What do apples represent in post-WW2 Japan?
Understand that in the immediate post-WWII years, Japanese society (particularly the part of Japanese society that was urban) was the throes of economic destitution and physical starvation. Thousands of Japanese died because of undernutrition, tens of thousands suffered from malnutrition, and hundreds of thousands consistently felt hunger pains. Hunger pains hurt. Bureaucrats did an abysmal job trying to distribute food rations to the starving masses they were supposed to provide over. Food stockpiles leftover from the war were plundered by former soldiers and officers. Domestic food production being diverted to sale at exorbitant prices in the black and gray markets. In this culture of defeatism and despair, or "kyodatsu," many gazed longingly at those patches of green maintained by the American Occupation, filled with apple trees ripe for fruitful harvest, but for the victors and not for the losers.
The apple was a fruit of forbidden luxury made even more luxurious and forbidden by the circumstances. This longing to taste its sweetness, never mind the substance of anything that was edible, stood for a repudiation of every suffering that the Japanese people now had to endure because of the Imperials: its chauvinism, its morality, its militarism, etc.
The apple was a fruit of forbidden luxury made even more luxurious and forbidden by the circumstances. This longing to taste its sweetness, never mind the substance of anything that was edible, stood for a repudiation of every suffering that the Japanese people now had to endure because of the Imperials: its chauvinism, its morality, its militarism, etc.