Awaiting Manila

Awaiting Manila (マニラを望む, January 1943) is the principal surviving work from Terauchi Manjirō's wartime service as an army painter (jūgun gaka) attached to the Southern campaign forces in the Philippines. Made in the first weeks of 1943, in the brief and deceptive window between the Japanese capture of Manila and the long American counteroffensive that would destroy the city in 1945, the painting offers a meditative view from a forward position outside the city, with the distant silhouette of Manila bay laid in low across the canvas under a heavy sky. Unlike the more grandly heroic war pictures of Fujita Tsuguharu or Miyamoto Saburō, Terauchi's painting maintains the contemplative inwardness of the studio nudes he had been painting in Urawa: there are no figures of victory, no insignia, no visible event, only a long view across the gulf to a city the artist is approaching. The work has been frequently reproduced as an unusually quiet example of the jūgun gaka commission and as evidence of the way the most settled of the inter-war yōga painters carried their established manner unaltered through the war years.