Diary 2016 (April 1st)- Notes on recent reading: Embracing defeat

During the past 15 months I have been reading a little bit about World War 2. It is more like I have been reading around it. I am not interested in generals, army movements, brilliant strategies and stupid tactics, bout how the battles and wars were won and lost. I realized that I find books set in the immediate aftermath of a war more interesting than those set during the war itself.

Civilization shatters during wartime. But primal survival instinct, wrapped up in ideas such as nation and religion hold things together. The sound and the fury of war are terrible. Once they die down, when the dust starts settling, then only the full extent of damage is visible.

In The Skin, Malaparte succinctly summarizes the difference between wartime and its wake in the passage below:

There is a profound difference between fighting to avoid death and fighting in order to live. Men who fight to avoid death preserve their dignity and one and all — men, women and children — defend it jealously, tenaciously, fiercely…When men fight to avoid death they cling with a tenacity born of desperation to all that constitutes the living and eternal part of human life, the essence, the noblest and purest element of life: dignity, pride, freedom of conscience. They fight to save their souls. But after the liberation men had to fight in order to live…It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one’s skin.

The famed Yamato spirit of the Japanese didn’t take long to devolve into dog eat dog after Emperor Hirohito’s surrender speech. There was widespread looting of army stocks. A vibrant black market blossomed. John Bower says that ‘For many Japanese, this was virtually the economy’.

Embracing defeat: Japan in the wake of World War II explores the history of Japan from 1945 till 1952, the end of the American occupation. The perspective is almost entirely Japanese.

It presents the portrait of a nation where 2.7 million servicemen and civilians died, millions more injured, sick or malnourished, one-quarter of the country’s wealth was destroyed and 40% of urban areas were destroyed, rendering 30% of their population homeless. Exhaustion and despair was so prevalent that the populace was said to have succumbed to something called the ‘kyodatsu’ condition. They had been primed for a total war, a war to glorious victory or total annihilation. The unconditional surrender left a number of people relieved yet devastated.

Bower spends a lot of pages trying to understand how and why Hirohito escaped being charged with any war crimes. There were many in the US armed forces and allied governments who would loved to line up a firing squad for him. According to Bower, majority of Japanese were also indifferent and at least wouldn’t have objected to his abdication and maybe even the abolition of monarchy. He gives the caveat though that historical speculation is always risky.

One reason seems to be General Mac Arthur and his staff’s fervent belief that the Japanese revered their emperor spiritually. Any attempt to remove him would lead to chaos and make the occupation much more difficult.

“(MacArthur) warned that if he were indicted the nation would experience “a tremendous convulsion”, “disintegrate”, initiate a “vendetta for revenge…whose cycle may well not be complete for centuries if ever.” Government agencies would break down; “civilized practices will largely cease”; guerrilla warfare could be expected; all hopes of introducing modern democracy would disappear; and once the occupation forces left, “some form of intense regimentation probably along communistic line(s) would arise from the mutilated masses.”

Bower judges this to be hyperbole on MacArthur’s part but the list of potential disasters seems to be eerily prescient and applicable to American interventions in the middle-east. It could have written for the Iraq war.

But insulating the Emperor from the trials had long-term repercussions. It compromised the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. The occupation bureaucracy and court officials worked behind the scenes not only to prevent Hirohito from being indicted, but also to slant the testimony of the defendants to ensure that no one implicated the emperor even by a slip of tongue. There were other serious problems with the trial which reduced their legitimacy in the eyes of not just the convicted and the Japanese populace but also among some of the judges and Allied army officials.

1. The concept of ‘naked conspiracy’- The prosecution tried to prove an eighteen year long ‘common plan’ to wage aggressive war. There was no such provision in international law. Also, acts of omission along with commission were factored in the trial. The ex post facto indictments threatened a fundamental principle of law : Without a law there can be no crime, without a law there can be no punishment.
2. Capricious and arbitrary selection of individuals to try: Examples had to be made and a few convenient ones were chosen. But no heads of the Kempetai, leaders of the nationalistic secret societies or industrialists, who were more than supportive of the government’s path to war were tried. Scientists from the notorious Unit 731 in Manchuria were granted blanket amnesty in exchange for sharing their research. By the latter stages of the trial, fighting communism was rapidly precedence over punishing war crimes. The ruthless economic head of the Manchurian government and a powerful right wing mobster were just two examples of individuals freed for they could be allies in fighting the menace of communism.
3. Nearly exclusive focus on war crimes committed against allied POWs: The mobilization of Koreans and Taiwanese (Formosans) for forced labor, comfort women, possible use of chemical warfare were all utterly ignored. The Japanese were even forbidden to refer to the Great Asia War and were required to use ‘Pacific war’. Bower describes as semantic imperialism, which gave primacy to the conflict between Japan and the US at the cost of their victims in Asia. It is pretty certain that the Americans did not think through the ramifications. It was not a conspiracy. But it wouldn’t have helped in remembering what the Asian countries suffered at the hands of Japan.
4. Hypocrisy about Western colonialism: Japan was accused of waging aggressive war. While the trial was going on, , Britain, France and Netherlands were actively and violently trying to re-establish control over their colonies. Justice Radhabinod Pal had a thing or two to say about the effusive rhetoric of freedom and democracy gushing from the American prosecutors. He mentioned how the Japanese ‘had followed the precedents of European imperialism, sometimes with “almost pedantic exactitude”’ and pointed out the similarities between Japan’s Amau doctrine and the US’ Monroe doctrine. It was no wonder that the Japanese took the accusations of crimes against peace and humanity with a pinch of salt.

There were more technical and execution problems which turned the trials into little more than a farce. The initial euphoria of freedom of speech and suddenly created space for political activism was dying by the time the trial judgments were handed down. Left-leaning politicians and newspapers were feeling the pressure. The censorship machinery had hardened. Bower takes care to point out that it was still better than the war years but it was a far cry from the heady initial days.

The Japanese struggled on how to deal with their war dead. Bower writes with empathy about it in a chapter titled, ‘What do you tell the dead when you lose.’ In the initial months, they also learned about the rape of Nanjing and Manila and similar events. Many were horrified.

But within a few years the focus had shifted to explaining the defeat. The scapegoats ranged from backwardness in science to an evil cabal of ultra-nationalist leaders to demented cabal of mad and/or stupid military clique who had betrayed the emperor and the Meiji charter. Several collections of letters and writings by soldiers were published in the late 1940s. Combined with the undeniable suffering of the Japanese people, it produced an intense, inward-looking sense of victim-hood.

It created a miasma of selective forgetting, a widespread amnesia regarding the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese army and the active or passive collusion of majority of Japanese. But in a true irony, it also planted a deep anti-war sentiment in the country. The roots struck seem to have been firm, firm enough that last year, when the Japanese parliament passed bills enabling the Japanese military to fight overseas and defend allies with limited conditions, over 50% of respondents opposed and only 29% supported the bills, according to polls. The bills were radical for Japan but tame by any other sovereign nation’s standards.

Japan’s post world war 2 history is interesting because of the questions it raises. Questions which are always more interesting than the answers. Questions about remembrance and forgetting, about guilt vs responsibility, about national character, top-down patently un-liberal imposition of liberal political systems.

It would be interesting to contrast Germany and Japan with regards to the culpability, repentance and atonement. Majority of populations in both countries supported the regimes. But after the war, it was hard to find Nazis in Germany or nationalists in Japan. Out of necessity, most of the middle level administration and bureaucracy in both countries had to be left in place by the victors to avoid total breakdown, though partial purges did happen if only for the sake of appearances. My reading on this is limited but in Germany, some amount of acceptance seems to have happened at the highest political levels and also among the public. It took time though. Apparently, when the American TV miniseries, The Holocaust, was aired in West Germany in 1979, people were shocked. The process was not easy.

The series which was watched by 20 million people or 50 percent West Germans first brought the matter of the genocide in World War II to widespread public attention in a way that it never been before. After each part of Holocaust was aired, there was a companion show where a panel of historians could answer questions from people phoning in. The historian’s panels were overwhelmed with thousands of phone calls from shocked and outraged Germans, a great many of whom stated that they were born after 1945 and that was the first time that they learned that their country had practiced genocide in World War II.

In Japan, it was much worse. There was no forthright facing up to the complete history. In today’s geopolitical environment, chances of that happening are negligible. China wields it as yet another weapon in their armory for achieving their global and regional ambitions. Tensions have risen and there has been a political leadership move towards renewed militarism and nationalism in Japan.

For later generations, direct guilt is not applicable. But would there be a sense of responsibility, a need to remember so as to not repeat? It is difficult to be optimistic based on history.