Shanghai is the city where Shozaburo Takitani’s prewar escape from Tokyo became a life of jazz, social ease, and wartime detachment—and where the connections that had served him well eventually became dangerous. His departure, imprisonment, and return make Shanghai more than a backdrop: it is the setting of a life first enlarged by opportunity and then abruptly narrowed by history.

Arrival and attachment

A fairly well-known jazz trombonist, Shozaburo left Tokyo four years before the Second World War broke out because of a problem involving a woman. Rather than simply relocate, he went to China with only his trombone. In those days, Shanghai was a day’s boat ride from Nagasaki; on the journey there, he stood aboard a boat moving up the Yangtze River and saw the city’s avenues in the morning light. He fell in love with Shanghai at once, reading its promise of a bright future. He was twenty-one.

The contrast with Tokyo was decisive. Shozaburo had left behind no possessions in Japan that he regretted losing, and Shanghai seemed better suited to his personality. The city offered not a reflective reconsideration of his past but a place to begin again on his own terms, with music as his principal occupation.

A life in the wartime city

Shozaburo spent the war playing trombone in Shanghai nightclubs. The Japanese invasion of China, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombings of Japan remained, in his view, events happening somewhere far away. He gave little thought to history or to his own relation to it; what mattered was being able to play, eat regularly, and have women nearby. The narrative presents this detachment not as political understanding but as a characteristic absence of introspection.

His youth, musical ability, and personal charm made him conspicuous in Shanghai, while his talent for making useful friends brought him into the company of high-ranking Japanese Army officers, Chinese millionaires, and other influential people profiting from the war. Their protection made his life easy: when difficulties arose, they opened doors for him. The same circle that sheltered him, however, tied his good fortune to wartime networks whose consequences would outlast the conflict.

Imprisonment and departure

After the war, Shozaburo’s associations drew the attention of the Chinese Army, and he was imprisoned for a long time. Other prisoners were repeatedly taken from their cells and executed without trial. He expected that he, too, might die, but accepted the possibility with relative calm, reflecting that he had already lived as he wanted and had little grounds to complain. In confinement, he watched clouds through the small window and recalled the women he had known, while executions continued outside his cell.

He ultimately became one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave alive and return home. As the boat carried him away and Shanghai receded, he wondered at the unintelligibility of life. His departure ended the period in which the city had seemed to guarantee possibility; survival did not give him an explanation for the reversal.

The city’s afterlife in Japan

Shozaburo returned to Japan in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war ended, emaciated and without possessions. His parents had died when their home was destroyed in the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 1945, and his brother had disappeared on the Burmese front. He experienced a sense of absence but did not grieve openly, taking solitude as an eventual condition of life. Shanghai had been the site of his escape and success; leaving it brought him back to a country in which his family and former home were gone.

In postwar Japan, he resumed his musical work, forming a small band that played at American military bases. A jazz-loving American major supplied records and provisions, and Shozaburo continued to build a life through music and personal connections. Shanghai therefore remains central to his history even after he has left it: it explains both the ease with which he had once moved through a world of influential acquaintances and the wartime associations that led to imprisonment. The city’s promise is inseparable from the instability that followed.