Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (10 page)

Other racist stereotypes traveled from war to peace in comparable ways. Although defeat temporarily extinguished the superman mystique, it reinforced the perception of the Japanese as little men or lesser men. Stated conversely, victory over Japan reinforced the conceit of inherent white and Western superiority. The more precise associations of Japan's “lesser” stature, however—the primitive social relations and attitudes, the childishness of the populace both psychologically and politically, the collective neurosis—all now provoked a paternalistic response. The American overseers of Occupied Japan thought in terms of a civilizing mission that would eliminate what was primitive, tribal, and ritualistic—an old but idealistic colonial attitude indeed. They would guide an immature people with backward institutions toward maturity. The Japanese “children” now became pupils in General MacArthur's school of democracy, learners and borrowers of advanced United States technology, followers of U.S. Cold War policies. Where the Japanese psyche was tortured, the Americans would be healers.

These were not frivolous attitudes, any more than paternalism itself is necessarily frivolous. At the individual level, moreover, countless Japanese and Americans collaborated equitably in pursuit of common goals. Neither democratization and demilitarization nor—later—economic reconstruction and remilitarization were ethnocentric American goals forced on unwilling Japanese. The overall relationship, however, was inherently unequal and patronizing on the part of the Americans, and it is here that racist attitudes survived. U.S. policymakers at the highest level also were not above cynically manipulating Japanese racism to serve their own purposes. In 1951, when Japan's allegiance in the Cold War was still not entirely certain, for example, John Foster Dulles recommended that the Americans and British take advantage of Japanese feelings of “superiority as against the Asiatic mainland
masses” and play up the “social prestige” of being associated with the Western alliance. (In a fine example of a truly free-floating stereotype, Dulles and other American leaders also liked to emphasize that the Soviet menace could be better understood if one remembered that the Russians were an Asiatic people.)

On the Japanese side, defeat was bitter but peace was sweet, and certain attitudes associated with wartime racial thinking also proved adaptable to the postsurrender milieu. Proper-place thinking facilitated acceptance of a subordinate status vis-à-vis the victorious Allies, at least for the time being. In this regard it is helpful to recall that the “leading race” rhetoric of the war years was a relatively new ideology in Japan, and that for most of their modern history the Japanese had played a subordinate role in the world order. The militarism of the 1930s and early 1940s arose out of a desire to alter that insecure status, and it ended in disaster. To seek a new place in new ways after 1945 was in fact the continuation of a familiar quest.

In fascinating ways, the wartime fixation on purity and purification proved adaptable to this commitment to a new path of development. Individuals who had been exhorted to purge self and society of decadent Western influences before the surrender now found themselves exhorted to purge the society of militarism and feudalistic legacies. This sense of “cleansing” Japan of foul and reactionary influences was truly phenomenal in the early postwar years, and while this tapped popular aspirations for liberation, it also politicized the militarists' ideology of the pure self in undreamed-of ways. Universal “democratic” values now became the touchstone of purity. And the guardians at the gates, to cap these astounding transmogrifications, were the erstwhile American demons. The United States assumption of a military role as protector of postwar Japan was a hard-nosed, rational policy, but from the Japanese perspective it had a subtle, almost subconscious logic. The fearsome demons of Japanese folklore, after all, were often won over and put to use by the ostensibly weaker folk.

The transitional adaptations of proper place, purity, and the
demon more or less deracialized the wartime fixations. They did not, however, eliminate racial tensions latent in the structure of institutionalized inequality that has characterized postwar U.S.-Japan relations until recently. So long as Japan remained conspicuously inferior to the United States in power and influence, the structure and psychology of what is known in Japan as “subordinate independence” could be maintained. When relations of power and influence changed, neither side could be expected to rethink these fundamental relationships without trauma. The great change came in the 1970s, when it became apparent—abruptly and shockingly for almost everyone concerned—that Japan had become an economic superpower while America was in relative decline. In this situation, war talk became fashionable again: talk of trade wars; ruminations on who really won the Pacific war; doomsday warnings of a new yen bloc, a seriously rearmed Japan, a “financial Pearl Harbor.” In American rhetoric, the simian subhumans were resurrected as “predatory economic animals,” the old wartime supermen returned as menacing “miraclemen,” garbed in Western business suits but practicing sumo capitalism. Japanese, in turn, often in high government positions, decried America's demonic “Japan bashing” and at the same time attributed their country's accomplishments to a “Yamato race” homogeneity and purity that “mongrelized” America could never hope to emulate.
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As times change, the malleable idioms of race and culture, power and status, change with them. They never completely disappear.

Since 1945 a great deal of international attention has been devoted to imperial Japan's wartime atrocities against the peoples of China and Southeast Asia, against Anglo-American prisoners of war, and against hundreds of thousands of the nation's brutalized Korean colonial subjects. The number of books, articles, films, symposiums, exhibitions, permanent museums, and now websites devoted to one or another aspect of this barbaric conduct is beyond counting. This stain on the nation's reputation is indelible
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It is vastly harder to reconstruct and recall how the Japanese were socialized to see their invasion of China and subsequent attack on the United States and European colonial powers as a just and even holy war
(seisen),
the very opposite of atrocious. Modern societies are not mobilized for war in the name of committing aggression. Losers do not get to propagate the propaganda that made them willing to fight and die. No one, whether winner or loser, really wants to revisit all the beautiful lies. Indeed, to attempt to do so runs the risk of being regarded as an apologist for, or even denier of, all those grievous war crimes. What becomes lost in this averted gaze is any meaningful understanding of how men, women, and children become harnessed to the war machine
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It can be plausibly argued that no nation in World War II launched a more sophisticated propaganda blitz domestically than the Japanese. Academics assisted the state's rabid ideologues in ransacking the classical
literary tradition for ornate tracts and a cascade of evocative slogans. Talented composers and lyricists churned out what may well be the most robust, melodic, and romantic body of war songs of any of the belligerents. Most of Japan's top writers and artists were recruited to contribute to the war effort, as were the most creative young filmmakers. The visual propaganda of the period from 1937 to 1945 was stunning—but has remained largely unseen and forgotten since the war ended
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One example of the visual beautification of the war effort that had no real counterpart elsewhere was the introduction of martial themes into textiles worn in the form of traditional garments. Particularly on festive occasions, boys, men, and even women could literally wrap themselves in aestheticized patriotism. These textiles remained virtually unknown even to present-day Japanese until recently, and were the subject of a pathbreaking exhibition at Bard College in 2005, curated by Jacqueline Atkins. The essay that follows appeared in the lavish catalog to that exhibition as a background piece on the beautification of the war, in which these textiles were but one tiny part
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S
o much depends on the eye of the beholder. World War II in Asia is a good example. For most Americans, the beginning of that war, like its end, is perfectly clear. Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, marks the beginning. August 14, 1945—when Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's capitulation following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—marks the end. The British and their Commonwealth compeers would more or less agree, although the indelible image they usually associate with the onset of all-out war in Asia is the fall of England's colonial enclave Singapore in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack.

From an Asian perspective, however, the war began much earlier. Indeed, the trial of accused war criminals that was convened by the victorious Allied Powers in Tokyo in 1946 as counterpart to the Nuremberg Trial of German leaders was premised on the prosecution's
charge that Japanese policymakers had pursued a “common plan or conspiracy” to wage “wars of aggression” ever since 1928.

No serious scholar today would endorse this simplistic conspiracy thesis, which so blithely ignores imperialist rivalries in Asia and the collapse of the capitalist world order in the Great Depression that began in 1929. At the same time, no one can ignore the fact that the so-called Manchurian Incident of 1931 marked the beginning of a new level of Japanese aggression and expansion on the Asian continent that led, seemingly inexorably, to all-out war with China six years later. From the Asian perspective, the “Pacific War” that began with Pearl Harbor and Singapore and ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki was simply the final stage in a fifteen-year war.

The 1931 Manchurian Incident itself began with a bogus
casus belli
—a plot by officers in Japan's elite Kwantung Army that involved blowing up a small portion of the Japanese-controlled South Manchurian Railway and attributing the nefarious deed to the Chinese. This led to Japan's takeover of the three Chinese provinces north of the Great Wall collectively known as Manchuria. And this, in turn, led to establishment of a puppet regime (“Manchukuo”) under “Emperor” Puyi, scion of the former Manchu ruling dynasty that reigned over China until the early twentieth century.

In 1933 Japan withdrew from the League of Nations after that international body condemned the takeover of Manchuria, and in 1936 the now isolated Japanese, in the name of fighting international Communism, entered into an Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany. In 1940, three years after plunging into all-out war with China, Imperial Japan joined Germany and fascist Italy in the so-called Tripartite Pact better known to the world as the Axis Alliance.

Just as it was the Soviet Union that suffered the most catastrophic losses on the Western front in World War II, so it was China that endured the greatest suffering and loss of life in the war in Asia. Unlike the conspiratorial incident that precipitated the takeover of Manchuria in 1931, the eruption of all-out war
in China in July 1937 did not involve a plot on the Japanese side. Rather, relations had become so volatile by this time that a minor incident involving Chinese and Japanese troops near Peking quickly escalated out of control. War may well have been inevitable; we can never say for sure. Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism were on a collision course, but the conflagration that erupted in 1937 was not planned.

For practical reasons, neither China nor Japan formally declared war in 1937. Under American “neutrality” legislation, this would have made both sides ineligible to obtain crucially needed military-related matériel from the United States. Despite such legal nicety—which enabled U.S. business interests to continue to feed the Japanese war machine while their government condemned Japan and extended aid to China—what the Japanese called the China Incident quickly turned ferocious and atrocious. Hard-line militarists predicted victory within six months over the technologically inferior and politically divided Chinese, and the emperor refused to grant an audience to more cautious Army General Staff officers.

Unexpectedly fierce Chinese resistance prompted Japan's civilian prime minister Konoe Fumimaro to observe, early in 1939, that Japan was actually engaged in a “war of annihilation.” And indeed it was. When battle-weary and undisciplined Japanese forces finally entered the Chinese capital of Nanking in December 1937, after having fought their way up from Shanghai, they ran amok in the frenzy of rape, murder, and pillage the world knows today as the Rape of Nanking.
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In the end China did not fold, although the greater part of it—the whole vast territory along the seacoast, with a population of over 200 million—remained under Japanese occupation from 1937 to 1945. We will never know for certain how many Chinese were killed in Nanking, or in other Japanese atrocities, or in the course of the tenacious eight-year-long Chinese resistance outside the occupied areas. After the war, official estimates put the number of Chinese military dead at around 1.3 million and total fatalities at anywhere between 9 and 15 million, figures that
have been substantially (but not necessarily persuasively) enlarged in recent years. The numerology of victimization is itself a form of contemporary nationalism, but the number of Asians who perished as a consequence of Japanese aggression in China, and later in Southeast Asia, was incontestably huge.

Where the Japanese and American war dead are concerned, we can speak with greater certainty. Approximately 2 million Japanese fighting men died between 1937 and the end of the war in 1945, out of a population that originally numbered a little more than 70 million. At least 700,000 civilians also perished, most of these deaths occurring in 1945 and the immediate aftermath of the war—in the American air raids on major Japanese cities, in the devastating Battle of Okinawa, and in the perilous and chaotic withdrawal from Manchuria after Japan's defeat. On the American side, battle fatalities in the Pacific totaled approximately 100,000. Three times that number of American fighting men were killed in the European theater.
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