I chose the navy—or rather I simply drifted into it. My father had served in the navy. In World War I, he went to Europe as an ordinary seaman on the old St. Louis. In the summer of 1943, during World War II, his ship was sunk by a long-range Japanese torpedo at Iron Bottom Bay, Guadalcanal. He survived and was in the reserves when, in 1950, as the Korean War began, he was “activated” and sent to Japan for a last fling at naval service. Two older cousins of mine fought in the navy at Leyte Gulf, and the idea that men from my family would do their military duty in the navy was more or less taken for granted.
As an undergraduate, I joined the Naval Air Reserve at Oakland Naval Air Station. I was an aviation machinist’s mate third class and flew around in the back of old Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers. Unlike my father’s unit, my reserve squadron was never activated during the Korean War. Having spent two summers in training and after receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1953, I emerged as a newly minted ensign.
What happened next changed my life, but was also a typical occurrence of the Cold War years. When we received our assignments to the fleet, I was dismayed to discover that I was assigned to a ship that did not even have a name—the U.S.S. LST-883, part of the amphibious forces based in Japan. No glamorous aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean for me; I was off to a rust bucket in the Gray Line. A chief petty officer who had been an instructor of mine said to me in his gruff way, “Johnson, you don’t know it, but you lucked out. Those guys going to carriers will just be errand boys, but you’re going to a ship with only six officers. You’ll be given important things to do fast and you won’t have to waste a lot of time heel clicking or boot licking.” As it turned out, he was absolutely right.
One night in the late summer of 1953, I found myself climbing the sheer ladder of an LST moored to a buoy in the harbor of the former Japanese naval base at Yokosuka, then, as today, the headquarters of the U.S. Seventh Fleet. Used to land tanks directly onto a beachhead during an amphibious assault, LSTs are diesel-powered, flat-bottomed ships with bow doors. Lacking any sort of keel, they roll all the time, even at anchor, and are no place for anyone given to motion sickness. I came aboard the Hachi-hachi-san (883, in Japanese) as the communications officer and left two years later as the operations officer.
Although we helped marine and army units practice amphibious landings in Korea and Japan, and twice crossed the Pacific at a top speed of ten knots, our diesel engines broke down regularly. The 883 spent fairly long periods being repaired at either the Yokosuka or Sasebo naval bases. Except for a few weekends in Tijuana, this was my first extended stay outside the United States, and I was enchanted by Japan. So I began to read voraciously in its history and literature. I spent Christmas 1953 in Kyoto among the old temples of Higashiyama; then, in that impoverished postwar land, they were still covered with weeds and in states of serious neglect. I began to study the language with an old Japanese naval officer who did not really believe a foreigner could learn it but was happy to be paid for giving lessons anyway.
War-defeated Japan in the 1950s was as different from the Japan of today as the Depression-era United States was from the world’s present-day “lone superpower.” Those of us drawn to Japan then could not imagine that two decades later it would be the first “miracle” economy of East Asia. What attracted us were aspects of an artistic and philosophic culture of great power that offered truly fresh insights to a foreigner from the United States. Even though the American occupation had ended a year earlier, I took it for granted that “United Nations Forces” deserved to ride in heated railroad cars while citizens of Japan shivered in ice-cold, often windowless ones at the end of the train. Nor did it seem at all unusual to me that some Yokosuka entrepreneurs had had the good sense to provide an upscale whorehouse for the exclusive use of American naval officers.
I took it for granted as well that the United States had no choice but to confront the evils of Communist totalitarianism politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically; and I assumed that the Cold War in East Asia was not essentially different from the Cold War in Europe. Admittedly, the French, British, and Dutch had been ridiculously slow to give up their Asian colonies, but American support for the European imperialists was just an unfortunate side effect of a necessary, global anti-Communist effort. I had no doubt that the Japanese-American Security Treaty was a legitimate undertaking meant to shield Japan from revolutionary events elsewhere in Asia and to give it time to evolve into a true democracy.
In 1955, released to inactive duty in the naval reserve, I enrolled as a graduate student at Berkeley. In no rush to find a career, I wanted to put my experiences in Japan into perspective, something the G.I. Bill made possible. Although I returned to Berkeley to study modern Japan, I came under the spell of the university’s preeminent historian of China, Joseph R. Levenson. Perhaps more than any other scholar of the time, he succeeded in intellectualizing Chinese history, drawing those of us who heard his lectures into the myriad complexities of Chinese civilization.
With my G.I. Bill benefits running out, I took up Chinese studies seriously, in part because that was where the money was. Some leading intellectual institutions of the time—notably the government’s foreign policy and intelligence agencies and the Ford Foundation—were then paying handsomely to attract graduate students into the study of China and, of course, Chinese communism. I saw these fellowships not as inducements to study the enemy in the service of the state but as a wonderful opportunity. I had no hint that, as a student of Asia, I would become as much a spear-carrier for empire as I had been in the navy.
My faculty adviser, political scientist Robert Scalapino, had recently acquired from Ken’ichi Hatano microfilmed files of the Japanese wartime Asia Development Board (Koain), one of the main organs through which Japan had exploited conquered China. Hatano, a former Koain official, had in 1944 moved his office files to his home, thereby saving them from the firebombing of Tokyo. Since I was a graduate student in need of work who could read Japanese, Scalapino hired me to index these once highly classified documents. Buried in them, I discovered a remarkable tale of how after 1937, Japan’s armies, bogged down in the interior of China, had resorted to “burn all, loot all, kill all” campaigns against the Chinese peasantry, and so had helped give birth to the most monumental and catastrophic revolutionary movement of our time. To sit alone in the university library at night and see in these dry accounts Japanese army officers sent back to Tokyo, how the then-minuscule Chinese Communist Party began organizing the peasants who had survived Japanese brutality, was revelatory—and exciting. I knew that I was witnessing, years late, a story still remarkably relevant to postwar Asia, racked with similar revolts against foreign armies of occupation.
Sometime in the late 1950s, I mentioned to Professor Levenson that on-the-spot Western observers of the Chinese Communist movement from 1937 to 1945 had almost uniformly reported on the party’s remarkable popularity among ordinary Chinese. Levenson replied that they had all paid a price for such reportage, for every one of them had subsequently been tarred as a leftist and possible traitor by Senator Joseph McCarthy or other red hunters of the time. The firsthand testimony of Edgar Snow, Evans Carlson, Agnes Smedley, Nym Wales, George Taylor, and others was still considered valueless in the America of the late 1950s, coming as it did from those believed, at best, to be ideologically predisposed to accept the Chinese Communists as mere “agrarian reformers.”
Having by now read a range of Imperial Japanese Army documents on China, I responded that I could supply secret assessments of the popularity of the Chinese Communist movement in the crucial period of 1937 to 1941 from an unimpeachably anti-Communist source—namely, the Japanese high command in China. Levenson pointed out that such a topic would make a good doctoral dissertation, and so, in 1962, my dissertation was published under the title Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945.1 The book had a significant impact on the study of modern China. The Japanese invaders,
I argued, had created conditions of such savagery, particularly in North China, that the peasant masses who survived their depredations naturally gravitated toward the only group that offered them hope and resistance—the Chinese Communist Party. China illustrated what was soon to become a major political lesson of twentieth-century Asia: only in those circumstances in which the most patriotic act is to join the Communist Party does a Communist movement become a mass movement.
On a personal level, Peasant Nationalism allowed me to avoid the two worst rites of passage of academic life—getting a job and then tenure. My own university hired me. I was lucky and I worked hard, but I was also in the right place at the right time. Between research stints in Japan and Hong Kong, I made my one and only visit to Saigon, in 1962. I was appalled by our government’s policy of “sink or swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.” Knowing what I did about guerrilla war, revolutionary politics, and foreign armies, I thought it a mistake for us to involve ourselves further in what was visibly a Vietnamese civil war.2 But once we did so in the mid-sixties, I was sufficiently aware of Mao Zedong’s attempts to export “people’s war” to believe that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam. In that, too, I was distinctly a man of my times.
It proved to be a disastrously wrong position. The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the Untied States government and its Department of Defense. I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework. One day at the height of the protests, I went to the university library to check out what was then available to students on Vietnamese communism, the history of communism in East Asia, and the international Communist movement. I was surprised to find that all the major books were there on the shelves, untouched. The conclusion seemed obvious to me then: these students knew nothing about communism and had no interest in remedying that lack. They were defining the Vietnamese Communists largely out of their own romantic desires to oppose Washington’s policies. As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow. They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive. In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.
During a year of China-watching (as it was then called) from Hong Kong, I began to have inklings of the Cultural Revolution to come, and in 1966, I wrote a long piece on how China’s People’s Liberation Army was being transformed into the personal political instrument of Mao Zedong.3 As we would later learn, Mao was indeed in the process of allying himself with the army—in order to attack the Communist Party itself, the very organization he had begun building into a mass movement in those years of Japanese occupation. But none of us studying China then came close to imagining what the Cultural Revolution would be like or what kind of a disaster it would become, all because Mao Zedong wanted revenge on some of his fellow revolutionaries. Before the savagery ended with Mao’s death in 1976, the so-called Cultural Revolution came to resemble Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s. It destroyed the last shreds of Chinese idealism about the promise of communism.
The Cultural Revolution isolated China from the First, Second, and Third Worlds. It became a pariah state, unable even to forge a united front with the Soviet Union to support the Vietnamese Communists. China and Russia came perilously close to war. The only stable person left among the top Chinese leadership, Premier Zhou Enlai, sought to avoid a preemptive Soviet strike against China’s fledgling nuclear weapons program by opening relations with the devil himself—the United States. President Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, jumped at the opportunity, and Sino-American rapprochement unfolded—against a backdrop of the war in Vietnam, Watergate, and China’s purge of anyone not totally committed to the cult of Mao. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 renewed popular interest in an etherealized China of acupuncture, the Great Wall, ancient cultural artifacts, and pandas—just as the real land was being run into the ground by its most despicable twentieth-century regime.
Like other foreign specialists in Chinese politics, I was active in trying to understand what was going on, writing papers and attending conferences where Chinese matters were discussed. In 1967, at age thirty-six, I was appointed chairman of Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies. Perhaps the most important action I took in my five years at the center was to hire, as our librarian, John Service, one of America’s great State Department China hands of the 1940s, who had been savaged by Senator Joseph McCarthy and whose career in the Foreign Service had been ruined. When, after Kissinger’s initial visit, Zhou Enlai told American reporters that Service was one of only three Americans the Chinese would welcome back (the other two were Professors John Fairbank and Owen Lattimore), we at the center hastily helped arrange for his trip. I can vividly remember him calling me on the day in July 1971 when it was announced that President Nixon had accepted an invitation from Mao Zedong to visit China. As much as he hated Nixon, he told me, he had to give him credit as virtually the only conceivable president who could have brought off such a breakthrough.
American university campuses in the late sixties and early seventies were not ideal places for anyone who doubted that Mao Zedong was a true scourge of bureaucracy or who questioned whether there was any wisdom at all in his “Little Red Book” of sayings. Campus Maoism was everywhere, fueled by the general euphoria over China that Nixon and Kissinger had unleashed. (Let us not forget that even seasoned journalists like James Reston and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times went a little gaga over the China they thought they saw.)
It was clear to me, however, that the Chinese “revolution” had degenerated into a Herodian horror show, destructive to the lives of all honest Chinese—fascinating to monitor, perhaps, but no longer of great significance to the global balance of power. In Japan, on the other hand, something interesting was going on to which no one in America seemed to be paying serious attention. In the summer of 1972, I returned to a Japan well on its way toward becoming the most advanced industrial nation on earth. The contrast with my earliest naval experiences there or with the Japan of 1961, when my wife and I had set up a household in a Tokyo suburb, was stark indeed. Japan’s economic “miracle” (a term used by Westerners to denote something attractive but from their point of view unexpected) was everywhere becoming obvious. Its economy had been growing for fifteen years at an annual rate of around 10 percent, and the results were starting to come in. Japan was producing a line of automobiles that American and East Asian consumers were beginning to buy in large numbers, thanks to their low price, reliability, fuel efficiency, built-in air-conditioning, and compact size. In design, its cameras, consumer electronics, and ships, among many other products, rivaled in simplicity and elegance the traditional designs of its houses and ceramics.
To a China specialist disillusioned by the savageries of the Cultural Revolution, Japan looked like a unique case of successful socialism in one country. A state bureaucracy guided the economy, setting social goals but avoiding the misallocation of resources, loss of incentives, and extreme rigidity that were hallmark features of the Soviet and Chinese economies. How had it done this? Americans were largely uninterested in answering such a question, even though Japan’s trade surpluses were starting to irritate their government. Americans were not even curious about the new institutional structures that Japan had forged to engineer high-speed economic growth, structures that would prevent any quick or easy solution to the trade imbalance. We still saw Japan as a “little brother,” learning from and emulating its postwar mentor. The idea that Japan could be experimenting with a different form of capitalism was, if even imaginable, certainly heresy. That they were beating us in manufacturing and marketing certain major products had to mean they were cheating.
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nbsp; Americans defined Japan as a democracy organized around a free-market economy, just as the United States itself was said to be. In his memoirs, Edwin O. Reischauer—the best-known American specialist on Japanese history and ambassador to Japan during the 1960s, at the height of that country’s “income-doubling plan”—hardly bothered to mention the economy. The truly amazing thing about such American myopia and condescension was that it would last well into the late 1990s, when it would suddenly turn into contempt for Japan precisely because it had a different kind of capitalism.
In the summer of 1972, one of my mentors and a preeminent political scientist, Professor Junnosuke Masumi, urged me to consider the then-emerging economic miracle. American scholars like me, he pointed out, tended to focus on left-wing and protest politics in Japan; virtually none of us had devoted any attention to its ruling elites. There were only a few studies in English of the Liberal Democratic Party, which had been continuously in power since the country had regained its independence in 1952, and nothing at all on the vast bureaucratic state apparatus that supported and guided the economy in much the same way the Department of Defense supported and guided the military-industrial-university complex in the United States.
We talked specifically about the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). Among knowledgeable Japanese in the Tokyo of that moment, it was the openly acknowledged author of the economic miracle. Much as Professor Levenson had suggested that I look into Japanese-occupied China to find the roots of the Chinese Communist Party’s success, so Professor Masumi suggested that I look into the roots of MITI to find the basis for his country’s “successful socialism.” I spent the next decade on this project, writing a history of an economic ministry that I thought might interest a few public policy specialists who did not read Japanese, as well as the usual group of Japanologists. I did not realize then that my research would inadvertently lead me to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported.
Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire Page 3
