Japan’s Enabled Disabled Veterans: Mobilizing “Workplace Heroes” during the Second World War

Faced with an unprecedented numerical surge in battle casualties with physically and financially destabilizing war wounds, in mid-1938 the Japanese state began to administer and coordinate a wide variety of vocational rehabilitation, job training, and work placement services for disabled ex-servicemen of the Second World War (1937-1945). In conjunction with private vocational rehabilitation support associations such as the Accomplishment Company (Keiseisha), the state’s new Wounded Soldiers Protection Agency (Shōhei hogoin) inaugurated career counseling at homefront military hospitals and established vocational training centers designed to mobilize disabled veterans for work. On the one hand, such endeavors earnestly sought to restore the physical, vocational, and spiritual fortitude of war-wounded men; on the other, placing so-called “workplace heroes” (shokuba no yūshi) into factories and fields cannily brought about the patriotic re-mobilization of male bodies to counter the demands of total war.

My paper examines the philosophies and objectives behind the wartime development of vocational guidance and job-related social services for Japanese veterans with physical disabilities and surveys manifestations of such programs. Ultimately, these state-sponsored initiatives were undone by the postwar Allied occupation of Japan (1945-1952), which enacted welfare policies geared for all Japanese people with disabilities, not ex-servicemen alone. But, before they disappeared, wartime measures for integrating disabled veterans into workplaces enabled those men to begin newly configured, active lives in their local communities. Although my research forefronts the institutional structure of these programs, my conclusions are strengthened by case studies drawn from official reports and popular periodicals that convey the aspirations and experiences of “workplace heroes.” Taken together, my paper argues that disabled veterans became valued figures within both Japanese society and Japan’s national war effort during World War II thanks to the conjoined implementation of public and private vocational support services for war-wounded men.