Next Century by David Halberstam

Author:David Halberstam [Halberstam, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-8608-1
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-11-13T23:39:00+00:00

IV

THE JAPANESE WERE NEVER PART of the Cold War, but they were ideally positioned to exploit it (that is, to be a part of it without being a part of it). Their nationalism was instinctive. To the outsider the Japanese seem a nation apart, a people who, because of the distinct nature of their history, geography, and language, prefer to think of themselves as a race.

The anticommunism of their ruling class was visceral, and they were glad, by and large, that America played the role it did in the postwar Pacific, but their essential purpose was always about Japan, never about some grand alliance. They have a singular sense of their own destiny. We cajoled and pressured them into doing exactly what they intended to do all along. We believed the Japanese were allies, that we shared similar goals (as well as enemies). Now, as we begin to face the true realities and intricacies of the relationship (on such issues as sharing technology on fighter planes), we both realize how little we know of each other.

Essentially the Japanese success is their own. They modernized on their own terms, adjusting in ways that felt comfortable to them, blending the needs of the present and the future while holding on to as much of the past as possible. Theirs was first an economic or industrial modernization and only then, reluctantly, a social and political one. They brilliantly took traditional Japanese forms and adapted them to the modern workplace. They were at once completely modern yet surprisingly feudal. “The electronic tribe” the writer Donald Richie has called them. In the years after the war their personal and national goals seemed to mesh perfectly, and they were able to attain in peacetime a level of nationalism and sacrifice that other nations could summon only in times of war.

Japan, more than any other nation I can think of, was the beneficiary of our empire. In different ways the wars in Korea and Vietnam helped the Japanese economy immeasurably. At the start of the Korean War any number of Japan’s largest industrial companies, having fought bloody battles with left-wing unions, were near bankruptcy. The economy was ill disciplined; inflation was rampant. Even before the Korean War broke out, the rise of tensions in Europe between the West and the Soviets and the decline of Chiang’s forces on the mainland of China, forced Washington (not MacArthur) to change the essential tilt of American policy toward Japan. There had been a good deal of zaibatsu bashing in the early days of the occupation. That was soon over. The zaibatsu would be allowed to regroup in different ways and in different garb. The purges of wartime businessmen stopped. The radicalism of the leftist unions was ho longer tolerated. Most important of all, the runaway inflation that seemed to perpetuate the wartime devastation and pessimism was ended.

During the Korean War Japan became a critical supply base for the American forces in Korea—for trucks and jeeps and napalm. Korea provided the boost that Japan’s struggling industrial forces needed to right themselves.

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