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War Responsibility and the Family in Japan: Kurahashi Ayako's My Father's Dying Wish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Philip Seaton  and
Kurahashi Ayako
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Extract

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This essay presents extracts from the autobiography of Kurahashi Ayako, My Father's Dying Wish (Paulownia Press 2009; original Japanese edition, Kempei datta chichi no nokoshita mono, Kobunken 2002). Kurahashi's father, who had been a military policeman during the war, made a dying wish in 1986 that an apology to the people of China be inscribed on his gravestone. The extracts of her testimony presented here clarify how the request forced her to confront the painful issue of taking individual responsibility for war actions, and how the decision by members of the war generation to testify must always be understood within the context of how that testimony will be received by family and friends.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 32 , August 2010 , e2
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2010

References

Notes

1 When getting married, women typically leave their parents' family register and join the family register of their husbands. Similarly, they are buried in their husband's family grave plot. People are not typically buried alone in single graves.

2 Bunka seishin igakusha Noda Masaaki – senjo no chichi no tsumi o meguru taiwa (NHK Educational, 20 January 1998). This programme is described in Sakurai Hitoshi (2005) Terebi wa sensō wo dō egaite kita ka (How has the War been Depicted on Television?), Tokyo: Iwanami, pp. 354-358.

3 On the night of 9-10 March 1945, a US Air Force incendiary bombing raid destroyed seventeen square miles of downtown Tokyo and killed around 100,000 people.

4 Kurahashi later discovered that this ‘restaurant’ had a more sinister function. See the Afterword to the English Edition.

5 These are issues explored in much more detail in Philip Seaton, “Family, Friends, Furusato: ‘Home’ in the Formation of Japanese War Memories” and “Do you really want to know what your uncle did? Coming to terms with relatives' war actions in Japan” in Oral History 43.1 (2006), pp. 53-60.