John W Dower: War Without Mercy

One thing I noticed in reading John W Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II was the extent to which American racism framed the US occupation of Japan, and the good fortune that both sides enjoyed in the Japanese willingness to let such afronts slide by. To some extent that was a reflection of Japan's own sense of racial superiority, which appeared as condescension ever so politely phrased. I knew then that Dower had written a previous book that explored just these themes: War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986; paperback, 1987, Pantheon Books). The book deconstructs both sides of the racial divide, reflected primarily in the sheer brutality of the war and the propaganda of both sides.

We've pretty much managed to expunge the nastiness of our specifically anti-Asian racism from our historical memory -- one reason the Japanese-American concentration camps of WWII seem so unfathomable. In fact, the camps were a continuation of a long line of harsh anti-Asian discrimination going back to the first arrival of Asian laborers, who were treated much like slaves, and endured their own Jim Crow segregation. Even after WWII, the Asian stereotypes proved easily transportable from Filipinos to Japanese to Chinese to Korean to Vietnamese as we rotated our enemies around in something akin to Russian Roulette.

The following are quotes, mostly self-explanatory.

(pp. 4-5):

The blatant racism of the Nazis had a twofold impact in the anti-Axis camp. On the one hand, it provoked a sustained critique of "masterrace" arguments in general, with a wide range of Western scientists and intellectuals lending the weight of their reputations to the repudiation of pseudoscientific theories concerning the inherently superior or inferior capabilities of different races. At the same time, this critique of Nazi racism had a double edge, for it exposed the hypocrisy of the Western Allies. Anti-Semitism was but one manifestation of the racism that existed at all levels in the United States and the United Kingdom. Even while denouncing Nazi theories of "Aryan" supremacy, the U.S. government presided over a society where blacks were subjected to demeaning Jim Crow laws, segregation was imposed even in the military establishment, racial discrimination extended to the defense industries, and immigration policy was severely biased against all nonwhites. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, these anti-"colored" biases were dramatically displayed in yet another way: the summary incarceration of over 110,000 Japanese-Americans.

Such discrimination provided grist for the propaganda mills of the Axis. The Germans pointed to the status of blacks in America as proof of the validity of their dogma as well as the hollowness of Allied attacks on Nazi beliefs. The Japanese, acutely sensitive to "color" issues from an entirely different perspective, exploited every display of racial conflict in the United States in their appeals to other Asians (while necessarily ignoring the whit supremacism of their German ally). Racism within the Allied camp was, however, a volatile issue in and of itself regardless of what enemy propagandists said. Although only a few individuals spoke up on behalf of the persecuted Japanese-Americans, both the oppression of blacks and the exclusion of Asian immigrants became political issues in wartime America. Blacks raised questions about "fighting for the white folks" and called for "double victory" at home and abroad. Asians, especially Chinese and Indians, decried the humiliation of being allied to a country which deemed them unfit for citizenship; and for a full year in the midst of the war, the U.S. Congress debated the issue of revising the suddenly notorious Oriental exclusion laws. In such ways, World War Two contributed immeasurably not only to a sharpened awareness of racism within the United States, but also to more radical demands and militant tactics on the part of the victims of discrimination.

(pp. 6-7):

Officials in the West took the rhetoric of Asian solidarity painfully to heart. During the first year of the war, for example, Admiral Ernest King worried about the repercussions of Japanese victories "among the non-white world" while Roosevelt's chief of staff Admiral William Leahy wrote in his diary about the fear that Japan might "succeed in combining most of the Asiatic peoples against the whites." William Phillips, Roosevelt's personal emissary to India in 1943, sent back deeply pessimistic reports about a rising "color consciousness" that seemed to be creating an insurmountable barrier between Oriental and Occidental peoples. In March 1945, a month before he died, President Roosevelt evoked in a negative way much the same image of Pan-Asian solidarity that the Asian leaders had emphasized in Tokyo in 1943. "1,100,000,000 potential enemies," the president told a confidant, "are dangerous."

During WWII Frank Capra made a series of propaganda films under the general title Why We Fight, including one on Japan, Know Your Enemy -- Japan (p. 16):

In a memorandum to one of his aides when the project was still in the planning stage, Capra stated that there were two overriding objectives to the films: to win the war and win the peace. And he quickly hit upon a simple working motto that decisively shaped the style and texture of the films: "Let the enemy prove to our soldiers the enormity of his cause -- and the justness of ours." Capra also expressed this more colloquially. "Let our boys hear the Nazis and the Japs shout their own claims of master-race crud," he declared, "and our fighting men will know why they are in uniform."

(pp. 20-21):

Know Your Enemy -- Japan was a potpourri of most of the English-speaking world's dominant clichés about the Japanese enemy, excluding the crudest, most vulgar, and most blatantly racist. The filmmakers adopted a strongly historical approach, offering a lengthy survey of those aspects of Japan's past which Westerners believed had made the Japanese a modern menace. They began as almost everyone began in those days, and many still do, with scenes of samurai, echoes of a disciplined killer past. The film then cut to a commentary on the Japanese mind, which was portrayed as being imprisoned in an ideological cage built of two unique elements: the Shinto religion (as perverted by the modern state) and belief in a divine emperor whose role was both sacred and secular. Out of this Shinto-emperor amalgam came Japan's cult of racial superiority, its sense of holy mission, and its goal of placing the "eight corners of the world" under a Japanese roof (encapsuled in the slogan Hakko Ichiu). Warrior ideals of bravery and fanatic loyalty, as well as warrior practices of ruthlessness and treachery, were traced back to the emergence of feudal society around the twelfth century. The lust for overseas conquest was garishly illuminated by the invasion of Korea ordered in the late sixteenth century by Hideyoshi, the megalomaniac who ruled Japan (with the emperor as mere figurehead) and dreamed of an empire embracing Korea, China, and the Philippines. The invasion was abandoned when Hideyoshi died in 1598, leaving a ruined landscape in Korea and a grisly memento in Kyoto in the form of the "ear mound," which contained pickled ears and noses from forty thousand enemy corpses. This became part of the historic memory of the Japanese people, it was explained, an ember that remained alive, waiting only to be fanned into flame again. Three centuries later, that flame licked out: Japan struck against China in 1894 and embarked upon the course of conquest that led to Pearl Harbor.

Dower examines a Japanese booklet, The Way of the Subject, which the Japanese handed out to their own soldiers (p. 31):

It was not that the Japanese people were, in actuality, homogeneous and harmonious, devoid of individuality and thoroughly subordinated to the group, but rather that the Japanese ruling groups were constantly exhorting them to become so. Indeed, the government deemed it necessary to draft and propagate a rigid orthodoxy of this sort precisely because the ruling classes were convinced that a great many Japanese did not cherish the more traditional virtues of loyalty and filial piety under the emperor, but instead remained attracted to more democratic values and ideals. At several points, The Way of the Subject said this directly. In other words, what the vast majority of Westerners believed the Japanese to be coincided with what the Japanese ruling elites hoped they would become.

(p. 33):

Shortly after World War Two ended, the American historian Allan Nevins, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, published an essay entitled "How We Felt About the War." "Probably in all our history," he observed, "no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese." Nevins attributed this to the infamy of the attack on Pearl Harbor, coupled with reports of Japanese atrocities and the extraordinary fierceness of the fighting in the Pacific. "Emotions forgotten sine our most savage Indian wars," he went on, "were reawakened by the ferocities of Japanese commanders" -- an analogy more telling to us today, perhaps, than Nevins intended.

(pp. 34-35):

The distinction between the war in the West and the war in Asia and the Pacific is in itself simplistic, however, for it obscures the fact that the Germans were engaged in several separate wars -- on the eastern front, on the western front, and against the Jews -- and their greatest and most systematic violence was directed against peoples whom most English and Americans also looked down upon, or simply were unable to identify with strongly. Foremost among these were the eastern Europeans, the Slavs, and the Jews -- all of whom, along with Asians, were the target of America's own severe immigration restrictions dating back to the 1920s. Thus, historians of the war in the Western Hemisphere emphasize that the German onslaught against the Soviet Union and eastern Europe was much more savage than the attack to the west; German atrocities on the eastern front were "planned and persistent," while on the western front they were more episodic; and as a consequence, notwithstanding a genuine horror at incidents like Lidice, as well as the normal war hate that simply came from direct confrontation,t he response to the Germans in countries like Britain and the United States generally was less violent than elsewhere. Scholars of the Holocaust, in turn, have demonstrated that although the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews was documented beyond doubt by November 1942, this generally was downplayed by American and British leaders, and was ignored or buried in the mainstream English-language media until after Germany collapsed and Western correspondents actually entered the death camps. Periodicals that regularly featured accounts of Japanese atrocities gave negligible coverage to the genocide of the Jews, and the Holocaust was not even mentioned in the Why We Fight series Frank Capra directed for the U.S. Army.

(p. 54):

[E]ven after the war ended and the Japanese turned their energies tot he tasks of peaceful reconstruction, a surprising number of Americans expressed regrets that Japan surrendered so soon after the atomic bombs were dropped. A poll conducted by Fortune in December 1945 found that 22.7 percent of respondents wished the United States had had the opportunity to use "many more of them [atomic bombs] before Japan had a chance to surrender."

(p. 55):

In May 1943, and for some time thereafter, the Navy representative to the first interdepartmental U.S. government committee that was assigned to study how Japan should be treated after the war revealed himself to be a literal believer in Admiral Halsey's motto "Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs." He called for "the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race," on the grounds that this "was a question of which race was to survive, and white civilization was at stake." Prime Minister Churchill, in a triumphant visit to Washington the same month, roused a joint session fo Congress with a speech in which he spoke of "the process, so necessary and desirable, of laying the cities and other munitions centers of Japan in ashes, for in ashes they must surely lie before peace comes back to the world." Elliott Roosevelt, the president's son and confidant, told Henry Wallace in 1945 that the United States should continue bombing Japan "until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population." While the president's son was expressing such personal views in private, the chairman of the War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, told a public audience in April 1945 that he favored "the extermination of the Japanese in toto." When asked if he meant the Japanese military or the people as a whole, he confirmed he meant the latter, "for I know the Japanese people." A week later, McNutt, a former U.S. high commissioner in the Philippines, called a press conference to make clear that his comments reflected his personal views rather than official policy. Several days before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Vice Admiral Arthur Radford was quoted as saying that "the Japs are asking for an invasion, and they are going to get it. Japan will eventually be a nation without cities -- a nomadic people."

Many more examples follow.

(p. 71):

In the opening days of 1943, almost a year and a half before Lindbergh arrived on New Guinea, General Blamey gave an emotional speech to his exhausted Australian troops, who were just beginning to turn the tide against the Japanese on that same bitterly contested island. "You have taught the world that you are infinitely superior to this inhuman foe against whom you were pitted," he said. "Your enemy is a curious race -- a cross between the human being and the ape. And like the ape, when he is cornered he knows how to die. But he is inferior to you, and you know it, and that knowledge will help you to victory." The general went on to compare his men to the courageous Roman legionnaires of ancient times, and to tell them that although the road ahead was long and hard, they were fighting for nothing less than the cause of civilization itself. "You know that we have to exterminate these vermin if we and our families are to live," he concluded. "We must go on to the end if civilization is to survive. We must exterminate the Japanese." In an interview around the same time that was reported on page 1 of the New York Times, Blamey, visiting the Buna battlefield, was quoted in much the same terms. "Fighting Japs is not like fighting normal human beings," he explained. "The Jap is a little barbarian. . . . We are not dealing with humans as we know them. We are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin." The general even went on to refer to the enemy as simply "these things."

(p. 73):

Allied propagandists were not distorting the history of Japan when they pointed ot much that was cruel in the Japanese past. They had to romanticize or simply forget their own history, however, to turn such behavior into something uniquely Japanese -- to ignore, for example, the long history fo torture and casual capital punishment in the West, the genocide of the Indian population in the Western Hemisphere by the sixteenth-century conquistadores, the "hell ships" of the Western slave trade, the death match of American Indians forcibly removed from the eastern United States in the 1830s, the ten thousand or more Union prisoners of war who died at Andersonville during the U.S. Civil War, the introduction of "modern" strategies of annihilation and terrorization of civilians by Napoleon and Lee and Grant and Sherman, and the death marches and massacres of native peoples by the European colonialists in Africa and Asia, right up to 1941. In their genuine shock at the death rituals which the Japanese military engaged in, moreover, the Westerners tended to forget not only their own "epics of defeat" (immortalized in such names as Roland, Thermopylae, the Alamo, and Custer), but also the self-sacrifice against hopeless odds of thousands of Allied fighting men. To give but one example,t he numver of United Kingdom airmen who gave their lives in World War Two was ten times greater than the number of Japanese who died as kamikaze pilots.

(p. 82):

For many Japanese-Americans, the verbal stripping of their humanity was accompanied by humiliating treatment that reinforced the impression of being less than human. They were not merely driven from their homes and communities on the West Coast and rounded up like cattle, but actually forced to live in facilities meant for animals for weeks and even months before being moved to their final quarters int he relocation camps. In the state of Washington, two thousand Japanese-Americans were crowded into a single filthy building in the Portland stockyard, where they slept on gunnysacks filled with straw. In California, evacuees were squeezed into stalls in the stables at racetracks such as Santa Anita and Tanforan. At the Santa Anita assembly center, which eventually housed eighty-five hundred Japanese-Americans, only four days elapsed between the removal of the horses and the arrival of the first Japanese-Americans, the only facilities for bathing were the horse showers, and here as elsewhere the stench of manure lingered indefinitely. Other evacuees were initially housed in horse or cattle stalls at various fairgrounds. At the Puyallup assembly center in Washington (which was called Camp Harmony), some were even lodged in converted pigpens.

(pp. 105-106):

Such complacency naturally turned into astonishment and disbelief when the Japanese launched their bold, unorthodox, and meticulously executed attacks on the Western powers in December 1941. As is well known, the first electronic sightings of the Japanese attack force moving against Pearl Harbor were not taken seriously. When Japanese aircraft swooped in on the Philippines nine hours after Pearl Harbor and wiped out General Douglas MacArthur's air force on the ground, the general was caught by surprise and refused to believe that the pilots could have been Japanese. He insisted they must have been white mercenaries. At almost the same moment, the British defenders of Hong Kong were voicing similar incredulity as they came under pinpoint low-level fire from Japanese planes. They "firmly believed," as the official British history of the war in Asia put it, "that Germans must be leading the sorties." (In the Soviet Union, Stalin joined this early chorus that placed Germans in Japan's cockpits). In some quarters, disbelief that the Japanese could really master the weapons of modern war persisted long after they had presumedly proven their mettle. When battle-hardened GIs, accustomed to the light-arms combat of the jungles and island atolls, moved on to Okinawa in April 1945 and found themselves suddenly pinned down by accurate heavy-artillery fire, the rumor quickly spread that "German experts are directing the Jap artillery." In this respect, the war in the Pacific ended much as it had begun: in American underestimation of the technical capability of the Japanese.

Comparable rumors flourished concerning the Japanese mind. It was the sine qua non of virtually all Western commentaries that the Japanese did not think as other peoples did, and were certainly not guided by "reason" or "logic" in the Western sense. They were often said to "feel" rather than think, or to think with their "whole being" rather than just their brains. Their minds were described as "pre-Hellenic, prerational, and prescientific" -- labels which were also commonly employed in discourse concerning the inferiority of the female mind. On occasion,this equation was made explicit. "The Japanese mind works in a more elemental way," wrote Otto Tolischus, "as a woman's is supposed to do -- by instinct, intuition, apprehension, feeling, emotion, association of ideas, rather than by analysis and logical deduction.

(p. 108):

Westerners, however, tended to find essentially what they started out expecting to find -- and in the case of the president of the United States, as Professor Christopher Thorne has revealed, thtis turned out to be a brain that was not so much peculiarly slow as peculiarly small. For this expert information, President Roosevelt was indebted to the curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, who, in a lengthy correspondence, explained that the Japanese were "as bad as they were" because their skulls were "some 2,000 years less developed than ours." The president's receptivity to this bogus empiricism reflected the durability of presumedly discredited nineteenth-century racist theories. And how could the Japanese escape this unfortunate biological curse? After they had been defeated, Roosevelt once privately suggested, they should be encouraged by every means possible to intermarry with other races.

Weston La Barre, a Yale-trained anthropolgist, published "a famous analysis of the Japanese character structure" in August 1945 (p. 136):

La Barre, like most commentators, accepted without question that the Japanese -- all Japanese -- did indeed desire to rule the world. He discussed this under the compulsive trait of self-righteousness, in which there was little ego examination of severe superego demands. "As with the Nazis in similar circumstances," La Barre observed, "the Japanese have manifested a sort of puzzled, hurt shock that other people did not accept their doctrine and domination, when their motives of civilizing the world under the divine ordainments of Amaterasu Omikami and her line were so pure and so self-evident." In both the German and Japanese cases, such self-righteousness was "part of a tribal theology of racial speriority and consequent divine mission." Unlike the majority of his anthropologist colleagues, however, La Barre concluded that this racist and militaristic sense of mission could only be expunged from the Japanese psyche by a direct and thoroughgoing attack on the mystique of the imperial institution. In this respect, he was a maverick among his peers, and far more in sympathy with those more politically radical analysts who analyzed Japan's dilemma from a historical and fundamentally socioeconomic perspective.

Other "experts" had counselled against confronting the Emperor. In the end, the US kept the Emperor, stripping his divine place in the Shinto state-religion, but also whitewashing him of all war crimes.

(p. 172):

Beyond this loomed the larger and more conventional Yellow Peril specter of China breaking with the Anglo-American powers and throwing its weight behind a Pan-Asian and antiwhite movement. In the war on hand, this would not simply have added the several million troops who comprised Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist forces to the ranks of the enemy, but would have freed an estimated two-million additional Japanese troops to fight against the Allies. Even assuming the Nationalists stayed the course in the battle against Japanese imperialism, however, it still remained to be asked where China and the rest of Asia would stand thereafter -- whether there would develop what William Phillips, a personal representative of President Roosevelt to India in 1943, perceived as a burgeoning "white against colored complex in the East." To the end of the war, the notion persisted in many circles that Japan could still "win by losing." This could happen, warned Robert S. Ward, an experienced U.S. foreign-service officer stationed in Chungking in May 1945, simply because "it is in the Japanese identification of imperial aims with the appeal to a race revolt that the real peril lies." The peoples of the East, he continued, had been exposed to "a virus that may yet poison the whole soul of Asia and ultimately commit the world to a racial war that would destroy the white man and decimate the Asiatic, with no possible future gain."

(pp. 173-174):

Like a stone cast into the water, the race issue made itself felt in ever-widening circles. Just as attacks on the Japanese enemy carried over into animosity toward Asian peoples in general, so did the Yellow Peril sentiment pass on into even larger fears concerning the rise of "colored" peoples everywhere. For the English, the colored problem evoked a multitude of unsettling images linking the war to the clamor for independence from colonial rule in India, Burma, Malaya, and, though still muted there, Africa. For white Americans, "color" was a blunt reminder that the upheaval in Asia coincided with rising bitterness, impatience, anger, and militance among blacks at home.

The alarm which accelerating black demands for equality caused in U.S. military and civilian circles during the war cannot be underestimated [??]. Secretary of War Stimson agonized over the "explosive" and seemingly insoluble race problem, and confided to his diary early in 1942 that he believed Japanese and Communist agitators were behind Negro demands for equality. General Marshall confidentially told reporters in August 1943 that he "would rather handle everything that the Germans, Italians and Japanese can throw at me, than to face the trouble I see in the Negro question." A white Southern moderate writing in Atlantic Monthly early in 1943 painted a doomsday picture of race riots erupting throughout the United States, incited by both radical blacks and reactionary whites, with blacks soon coming to the conclusion that they had little to lose by a Japanese victory. "Like the natives of Malaya and Burma," he stated, "the American Negroes are sometimes imbued with the notion that a victory for the yellow race over the white race might also be a victory for them." At the same time, the article went on, should the United States erupt in racial violence, this probably would have "far-reaching and heavily adverse effects upon the colored peoples of China, India, and the Middle East."

The "cannot be underestimated" looks like a botched edit; "cannot be overestimated" is more like it, but "should not be underestimated" is probably most accurate. There was a growing civil rights movement before the war, but it was still focused mostly on anti-lynching laws. The war brought equal access and equal rights to the fore. Indeed, it could be credibly argued that those were things America was fighting for, even if few white Americans realized it at the time.

(p. 204):

Japan's modern experience itself generated an indebtedness to the West which made a Japanese equivalent of whit supremacism improbable if not impossible. In addition tot he rapid and often enthusiastic "Westernization" which took place in Japan during the decades that followed the overthrow of the feudal regime in 1868, moreover, one must take into consideration two further factors. First, the half century or more during which the Japanese initially turned to the West for education coincided almost exactly with the period when scientific racism dominated the natural and social sciences in Europe and the United States. In Japan, that is, the very process of Westernization involved being told that the racial inferiority of the Japanese was empirically verifiable, thus placing Japanese scientists and intellectuals in the awkward position fo either ignoring such arguments or attempting to repudiate their ostensible teachers. Second, by the 1930s the Japanese had been forced to endure racial slights and outright discrimination by both Americans and Europeans in a variety of highly public forms, including the unequal treaties of the nineteenth century, discriminatory immigration policies in the United States and elsewhere, and humiliation in the founding moments of the League of Nations, when Japan's request for a simple declaration of "racial equality" was rejected. To an immeasurable degree, there was thus a reactive cast to the anti-Western rhetoric of the Japanese during the years under discussion -- a clear sense of revenge for past indignities and maltreatment which, again, has no precise counterpart in the racism of white supremacists. The situation was compounded further by a decided assumption of Japanese superiority vis-à-vis the other races of Asia -- a condescending attitude which rested in good part upon Japan's successful adaptation of Western machines.

Dower follows with a long survey of Japanese racial views. One key aspect of this was the notion of "purification" (p. 228):

If the average Japanese citizen had been asked what "purification" meant during these years, however, he or she undoubtedly would have answered in less abstract terms. At the everyday level, purification was understood to mean (1) expunging foreign influences, (2) living austerely, and (3) fighting and, if need be, dying for the emperor.

(pp. 259-261):

Much as happened in the case of the Americans and the English, Japanese at all levels allowed themselves to be misled by distorted perceptions of both their own strengths and the purported weaknesses of their enemies. They exaggerated their social cohesiveness and supposedly unique spiritual and moral qualities, while at the same time grossly underestimating the material strength and moral fiber of the other side.

This was most conspicuous in the year preceding and the year following Pearl Harbor. The decision to attack the Pacific Fleet in its Hawaii anchorage was not reached easily, not was it irrational once the decision had been made that Japan could not survive without control of the southern region. As researchers such as Michael Barnhart and others have demonstrated, however, the brilliance of the military's operational plans for the opening stage of the war was offset by an astonishing lack of serious intelligence analysis of a psychological and economic nature. Prior to 1940, the Imperial Army virtually ignored the United States and Great Britain altogether in its intelligence gathering, being more focused on China and the Soviet Union; English was not even taught in the Army schools. Neither the Imperial Navy nor other key government organs made a major investigation of U.S. productive capacity before initiating the war. Because the plan to attack Peal Harbor was so secret, moreover, Naval Intelligence was kept out of the planning (which was done by the Operations section), and no serious evaluation of the probable psychological effects of a surprise attack were undertaken. Admiral Yamamoto himself, as previously noted, hoped the attack would discourage the Americans and destroy their will to respond.

This blithe assumption reflected an arrogance and ineptitude every bit as great as that displayed toward the Japanese by the British and Americans in the period prior to December 1941; and in a similar fashion such wishful thinking rested on disdainful racial and cultural stereotypes. Briefly put, Westerners were assumed to be selfish and egoistic, and incapable of mobilizing for a long fight in a distant place. [ . . . ]

For a half year or more after Pearl Harbor, this impression of a soft enemy appeared to be true. The huge size of the U.K. force that surrendered without much of a fight at Singapore was incredible by anyone's reckoning, and the combined U.S. and Filipino army that capitulated on Bataan was twice as large as the Japanese expected. (They expected forty thousand prisoners, or possibly many fewer, and approximately seventy-eight thousand men surrendered.) Japanese casualties were light, and Japanese euphoria knew no bounds. For the Western Allies, these were the months of humiliating defeat that spawned the myth of the Japanese superman; to the Japanese, they were months of glorious victory that once and for all confirmed their innate superiority. It was during these months that there emerged in Japan what after the war was called the "victory disease," the fatal hubris of invincibility. Even the most cautious of military leaders were not immune to such wishful thinking. Ont he eve of the decisive battle of Midway, for example, Admiral Nagumo Chuichi's intelligence concluded that Americans did indeed "lack the will to fight."

(p. 289):

While public speakers called for Pan-Asianism, racial harmony, and liberation from the white colonial yoke, privately the Japanese managers of the new imperium were advised to pay careful attention to relations among the different races and countries under their leadership. They were told to "take advantage of enmity and jealousy among these peoples" and pursue, wherever feasible, a shrewd "divide-and-rule" policy. They were also warned to be particularly cautious in dealing with the mixed-blood offspring of Southeast Asians and Caucasians or overseas Chinese.

(pp. 298-299):

The total of over 2,100,000 military and civilian Japanese deaths amounts to 3 percent of the total Japanese population at the time, but this does not convey the full picture on the Japanese side. It is estimated that only one third of the military deaths occurred in actual combat, the majority being caused by illness and starvation. Over 300,000 men were wounded severely enough to qualify for government pensions during and after the war. In 1945 alone, some 4,470,000 of the Japanese troops repatriated to Japan immediately after the surrender -- the vast majority of the total fighting force -- were found to be suffering from illness or injury. The condition of the imperial forces was so wretched by war's end that over 81,000 Japanese died overseas after the cease-fire before they could be repatriated by their Allied captors (other than the Soviets) -- a startling figure in itself, although it went virtually unnoticed at the time and survives only as a forgotten historical footnote.

The standard listings of Japanese war victims also generally neglect other deaths, both military and civilian, that occurred after as well as during the period of actual fighting. As many as 10,000 Japanese civilians may have perished on Saipan, while a recent study of the last great battle of the war, on Okinawa in the spring of 1945, places civilian deaths (including citizens recruited for war work) at 150,000 -- one third of the island's population. For hundreds of thousands of Japanese, moreover, the war did not end in 1945. Scores of thousands of soldiers became absorbed by Chinese armies engaged in the civil war that wracked the mainland after Japan's defeat; thousands of others were held as Allied prisoners in Southeast Asia until as late as October 1947; and an immense number fell into the hands of the Soviet Union. The Japanese government estimated that over 1.3 million Japanese soldiers and civilians surrendered to the U.S.S.R. in Manchuria and northern Asia in August 1945, but over the course of the next four years only 1 million were repatriated to Japan -- leaving more than 300,000 unaccounted for and presumed to have died after August 1945. Countless Japanese civilians, many women and children among them, failed to survive the chaos that followed the end of the war in continental Asia. In Manchuria in the winter of 1945-46 alone, it is estimated that well over 100,000 Japanese soldiers and civilians perished from hunger, cold, and epidemics.

When such neglected figures are added to conventional tallies, the human cost of the war for the Japanese themselves appears to be close to 2.7 million individuals -- much smaller than China's losses and less than half the combined military and civilian deaths suffered by the Germans, but twenty-five times greater than American combat deaths in the Pacific theater, and eight or nine times greater than the total number of Americans killed in World War Two.

(pp. 300-301):

On August 10, the day after the Nagasaki bomb (and two days after the Soviet Union declared war on Japan), the Japanese government made clear it intended to surrender, although the terms remained to be ironed out. Between then and the actual end of the war, two now-forgotten happenings took place that symbolize the war hates and race hates which had driven both sides so far, so disastrously. After the saturation bombing of Japanese cities began in March 1945, the Japanese military in the home islands commenced summarily executing the small number of U.S. airmen who fell into their hands. On August 12, eight were executed in Fukuoka; on August 15, the formal cease-fire a whisper away, eight more were killed by the military command in the same city -- marking Japan's last moment of war with a final atrocity. While this was taking place, General Henry H. Arnold, one of the major planners of the U.S. bombing strategy, was desperately attempting to arrange "as big a finale as possible" to end the war. I twas his dream to hit Tokyo with a final 1,000-plane air raid -- and on the night of August 14 he succeeded in collecting such a force and sending it against the already devastated capital city. A total of 1,014 aircraft -- 828 B-29 bombers and 186 fighter escorts -- bombed Tokyo without a single loss. President Truman announced Japan's unconditional surrender before all of them had returned to their bases.

(p. 309):

With the "anti-Communist" allure of postwar Japan, one moves on to a fuller appreciation of the true resilience of code words concerning the Other. Not only are such concepts capable of evoking constructive as well as destructive responses; they are also free-floating and easily transferred from one target to another, depending on the exigencies and apprehensions of the moment. The war hates and race hates of World War Two, that is, proved very adaptable to the cold war. Traits which the Americans and English had associated with the Japanese, with great empirical sobriety, were suddenly perceived to be really more relevant tot he Communists (deviousness and cunning, bestial and atrocious behavior, homogeneity and monolithic control, fanaticism divorced from any legitimate goals or realistic perception of the world, megalomania bent on world conquest). Indeed, as influential American spokesmen such as George Kennan and John Foster Dulles occasionally pointed out at the height of the cold war, the Russians were really an Asiatic, or Oriental, people. They were, as Churchill liked to say even before the war ended, the real menace from the East.

Enemies changed, with wrenching suddenness; but the concept of "the enemy" remained impressively impervious to drastic alteration, and in its peculiar way provided psychological continuity and stability from the world war to the cold war. If this was true in the shaping of anti-Soviet sentiments, the transferral became even more vivid when China joined the Communist camp and Japan and China changed places in the eyes of the Americans and the British. Heralded by Americans during the war for their individualism and love of democracy, the Chinese suddenly inherited most of the old, monolithic, inherently totalitarian raiments the Japanese were shedding. They became the unthinking horde; the fanatics; the 500 (or 600 or 700) million blue ants of Asia; the newest incarnation of the Yellow Peril -- doubly ominous now that it had become inseparable from the Red Peril. The Chinese, like the Russians, explained the diplomat O. Edmund Clubb, one of America's leading China specialists, in April 1950, "do not think like other men." On the contrary, they acted out of a "madness born of xenophobia."

posted 2007-09-04