Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (8 page)

Racism also shaped the Japanese perception of self and other—again in patterned ways, but patterns different from those of the West. History accounts for much of this difference. Over centuries, Japan had borrowed extensively from India, China, and more recently from the West, and had been greatly enriched; and it acknowledged these debts. And over the course of the preceding century, the Japanese had felt the sting of Western condescension. Even when applauded by the Europeans and Americans for their accomplishments in industrializing and “Westernizing,” the Japanese were painfully aware that they were still regarded as immature and unimaginative and unstable—good in the small things, as the saying went among the old Japan hands, and small in the great things.

Thus Japanese racial thinking was riven by an ambivalence that had no clear counterpart in white supremacist thinking. Like the white Westerners, they assumed a hierarchical world; but
unlike the Westerners, they lacked the unambiguous power that would enable them to place themselves unequivocally at the top of the racial hierarchy. Toward Europeans and Americans, and the science and civilization they exemplified, the national response was one of admiration as well as fear, mistrust, and hatred. Toward all others—that is, toward nonwhites including Asians other than themselves—their attitude was less complicated. By the twentieth century Japan's success in resisting Western colonialism or neocolonialism and emerging as one of the so-called Great Powers had instilled among the Japanese an attitude toward weaker peoples and nations that was as arrogant and contemptuous as the racism of the Westerners. The Koreans and Chinese began to learn this in the 1890s and early 1900s; the peoples of Southeast Asia learned it quickly after December 7, 1941.

For Japan, the crisis of identity came to a head in the 1930s and early 1940s, taking several dramatic forms. Behind the joy and fury of the initial attacks in 1941–42, and indeed behind many of the atrocities against white men and women in Asia, was an unmistakable sense of racial revenge. At the same time, the Japanese began to emphasize their own destiny as a “leading race” (
shidō minzoku
). If one were to venture a single broad observation concerning the difference between the preoccupations of white supremacism and Japanese racism, it might be this: that whereas white racism devoted inordinate energy to the denigration of the other, Japanese racial thinking concentrated on elevating the self. In Japanese war films produced between 1937 and 1945, for example, the enemy was rarely depicted. Frequently it was not even made clear who the antagonist was. The films concentrated almost exclusively on the admirable “Japanese” qualities of the protagonists. The focus of the broader gamut of propaganda for domestic consumption was similar. In its language and imagery, Japanese prejudice thus appeared to be more benign than its white counterpart—by comparison, a soft racism—but this was misleading. The insularity of such introversion tended to depersonalize and, in its own peculiar way, dehumanize all non-Japanese
“outsiders.” In practice, such intense fixation on the self contributed to a wartime record of extremely callous and brutal behavior toward non-Japanese.

The central concept in this racial thinking was that most tantalizing of cultural fixations: the notion of purity. In Japan as elsewhere, this has a deep history not merely in religious ritual, but also in social practice and the delineation of insider and outsider (pure and impure) groups. By turning purity into a racial ideology for modern times, the Japanese were in effect nationalizing a concept traditionally associated with differentiation within their society. Purity was Japanized and made the signifier of homogeneity, of “one hundred million hearts beating as one,” of a unique “Yamato soul” (
Yamato damashii
, from the ancient capital of the legendary first emperor). Non-Japanese became by definition impure. Whether powerful or relatively powerless, all were beyond the pale.

The ambiguity of the concept enhanced its effectiveness as a vehicle for promoting internal cohesion. At a superficial level, this fixation on the special purity or “sincerity” of the Japanese resembles the mystique of American “innocence.” Whereas the latter is a subtheme in the American myth, however, the former was cultivated as the very essence of a powerful racial ideology. Like esoteric mantras, a variety of evocative (and often archaic) words and phrases were introduced to convey the special racial and moral qualities of the Japanese; and like esoteric mandalas, certain visual images (sun, sword, cherry blossom, snowcapped Mount Fuji, an abstract “brightness”) and auspicious colors (white and red) were elevated as particularistic symbols of the purity of the Japanese spirit.

Where Westerners had turned eventually to pseudoscience and dubious social science to bolster theories of the inherent inferiority of nonwhite and non-Western peoples, the Japanese turned to mythohistory, where they found the origins of their superiority in the divine descent of their sovereign and the racial and cultural homogeneity of the sovereign's loyal subjects. Deity, monarch, and populace were made one, and no words captured this
more effectively than the transcendent old phrase resurrected to supersede plain reference to “the Japanese”:
Yamato minzoku
, the “Yamato race.” “Yamato”—the name of the place where Jimmu, grandson of the grandson of the sun goddess, was alleged to have founded the imperial line in 660
B.C
.—was redolent with the archaic mystique of celestial genetics that made Japan the divine land and the Japanese the chosen people. In
Yamato minzoku
, the association became explicitly racial and exclusionary. The race had no identity apart from the throne and the traditions that had grown up around it, and no outsider could hope to penetrate this community. This was blood nationalism of an exceptionally potent sort.

Many of these themes were elaborated in the ideological writings of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the cause of blood nationalism was elevated when 1940 became the occasion for massive ceremony and festivity in celebration of the 2,600-year anniversary of the “national foundation day.” At the same time, the racial ideologues took care to emphasize that purity was not merely an original state, but also an ongoing process for each Japanese. Purity entailed virtues that needed to be cultivated, and preeminent among these were two moral ideals originally brought to Japan from China: loyalty and filial piety (
ch
Å«
k
ō
). Why these became a higher expression of morality in Japan than elsewhere, higher even than in China, was explained by their ultimate focus in the divine sovereign. Purity lay in transcendence of ego and identification with a greater truth or cause; and in the crisis years of the 1930s and early 1940s this greater truth was equated with the militarized imperial state. War itself, with all the sacrifice it demanded, became an act of purification. And death in war, the ultimate expression of selflessness, became the supreme attainment of this innate Japanese purity. We know now that most Japanese fighting men who died slowly did not pass away with the emperor's name on their lips, as propaganda claimed they did. Most often they called (as GIs did also) for their mothers. Still, they fought and died with fervor and bravery, enveloped in the propaganda of being
the divine soldiers of the divine land, and this contributed to the aura of a people possessed of special powers.

Both the Western myth of the superman and the bogey of the Yellow Peril had their analogue in this emphasis the Japanese themselves placed on their unique suprarational spiritual qualities. In Western eyes, however, this same spectacle of fanatical mass behavior also reinforced the image of the little men, of the Japanese as a homogeneous, undifferentiated mass. There is no small irony in this, for what we see here is the coalescence of Japanese indoctrination with the grossest anti-Japanese stereotypes of the Westerners. In the crudest of Anglo-American colloquialisms, it was argued that “a Jap is a Jap” (the famous quotation of General John DeWitt, who directed the incarceration of the Japanese Americans). In the 1945 propaganda film
Know Your Enemy—Japan
, produced by Frank Capra for the United States Army, the Japanese were similarly described as “photographic prints off the same negative”—a line now frequently cited as the classic expression of racist American contempt for the Japanese. Yet in essence this “seen one seen them all” attitude was not greatly different from the “one hundred million hearts beating as one” indoctrination that the Japanese leaders themselves promoted. Homogeneity and separateness
were
essential parts of what the Japanese ideologues said about themselves. In their idiom, this was integral to the superiority of the Yamato race. To non-Japanese, it was further cause for derision.

The rhetoric of the pure self also calls attention to the potency of implicit as opposed to explicit denigration. In proclaiming their own purity, the Japanese cast others as inferior because they did not, and could not, share in the grace of the divine land. Non-Japanese were, by the very logic of the ideology, impure, foul, polluted. Such sentiments usually flowed like an underground stream beneath the ornate paeans to the “pure and cloudless heart” of the Japanese, but occasionally they burst to the surface with extraordinary vehemence. Thus, in a book of war reportage titled
Bataan
, Hino Ashihei, one of the best-known Japanese wartime writers,
described American POWs as “people whose arrogant nation once tried to unlawfully treat our motherland with contempt.” “As I watch large numbers of the surrendered soldiers,” he continued, “I feel like I am watching filthy water running from the sewage of a nation which derives from impure origins and has lost its pride of race. Japanese soldiers look particularly beautiful, and I feel exceedingly proud of being Japanese.”
²
These were the American prisoners, of course, whom Japanese soldiers brutalized in the Bataan death march. Hino's contempt for the “impure” American prisoners provides an almost perfect counterpoint to Ernie Pyle's revulsion on seeing his first “subhuman” Japanese POWs.

As a rule, however, the Japanese turned to one particular negative image when referring directly to the Anglo-American enemy: the demon or devil. “Devilish Anglo-Americans” (
kichiku Ei-Bei
) was the most familiar epithet for the white foe. In the graphic arts the most common depiction of Americans or British was a horned Roosevelt or Churchill, drawn exactly like the demons (
oni
,
akuma
) found in Japanese folklore and folk religion. As a metaphor of dehumanization, the demonic white man was the counterpart of the Japanese monkeyman in Western thinking, but the parallel was by no means exact. The demon was a more impressive and ambiguous figure than the ape, and certainly of a different category entirely from vermin. In Japanese folk renderings, the demon was immensely powerful; it was often intelligent, or at least exceedingly crafty; and it possessed talents and powers beyond those of ordinary Japanese. Not all demons had to be killed; some could be won over and turned from menaces into guardians. Indeed, Japanese soldiers killed in battle often were spoken of as having become “demons protecting the country” (
gokoku no oni
)—easy to imagine when one recalls the statues of ferocious deities that often guard Buddhist temples. Here again, like the flexible Western metaphor of the child, was an intriguingly malleable stereotype—one that would be turned about dramatically after the war, when the Americans became the military “protectors” of Japan.

During the war years, however, this more benign potential of
the demonic other was buried. For the Japanese at war, the demon worked as a metaphor for the enemy in ways that plain subhuman or bestial images could not. It conveyed a sense of the adversary's great power and special abilities, and in this respect it captured some of the ambivalence that had always marked Japan's modern relationship with the West. At the same time, the demonic other played to deep feelings of insecurity by evoking the image of an ever-present outside threat. Unlike apes or vermin, the demon did not signify a random presence. In Japanese folklore, these figures always lurked just beyond the boundaries of the community or the borders of the country—in forests and mountains outside the village, on islands off the coast. In origin, they exemplified not a racial fear, but a far more basic fear of outsiders in general.

Contrary to the myth of being homogeneous, Japanese society was honeycombed with groups suspicious of one another, and the blue-eyed barbarians from across the seas became absorbed into patterns of thinking that had emerged centuries earlier as a response to these tense and threatening insider/outsider relationships. The Westerners who suddenly appeared on Japan's horizon in the mid-nineteenth century were the most formidable of all outsiders, and the response to them mobilized nationalist and racist sentiments in unprecedented ways. Symbolically the demonic other was already present to be racialized. There was, moreover, a further dimension to this complicated play of symbolic representation, for it was but a short step from the perception of an ever-present threat to the consciousness of being an eternal victim. This too is a sentiment that recurs frequently in the Japanese tradition, and in the modern world this “victim consciousness” (
higaisha ishiki
) became inextricably entangled with the perception of foreign threats. From this perspective, modern Japanese racism as exemplified in the demonic other reflected an abiding sense of being always the threatened, the victim, the aggrieved—and never the threat, the victimizer, the giver of grief.

Where images and actions came together most decisively, however, demon, ape, and vermin functioned similarly. All made
killing easier by dehumanizing the enemy. The rhetoric of “kill the American demons” and “kill the British demons” became commonplace not only in combat, but also on the home front. A popular magazine published in late 1944 conveyed the fury of this rhetoric. Under the title “Devilish Americans and English,” the magazine ran a two-page drawing of Roosevelt and Churchill as debauched ogres carousing with fellow demons in sight of Mount Fuji and urged all Japanese, “Beat and kill these animals that have lost their human nature! That is the great mission that Heaven has given to the Yamato race, for the eternal peace of the world!” Another magazine, reporting on the decisive battle in the Philippines, declared that the more American beasts and demons “are sent to hell, the cleaner the world will be.” Iwo Jima, where United States marines called themselves “rodent exterminators,” was described in official Japanese newsreels as “a suitable place to slaughter the American devils.”