Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival

by Pilling, David

  Even Fukuzawa, by the standards of his age a most liberal thinker, never doubted his country’s duty to bring ‘enlightenment’ to other parts of Asia. Of Japan’s victory over China in the war of 1895, he wrote, ‘How happy I am. I have no words to express it . . . I am often brought to tears of pity for those who died too soon [to see it].’36 Some years previously, an anonymous newspaper article had appeared that was later attributed to Fukuzawa. In ‘On Leaving Asia’, he wrote that China and Korea, which had failed to emulate the modernizing Meiji reforms, were too backward to join Japan on the road to ‘civilization’. Japan should therefore ‘leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with the civilized nations of the west’. It was not a big leap from there to suggest that it should emulate the great ‘civilizing’ endeavour of the European powers by acquiring colonies of its own. ‘Fukuzawa saw the future of East Asia as pivoting on a Chinese–Japanese conflict,’ Masamichi Komuro told me when I went to see him in his office in Keio University, the institution Fukuzawa founded. ‘This would resolve the issue: was East Asia to become a Confucian bloc or a modern bloc?’

  By the end of the nineteenth century, just thirty years after the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s relations with the outside world had been transformed. From being a marginal backwater on the edge of Asia, it had won a dominant regional position and was fast to be counted, at least formally, among the world’s Great Powers. Its expansionism had begun in the 1880s, when it had imposed unequal treaties on Korea, much as America had forced such treaties on Japan. In 1894, a few weeks before the start of the Sino–Japanese War, Japan achieved its long-desired diplomatic goal of overturning the unequal treaties it had been forced to sign a quarter of a century earlier. That ended its status as a quasi-colony. In 1895, it gained control over Taiwan after its victory over China in war. China paid Japan reparations and Japanese ships were allowed to ply the river Yangtze. In 1902, the Anglo-Japanese alliance was signed, suggesting – at least on paper – that Japan had finally achieved Fukuzawa’s improbable dream of becoming ‘a great nation in this far Orient [to] stand counter to Great Britain of the west’. In 1905, Japan stunned the world by defeating the Russians and gained an early, ill-fated, foothold in Manchuria. By 1910, it had formally annexed Korea. The victim was turning victimizer. What was expected of a ‘civilized’ power was neatly summed up by Kakuzo Okakura, author of The Book of Tea. ‘The average westerner was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace,’ he wrote. ‘He calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on the Manchurian battlefields.’37

  In addition to its external conduct, there was a systematic attempt, much of it rather po-faced, to adopt foreign practices at home. Japanese high society took to attending balls, to wearing tailored suits and top hats, to shunning the pleasure quarters and to eating beef, which Fukuzawa said would improve their physique. Kabuki, a ribald form of entertainment that had its origins in riverside performances by Kyoto prostitutes, became staid and classical. Danjuro Ichikawa IX, whose descendants are still acting on the stage today, decried the traditions of a kabuki theatre that he said had ‘drunk up filth’. Instead of wearing a dashing kimono or dressing as a demon on stage, he donned white tie and tails.38 The establishment took to pressing western morals on its populace, for example forbidding public nakedness and mixed bathing. One such ordinance proclaimed that although ‘this is the general custom and is not so despised among ourselves, in foreign countries this is looked on with great contempt. You should therefore consider it a great shame.’39

  Yet for all its efforts, both on the battlefield and in its ballrooms and bathhouses, Japan never won the acceptance it craved. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Tokyo pressed for the principle of racial equality to be made part of the founding covenant of the League of Nations. The western powers refused, causing immense bitterness among the Japanese, who took it to mean – perhaps rightly – that a nation of ‘yellow-skinned’ people would never be accepted as equal by racist westerners.

  The sense that Japan would always be excluded from the white man’s club is an important psychological backdrop for its eventual descent into aggressive militarism. The Japanese saw Woodrow Wilson’s newfound championing of the sovereignty of nations as hypocritical. Now that western powers had seized their colonies and established their control over the world’s natural resources, their aim was to shut out latecomers such as Japan. As early as the 1880s a popular song spelled out Japan’s view of what lay beneath the deceitful civility of the new world order. ‘There is a Law of Nations, it is true, / but when the moment comes, remember, / the strong eat up the weak.’40

  Japan’s victories over China and Russia and its full annexation of Korea set it on a tragic course. These early triumphs instilled an over-confidence and sense of manifest destiny that ended with its brutal campaign throughout the region. Before the fighting was over in 1945, several million Chinese had been killed (the United Nations estimated 9 million in the war alone, not counting those who died of hunger and disease) and several million more Asians had perished as a direct or indirect consequence of war. Tens of thousands of forced labourers, from Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, China and elsewhere were worked to death in the mines or in the ‘death march’ construction of railroads. After the war, the French sought reparations on the basis that 5.5 per cent of the European population and 2.5 per cent of the native population had died during Japanese rule in Indochina. In the Pacific theatre, the American armed forces lost 101,000 men with a further 291,500 injured. The Japanese themselves were not spared. Some 1.75 million military personnel died, as did nearly 400,000 civilians, including those in the bombing raids on Tokyo and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The total of more than 2.1 million dead represented some 3 per cent of the Japanese population.41

  Yet as Japan had been gearing up for war after its unprecedented victory over Russia in 1905, some Asians had celebrated its military ambitions as a blow for Asian liberation, proof that non-whites could be a match for Europeans. Sun Yat-sen, China’s nationalist leader, said, ‘We regarded that Russian defeat by Japan as the defeat of the West by the East.’42 Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of an independent India, wrote in his autobiography, ‘Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm . . . Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.’43 John Frederick Charles Fuller, a British army officer and military historian, had no doubt about the significance of Japan’s victory. ‘Above all it was a challenge to western supremacy in Asia,’ he wrote. ‘The fall of Port Arthur in 1905, like the fall of Constantinople in 1453, rightly may be numbered among the few really great events of history.’44

  That initial reaction lent a veneer of credence to Japanese propaganda that its invasion of neighbours was a war of liberation not of subjugation. It proved to be a lie. The claim was quickly undermined by the blatantly racist attitudes that the Japanese exhibited towards fellow Asians. Imperial ideology, with its faith in Japan as the ‘land of the gods’, had taught its subjects to believe that other Asians were inferior, even subhuman. Japanese working in the hellish Unit 731 in the puppet state of Manchukuo – where vivisections and biological and chemical experiments were performed on mainly Chinese and Korean prisoners – referred to their victims as ‘logs’, not human beings. Throughout Asia, those ‘liberated’ by Japan’s Imperial Army soon found their new masters to be worse than the old ones. General Aung San, father of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, helped the Japanese to invade Burma, but quickly saw how repressive the Japanese ‘liberators’ turned out to be. ‘I went to Japan to save my people, who were treated like bullocks by the British,’ he said in 1942. ‘But now we are treated like dogs.’45

  • • •

  Domestically, it was a failure to deepen the institutions established by the Meiji Restoration that allowed Japan to fall under the spell of a quasi-fascist imperial cult
. Fukuzawa feared his country would not be able to embrace the philosophy of individual inquiry that he thought necessary to the success of a modern state. ‘His fundamental belief was that this spirit of inquiry was essential and that the only way to achieve it was to oppose hierarchical structures,’ said Komuro of Keio University. ‘Only with the autonomy of the individual could the nation also become autonomous.’ Contrary to Fukuzawa’s hopes, the early decades of the twentieth century saw the gradual snuffing out of individualism and the reassertion of hierarchy. Japan’s feudal order had been overturned not, as in some European states, by a revolution from below, but rather by one imposed from above by a modernizing clique of samurai. It had a parliament, elected by a narrow franchise of male voters, political parties and a prime minister, but it lacked the sense of a sovereign people characteristic of modern democracies. That made it easier for a conservative elite to rally people around a national project, namely rapid industrialization and colonial conquest, wrapped in the shroud of an imperial cult.

  The Meiji era came officially to a close in 1912 with the death of the Meiji emperor. For a reign associated with startling modernization, the emperor in whose name it was conducted was afforded a fanatical devotion reminiscent of the feudal order Japan had supposedly discarded. On the day of the emperor’s funeral, 13 September 1912, General Maresuke Nogi, the hero of the Russo-Japanese War, stripped to his undergarments while his wife donned a black kimono. After bowing to a picture of the emperor, General Nogi plunged a knife into his wife’s neck and then committed ritual suicide by thrusting a short sword into his belly.46 It was the classic act of a loyal samurai, not that of a modernizing general bent on the assimilation of western learning.

  The emperor who followed Meiji gave his name to the Taisho era (1912–26), one associated with a febrile political debate that could plausibly have developed into a more participatory democracy. The emperor himself was prone to bouts of mental illness and his reign was cut short, ending with it the putative development of a functioning civil society. The political system during his reign had evolved more quickly than the leaders of the Restoration had intended. Political parties grew stronger. The new labour movement engendered by rapid industrialization began to seek rights and influence. The number of street protests, often violent, mushroomed, culminating in 1918 with a push for universal male suffrage. In that same year, rice riots spread across the countryside. Troops were called in to quell disorder. Tenant militancy spread partly as a result of growing literacy among all classes. Masato Miyachi, a historian at Tokyo University, called it ‘the era of the popular riot’.47 Some elements of the labour movement even flirted with the Marxism that was energizing Europe. The constitution was ambivalent on quite where power resided. The emperor was sovereign yet the constitution rejected the idea of direct imperial rule.48 For a while, Japan’s democratic future hung in the balance.

  ‘Taisho democracy’ was a chimera. The 1923 earthquake, which flattened large parts of Tokyo and killed around 140,000 people, proved to be a turning point. In the wake of that disaster, police exploited the chaos to round up leftists and anarchists. Although universal male suffrage was enacted in 1925, other freedoms were rolled back. Political groups with radical agendas were banned while the Peace Preservation Law made criticism of the emperor, or of the system of private property, an offence punishable by up to ten years in prison.49 As the economy slid into recession towards the end of the decade, the scene was set for a further lurch to the right. In 1928, after general elections in which workers’ parties had participated, there was another mass roundup of leftists.50 In the end, party politics, with its inevitable divisions and competing ideologies, was jettisoned as an idea: it was regarded as incompatible with Japan’s principal national interest, namely the cranking up of a war economy. ‘Two-party politics can be a meaningful way to generate good policy for a wealthy, advanced nation,’ wrote Kazushige Ugaki, a moderate military leader, in 1931, in an argument beloved of authoritarian leaders even today. ‘But a weak, poorly endowed late-developer needs to seek the welfare of the people not only at home but in development abroad. That requires national unity, and the two-party system is not welcome.’51

  Things shifted decisively into the hands of the military after the assassination on 15 May 1932 of Tsuyoshi Inukai, a liberal-leaning prime minister who had tried to restrain the armed forces. He was killed by fanatics seeking to ‘restore’ the emperor to his place at the centre of the system. From the time of his murder, prime ministers were no longer drawn from political parties but from the military or its sympathizers. With his death, descent into militarism and all-out war was sealed. At political rallies, anyone who criticized the military was silenced. Yet even then, radical parties struggled on. The Social Masses Party won nearly 10 per cent of the vote in the 1937 election, a sign that not everyone was swept up in the imperial cult. Still, the Japanese system came more and more to resemble the fascist states of Germany and Italy. There was a fanatical emphasis on the supposed purity of the Yamato race, a near religious devotion to the emperor and a strong desire, shared by some on the left, to spread Japanese ‘values’ to other countries. At the time of Meiji, Japan’s leaders had been determined to ‘leave Asia’ in order to join the Great Powers of Europe at the head table. Having not been invited to dinner, Japan felt humiliated. Many of its intellectuals were spoiling for a fight. ‘We are the so-called “yellow race”. We are fighting to determine the superiority of a race that has been discriminated against,’ wrote Sei Ito (1905–69) in his diary. ‘Our destiny is such that we cannot realize our qualifications as a first-class people of the world unless we have fought with the top-ranking white men.’52

  That looked more and more inevitable as Japan’s campaign to be treated equally went nowhere. The number of naval vessels Japan could own in relation to Britain and America was frozen by international agreement. In 1933, after the League of Nations had condemned the seizure of Manchuria, Japan walked out in disgust. It had effectively given up on its long-held ambition to be accepted as a member of the western colonial club. Shorn of its moorings, Japan’s military flew out of control. By 1937, it had moved from Manchuria deeper into China proper, and in 1940 into northern Indochina. When Japan pushed further into Indochina, Washington responded with a full-blown international oil embargo. Boxed in, Japan’s leaders mounted what they portrayed as a ‘defensive’ attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The following February the Japanese seized Malaya and Singapore and, within weeks, the Dutch East Indies, modern Indonesia, fell into its hands. Not long after, it grabbed a large part of the Philippines and much of Burma.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor was greeted with euphoria at home, where many saw it as revenge for Commodore Perry’s assault on Japan all those years before. It was celebrated by one poet, Kotaro Takamura (1883–1956), who saw in the bold act against the Anglo-Saxons revenge for years of humiliation and an affirmation of Japanese superiority.

  Nippon, the land of the gods

  Ruled over by a living god53

  Yet now America had been provoked into entering the war, it was only a matter of time before the military tide turned. Just six months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy lost the decisive battle of Midway, which severely depleted its fleet and left its new empire in the Pacific exposed. The Americans pursued an island-hopping strategy, moving ever closer towards Japan. When, in July 1944, they captured Saipan, within bombing range of Japan, the great air raids on the Japanese cities began. Unfortunately, Japan’s military leaders were unable to face the inevitable. The navy was perhaps prepared to accept a negotiated surrender, but not the unconditional capitulation the Allies were demanding. Terrible battles ensued, not least the one for Okinawa, so catastrophically violent it was known as the ‘Typhoon of Steel’. The battle, in which kamikaze pilots mounted some 1,500 attacks on American ships and Okinawan civilians committed mass suicide, often instigated by Japanese troops, was one of the most ferocious of the Second
World War. Then came the two nuclear bombs on 6 August and 9 August of 1945, followed by the unconditional surrender that Japan’s deluded leaders had so long resisted.

  Japan lay in ruins. For the next seven years it would be a supplicant of America and the occupying force of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Japan had left Asia. But the price of doing so was to become subordinate to another power – the United States.

  PART THREE

  Decades Found and Lost

  5

  The Magic Teapot

  Two months before Japan surrendered to the Allies, Shijuro Ogata, the seventeen-year-old son of a famous newspaper editor, secured a ticket for the Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra. The concert was Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. It was to be held in the Hibiya Public Hall, a brick construction erected as part of the capital’s modernization effort after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. On the evening of the concert, Ogata remembers taking a tram from Shibuya to Shimbashi, a distance of some three miles. The journey covered what are now some of the city’s most expensive neighbourhoods, a choc-a-bloc jumble of neon, skyscrapers, office buildings, parks, homes, department stores, boutiques, bowling alleys, arcades, cinemas, theatres, clubs, museums and thousands of cafés, restaurants and bars. Back then the scene was desolate. From early 1945, the US had sent dozens of low-flying B-29s to drop incendiary bombs on the Japanese capital, much of which was constructed of wood. On the night of 9–10 March, some 300 bombers had roared over the city, dropping bombs that destroyed sixteen square miles of buildings and unleashed raging fires. That night alone, an estimated 100,000 civilians died and a million homes went up in flames. It is considered the most destructive bombing raid in all human history, more deadly, even, than the atomic bombs. The Ogatas’ house in the then up-and-coming Shinjuku district survived the March raid only to succumb to another in late May. ‘Tokyo was completely devastated,’ Ogata recalls of his journey through the charred wasteland to the concert in Hibiya Hall. ‘Everything was flat, just flat.’1