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Dying for a laugh: post-1945 Japanese service comedies

One of the difficulties of examining war comedies, or comedy films with war-related themes, lies in the fact that war itself has not conventionally been considered humorous. Adequately dealing with the war comedy film genre is complex in that it blends two seemingly oppositional notions—humor and violence. Wartime regimes, to the extent that they even recognize comedy, have generally understood it for its ‘usefulness’ in raising the spirits of soldiers and thereby invigorating ‘the war machine’. Yet comedy was not only a form of emotional release or comfort for soldiers and/or homefront audiences, it was often used to lampoon and critique war as films like Shoulder Arms (1918), Duck Soup (1933), The Great Dictator (1940) and many others suggest. It was precisely because of this ambiguity that the military elite in wartime Japan generally regarded both comedy and filmmaking with suspicion. Transforming comic entertainment from a decadent luxury at a time when ‘luxury was the enemy’ into an indispensable part of mobilization for ‘total war’ was serious business [3]. Ironically, it was not until after the war that Japanese filmmakers were able to fully explore the war using the Japanese war comedy (guntai kigeki) genre. This article examines two postwar Japanese war comedy series—Nitôhei Monogatari (1955–1961) and Haikei Tennô Heika-sama (1963–1964)—in order to analyze ways in which Asia is both remembered and forgotten in the construction of a postwar Japanese identity. Recent scholarship on Japanese culture of the postwar era suggests that Japanese victimization discourse is a crucial element effecting the establishment of postwar narratives of Japanese national identity [4]. Similarly, the victimization of ordinary Japanese by their military leaders is also a dominant theme in many warthemed comedies produced in the postwar. Whereas scholarly interest in ‘antiwar’ film dramas is relatively high, postwar Japanese war comedies have remained largely unexplored [5]—too frivolous for serious film scholarship and too heavy for a growing