Students Off to War

Held in Kyoto University, Students Off to War (Gakuto shutsujin, 1944) is Suda Kunitarō's principal contribution to the official cycle of sensō kiroku-ga (war record painting) and one of the most reluctant images of the entire wartime commission. The large canvas depicts the October 1943 send-off ceremony held in the Kyoto University assembly hall for the conscripted students of the university, who, under the abolition of the previous student deferral, were being despatched to the imperial military as officer cadets. Suda — then in his early fifties and resident in Kyoto throughout the war — paints the event in a deeply shadowed interior, with the ranked rows of dark-uniformed students reading as a single block of slate-black against the warm umber and oxide-red of the hall, and a single, washed-out shaft of light falling from above on the standing figure of the rector. The painting is conspicuous within the genre for its absence of military spectacle: where the canonical war pictures by Fujita Tsuguharu and Miyamoto Saburō stage scenes of combat or triumph, Suda's canvas dwells on the moment of departure as a near-funereal act, and it has come to be read in the postwar period as a quietly dissenting picture and as the document of a generation's loss.