November 24, 2021
Embracing Defeat
The first years of the Occupation saw a spate of surprisingly liberal reforms (that drove conservative anti-war politicians like Shigeru Yoshida up a wall). Leftists, labor organizers, and even communists were released from jail and the press was unleashed.
Dower documents how enthusiastically the Japanese public embraced these freedoms. Analyzing the flood of mass media publications that followed, he portrays how ordinary people were affected by the most dramatic social upheaval in Japanese history.
This bottom-up revolution inevitably ran headlong into the top-down political machinations originating from SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers). General Douglas MacArthur was very much Japan's last shogun.
Over the course of seven years, the fusion of these forces shaped the face of modern Japan. A result, Dower argues, that did not arise from "a borrowed ideology or imposed vision, but a lived experience and a seized opportunity."
Related links
August 15
The last shogun
Victory in Defeat
The Showa drama
The rebirth of Japan's mass media
Labels: books, ebooks, embracing defeat, history, japan, japanese culture, ww2
August 16, 2018
The last shogun
Oh, those powers were, on paper, vested in the emperor. So had they been during the shogunate. It's just that from the 17th century through the early 19th, the Tokugawa shogun unquestionably controlled the emperor. Now nobody controlled the emperor. And the emperor didn't control anything either.
In a deadly game of king of the hill, the years in Japan between the Meiji Restoration and WWII were punctuated by a series of attempted coups. None succeeded, but all had the effect of pushing the government further to the right in hopes of deflecting the next military revolt, until the army was operating without any practical constraints.
Echoes of the first half of the 16th century, when the slow rot of the Ashikaga shogunate ignited battles amongst the military governors that culminated in the Warring States period.
Lacking the checks and balances of civilian oversight, the Japanese army ended up starting a small war in China that grew out of control, basically Vietnam on a continental scale. When the U.S. cut off oil and scrap metal exports to Japan as a response, the military lashed out without considering its capabilities or the military consequences.
Thanks to the military doctrine of Kantai Kessen, meaning a winner-take-all contest between battleships, the Japanese war effort was doomed from the start. Japanese military leaders couldn't stop believing in Kantai Kessen because it had proved so decisive during the Russo-Japanese War.
But by June of 1942 and the Battle of Midway, the battleship was a white elephant. The aircraft carrier ruled the waves. To be sure, the Japanese navy had indeed crushed the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, compelling a shaky Russian government to sue for peace.
This "underdog" victory was hailed around the world (even though it began with a "sneak attack"). The Japanese government was quick to believe its own press, forgetting that the land war going on at the same time was about as decisive as the First World War would be, with the Japanese infantry taking as many casualties as the Russians.
Notwithstanding one the greatest diplomatic achievements in history, the victorious Japanese came away from the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905) believing that the western powers had robbed them of their due. This combination of victimhood, aggrievement, and overconfidence set the stage for the next forty years of accumulating disasters.
In Japan, ordinary citizens—already living under draconian rationing and sumptuary laws—took the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor to be a second Tsushima, signaling an end to the conflict.
By the Battle of Okinawa, nobody in the Japanese government believed they could prevail by force of arms alone. But they could convince the Americans that invading the main islands carried too high a cost, essentially Robert E. Lee's strategy in 1864, that might have succeeded except for the fall of Atlanta and Sherman's March to the Sea.
The bitter irony is that in this they succeeded. Thus the atomic bomb. But the atomic bomb probably had a greater influence on Stalin, who, thanks to his spies, knew more about it than Truman. Stalin didn't launch his invasion of Manchuria until after Nagasaki. Once the bomb was dropped, Stalin had to act before Japan surrendered.
One of Stalin's goals was payback for the Russo-Japanese War. The Soviet army reclaimed all of its former territories, plus several islands that had always been part of Japan. From 560,000 to 760,000 Japanese were shipped off to the gulags, where from 10 to 50 percent of them died. This treatment by a former "ally" still rankles in Japan.
There is much talk of "formally" ending the Korean War. The one-week war between the Soviet Union and Japan has never been formally resolved either.
All through the Second World War, Japan and the Soviet Union had a non-
But a negotiated surrender would not be acceptable to the Allies and certainly not to their citizens. They had been there and done that and suffered the consequences. In July of 1918, Winston Churchill laid out the terms for a lasting armistice with Germany. In the process, he made clear why the "Great War" would not be "the war to end all wars."
Germany must be beaten; Germany must know that she is beaten; Germany must feel that she is beaten. Her defeat must be expressed in terms and facts which will, for all time, deter others from emulating her crime, and will safeguard us against their repetition.
Despite all the treaties signed and reparations extracted at Versailles, between the two world wars, Germany acceded to none of these conditions. But in August of 1945, as John Dower vividly lays out in Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, Japan very much did.
The atomic bomb was considerably less destructive than Curtis LeMay's ongoing firebombing campaigns. But it forced Stalin's hand and that forced the Japanese government to finally face reality. And when he finally did face reality, the atomic bomb gave the emperor a transcendent power to whom he could surrender Japan's wartime ideology.
This time, history would not repeat itself.
Though in a very real sense, history was repeating itself for the fourth time. In 1185, Minamoto Yoritomo destroyed the Taira clan—the power behind the throne—and moved the capital of Japan to Kamakura, inaugurating the rule of the shoguns. On and off for the next 700 years, the emperor reigned as little more than a figurehead.
When Tokugawa Ieyasu consolidated power after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the country breathed a sigh of relief and mostly aligned itself with the new regime. Like Ieyasu himself, it was an opportunistic resolution that demanded little in the way of ideological conformity, except to go along to get along, a social compact that worked.
In the mid-1860s, as the Tokugawa regime crumbled around them and the center could no longer hold, this opportunistic ambivalence was expressed in the "Ee ja nai ka" movement, an anarchic yet strangely playful popular uprising that proclaimed, "So what? Why not? Who cares?"
In the late summer of 1945, the population was too exhausted to dance in the streets. But they'd had enough of ideology. Observes John Dower, when General MacArthur arrived in Japan on August 30 of that year,
he easily became a stock figure in the political pageantry of Japan: the new sovereign, the blue-eyed shogun, the paternalistic military dictator, the grandiloquent but excruciatingly sincere Kabuki hero.
Dower wryly concludes, "Indeed, the response of huge numbers of Japanese was that the supreme commander was great, and so was democracy." So it comes as no surprise that they should so readily switch their allegiances to the man who promised them much less torment and a much better future.
Related posts
The grudge and the dream
Kantai Kessen
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Labels: books, embracing defeat, history, japan, politics, ww2
August 04, 2016
The rebirth of Japan's mass media
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| Mitsuki Takahata (bottom right) plays Shizuko Ohashi in the NHK series. |
Because MacArthur believed in the power of the mass media to spread the good word of freedom and democracy. His good word. It wasn't simply a political pose. MacArthur was Ronald Reagan with ten times the ego and a papal sense of infallibility.
In other words, the perfect personality for a Japanese shogun (with access to a radio studio).
In fact, the first few years of the Occupation saw a spate of surprisingly liberal reforms (that drove Shigeru Yoshida up a wall). Leftists, labor organizers, and even communists were let out of jail and the press was unleashed.
In Embracing Defeat, John Dower documents how enthusiastically the Japanese embraced these freedoms. Soon SCAP was censoring as many articles and broadcasts as it was approving. A free press, you see, wasn't free to criticize SCAP.
But the fire had been lit. It's telling that the moral backlash that "brought about the collapse of the comic book industry in the 1950s" was shrugged off almost as soon as it arrived in Japan (though, to be sure, it never entirely went away).
The NHK Asadora, Toto Nee-chan, is a fictionalized biography of Shizuko Ohashi (1920–2013), who in 1948 co-founded 「暮しの手帖」 ("Notebook for Living"), a home improvement magazine for women still in print.
This retrospective at the magazine's website is in Japanese, but the illustrations largely speak for themselves.
This was an era when movie makers as well were yanking themselves up by their bootstraps. Akira Kurosawa turned the devastated landscape of Tokyo into a movie set in his second post-war film, One Wonderful Sunday, released in 1947.
Labels: asadora, embracing defeat, history, japan, japanese culture, japanese tv, movies about japan, nhk, politics, publishing, social studies, ww2
August 12, 2015
The grudge and the dream
William Tecumseh Sherman said it best: "War is all hell." But criminal sociopathy aside, why should some soldiers be so eager to usher in Hell on Earth? In the case of Japan during WWII, the common answer is its "martial culture," an answer that is in small parts true and large parts wholly beside the point.
To be sure, it is no less important to ask why these questions are kept more alive in some quarters than in others (answer: as a cynical and hypocritical foreign policy strategy). By contrast, Michael Totten reports that in present-day Vietnam,
Vietnam has also "moved on" from the one million Vietnamese who died during WWII. The same can be said about the Philippines, which now prefers Japan as an ally since China started stomping all over the South China Sea like, well, Imperial Japan a century ago. But these considerations do not extinguish the moral quandaries.
The undeniable brutality visited upon soldier and civilian alike in Nanking, Bataan, Manila, and Burma is all more surprising in light of the actions of men like Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who issued visas that allowed 6,000 Jews to escape from Nazi-occupied territories to occupied China via Japan.
Though his superiors reprimanded Sugihara for doing so, when pressed by Berlin, the Japanese government
Modern Japan had waged two major wars before WWII and the historical record offers little evidence of a martial culture indifferent to the welfare of the defeated. To be sure, there were scattered cases—such as that of the White Tiger Corps—of soldiers killing themselves for no good reason, but not the enemy.
During the Boshin War (1868), casualties on both sides came to less than 10,000. The Tokugawa loyalists were shown clemency, and many later joined the government. Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last shogun, abdicated and lived out the rest of his life in peace. The capital, Edo (Tokyo), surrendered with casualties only in the hundreds.
The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) is chiefly remembered for Admiral Togo's brilliant execution of the naval battles. The equally important but largely forgotten land war around Port Arthur was a sneak preview of WWI, wracking up most of Japan's 47,000 casualties.
(If European generals hadn't learned from Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Kennesaw Mountain what damage the muzzle-loading rifle could inflict, the Russo-Japanese war should have informed any rational observer what happens when infantrymen charge entrenched positions fortified with machine guns.)
In any event, Japan was celebrated in the Western press for waging and winning a "European" war in Asia. In 1906, Admiral Togo (who seriously believed himself to be the reincarnation of Horatio Nelson) was made a Member of the British Order of Merit by King Edward VII.
For perhaps the first and last time, the Japanese army and navy were "on the same page," fighting the same enemy with the same objectives.
And yet it was during the Russo-Japanese war that deep conflicts between Japan's military services began to emerge, the costly land war being overshadowed by the triumphant navy and a pliable press. By 1940, these rivalries would prove hugely detrimental to both to the war effort and the men engaged in the fighting.
The modern Japanese navy dates back to the mid 1800s, when forward-thinking leaders like Katsu Kaishu envisioned Japan's future as a naval power. Although he was a Tokugawa loyalist, among his students were many "founding fathers" of the Meij Restoration. Ever since, the navy continued to attract the "best and the brightest."
The army, by contrast, found itself the poor stepchild to the navy. "Interservice rivalry" doesn't begin to describe the bad blood between the Imperial army and navy. The army had been mauled by Soviet forces in border conflicts during the 1930s and its self-declared war in China was going nowhere, giving the navy the upper hand.
The first scenes of the biopic Admiral Yamamoto (2011) makes this abundantly clear: Yeah, we're going to end up fighting the Americans, but right now the real enemy is the army. And the press. And the government.
When the tables were turned at the Battle of Midway, the Imperial navy took its own sweet time informing the army (the public had to infer what had happened) that it had lost, and badly. The navy had good reason not to trust the army.
Saigo Takamori, the commanding general of the Boshin War, first quit the government because the politicians wouldn't invade Korea fast enough. After Meiji reforms stripped the samurai of their hereditary privileges, Saigo ended up leading a counterrevolution (the Satsuma Rebellion). He was George Washington and Robert E. Lee in one.
Like Lee, Saigo Takamori emerged a hero despite his wasteful and pointless rebellion (and all the more so since he'd died "heroically" in the process). That set a "standard" for celebrating passion over discipline and created an officer corps that fell into the habit of launching coups and starting wars whenever they felt like it.
The Imperial army sallied into the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, a conflict as brutal to the Japanese army as the Eastern Front was to the Wehrmacht. Attrition was hollowing out the professional officer corps even before Pearl Harbor. The Solomon Islands campaign in 1943 further depleted the army of officers and the navy of pilots.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the kind of cynical movies later made about Vietnam in Hollywood were made about WWII in Japan. The army was blamed for dragging the nation into the conflict in the first place, and returning soldiers—infantrymen, in particular—did not have kind things to say about their commanding officers.
In Embracing Defeat, John Dower describes the kind of letters published in Japanese newspapers by returning veterans after the war.
What emerges here is a toxic brew of desperation and incompetence, coupled with incoherent and flatly impossible objectives, the same poison that resulted in moral black holes as dissimilar as Andersonville Prison and My Lai.
Add to that a manufactured ideology that had been, in the words of Douglas Lummis, professor of political philosophy at Tsuda University, "pounded into them by a modern, highly organized, state-controlled school system, and by all the other 20th century techniques of indoctrination which the government had available to it."
The Meiji Restoration itself was a reinvention of Japanese political history, ostensibly "reinstating" the emperor as the acting head of government (which he hadn't been for 1000 years). But here I'm referring to a far more invidious creation: the crude politics of resentment concocted after the Russo-Japanese war.
The 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth (for which Teddy Roosevelt received the Nobel Prize) gave Japan one of the greatest negotiated bounties in history. Japan walked away with "legal" (internationally recognized) possession of the entire East Asian archipelago, from Taiwan all the way up to Kamchatka, with Korea thrown in for good measure.
And yet fervent nationalists and populist rabble-rousers in the press convinced the public that they were owed more. Increasingly violent protests led to the Hibiya riots and the collapse of the government. The conviction that "We was robbed!" became a rallying cry, a grudge nursed for the next three decades.
That grudge was ginned up by the "educated" classes. But what would compel the average infantryman to fight so ferociously against foreigners with whom he had no quarrel? In the September 16, 1942 edition of the Wall Street Journal, former Tokyo correspondent Ray Cromley I think accurately identifies the root motivation.
Cromley's military analysis is mostly wrong (granted, the British had been thoroughly outsmarted at Singapore), though viewed in light of the balance of power in September 1942, understandable. Cromley does capture the essence of the simmering discontent that goes back not only to Portsmouth but to the "Unequal Treaties" of 1858.
There is something darkly comedic about people getting enraged by the legislative actions of a foreign country that would never affect them in the slightest (and differed little from the laws in their own country). But such is the nature of nursed resentments and harbored grudges that drive so many conflicts today.
(This article about the introduction of Japanese cuisine to the U.S. points out that as early as the late 1800s, Japanese culture and the Japanese themselves were held in much higher esteem than the Chinese.)
For those who have no plausible recourse against the actual and immediate source of their suffering, foreign devils and the heretics frustrating the divine cause become the most accessible scapegoats, to be driven in the hills and sacrificed, for real and imagined wrongs often suffered generations before.
Once these convictions become fixed in the collective consciousness, further fueled by a sense of mission whose righteousness increases in inverse proportion to its attainability, they are almost impossible to root out. Again, it was Sherman who realized the full extent of the awful implications. After the Battle of Atlanta, he prophesied:
What Sherman foresaw was a psychic sunk-cost fallacy (an "escalation of commitment") playing out on a massive existential scale.
The Civil War cost the South over a quarter-million dead. The bitter remainders of Sherman's 300,000 kept the war going for another century. The Thirty Years' War cost Western Europe eight million lives, depleting the population of parts of Germany by half. It can be argued that the Thirty Years' War really didn't end until 1989.
By the same token, Japan's 20th century wars in China and the Pacific were the final, dying attempts to realize the expansionist dreams of the 16th century warlord, Oda Nobunaga. As David Goldman vividly describes, throughout history these hopeless wars have inevitably grown more brutal as the dream slipped away.
Either the ideology dies, or the people willing to fight to keep it alive do (by force or arms or by natural causes), in sufficient numbers to render the cause inert. That may literally take the lifetimes of everyone who subscribes to it.
To be sure, it is no less important to ask why these questions are kept more alive in some quarters than in others (answer: as a cynical and hypocritical foreign policy strategy). By contrast, Michael Totten reports that in present-day Vietnam,
anti-Americanism scarcely exists. What we call the Vietnam War, and what they call the American War, casts no shadow—especially not in the South, which fought on the American side, but not even in Hanoi, a city heavily bombed by the United States. The war was just one in a long history of conflicts, and it isn't even the most recent. Perhaps it's not so remarkable that the Vietnamese have moved on. Most Americans don't hold grudges for long, either, after the furies of war have subsided.
Vietnam has also "moved on" from the one million Vietnamese who died during WWII. The same can be said about the Philippines, which now prefers Japan as an ally since China started stomping all over the South China Sea like, well, Imperial Japan a century ago. But these considerations do not extinguish the moral quandaries.
The undeniable brutality visited upon soldier and civilian alike in Nanking, Bataan, Manila, and Burma is all more surprising in light of the actions of men like Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who issued visas that allowed 6,000 Jews to escape from Nazi-occupied territories to occupied China via Japan.
Though his superiors reprimanded Sugihara for doing so, when pressed by Berlin, the Japanese government
rejected requests from the German government to establish anti-Semitic policies. Towards the end, Nazi representatives pressured the Japanese army to devise a plan to exterminate Shanghai's Jewish population, and this pressure eventually became known to the Jewish community's leadership. However, the Japanese had no intention of further provoking the anger of the Allies, and thus delayed the German request for a time, eventually rejecting it entirely.
Modern Japan had waged two major wars before WWII and the historical record offers little evidence of a martial culture indifferent to the welfare of the defeated. To be sure, there were scattered cases—such as that of the White Tiger Corps—of soldiers killing themselves for no good reason, but not the enemy.
During the Boshin War (1868), casualties on both sides came to less than 10,000. The Tokugawa loyalists were shown clemency, and many later joined the government. Tokugawa Yoshinobu, the last shogun, abdicated and lived out the rest of his life in peace. The capital, Edo (Tokyo), surrendered with casualties only in the hundreds.
The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) is chiefly remembered for Admiral Togo's brilliant execution of the naval battles. The equally important but largely forgotten land war around Port Arthur was a sneak preview of WWI, wracking up most of Japan's 47,000 casualties.
(If European generals hadn't learned from Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, and Kennesaw Mountain what damage the muzzle-loading rifle could inflict, the Russo-Japanese war should have informed any rational observer what happens when infantrymen charge entrenched positions fortified with machine guns.)
In any event, Japan was celebrated in the Western press for waging and winning a "European" war in Asia. In 1906, Admiral Togo (who seriously believed himself to be the reincarnation of Horatio Nelson) was made a Member of the British Order of Merit by King Edward VII.
For perhaps the first and last time, the Japanese army and navy were "on the same page," fighting the same enemy with the same objectives.
And yet it was during the Russo-Japanese war that deep conflicts between Japan's military services began to emerge, the costly land war being overshadowed by the triumphant navy and a pliable press. By 1940, these rivalries would prove hugely detrimental to both to the war effort and the men engaged in the fighting.
The modern Japanese navy dates back to the mid 1800s, when forward-thinking leaders like Katsu Kaishu envisioned Japan's future as a naval power. Although he was a Tokugawa loyalist, among his students were many "founding fathers" of the Meij Restoration. Ever since, the navy continued to attract the "best and the brightest."
The army, by contrast, found itself the poor stepchild to the navy. "Interservice rivalry" doesn't begin to describe the bad blood between the Imperial army and navy. The army had been mauled by Soviet forces in border conflicts during the 1930s and its self-declared war in China was going nowhere, giving the navy the upper hand.
The first scenes of the biopic Admiral Yamamoto (2011) makes this abundantly clear: Yeah, we're going to end up fighting the Americans, but right now the real enemy is the army. And the press. And the government.
When the tables were turned at the Battle of Midway, the Imperial navy took its own sweet time informing the army (the public had to infer what had happened) that it had lost, and badly. The navy had good reason not to trust the army.
Saigo Takamori, the commanding general of the Boshin War, first quit the government because the politicians wouldn't invade Korea fast enough. After Meiji reforms stripped the samurai of their hereditary privileges, Saigo ended up leading a counterrevolution (the Satsuma Rebellion). He was George Washington and Robert E. Lee in one.
Like Lee, Saigo Takamori emerged a hero despite his wasteful and pointless rebellion (and all the more so since he'd died "heroically" in the process). That set a "standard" for celebrating passion over discipline and created an officer corps that fell into the habit of launching coups and starting wars whenever they felt like it.
The Imperial army sallied into the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, a conflict as brutal to the Japanese army as the Eastern Front was to the Wehrmacht. Attrition was hollowing out the professional officer corps even before Pearl Harbor. The Solomon Islands campaign in 1943 further depleted the army of officers and the navy of pilots.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the kind of cynical movies later made about Vietnam in Hollywood were made about WWII in Japan. The army was blamed for dragging the nation into the conflict in the first place, and returning soldiers—infantrymen, in particular—did not have kind things to say about their commanding officers.
In Embracing Defeat, John Dower describes the kind of letters published in Japanese newspapers by returning veterans after the war.
In May 1946, a veteran wrote a typically anguished letter to the Asahi, one of the country’s leading newspapers, recalling the "hell of starvation" he and his fellow soldiers had endured on a Pacific island and the abuse they suffered at the hands of their officers. Several months later, a report in the Asahi about an abusive officer "lynched" by his men after surrender triggered eighteen reader responses, all but two of which supported the murder and offered their own accounts of brutality and corruption among the officer corps.
What emerges here is a toxic brew of desperation and incompetence, coupled with incoherent and flatly impossible objectives, the same poison that resulted in moral black holes as dissimilar as Andersonville Prison and My Lai.
Add to that a manufactured ideology that had been, in the words of Douglas Lummis, professor of political philosophy at Tsuda University, "pounded into them by a modern, highly organized, state-controlled school system, and by all the other 20th century techniques of indoctrination which the government had available to it."
The Meiji Restoration itself was a reinvention of Japanese political history, ostensibly "reinstating" the emperor as the acting head of government (which he hadn't been for 1000 years). But here I'm referring to a far more invidious creation: the crude politics of resentment concocted after the Russo-Japanese war.
The 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth (for which Teddy Roosevelt received the Nobel Prize) gave Japan one of the greatest negotiated bounties in history. Japan walked away with "legal" (internationally recognized) possession of the entire East Asian archipelago, from Taiwan all the way up to Kamchatka, with Korea thrown in for good measure.
And yet fervent nationalists and populist rabble-rousers in the press convinced the public that they were owed more. Increasingly violent protests led to the Hibiya riots and the collapse of the government. The conviction that "We was robbed!" became a rallying cry, a grudge nursed for the next three decades.
That grudge was ginned up by the "educated" classes. But what would compel the average infantryman to fight so ferociously against foreigners with whom he had no quarrel? In the September 16, 1942 edition of the Wall Street Journal, former Tokyo correspondent Ray Cromley I think accurately identifies the root motivation.
Cromley's military analysis is mostly wrong (granted, the British had been thoroughly outsmarted at Singapore), though viewed in light of the balance of power in September 1942, understandable. Cromley does capture the essence of the simmering discontent that goes back not only to Portsmouth but to the "Unequal Treaties" of 1858.
The average Japanese sailor and soldier is a simple fellow from the country. He has been filled with propaganda about how Westerners treat Japanese. He believes that Britons and Americans despise him as an inferior. This is his opportunity, his officers tell him, of "showing up" the Westerners. Japanese soldiers are getting "revenge" for the white man's treatment of him as an inferior. Much use is made of the American Oriental Exclusion Law, which the Japanese say insults them.
There is something darkly comedic about people getting enraged by the legislative actions of a foreign country that would never affect them in the slightest (and differed little from the laws in their own country). But such is the nature of nursed resentments and harbored grudges that drive so many conflicts today.
(This article about the introduction of Japanese cuisine to the U.S. points out that as early as the late 1800s, Japanese culture and the Japanese themselves were held in much higher esteem than the Chinese.)
For those who have no plausible recourse against the actual and immediate source of their suffering, foreign devils and the heretics frustrating the divine cause become the most accessible scapegoats, to be driven in the hills and sacrificed, for real and imagined wrongs often suffered generations before.
Once these convictions become fixed in the collective consciousness, further fueled by a sense of mission whose righteousness increases in inverse proportion to its attainability, they are almost impossible to root out. Again, it was Sherman who realized the full extent of the awful implications. After the Battle of Atlanta, he prophesied:
I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.
What Sherman foresaw was a psychic sunk-cost fallacy (an "escalation of commitment") playing out on a massive existential scale.
The Civil War cost the South over a quarter-million dead. The bitter remainders of Sherman's 300,000 kept the war going for another century. The Thirty Years' War cost Western Europe eight million lives, depleting the population of parts of Germany by half. It can be argued that the Thirty Years' War really didn't end until 1989.
By the same token, Japan's 20th century wars in China and the Pacific were the final, dying attempts to realize the expansionist dreams of the 16th century warlord, Oda Nobunaga. As David Goldman vividly describes, throughout history these hopeless wars have inevitably grown more brutal as the dream slipped away.
Either the ideology dies, or the people willing to fight to keep it alive do (by force or arms or by natural causes), in sufficient numbers to render the cause inert. That may literally take the lifetimes of everyone who subscribes to it.
Labels: embracing defeat, history, japan, japanese culture, social studies, ww2
August 05, 2015
Admiral Yamamoto
The 2011 biopic Admiral Yamamoto (Toei Pictures) focuses on the last decade of Yamamoto's life. But even at 140 minutes, it only skims the surface, a surface made all the thinner by telling a peripherally-related "homefront" story at the same time. The "fiction" in this "historical fiction" gets a good workout.
As for the "historical" part? That's pretty much fiction too.
To cite one technical detail, Yamamoto's plane was shot down near Bougainville in 1943. We're shown the version carried in the Japanese press, that has him dying elegiacally in the crash. In fact, U.S. Naval Intelligence knew where he was and he was killed mid-air by a P-38 Lightning during its initial strafing run.
Well, call it "subjective" history. This shameless hagiography burnishes Yamamoto's reputation the same way Robert E. Lee's record was "rehabilitated" after the Civil War. As a military commander, Lee was less than he was cracked up to be. Like Lee, Yamamoto was a disaster at every offensive action he initiated.
But the buck stopped nowhere. However reluctant he might have been going in, Yamamoto pushed hard for the Pearl Harbor attack. And then with no carriers to hit, he refused to launch a necessary second wave to destroy the tank farms. Later in the film he declares Pearl Harbor a failure. Which it was, largely because of him.
The movie does show how the Doolittle Raid fueled Yamamoto's obsession with Midway (a welcome result entirely unintended). Forced to divide his forces to keep the Midway option alive, Coral Sea was a halfhearted effort the U.S. Navy was able to fight to a draw.
Then at Midway, Yamamoto failed to rein in Admiral Nagumo after the battle was lost for certain, and acquiesced to Rear Admiral Yamaguchi going down with his ship. No, you don't let experienced officers kill themselves after the enemy failed to do so.
Veteran actor Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance) depicts Yamamoto as practically a spectator to the war he's waging. Director Izuru Narushima apparently wants us to associate "passive" and "detached" with "peaceful." Except depicting Yamamoto as a saint makes him as delusional as his ideological foes in the Imperial Army.
In real life, Yamamoto was anything but a bystander when it came to the war planning. In Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully recount that
Both McClellan1 and MacArthur also thought themselves indispensable men. Lincoln and Truman let them know they weren't.
I subscribe to the theory that when the critical information fell into his hands, Admiral Nimitz might possibly have balked at killing Yamamoto for the same hypothetical reasons Lee would have balked at killing McClellan in 1862. Why eliminate your best asset?
At its heart, Admiral Yamamoto wants to be one of those old-fashioned, patriotic, big-screen blockbusters like The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and The Battle of Britain (1969) and Midway (1976). Those were movies that celebrated the "good war" and the "greatest generation" and starred every big-name actor under the sun.
(And to lend extra gravitas: John Wayne's Sergeant Stryker dies on the slopes of Mt. Suribachi in the last reel after the iconic flag raising. Charlton Heston's Captain Garth dies in the last reel ferrying a fighter from the sinking Yorktown. Alas, Yakusho's Yamamoto dies in the last reel amidst a "transfer of troops.")
Those earlier classics were made with the cooperation of the military branches, along with mothballed equipment pulled out of storage and plenty of repurposed newsreel footage. Admiral Yamamoto make good use of digital effects to create more convincing snapshots of Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the Solomons.
Unfortunately, live-action digital effects like this don't come cheap in Japan, where a "feature film" is "low budget" by Hollywood standards. So Admiral Yamamoto gives us maybe ten minutes of actual cinematic battles and two hours of actors pacing around soundstage sets.
It's on those sets that Teruyuki Kagawa steals every scene he's in as a fiery newspaper editor in the tradition of William Randolph Hearst: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Then does a 180 when the war is lost. (John Dower notes in Embracing Defeat that this was a not uncommon phenomenon in 1945.)
The more interesting (perhaps unacceptably iconoclastic) story would have shown us the war from the point of view of Kagawa's newspaperman, who goes from hero worship to cynic, and yet concludes (as Jimmy Stewart is informed in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance), "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
1. Both McClellan and Yamamoto had great press and the affection of their subordinates. Both were enamored of elaborate battlefield strategies that promised the deliver a crushing blow to the outfoxed enemy (Parshall and Tully explore this failing at length). Both couldn't accept that "no plan survives the first shot." As a result, neither knew what to do next besides retreat. Unlike McClellan, Imperial Japan didn't have more capable officers waiting in the wings. Yamamoto was the basket in which they had placed all their eggs.
As for the "historical" part? That's pretty much fiction too.
To cite one technical detail, Yamamoto's plane was shot down near Bougainville in 1943. We're shown the version carried in the Japanese press, that has him dying elegiacally in the crash. In fact, U.S. Naval Intelligence knew where he was and he was killed mid-air by a P-38 Lightning during its initial strafing run.
Well, call it "subjective" history. This shameless hagiography burnishes Yamamoto's reputation the same way Robert E. Lee's record was "rehabilitated" after the Civil War. As a military commander, Lee was less than he was cracked up to be. Like Lee, Yamamoto was a disaster at every offensive action he initiated.
But the buck stopped nowhere. However reluctant he might have been going in, Yamamoto pushed hard for the Pearl Harbor attack. And then with no carriers to hit, he refused to launch a necessary second wave to destroy the tank farms. Later in the film he declares Pearl Harbor a failure. Which it was, largely because of him.
The movie does show how the Doolittle Raid fueled Yamamoto's obsession with Midway (a welcome result entirely unintended). Forced to divide his forces to keep the Midway option alive, Coral Sea was a halfhearted effort the U.S. Navy was able to fight to a draw.
Then at Midway, Yamamoto failed to rein in Admiral Nagumo after the battle was lost for certain, and acquiesced to Rear Admiral Yamaguchi going down with his ship. No, you don't let experienced officers kill themselves after the enemy failed to do so.
Veteran actor Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance) depicts Yamamoto as practically a spectator to the war he's waging. Director Izuru Narushima apparently wants us to associate "passive" and "detached" with "peaceful." Except depicting Yamamoto as a saint makes him as delusional as his ideological foes in the Imperial Army.
In real life, Yamamoto was anything but a bystander when it came to the war planning. In Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway, Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully recount that
In the midst of the Pearl Harbor debate, [Yamamoto] had let it be known that he and the entire staff of Combined Fleet were prepared to resign if his views were not confirmed. [Admiral] Nagano, given the choice between acquiescing or confronting his wayward subordinate, had backed down. In so doing, he essentially let Yamamoto hijack the Navy’s strategic planning process and place it under the purview of Combined Fleet.
Both McClellan1 and MacArthur also thought themselves indispensable men. Lincoln and Truman let them know they weren't.
I subscribe to the theory that when the critical information fell into his hands, Admiral Nimitz might possibly have balked at killing Yamamoto for the same hypothetical reasons Lee would have balked at killing McClellan in 1862. Why eliminate your best asset?
At its heart, Admiral Yamamoto wants to be one of those old-fashioned, patriotic, big-screen blockbusters like The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and The Battle of Britain (1969) and Midway (1976). Those were movies that celebrated the "good war" and the "greatest generation" and starred every big-name actor under the sun.
(And to lend extra gravitas: John Wayne's Sergeant Stryker dies on the slopes of Mt. Suribachi in the last reel after the iconic flag raising. Charlton Heston's Captain Garth dies in the last reel ferrying a fighter from the sinking Yorktown. Alas, Yakusho's Yamamoto dies in the last reel amidst a "transfer of troops.")
Those earlier classics were made with the cooperation of the military branches, along with mothballed equipment pulled out of storage and plenty of repurposed newsreel footage. Admiral Yamamoto make good use of digital effects to create more convincing snapshots of Pearl Harbor, Midway, and the Solomons.
Unfortunately, live-action digital effects like this don't come cheap in Japan, where a "feature film" is "low budget" by Hollywood standards. So Admiral Yamamoto gives us maybe ten minutes of actual cinematic battles and two hours of actors pacing around soundstage sets.
It's on those sets that Teruyuki Kagawa steals every scene he's in as a fiery newspaper editor in the tradition of William Randolph Hearst: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Then does a 180 when the war is lost. (John Dower notes in Embracing Defeat that this was a not uncommon phenomenon in 1945.)
The more interesting (perhaps unacceptably iconoclastic) story would have shown us the war from the point of view of Kagawa's newspaperman, who goes from hero worship to cynic, and yet concludes (as Jimmy Stewart is informed in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance), "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
1. Both McClellan and Yamamoto had great press and the affection of their subordinates. Both were enamored of elaborate battlefield strategies that promised the deliver a crushing blow to the outfoxed enemy (Parshall and Tully explore this failing at length). Both couldn't accept that "no plan survives the first shot." As a result, neither knew what to do next besides retreat. Unlike McClellan, Imperial Japan didn't have more capable officers waiting in the wings. Yamamoto was the basket in which they had placed all their eggs.
Labels: embracing defeat, history, japan, japanese movie reviews, movies about japan, ww2
August 18, 2014
August 15
Emperor (with Matthew Fox and Tommy Lee Jones) is a needlessly boring and unjustifiably self-important melodrama that misses the great thriller lurking right under its nose.
Early in the morning of August 15, 1945, a group of young Imperial Japanese Army officers attempted to forcibly prevent the Emperor's surrender address from being broadcast that afternoon.
It was an eerie repeat of the "February 26 [1936] Incident" (and even the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877), when a similar coup d'état was launched with the goal of "purging the government and military leadership of their factional rivals and ideological opponents."
The "August 15 Incident" ran out of steam when die-hard War Minister General Korechika Anami refused to lend his moral or material support (unlike Saigo Takamori back in 1877, whose participation ensured a lot more people dying for no reason).
The best cinematic account of the events of August 15 is Japan's Longest Day.
Kihachi Okamoto's 1967 docudrama (based on the book by Kazutoshi Hando), with Toshiro Mifune as General Anami, is rather too hagiographic about Hirohito's role. But it faithfully portrays the suicidal spasm of fanaticism that ended the war for good.
What makes it all the more fascinating is that, almost immediately following a "war without mercy," the war did indeed end for good, as John Dower lays out in detail in his history of the Occupation, Embracing Defeat.
Popular culture perhaps makes an even stronger argument. A number of surprisingly decent Hollywood movies with marquee stars were set in—and even made in—Japan not long after the end of the war.
Go for Broke! (1951, with Van Johnson) is about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese-Americans. They fought in Europe. It depicts the Nisei soldiers in a quite positive light. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.
Then into the 1960s, we have:
You Only Live Twice canonized the silliest of modern stereotypes about Japan. Japanese audiences, though, were delighted with the whole thing. The same can be said about The Last Samurai, which is about as historically insightful as an old western B movie.
It seems a little Orientalism can be good for art. I'm sure Hollywood found the "exoticism" of Japan fascinating. But it was exactly this fascination that allowed them to take the non-exotic parts at face value, rather than filter them through their own biases.
It was an eerie repeat of the "February 26 [1936] Incident" (and even the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877), when a similar coup d'état was launched with the goal of "purging the government and military leadership of their factional rivals and ideological opponents."
The "August 15 Incident" ran out of steam when die-hard War Minister General Korechika Anami refused to lend his moral or material support (unlike Saigo Takamori back in 1877, whose participation ensured a lot more people dying for no reason).
The best cinematic account of the events of August 15 is Japan's Longest Day.
Kihachi Okamoto's 1967 docudrama (based on the book by Kazutoshi Hando), with Toshiro Mifune as General Anami, is rather too hagiographic about Hirohito's role. But it faithfully portrays the suicidal spasm of fanaticism that ended the war for good.
What makes it all the more fascinating is that, almost immediately following a "war without mercy," the war did indeed end for good, as John Dower lays out in detail in his history of the Occupation, Embracing Defeat.
Popular culture perhaps makes an even stronger argument. A number of surprisingly decent Hollywood movies with marquee stars were set in—and even made in—Japan not long after the end of the war.
- Tokyo Joe (1949, with Humphrey Bogart)
- House of Bamboo (1955, with Robert Ryan and Robert Stack)
- Teahouse of the August Moon (1956, with Marlon Brando, Glenn Ford, Eddie Albert, and Harry Morgan)
- Sayonara (1957, with Marlon Brando, Patricia Owens, James Garner, Miiko Taka, Red Buttons, and Ricardo Montalban!)
- Escapade in Japan (1957, with Jon Provost of Lassie fame)
Go for Broke! (1951, with Van Johnson) is about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese-Americans. They fought in Europe. It depicts the Nisei soldiers in a quite positive light. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.
Then into the 1960s, we have:
- Cry for Happy (1961, with Glenn Ford, Donald O'Connor, and Miiko Taka)
- My Geisha (1962, with Shirley MacLaine, Yves Montand, and Edward G. Robinson)
- Walk, Don't Run (1966, with Cary Grant, Samantha Eggar, Jim Hutton, and Miiko Taka)
- You Only Live Twice (1967, with Sean Connery as James Bond)
You Only Live Twice canonized the silliest of modern stereotypes about Japan. Japanese audiences, though, were delighted with the whole thing. The same can be said about The Last Samurai, which is about as historically insightful as an old western B movie.
It seems a little Orientalism can be good for art. I'm sure Hollywood found the "exoticism" of Japan fascinating. But it was exactly this fascination that allowed them to take the non-exotic parts at face value, rather than filter them through their own biases.
Labels: embracing defeat, history, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies about japan, showa period, ww2
February 11, 2013
"Emperor" trailer
Here's a movie I'm looking forward to, even though, based on what's presented in the trailer, it looks the "drama" was invented out of thin air.
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial wanted to be Nuremberg II, but ended up the Great Scapegoat Hunt. General MacArthur's goal from the start was to whitewash Emperor Hirohito's record. Bonner Fellers's job was to coordinate that effort. The results of the "investigation" were never in doubt.
As John Dower describes MacArthur's intentions in his masterful account of the Occupation, Embracing Defeat:
In the process, says Herbert Bix, MacArthur's extraordinary measures "had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war." It is this historical legacy that continues to haunt Japan's diplomatic relations with Korea and China over half a century later.
I'm convinced that at least some of this discord could have been ameliorated if Hirohito had abdicated at the end of the Occupation, and in more apologetic tones than his famous surrender address (in which he basically said: "Well, things didn't quite turn out as we expected.")
In any case, Hirohito's actions hardly constituted a "crime" (if anything, his incompetence helped lose the war). But the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was more about getting even, settling old scores, and moral preening. The wartime propaganda notwithstanding, Tojo was in no way analogous to Hitler.
To suggest an imperfect precedent—though Andersonville certainly presaged Bataan in many gristly ways—Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville Prison, was tried and executed after the Civil War, but not Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee, who had far bloodier hands.
If "war crime" is a redundancy, then "just war" is an oxymoron, as if there's a "right" or "moral" way to kill millions of people and destroy trillions in property and infrastructure. William Tecumseh Sherman was right: War is all hell. However necessary a war may be, it should never be mistaken for "justice."
In the end, the loser cannot escape paying the exacting cost of simply losing. Even MacArthur's staff, privy to the aerial bombing surveys, were not prepared for the magnitude of the wasteland that greeted them: 60 to 80 percent of every major city (except Kyoto) in Japan burned to the ground.
The winners don't fare so well either, which is why the difficult but just thing to do is resist the urge for show trials and payback. Fortunately, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was over by 1947 (the typical civilian felony trial takes longer). The Occupation would go on for another five years.
I consider the Meiji Restoration in the mid-19th century and the Occupation of Japan in the mid-20th not just two of the most fascinating periods in Japanese history, but human history. Both periods epitomize what it means for a people, in John Dower's words, "to start over in a ruined world."
So even the revisionist versions are worth a look. Besides, Tommy Lee Jones!
In any case, considering Hollywood's low standards of accuracy when it comes to Japanese history, it'd be practically impossible not to improve upon The Last Samurai, which scoots right past revisionism into outright fantasy.
Speaking of which, if you want to pick a person responsible for the Pacific War, Saigo Takamori is your man. He died in 1877, but the bushido ideals he personified (one thing accurately depicted in The Last Samurai) would quickly corrupt Japanese politics and start the dominoes tumbling down.
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial wanted to be Nuremberg II, but ended up the Great Scapegoat Hunt. General MacArthur's goal from the start was to whitewash Emperor Hirohito's record. Bonner Fellers's job was to coordinate that effort. The results of the "investigation" were never in doubt.
As John Dower describes MacArthur's intentions in his masterful account of the Occupation, Embracing Defeat:
This successful campaign to absolve the emperor of war responsibility knew no bounds. Emperor Hirohito was not merely presented as being innocent of any formal acts that might make him culpable to indictment as a war criminal. He was turned into an almost saintly figure who did not even bear moral responsibility for the war.
In the process, says Herbert Bix, MacArthur's extraordinary measures "had a lasting and profoundly distorting impact on Japanese understanding of the lost war." It is this historical legacy that continues to haunt Japan's diplomatic relations with Korea and China over half a century later.
I'm convinced that at least some of this discord could have been ameliorated if Hirohito had abdicated at the end of the Occupation, and in more apologetic tones than his famous surrender address (in which he basically said: "Well, things didn't quite turn out as we expected.")
In any case, Hirohito's actions hardly constituted a "crime" (if anything, his incompetence helped lose the war). But the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was more about getting even, settling old scores, and moral preening. The wartime propaganda notwithstanding, Tojo was in no way analogous to Hitler.
To suggest an imperfect precedent—though Andersonville certainly presaged Bataan in many gristly ways—Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville Prison, was tried and executed after the Civil War, but not Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee, who had far bloodier hands.
If "war crime" is a redundancy, then "just war" is an oxymoron, as if there's a "right" or "moral" way to kill millions of people and destroy trillions in property and infrastructure. William Tecumseh Sherman was right: War is all hell. However necessary a war may be, it should never be mistaken for "justice."
In the end, the loser cannot escape paying the exacting cost of simply losing. Even MacArthur's staff, privy to the aerial bombing surveys, were not prepared for the magnitude of the wasteland that greeted them: 60 to 80 percent of every major city (except Kyoto) in Japan burned to the ground.
The winners don't fare so well either, which is why the difficult but just thing to do is resist the urge for show trials and payback. Fortunately, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was over by 1947 (the typical civilian felony trial takes longer). The Occupation would go on for another five years.
I consider the Meiji Restoration in the mid-19th century and the Occupation of Japan in the mid-20th not just two of the most fascinating periods in Japanese history, but human history. Both periods epitomize what it means for a people, in John Dower's words, "to start over in a ruined world."
So even the revisionist versions are worth a look. Besides, Tommy Lee Jones!
In any case, considering Hollywood's low standards of accuracy when it comes to Japanese history, it'd be practically impossible not to improve upon The Last Samurai, which scoots right past revisionism into outright fantasy.
Speaking of which, if you want to pick a person responsible for the Pacific War, Saigo Takamori is your man. He died in 1877, but the bushido ideals he personified (one thing accurately depicted in The Last Samurai) would quickly corrupt Japanese politics and start the dominoes tumbling down.
Labels: embracing defeat, history, japan, movie reviews, movies about japan, ww2
October 22, 2012
Victory in Defeat
The title of a five-part biopic about Shigeru Yoshida, Japan's prime minister during the American Occupation. An ambassador to Italy and the United Kingdom during the 1930s, he was a product of the Meiji era and an old-school imperialist, and came to see the war as inimical to his "Japan-first" philosophy.
That got him thrown in jail, a fate that confirmed his anti-military bona fides which, combined with his fluency in English, made him an ideal counterpart to MacArthur. He would push back hard against MacArthur's sweeping reformist agenda and see his views vindicated during the infamous "Reverse Course" years.
The middle ground carved out between the two formed the political foundations of modern Japan.
NHK labels the series "historical fiction," and it starts on a firm footing. The following scene occurs in the first episode almost exactly as it's described here on The American Experience:
Unfortunately, the taut political drama is too often interrupted by attempts at more "Micheneresque" scenes of invented melodrama that range from the maudlin to the vaudevillian. Soap opera history is bad enough. Histrionic soap opera history is excruciating.
These types of productions too often feature "Americans" who are Caucasians first--sometimes not even speaking English as their first language--and actors second (or third or forth). The Japanese actors, likewise, are rarely as fluent in English as their characters are supposed to be.
This time around, that criticism doesn't apply to the leads. Ken Watanabe is Yoshida, down to the permanent grimace and the pince-nez. And having cast one heavyweight, NHK went the extra mile and got David Morse to play Douglas MacArthur.
But another problem is the English lines being translated by somebody with no ear for dialogue, and then spoken by "foreign" actors who are simply reciting what's written on the page. Sure, there's the occasional clunker here and there, but Morse and Watanabe have the acting chops to make their scenes come alive.
It also helps that Morse is six-foot-four, so he does physically tower over everybody as MacArthur would have.
But when Morse is on his own without Watanabe to play against, as in scenes that try to create a character arc revolving around MacArthur's presidential aspirations, the dialogue falls too flat for him to rescue. And conspiratorial subplots involving his staff come across as rejected West Wing scripts.
I'd like to see the series cut down to around four hours (from almost eight), eliminating most of the scenes that don't have Watanabe in them, and filling in the gaps with stylistic flourishes, such as montages of newspaper headlines with radio news voice-overs. Or interviews with historians, Ken Burns style.
The American Occupation is a one of the most fascinating episodes in modern history, a successful projection of American power that engaged everything from constitutional to agricultural reform.
And from which the entirely wrong lessons were learned. Just as the onset of WWII did not prove that "Keynesianism works" (sans a massive world war, at least), the occupations of Japan and Germany did not prove that "American democracy" can be spread by force of arms (sans a massive world war, at least).
For that reason alone, it deserves a lot more attention in the west. A good place to begin is John Dower's Embracing Defeat.
That got him thrown in jail, a fate that confirmed his anti-military bona fides which, combined with his fluency in English, made him an ideal counterpart to MacArthur. He would push back hard against MacArthur's sweeping reformist agenda and see his views vindicated during the infamous "Reverse Course" years.
The middle ground carved out between the two formed the political foundations of modern Japan.
NHK labels the series "historical fiction," and it starts on a firm footing. The following scene occurs in the first episode almost exactly as it's described here on The American Experience:
Yoshida later revealed to his daughter that the American paced theatrically back and forth while delivering one of his sekkyo, or sermons, prompting Yoshida to laugh, as he imagined being caged with a pacing lion. MacArthur asked what was so funny, Yoshida told him, and MacArthur glared for a moment before laughing along with his guest. The ice broken, the two established a good working relationship, and met many times in the coming years.
Unfortunately, the taut political drama is too often interrupted by attempts at more "Micheneresque" scenes of invented melodrama that range from the maudlin to the vaudevillian. Soap opera history is bad enough. Histrionic soap opera history is excruciating.
These types of productions too often feature "Americans" who are Caucasians first--sometimes not even speaking English as their first language--and actors second (or third or forth). The Japanese actors, likewise, are rarely as fluent in English as their characters are supposed to be.
This time around, that criticism doesn't apply to the leads. Ken Watanabe is Yoshida, down to the permanent grimace and the pince-nez. And having cast one heavyweight, NHK went the extra mile and got David Morse to play Douglas MacArthur.
But another problem is the English lines being translated by somebody with no ear for dialogue, and then spoken by "foreign" actors who are simply reciting what's written on the page. Sure, there's the occasional clunker here and there, but Morse and Watanabe have the acting chops to make their scenes come alive.
It also helps that Morse is six-foot-four, so he does physically tower over everybody as MacArthur would have.
But when Morse is on his own without Watanabe to play against, as in scenes that try to create a character arc revolving around MacArthur's presidential aspirations, the dialogue falls too flat for him to rescue. And conspiratorial subplots involving his staff come across as rejected West Wing scripts.
I'd like to see the series cut down to around four hours (from almost eight), eliminating most of the scenes that don't have Watanabe in them, and filling in the gaps with stylistic flourishes, such as montages of newspaper headlines with radio news voice-overs. Or interviews with historians, Ken Burns style.
The American Occupation is a one of the most fascinating episodes in modern history, a successful projection of American power that engaged everything from constitutional to agricultural reform.
And from which the entirely wrong lessons were learned. Just as the onset of WWII did not prove that "Keynesianism works" (sans a massive world war, at least), the occupations of Japan and Germany did not prove that "American democracy" can be spread by force of arms (sans a massive world war, at least).
For that reason alone, it deserves a lot more attention in the west. A good place to begin is John Dower's Embracing Defeat.
Labels: embracing defeat, history, japan, japanese culture, japanese tv, politics, ww2
October 17, 2011
Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
In short, Bix argues that the Showa Emperor, rather than being a passive pawn of the Tojo militarists, was deeply involved in every aspect of WWII. He was, to mix modern terms, an "activist" emperor who hung onto power as long as he could and deeply resented giving it up.
Perhaps Bix's most disturbing claim is that Hirohito himself was responsible—contrary to the propaganda fashioned both by MacArthur's GHQ and the Imperial staff and Hirohito himself—for delaying surrender until after Nagasaki, while he attempted to secure (largely through fruitless negotiations with the Soviet Union) the continuation of his reign in a post-war Japan.
Bix is not as compelling a writer as John Dower (Embracing Defeat). For one thing, Dower draws from a wider spectrum of secondary materials, such as mass-media publications, to flesh out his arguments. Bix's primary sources—diaries and interviews by members of the Imperial household, the parliament and the cabinet—bring us eyeball-to-eyeball with the day-to-day machinations that drove both the war and the peace, but it also results in dryer prose. It's all "inside politics."
And unlike with Germany, one finds not so much a banality of evil arising out of deliberate, malicious intent, but rather a banality of evil rising out of ego and incompetence and self-ingested propaganda and raw political power struggles. Japan's war-era cabinets tossed around prime ministers like juggling balls.
One apt criticism of Bix's approach is that his focus is so narrow that he never pulls back far enough to examine in any kind of depth the horrifying consequences of this Machiavellian, play-king gamesmanship.
But as does Dower, Bix concludes that the Tokyo trials ended up a farce to equal any Stalinist show trial. The real quest for the truth was corrupted by MacArthur's desire to use Hirohito for his own purposes, and, as Bix notes, Hirohito was only too happy to be used if it'd get him off the hook (and sell his subordinates down the river in the process).
To make matters worse, a dozen judges from Pacific Rim nations showed up at the trials, all with competing agendas.
The Nationalist Chinese, who had collected mountains of evidence of war crimes, checked their severest indictments in hopes of securing Japan's backing against the Communists. The OSS spirited away all the hard evidence of Japan's battlefield use of biological and chemical weapons. An iconoclastic judge from India was hardly upset that the British had spent four years getting their butts kicked by Asians.
Of course, MacArthur made sure that his battlefield enemies in the South Pacific were summarily tried and executed. Bix does credit MacArthur for being as aggravating to the Japanese as he was to the Joint Chiefs. The Japanese navy had anticipated a winner-take-all contest with Nimitz in the central Pacific, believing that the ultimate objective of naval warfare was "to win by hurling a large, powerful fleet into a single decisive battle."
After Pearl Harbor, every time the Japanese navy maneuvered itself into such an engagement, it lost, and badly. Equally unprepared to support a land war against MacArthur at the same time, it ended up throwing away a third of its resources in the process.
Perhaps Bix's most astute observations comes in the parallels he draws between MacArthur and Hirohito. They were diametrical opposites in terms of physical presence and personality, but both saw themselves at the center of all victory—the sole reason any great effort should and would succeed—while ascribing failure to dark forces and political conspiracies and placing the blame on their subordinates (and expecting them to do impossible things).
In the end, Hirohito's fascination with his own manufactured image as a divine emperor, combined with his incompetence (rarely questioned by his handlers), both led to the war and guaranteed that Japan would never win it. MacArthur's ego and presumptuousness (bolstered by a powerful cohort of ideological sympathizers in the State Department) meant that the emperor, and by extension the nation, would never take responsibility for it.
That is the Showa Emperor's true legacy, and one that unfortunately continues to this day.
Related posts
Kantai Kessen
The last shogun
The known unknowns
Labels: book reviews, embracing defeat, history, japan, showa period, ww2