Patriotic March

The story

The "Patriotic March" was made in 1937 under the National Spiritual Mobilization policy adopted by the first cabinet of Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe in August that year. The newly founded Cabinet Information Division held a public contest for "a national song for the people to sing for ever", asking for a bright and stirring march that would praise Japan's true nature and the empire's eternal life and ideals. Of 57,578 entries it chose the words of Morikawa Yukio, who ran a printing business in Sakai, Tottori Prefecture, but its seven judges, among them the poets Sasaki Nobutsuna, Kitahara Hakushū and Shimazaki Tōson, reworked them so heavily that little of the original remained; Kitahara and Sasaki fell out over the revisions and never made peace. A second contest for the music drew about 10,000 entries (9,555 by another account) and chose the tune of Setoguchi Tōkichi, a former navy bandmaster known for the "Warship March", from a jury that included Kiyoshi Nobutoki, Kōsaku Yamada, Hashimoto Kunihiko and Konoe Hidemaro.

The song was first performed at the Prime Minister's official residence on 24 December 1937 and presented to the public at Hibiya Public Hall two days later. Because the Information Division left its copyright free, record companies competed to record it: Columbia alone is said to have made five versions, and Victor, King, Polydor, Teichiku and Taihei recorded it too, in more than twenty recordings with estimated sales of a million copies. Children holding its score and singing appeared on the cover of the first issue of the government's photographic weekly Shashin Shūhō on 16 February 1938. The Information Division also commissioned marches with the song in their trio, and Saitō Ushimatsu of the navy and Suma Yōsaku of the army each wrote one called "Aikoku". Opinion was divided: the conductor Konoe Hidemaro said that such a jury and such a method could never produce a true national march, and many found the words superficial, while Hashimoto Kunihiko judged Setoguchi's tune unequalled. Until the end of the war it was treated as Japan's de facto second national anthem.

During the Pacific War the Japanese army spread the song through the parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands it occupied, and for some forty years after the war many people abroad took it for Japan's representative song. The writer Agawa Hiroyuki recorded hearing a local guide sing it on Bougainville in 1966; in Palau it lives on with new words, and in 1994 Japanese reporters filmed veterans of Indonesia's war of independence singing it at independence celebrations. Imelda Marcos, wife of the Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, sang it with Empress Kōjun on a visit to Japan. At home, parodies mocking the wartime prime minister Tōjō Hideki circulated in secret, and phrases of the song were borrowed in other wartime songs.

In Hungary, Japan's ally in the war, the poet and translator Liszt Nándor (1899-1946) gave the song free Hungarian words around 1941, published in Budapest by Bárd Ferenc és Fia as "Hazaszeretet" ("Love of the homeland") and known by its opening as "Napkeleti vizeken". Recorded by the Patria male choir with the Hungarian Air Force band, it was broadcast in 1942 in Hungarian Radio's programme "Háborús dallamok" ("Wartime melodies") and sung in schools and youth choirs, so that some later remembered it as the Japanese national anthem. After 1945 it vanished from Hungarian public musical life; the Hungarian Berentés Tamás recalled singing it, in Hungarian and in Japanese, with a Japanese internee, Suzuki Kiyomi, in a Soviet camp.

What it says

A march in praise of Japan and its empire, written to order for the government's wartime mobilisation; bright and stirring.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words.