Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (5 page)

And, as has been noted, he did suggest earlier that the world might have been spared the ordeal of Japanese aggression had more blood been shed in the early Meiji and the Japanese people thereby won for themselves a truer freedom. In “Persuasion or Force,” he endeavored to illustrate this dilemma by citing the position of Socrates in Plato's dialogues
The Apology of Socrates
and
Crito
: Socrates would neither compromise his
right
of disobedience nor deny the state its duly constituted right to punish. That this was a paradox Norman himself acknowledged, and he said he did not propose to pursue it
beyond stressing two lessons: “First, how delicate and intricate a problem is involved in the relation between freedom and self-government, and secondly, by abridging free speech, a self-governing society will no longer find itself self-governing in the true sense of that word.” But he also added this significant point: “Let me remind you here that Socrates is speaking of the civic obligation of obedience in a society of which he felt himself to be an intimate and integral part. We cannot assume from this what his attitude might be had he been living in an oppressive society repugnant to him.” Rather than suggest that Norman was inconsistent, or later retreated from an earlier position, it seems more just to suggest that throughout his thought there exists the inherent tension of commitment to the basic values of human life and civilized behavior and the confrontation with situations in which violence, the antithesis of these values, may appear to be the only recourse remaining to destroy a system which represses freedom, sacrifices life, and retards the creation of true self-government. In his work he held back somewhat from this problem. In his life he could not avoid it. And in his death, like Socrates, the paradox remained.

Norman concluded his speech at Kei
ō
with these words:

__________________

^*
He is not forgotten in Canada, where his scholarship draws more attention and his tragic death elevated him, in some circles, to the status of a national hero victimized by American political hysteria. In 2000, twenty-five years after I brought
Japan's Emergence
back into print, the University of British Columbia Press published a “60th Anniversary Edition” of this pioneer text, edited by Lawrence T. Woods and including as an epilogue ten short reflections on Norman and his work “then and now.” I contributed one of these essays.

In a 1986 monograph titled
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War,
I attempted to meld the official or quasi-official documents I was trained to focus on as a researcher in history with a range of unofficial “texts” such as cartoons, films, songs, slogans, and rough colloquial rhetoric. I was, in a word, trying to integrate polished formal and elite resources with the more visceral expressions and dynamics of our human experience. This sort of popular cultural history was coming into its own in scholarship on Europe and the United States in those days. It had not yet made much of a mark on the Asia field, however; and it was rarely if ever used to draw the sort of even-keel comparisons between Anglo-Americans and Japanese that I ended up drawing
.

Rather like the Norman essay excerpted in
chapter 1
, War Without Mercy
started out as something different than the book it ended up being. It began as a sentence in the opening pages of a manuscript that was going to be about postwar Japan—a passing comment about how remarkable it was that the vicious racial hatreds of the Pacific War, especially between Americans and Japanese, dissipated so quickly after the fighting ended. This sentence needed expanding, I thought; and the sentence became a paragraph that became a chapter that ended up becoming a book
.

While racial thinking made both national solidarity and killing easier
on all sides in the war in Asia, it is not my argument that racism is the key factor to understanding the cause or conduct of this conflict. Rather, the Anglo and Japanese antagonists, each in their own way, pumped up racial identity to both boost morale and abet war conduct; their racism was embedded in language at every level from the formal to the vulgar; such blinders impeded war conduct (such as intelligence evaluations) as much as they fired up the killing machines; and, as it turned out once Japan had been defeated, they could be turned off, or almost off, like a spigot. Racism is always with us, but its idioms and uses prove to be remarkably malleable
.

The essay reproduced here recapitulates some of the themes introduced in
War Without Mercy
and appeared in a collection of articles on “the war in American culture” published in 1996. Essentially the same text was included in my 1993 volume of essays
Japan in War and Peace,
but this present version incorporates samples of the visual materials that now seem indispensible to any serious attempt to recapture the clamorous ambiance of our modern times
.

*
*
*

F
or most Americans, World War II always has involved selective consciousness. The hypocrisy of fighting with a segregated army and navy under the banner of freedom, democracy, and justice never was frankly acknowledged and now is all but forgotten. In Asia, Japan was castigated for subjugating the native peoples of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), British Hong Kong, Malaya, Burma, the American Philippines, and French Indochina—and neither then nor later did the anomaly of such condemnation sink in. Consciousness and memory have been deceptive in other ways as well. If one asks Americans today in what ways World War II was atrocious and racist, they will point overwhelmingly to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. When the war was being fought, however, the enemy Americans perceived as most atrocious was not the Germans but the Japanese; and the racial issues that provoked their greatest emotion were associated with the war in Asia.

With few exceptions, Americans were obsessed with the uniquely evil nature of the Japanese. Allan Nevins, who twice won the Pulitzer Prize in history, observed immediately after the war that “probably in all our history, no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese.” Ernie Pyle, the most admired of American war correspondents, conveyed the same sentiment unapologetically. In February 1945, a few weeks after being posted to the Pacific following years of covering the war in Europe, Pyle told his millions of readers that “in Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive, the way some people feel about cockroaches or mice.” Pyle went on to describe his response on seeing Japanese prisoners for the first time. “They were wrestling and laughing and talking just like normal human beings,” he wrote. “And yet they gave me the creeps, and I wanted a mental bath after looking at them.” Sober magazines like
Science Digest
ran articles titled “Why Americans Hate Japs More Than Nazis.” By incarcerating Japanese Americans, but not German Americans or Italian Americans, the United States government—eventually with Supreme Court backing—gave its official imprimatur to the designation of the Japanese as a racial enemy. It did so, of course, in the most formal and judicious language.

It is not really surprising that the Japanese, rather than the Germans and their decimation of the Jews, dominated American racial thinking. In the United States, as well as Britain and most of Europe, anti-Semitism was strong and—as David Wyman among others has documented so well—the Holocaust was wittingly neglected or a matter of indifference. Japan's aggression, on the other hand, stirred the deepest recesses of white supremacism and provoked a response bordering on the apocalyptic. As the Hearst papers took care to editorialize, the war in Europe, however terrible, was still a “family fight” that did not threaten the very essence of occidental civilization. One Hearst paper bluntly identified the war in the Pacific as “the War of Oriental Races against Occidental Races for the Domination of the World.”

There was almost visceral agreement on this. Thus Hollywood formulaically introduced good Germans as well as Nazis but almost never showed a “good Japanese.” In depicting the Axis triumvirate, political cartoonists routinely gave the German enemy Hitler's face and the Italian enemy Mussolini's, but they rendered the Japanese as plain, homogeneous “Japanese” caricatures: short, round-faced, bucktoothed, slant-eyed, frequently myopic behind horn-rimmed glasses. In a similar way, phrasemakers fell unreflectively into the idiom seen in the
Science Digest
headline: Nazis and Japs. Indeed, whereas the German enemy was conflated to bad Germans (Nazis), the Japanese enemy was inflated to a supra-Japanese foe—not just the Japanese militarists, not just all the Japanese people, not just ethnic Japanese everywhere, but the Japanese as Orientals. Tin Pan Alley, as so often, immediately placed its finger on the American pulse. One of the many popular songs inspired by Pearl Harbor was titled “There'll Be No Adolph [sic] Hitler nor Yellow Japs to Fear.” Pearl Harbor and the stunning Japanese victories over the colonial powers that followed so quickly in Southeast Asia seemed to confirm the worst Yellow Peril nightmares.

World War II in Asia was, of course, not simply or even primarily a race war. Alliances cut across race on both the Allied and Axis sides, and fundamental issues of power and ideology were at stake. Where the Japanese and the Anglo-American antagonists were concerned, however, an almost Manichaean racial cast overlay these other issues of contention. This was true on both sides. The Japanese were racist too—toward the white enemy, and in conspicuously different ways toward the other Asians who fell within their “Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Thus the war in Asia offers an unusually vivid case study through which to examine the tangled skein of race, language, and violence from a comparative perspective—not only with the luxury of retrospect, moreover, but also at a time when U.S.-Japan relations are very different and yet still riven with racial tension.

The war exposed core patterns of racist perception in many forms: formulaic expressions, code words, everyday metaphors,
visual stereotypes. Such ways of thinking, speaking, and seeing were often vulgar, but their crudeness was by no means peculiar to any social class, educational level, political ideology, or place or circumstance (such as the battlefield as opposed to the home front as opposed to the corridors of power and policymaking). On the other hand, in many instances the racist patterns of perception and expression were just the opposite: subtle, nuanced, garbed in the language of empiricism and intellectuality. This too was typical. Ostensibly objective observations often are laced with prejudice.

That racist perceptions shape behavior may seem obvious, but the war experience calls attention to how subtly this occurs, and at how many different levels. Myths, in this case race myths, almost always override conclusions drawn from sober, rational, empirical observation—until cataclysmic events occur to dispel or discredit them. It took Pearl Harbor and Singapore to destroy the myth cherished by Caucasians that the Japanese were poor navigators and inept pilots and unimaginative strategists, for example, and it required a long, murderous struggle to rid the Japanese of their conceit that the Anglo-Americans were too degenerate and individualistic to gird for a long battle against a faraway foe. We have become so mesmerized by the contemporary cult of military intelligence gathering that we often fail to recognize how extensively unadulterated prejudice colors intelligence estimates, causing both overestimation and underestimation of the other side. Beyond this, in its most extreme form racism sanctions extermination—the genocide of the Jews, of course, but also the plain but patterned rhetoric of exterminating beasts, vermin, or demons that unquestionably helped raise tolerance for slaughter in Asia.