Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (39 page)

Even the Japanese post office took part in the business of reinventing tradition and building bridges from the old to the “new” Japan. There was no place for a Meiji-era hero like General Nogi Maresuke on postage stamps anymore, but who could take his place? From early on, it was clear that the country's new indigenous heroes had to be modern “cultural” figures, but it took a long time to decide who these should be. It was not until 1949 that the postal service inaugurated its Cultural Leaders Series with a stamp honoring the medical researcher Noguchi Hideyo. Between 1950 and 1952, sixteen eminent prewar men and one distinguished woman (the writer Higuchi Ichiy
ō
) were similarly commemorated as prewar models for the new postwar era.
²³

The bridges that linked past, present, and future were many and various indeed.

This short article, like the one that follows, returns to the “uses of history”—more particularly, the uses and misuses of modern Japanese history—that I first wrestled with in bringing the writings of E.H. Norman back into print in the 1970s. Both were written in conjunction with the U.S. “war on terror” and invasion of Iraq following Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001
.

The article appeared as an op-ed essay in the
New York Times
at the end of October 2002, when the machinery for war against Iraq was moving into high gear. This is when administration officials began evoking the occupations of Japan and Germany after World War II as models or mirrors—or even talismans of a sort—for the liberalization and pro-American reorientation that could be expected in Iraq once Saddam Hussein was overthrown. Japan quickly emerged as a more seductive putative lodestar than Germany, for obvious reasons: like Iraq, it was non-Western, nonwhite, and non-Christian
.

This was spin and propaganda, like so much else in the run-up to the invasion. At the same time, however, it also reflected the astounding level of wishful thinking that saturated the highest levels of policymaking in the Bush administration. Anyone knowledgeable about Iraq and early postwar Japan recognized that all the key indigenous factors to which we attribute the successful elimination of authoritarianism and militarism
in Japan were absent in Iraq. Occupied Japan should have been a red light, rather than the green light the war-makers chose to see
.

The op-ed fell like water on stone, of course. What is most interesting in retrospect is that there was nothing original about it. We now know that the same arguments against invasion were being made in much greater detail at lower levels throughout the U.S. civilian and military bureaucracy. That these warnings had no impact on top leaders in the White House is a sobering commentary on the real workings of “democracy” under an imperial presidency. That they were not picked up or pursued in any serious or sustained way by the mainstream media that jumped onboard the invasion is no less disturbing
.
^*

*  *  *

I
n their immediate response to the shock of September 11, journalists and pundits across America evoked, almost as one, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier. Headlines proclaimed a new “day of infamy.” Feature stories dwelled on similarities (and differences) between the holy-war fanaticism of the Islamic terrorists and that of the Japanese—and, of course, on the dismal failure of American intelligence to anticipate either attack.

Now, with the Bush administration itself promoting the virtue of preemptive strikes, Japan has emerged as possibly offering a very different sort of historical precedent. Does America's successful occupation of Japan after World War II provide a model for a constructive American role in a post–Saddam Hussein Iraq?

The short answer is no.

By almost all standards, the occupation of defeated Japan was a remarkable success. A repressive and militaristic society emerged from defeat and occupation to become a viable democracy that
has posed no threat to its neighbors for half a century. Naysayers who declared the Japanese people to be culturally incapable of self-government—and their numbers were great in 1945—were proved impressively wrong.

Contrary to what self-anointed “realists” seem to be suggesting today, however, most of the factors that contributed to the success of nation-building in occupied Japan would be absent in an Iraq militarily defeated by the United States.

When war ended in 1945, the United States–dominated occupation of Japan had enormous moral as well as legal legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world. This was certainly true throughout Asia, so recently savaged by the Japanese war machine. It was true among America's European allies as well. There was a level of unequivocal regional and global support that a projected U.S. war against Saddam Hussein does not enjoy.

The occupation also had legitimacy in the eyes of almost all Japanese. The Japanese government formally accepted this when it surrendered. Emperor Hirohito, great weather vane that he was, gave his significant personal endorsement to the conquerors. And Japanese at all levels of society quickly blamed their own militaristic leaders for having initiated a miserable, unwinnable war. Saddam Hussein will never morph into a Hirohito figure, and a preemptive war will surely alienate great numbers of Iraqis, even many who might otherwise welcome Mr. Hussein's removal.

In defeat, the Japanese proved to be anything but homogeneous. Political allegiances ran the spectrum from conservatives to Communists. Nonetheless, Japan was spared the religious, ethnic, regional and tribal animosities that are likely to erupt in a postwar Iraq. By the same token, the suicidal fanaticism that characterized Japanese behavior on the battlefield did not survive the war. In an occupation that lasted from 1945 to 1952, there was not one instance of Japanese terror against the occupation forces. Does anyone really imagine this would be the case in an occupied Iraq?

Much of the success of the Japanese occupation derived from the fact that Japan surrendered “unconditionally,” thereby ceding
absolute and nonnegotiable authority to the victors. The exercise of this authority, moreover, was vested in an unusually charismatic supreme commander, General Douglas MacArthur, who, in effect, was authorized to rule by fiat. It is not conceivable to think of the United States military or any single American commander wielding comparable civil authority in a foreign land today.

Planning for the occupation of Japan actually began in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and the general objectives of demilitarization and democratization of the vanquished foe were spelled out in the Potsdam Proclamation of July 1945, weeks before the Japanese government finally capitulated. MacArthur's staff had considerable leeway for creative interpretation of their orders, but those orders reflected long interdepartmental deliberation in Washington, in contrast to today's hasty policymaking.

The great legal and institutional reforms that continue to define Japanese democracy today reflected liberal New Deal policies that now seem testimony to a bygone age: land reform that eliminated widespread rural tenancy at a stroke; serious encouragement of organized labor; the drafting of a new constitution that not only outlawed belligerence by the state, but also guaranteed an extremely progressive range of civil rights to all citizens; restructuring of schools and rewriting of textbooks; revision of both the civil and penal codes, and so on. It is hard to imagine today's “realists” making this sort of lasting, progressive agenda their primary concern.

Ideology aside, the simple logistics of such serious nation-building would seem prohibitive. The key military and civilian personnel who carried out civil-affairs policy under MacArthur numbered around 5,000 to 6,000 individuals at any given time, stationed mostly in Tokyo but also in grassroots offices throughout the country. Many tens of thousands of bilingual Japanese support staff were hired. And for most of the occupation, American military forces—whose mission quickly turned to Cold War objectives rather than the prevention of domestic unrest—numbered more than 100,000 men.

What ultimately enabled the Americans to institutionalize democracy in defeated Japan was not only the existence of strong prewar democratic traditions, but also the survival and cooperation of the existing bureaucracy. The administrative structure remained essentially intact from the central ministries and agencies down to the level of town and village governments, and administrators at all levels often proved genuinely receptive to the vision of a new and better society. Again, it is difficult to imagine a postwar Iraq in which structures of the old regime will provide so ready a vehicle for carrying out far-reaching reforms.

One could easily go on with examples of the unique nature of Japan's occupation. As an island, Japan was physically isolated from neighbors (like China) that soon became hostile to its incorporation in America's Cold War strategy. By contrast, Iraq shares borders with apprehensive and potentially intrusive neighbors.

Of even greater importance, MacArthur and his staff had the period of relative quiet from 1945 to 1947 to concentrate on promoting democratization, while policymakers in Washington were preoccupied with developments in Europe. In the cauldron of Middle East politics, there will be no such period of calm after a war with Iraq.

Defeated Japan also had the blessing of being poor in natural resources and of virtually no economic interest to outsiders. It was spared the presence of carpetbaggers who might have tried to manipulate occupation policy to serve their private interests. In oil-rich Iraq, foreign capital is poised to play a major political as well as economic role.

While occupied Japan provides no model for a postwar Iraq, it does provide a clear warning: Even under circumstances that turned out to be favorable, demilitarization and democratization were awesome challenges. To rush to war without seriously imagining all its consequences, including its aftermath, is not realism but a terrible hubris.

__________________

^*
The preinvasion warnings in the civilian and military bureaucracies are discussed in Dower,
Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 /Iraq
(New York: W.W. Norton and The New Press, 2010), which also includes an extended comparison of occupied Japan and occupied Iraq.

Any Westerner who spends a career engaged with a non-Western nation or society knows that when it comes to modern or contemporary times, the practice of comparison is a one-way street. “The West” is the model; “the Rest” are evaluated in terms of the degree to which they succeed or fail in approaching the advanced accomplishments of that model. The “modernization theory” paradigm that mesmerized academe when I entered the field in the 1960s was very explicit about this: the measure of “modernity” was how closely other countries
converged
with the great accomplishments of the West in science, industry, international contacts, pluralism, “rationality,” what have you. It was irrational to suggest that an advanced Western power like the United States might be scrutinized critically against a template of anyone who had the misfortune to belong to “the Rest.
”

Prior to March 2003, I had written in several places that occupied Japan was a terribly misleading example to hold up as an indication of what might be expected in a post-invasion Iraq. After the invasion, as the heavy-handed U.S. military occupation unfolded, I was struck by a different, thoroughly heretical, model for what was taking place: the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, followed by the creation of the puppet state Manchukuo one year later. Of course the parallels were not exact. In critical areas, the differences were immense: the United States was a democracy of sorts, for example, whereas imperial Japan was not
.
But both countries were militaristic; high rhetoric and low deeds characterized both invasions and both occupations; in each case, enormous public and private resources were poured into what we now call nation-building; and once one began pulling at this thread, various other sorts of resonance between 1930s Japan and early twenty-first-century America began to emerge. This little essay suggesting a range of places where comparison of the undertakings in Manchuria and Iraq can be illuminating appeared in
The Nation
in June 2003, three months after the invasion
.

Almost no one bought this argument, so far as I am aware; but I still am not ready to discard it. The essence of what patriots speak of as “American exceptionalism” is that the United States is superlative in virtue and, in this and most everything else in the moral and material worlds, beyond compare. Much of the chatter about “the West and the Rest” rests on a similar presumption—and so does the popular vogue of “clash of civilizations” thinking as most Westerners embrace this. Serious historical comparisons, however, crosscut time and place
.

*  *  *

A
s we enter a dramatically altered world, both internationally and domestically, it is only natural that we look to history for bearings, points of comparison, glimmerings of the familiar. In these predictable uses of the past, “Japan” has emerged as a small trope for both horror and hope. Thus, September 11 became our generation's Pearl Harbor (headline writers across America turned, almost instinctively, to “Day of Infamy!”). Our new enemies have been declared an “axis of evil” (with North Korea presumably replacing the Japan of the 1930s). And now we have the sanguine scenario of the democratization of “occupied Japan” after World War II as a model for post-hostilities Iraq.

None of those analogies withstand serious scrutiny, and looking back at occupied Japan should really remind us both how fundamentally different Iraq is from the Japan of 1945 and also how far the United States itself has departed from the ideals of a half-century ago. Liberalism, internationalism, serious commitment to
human rights, a vision of economic democratization in which the state is assigned an important role—these were watchwords of the Americans who formulated initial policy for occupied Japan. In the Bush administration, they are objects of derision.