Inventing Japan by Ian Buruma

Author:Ian Buruma [Buruma, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-282-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

5

WAR AGAINST THE WEST

It was a moment of great joy for the emperor and many of his subjects when Japanese torpedo and dive bombers wrecked much of the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Emperor Hirohito was dressed for the occasion in his navy uniform, and courtiers recorded that His Majesty was in “a splendid mood.” Hayashi Fusao, author of In Affirmation of the Great East Asian War, was traveling in Manchukuo when he heard the news. It was, he wrote, “as if a heavy load had been lifted from my shoulders.” Takamura Kotaro, the poet, sculptor, and Parisian-style bohemian, wept tears of joy. The literary critic Ito Sei “felt as if in one stroke I had become a new man.…” After Pearl Harbor came Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines … The holy war (seisen) of Asian liberation could not have got off to a better start.

One Japanese eyewitness, Okuna Takao, a distinguished literary critic, summed it up as follows:

“The attitudes of ordinary people, who had felt ambivalent about the war against China, and even of intellectuals who denounced it as an invasion, were transformed as soon as the war against Britain and the U.S. began.… Everyone worried about what would happen to Japan.… At the same time, there was a sense of euphoria that we’d done it at last; we’d landed a punch on those arrogant great powers Britain and America, on those white fellows. As the news of one victory after another came in, the worries faded, and fear turned to pride and joy.… All the feelings of inferiority of a colored people from a backward country, towards white people from the developed world, disappeared in that one blow.… Never in our history had we Japanese felt such pride in ourselves as a race as we did then.”

This is probably as truthful a description as one is ever likely to get. All those years of being told one was the victim of the arrogant West, all the snubs and slights, real or not, the humiliations of trying to catch up with the material superiority, not to mention the “Civilization and Enlightenment,” of the Occident by acting as the best pupils in the class of Westernization—the shame of all that had been wiped out in one blow by those dive bombers swooping down on Pearl Harbor. Perhaps now the world would take the Japanese as seriously as they took themselves.

After the first victories in 1937, more and more Japanese had been troubled by the “holy war” in China. Japanese war movies of the time were surprisingly honest in showing hardships suffered by the common soldiers—though not, with rare exceptions, of their victims. Wartime propaganda rarely focused on the wickedness of Japan’s enemies. Films celebrated the spirit of self-sacrifice, of everyone doing his bit for the nation, the poor soldiers stuck in the Chinese mud as much as the people back home. There was no joy in the seemingly endless battles and skirmishes in China, which never produced the desired result of Chinese submission.

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