Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (9 page)

Fig. 2-6. Entitled “The Cruel Nature of Americans,” this two-page spread appeared in the November 1944 issue of a popular Japanese magazine. Read from right to left, the top portion illustrates American viciousness with scenes of boxing matches, white people stoning a drowning Negro (a reference to the Detroit race riots), Negroes being humiliated as carnival targets, a black man being lynched, and an American pilot bombing a Japanese hospital ship. The bottom panels offer a chronological cartoon history of “American Aggression in East Asia,” beginning with the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in Japan in 1853 and ending with the encirclement of Japan by the “ABCD” (American, British, Chinese, and Dutch) powers on the eve of Pearl Harbor, and gangster America's final ultimatum to Japan. From
Hinode
, November 1944.

Fig. 2-7. In the most common Japanese rendering, the Anglo-American enemy was demonized. This illustration, which appeared immediately after Pearl Harbor, accompanied a discussion of the road to war and depicts innocent Japan extending the hand of friendship while the United States and Britain (President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill) feign amity and clandestinely extend their demonic claws (marked “conspiracy”) to seize the Orient. From
Osaka Puck
, January 1942.

Fig. 2-8. The Japanese counterpart to the Anglo-American exterminationist imagery of killing beasts entailed annihilating demons. In this poster from 1942, the bayonet of Japanese righteousness skewers the Anglo-American demons. The caption reads, “The death of these wretches will be the birthday of world peace.” From
Osaka Puck
, February and December 1942.

Demonization was by no means an essential precondition for killing, however. The most numerous victims of Japanese aggression and atrocity were other Asians, who were rarely depicted this way. Toward them the Japanese attitude was a mixture of “Pan-Asian” propaganda for public consumption, elaborate theories of racial hierarchy and Japanese hegemony at official and academic levels, and condescension and contempt in practice. Apart from a small number of idealistic military officers and civilian officials, few Japanese appear to have taken seriously the egalitarian rhetoric of Pan-Asian solidarity and genuine liberation of colonized Asian peoples. Never for a moment did the Japanese consider liberating their own Korean and Formosan colonies, and policy toward Southeast Asia—even when “independence” was granted—was always framed in terms that made Japan's preeminence as the “leading race” absolutely clear. The purity so integral to Japanese thinking was peculiar to the Japanese as a race and culture—not to “oriental” peoples in general—and consequently there emerged no real notion of “Asian supremacism” that could be regarded as a close counterpart to the white supremacism of the Anglo-Americans.

Before the 1930s, the Japanese did not have a clearly articulated position toward other Asians. The rush of events thereafter, including the invasion of China and the decision to push south into Southeast Asia, forced military planners and their academic supporters to codify and clarify existing opinions on these matters. The result was a small outpouring of studies, reports, and pronouncements—many of a confidential nature—that explicitly addressed the characteristics of the various peoples of Asia and the appropriate policy toward them. That these were not casual undertakings was made amply clear in 1981, when a hitherto unknown secret study dating from 1943 was discovered in Tokyo. Prepared by a team of some forty researchers associated with the Population and Race Section of the Research Bureau of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, this work devoted over three thousand pages to analysis
of race theory in general and the different races of Asia in particular. The title of the report gives an inkling of its contents:
An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus
.

The
Investigation
was a serious intelligence report, and its style was academic. In its way it was a counterpart to the “national character” writings of the Anglo-American social scientists who mobilized in support of the Allied war effort. The Japanese researchers called attention to Western theories of race and, while attentive to Nazi ideas, surveyed the gamut of racial thinking beginning with Plato and Aristotle. In the modern world, they noted, racism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism had become inseparably intertwined. And though modern scholarship had repudiated the notion of biologically pure races, blood still mattered greatly in contributing to psychological unity. In this regard, as Karl Haushofer had observed, Japan was fortunate in having become a uniform racial state (Haushofer, the geopolitician whose writings influenced the Nazis, had done his doctoral work on Japan). At the same time, overseas expansion should be seen as essential not merely for the attainment of military and strategic security, but also for preserving and revitalizing racial consciousness and vigor. On this point the Japanese again quoted Western experts, including not merely the Germans but also the British. Looking ahead, it was predictable that the second and third generations of overseas Japanese might face problems of identity, and thus it was imperative to develop settlement policies that would thwart their assimilation and ensure that they “remain aware of the superiority of the Japanese people and proud of being a member of the leading race.”

The focus of this massive report was on Asian rather than Western peoples, and its dry language provides insight into how racial inequality in Asia was rationalized. The central metaphor was the family. The critical phrase was “proper place”—a term that had roots in Confucian prescriptions for domestic relationships but was carefully extended to cover international relations beginning in the late 1930s. The family idiom is another example of the malleable social construct, for it suggests harmony and reciprocity
on the one hand, but clear-cut hierarchy and division of authority and responsibility on the other; and it was the latter that really mattered to the Japanese. The authors of the
Investigation
were emphatic in condemning false consciousness concerning equality. “To view those who are in essence unequal as if they were equal is itself inequitable,” they observed. And it followed from this that “to treat those who are unequal unequally is to realize equality.” The family exemplified such equitable inequality, and the Japanese writers made clear that Japan was not merely the head of the family in Asia, but also destined to maintain that position “eternally.” Whether the Yamato race also was destined to become the head of the global family of races and nations was left unanswered, although passing comments suggested that this was the ultimate goal. The opening pages of the study flatly declared that the war would continue “until Anglo-American imperialistic democracy has been completely vanquished and a new world order erected in its place.” And as the
Investigation
made amply clear, the Japanese-led imperium in Asia would assume a leading role in this new world order.

Despite their Confucian overtones, the family metaphor and proper-place philosophy bore close resemblance to Western thinking on issues of race and power. The Japanese took as much pleasure as any white Westerner in categorizing the weaker peoples of Asia as “children.” In their private reports and directives, they made clear that “proper place” meant a division of labor in Asia in which the Yamato race would control the economic, financial, and strategic reins of power within an autarkic bloc and thereby “hold the key to the very existence of all the races of East Asia.” A secret policy guideline issued in Singapore at the outset of the war was equally frank. “Japanese subjects shall be afforded opportunities for development everywhere,” it stated, “and after establishing firm footholds they shall exalt their temperament as the leading race with the basic doctrine of planning the long-term expansion of the Yamato race.” Despite their detailed country-by-country, race-by-race summaries, the Japanese were interested in other Asians only as subordinate members of the family who could be manipulated
to play roles assigned by Japan. For other Asians the real meaning of Japan's racial rhetoric was obvious. “Leading race” meant master race, “proper place” meant inferior place, “family” meant patriarchal oppression.

Given the virulence of the race hate that permeated the Pacific war, at first it seems astonishing that Americans and Japanese were able to move so quickly toward cordial relations after Japan's surrender. Intimate face-to-face contact for purposes other than mutual slaughter enabled each side to rehumanize the other in the highly structured milieu of the Allied Occupation of Japan, which lasted from 1945 to 1952. Although the United States–dominated Occupation was ethnocentric and overbearing in many respects, it also was infused with goodwill and—in its early stages—a commitment to “demilitarization and democratization” that struck a responsive chord among most of the defeated Japanese. Contrary to the wartime stereotypes of propagandists in both the Allied and Japanese camps, most Japanese were sick of regimentation, indoctrination, and militarism. At the same time, the Cold War facilitated a quick diversion of enmity, and anti-Communism became a new crusade uniting the two former antagonists at the state level. Enemies changed, enmity did not.

On both sides, the abrupt metamorphosis from war to peace was cushioned by the malleability of racial, cultural, and ideological stereotypes. With only a small twist, patterns of perception that had abetted mass slaughter now proved conducive to paternalistic patronage on the American side—and to acquiescence to such paternalism by many Japanese. Racism did not disappear from the U.S.-Japan relationship, but it was softened and transmogrified. For the Americans, the vermin disappeared but the monkeymen lingered for a while as charming pets. The September 1945 cover of
Leatherneck
, for example—the first issue of the marine monthly to appear after Japan's capitulation—featured a cheery cartoon of a GI holding a vexed but thoroughly domesticated monkey wearing
the cap, shirt, and leggings of the Imperial Army.
Newsweek
, in its feature article on what sort of people the Americans might expect to find in Japan when the Occupation commenced, ran “Curious Simians” as one subheading.