Japanese Army

The Japanese Army is presented not through a campaign narrative but through the personal history of Shozaburo Takitani, a jazz trombonist who cultivated friendships with high-ranking officers in wartime Shanghai. Those relationships helped make his life unusually comfortable, while the end of the war turned his wartime associations into a danger. The Army thus belongs to the book’s larger account of history as a force that can pass through a person’s life without being understood or consciously confronted, yet leave consequences that endure across generations.

Wartime Connections in Shanghai

Four years before the Second World War began, Shozaburo left Tokyo for Shanghai, where he built a life playing trombone in nightclubs. He maintained cordial relations with high-ranking Japanese Army officers, as well as Chinese millionaires and other influential people profiting from the war through obscure channels. Many of these associates carried pistols and took precautions when entering or leaving buildings; Shozaburo, by contrast, was protected by his ability to make useful friends and by the goodwill he inspired. His Army connections helped ensure that problems were dealt with and that life in Shanghai remained easy for him.

The narrative emphasizes the gap between the scale of the conflict and Shozaburo’s personal orientation. He continued to play music, eat regularly, and pursue his social life while the Japanese invasion of China and other defining events of the war unfolded. He possessed little inclination to reflect on history or his place within it. The Army appears as part of the immediate social world that sheltered him, while the war itself remained, in his view, remote from ordinary daily routine.

The Postwar Reversal

When the war ended, the same wartime associations that had helped Shozaburo now drew the attention of the Chinese Army. He was imprisoned for a long period. Other Japanese prisoners were taken from their cells and executed without trial, and Shozaburo came to expect that he, too, would die. He tried to accept that possibility rather than protest it, reflecting on the life he had already lived as he waited in his cell.

Shozaburo ultimately became one of only two Japanese prisoners to leave the prison alive and return to Japan. His survival does not restore the ease of his Shanghai years: he came home emaciated and without possessions in the spring of 1946, nine months after the war ended. The narrative makes the turn from wartime privilege to imprisonment a consequence of political relationships whose meaning had changed with the defeat of Japan.

Private Life and Historical Aftermath

The postwar consequences continue beyond Shozaburo’s return. 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. Shozaburo was left alone, but he met these losses without a strong outward emotional response, treating solitude as something that life eventually imposed. His subsequent work with a jazz band at American military bases shows him rebuilding a livelihood through music and personal contacts rather than through any sustained reckoning with the wartime past.

The book’s framing of the 1960s as a vivid but already receding historical age provides a contrast to Shozaburo’s experience. The younger generation’s account of its own moment emphasizes energy, immediate causes, and the sense that reality could be grasped directly. Shozaburo’s story, by comparison, shows how war’s causes and consequences exceed an individual’s understanding: he benefited from his ties to Japanese Army officers, was later imprisoned in the altered political order, and returned to a Japan in which his family and former life had largely vanished. The organization’s significance in the narrative lies in this passage from public history into private circumstances, not in a detailed account of its military structure or operations.