Conflict + Context

5/13/06
Japan: past + present
Hist 192: Spring 2006


Conflict and context

In the preface to his book, War Without Mercy, John Dower gives us a word which can serve as a sort of keystone for discussion of the horrors of World War II between Japan and the Western Allies in the Pacific: he calls it Manichaean. Another one of those academic words stuck on a shelf, Manichaeism means the dualist black-and-white perspective of a battle between good and evil; one side absolutely right, and the other absolutely wrong. Dower recounts the history from a personal bias, tending to present the American side in a more human way; however he approaches fairness by trying to put each side within its cultural context. The various atrocities described in the book show us that racism in this war was very complete: each side thought it was completely justified for its behavior, on the argument that “the Other” were lesser humans.

There were many reasons why Japan and the United States came to face each other in war: racism, rooted in fear of what is different, was what made it so vicious. This racism and consequently this viciousness entered the war as soon as the Manichaean perspective did. In 1943, the Assembly of Greater East Asiatic Nations convened in Tokyo, where “a succession of Asian leaders voiced support for Japan and placed the war in an East-versus-West, Oriental-versus-Occidental, and ultimately blood-versus-blood context” (6). This idea of absolute east-west struggle was alive on the other side as well. In 1945, President Roosevelt was still afraid of what was being discussed by these eastern leaders two years before. “’1,100,000,000 potential enemies,’ the president told a confidant, ‘are dangerous.’” (7).

We can see into Dower’s bias with how he recounts these two events: his description of the Roosevelt’s encounter with this east-west absolute struggle idea is put into a human context (a president worrying about the racial solidarity of a hostile foreign power), while his description of the Assembly of Greater East Asiatic Nations lacks such a human context. Dower even mentions that Roosevelt’s comments came “a month before he died,” as though to draw the reader’s sympathy (7).

Propaganda was generated on a massive scale by both sides of this conflict, and helped throw fuel upon the fires of this racism. Dower’s discussion of this propaganda, in line with his bias, begins by describing an American example, a film called “Know Your Enemy.” Instead of directly describing the content, he again puts the western side of things in a human light, by starting with the scene of the good American movie producer, Frank Capra, being asked to do his duty and make the film: he first refuses because he hadn’t ever made a documentary before. However, Dower tells us, after being told by Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall that “thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before,” Capra “apologized, and promised ‘the best damned documentary films ever made” (15).

Dower’s discussion of what might be an equivalent expression of institutionalized Manichaeism on the Japanese side has no such human quality. “[I]n August 1941… the [Japanese] Ministry of Education issued a major ideological manifesto entitled The Way of the Subject (Shinmin no Michi)… [which] told the Japanese people who they were, or should aspire to be, as a people, nation, and race” (24). In place of a concerned citizen who decides to make propaganda for his government because of his fellow young Americans having their legs shot off for the first time, we have a faceless institution issuing a major ideological manifesto.

An attempt to reconcile the two sides is worth mentioning as credit to Dower’s analysis, and it follows immediately after “The Japanese … read Western history much the same way that Westerners were reading the History of Japan: as a chronicle of destructive values, exploitative practices, and brutal wars” (24). Wartime Manichaeism makes it easy to attribute such evils entirely to “the enemy.” We know that suffering and horror caused by wars such as this one is universal and that to each side belongs its own responsibility; but the pervasive idea of racism made each side feel that it was justified, and that the other was atrocious.

Another attempt to reconcile the two sides of this war of propagandas comes with discussion of stereotypes which recurred within the propaganda. “[T]hey followed predictable patterns of contrariness, in which each side portrayed the other as it’s polar opposite: as darkness opposed to its own radiant light… [T]he positive self images of one side were side were singled out for ridicule and condemnation by the other” (28). This sort of analysis shows that, while the specifics involved in creating hatred out of fear vary, each “side” goes through the process in a very similar way.

References to other accounts of the pacific war’s history credit Dower’s presentation of events. In the midst of discussion about war time atrocities, we hear of a tribunal in Tokyo at which Justice Radhabinod Pal of India argued that “the clearest example of direct orders to commit ‘indiscriminate murder’ in the war in Asia… may well have been ‘the decision coming from the allied powers to use the atom bomb” (38). While this idea is presented as an opinion separate from that of the author, many readers who have seen pictures of any sort of mushroom cloud will find it to be a powerful argument.

Another person who’s referenced in War Without Mercy’s account also serves to set the reader in an active critical mindset. An extract from Charles Lindbergh’s diary offers another person’s attempt to reconcile the two perspectives, one which (while not necessarily humanizing the Japanese), is critical and perhaps even dehumanizing of the Americans. “’A Japanese soldier who cuts off an American soldier’s head is an Oriental barbarian, ‘lower than a rat,’ …[Charles] observed, whereas ‘an American soldier who slits a Japanese throat ‘did it only because he knew the Japs had done it to his buddies.’” (70). Certainly the Japanese soldier who cut off the American soldier’s head followed the same kind of thinking.

Dower’s attempts to put each side’s specific nuance with respect to the racist propaganda they produced within its cultural context. He shows how American propaganda tried to deny the Japanese of any diversity: “[m]agazines like Time hammered this home even further by frequently referring to ‘the Jap’ rather than ‘Japs,’ thereby denying the enemy even the merest semblance of pluralism” (79). This furthers a process of dehumanization which also included frequent comparisons of the Japanese racial character to that of a monkey. An enemy so dehumanized would not be shown pity, but seen as “’Mad dogs,’… ‘Just insane animals that should be shot.’” (83.)

On the other side of the coin, War Without Mercy notes that while “racism in the west was markedly characterized by denigration of others, the Japanese were preoccupied far more exclusively with elevating themselves” (204). When westerners are denigrated by Japanese propaganda they are often associated with demons, but more likely is propaganda emphasizing “how the ‘Yamato Race’ was unique among the races and cultures of the world, and why this uniqueness made them superior” (205). Dower tells us about how war in the Japanese mind was an act of purification, an idea rooted in the traditional religion of Shinto. He offers four lines from a wartime song called “Companion Cherry Blossoms,” which illustrate this idea quite well:

“You and I, companion cherry blossoms,

Flowered in the garden of the same military school.

Just as the blossoms calmly scatter,

We too are ready to fall for our country” (214).

Whether the tendency is to elevate one’s own or to denigrate the ever-present “Other,” the end result is the merciless perspective of Manichaeism.

Despite the problem of inescapable subjectivity in writing history, or any writing for that matter, Dower is thorough enough to include both sides as best as he can. A reader will hopefully stop at the two section titles “The War in Western Eyes,” and “The War in Japanese Eyes,” and ask the question, “Whose eyes am I seeing the war through now?” Dower’s eyes, and while they are not without a bias, they have seen much on the topic: by the end of War Without Mercy, we are left with a fair idea of why the war was without mercy: because of the racism that each side spread as a response to their fear.