by Howard Zinn
Something like that happens when you spend time in Japan talking to the Japanese about American policy in Vietnam. The brutality of the war we are waging, no matter how sharply we feel it on occasion, has the quality of fiction as it appears on television screens or in news columns. Always at hand to "explain" the bombing of villages, the death toll of civilians, the crushing of Buddhist dissidents, are earnest "liberals" (Humphrey and Goldberg), "realistic" experts (Rostow), genial spokesmen for the Administration (Rusk and McNamara). We listen with the languor of a people who have never been bombed, who have only been the bombardiers. So even our flickers of protest somehow end up muted and polite.
The Japanese have had a more intimate association with death, both as killers and as victims. We in America still cling to the romance of war that is not really war, but Terry and the Pirates, Defending the Free World, or LBJ in a Green Beret. For the Japanese, the recollection of themselves as kamikaze pilots, and then the turn-about-Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wore off all the sheen. Out of their experience, the Japanese want desperately to speak to us.
In Tokyo, rain cascading down outside, the auditorium at Meiji University filled, popular novelist Kaiko Ken told about his four months of note-taking on the front lines in Vietnam, much of the time spent with American soldiers. Kaiko, who is thirty-six, wore a sporty tan suit with open shirt collar, and tan suede shoes. "It used to be said in Vietnam that it is disastrous to be born a man, for you are drafted and killed; it is better to be a woman. But in South Vietnam today, a woman has a child at each side and one in her belly, and still must flee the American bombs." He had seen it himself, he said, that the Americans could not distinguish the Viet Cong from the air—no matter what the official assurances were—so they simply killed whomever they could find in the target area.
If this talk had been given in the United States, in any large gathering of students, one or more would have risen at some point in the discussion to challenge Kaiko's accusation—either to deny it, or to explain why the bombings were needed. In Japan, it is hard to find any defenders of American policy.
It was Kaiko, not a very political person, who last year collected money throughout Japan for a full-page ad which appeared in the New York Times as a plea to Americans: "The Japanese learned a bitter lesson from fifteen years of fighting on the Chinese mainland: weapons alone are of no avail in winning the minds and allegiance of any people.... America's conduct of the war in Vietnam is alienating the sympathy of the Japanese." Corroboration of this last statement came from a journalist of long experience with a leading conservative newspaper in Japan, who said to me: "The polls show 80 percent of the Japanese opposed to U.S. policy in Vietnam. Emotionally, it is closer to 100 percent."
This was confirmed again and again as we talked with Japanese students and professors in 14 different universities along the 1500 mile journey from Hokkaido to Okinawa. In Kyoto, a pediatrician spoke up from the audience. (Our interpreter—a poet and former Fulbright scholar in America—explained who the speaker was: "Dr. Matsuda's books on child care have sold in the millions; he is known as the Benjamin Spock of Japan.") Matsuda said: "What the United States does not understand is that communism is one of the effective ways in which underdeveloped countries become organized. Its reaction to this phenomenon in the world is neurotic." Matsuda, a vigorous man in his fifties, added: "Perhaps it needs..." Our interpreter hesitated at this point, and then translated the ending as "... a laxative." Then he corrected himself: "...a sedative."
At that meeting in Kyoto, a mountain-rimmed city of temples and pagodas, over a thousand people—students, faculty, town residents— came to talk about Vietnam. A ninety-two-year-old man, dean of the Buddhist priests in this holy city, spoke: "The American concept of freedom violates the principles of self-determination. It is the kind of liberalism that expresses only the purpose of the American state." And a Zen Buddhist, head shaven, in black robes and white scarf, said, "There is a major law in Buddhism—not to kill. Mass killing should not go on; that is the simple slogan that binds Japanese Buddhists with Buddhists in North and South Vietnam. And this should be brought to America."
It was in Kyoto that a young professor of astronomy spoke, with great feeling: "As a child, I was machine-gunned by an American plane. And at that moment there came a shock of realization that it was a human being who pulled the trigger. I wanted so much to have been able to say to him 'Please—don't pull the trigger!'"
You find many men in Japanese universities who spent time in jail for opposing Japanese aggression in the '30s. At Nagoya—sprawling, smoky, the Detroit of Japan—we were met by Professor Shinmura, who in 1936-37 put out a humanist magazine called Sekai Bunka (World Culture) until he was seized by the police. Shinmura, quiet, gray-haired with a slight stoop, is a specialist in French literature, and after release from prison made a living by anonymously translating the writings of Rolland, Diderot and others. I asked how many members of his faculty supported American policy in Vietnam. There were 600 on the faculty, including graduate asistants. No one knew of any who supported American policy.
To the Japanese we met, America was so clearly in the wrong, that it was incomprehensible to them why anyone believed Johnson and his cabinet members. "No country should be permitted—as the U.S. is doing—to smuggle counter-revolution to another country," a professor of literature at Hosei University in Tokyo said.
After a four hour discussion session at Tohoku University in Sendai, a quiet town in northern Honshu, I was met by fifty students waiting eagerly to continue the discussion. We trooped off to the park. There in the cool darkness of Sendai, I wondered why fifty Japanese kids would stay out after midnight to discuss the war in Vietnam, when Japan was only a minor accessory to American action. When the U.S. was helping the French crush the Algerian revolt, did any group of American students ever gather in the park at midnight to brood over this? Did a thousand ever meet to protest it? By the end of our trip I thought I had found the answer. It lay in the Japanese people's piercing consciousness of their own recent history. Again and again, at virtually every meeting, there arose the accusation, directed at the Japanese past and the American present: "You are behaving in Asia as we once did."
There is widespread and vocal recognition of Japan's own sins, from the Manchurian invasion of 1931, to Pearl Harbor. Japanese scholars have done much research on those years, and see in American actions in Vietnam many of the same characteristics displayed by Japan in the '30s. Unlike the Nazis, the Japanese did not abruptly replace parliamentary democracy with authoritarian dictatorship. Rather, there was an almost imperceptible growth of the power of the military within the outwardly parliamentary system. When the Japanese took Manchuria in 1931, then attacked China proper in 1937 and moved into Sougheast Asia in 1940, they did not crassly declaim of world conquest like Hitler, but spoke of a "co-prosperity sphere" which they were creating in Asia for the benefit of all.
I asked one of Japan's most disginguished scholars about this analogy. This was Professor Maruyama of Tokyo University, a political scientist and prolific author, who five years ago was a visiting professor at Harvard. "There are many differences," Maruyama said, "but one crucial element is quite the same: the apologies and justification created by both governments for what is basically an attempt by a strong nation to establish a base of power inside a weaker one. Both Japan and the U.S. had difficulties and made excuses. The U.S. blames its difficulties in winning the Vietnamese war on China and North Vietnam. Japan attributed her failures not to the stubborn resistance of the Chinese, but to the aid of Great Britain and the United States. Japan declared that its aim was to emancipate the people of Southeast Asia and to bring them economic development. Just as the U.S. speaks not about economic and social reform while it carries on an essentially military action in Vietnam."
American commentators have a habit of dismissing Japanese criticism of our foreign policy as the work of communists, or—more vaguely—"leftists." This is comforting at first, but not afte
r one reflects that most public opinion in the world, even in countries allied to us, is to the left of ours. We have become, since that period when Europe's monarchs feared we would spread the doctrine of revolution everywhere, a conservative nation. Even our "liberals" are conservative by global standards. Professor Maruyama said: "I am a liberal, not a radical. So I am concerned with what liberals in the States are doing. And I am very disappointed."
Our companions and interpreters in Japan were young intellectuals—two journalists, three novelists, a film producer, a poet, a philosopher—who last year decided to cross the maze of radical party lines in Japan and form a group (called Beheiren) dedicated to ending the war in Vietnam. Their chairman, Oda Makoto (family name first), is a wry thirtyfour-year-old novelist who refuses to wear a tie no matter how formal the occasion. Oda started our meeting with students at Hokkaido University as follows: "You know, I got the idea for this tour of conscience while in the toilet. (Laughter) This is not strange. The peace movement starts like that, from the most common behavior of human life, from the elemental."
Oda, like most Japanese intellectuals, is critical of Communist China, but with no more heat than he is critical of Japan or America. He sees it as a new society, with the spit and fire that other new nations show, but not as a threat to the rest of Asia. It shows no signs of wanting to gobble up Southeast Asia; it maintains pacific relations with Burma, which is defenseless along a very long border—and with Cambodia. And, in contrast to the United States, China does not have a single soldier stationed outside its borders. Japanese intellectuals do not doubt that, in view of China's behavior, the U.S. is acting hysterically, and that people in Vietnam are dying unnecessarily because of it.
The United States keeps saying its aim is a free and prosperous Asia, but the Asians themselves, including the Vietnamese, are far from ardent about this war, and the only countries giving substantial aid to the American military effort (Korea and Thailand) are those which are economically dependent on th U.S., under its military occupation, and controlled by elites which can ignore popular desire. Japan is also a station for American troops (under the much-resented Security Treaty of 1960) and its former territory, Okinawa, has been taken away by the U.S. and converted into one of the most powerful military bases in the world. ("Please inform your fellow Americans," a Tokyo University student sociologist said, "that the majority of Japanese do not think these military bases protect Japan's security—in fact they feel endangered by them.") Nevertheless, the government of Premier Sato, while nodding and bowing to the U.S. Department of State, keeps a wary eye on the Japanese public, knowing their feelings.
Our envoy to Japan, Edwin Reischauer, an astute scholar of Asian affairs before his appointment, now lives in a comfortable bubble of his own in the Embassy, quietly ignoring Japanese disapproval of this country's actions. My last hour in Tokyo was spent in rapid-fire dialogue with him, trying to penetrate that bubble. But, except for Reischauer's personal charm, it was like listening to an LBJ press conference, or a McNamara briefing.
Reischauer thought differently in 1954 when, as a Harvard expert on Japan, he wrote Wanted: an Asian Policy. In it, he described the French suppression of the Viet Minh, with American aid, as "a sobering example of the weakness of defending the status quo." He found the main reason for the effectiveness of the Communists "in the realm of ideas" and because they "carried out much needed land reform for the peasants." He wishes the U.S. "had the foresight and the courage in the early postwar years to persuade the French to extricate themselves soon enough from their untenable position in Indochina." And, he said a policy based largely on stopping communism was "a dangerous oversimplification of our Asian problem." In his book, he accused American policy-makers of "frenzied emotionalism" and "dangerous inflexibility." But now he is the ambassador.
Japan is an embarrassment, because it was under our post-war tutelage that she put into her 1947 Constitution the statement: "...never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government." And Article 9 contains a silent reproach to what the United States is doing in Vietnam: "... the Japanese people forever rennounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes." It is the old human story, the little boy nurtured by his family on the Biblical exhortation Thou Shalt Not Kill, watching his father return, gun still smoking from a mission of murder.
The Japanese are trying to speak to us, but we will not listen. They have been both Fish and Fisherman, in a short space of time. We in the United States have never had to struggle at the end of the hook—and lose. We have no Hiroshima, no city of the blind and maimed, no professors still haggard from long terms in jail. And while, on a numbr of occasions, we have been the Fisherman, we have never been forced, as the Japanese have, to recognize our deeds, to bow, to apologize, to promise a life of peace. We have, in other words, never been caught.
5
A Speech for LBJ
It is a common occurrence in American politics that critics of a certain policy, while fervently declaring their allegiance to moral principle, nevertheless say they can "understand" the reluctance of the President to act on such principle because of the "realities" of politics, that he cannot "afford" (a word I always associated with dire poverty and not with the occupant of the White House) to go against "public opinion." This is almost always a feeble rationalization for a deep lack of principle, and when the same argument for "realism" was put forth against the idea of withdrawal from Vietnam, I decided to challenge it. It seemed to me that public opinion was usually ahead of the national government on moral issues, that in any case such opinion was extremely volatile and movable by reasonable argument. My method was to write a speech for Lyndon Johnson which would persuasively explain to Ameircans more than ready for such an explanation, indeed eager for it as the bodybags of their sons were returning home in great numbers, why he was immediately withdrawing our military machine from Vietnam, I ended my book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal with that speech. A businessman bought six hundred copies of the book and sent it to every member of Congress. The speech was reprinted in full-page ads in newspapers in various parts of the country. The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran simultaneous articles by Congressman Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, urging escalation of the war, by Senator William Fulbright, calling for gradual de-escalation and negotiations, and by me, agruing for immediate withdrawal. The paper then took a poll of its readers and 63% voted for immediate withdrawal. A columnist for the Plain Dealer wrote: "Howard Zinn, a professor of government at Boston University, who served as a bombardier in World War II, has written a speech for Lyndon Johnson which, if he delivered it, would make the President one of the great men of history in my opinion." But Johnson did not deliver that speech. He did start negotiations with the Vietnamese in Paris, and announced he would not run for President in 1968. The war continued, and the anti-war movement grew, and in 1973 the United States finally withdrew; 55,000 Americans had lost their lives, Vietnam was devastated, and two million of its people, mostly civilians, were dead. Here is the speech I wrote in 1967.
My Fellow Americans:
Not long ago I received a letter from my fourth-grade school teacher who still lives back in the little town where I grew up. She is of advanced age now, but still as she was when I sat in her class, a kindly and wise woman. She had been through depression and war, through sickness and the death of loved ones, more than most of us. Let me share her letter with you; I am sure she will not mind.
Dear Lyndon: You know I have always had faith in you and knew you would do what is right. And you have been trying your best on this Vietnam situation. But nothing seems to be going right. So many people are getting killed. Not only our boys, but all those poor people over there. You have tried talking peace. And you have tried bombing, and what not. But there is no end in sight. I hear people in town saying: "We should never have gotten in, but now that we are in, we don't seem able to get out." Lyndon,
can't you get us out? I am getting on now in years and would like to see peace gain. God Bless you. Sincerely, Mrs. Annie Mae Lindley
Now let me read just one more letter to you. It came to me from a young man fighting with the First Marine Division in South Vietnam:
Dear Mr. President: I am twenty years old and enlisted in the Marines as soon as I left high school in Massilon, Ohio. I have been in Vietnam six months now, and I have seen a lot. Three days ago my closest buddy was killed. Yesterday our outfit destroyed a hamlet that Intelligence said had been used by the VC as a base. We burned the huts and threw grenades down the tunnels. But there were no VC there. In one of the tunnels there were two women and three kids. We didn't know that. One of the kids was killed and one of the women lost an eye. We rounded up all the villagers and they stood around—children, old folks, women—crying and afraid. Of course we didn't mean to kill any kids. But we did. And that's war. I know you need sometimes to do nasty things for an important cause. The trouble is—there doesn't seem much of a cause left here in Vietnam. We're supposed to be defending these people against the VC. But they don't want us to defend them. They don't care about Communism or politics or anything like that. They just want to be left in peace. So, more and more, my buddies and I wonder—what are we doing here? We're not afraid. We've been sticking it out, in the mud and in the jungle. And we'll go on like this if you ask us to. But somehow it seems wrong. I don't know what we should do, but I just thought I'd let you know how soome of us feel. Sincerely, James Dixon, Corporal 1st Marine Division.
My fellow Americans, let me tell you, I have read and reread these two letters, and they have been on my mind. You all know how my administration has been concerned with the war in Vietnam. Night after night I have sat up thinking, and sometimes—I don't mind telling you— praying, that we would find a way to end this terrible war, which has cost tens of thousands of lives, American and Vietnamese, and which has caused so much pain and suffering to millions of people in that unfortunate little country.
