The homefront and the battlefront

The climactic scene of the film Rikugun (Army), produced in 1944, shows a platoon of soldiers marching through town, about to leave for the battlefront. A middle-aged woman fights her way through a crowd composed largely of women in kimono and white aprons. She struggles to keep up with the parade, unwilling to let her newly conscripted son out of her sight. She has raised her son to be a loyal subject and soldier, like his father and grandfather before him, but this does not stop her from shedding a tear on farewelling him. The self-sacrificing mother in this scene embodies the ideal of femininity in the wartime period, while her son represents the ideal of patriotic manhood. The scene demonstrates the complexity of women's involvement in support for the war effort and suggests that devotion to national causes was not achieved without conflict – for patriotic mothers, or their sons.

These gendered forms of nationalist identification were produced after several decades of state management of emotion. Such processes, however, also had their critics. In the 1900s, socialist women had criticised the activities of the Patriotic Women's Association (Aikoku Fujinkai), while Yosano Akiko's pacifist poem of 1904, ‘Do not give up your life’ (Kimishinitamau koto nakare) had dramatised the contradictions between familial feeling and patriotic duty, as we have seen above.