Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (12 page)

Fig. 3-3. Child's kimono (detail), “Nanking Occupied.” Japan 1937. Printed wool muslin; 25'' x 28
⅜
''. Collection Jacqueline M. and Edward G. Atkins, New York. Courtesy of Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture; New York. Photographer: Bruce White. This celebratory design for a boy's kimono includes a military balloon trailing a banner proclaiming “Nanking Occupied.” The capital of Republican China, Nanking was taken by the Japanese in mid-December 1937.

In this patriotic milieu, public figures and the media focused overwhelmingly on the hardships and triumphs of “our troops.” The conquest of vast reaches of China, essentially completed by 1938, unfolded as a succession of hard-won battles. The fall of Nanking was portrayed at home as a stunning, sterling victory—not a massacre, certainly not a “rape” (
Fig. 3-3
). Governance of the vast occupied area of China that followed was carried out through a collaborationist National Government of China ensconced in Nanking under the well-known politician Wang Ching-wei. As the propagandists would have it, Japan was this administration's generous mentor in collaborative nation-building. “Bandits and Communists” led the Chinese resistance that operated out of the hinterlands, where Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek had established a temporary new capital at Chungking while Mao Tse-tung directed Communist guerrilla activity from Yenan.

Similarly, the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor and the American, British, and Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia was presented as a defensive act against powers that supported the enemy in China and threatened to cut Japan off from essential resources
and to thwart its destiny as the leader of a prosperous Asia. “It has been truly unavoidable and far from Our wishes that Our Empire has been brought to cross swords with America and Britain,” the emperor declared in his rescript announcing the expanded war to his subjects on December 8 (Japan time). “More than four years have passed,” he continued, “since China, failing to comprehend the true intentions of Our Empire, and recklessly courting trouble, disturbed the peace of East Asia and compelled Our Empire to take up arms. Although there has been established the National Government of China, with which Japan had effected neighborly intercourse and cooperation, the regime which has survived at Chungking, relying upon American and British protection, still continues its fratricidal opposition. Eager for the realization of their inordinate ambition to dominate the Orient, both America and Britain, giving support to the Chungking regime, have aggravated the disturbances in East Asia. Moreover these two Powers, inducing other countries to follow suit, increased military preparations on all sides of Our Empire to challenge Us.”

After more rhetoric along these lines, the emperor concluded with these words: “The hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors guarding Us from above, We rely upon the loyalty and courage of Our subjects in Our confident expectation that the task bequeathed by Our forefathers will be carried forward and that the sources of evil will be speedily eradicated and an enduring peace immutably established in East Asia, preserving thereby the glory of Our Empire.”

The rescript was reissued for the emperor's subjects to reread on the eighth day of each month until the end of the war.
⁴

In retrospect, escalation of the China war into an Asia-Pacific war involving the United States and European colonial powers was an act of desperation if not outright insanity. At the time, however, Japan's leaders deemed this wider war unavoidable if Japan were not to be reduced to the status of a “fourth-class” nation. The Allied powers, it was argued, preoccupied with the Nazi onslaught in Europe, would be inclined to negotiate some sort of settlement
that would enable Japan to retain access to Southeast Asian resources and suppress the tenacious resistance in China.

Japan's ability to bring the Western powers to the negotiating table, the argument continued, would be strengthened by indigenous Asian support for the noble goal of liberation from colonial oppression. By the time the emperor delivered his December 1941 declaration of war, the “white” enemy in Asia had been conflated with the Chinese resistance into a handy alphabetic shorthand. Japan, it was said, was being strangled by the “ABCD” enemy—the Americans, British, Chinese resistance, and Dutch. The Americans and Dutch controlled the Philippines and Indonesia, respectively, and the British were colonial overlords of Hong Kong, Malaya (including Singapore), Burma, and India. Once Japan stood up firmly against them, the propagandists promised, other Asians would rise up in support. Were the Japanese not, after all, liberators? (
Fig. 3-4
)

They were not, but this pipe dream was not entirely divorced from plausibility. Two hundred million Chinese, after all, had submitted to Japanese control. As it turned out, small “independence” armies of Burmese and Indians also bought into the liberation rhetoric and threw their lot in with the Japanese, and the Philippines and Indonesia did produce their native collaborators. (The Japanese had already negotiated the takeover of France's colonies in Indochina after the fall of France to Germany in 1940.) To Japanese fighting men and their families and supporters back home, the notion that their deeds would bring about the expulsion of Western imperialism and the “rise of Asia” clarified and ennobled the great sacrifices they were being called upon to make.

The Japanese campaign against Western and Communist influences in Asia extended to the domestic scene as well, where the “thought police” of the Home Ministry devoted great energy to ferreting out “dangerous thoughts.” In the 1920s, so-called Peace Preservation legislation had targeted Communist organizers and left-wing intellectuals in particular. By the late 1930s, the definition of dangerous views had been expanded to include “Anglo-American thought” in general. What this entailed was eventually spelled out in lengthy official tomes such as
Cardinal Principles of the National Polity
(
Kokutai no Hongi
, 1937) and
The Way of the Subject
(
Shinmin no Michi
, 1940). A cartoon published in the officially approved humor magazine
Manga
in May 1942 captured the thrust of “Purging One's Head of Anglo-Americanism” in an unusually graphic manner. It depicted a young woman combing flakes of dandruff from her scalp—the scruff being variously identified as “extravagance,” “selfishness,” “hedonism,” “liberalism,” “materialism,” “money worship,” “individualism,” and “Anglo-American ideas.”
⁵

Fig. 3-4. Government poster, Japan, c. 1943 (reproduction). Private Collection, New York. Courtesy of Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture; New York.

This poster aimed at foreign audiences captures official propaganda about liberating Asia from American, British, and Dutch (“A,” “B,” and “D”) oppression and the Chinese (“C”) resistance to Japan's “noble” mission in China.

Such broad-brush attacks on Anglo-American values and character traits served several functions. Portraying the Western enemy as incorrigibly decadent and consumed by egoistic concerns did more than just incite contempt for the foe. It reinforced the wishful belief that the Americans and British would be unwilling and unable to mount a prolonged military response to Japan's escalated aggression in Asia. At the same time, these “national character” polemics laid the ground for trumpeting so-called traditional Japanese virtues. Ideologues and propagandists ransacked the past for usable images and ideas—and came up with the cherry blossom, for example, and the mystique of a unique Yamato spirit (
Yamato damashii
) and a great deal of flowery language about purity. Medieval texts provided highly idealized codes concerning the “way of the warrior” (
bushid
ō
)—prose easily adaptable to positing spiritual and aesthetic aspects of war that, it was declared, no other people or culture could ever hope to truly understand or emulate.
⁶

More potent yet, the old writings provided fodder for high rhetoric about a putative Imperial Way (
K
ō
d
ō
) that wedded loyalty and filial piety under the inimitable aegis of a dynasty that traced its lineage back to Amaterasu, the sun goddess. The imperial rescript of December 8, 1941, was redolent with such hot air. When it came to reinventing tradition for practical, contemporary purposes—a concept much beloved by present-day historians—no one surpassed the Japanese.

At the same time, however, the propagandists proved equally adept at dressing their holy war in the most up-to-date, futuristic
apparel. And at least initially—when there still seemed to be a real prospect of victory in China, or against the Americans and British who had proven so astonishingly inept in defending Pearl Harbor and Singapore—this positive, forward-looking vision was the real key to mobilizing popular sentiment. The Japanese populace was bombarded with propaganda about creating a new structure at home and a new order abroad; about liberating Asia from the scourge of Western exploitation and creating a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”; about crushing the menace of Communism and bringing about revolutionary change “under the brocade banner” of the throne. Japan's mission, philosophers associated particularly with Kyoto Imperial University said, was nothing less than to “overthrow the modern” and lead the way to a brave new world. As plainer phrasemakers put it, Japan would be “the Light of Asia”
⁷
(
Fig. 3-5
).

Fig. 3-5. Poster, “Develop Asia!” Designed by Tsuruta Gor
ō
and issued by Japan's Ministry of War in celebration of Army Day. Japan, undated. From
Reports of General MacArthur
, vol. 2, part 1. Collection National Archives and Records Administration.

This emphasis on Japan's
modernity
—even, as it were, on its destiny to show the way to a postmodern world beyond what the decadent West offered—is often overlooked.
⁸
Yet the thrust of the country's wartime propaganda cannot be understood without this. Why were the Japanese destined to be the leading race (
shid
ō
minzoku
) of Asia, and perhaps of the whole world? Because, the
ideologues declared, the Japanese people exemplified values and talents no other people possessed or could ever hope to possess in like manner.

All manner of “evidence” was evoked in support of such ultranationalistic palaver. Imperial Japan had absorbed Confucian ideals—and the cardinal virtue of filial piety in particular—from a China where these values no longer flourished. It had forged a modern nationalism out of elements peculiar to its own history and culture: the loyalty and self-sacrifice ascribed to feudal warriors, coupled with myths of racial purity that could be squeezed out of the indigenous Shinto religion, and all this coupled again with the mystique of a divinely descended dynasty. And, not least, Japan alone of all the non-Caucasian, non-Christian, non-Western peoples and countries of the world had escaped domination by the West. How? By mastering their science and technology. Japan and Japan alone, the propaganda held, had succeeded in hybridizing the very best of East and West.