by Ian Buruma
Hong Kong Tatler, February 1990
“Hong Kong,” exclaimed an Italian China hand, “feels like Shanghai in the twenties!” My friend is fond of exclamations, it is true, but one sees what he means. There is a whiff of The Last Emperor about the slim young Chinese boys, dressed to the nines in retro styles, their hair slicked back like wet black silk, languidly sipping champagne in the neo–art deco hotels that are at the height of fashion. There is something distinctly devil-may-care about the Priscilla Chois, the Rawley Chaos, Pansy Hos and the Dickson Poons dancing the nights away at their Venetian masquerades, their fifties parties and their Marie Antoinette balls, while the young Brits from the banks and trading houses have fun ruining their dinner jackets in custard-pie fights. There they all are, you might think, tuning their fiddles in anticipation of the great conflagration.
And yet decadent is not the right way to describe late-imperial Hong Kong, for decadence suggests a bored dissipation of wealth acquired over the ages, indeed the squandering of heirlooms. Hong Kong really lacks the cultural richness for true decadence. And the squanderers are too busy making more money to throw away. In fact there is a raw, not to say vulgar, vitality in the way the gilded youth enjoys its excess; not so much divine decadence as nouveau riche flashiness. There is something Gatsbyish about Hong Kong high life. Instead of bored dissipation, there is a frenzied scramble for wealth and a childish desire to show it off before it is too late, before it is time to move on, to the next party, somewhere else.
The brain drain is already so serious that people with special skills have to be paid more and more to stay on. At the same time, people must pay more and more to leave, legally or not. Doctors feel they can no longer afford to work in public hospitals. Policemen may be more tempted to take bribes. There is a flourishing trade in fake passports, fake IDs, fake travel documents. A former principal of the Hong Kong College of Language and Commerce, who also ran an immigration consultancy business, was arrested early in 1990 for having forged immigration stamps. Corruption, always endemic to Hong Kong, is reaching such proportions that half the legal department seems to be under investigation. Far from dying, then, Hong Kong is becoming a free-for-all, battling against the clock.
Now, more than ever, Hong Kong feels like a city without a past or a future, only a frenzied present. Almost the only institution still talking about big investments in the future is the government itself, just to keep the morale up, to show that not all is lost. A new airport is planned, for example, but quite who will finance such a grand project is still unknown. Before anything can go ahead, there are matters to be considered that have little to do with business. “Sensitivity tests” is what these considerations are called in the charming jargon of the day: How will Beijing react? How will it affect the morale in Hong Kong? Will it give the government face? and so on.
The morale of my own Chinese friends is already such that most of them are actively seeking a way out, even those who, when I first met them some years ago, vowed never to leave. One is trying to get a Taiwanese passport, another might move to Canada, a third is thinking of Singapore. But these friends, sad though their departures are, do not deserve our deepest sympathy. That should go to those who stay behind because they have no choice, and especially to those very few who still fight for political change, however naively or quixotically.
As I prepare my own departure, I often think of an image that captures the melancholy of this slowly breaking city. It is a scene I saw on the television news, almost surreal in its violent intensity: the scene of a great bulldozer crushing a mountain of fake gold watches, all made in Hong Kong, until there was nothing left but dust.
1990
*When honored with the title of Dame, she chose to name herself Baroness of Knightsbridge.
GHOSTS OF PEARL HARBOR
“Why,” so an essay with the intriguing working title “The Japs—A Habit of Mind” begins, “do so many Americans, after witnessing the devastation and the futility of war, continue to think of Japan and the Japanese in terms of war? Why have so many Japanese a similar mental attitude toward the United States? Is this mutually apprehensive habit of mind, to whatever understandable origins it may be due, justified today?”
The essay was written for Asia magazine by Franklin D. Roosevelt, former assistant secretary of the Navy, in 1923—eight years before the Japanese took over Manchuria, fourteen years before the invasion of China, and eighteen years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. It is a sad fact that Roosevelt’s question has lost none of its pertinence even now. For once again, it is said that the U.S. and Japan are on a collision course—a collision not just of economic interests, but of values, cultures, in some cases even of racial sensibilities.
If the reaction of a famous Japanese novelist upon hearing the morning news on December 8, 1941, did not exactly answer the question, it at least illustrated the problem. The news, so Dazai Osamu noted in his book, entitled 8 December,
entered my pitch-dark room like a shaft of light. The announcement was joyfully repeated twice. As I listened, I felt I had become a new man, as though a flower petal stirred in my breast, cooled by the sacred breath of a deity. After this morning Japan had become a new country too …
It is remarkable how hostile one can feel towards people whose eyes and hair are of a different colour. I want to beat them to death. This feels quite different from fighting against China. The very idea of those insensitive American savages treading on our beautiful Japanese soil is unbearable.… Oh, beautiful Japanese soldiers, please go ahead and smash them!
To Dazai, who was not some third-rate nationalist hack, but one of the great writers of modern Japan, Pearl Harbor came as a relief. The war in China, brutal and apparently endless, was an embarrassment; the war against the “Anglo-Saxon oppressors,” the “Anglo-American devils,” was a righteous explosion of pent-up feelings of inferiority and frustration, the revenge for countless slights and humiliations, imagined or real, personal or national, or, as was usual, a combination of both. The news of great victories, wrote the historian Hayashi Fusao, whose opinions were as candid as they were chauvinistic, “changed our feeling of tension into one of liberation, our sense of fear into one of superiority, joy and pride.”
This sort of thing had its counterpart on the other side of the Pacific. It can be found in such American reactions to the attack on Pearl Harbor as the one, expressed by the commander of an airfield on the scene: “To think that this bunch of little yellow bastards could do this to us when we all knew that the United States was superior to Japan!”
That quotation is from Thurston Clarke’s Pearl Harbor Ghosts, an account of American attitudes towards the Japanese aggression, then and now. The book’s central idea is that “there is no greater disgrace than to be defeated by an opponent you have previously denigrated.” Clarke believes that Americans, blinded by racial and cultural prejudice, would not recognize the Japanese threat, but were obsessed instead by treacherous aliens in the U.S. “Blinded” is apt: folk opinion actually had it that slant-eyed people couldn’t shoot straight—just as many Japanese believed that large-nosed white men couldn’t see properly.
Clarke’s main idea strikes me as a sound one. A wounded sense of superiority must account for the overblown rhetoric coming from, among others, Gerald A. Glaubitz, president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association. When it was suggested that Japanese veterans should be invited to attend the 1991 commemoration of the attack and offer their apologies, Glaubitz was outraged: “Would you expect the Jews to invite the Nazis to an event where they were talking about the Holocaust?” I don’t think even Dazai Osamu had a holocaust in mind when the petal fluttered in his breast on that fateful morning fifty years ago.
But then we are dealing here not so much with history as with legend: the legend, on the one hand, of a desperate nation tossing its last card on the table in a heroic struggle for survival against Anglo-Saxon hegemony, and on the other, of the greatest nation on earth being ambushed by a
treacherous foe. Clarke gives interesting examples of postwar American mythmaking. It seems that even men who witnessed the attack have trouble distinguishing what they actually saw from movie versions of the same. It is also remarkable how many witnesses claim to have seen the faces of the Japanese pilots as they swooped down to bomb and strafe, usually baring their teeth in devilish grins, “with the square goggles over the slant eyes,” sometimes even waving to the intended victims of their treachery. For one veteran, Richard I. Fiske, a marine bugler on the battleship West Virginia, the vision was so powerful that he dreamed of it for years. As he told The New York Times, “I can still see that smile.”
Now, it is possible that some people actually observed the pilots of low-flying aircraft, but the grins and the waves, not to mention the slant eyes, are just a bit too much. They smack of myth, rather like Hitler eating his carpet, or Japanese soldiers having the hearts and livers of executed POWs for lunch.
Much is made in America of the sneakiness of the Japanese attack. To be sure, declaring war after the first blow had been struck was not a gentlemanly thing to have done, but worse things happened in those days. We also tend to forget that when the Japanese used the same tactic in 1904 to destroy the Russian fleet in Port Arthur, their audacity was widely admired, even in America. Again, Clarke is on the right track, I think, when he explains the sense of outrage in terms of American myth. He makes the interesting point that Westerns might have had an influence: “The Indians too were seen as treacherous and sneaky, having no regard for human life or the rules of war. They too lay in wait behind pink desert ridges, ready to ambush white men.” The problem with stressing the horrors of Pearl Harbor, rather than, say, the mass murders in China, is that it makes it easier for Japanese apologists to point at Hiroshima and claim it was many times worse.
Clarke is also right, I believe, to connect the continuing desire for conspiracy theories (Roosevelt invited the attack, Churchill knew all about it, etc.) to injured pride. Underneath the Roosevelt-provoked-Pearl-Harbor-to-get-into-the-war theory, he writes, was a desperate need to explain what happened at Pearl Harbor without conceding victory to Japanese arms or defeat to American errors and overconfidence.
There is, however, more to it than that. For the conspiracy theorists include men of very different stripes. There are, as Clarke says, people who begrudge the Japanese what was, after all, an extraordinary military feat. Just how extraordinary it was can be surmised from the reactions of the men who had been warned, had read secret Japanese codes, saw the planes coming and still couldn’t believe that such an operation was possible. “Ridiculous,” is what Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commander of the Hawaiian Department, is supposed to have said after being informed that the Japanese had launched their attack. Then there are the isolationists who hated Roosevelt. And there are former intelligence agents, who can only explain the incompetence and pigheaded politicking of their superiors in terms of a conspiracy. Finally, there are perhaps the greatest conspiracy theorists of all: the Japanese themselves.
Not all Japanese, of course. There are many who think the attack on Pearl Harbor was an act of folly, the epitome of militarist stupidity. The historian Ienaga Saburo, among others, has pointed out that just as the Americans underestimated the Japanese, the Japanese showed little respect for the Americans: How could those ice-cream-fed, jazz-loving, flabby democrats possibly have the guts to stand up to the iron will and fighting spirit of his imperial majesty’s forces? (One man who never fell for this line was Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the planner and commander of the Pearl Harbor raid.) During the Gulf War a literary critic named Matsumoto Kenichi compared Japan in 1941 to Iraq in 1991. He wrote in the newspaper Tokyo Shimbun that “Japan and Iraq went to war for virtually identical reasons”—expansionism in the guise of liberation. But, being a good Japanese liberal, he added, somewhat incongruously, that Japanese government support for the multinational coalition against Saddam Hussein showed that Japanese conservatives had “learned little from Japan’s own descent into barbarism just fifty years ago.”
But still, many Japanese believe that Japan had no choice but to fight. The reasoning is more or less as follows: Japan had legitimate special interests in Korea and China that were never recognized by the arrogant Western powers, whose own right to rule of Asian empires continued to be beyond dispute. It was perfectly understandable that Japan should wish not only to secure its economic interests in East Asia, but also to protect itself from Western imperialism and Chinese and Soviet communism, with force if need be. Far from being an ignoble exercise, Japanese self-defense was at the same time an attempt to liberate Asia and instill much needed discipline in decadent old China.
These aims were, however, thwarted by Anglo-Saxon discrimination at naval conferences and other international gatherings. Not only did the Western powers refuse to endorse the Japanese demand for racial equality at Versailles and the League of Nations, but the U.S. openly supported Chinese resistance against Japan. As a result, Japanese troops got bogged down in what is usually termed “the Chinese quagmire.” Then, when the Americans decided to withhold vital raw materials and supplies from Japan, the Japanese had to secure them from Southeast Asia. When this, too, was resisted by the “ADB” (American, Dutch, British) powers, and when Americans insisted on complete Japanese withdrawal from China, Japan, which had never wished for anything but peace, was forced to go to war for its national survival. Most likely, Roosevelt deliberately trapped the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor; but even if he did not, it’s quite clear that the Pacific War was the final showdown, which the U.S. had wanted at least since the beginning of the century, and perhaps from as long ago as 1853, when Commodore Perry’s naval ships first arrived to force open the Japanese door.
It is not an entirely spurious theory, even though it contrives to shift responsibility for almost everything that happened in this century onto others, particularly America. It is true that the Western powers did not treat Japan as an equal. It is also true that after the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 the Americans began to worry that Japan would get uppity. In American Diplomacy: 1900–1950, George Kennan, not a noted Japanophile, observed that American policy in the Far East was marked more by self-righteousness than by realism, that too little attention was paid to genuine Japanese interests, that the price of American frustration with Japanese policies in China was the entrenchment of military extremists in Tokyo, and that American immigration policies inflamed Japanese passions unnecessarily:
I cannot say that Pearl Harbor might have been avoided had we been over a long period of time more circumspect in our attitudes toward the Japanese, more considerate of the requirements of their position, more ready to discuss their problems with them on their own terms … I can only say that there was a possibility that the course of events might have been altered by an American policy based consistently, over a long period of time, on a recognition of power realities in the Orient as a factor worthy of our serious respect.
This is an eloquent argument for realpolitik. One might find fault with it, of course—I doubt that a liberal government in Tokyo would have had a better chance had the U.S. recognized power realities created by Japanese cowboys in northern China—but at least Kennan avoids the jargon of racial competition and Kulturkampf, and he admits that the Japanese were not always given their due. It was all very well for Washington to insist in 1921 on Chinese independence and territorial integrity, when the Western powers had left the Chinese little independence and territorial integrity to defend. This was just the kind of hypocrisy that the Japanese—and who could blame them?—managed to exploit. Yet to say that Japanese interests should have been taken more seriously is not to say that America forced Japan into going to war. Robert Smith Thompson has said exactly that, however, in his book A Time for War.
Although Thompson doesn’t claim, as some Japanese revisionists do, that the Nanking massacre of 1937 was a fiction of Chinese propaganda, he follows the Japanes
e revisionist line quite closely in most matters. In fact, here and there he even appears to see the events in East Asia from the perspective of Greater East-Asian Coprosperity Sphere propaganda. Chinese resistance is frequently called “terrorism,” and the resisters are either “terrorists” or “bandits.” There were, to be sure, many ruffians in China, including quite a few in Chiang Kai-shek’s ranks, but, at the same time, millions were defending their country against an army of conquistadors.
Thompson’s line, briefly, is that Washington made life impossible for the Japanese by fighting a kind of low-intensity war with Japan for years. Economic squeeze was applied, supply routes to Chiang’s army were kept open, and those Chinese terrorists were propped up. Years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan was being slowly strangled by Western military bastions which grew stronger by the day. And Japan felt threatened by American readiness to firebomb its cities from the air. This is curious, since the first American attack on Tokyo, the famous Doolittle raid, took place only in 1942 and did hardly any damage at all. However, not only did Japan have to contend with U.S. belligerence, but, according to Thompson, the Tokyo government’s grip on power was fragile: “The government was having to use every known device—uniformity of dress, spy scares, mountains of words in the newspapers about Japan’s just cause—to stifle domestic dissent. The government could not go backward from the China war; to do so would show weakness and invite revolution.”
This seems very odd. Either the Chinese war was popular and the “just cause” message was unnecessary, or it wasn’t and a retreat would have been applauded. Either way, I have never come across much evidence of a revolutionary situation in Japan in the 1930s, except maybe among military extremists, whose quarrel was not so much with the general direction of Japanese policies as with the speed and zealousness of their execution.
