Japanese Memory

G.I.s who wandered into Tokyo's barnlike Ueno Museum last week saw themselves as the Japs had once tried to see them--reeling back in defeat.

The Japs did almost as much as any government--perhaps more than the U.S.* ;to commemorate their war in oils. As early as 1938 the military began combing its files on Japan's 20,000 registered artists (most of whom specialize in still life), and chose 100 to glorify the Rising Sun. Their work, on exhibition last week, was as painstakingly photographic and heroic as modern Soviet painting. Technically it was perhaps the equal of state-sponsored war painting in Russia, Britain and the U.S.

Victory Preferred. Like other combat artists, Japanese painters moved with the troops. Three were killed in China (one by a bullet which pierced his sketch board), and several more went down with ships in the South Pacific. But Japanese artists usually stayed well behind the front lines, worked from photographs or imagination.

All but a few pictures illustrated Japanese triumphs. Among the best was Raid on Pearl Harbor (painted from an aerial photograph) by Fujita, a little man in bangs and Harold Lloyd spectacles who once wowed Paris with his brush drawings of cats and catlike women. Other standouts: Junkichi Mukei's Bataan Death March and Hoshin Yamaguchi's General Attack on Hong Kong, which had an Oriental delicacy of line only partly obscured by smoke from the burning city.

Some of the pictures, like Kei Sato's fierce tangle of men and bayonets entitled Deadly Struggle in the Jungle, were mere studio nightmares. Sato had pictured the U.S. enemy in World War I uniforms, with gas masks and doughboy helmets. He based his ideas of U.S. equipment on obsolete materiel the Japs captured in the Philippines.

To G.I.s, the few paintings of Japanese defeat seemed absurdly dignified. Renzo Kita's Last Moments of Admiral Yamaguchi showed the Admiral among his officers on the flaming flight deck of the aircraft carrier Hiryo, preparing with a tight smile to toast the Emperor in sake.

During the war the canvases were first displayed before Hirohito, then exhibited in groups of 30 or 40 at museums throughout the country. When U.S. bombers began coming over, the pictures were scattered for safekeeping. Occupation authorities started collecting them last February, have so far found 151 of the 196 known to have been painted.

Last week's show was for conquerors only. White-helmeted M.P.s stood at the museum doors to bar any nostalgic Japs.

*In 1943 the War Department commissioned 42 painters, sent some to war areas. Congress refused to appropriate $125,000 to keep them painting. LIFE eventually took over the job.

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