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.

One Written Word is Worth A Thousand Pieces of Gold

History 190
11/17/05

“One Written Word is Worth a Thousand Pieces of Gold” – “yi zi qian jing”



When the Merchant Lu published the essays of his sponsored scholars, titled Spring and Autumn Annals of the House of Lu, he hung a thousand pieces of gold above the publicly displayed tablet pages declaring that anyone who could improve the work by adding or removing a single word would be so rewarded. Nobody dared suggest any changes. This incident took place around 250 B.C.E, and reflects a Chinese cultural attitude about the power and value of the written word. The phrase “yi zi qian jing,” or “one written word is worth a thousand pieces of gold,” has become a Chinese proverb used to describe any work of literary merit.1

The written Chinese language was standardized as China was united under the first Qin emperor and has remained very true to its ancient forms. Pronunciations vary from place to place but the characters are universal to the Chinese mind. The driving Confucian force of education, usually involving reading classic texts, furthers this cultural expression of the power of the written word. Students study Confucius’s Analects, Sun Tsu’s Art of War, Lao-Tse’s Tao Te Ching, and other texts. More than one tomb has been opened and found home to beautiful scroll-painted copies of classic texts. Despite certain political periods in which many books were seen as dangerous by the imperial power and ordered destroyed, copies of these classic texts can still be purchased in any myriad of translations.

Lao-Tse’s Tao Te Ching remains one of the world’s most-translated, most-distributed books, ranking up with the christian Bible. It is interesting to read this ancient Chinese classic, restored from the original characters carved onto bamboo, with the proverb “yi zi qian jing,” in mind. The first lines of the Tao Te Ching read something like “the Way that can be spoken of is not the constant way; the name that can be named is not the constant name.”2 Lao-Tsu believed that the “way” could not be put into words, because words were finite and subjective; any word that tried called preconceived notions to mind, and ruined perception of the “way” as it really was.

Other chapters in the Tao Te Ching reflect a disdain for frivolous use of language. “Wise men don’t speak,” says one of the chapters; Lao-Tse did not mean that they didn’t speak parsay, just not frivolously. Legend has it that he was a court librarian who left finally for a life in the woods. One of the guards saw him leaving and noticed he was a holy man, and asked him for his wisdom; the things he told the guard were later compiled into the Tao-Te-Ching. While he can’t truly describe the “way” with a word, he does manage to talk around it eloquently enough for the understanding of a western mind, thousands of years later.

Maybe it is the continuity within the language, but China is the only one of the great civilizations to have survived fairly intact into the modern day. Since the first emperor of Qin standardized the language, it has remained fairly constant. When new words were needed, new characters would be created – old characters were constant. Anyone who can read modern Chinese can read ancient texts without too much difficulty.

There are extensive historical records, too, because of the way that writing was valued within the culture. For example, Sima Qian’s Shiji, an account of the warring states period, before the unification of China under Qin. Sima Qian earned the emperor’s attention and displeasure when he stood up for Li Ling, an critic of the emperor’s, in court. He was thrown in jail. Later he was accused by the emperor of deceit and sentenced to death. He couldn’t pay the steep fine offered in exchange for his life, but could submit to total castration in exchange for the right to continue living. Sima Qian chose to become a eunuch so that he could finish writing Shiji, his history, his life’s ambition. The completion of his work was so important to him that he called the cost as insignificant as “the loss of one hair from nine oxen,” in a letter (c.93 B.C.E.) to his friend Ren An, a Chinese governor.3 This book, when released, became a cultural classic of China and the model on which future histories were written.

In A Thousand Pieces of Gold the author retells a little her grandfather’s story. “…when he was a boy growing up in Shanghai he saw… large red boxes placed at major street corners. Each had… four gilded characters written on it…’jing xi zi zhi,’ or ‘respect and cherish words.’”4 Men with bamboo poles would collect all of the trash on the ground with written words on it at a great expenditure of energy for the Confucian paper burning ritual at the temple. Candidates who had passed the imperial examinations could attend this ritual to give worship to Heaven until all the paper had turned to ashes. There were boxes on the way out for donations; each was labeled with the famous proverb, “yi zi qian jing,” or “one written word is worth a thousand pieces of gold.”

Another example of the Chinese reverence for the written word is the practice and art of calligraphy. The art of writing characters is considered the a priori art in China. It is considered to “come before” other arts and strongly influence them, especially painting and swordplay. Many Chinese hang scrolls of beautiful calligraphy on their walls and admire them as one would admire a Monet print. It is common in American open-air marketplaces or “Chinatowns” (for example, in San Francisco) to find a Chinese calligraphy artist who will write your name or whatever you like in lovely flowing script. It won’t even cost you a thousand pieces of gold; and that fact won’t change its worth. In English we have a saying “words are cheap,” but this statement applies to itself. When someone creates a work of literary art that changes the cultural consciousness in the western world (Shakespeare et. al.), we call it a “masterpiece” or a “chef d’ouvre” but in China they would say of it that “one word is worth a thousand pieces of gold.”