The Missionary and the Libertine

by Ian Buruma

  After years of anti-Japanese provocation, then, “the American players were all in place,” the bases in Singapore, Hawaii and the Philippines were loaded, and “On March 30, 1941, [Roosevelt] returned to the White House. He was rested. And he was ready.” This apparent readiness to wait for Japan to do its worst, so that America could come in and crush both the Japs and the Nazis, is contradicted by the facts. The Philippines were far from ready, and the defense of Singapore had already been given up as a hopeless cause by the British in the summer of 1939. Indeed, Thompson himself quotes a memorandum from Admiral Stark and General Marshall to Roosevelt in November 1941 which shows the Americans were still playing for time a month before Pearl Harbor was attacked:

  At the present time … the United States Fleet in the Pacific is inferior to the Japanese Fleet and cannot undertake an unlimited strategic offensive in the Western Pacific.… [But] the U.S. Army air forces will have reached … projected strength by February or March 1942. The potency of this threat will have then increased to a point where it might well be a deciding factor in deterring Japan in operations in the areas south and west of the Pacific.

  Hardly an ideal situation in which to throw away half the American fleet by inviting the Japanese to come and smash it. Thompson doesn’t categorically state that Roosevelt knew of the attack in advance. That, he writes, was “possibly” the case. His main point is that America “provoked” Germany “into its declaration of war and Japan into its Pearl Harbor attack.”

  Certainly, by the end of 1941 Japan was left with little choice but to forget about the New Order in Asia or go to war with the U.S. We also know that Winston Churchill desperately wanted the Americans to come into the war, and that Roosevelt was working toward that end. The famous note from Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state, to the Japanese government in 1941 was really an ultimatum: get out of China or prepare for war. Churchill never disguised his relief when the Japanese obligingly attacked, and Hitler declared war on America. Quite rightly, he knew then that the war against Germany would be won. But there is no evidence that Roosevelt wanted it to happen quite so soon, and to lose so much of his navy in the bargain.

  James Rusbridger and Eric Nave, in Betrayal at Pearl Harbor, have tried to shift the conspiracy theory from Roosevelt to Churchill. They use their considerable expertise in the history of military intelligence and code-breaking (Nave was himself an important code-breaker during the Pacific War) to prove that Churchill must have had information on the impending attack, which he deliberately withheld from Roosevelt. The case rests on the premise that the British had access to codes that the Americans might not have broken yet, and that Churchill was given intelligence that Roosevelt never saw, because of office politics in Washington. The book is interesting for cryptography and code-breaking enthusiasts, but the main thesis is not proved. It is hard to prove, since, as the authors rightly complain, Her Majesty’s government is absurdly tight about historical documents in its keep. But we cannot be sure that Churchill saw what he was supposed to have seen, and, even if he did, it would not be conclusive. The question, in intelligence matters, is not what raw data you see, but how you choose to interpret them. And, besides, as Dan van der Vat writes in The Pacific Campaign:

  The risk involved for Churchill in finding out, not telling, and later being discovered to have known—a very real risk, considering how closely Anglo-American intelligence staffs worked together and the short shelf-life of American official secrets—would surely have been too high even for such a scheming gambler.

  At any rate, Thompson’s message is less that Japan was a benign, hapless victim of Western conspiracies—although for polemical purposes one is sometimes given that impression—than that America had no business getting involved in these foreign quarrels in the first place. To judge from his sneering asides about Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and falling dominoes, Thompson is an isolationist.

  Would isolation have been a wiser course? Was Japan needlessly provoked? I doubt it. Japan’s dilemma in 1941 was the result of having tried to conquer China. If the Chinese morass had sucked them in too deeply, the Japanese could only blame themselves for having entered it. It is possible, I suppose, to argue that power realities should have been accepted and that New Orders in Asia and Europe, dictated by the Axis powers, posed no direct threat to a U.S. in splendid isolation. But aside from the dubious morality of leaving Chinese and Europeans to their fates, I don’t think American isolation would have been so splendid.

  In fact, the reverse of Thompson’s view is more persuasive: it was the failure of the U.S., and Britain, to check the military adventures of Germany and Japan earlier that led to the all-or-nothing war. Unfortunately, however, the Western powers, specifically the American, British and Dutch, had a particular problem in Asia: Japan’s “special interests” could not be convincingly curbed as long as Western special interests were to remain unchallenged. This is why Japanese policies met mostly with appeasement, why their propagandists could claim they were fighting a war of Asian liberation, and why revisionists can continue to repeat that line today.

  Why did Japan get itself in such a stew in the first place? Was there some deep cultural flaw that would account for the extremism of its military forces? Was Pearl Harbor the result of suicidal samurai ethics? In short, were the Japanese mad? There was indeed, as a result of incessant militarist and Emperor-worshiping propaganda, a kind of madness in the land. It took several years of living in the U.S. to cure a gentle student like Murata Kiyoaki of his conviction that his highest duty was to die at the front. Murata’s description, in An Enemy Among Friends, of his student years in California and Chicago is interesting, since it contradicts the conventional view of America, rather popular in Japan these days, as an utterly racist society, where the only good Japs were thought to be dead Japs, or at least Japs behind detention-camp bars. Far from meeting with prejudice, he writes, “I spent seven delightful and fruitful years in America, including the war years.” But then, he admits, he might have been oblivious of racial slights, since he himself never doubted his own racial superiority. It clearly was a rum time for all.

  Propaganda madness is no proof, however, that the Pearl Harbor attack was either mad or rooted in a perverted samurai spirit. Its architect, Admiral Yamamoto, was, as I have indicated already, under no illusion about the potential might of the U.S. He knew that Japan could not win a protracted war. But, faced with the fact that the army would not pull out of China, that the navy was passive, that the civilians in government were powerless, that the Emperor did nothing but compose melancholy poems, and that war was therefore inevitable, he thought that only a quick and smashing Japanese victory might prompt Washington to negotiate on Japanese terms. He was wrong, but he was not crazy. Nor was the tactic used in the Pearl Harbor raid—even that!—originally Japanese.

  William H. Honan, in his intriguing if perhaps too reverential book Visions of Infamy, shows how the British naval journalist Hector C. Bywater imagined in 1921, and in even greater detail in 1925, just what the Japanese might do in a future war with America. There had been a demand for such books since the turn of the century. Many coming-war-with-Japan books stressed American decline and vulnerability, which shows that “declinism” is not a new phenomenon. This taste was shared by Japanese readers, who lapped up such works as The Future Japan–U.S. War, by Fukunaga Kyosuke. Of the American books, Homer Lea’s (The Valor of Ignorance, etc.) were at the vulgar end of the market, while Bywater aimed at the more sophisticated reader.

  In his two famous books, Sea-Power in the Pacific and The Great Pacific War, Bywater described with amazing accuracy what would come to pass: a swift Japanese raid on the U.S. Navy, followed by many island-hopping battles in the Pacific, and ending with a narrow American victory. Honan, like many journalists, puts great faith in the influence of fellow hacks on public affairs, and might have overstated Bywater’s impact on the tactics of the imperial Japanese navy, but his books were given much attention in Japan, notab
ly by Yamamoto himself. There were several Japanese editions. One Japanese author even wrote a book-length critique, the main point of which was that Japan, not the U.S., would be the victor.

  Honan’s conclusion that Bywater’s story should dispel the image of the Pearl Harbor attack as characteristic of Japanese treachery and deceit is just, even if his remark that it was “in reality as English as plum pudding and as American as apple pie,” is stretching the point a little far.

  But, desperate tactics aside, one still has to wonder why the governments of a civilized nation allowed its army to run amok and start a war. The answer concerns not only the question Roosevelt posed in 1923, but also the current debate on U.S.–Japan relations. After all, we are once again living at a time in which books prophesying wars with Japan mean big business, in the U.S. as well as in Japan.

  Maruyama Masao, the distinguished political scientist, thought the root of Japan’s political problem in the 1930s was what he called “the system of irresponsibility.” In Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, he contrasted the Japanese political and bureaucratic elite of that time with the thugs who ran Nazi Germany. The thugs, he wrote, may have been thugs, but at least they took responsibility for their actions. They were even proud of their crimes. The Japanese elites, in contrast, consisted of gentlemen who hid behind “unexpected events,” behind decisions made outside their bureaucratic competence, behind unaccountable generals and, perhaps most important of all, behind the emperor, who, as “constitutional monarch,” disclaimed all responsibility himself.

  It is a plausible analysis that is, however, rooted not so much in the ancient Japanese past or some inscrutable Japanese mentality as in a clear constitutional problem. According to the Meiji constitution, which lasted until 1945, the emperor was not only a constitutional monarch, but also the divine patriarch of the nation. But just as the emperor was above politics, so, according to a rescript promulgated in 1882, were his soldiers and sailors. Their loyalty was to him, not to the governments of the day. The rescript was meant to keep the military out of politics. In effect, it encouraged them to ignore civilian politics altogether and to do anything they could justify to themselves as being in the divine imperial cause. Bureaucrats were also beyond democratic control, and so, after years of propaganda denigrating politics and politicians as corrupt, greedy, unprincipled and un-Japanese, a military–bureaucratic alliance could push the country in a direction that was to end in catastrophe.

  The point is often made that the Japanese after the war showed less repentance for what they had done than the Germans. But was this really so surprising when the man in whose name their deeds were done was not just left untouched, but was received as “the first gentleman of Japan” by General MacArthur? Not only that, but some of the very same bureaucrats who were responsible for what happened during the 1930s and 1940s came back into power, with American blessing, after the war. It is surprising, in these circumstances, that anyone in Japan should feel guilty at all. It would be even more surprising if, of all the things to feel guilty about, the attack on Pearl Harbor came very high on the list.

  In the end everything was blamed on the army. So it seemed both just and wise, when the war was over, for the Americans to write a new Japanese constitution that took away Japan’s right to wage war, or even to maintain an army. Instead, Japan was told to put all its national energy into rebuilding the economy. Then, as a response to the Cold War, the Japanese government was encouraged to undermine the “peace constitution” by starting a kind of unofficial shadow military called the Self-Defense Forces. Once again, for the best reasons, Japanese soldiers and sailors exist outside the mainstream of civilian politics, since constitutionally they are not supposed to exist at all. In effect, Japanese security policy is dictated by the U.S., resulting in rabid nationalism on the right and stubborn pacifism on the left, and silence in the middle.

  Faint signals of this are beginning to be picked up in the U.S., but, as with all decoded intelligence, much depends on interpretation. Ignoring the severe limits on Japanese sovereignty, some observers describe Japan as an “amoral” state, an irresponsible nation, without direction or purpose, or, conversely, as a sneaky state bent on conquering the world through unfair trade. The phrase “economic Pearl Harbor” pops up in political speeches. To Edith Cresson, the prime minister of France, Japan is our new “enemy.” Japan—here I quote from the 1991 CIA-funded report Japan 2000, by Andrew J. Dougherty—“often appears to be in direct conflict with widely and deeply held Western moral imperatives.” Every Japanese action, the same report states, is inspired by oppressive ideas derived from Shinto, Buddhism and Confucianism. The common message in these polemics is that Japan is a special case, not to be trusted, because of the war, its sneaky attacks, its unfairness in trade and its peculiar culture with its alien morality.

  Stung by the perception that Japan is being ganged up on by Western bullies, and humiliated by a virtually complete military dependency on the U.S., right-wing Japanese politicians seek to inspire their audiences with messages that Japan should now say no to America. The most vociferous proponent of this idea, the writer and politician Ishihara Shintaro, has written that the Pacific War was a battle of cultures, that the American victors wanted to rob Japan of its identity, but that finally the East (Japan) will prevail in the struggle with the West (America).

  This kind of rhetoric on both sides of the Pacific is not only inflammatory, it also muddles the debate on actual economic and political problems. Neither half-baked Spenglerism nor ill-informed lessons in Japanese folklore are of much help in discussing the rights and wrongs of industrial and trade policies or collective-security arrangements. It is remarkable how similar the jargon of Kulturkampf is on both sides: the CIA-funded report on Japan actually repeats many of the clichés used by Japanese nationalists to prove the uniqueness of their nation. One result of seeing Japan as a special case, culturally, economically, politically, is the growing sense of isolation in Japan. And that, some seventy years ago, was the beginning of the Japanese road to infamy.

  1991

  THE WAR OVER THE BOMB

  1.

  The flight of the bomber called Bock’s Car on August 9, 1945, from Tinian to Nagasaki was blessed but not smooth. In a Quonset hut at the air base before takeoff Chaplain Downey had prayed for the success of the plane’s mission. “Almighty God, Father of all mercies,” he said, “we pray Thee to be gracious with those who fly this night.” He also said: “Give to us all courage and strength for the hours that are ahead; give to them rewards according to their efforts. Above all else, our Father, bring peace to Thy world.”

  But things went wrong from the start. A fuel pump wasn’t working. So the captain, Major Charles “Chuck” Sweeney (“cheerful Irish grin”), decided to rendezvous with escort planes over Japan and refuel in Okinawa on the way back. The skies were thundery and turbulent. The rendezvous was missed: the planes lost contact and much time. The primary target, Kokura, an industrial city in northern Kyushu, was covered by smoke from a bombing raid on a neighboring city. Fuel was running low, but Sweeney flew his B-29 bomber on to the second target on the list: Nagasaki.

  A thick deck of clouds had rendered Nagasaki invisible, too. “Skipper” Sweeney had to think fast. Fuel was running out. Ditching his load in the ocean was one possibility. But he decided against it. “After all,” he said, “anything is better than dumping it in the water.” He would ignore his orders, which stipulated that the target had to be visible, and drop the “Fat Man” by radar. Then, suddenly, Kermit “Bea” Beahan (“slow Texas drawl”; “crack bombardier”; “ladies’ man”), shouted: “I’ve got it. I see the city. I’ll take it now.… ”*

  And so the “Fat Man” went down, slowly at first. It took a while for things to happen. Internal radar fuses had been activated in the bomb to sense its height. Chuck Sweeney was impatient. “Oh, my God,” he said to his copilot, Charles “Donald Duck” Albery (“a deeply religious man”), “did we
goof it up?” Moments later, the sky lit up, the plane was rocking like a rowing boat in a storm, and Sweeney could relax at last. “Well, Bea,” said “Donald Duck” to the bombardier, “there’s a thousand Japs you’ve just killed.”

  The “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb, exploded about three miles from the center of Nagasaki, above an area called Urakami, sometimes referred to in Nagasaki as Urakamimura, or Urakami village. The pressure generated by the bomb at the hypocenter—the point directly under the blast—was about ten tons per square meter. The heat at ground level reached 4,000 degrees Celsius. People near the hypocenter were vaporized. Others, who were not so lucky, died more slowly, often after shedding their skins like snakes. Some died weeks or months, or even years, later of various kinds of cancer. Altogether up to 70,000 people are thought to have died as a result of the bombing of Nagasaki. About half of them died on the day itself.

  The landscape of Urakami, separated by mountains from Nagasaki proper, was marked by Mitsubishi weapons factories and the largest cathedral in east Asia. Urakami was a district with a low reputation. Its population included a large number of poor Roman Catholics and even poorer outcasts. It was as though a bomb had fallen on Harlem, leaving the rest of Manhattan relatively unscathed. Some residents of Nagasaki quietly voiced the opinion that the bomb had “cleaned up” Urakami. In August 1945, there were 14,000 Catholics in Nagasaki. More than half were killed by the bomb. There are 70,000 Catholics living in Nagasaki today. Southern Kyushu is still the only part of Japan with a large Christian minority.

  The first missionary to reach Kyushu was Francis Xavier, who landed there in 1549. His high hopes for Japan were not disappointed. By the turn of the century about 300,000 Japanese had been converted to the Roman faith. Even Hideyoshi, the “Barbarian-slaying” shogun himself, was seen in his palace fingering a rosary. This did not stop him from crucifying twenty-six Japanese and European priests in Nagasaki in 1597. Like his more ferocious successors, he was afraid that Japanese Christians might help Spanish invaders take over Japan—a fear that Dutch traders did their best to encourage.