdan shokuin kōgiroku,” Naimu Kōsei jihō 3, no. 12 (1938): 61. 44 Fujiwara Takao, “Shōhei hogo jigyō to sono seishi,” in Shōi Gunjin Sōdan Shokuin Kōzakai kōgiroku, ed. Shōhei Hogoin (Tokyo, 1939), 2. 45 Fujiwara, “Shōhei hogo jigyō to sono seishi,” 14. 46 Chūō Shakai Jigyō Kyōkai, Nihon shakai jigyō nenpan (Shōwa 9-nenpan) (Tokyo, 1934), 109. 47 Mikuni no hana (Flowers of Our Country), the monthly newsletter of the Disabled Veterans Association, introduced the “Five Principles” in its July 1939 issue; see “Shōi gunjin gokun,” Mikuni no hana 31 (1939): 1. 48 Shōhei Hogoin, “Shōi gunjin kansha yūgū ni kansuru hyōgo,” Naimu Kōsei jihō 3, no. 5 (1938): 47. 49 Fujii Tadatoshi, Kokubō Fujinkai: Hinomaru to kappōgi (Tokyo, 1985), 151. 50 For the group’s membership, see the pamphlet Aikoku Fujinkai, Shōwa 15-nen no Aikoku Fujinkai o kaiko shite (Tokyo, 1941), 27. 51 Tsuyoshi Miyao, “Our Women in the Emergency,” Contemporary Japan 8, no. 5 (1939): 646. 52 The forty-year history of the Aikoku Fujinkai, which was published in July 1941, states that the group’s central leadership issued an instruction to trustees on October 20, 1938, announcing it would soon be opening counseling centers and supplemental facilities for marriage mediation. Accompanying text within a double-page spread about marriage mediation that appeared in an album of forty-year commemorative photographs states that the Aikoku Fujinkai began marriage mediation in earnest in January 1939. For the forty-year history, see Aikoku Fujinkai, Aikoku Fujinkai 40-nen shi (Tokyo, 1941), 788–89. For the album, see Aikoku Fujinkai, Aikoku Fujinkai 40-shūnen kinen shashinchō (Tokyo, 1942), 46–47. 53 Aikoku Fujinkai, Aikoku Fujinkai 40-shūnen kinen shashinchō, 46. 54 Okada Teiko, Byōinsen jūgunki (Tokyo, 1943), 24. The Japan Red Cross Society was a quasi-official organization; during peacetime it managed civilian-use hospitals with attached medical schools designed to train nurses for the purpose of being deployed with Japanese military forces should war break out. 55 Watanabe Matao, “Shōi gunjin no kekkon mondai,” in Sensō to kekkon, ed. Nishimuta Shigeo (Tokyo, 1942), 253. 56 Watanabe, “Shōi gunjin no kekkon mondai,” 254. 57 Watanabe, “Shōi gunjin no kekkon mondai,” 253. 58 Hagino Kensuke, “Shōi no mi ni kōmyō o!” in Kekkon shintaisei, ed. Ishida Hirohide and Takano Zen’ichirō (Tokyo, 1941), 409, 411. The book’s title alludes to the broad goal of Japan building a “new order” in East Asia. 59 For the ages of individuals who submitted applications between January 1939 and November 1940, see the chart “Nenrei oyobi shochi betsu,” in Aikoku Fujinkai, Shōwa 15-nen no Aikoku Fujinkai o kaiko shite, n.p. Applicants’ ages ranged from twenty to forty-two years for men and nineteen and thirty-nine years for women. Additionally, there were two male and ten female applicants of unknown age. The highest number of applicants per age was seventeen men at age twenty-eight (out of 121 male applicants) and sixteen women at age twenty-five (out of 130 female applicants). 60 Wounded servicemen figured more prominently in Western visual culture during World War I than World War II. For American representations, see John M. Kinder, “Iconography of Injury: Encountering the Wounded Soldier’s Body in American Poster Art and Photography of World War I,” in Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture, ed. Pearl James (Lincoln, 2009), 340–68; and John M. Kinder, “Marketing Disabled Manhood: Veterans and Advertising Since the Civil War,” in Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity, ed. Kathleen M. Brian and James W. Trent, Jr. (New York, 2017), 93–125. 61 Wakakuwa Midori, Sensō ga tsukuru josei zō: Dainiji Sekai Taisen-ka no Nihon josei dōin no shikakuteki puropaganda (Tokyo, 2000), 59. 62 Saijo Yaso, “Jūgo no hanabata,” Shufu no tomo 21, no. 11 (1937): 496–99; “Otto ni jū o tori, tsuma ha byakue no jūgun kangofu; Fūfu sorotte shussei homare no go-katei hōmon,” Fujin kurabu 18, no. 14 (1937): 226–34; Hasunuma Monzō, “Senbyōhei no tsuma ni atau,” Shufu no tomo 22, no. 5 (1938): 144–48. 63 Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (Honolulu, 2006), 18. 64 Taguchi Tokiko, “<Dokusha no taiken> Migi-ashi o ushinatta mazushii senshōsha to kekkon shite kōfuku na katei o kizukiageta taiken,” Shufu no tomo 22, no. 7 (1938): 356–60. 65 “Kansha ni hiraku uruhashiki aikoku no hana! Byakue no yūshi ni totsuida 2-josei no shuki,” Fujin kurabu 20, no. 3 (1939): 142–44. 66 Yamaguchi Suenobu, a poet, gained acclaim in 1939 when his poem “Byakue-dama” (White-Robed Soul) was set to music by composer Akemoto Kyōsei and recorded by the “one-armed baritone corporal” Itō Takeo, a veteran whose arm had been severed in China. The title refers to the white gowns worn by wounded servicemen, who were popularly called “white-robed heroes” (byakue yūshi). Yamaguchi wrote his own memoir, which focused on his experiences peripheral to his wounding but did not discuss his marriage. For his memoir, which includes an essay about the poem, see Yamaguchi Suenobu, Kasen o yuku: Taijisō gekisenki (Tokyo, 1939). 67 Yamaguchi Satono, Waga ai no ki (Tokyo, 1940), 6. 68 Yamaguchi, Waga ai no ki, 14–15. 69 Yamaguchi, Waga ai no ki, 16–17. 70 In the cinematic version directed by Toyoda Shirō, which deviates slightly from the memoir by adding or compositing a few characters and trimming scenes for pacing requirements, Satono is renamed Satoko, and Yamaguchi Suenobu is known as Yamada Sueo. The film script by Yagi Yasutarō appeared as “<Shinario> Waga ai no ki,” Eiga hyōron 1, no. 4 (1941): 130–45. 71 Kodera, Ai no kiroku, 2–17. 72 Kodera, Ai no kiroku, 24. 73 Kodera, Ai no kiroku, 28–32. 74 The city of Osaka initially hesitated to permit Obata to offer free marriage mediation services; it refused to recognize her initiative as a charitable enterprise because matchmaking businesses typically sought profit. One of Obata’s younger brothers intervened and helped to convince the city to issue her a charter. Obata Tadayoshi, who was his older sister’s designated heir, wielded political clout by being not only director of the Sumitomo Corporation’s Accounting Bureau but also vice-director of the Cabinet Planning Board, and he later served as the head of the Planning Division of the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro established the Imperial Rule Assistance Association in October 1940 to act as Japan’s singular statist political party. Until it dissolved in June 1945, the organization played a central role in coordinating neighborhood associations to support the war effort, among other responsibilities. For Tadayoshi’s role in helping his sister establish her marriage mediation center, see Kodera, Ai no kiroku, 32–38. 75 Kodera, Ai no kiroku, 57–58. 76 Kodera, Ai no kiroku, 61–62. 77 Kodera, Ai no kiroku, 77. 78 Kodera, Ai no kiroku, 108. 79 In late 1938, the Army, Navy, and Welfare ministries oversaw the creation of the Servicemen’s Support Association via the merger of three existing organizations that provided assistance to military men of various sorts. Branch offices managed by its dissolved predecessors gave the Servicemen’s Support Association an established foothold throughout Japan from January 1939 onward. The Army, Navy, Welfare, and Home ministries established local home-front service associations in mid-January 1939; these organizations promoted public service activities geared toward mobilizing public involvement in the war effort. The Shōhei Hogoin officially became the Gunji Hogoin on July 15, 1939. See Pennington, Casualties of History, 157–61. 80 Provisional Tokyo Number Three Army Hospital (Rinji Tōkyō Dai-3 Rikugun Byōin) was a sprawling complex located on the western outskirts of Tokyo in rural Sagamihara. Established in March 1938, the hospital was Japan’s premier medico-military facility for amputees and men with orthopedic and mobility issues. For an overview of the hospital and its programs, see Pennington, Casualties of History, chap. three. 81 For the full notice titled “Matters Concerning Spouse Mediation for Disabled Veterans” (Shōi gunjin no haigūsha assen ni kansuru ken), see “Shōi gunjin ni yoki hanayome o,” Mikuni no hana 56 (1941): 1. 82 There were 749 branch offices of the Disabled Veterans Association in April 1941; the number rose to 763 branches at the end of March 1942. See Gunji Hogoin, Shōwa 16-nendo gunjin engo jigyō gaiyō (Tokyo, 1943), 242, 249. 83 Chūō Shakai Jigyō Kyōkai, Nihon shakai jigyō nenpan (Shōwa 18-nenpan) (Tokyo, 1945), 99. This March 1945 publication, which focused on the years 1942 and 1943, was the only annual report issued by the Central Social Welfare Association to contain a section detailing marriage mediation for disabled veterans. And, it was the last Central Social Welfare Association annual report to be published before Japan’s defeat in August 1945. 84 In February 1942, the Aikoku Fujinkai, National Defense Women’s Association, and all other leading women’s associations merged to form the Greater Japan Women’s Association, which was under the control of the central government. According to Sandra Wilson, the Greater Japan Women’s Association valued motherhood and domestic responsibilities and remained torn over advocating women’s participation in patriotic and vocational activities outside of the home. In her assessment, despite boasting an all-female membership of over 20 million persons, “Women themselves do not appear to have been especially impressed with the organization” (231). It is unclear to what extent the Greater Japan Women’s Association embraced the cause of marriage mediation prior to the group’s dissolution in June 1945, but according to the Central Social Welfare Association, it managed seventeen marriage consultation centers between April 1941 and June 1942. For the Greater Japan Women’s Association, see Wilson, “Family or State? Nation, War, and Gender in Japan, 1937–45,” 209–38. For the number of its marriage consultation centers, see Chūō Shakai Jigyō Kyōkai, Nihon shakai jigyō nenpan (Shōwa 18-nenpan), 99. 85 Existing Japanese-language scholarship, too, currently recognizes the figures for 1941–1942 as the only available annual count of mediated marriages for the years 1940 through 1945. See Namase, “15-nen Sensō-ki ni okeru ‘shōi gunjin no kekkon assen’ undō oboegaki,” 334; and Takayasu, “Senjika ni okeru shōi gunjin kekkon hogo taisaku,” 56. 86 “Shōi no yūshi ni hanayome o,” Shashin shūhō 188 (1941): 2–3. Shashin shūhō was a mass-market publication of the Japanese government that touted public manifestations of patriotism. 87 “Ima ha tanoshii yūshi no ie,” Shashin shūhō 188 (1941): 4–5. 88 “Population Bureau Will Open in April,” Japan Times & Advertiser, February 4, 1941, 3; “New Marriage Service Is Opened as a Means of Increasing Population,” Japan Times & Advertiser, September 2, 1942, 1. 89 “Tokyo Marriage Bureaus Being Consulted by Many,” Japan Times & Advertiser, October 27, 1941, 2; “Officials to Toll Wedding Bells Oftener by Providing Funds, Clothes, Go-Betweens,” Japan Times & Advertiser, November 27, 1941, 2. 90 “Industrial Body to Aid Men Seeking Brides,” Japan Times & Advertiser (August 19, 1942): 1. 91 Yoshiko Miyake, “Doubling Expectations: Motherhood and Women’s Factory Work under State Management in Japan in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein (Berkeley, CA, 1991), 267–95. 92 “Mates for Wounded Need Firm Resolve,” Japan Times & Advertiser, February 5, 1941, 2. 93 Watanabe Matao, “Shōi gunjin no kekkon mondai,” in Sensō to kekkon, ed. Nishimuta Shigeo (Tokyo, 1942), 246–47. 94 “Mates for Wounded Need Firm Resolve,” 2. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Wives for the Wounded: Marriage Mediation for Japanese Disabled Veterans during World War II
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shaa011
DA - 2020-03-01
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