Junpei Gomikawa

Gomikawa was born and raised in Dalian in colonial Manchuria, referring to himself as a "second generation Manchurian-Japanese".{{Citation |last=Hashimoto |first=Akiko |title=Japanese Narratives of Decolonization and Repatriation from Manchuria |date=2020 |url=https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_3 |work=The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization: Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination |pages=57–83 |editor-last=Eyerman |editor-first=Ron |place=Cham |publisher=Springer International Publishing |language=en |doi=10.1007/978-3-030-27025-4_3 |isbn=978-3-030-27025-4 |s2cid=213913935 |access-date=2022-10-12 |editor2-last=Sciortino |editor2-first=Giuseppe}}{{Cite book |last=Watt |first=Lori |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/71201757 |title=When empire comes home : repatriation in postwar Japan, 1945–1958 |date=2002 |publisher=Columbia University |isbn=978-0-493-85401-4 |oclc=71201757}} He enrolled in the Tokyo College of Commerce (today Hitotsubashi University) in 1933 but dropped out and entered the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages in 1936. In 1940, Gomikawa was arrested under suspicion of violating the Peace Preservation Law but nevertheless graduated and returned to Manchuria to take a job at the Anshan Ironworks Company, where he noted that the economic conditions were attractive for Japanese living in Manchuria, compared to Koreans, Chinese, and recent graduates living in Japan.{{Cite web |last= |first= |title=五味川純平 |url=https://kotobank.jp/word/%E4%BA%94%E5%91%B3%E5%B7%9D%E7%B4%94%E5%B9%B3-176041 |access-date=2022-10-12 |website=コトバンク |language=ja}} He was eventually drafted in 1942. Gomikawa was a soldier in the Kwantung Army, a unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, stationed on the border of the Soviet Union and Manchukuo.{{Cite book |last=Igarashi |first=Yoshikuni |title=Homecomings |chapter-url=https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7312/igar17770-005/html |chapter=Two. The Story of a Man Who Was Not Allowed to Come Home: Gomikawa Junpei and The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken) |date=2016-09-06 |pages=51–80 |publisher=Columbia University Press |isbn=978-0-231-54135-0 |language=en |doi=10.7312/igar17770-005}} Holding a below-officer rank, he survived a Soviet tank attack in which 154 men of his 158-person unit died.{{Cite book |last=Hicks |first=George L. |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1102469283 |title=Japan's war memories : amnesia or concealment? |date=2019 |isbn=978-0-429-44409-8 |location=London |oclc=1102469283}} According to Kobayashi, Gomikawa had worked as a labor supervisor in a mine where he witnessed executions.{{Cite book |last=Prince |first=Stephen |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DKdADwAAQBAJ |title=A Dream of Resistance: The Cinema of Kobayashi Masaki |date=2017 |publisher=Rutgers University Press |isbn=978-0-8135-9239-8 |pages=123–127 |language=en}} After surviving the Soviet offensive in August 1945, he returned to Japan in October 1947.

Prior to the publication of The Human Condition, a semi-autobiographical novel, Gomikawa had only published one short story and staged one play. He began working on The Human Condition in 1955 with the first volume released in August 1956 and immediately followed by the second. The final volume was published in February 1958, by which point it had sold millions of copies. The volumes were published by {{Nihongo3||三一書房|San’ichi shobō}}, a small publishing company part of the mutual support organization {{Nihongo3|The Thursday Association|木曜会|Mokuyōkai}} that was sympathetic to the Japanese Communist Party and were on the forefront of moderate left-wing publishing. San’ichi Shobō was the most active member of the Mokuyōkai in the late 1950s but struggled financially until the commercial success of The Human Condition.{{Cite journal |last=Ward |first=Vanessa B. |date=2006-09-01 |title=The spectre of the left: Iwanami shoten, ideology and publishing in early postwar Japan |url=https://doi.org/10.1080/10371390600883578 |journal=Japanese Studies |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171–184 |doi=10.1080/10371390600883578 |s2cid=143914456 |issn=1037-1397}}

The six-part novel was adapted into film by Masaki Kobayashi, with whom Gomikawa shared political and life experiences. Both had been stationed in Manchukuo, served in the Kwantung Army, and both were taken prisoner at the end of the war (Gomikawa by the Soviets, whereas Kobayashi was held in an American POW camp in Okinawa).{{Cite journal |last=Loska |first=Krzysztof |date=2015 |title=Kobayhashi Masaki and the Legacy of the World War II |url=http://www.silvajp.amu.edu.pl/Silva%2043444546.pdf#page=68 |journal=Silva Iaponicarum |issn=1734-4328}} Kobayashi, part of the Ninjin Kurabu (Carrot Club) production company, first heard of the novel from actress and club member Ineko Arima. Arima was the first one in the group to have read the novel before it became widely popular and soon convinced other members to read it. The company acted swiftly to buy the rights for a film adaptation, a week before the Shukan Asahi, a weekly publication, released a special issue on "hidden bestsellers" that paid special attention to Gomikawa's novel. The weekly noted that although Gomikawa was an unknown author and the novel was unserialized, unadvertised, and not broadcast on radio or television, it was avidly read across Japan in both rural and urban areas and was frequently passed around in labor union reading groups.

In an interview, Gomikawa commented that the principal character of the novel, Kaji, had many characteristics that were absent in the real members of the Japanese left, such as decisiveness, strength, and bravery; he also noted that real intellectuals are not as weak as people think.{{Cite journal |last=Wilson |first=Sandra |date=July 2008 |title=War, Soldier and Nation in 1950s Japan |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1479591408000016/type/journal_article |journal=International Journal of Asian Studies |language=en |volume=5 |issue=2 |pages=187–218 |doi=10.1017/S1479591408000016 |s2cid=56459943 |issn=1479-5914}} Kaji, who was not repatriated, resonated strongly with tens of thousands of families who were waiting for the return of their loved ones into the late 1950s. In James Orr's book on postwar Japan, Gomikawa received hundreds of letters from women asking if his writings reflected experiences their husbands and sons had lived through.

After the publication of the final volume of The Human Condition, Gomikawa published and serialized {{Nihongo|The Historical Experiment|歴史の実験}} in the monthly magazine Chūōkōron about a soldier in a defense unit on the Soviet-Manchuria border who barely survived a scene of carnage.

In June 1963 Gomikawa visited East Africa with the writer Noma Kanjirō, a key figure in the early anti-apartheid movement in Japan where they attended a south Africa Freedom Day in Dar es Salaam.{{Citation |last=Makino |first=Kumiko |title=Travelling for Solidarity: Japanese Activists in the Transnational Anti-apartheid Movement |date=2018 |url=https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60205-3_12 |work=Migration and Agency in a Globalizing World: Afro-Asian Encounters |pages=247–270 |editor-last=Cornelissen |editor-first=Scarlett |place=London |publisher=Palgrave Macmillan UK |language=en |doi=10.1057/978-1-137-60205-3_12 |isbn=978-1-137-60205-3 |access-date=2022-10-12 |editor2-last=Mine |editor2-first=Yoichi}}

Following the publication of The Human Condition, Gomikawa continued writing about the events of the war, including a widely read book on the history of the Nomonhan Incident following the lifting of the ban on its reportage.{{Cite journal |last=Tsuyoshi |first=Hasegawa |date=1987 |title=Review of Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/132482 |journal=Journal of Japanese Studies |volume=13 |issue=2 |pages=481–488 |doi=10.2307/132482 |jstor=132482 |issn=0095-6848}}

• {{Citation |last=Gomikawa |first=Junpei |title={{Nihongo3|人間の條件|Ningen no joken}} |year=1956–1958 |publisher=三一書房 |language=ja}}
• {{Citation |last=Gomikawa |first=Junpei |title={{Nihongo|The Historical Experiment|歴史の実験}} |year=1959 |publisher=中央公論社 |oclc=55658037}}
• {{Citation |last=Gomikawa |first=Junpei |title={{Nihongo3|人間の朝; 東アフリカ記行|Morning of Human Beings: On Travels in East Africa}} |year=1964 |publisher=河出書房新社 |oclc=22445834}}
• {{Citation |last=Gomikawa |first=Junpei |title={{Nihongo3|ノモンハン|Nomonhan}} |year=1978 |publisher=文芸春秋 |language=ja |oclc=10753683}}
• {{Citation |last=Gomikawa |first=Junpei |title={{Nihongo3|戦争と人間|Senso to ningen}} |year=1983–1984 |oclc=10753683|language=ja}}

• The collapse of the 'myth': the ambitions and dissolution of the Kwantung Army (Shinwa’ no hōkai: Kantōgun no yabō to hatan), 1988

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Category:1916 births

Category:20th-century Japanese novelists

Category:1995 deaths

Category:Writers from Dalian

Category:Japanese people from Manchukuo

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