Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (7 page)

Fig. 2-5. In this famous photograph from the May 22, 1944, issue of
Life
magazine, a young woman sweetly contemplates a “Jap skull” sent by her boyfriend. Although it was well known that American fighting men collected such grisly battlefield trophies in the Pacific theater, such practices would have caused an uproar had they involved desecration of the German and Italian war dead. © Ralph Crane/TIME & LIFE Images/Getty Images.

Such contempt led, among other things, to a pervasive underestimation of Japanese intentions and capabilities by British and American observers at even the highest levels. Before Pearl Harbor, it was common wisdom among Westerners that the Japanese could not shoot, sail, or fly very well. Nor could they think imaginatively; as a British intelligence report carefully explained, this was because
the enormous energy required to memorize the ideographic writing system dulled their brains and killed the spark of creativity. There can be few better examples of the power of myth and stereotype over the weight of objective analysis than the unpreparedness of the Westerners when Japan attacked. Almost everything was a shock: the audacity of the Pearl Harbor attack and the ability of the Japanese to bring it off, the effectiveness of the Zero aircraft (which had been in operation in China for over a year), the superb skills of the Japanese pilots, the esprit and discipline of the Japanese ground forces, the lightning multipronged assault against the European and American colonial enclaves. Equally shocking, of course, was the Western side of the coin: the unpreparedness in Hawaii, the debacle at Singapore, the humiliation in the Philippines. In the long view, despite Japan's eventual defeat, the events of 1941–42 exposed the dry rot of the old empires and irreparably shattered the mystique of white superiority among the native peoples of Asia.

These Japanese victories—coupled with the spectacle of Japanese brutality and atrocity—set whole new worlds of racial thinking in motion. The little men suddenly became supermen; and at the same time more elaborate versions of the little-men thesis were developed. A remarkable intelligence report circulated by psychological warfare experts within General Douglas MacArthur's command in mid-1944, for example, masticated the old thesis with excruciating thoroughness:

At the same time, the little-men thesis also was elaborated on in ways that shed harsh light on racist bias in the academic disciplines by revealing how Western social sciences could be used to support popular prejudices. The war years witnessed the emergence of anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists as the new mandarins of theories of “national character,” and on the whole they performed a valuable service in repudiating the old theories of biological determinism. What the social scientists did not dispel, however, were the racial stereotypes that had been associated with biological determinism. On the contrary, they essentially reaffirmed these stereotypes by offering new cultural or sociopsychological explanations for them.

This is seen most clearly in three of the most influential themes that American and British social scientists introduced to explain Japanese behavior. The Japanese, they argued, were still essentially a primitive or tribal people, governed by ritualistic and particularistic values. The influence of cultural anthropologists was particularly apparent here. Furthermore, it was emphasized that Japanese behavior could be analyzed effectively using Western theories of child or adolescent behavior. Here the Anglo-American intellectuals turned to Freudian-influenced theories concerning toilet training and psychic blockage at various stages of immaturity (the British social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer was extremely influential on this theme) and also extolled the value of applying insights gained from American studies “of individual adolescent psychology and of the behavior of adolescents in gangs in our society, as a systematic approach to better understanding of the Japanese” (the quotation is from the minutes of a large 1944 symposium involving, among others, Margaret Mead and Talcott
Parsons). Finally, in the third great preoccupation of the new intellectual mandarins, it was argued that the Japanese as a collectivity were mentally and emotionally unstable—neurotic, schizophrenic, psychotic, or simply hysterical.

In the final analysis, the “national character” studies amounted to a new way of explaining what the presumedly discredited biological determinists had concluded long ago: the Japanese as a people displayed arrested development. Although this was not inherent in their genes, it was the inevitable consequence of their peculiar history and culture. All this was expressed with considerable erudition, and many of the insights of wartime social scientists concerning societal pressures and situational ethics remain influential today. For the proverbial man from Mars given access only to such wartime writings, however, it would be reasonable to conclude that imperialism, war, and atrocity had been invented in Asia during the twentieth century by developmentally retarded Japanese. They were unique, sui generis, and very peculiar indeed.

When all was said and done, however, these designations of Japanese peculiarity possessed a universal quality. They were formulaic and rested in considerable part on code words that transcended Japan and even transcended racial and cultural discourse in general. In suggestive ways, these code words also overlapped with vocabularies associated with discrimination based on gender and class. The central image of arrested growth, or “childishness,” for example, was and remains one of the most basic constructs used by white Euro-Americans to characterize nonwhite peoples. This could be buttressed with pseudoscientific explanations (nonwhites being lower on the evolutionary scale, and thus biologically equivalent to children or adolescents vis-à-vis the “mature” Caucasian races) or meretricious social scientific equations (the “less developed” peoples of “less developed” nations, for example, or peoples alleged to be collectively blocked at a primitive or immature state psychologically by indigenous cultural practices or mores). In the milieu of war, the image of the Japanese as children conveyed utter contempt (as in
Newsweek'
s wartime reference to “the child mind
of the Jap conscript”), but in less harsh circumstances it also was capable of evoking a condescending paternalism (as reflected in the depiction of Japanese after the surrender as “MacArthur's children” or as the beneficiaries of a student-teacher relationship with Americans). This same metaphor also is integral to the rationale of male domination and rule by elites. Thus, to describe women as childish or childlike is one of the most familiar ways men traditionally have signified both the inherent inferiority of women and their own obligation to protect or at least humor them. Similarly, dominant social and political classes commonly affirm their privileged status and inherent right to rule by dismissing the masses as irrational, irresponsible, and immature. In its softer guise, the elite sense of noblesse oblige masks class inequalities with a paradigm of parent-to-child obligations.

The resonances of this broader conceptual world also help clarify how Japan's attack on the West revitalized other fantasies. It is characteristic of the paranoia of self-designated master groups that even while dismissing others as inferior and “less developed,” they attribute special powers to them. The lower classes may be immature to the elites, but they also are seen as possessing a fearsome potential for violence. Women may be irrational in male eyes, but they also are said to have special intuitive powers and the Jezebel potential of becoming castrators. Where Western perceptions of the Japanese and Asians in general are concerned, there is in fact a provocative congruence between the female and Oriental mystiques as expressed by white male elites. Thus, even in the war years, the “femininity” of Japanese culture was indirectly if not directly emphasized. Traits attributed to the Japanese often were almost identical to those assigned to women in general: childishness, irrationality, emotional instability, and “hysteria”—and also intuition, a sixth sense, and a talent for nondiscursive communication. It even was said that the Japanese, like women generally, possessed an exceptional capacity to endure suffering. Put negatively, these latter intuitive and emotional qualities could be equated with nonrationality and simply integrated into the argument of arrested development.
Positively framed, they became suprarational powers—impossible to explain, but all the more alarming to contemplate.

Because nothing in the “rational” mind-set of Western leaders prepared them for either the audacity and skill of Japan's attack or the debacle of British, Dutch, and American capitulations to numerically inferior Japanese forces that followed in Southeast Asia, it was natural to look to nonrational explanations. Scapegoating helped obfuscate the situation—the United States commanders at Pearl Harbor were cashiered, and the West Coast Japanese Americans were locked up—but this was not enough. It also became useful to think of the Japanese as supermen. Graphic artists now drew the Japanese as giants on the horizon. Rhetorically, the new image usually emerged in a more serpentine or backhanded fashion. Thus the United States print media from 1941 to the end of the war featured a veritable “between the lines” subgenre debunking the new myth of the supermen. Battle A proved they could be beaten at sea, battle B that they could be beaten in the jungle, battle C that they were not unbeatable at night fighting, battle D that the myth of the “invincibility of the Zero” was finally being destroyed. The
New York Times Magazine
took it upon itself to address the issue head-on with a feature article titled “Japanese Superman: That Too Is a Fallacy.” Admiral William Halsey, the most blatantly racist officer in the United States high command, later claimed that he deliberately belittled the Japanese as “monkeymen” and the like in order to discredit “the new myth of Japanese invincibility” and boost the morale of his men.

The myth of the superman was never completely dispelled. To the end of the war—even after most of the Japanese navy and merchant marine had been sunk; after Japanese soldiers in the field, cut off from support, had begun starving to death and were being killed by the tens and hundreds of thousands; after the urban centers of the home islands had come under regular bombardment—Allied planners continued to overestimate the will and capacity of the Japanese to keep fighting. There are surely many explanations for this, but prominent among them is a plainly racial consideration:
the superman image was especially compelling because it meshed with the greatest of all the racist bogeys of the white men—the specter of the Yellow Peril.

Hatred toward the Japanese derived not simply from the reports of Japanese atrocities, but also from the deeper wellsprings of anti-orientalism.
Time
magazine's coverage of the American response to Pearl Harbor, for example, opened on this very note. What did Americans say when they heard of the attack,
Time
asked rhetorically. And the answer it quoted approvingly as representative was, “Why, the yellow bastards!”
Time'
s cover portrait for December 22, 1941, depicting Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, was colored a single shade: bright yellow. At one time or another almost every mainstream newspaper and magazine fell into the color idiom, and yellow was by far the dominant color in anti-Japanese propaganda art. Among the music makers, we already have encountered Tin Pan Alley's revealing counterpoint of Hitler and the “Yellow Japs.” Other song titles included “We're Gonna Find a Fellow Who Is Yellow and Beat Him Red, White, and Blue” and “Oh, You Little Son of an Oriental.” In some American pronouncements, the Japanese were simply dismissed as “LYBs,” a well-comprehended acronym for the double entendre “little yellow bellies.”

Spokesmen for Asian Allies such as China were aghast at such insensitivity, and the war years as a whole became an agonizing revelation of the breadth and depth of anti-Asian prejudice in the United States. In the very midst of the war these revelations prompted a yearlong congressional hearing to consider revision of the notorious “Oriental Exclusion Laws”—the capstone of formal discrimination against all people of Asian origin. What the Japanese attack brought to the surface, however, was something more elusive and interesting than the formal structures of discrimination: the concrete fears that underlay the perception of a menacing Orient.

Since the late nineteenth century, when the Yellow Peril idea was first expressed in the West, white people had been unnerved
by a triple apprehension—recognition that the “hordes” of Asia outnumbered the population of the West, fear that these alien masses might gain possession of the science and technology that made Western domination possible, and the belief that Orientals possessed occult powers unfathomable to Western rationalists. By trumpeting the cause of Pan-Asianism and proclaiming the creation of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan raised the prospect that the Asian hordes might at last become united. With their Zero planes and big battleships and carriers, the Japanese gave notice that the technological and scientific gap had narrowed dramatically. And with the aura of invincibility that blossomed in the heat of the early victories, the Japanese “supermen” evoked the old fantasies of occult oriental powers. All this would be smashed in August 1945, when Japan capitulated. And it would all resurface three decades later when Japan burst on the scene as an economic superpower and other Asian countries began to emulate this “miracle.”