Summary Of Harp Of Burma By Michio Takeyama

In his 1946 book Harp of Burma, Michio Takeyama wrote about the adventures of a unique company of Japanese soldiers and their adventures across Burma. These soldiers returned home from World War II so cheerful and energetic that civilians thought the company had extra rations, but instead had kept up their morale through singing (Takeyama 1). Due to the book being published just a couple of years after the end of World War II and a focus of the book being the Buddhist culture of Burma, Takeyama contributed to a sense of false hope and amnesia that helped the Japanese people move on. He showed that there is an alternative way of thinking rather than that of the Japanese mindset and that it is possible to escape from the grasp of the Japanese …show more content…
Starting on page 46, the company of soldiers debated about which is better, that Japan required their youth to spend a year in the military or that Burma required their youth to go through religious training. The argument went so far as to question whether it might be better to have a country as relaxed and calm as Burma to have an Atomic bomb rather than a country like Japan (Takeyama 49). Preceding this topic, the company debated on whether Japan was truly more civilized than Burma or not. The argument was that even though Japan had the tools to be civilized, the Japanese are still savages at heart and that the Burmese are perfectly content while this war was brought to their country (Takeyama 48). Riggs brought up in his discussion about military service versus religious studies that because Mizushima decides to stay in Burma he is deciding that it is the best way for him to serve his home country (Riggs 346). So instead of blatantly picking a side, Takeyama chose to support Japan in a different way than going back to …show more content…
Even reading the book from a teenager’s point of view shows the main character abandoning his own country. On top of that, the Buddhist culture was so appealing that other Japanese soldiers chose to stay in Burma and completely change their lives rather than to return home to a dilapidated Japan. In a time like post-World War II, Japan needed as much support as it could internally get. From the reparations they had to pay out to the deaths they had, they needed a way to take their mind off of the war and look forward. Authors like Michio Takeyama did just this and this caused people to not only move on from the war, but to act like it never happened and ignore it completely, thus causing a sense of cultural amnesia about World War