The Unpredictability of the Past: Memories of the Asia-Pacific War in U.S.–East Asian Relations 9780822390527

Citation preview




the unpredictability of the past

American Encounters/Global Interactions A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh interpretive frameworks for scholarship on the history of the imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary concerns include the deployment and contestation of power, the construction and deconstruction of cultural and political borders, the fluid meanings of intercultural encounters, and the complex interplay between the global and the local. American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and collaboration between historians of U.S. international relations and area studies specialists. The series encourages scholarship based on multiarchival historical research. At the same time, it supports a recognition of the representational character of all stories about the past and promotes critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In the process, American Encounters strives to understand the context in which meanings related to nations, cultures, and political economy are continually produced, challenged, and reshaped.

The Unpredictability

memories of the asia-pacific war in u.s.–east asian relations

of the Past












edited by Marc Gallicchio

du k e u n i ver si t y press

du rha m & lo n d o n

2 007

∫ 2007 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acidfree paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Adobe Garamond with Goudy Old Style display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

to hosoya chihiro and akira iriye With admiration and appreciation for their many contributions to scholarly exchange across the Pacific

. contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction marc gallicchio

1

I Memory’s Many Forms 1. Remembering Pearl Harbor before September 11, 2001 emi ly s. rosenberg 15 I I Policymakers and the Uses of Historical Memory 2. The First Revisionists: Bonner Fellers, Herbert Hoover, and Japan’s Decision to Surrender h aruo iguchi 51 3. History and Memory in Postwar U.S.-Japanese Relations frank ninkovich 85 4. Cold War Diplomacy and Memories of the Pacific War: A Comparison of the American and Japanese Cases takuya sasaki 121 I I I Making Memory Concrete:

Museums, Monuments, and Memorials 5. Constructing a National Memory of War: War Museums in China, Japan, and the United States xiaohua ma 155 6. The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory w aldo heinrichs 201 7. War Memories across the Pacific: Japanese Visitors at the Arizona Memorial yujin yag uchi 234 I V Transpacific Memories 8. Memory and the Lost Found Relationship between Black Americans and Japan marc gal l icchio 255 9. Entangled Memories: China in American and Japanese Remembrances of World War II d aq ing yang 287 Concluding Remarks Contributors Index 331

329

marc gal l icch io

319

. acknowledgments

The work presented here, except for Yujin Yaguchi’s essay, developed over the course of several meetings sponsored by the International University of Japan. We are especially grateful for the guidance provided by Professors Hosoya Chihiro, Akira Iriye, and Ryo Oshiba in that endeavor. Most of the editorial work for this manuscript was completed while I was a visiting lecturer at the University of the Ryukyus, Okinawa, Japan. I wish to thank the Japan–United States Educational Commission and the J. William Fulbright Foundation for sponsoring my stay at Ryudai during the 2004–2005 academic year. The readers for Duke University Press provided us with helpful comments and suggestions for revisions. We did our best to address their concerns. I wish to thank Tom Zeiler for encouraging me to pursue this project. I also want to thank my Villanova University colleague Charlene Mires for her careful reading of my contributions to this volume and for the loan of a small library of books on the subject of memory. I am greatly indebted to Mrs. Geogiana Kilroy for using her computer expertise to whip this manuscript into shape. Finally, all of the contributors wish to thank Valerie Millholland, Miriam Angress, and Mark Mastromarino at Duke University Press and their copyeditor Judith Hoover for their invaluable assistance in turning this manuscript into a book. Earlier versions of these essays, except for Yujin Yaguchi’s, have been published in Japanese in Chihiro Hosoya, Akira Iriye, and Ryo Oshiba, eds., Kioku to shiteno Paru Haba (Pearl Harbor as Memory) (Kyoto: Minerva Shobo, 2004). marc gallicchio Villanova, Pennsylvania

Introduction

. marc gallicchio It appears that history, which used to play a supporting role, has become the leading player on the East Asian international political scene where the past is more unpredictable than the future.—yoichi funabashi, chief diplomatic correspondent, ‘‘East Asia’s History Creating Mistrust,’’ Asahi Shimbun, 4 January 2005

In April 2005, Chinese-Japanese relations were convulsed by a wave of protests in cities across China. Thousands of chanting demonstrators carried banners and posters calling on the Japanese government to apologize for its actions in China sixty years earlier, during the AsiaPacific War. ‘‘Face up to history,’’ read one. ‘‘The anti-Japanese war is not over yet,’’ declared another, more belligerent poster. On April 12, protestors gathered outside the Japanese embassy and the ambassador’s residence in Beijing. The following weekend, protestors in Shanghai overturned a Japanese car, attacked several Japanese restaurants, and hurled rocks and paint bombs at the Japanese consulate.∞ History had once again taken center stage in Asian politics. Chinese and Korean complaints about Japan’s historical amnesia had become a common feature of the political landscape during the previous two decades. This new wave of protests seemed more serious, however, as it had the potential to disrupt international relations throughout the region. Take the problem of North Korea, for example. Chinese and Japanese cooperation seemed essential to the success of the American-led multinational e√ort to rein in North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. But would China and Japan be able to agree on policies a√ecting the future of Asia if they could not agree on how to view the events of the past? Concerned by the escalating crisis, the American ambassador to Japan, Thomas Schie√er, encouraged both sides to resolve their di√erences. Publicly, the ambassador remained confident that the demonstrations would not impair e√orts to resume the so-called six-party talks on Korea, but he was no doubt relieved

when Japanese and Chinese leaders managed to restore a semblance of calm by the end of the month.≤ Although the demonstrations had run their course, most observers realized that nothing had been done to address the causes of the protests. As the placards carried by the demonstrators indicated, competing views of the Asia-Pacific War provoked this latest flurry of protests from one of Japan’s neighbors. In this case, the spark that ignited the demonstrations was a decision by the Japanese Ministry of Education to approve a nationalistic history textbook for use by middle school students. By 2005, textbook controversies had become a recurring issue in Asian politics. As the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war, however, 2005 appeared to hold greater significance for all of the parties involved. ‘‘We cannot avoid history,’’ Chinese President Hu Jintao told an international conference. ‘‘I want [ Japan] to deal with the problem properly. In particular, 2005 is a sensitive year that marks the 60th anniversary of anti-fascist victory.’’≥ Lacking the symbolic weight usually associated with a fiftieth anniversary, 2005 nevertheless drew special commemorative significance from the realization that many of the war’s survivors were passing from the scene.∂ That awareness gave rise to a growing concern on the part of many countries in Asia that, as the living memory of the war faded, Japan might find it easier to shed its past and, with it, the various political, constitutional, and moral constraints that had shaped Japanese foreign policy in the postwar era. Japan’s quest for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and growing support within Japan for revision of Article 9 of the constitution, with its famous renunciation of war as an instrument of the state, fed anxieties across the region. These concerns were sharpened by the belief that the Japanese government has never forthrightly taken responsibility for its actions during the war. As the historian James Orr has noted, in the past sixty years many Japanese scholars and commentators have denounced Japan’s aggression in Asia in the strongest terms. But interest groups and the Japanese government have blunted the impact of those condemnations by simultaneously identifying Japan as one of the victims of the war.∑ More recently, critics outside of Japan have complained that o≈cial apologies, when they have been made, have always seemed grudgingly o√ered and less than heartfelt, as if they were scripted by a committee in the Foreign Ministry.∏ 2

Introduction

As if to emphasize the significance of the sixtieth anniversary, the campaign of protests against Japan began on January 1, with a massive electronic assault that shut down the website of Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. The New Year’s Day cyberattack actually resumed a bombardment campaign that had begun shortly after Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro visited the shrine in September 2004. Like previous prime ministers, Koizumi insisted that his o≈cial visits to the shrine were intended to pay tribute to the several million souls memorialized there who sacrificed their lives for Japan during the Asia-Pacific War. Since 1978, however, the shrine has also memorialized fourteen convicted war criminals, including the wartime prime minister, General Tojo Hideki. Critics complain that in visiting the shrine in his o≈cial capacity, the prime minister is also honoring some of Japan’s most notorious war criminals. In February 2005, the cyberprotests over the visits to Yasukuni expanded into a broader campaign directed at various government facilities, including the website of the prime minister’s o≈cial residence. Japanese authorities traced the assault back to a Chinese website that posted a message boasting, ‘‘We have carried out an attack on xiao riben [little Japan].’’π The new year brought additional reminders of the political volatility of war-related memories. In early January, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun printed a story claiming that several right-wing politicians had pressured the nhk public television network into revising a documentary on the Imperial Army’s wartime system of sexual slavery. The documentary in question reported on an international civil tribunal—its detractors called it a ‘‘mock trial’’—held to call to account those who had forced an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 ‘‘comfort women’’ across Asia into military brothels. Although it lacked the authority to impose penalties, the tribunal nevertheless sought to bring before the bar of public opinion all those found to be responsible, including the late Emperor Hirohito. According to the Asahi report, executives at nhk deleted segments of the program that offended the complaining politicians’ nationalistic sensibilities, including any references to the emperor. As a political storm broke over allegations of censorship at nhk, observers were reminded that the politicians involved in the controversy also supported the campaign to revise history textbooks.∫ In contrast to the controversies that flared across Asia, Americans and Japanese solemnized the di√erent milestones in the war’s end in marc gallicchio

3

ways they deemed appropriate without giving o√ense to the other. Inasmuch as the memory of the Asia-Pacific War remained such a volatile issue in the region, this absence of sharp disagreement was telling. In 2005, the relative calm that characterized the sixtieth anniversary ceremonies extended to other aspects of the U.S.-Japan relationship. Economic disagreements persisted, but they lacked the intensity that had troubled relations a decade earlier. Even more significant, during 2005, the two governments strengthened their ties as allies in ‘‘the global war on terror’’ by concluding new military agreements. As part of those negotiations, Tokyo assented to the relocation of the key American base on Okinawa, despite the strenuous opposition of many of the island’s inhabitants.Ω In June, the emperor made the first royal visit to a battlefield outside of Japan when he attended ceremonies on Saipan. During his brief stop he paid homage to Americans and Koreans killed during the battle and to the Japanese who ended their lives in suicidal leaps from the island’s cli√s.∞≠ Meanwhile, Americans combed the Pacific battlefields courtesy of the various travel agencies that sponsored heritage tours. The tourists included veterans, most of whom were returning to the islands for the first time, family members, and the historically curious. On June 23, a ceremony was held at Camp Foster, part of the continual American military presence on the island since 1945, to commemorate the end of the battle of Okinawa, the last major battle of the war. The commanding o≈cer of the U.S. Marines said that both sides in the battle had fought with determination, skill, courage, and valor. He also spoke of the healing e√ects of time passing and of the bonds that had developed between Japan and the United States.∞∞ Boilerplate references to the skill and courage of one’s former enemies may be standard fare on such occasions, but in the case of Okinawa they created a picture of the enemy that few American veterans would have recognized. They also blithely ignored the story of the battle told at many of Okinawa’s memorials. There one reads of the Japanese military’s suicidal ferocity and its disregard for the lives of Okinawans. Indeed, for Okinawans, the last battle of the war is remembered as the first time they were sacrificed to the interests of the Japanese government. The second came with the peace treaty in 1952 which left the Americans in control of the island for another two decades. Americans commemorated the last battle of the war as the 4

Introduction

beginning of a peaceful postwar relationship. Okinawans remembered the war’s end di√erently, as a cataclysm that destroyed their island and ushered in an era of military occupation. Fueled by those memories, the opponents of new agreements promised to continue their campaign of political protest and nonviolent resistance against the American and Japanese governments’ plans for the island.∞≤ Once again, as in the April demonstrations in China, di√ering memories of the AsiaPacific War had the potential to disrupt regional politics. In light of the events surrounding the sixtieth anniversary of the war’s end, it seems safe to say that the so-called memory wars are a significant factor in current Asian a√airs. The essays that follow expand upon that point by evaluating the role that memories of the war have played in the development of transpacific relations since 1945. In exploring a range of topics, the authors are concerned with the many ways in which memories were created, preserved, and revised. In particular, they ask how contemporary events or concerns influenced and framed memories of the Asia-Pacific War. Although several of the authors make their own original contributions to the developing theories of collective memory, all proceed from several generally accepted ideas about what is variously called collective, social, or popular memory.∞≥ The first proposition is that memory is a reconstruction of the past, not a reproduction. This means that attempts to preserve the past inevitably alter it. Historians are familiar with this phenomenon. Simply by asking certain questions about the past, a historian is deciding to concentrate on one area and ignore another. If a historian does his or her job well, the picture that results is a faithful rendition of a part of the past, but not a perfect copy. Societies or groups do something similar in seeking to preserve the past. Decisions about what to preserve inevitably result in decisions, conscious or unconscious, to ignore or forget some other aspect of the past. Frequently, those decisions are culturally and politically sensitive, especially since what is remembered is crucial to a society’s identity and sense of itself. Those groups that have a stake in what is remembered debate, challenge, and contest which version of the past will be remembered. And those debates reflect present-day concerns. In this way, contemporary issues contribute to a framing of the past. To cite one example from this book, many observers believe that Beijing is exploiting the history of the Asia-Pacific War to whip up Chinese nationalism during a time of considerable social disruption at marc gallicchio

5

home. Another, complementary argument is that Beijing has been disturbed by signs of a growing nationalism in Japan. Thus the Chinese government has sought to remind the world of what it views as Japan’s lack of contrition about its past as a way of preventing developments in Japanese foreign policies that Beijing opposes. The extent to which the present shapes the past is a subject of debate among scholars. Some argue that there are limits to how far a group can go in transforming the past to suit the present. Others argue that in our consumer-oriented society the past becomes a marketable commodity that can become completely detached from its original context for commercial purposes. It is not possible to resolve this debate here. But for our purposes it su≈ces to note that most scholars agree that in creating collective memories, societies are not bound by the same rules of evidence and logic that discipline historians. The essays that follow are written by scholars who are primarily concerned with the history of international relations. They perceive those relations broadly to include a wide range of nongovernmental groups and organizations that contribute to the interactions of peoples across the Pacific. This volume builds on the work of other scholars who have explored the role of memory in various aspects of transpacific relations. These essays contribute to that scholarship in several ways. Together they employ a wide variety of sources to examine the interaction between contemporary events and memories of the AsiaPacific War. These include the archival records traditionally used by historians but also film, literature, museums, monuments, and mass media. Most of the authors explicitly discuss the relevant literature on collective memory that informed their analysis, and they do so in a way that is readily accessible to the nonspecialist. Another contribution of this volume is to show that in some instances shared memories have played a constructive role in international relations and even nurtured new relationships across the Pacific. Some of the previous studies dealing with memories of the AsiaPacific War have concentrated on a single issue, such as the atomic bomb. Others have sought to recover some of the forgotten experiences of the war by assaying memories from a range of perspectives and locations, giving special attention to the memories of often powerless groups.∞∂ In looking primarily at American, Chinese, and Japanese memories, we have sacrificed some of the benefits of that more expansive approach. Our hope is that by presenting essays that are more 6

Introduction

closely connected to each other we will provide the reader with a solid foundation for future inquiry. A brief discussion of nomenclature is in order. The varying perspectives that one can employ to view this subject is suggested by the terminology used to name it. The term ‘‘Asia-Pacific War’’ is a recent formulation. Japanese scholars seeking to emphasize Tokyo’s aggression in Asia sometimes use the term ‘‘Fifteen-Year War’’ to describe Japan’s wars in China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Nationalists have countered with a revival of the term ‘‘Greater East Asia War,’’ a label that recalls Japanese wartime propaganda. On the other hand, o≈cial histories refer to the ‘‘Pacific War,’’ a term first favored by American occupation authorities as an alternative to the politically charged ‘‘Greater East Asia War.’’ But ‘‘Pacific War’’ also has its critics. They perceive in the label an attempt to justify Japanese actions by implying that Japan’s real battle was against Western imperialism, in the form of the United States, and not China.∞∑ O≈cial media in the People’s Republic of China employ several labels, including ‘‘the Anti-Japanese War,’’ for which the dates 1937 to 1945 are often used, and ‘‘the War of Resistance.’’ In contrast, Americans tend to view the war against Japan as part of the larger struggle against fascism, most commonly known as World War II. When discussing the campaigns against Japan, American histories often focus on what the Americans called the Pacific Theater, thereby appearing to slight the war in China. As one can readily see, labels, even the most innocuous-sounding ones, reflect the user’s assumptions and perspective. With that cautionary note in mind, we have used the term ‘‘AsiaPacific War’’ in the title and introduction in an e√ort to be as inclusive as possible. It seemed counterproductive, however, to try to impose a single label on the di√erent conflicts described throughout the book. Emily Rosenberg’s ‘‘Remembering Pearl Harbor before September 11, 2001,’’ serves as an introduction to this volume by addressing a variety of ways that collective memories are formed. In particular, she explores the various international, political, and cultural contexts that contributed to the reemergence and renewed prominence of Pearl Harbor images in U.S. media during the decade before September 11. In doing so she introduces the reader to some of the foundational works on the role of social institutions and groups in the formation and perpetuation of collective memories and vividly demonstrates ‘‘the constant interaction between past and present in shaping the meanings of both.’’ marc gallicchio

7

The next three chapters analyze how o≈cials in the United States and Japan have used the lessons of the past to guide them in foreign policy decisions. Government o≈cials in China, Japan, and the United States take a keen interest in how the past is represented to their citizens. In some cases government o≈cials weigh in on debates over museums and memorials because they view them as important to the formation of national identity or as valuable instruments in foreign a√airs. But this sensitivity to the past may also be derived, at least in part, from policymakers’ own understanding of how important historical memory is in their own decision making. Haruo Iguchi’s ‘‘The First Revisionists: Bonner Fellers, Herbert Hoover, and Japan’s Decision to Surrender’’ explores a little-known chapter in the historical debate over Japan’s decision to surrender. Iguchi shows that almost as soon as Japan surrendered, a group of American conservatives led by former president Herbert Hoover and the less well-known Bonner Fellers tried to shape the American public’s understanding of the end of the war. Fearful of Soviet expansion and opposed to New Deal–style reforms in Japan, Hoover and Fellers were among the first Americans to argue that supporters of the policy of unconditional surrender had deliberately prolonged the war and that the atomic bombs were unnecessary. In publicizing their claims, Fellers and Hoover auditioned arguments that would become staples in the New Left historiography of the atomic bombs and the origins of the cold war. Aspects of the Hoover-Fellers critique continue to fuel public debate today, although the circumstances in which those arguments were first made and the conservative uses to which they were put are nearly forgotten. Frank Ninkovich begins his essay, ‘‘History and Memory in Postwar U.S.-Japanese Relations,’’ with a straightforward question: ‘‘What part has collective memory played in the recent history of U.S.-Japanese relations?’’ He replies by saying that short-term memories of the war mattered less to U.S. policymakers than accounts in contemporary media would suggest. He posits that for American policymakers historical understanding was a form of collective memory that outweighed the lived experience of the war. Instead of treating collective memory as an easily manipulated tool at the disposal of opportunistic policymakers, Ninkovich presents it, in the form of historical understanding, as a powerful influence shaping policy. In doing so, he argues that American policymakers’ understanding of history led them to situate 8

Introduction

U.S.-Japanese relations within a liberal vision of global modernization that provided the foundation for a constructive postwar policy toward Japan. Takuya Sasaki diverges from Ninkovich’s essay by asking how specific memories of the Pacific War shaped American and Japanese policies in Asia beyond the period of the occupation. In ‘‘Cold War Diplomacy and Memories of the Pacific War: A Comparison of the American and Japanese Cases,’’ Sasaki analyzes the memories of foreign policymakers in Washington and Tokyo as they responded to the rise of Soviet power and the cold war. Although Sasaki sees the war producing very di√erent legacies and lessons for policymakers in the United States and Japan, he suggests that those di√erences remained submerged until after the demise of the Soviet Union. Equally important, he discusses how the contemporary ‘‘history wars’’ in Asia may be one of the unexpected legacies of the influence of historical understanding on American policy. The communal remembering of an event is a highly selective act involving complex choices about what to preserve and how to record and symbolize it. Memory is made tangible through museums, monuments, and memorials that impart an aura of authority to the stories they tell. Frequently, the process of memorializing becomes political. But as the essays in Part III show, the creators of museums and memorials do not control how di√erent groups experience them. Xiaohua Ma’s ‘‘Constructing a National Memory of War: War Museums in China, Japan, and the United States’’ focuses on the establishment of a special kind of museum, the war museum, to analyze the politics of war memorializing in the context of international relations in the AsiaPacific region. Ma examines the internal and international reasons for China’s own memory boom and records the numerous modifications undertaken by governments and private groups to make museums provide lessons from the past that are consistent with the concerns of the moment. In doing so, she shows how museum construction became a source of friction in o≈cial Chinese-Japanese relations while simultaneously fostering transpacific communities of memory in China and the United States. Waldo Heinrichs’s ‘‘The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory’’ examines the public battle over the Smithsonian Institute’s attempt to commemorate the end of World War II and the surrender of Japan. Heinrichs draws on previously unused records of the Air Force Assomarc gallicchio

9

ciation, as well as museum scripts, commentaries, and a wide range of news and opinion pieces from the national and regional press, to provide a case study of an aroused collective memory in action, in this case the memory of World War II veterans. Yujin Yaguchi, in ‘‘War Memories across the Pacific: Japanese Visitors at the Arizona Memorial,’’ shows readers how Japanese tourists view one of the most recognized landmarks in America: the uss Arizona. Not surprisingly, Japanese visitors tend to understand the memorial and interpret its significance quite di√erently from the majority of U.S. visitors. But as Yaguchi’s fieldwork at the memorial shows, in one important respect the site still serves its purpose by crystallizing a sense of di√erence based on national identities and encouraging a historical understanding based on a nationalist framework. The last two chapters look at the role of racial and ethnic identity in the formation of transnational memories, a subject broached by Xiaohua Ma toward the end of her essay. In ‘‘Memory and the Lost Found Relationship between Black Americans and Japan,’’ I discuss how collective memory functioned in the African American encounter with Japan before World War II. I note the recent scholarly interest in that relationship and ask how the story was ‘‘lost’’ in the first place. The essay begins by explaining the importance of collective memory in shaping black American perceptions of Japan’s historic role as a challenger to white supremacy. I then discuss how that memory was gradually displaced or rescripted into a new narrative that sought to commemorate African Americans’ role in World War II. In the last chapter, ‘‘Entangled Memories: China in American and Japanese Remembrances of World War II,’’ Daqing Yang notes that for Americans and most Japanese, collective memories about the AsiaPacific War are bracketed by Pearl Harbor at one end and Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the other, to the almost total neglect of Japan’s long war in China. That is beginning to change, owing in part to the e√orts of individuals and groups who seek to correct what they see as a tragic omission from collective remembrances of the war. In recounting these e√orts, Yang asks how the growing awareness of the Chinese-Japanese war in American and Japanese memories of World War II complicates those older memories and a√ects current international relations. To further understand how memory functions in a transpacific perspective, Yang examines the role of ethnic and interest groups in Japan,

10

Introduction

China, and the United States in reshaping the memories of what some historians have begun to call Asia’s Great War. This collection of essays ends by gathering up some of the related threads woven through the di√erent chapters. ‘‘Concluding Remarks’’ makes some suggestions for further study and o√ers some additional observations about the role of memory in transpacific relations. We hope that readers will find the following essays helpful in thinking about the many ways that societies create collective memories and that they will gain a better appreciation for the variety of forms that such memories can take. All of the authors have sought to show how memories of the Asia-Pacific War shaped and continue to influence transpacific relations. But we have also sought to demonstrate the interplay between contemporary events and concerns and the formation of those memories. The dynamism inherent in that process is what makes the future of the past unpredictable.

Notes 1 ‘‘Huge Anti-Japanese Protests,’’ Yomiuri Shimbun, 17 April 2005, 1; ‘‘Editorial: Crisis in China Ties,’’ asahi.com, 19 April 2005, at www.asahi .com/English/Herald-asahi/TKY 200504190095.html. 2 ‘‘Schie√er Concerned,’’ Japan Times, 21 April 2005. 3 Funabashi Yoichi, ‘‘East Asia’s History Creating Mistrust.’’ Asahi Shimbun, 4 January 2005. 4 Laura Hein, ‘‘Remembrance of World War II and the Postwar in the United States and Japan,’’ Japan Focus, ZNet/Japan, 30 May 2005, at www .zmag.org/content/print — article.cfm?itemID=7977§ionID=17. 5 James J. Orr, The Victim As Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 173–176. 6 Alexis Dudden, ‘‘The End of Apology,’’ Japan Focus, ZNet/Japan, 16 February 2005, at www.zmag.org/content/print — article.cfm?itemID=725 7§ionID=17; David McNeill and Mark Selden, ‘‘Why Is Japan Suddenly Indulging in Rosy Reinterpretations of the Past?,’’ History News Network, News Abroad, 18 April 2005, at hnn.us/articles/11354.html. 7 ‘‘Internet Intruders,’’ Asahi Shimbun, 14 April, 2005, 1; ‘‘Yasukuni Shrine, Nationalism and Japan’s International Relations,’’ Japan Focus, ZNet/Japan, 6 June 2005, at www.zmag.org/content/print — article.cfm?

marc gallicchio

11

itemID=8016§ionID=17; Roger B. Jeans, ‘‘Victims or Victimizers? Museums, Textbooks, and the War Debate in Contemporary Japan,’’ Journal of Military History 69 ( January 2005): 151–157. 8 Gavan McCormack, ‘‘War and Japan’s Memory Wars: The Media and the Globalization of Consciousness,’’ Japan Focus, ZNet/Japan, 29 January 2005, at www.zmag.org/content/print — article.cfm?itemid=7140§ion id=17. 9 Gavan McCormack, ‘‘Okinawa and Revamped U.S.-Japan Alliance,’’ Japan Focus, ZNet/Japan, 16 November 2005, at www.zmag.org/content/ print — article.cfm?itemID=9132§ionID=17. 10 ‘‘Emperor Honors Saipan War Dead,’’ Japan Times, 29 June 2005, 1. 11 ‘‘Military Pays Tribute to All Battle of Okinawa Victims,’’ Japan Update, 23 June 2005. 12 ‘‘The Battle of Okinawa,’’ Asahi Shimbun, 24 June 2005; McCormack, ‘‘Okinawa and Revamped U.S-Japan Alliance.’’ For the views of an activist and opponent of the plan who links memories of the war to contemporary protests, see Miyagi Yasuhiro, ‘‘Rising Magma,’’ Japan Focus, ZNet/Japan, 9 December 2005, at www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm ?SectionID=17&ItemID=9294. 13 The starting point for most scholars is Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For helpful introductions to the subject, see David Thelen, ‘‘Memory and American History,’’ Journal of American History 75 (March 1989): 1117– 1129; Barry Schwartz, ‘‘Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington,’’ American Sociological Review 56 (April 1991): 221–236; and John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Other relevant works are cited throughout the individual chapters. 14 Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Philip West, Steven I. Levine, and Jackie Hiltz, eds., America’s Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory (Armonk, N.Y.: East Gate Books, 1998); and T. Fujitani, Geo√rey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 15 See Daqing Yang’s essay in this volume and Orr, Victim As Hero, 31.

12

Introduction

Remembering Pearl Harbor before September 11, 2001

. emily s. rosenberg

‘‘infamy!’’ headlined news stories across the country on September 11 and 12, 2001. Live on television and in repetitive images, Americans witnessed planes slamming into the World Trade Center and smoke billowing from the Pentagon. The surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor became the first frame of reference for the attack. No one needed to command the widespread use of Pearl Harbor imagery. Commentators around the country spontaneously invoked it, and many Americans seemed actually to ‘‘experience’’ the attacks through the collective memory of Pearl Harbor.∞ ‘‘Infamy’’ provided a sign that was culturally legible to almost everyone: it invoked a familiar narrative about a sleeping nation, a treacherous attack, immense homeland casualties, the need to pull together to victory, and eventual triumph. Why do people turn to the past for frameworks to understand their present? How do traditions embedded in a nation’s collective memories interact with current experience to shape narratives of both? David Lowenthal has suggested that people turn to the past for ‘‘rea≈rmation of belief and action; the guidance of example; and the awareness of personal and communal identity.’’≤ In the midst of the completely unexpected, it may seem reassuring to discern some familiar pattern, to domesticate the strangeness of the present by invoking the familiarity of a past shared in memory. The Pearl Harbor story itself had taken shape within the conventions of earlier frontier legends of challenge and triumph. Now, Pearl Harbor could be to September 11 what Custer’s Last Stand and the Alamo had been to Pearl Harbor: widely recognized, iconic tales of threat and harm that worked to rally patriotism, marshal manly virtues, and promise eventual and righteous triumph to a nervous nation. There is, however, more to an analysis of the pervasiveness of Pearl Harbor imagery in the aftermath of September 11. This essay goes back more than a decade, to 1991, to explore the ways Pearl Harbor has

1

gained increasing visibility as an icon in American culture. Although diverse narratives about Pearl Harbor had circulated among Americans since 1941, by the summer of 2001, American culture had become saturated as never before with books, videos, films, and recollections of the 1941 attack. Sociologists and historians have tried to understand the processes by which some things in the past become forgotten and others become vivid ‘‘secondary memories’’ for new generations who did not experience them. Building upon the insights of Maurice Halbwachs, the first sociologist to theorize the role of social institutions and groups in the formation and perpetuation of collective memories, much work on historical memory (including this essay) emphasizes the social construction of memory, the multiplicity and mutability of memory traditions, and the roles of governments, private institutions, pressure groups, and media in perpetuating narratives (often conflicting and contested ones) about the past.≥ This essay examines the various international, political, and cultural contexts that contributed to the reemergence and renewed prominence of Pearl Harbor images in U.S. media during the decade before September 11. Specifically, it examines the circulation of Pearl Harbor images in four contexts: the role of bilateral relations between the United States and Japan during the 1990s; the growing ‘‘memory boom’’ that honored the aged veterans of World War II as ‘‘the greatest generation’’; the politics of the ‘‘history wars,’’ including the often partisan crusade to restore rank, posthumously, to the commanders in charge at the Pearl Harbor base in 1941; and the extravagant hype associated with the blockbuster film Pearl Harbor during the spring and summer of 2001.

Bilateral Relations: Commemorating Pearl Harbor and the Apology Controversies On the eve of the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1991, many irritants roiled the relationship between the United States and Japan. The strength of the yen and Japan’s strong trade balance during most of 1991 fed charges, leveled in many American books and articles, of an ‘‘economic Pearl Harbor.’’ Japanese ownership of the headquarters hotel at which the Pearl Har16

Remembering Pearl Harbor

bor veterans would stay during the commemorative ceremony highlighted the perceived threat. On the other side, many in Japan angrily charged Americans with cultural imperialism and with scapegoating Japan to evade dealing with America’s own economic weaknesses. The recent Persian Gulf War accentuated such disputes, as the United States urged Japan to play a more significant role in bankrolling this and other post–cold war ‘‘peacekeeping’’ e√orts. Moreover, the planning for the fiftieth anniversary revealed di√erent understandings of the history of World War II: dominant views on each side still saw the other as the principal aggressor leading up to the attack of 1941. Although most Americans assumed that Pearl Harbor commemorated clear aggression on the part of Japan, many Japanese leaders propounded the view that the attack had been a necessary strategic measure in a defensive war that had been pushed upon Japan.∂ In this contentious atmosphere, several proposals to use the 1991 ceremonies as a symbol of reconciliation proved unsuccessful. The superintendent of the Arizona Memorial had once broached such an idea, but the acting director of the National Park Service deemed the suggestion ‘‘inappropriate, possibly o√ensive.’’∑ The president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association (phsa) in Atlanta, Jack Westerman, also advanced a plan for reconciliation. With the support of his membership, he proposed a reunion in which old enemies could become friends. Some Japanese respondents established a Japan Friends of Pearl Harbor Association to become the counterpart group for a projected reunion to take place in October 1991. When the president of the national phsa, Gerald A. Glaubitz, heard of the plan, however, he denounced the idea, stating that ‘‘99.99%’’ of the membership would not approve. ‘‘We did not invite the Japanese 50 years ago, and we don’t want them now,’’ said Glaubitz. The reunion was canceled.∏ Attempting to steer clear of any criticism from veterans groups, President George H. W. Bush announced definitively that the commemoration would be a ‘‘national’’ ceremony, for Americans only. When Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi suggested inviting Japan if its government apologized for Pearl Harbor, o≈cials in Tokyo suggested that the United States should apologize for its atomic bombing. This suggestion, along with other irritants, so infuriated President Bush that he canceled a trip to Asia and declared that ‘‘this president’’ would not issue an apology. This apology controversy boiled right up to the days of the commemorative ceremonies.π emily s. rosenberg

17

In light of Americans’ use of Pearl Harbor metaphors in antiJapanese rhetoric during the economic disputes of the late 1980s and early 1990s, many people in Japan apparently feared that the fiftieth anniversary of the attack would further feed American hostility. ‘‘Hatred toward Japan Is about to Explode!’’ headlined one of the many Japanese articles that predicted an outpouring of hostile sentiment. But despite the bilateral tensions, the commemoration took a somewhat di√erent turn. A Japanese television crew that came to the United States to document surging Japan bashing found so little that it changed the focus of its report. In some places, images of reconciliation prevailed. The American Airpower Heritage Museum in Midland, Texas, held a seminar during the week of the anniversary, inviting both U.S. and Japanese veterans of the conflict. People magazine did a spread featuring photos and interviews of individuals from both groups, labeling them ‘‘survivors from both sides’’ and alternating the coverage to emphasize the commonalities in personal experiences rather than the national polarity of the conflict.∫ In the end, the books, articles, tv programs, and speeches during the commemorative year of 1991 drew lessons to suit every persuasion. Barry Hillenbrand in Time used the commemoration to underscore current U.S.-Japanese tensions over economics, textbooks, and strategic interest. McGeorge Bundy in Newsweek, by contrast, lauded the long American-Japanese alliance, arguing that ‘‘in the end, the attack was good for both’’ because it led to the ‘‘victory that made lasting peace possible.’’ Ralph Kinney Bennet in Reader’s Digest used Pearl Harbor to advance a triumphalist version of the cold war: Pearl Harbor had taught the lesson of vigilance that, in turn, defeated the Soviet Union. Alexander Cockburn in The Nation suggested that memories of Pearl Harbor should not ignore U.S. diplomatic and trade ‘‘o√ensives’’ against Japan in the 1930s or eclipse the memory of U.S. ‘‘guilt’’ for dropping atomic bombs or demand Japanese apologies when the United States had not apologized to Vietnam for its su√ering in the 1960s. Histories advancing the ‘‘backdoor-to-war’’ thesis (which blamed President Roosevelt for pushing Japan into striking first in order to justify the United States joining the war to help Britain in Europe) vied with pro-Roosevelt interpretations (which stressed poor coordination of intelligence and laxity on the part of the U.S. base commanders in Hawaii). Americans were exhorted to remember Pearl Harbor, but that memory was invoked to substantiate many di√erent narratives and history lessons.Ω 18

Remembering Pearl Harbor

The commemoration ceremonies both at Pearl Harbor and around the country, while not free of anti-Japanese sentiment, generally accentuated themes that hardly related to foreign policy at all: patriotism, unity, and the singular virtues of the now elderly World War II generation. Reflection and personal memory, rather than vengeance and acrimonious relations with Japan, set the dominant tone.∞≠ On Saturday, December 7, President Bush, himself a World War II navy pilot who had been shot down by the Japanese, delivered two speeches in Hawaii. At the Punchbowl, a memorial to war dead, he apologized for internment of Japanese Americans. Later, he presented a moving speech in front of Pearl Harbor survivors at the Arizona Memorial, prefaced by airplanes flying the ‘‘missing man’’ formation. Although Japan’s parliament had failed to agree on any resolution of apology (the foreign minister, instead, expressed ‘‘deep remorse’’), the president did not bring up the recent apology controversy. He commented that he had ‘‘no rancor in my heart’’ toward the Japanese, and then hardly mentioned Japan at all. In the formal speech, he honored the ‘‘heroes of the harbor’’ who instinctively rushed to their posts and ‘‘did not panic.’’ Choking up on the second to last paragraph as he remarked that the harbor’s water had carried the ‘‘finest sons any nation could ever have’’ to a ‘‘better world,’’ he moved the audience to tears. It was a speech of shared memories, celebrating the achievements and sacrifices of the World War II generation. For the individuals in the audience and for the nation as a whole, the message looked inward, a testament to an American generation that now stood for old-fashioned virtues—a bulwark against the changing present.∞∞ After 1991, there were renewed attempts at reunion and reconciliation on the part of U.S. and Japanese veterans. Jack Westerman had canceled his plans for a joint ceremony in 1991, but interest on both sides of the Pacific prompted him to reschedule it. An October 1992 meeting at Pearl Harbor included a few Japanese veterans and over a dozen Pearl Harbor survivors from the mainland. Arriving at the Arizona Memorial by special ferry, the group joined hands as Westerman expressed the hope that their ‘‘act of friendship’’ would ‘‘ensure a spirit of peace for the world’’ and as Japanese former pilot Abe Zenji expressed ‘‘heartfelt condolences.’’ Attendance at such reunions would build throughout the decade.∞≤ After the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, discourses of distrust and those of reconciliation continued to circulate simultaneously in emily s. rosenberg

19

American culture. During the 1990s, a large body of scholarship on the Holocaust against the Jews raised issues related to trauma, collective memory, history writing, and meaning. Scholars and others adapted such themes in examining the horrors of the Pacific War. Wellpublicized investigations and compensation to Jewish victims and their families focused further attention on wartime victimization. Which groups of war victims, however, should have priority in the Pacific: Japanese victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Asian and pow victims of Japan?∞≥ With the World War II generation dying, Chinese and Koreans stepped up their demands for greater recognition for their su√ering. A growing movement throughout Asia and among some Americans of Asian ancestry demanded that the Japanese government make a full disclosure of its World War II crimes, provide reparations to victims, and place this history in its o≈cial textbooks. Issues of respective victimization became highlighted during the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing, in August 1995: those Americans emphasizing reconciliation asked their country to remember the horrors of the atomic attack; those demanding Japanese apologies cautioned Americans to ‘‘remember Pearl Harbor.’’ Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor became symbols of larger historical narratives that placed the history of the Pacific War within frameworks either of bilateral reconciliation or of continued distrust.∞∂ In February 2001 the uss Greenville, a nuclear submarine, accidentally rammed and sank a Japanese fishing boat, the Ehime Maru, near Pearl Harbor. Nine people, some students, were lost at sea, and many in Japan demanded an o≈cial apology and compensation. For many Americans, the Pearl Harbor location (actually, the sinking was o√ Diamond Head) and Japan’s response again highlighted the issue of apology. Although the U.S. government agreed to raise the vessel and pay compensation and the submarine commander Scott Waddle offered numerous personal apologies, many Americans bristled at Japanese suggestions that an o≈cial apology should be forthcoming. Japan, some pointed out, had never o≈cially apologized for the 1941 attack. The Greenville dispute, again, showed how easily any irritant between the United States and Japan could quickly devolve into an apology controversy and revival of Pearl Harbor memories.∞∑ Public issues related to both discord and reconciliation in relations between the United States and Japan in the 1990s helped to keep Pearl Harbor in the spotlight as an icon of the bilateral relationship. It is 20

Remembering Pearl Harbor

perhaps surprising, however, how small a role representation of Japan played in most of the renewed attention and media circulation related to Pearl Harbor. The revival of Pearl Harbor as a site of historical memory in American culture, as the commemorative events of 1991 suggested, said much more about issues internal to America than about bilateral ties. Relations with Japan, while important, had less cultural visibility than several other concerns that boosted the iconic visibility of Pearl Harbor at the close of the twentieth century.

The Memory Boom and the Greatest Generation In most American representations, the symbolism of Pearl Harbor became connected to nostalgia for the past and for a passing generation. From the 1970s on, a memory boom had saturated American life, proliferating and blurring forms of history and commemoration.∞∏ Set amid this fascination with the past, the fifty-year anniversaries that began in 1991 riveted media attention on the meanings and experiences of World War II. After years of reticence, an older generation grew anxious to tell its wartime stories—to get them into the nation’s memory and history—before passing from the scene. Their children, baby boomers of the Vietnam generation, seemed eager to honor and commemorate their parents and to rediscover a more glorious, less ambiguous time. The much remarked generation gap that had divided World War II parents from their Vietnam-era children rendered the sudden outpouring of memory and reconciliation more poignant. Even before the commemorative events of 1991, Studs Terkel’s ‘‘The Good War’’ (1984), a collection of remembrances about World War II gathered from interviewing a wide variety of Americans, won a Pulitzer Prize and shot to the top of the bestseller list. ‘‘The Good War,’’ Terkel wrote, was ‘‘a memory book, rather than one of hard fact,’’ designed to counter the ‘‘disturbingly profound dis-remembrance of World War Two.’’∞π It presented highly readable stories, carefully selected by a master at listening and editing. The theme of the book subtly drew a contrast with the Vietnam War by opening with a verse of Tom Paxton’s bitterly anti–Vietnam War song ‘‘What Did You Learn in School Today?’’ (‘‘I learned that war is not so bad; I learned about the great ones we have had; we fought in Germany and in France; and I am someday to get my chance.’’) By invoking Paxton and emily s. rosenberg

21

the war that had divided Americans and ravaged Indochina, Terkel reminded readers that America’s military engagements had not always been so divisive. He took the stories of the great and the unimportant, of men and women, of Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, and reenlisted them within an overall framework of collective endeavor. He did put the phrase ‘‘the good war’’ in quotation marks, however, an act that subverted the term even while advancing it. Terkel’s widely praised book dovetailed with the rising interest in oral history and, perhaps, helped generate some of the enthusiasm that accompanied the fiftieth anniversary commemorations of Pearl Harbor in 1991. The political disagreements and cultural wars related to Vietnam had long eclipsed the memory of World War II. But, suddenly, ‘‘the good war’’ seemed to be rediscovered, and the new fascination with oral history fed an urgency about preserving the fading memories of those days of hazard and glory. Radio broadcasts featured interviews with veterans; television documentaries took new interest in ordinary people who had lived through the war years; magazines ran features; museums and universities developed oral history collections; and more books of World War II recollections rolled o√ the presses.∞∫ Americans seemed to embrace the interview format as a kind of grassroots history that avoided the complicated questions of grand politics and, instead, highlighted specific detail, personal feelings, and the element of chance. In oral histories of the Pearl Harbor attack, the remembrances of first reactions, the descriptions of explosion and death, the presentations of panic and response could rivet audience attention. Individual courage, hardship, and heroism usually stood out as the most important themes. Borrowing from the framework popularized by Terkel and buoyed by this memory boom, news anchorman Tom Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation, became a cultural phenomenon that overshadowed even Terkel’s bestseller. The Greatest Generation presents a collection of stories from some fifty Americans—men and women, ordinary and now famous—who fought in World War II. Brokaw was not interested in the international politics of the war; he took as a given that it was a just cause fought against ‘‘maniacs’’ and said no more about larger international causes or consequences.∞Ω His focus instead was on the individuals involved: their memories of the way they experienced the war, their everyday qualities of courage and achievement. Though certainly patriotic in its overall message, the book is primarily 22

Remembering Pearl Harbor

philiopietistic, a testimonial in praise of our fathers. Suddenly, Brokaw and the idea of the greatest generation seemed to be everywhere. Brokaw himself expressed surprise at the outpouring of interest and suggested that he had tapped some very great need in American culture: the need to commemorate the deeds of the past generation. World War II veterans themselves began to seek greater recognition. Throughout the country veterans or veterans groups, spearheaded by the phsa, pressed local legislatures and city councils for commemorative resolutions, and many were passed.≤≠ In 1996, the fifty-fifth anniversary of the attack, President Bill Clinton proclaimed December 7 National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, but some veterans lobbied for more. In March 1999, veterans from Bu√alo, New York, backed Republican Representative Jack Quinn in sponsoring legislation that would designate December 7 a federal holiday equal to Veterans Day. A member of the Veterans A√airs Committee in the House, Quinn proclaimed that Pearl Harbor deserved its special day because ‘‘if the United States hadn’t responded to events at Pearl Harbor, there wouldn’t be any other holidays for us to talk about.’’ The idea found little support. Even many veterans argued that the sacrifices made at d-day or the Battle of the Bulge made such an enduring emphasis on Pearl Harbor seem ill-conceived.≤∞ Despite the failure to designate a federal vacation day for December 7, the commemorative mood still spread. The Navy withdrew its long objection to naming a ship the Pearl Harbor ; Colorado’s Interstate 70 and an extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike were designated a Pearl Harbor Memorial Highway.≤≤ The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s National Museum of the Pacific War at the Admiral Nimitz Historical Center in Fredericksburg, the only museum dedicated entirely to the Pacific Theater of the war, opened a new twenty-three-thousandsquare-foot gallery named after George H. W. Bush and containing a thousand artifacts from the war, many related to Pearl Harbor.≤≥ In many cases, it was less the veterans themselves than their children who propelled the World War II memory boom. Generational politics —first rebellion and then reconciliation—set agendas for collective memory. The phenomenon of a generational shift often profoundly a√ects ways in which groups of people solidify common memories and create identities; honoring the sacrifices of World War II seemed a balm for the divisions that had come with Vietnam. The Vietnam generation, now middle-aged, seemed to embrace the previous generation, emily s. rosenberg

23

against which it had once rebelled. Aged fathers, perhaps once ignored or taken for granted, could be now recognized; remembrance of the unifying good war could sublimate the divisions of the Vietnam era.≤∂

The Kimmel Controversy, the History Wars, and the Republican Revival The persistent reiteration of World War II themes in the memory boom culture of the late 1990s transferred the memories of the war to a new generation that had not personally lived through it. The war, as secondary memory, became fresh again, and these new rememberings returned to prominence the old debates over how to understand the meaning of the war’s central symbol, Pearl Harbor. Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, the commanders at Pearl Harbor, had been relieved of their commands immediately following the attack and were retired at the lower (two star) ranks of rear admiral and major general. Short died in 1949, and Kimmel died in 1968. They, and many others, felt that Roosevelt administration o≈cials had unfairly scapegoated them to divert blame from themselves. In 1987 Admiral Kimmel’s sons, Edward and Thomas, both Navy veterans, petitioned Secretary of the Navy James H. Webb Sr. to restore their father’s full rank posthumously. The Pacific War historian Ronald H. Spector, director of naval history in the Navy Department, did not support the petition. Spector cited his approval of Gordon Prange’s influential study, which argued that Kimmel was aware that a Japanese attack might likely come from the north and that consequently he should have been more prepared and proactive. The petition was denied. Edward Kimmel, nonetheless, found a more than sympathetic hearing among some Navy personnel, many of whom themselves had spent years denouncing the unfair treatment of Admiral Kimmel and General Short. (General Short’s wife and son had died, so the discussions of injustice tended to emphasize Kimmel, although Short’s grandson, Walter Short, did also join the e√ort.) Thirty-six retired flag-rank o≈cers, mostly four-star admirals, wrote President George H. W. Bush urging him to use his own authority to direct ‘‘remedial action’’ on Kimmel’s behalf.≤∑ The Kimmel family and its supporters claimed that o≈cials in 24

Remembering Pearl Harbor

Washington rather than those at Pearl Harbor were to blame for the lack of preparedness. Washington, they contended, received ample information that an attack would come on Pearl Harbor, yet the warnings sent to the commanders were so vague that the commanders continued to believe the target would be elsewhere. The Kimmels themselves did not exactly charge a backdoor-to-war conspiracy, but by placing the blame in Washington, they did help refresh and recirculate a variety of anti-FDR, backdoor narratives. Although not taken very seriously in academic circles, where books by Roberta Wohlstetter and Gordon Prange remained authoritative, the backdoor, blame-the-Roosevelt-administration perspective remained very much alive in American culture. With another popular Democrat, Bill Clinton, elected to the White House in 1992, these backdoor views circulated ever more prominently. A rush of new books defending Kimmel and Short dusted o√ old arguments about executive branch duplicity and also advanced some new twists. Some argued the full-blown backdoor conspiracy theory; others provided a brief for Kimmel and Short that blamed Washington’s miscalculations and strategic shortsightedness but fell short of charging conspiracy or intentionality. James Rusbridger and Eric Nave’s Betrayal at Pearl Harbor (1991), among the most extreme, charged that intercepted naval signals intelligence o√ered substantial forewarning of Pearl Harbor separately to both London and Washington and that several related conspiracies suppressed this information.≤∏ The book broadened the backdoor conspiracy charges, blaming not just Roosevelt but also his alliance with Churchill, who maneuvered to bring the United States into the war. John Costello’s Days of Infamy (1994) similarly argued that Kimmel and Short had been scapegoats and blamed FDR and Churchill, but charged them with ‘‘miscalculation’’ rather than outright conspiracy.≤π In 1994 the historian Michael Gannon published ‘‘Reopen the Kimmel Case’’ in the Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. It refuted Prange and Spector’s contention that Kimmel had been warned of an attack from the north and denied that, given his shortage of planes, he could possibly have conducted e√ective air reconnaissance to the north.≤∫ In 1995 retired U.S. Navy Captain Edward L. Beach published an emotional backdoor, pro-Kimmel brief called Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor.≤Ω Beach, a highly decorated o≈cer, had been a naval aide to President Dwight Eisenhower. emily s. rosenberg

25

The reignited controversy over assigning blame for Pearl Harbor coincided with a larger historical controversy that gained an even higher public profile. In 1993 a dispute broke out over a proposed Smithsonian Museum exhibit focused on the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. This increasingly politicized conflict, which eventually reached the halls of Congress, pitted the historians who had prepared an interpretive script for the exhibit against military-associated groups which felt the script dishonored America’s fighting men. The curators and historical advisers who, in 1993, wrote the first script for the interpretive panels that would accompany the Enola Gay display emphasized a narrative about atomic destruction and sought to raise some of the dilemmas involved in nuclear strategy. In this view, the Pacific War, with its escalating racial hatreds, became contextual background to the American decision to use the bomb, an action that inaugurated the age of atomic threats and turned Japanese victims of the bombing into symbols of the age’s new perils. The Enola Gay, in short, became the focus for a history centering on the advent of nuclear weapons. The Air Force Association and other military-associated groups, however, had expected the Enola Gay to highlight a narrative addressing Japanese aggression and atrocity and providing a commemorative tone for the sacrifices, and ultimate triumph, of American veterans. They charged that the script marginalized Japanese brutality and conquest while suggesting an outrageous ‘‘moral equivalency’’ between the two sides in the war. World War II veterans groups took the historians’ script as a sign that the ‘‘truths’’ of their history were under siege by the professional custodians of historical memory at the countries’ museums and sacred sites, people who were generally of the Vietnam-era generation. At stake was how a public museum should remember the history of the Pacific Theater, and the controversy grew increasingly ugly during 1994. Many of the country’s most distinguished historians generally defended the script, insisting that history museums should aim for education and complexity rather than for commemoration. Diverse military and conservative groups, by contrast, charged curators and historians with ‘‘distorting’’ history through ‘‘political correctness’’ and for turning America’s foremost museum into an unpatriotic institution. As the script underwent revision, the Air Force Association, joined by 26

Remembering Pearl Harbor

the American Legion, mounted a vigorous media o√ensive against the museum and its historians; it also appealed to sympathetic listeners in Congress, where Republicans became dominant after the midterm elections of November 1994. Widely reprinting material from the Air Force Association’s media campaign, newspapers throughout the country, large and small, portrayed the Enola Gay struggle as one in which patriotism and ‘‘authentic’’ views of the good war’s veterans were being trammeled by Vietnam-era historians who warped history and sympathized with the nation’s enemies. The pressure—with future congressional funding as the ultimate lever—became so strong that the script was abandoned altogether and the principal museum o≈cial stepped down from his job.≥≠ The issues, splits, and multiple understandings involved in narrating the history of World War II provided a focal point for an even larger set of increasingly political ‘‘history wars’’ during the mid1990s.≥∞ These heated debates over history generally pitted the country’s organized historical associations against groups of political and cultural conservatives, which often included World War II veterans who had been newly mobilized into the history wars. At heart was the question of who had the right (and the power) to claim knowledge of the past. Veterans and cultural conservatives railed that historians were ‘‘revising’’ history to suit current agendas; many historians railed back that narrow pressure groups were seeking to ‘‘revise’’ history into popular oversimplifications. The dirty word ‘‘revisionism’’ was slung liberally by both sides, and all the would-be custodians of history/memory went on the alert about the politics of historical representation. In this climate, the narrow issue of Kimmel’s posthumous status and the larger issue of blame for Pearl Harbor became more visible and became entangled in political maneuvering, even in appeals to Congress to get involved in settling the ‘‘truth’’ of history. With another strong Democratic president in the White House (Bill Clinton), who was generally distrusted by the military and despised by conservative Republicans, the Kimmel controversy gained political legs. The blame for Pearl Harbor took on more emotion than ever. The pro-Kimmel campaign stepped up its e√orts in the mid-1990s. After the Republicans gained control of Congress in the midterm elections of 1994 (the first time in forty years), Kimmel’s forces pushed for another hearing related to Pearl Harbor. Senator Strom Thurmond carried the request to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which emily s. rosenberg

27

subsequently convened a hearing. Historians Beach, Costello, and Gannon testified along with Kimmel family members and other military supporters. On the other side, the Departments of Defense and the Navy reiterated the conclusions of the 1946 congressional report which had held Kimmel and Short responsible for the unreadiness of American defenses at Pearl Harbor.≥≤ After the hearing, the senators asked the Pentagon to conduct a new review of the controversy. The Pentagon review, submitted by Under Secretary of Defense Edwin Dorn to the Congress on December 15, 1995, rejected the case advanced by the Kimmel crusade. The Dorn report supported the Defense and Navy Department arguments that responsibility for the attack ‘‘should be broadly shared’’ but that ‘‘the intelligence available to Admiral Kimmel and General Short was su≈cient to justify a higher level of vigilance than they chose to maintain.’’≥≥ The finding, however, only further inflamed the pro-Kimmel advocates. As the e√ort to restore Kimmel’s reputation intensified, Edward Kimmel altered his congressional strategy. In 1998 he enlisted support from Delaware’s two senators, Republican William V. Roth Jr. and Democrat Joseph R. Biden, for a resolution, to be attached to a military spending bill, that would clear the names and restore the rank of Kimmel and Short. The amendment was backed by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Naval Academy Alumni Association, the Pearl Harbor Commemorative Committee, the Admiral Nimitz Foundation, the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, and many high-ranking military o≈cials.≥∂ Senator Roth stated that ‘‘Pearl Harbor was a systemic failure in which the gravest mistakes were made by the Washington authorities.’’≥∑ Some senators may have remained only dimly aware of the various backdoor, anti-FDR theories to which such a statement gave credence, but partisan splits were still apparent: Republican veterans Jesse Helms, Thurmond, and Roth supported the amendment (though so did some powerful Democrats, such as Biden and Edward Kennedy). The Biden-Roth resolution passed narrowly and became part of the defense bill of October 30, 2000. By this action, Congress called on President Clinton to exculpate the commanders at Pearl Harbor of responsibility, stating that they ‘‘were not provided necessary and critical intelligence that would have alerted them to prepare for the attack.’’≥∏ Several historians who had long refuted such claims of executive branch culpability expressed amazement and outrage at the Senate’s 28

Remembering Pearl Harbor

entry into the history business. Donald Goldstein of the University of Pittsburgh, who had been coauthor with Gordon Prange of At Dawn We Slept, denounced the Senate for ‘‘rewriting history.’’ Kimmel and Short had enough information, and ‘‘they really bungled it,’’ he said.≥π Stephen Ambrose wrote a scathing editorial about the cultural importance of people accepting personal responsibility for their mistakes. Others, such as Richard Snow, the editor of American Heritage magazine, and William J. vanden Heuvel of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, joined in. Gerald Posner, whose 1998 book had debunked conspiracy theories about the assassination of Martin Luther King, declared it ‘‘a perversion of history to pass a resolution that e√ectively endorses an Oliver Stone–type conspiracy about . . . Pearl Harbor.’’ He, too, denounced ‘‘our national obsession to absolve anyone of any responsibility for their actions’’ and to blame the president.≥∫ Meanwhile, Robert B. Stinnett, who had served under Lieutenant George H. W. Bush in the Navy during World War II and was the author of George Bush: His World War II Years, entered the controversy with a new backdoor polemic that supported the pro-Kimmel e√ort. His Day of Deceit (2000) charged President Roosevelt with provoking Japan, having full knowledge of its plan to attack Pearl Harbor, and then conspiring to hide the evidence.≥Ω Reaction to Stinnett’s book— applause from backdoor true believers and criticism from most professional historians—showed that the history/memory of Pearl Harbor remained as bitterly (and partisanly) contested as ever.∂≠ The decade’s various history wars, in which historical scholarship, media campaigns, website accumulations, and political crusades all blurred together, had been both a product of and a contributor to the bitter partisanship of the late 1990s. As the good war loomed ever more sacred in memory and secondary memory, old and new controversies became more visible and acrimonious. Partisans on both sides of the Kimmel controversy invoked the authority of history and alleged politically motivated distortions on the other side. And the controversy over blaming the Democratic president in Washington versus blaming the military commanders in the field held special resonance in 1999 and 2000, amid the Senate’s impeachment hearings on another strong, popular Democratic president and on the eve of what promised to be a close presidential election. Vice Admiral Robert F. Dunn commented that ‘‘ ‘Remember Pearl Harbor’ now calls to mind the Kimmel-Short controversy as much as the Japanese surprise attack.’’∂∞ emily s. rosenberg

29

Under siege and at the end of his term, President Clinton did not act on the congressional request to restore rank to Kimmel and Short, and after the uncertain and bitter election of 2000 the Kimmel advocates shifted their sights to the new Republican in the White House, George W. Bush. Many of Kimmel’s most vocal supporters, after all, were Republicans, and the general refrain that true history needed to be rescued from Democratic-leaning academics and from political correctness had been orchestrated by no less a figure than the new vice president’s wife, Lynne Cheney, when she headed the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was not the Kimmel crusade, however, that would put issues related to Pearl Harbor front and center in the new administration. The pro-Kimmel argument, with its implication of executive branch failure (or even conspiracy) to prevent a surprise attack in order to maneuver the country into military action, was hardly a narrative that the Bush administration wanted to embrace after September 11, 2001. Congress’s recommendation remained unheeded by the White House, and the visibility of the Kimmel issue declined as the political constellations changed. ‘‘I think events of 9/11 have put [the recommendation] at the bottom of the pile,’’ Edward Kimmel told a reporter.∂≤ After September 11, a Republican president had to confront his own ‘‘day of infamy’’ and another set of questions about flawed intelligence capabilities and warnings.

Spectacular History International politics, the memory boom, and the politicized Kimmel controversy kept the historical memory of Pearl Harbor in media circulation during the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, but Hollywood contributed most of all to its visibility. Crafting a spectacle that would completely ignore the various controversies over U.S. relations with Japan, commanders’ guilt, or bungling bureaucracies, Hollywood began to put together what promoters hoped would be its biggest blockbuster ever: a $135 million 2001 film called, simply, Pearl Harbor. Historical narratives of Pearl Harbor—the dramatic surprise, the tragedy and triumph—seemed well suited to the spectacular formulas of Hollywood. Posed to appeal to ‘‘the greatest generation’’ mania, the 30

Remembering Pearl Harbor

film presented opportunities for all involved. For the Walt Disney Company, it might boost profits; for Michael Bay, the director best known for The Rock and Armageddon, it might demonstrate greater depth and substance; for the producer Jerry Bruckheimer the potential for spectacular e√ects topped even that of his earlier hits Top Gun and Armageddon. Randall Wallace (of Braveheart ) added the idea of ending not with defeat but with Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s Tokyo raid, which could provide a flag-waving finale. The Navy permitted Bay and Bruckheimer to explode an inactive fleet which was mothballed at Pearl Harbor and slated to be sunk as part of a program to create artificial reefs.∂≥ Pearl Harbor took its place within a tradition of films set against the dramatic event of the Japanese attack. Each Pearl Harbor film had o√ered a chance to re-remember the coming of World War II and, in so doing, to fix a particular vision of American culture. Many of the individuals and groups who were acquainted with Pearl Harbor controversies waited apprehensively for the new film: Japanese commentators worried about Japan bashing; the Japanese American Citizens League of San Francisco, which organized protests, feared possible hints about disloyalty and subsequent backlash against Asians; proChinese activists warned about soft-pedaling Japanese imperialism; pro-Kimmel groups wondered whether their cause would be advanced or undercut.∂∂ American veterans, whom the film’s director had interviewed and sought to honor, probably each hoped for some echo of their own remembered experiences. Would this film stumble into the contentiousness of any of these history wars? Not to worry. The film managed to convey little sense of any context that might be controversial. It sidestepped interpretations of the reasons for the appalling surprise, of the military or diplomatic miscalculations, of the clash between isolationists and interventionists, or of the racial politics of the 1940s and its current sensitivities. Each character, it seemed, was cast as a member of the greatest generation.∂∑ Transcending all of the diverse controversies, the film did what Hollywood does best: it choreographed what Geo√ King has termed a ‘‘spectacular narrative’’ in which the real substance of the film was its special e√ects. Emphasizing spectacle had become central to Hollywood’s strategy to parry the threat of television, the small screen that might entice audiences to remain home and stay out of the theaters. Emphasizing emily s. rosenberg

31

fast-moving action sequences, in enormous size and with multichannel sound, also lured overseas markets by being able to leap cultural and language barriers. Whereas some media scholars have argued that the growing reliance on spectacle undermined narrative in Hollywood films, Geo√ King has argued that narrative and spectacle often work together. Big-screen attractions encourage viewers to pause and stare, while narrative engages the viewer in the mystery of the ending, in the desire to ‘‘find out’’ by moving along to the next frame and the next. Blockbusters that emphasize spectacle, according to King, still have the ‘‘oppositions and reconciliations’’ associated with narrative.∂∏ Employing ‘‘spectacular narrative,’’ Pearl Harbor drew from several Hollywood trends. First, it updated the western formula. Because the infamy-and-triumph narrative of Pearl Harbor had drawn upon standard elements of frontier legend, it is not surprising that the film Pearl Harbor also articulated the familiar frontier formulas: redemption through individualism, application of superior technology, loyalty to friends and country, and assertive masculinity (including emphasis on personal honor) joined with traditional family values. The male heroes who exemplify all of these virtues are common people, rural folks who grew up close to the land and ultimately return to it, yet are fascinated by the technology of flight. (The film is so disinterested in its female lead that her family, region, and interests remain unknown.) These values that Pearl Harbor exalts marked previous blockbusters that film critics have generally seen as disguised westerns. Jerry Bruckheimer, with his reputation for amazing special e√ects, had himself previously directed hits that grafted classic western themes and structure onto spectacularized disaster films such as Independence Day (1996), Twister (1996), and Armageddon (1998).∂π Second, Pearl Harbor fed on the accelerating World War II memory boom and greatest generation phenomenon. It became part of Hollywood’s rediscovery of World War II. Although the film industry had promoted various Vietnam films (both pro- and antiwar), especially during the 1980s, the long neglect of World War II ended in the 1990s. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993 ) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), as well as The Thin Red Line (1999) and U-571 (2000), brought audiences back to the heroic values and human dilemmas that the postwar cycle of combat films had explored. Like Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor showcased its battle scene ‘‘authenticity,’’ the quality that

32

Remembering Pearl Harbor

had also sailed Brokaw’s oral histories of the greatest generation to the top of the bestseller lists. Third, the film mimicked the mix of love story, special e√ects, and music that had made Titanic (1997) one of the biggest blockbusters of the era. The huge popularity (and profitability) of Titanic, which became the most successful movie up to that time, reinforced Hollywood’s long fascination for epic historical dramas in which personal love stories played out against disaster and destruction. Titanic successfully combined the big-budget action spectacle, which held special appeal to young male viewers, with the kind of love story that would attract young women. The attack on Pearl Harbor seemed a superb opportunity to do the same.∂∫ It mixed historical appeal (shown in other recent films such as Braveheart and The Patriot ), disaster spectacle (Bruckheimer’s specialty), and a love story that accentuated manliness, loyalty, and patriotism (following From Here to Eternity ’s appeal to an earlier generation). Last, Pearl Harbor raised marketing hype to new levels. Unlike Hollywood films that were designed for niche markets, blockbuster films were fashioned to appeal to all categories of filmgoers and even to those who did not regularly attend. The blockbuster aimed to become such a central cultural experience that people who did not see it would feel deficient and left out of the ‘‘everybody’’ who went and then talked about the film.∂Ω For years, entertainment giant Walt Disney worked on timing and publicity. It opened its publicity campaign a year before release, showing previews accompanying the Revolutionary War epic The Patriot. It developed a state-of-the-art website and licensed two film-related products, a Hamilton Pilot watch and Ray-Ban sunglasses.∑≠ For a signature song, Bruckheimer and Bay turned to Diane Warren, whose many previous hits and five Academy Award nominations included tear-jerkers for Armageddon and other Bruckheimer spectacles, and to singer Faith Hill, who had topped the charts with sentimental hits from the country genre. The resulting ‘‘There You’ll Be’’ is heard over the closing credits of the film. Premiering on Memorial Day 2001, the film attracted special press because of its calculated timing. It helped that Disney spent more than $5 million providing journalists and others with transportation to and lodging in Hawaii. A lavish party, complete with an eighty-person Hawaiian choir and a Navy band, entertained two thousand guests

emily s. rosenberg

33

aboard the nuclear aircraft carrier John C. Stennis. Throughout the filming, everyone associated with the film repeatedly stated that it would honor veterans; by its opening on May 25, it would have seemed almost unpatriotic not to have covered the film as a news story. A database search of headlines in the three months leading up to the release showed that it gained far more mention than had previous landmark films such as Titanic, Jurassic Park, and Star Wars.∑∞ Many theaters held special promotions for veterans and facilitated postfilm exchanges between veterans and members of the audience. Pearl Harbor became news rather than simply entertainment. ‘‘It was a total marketing blitz, and I can’t imagine anyone who didn’t know ‘Pearl Harbor’ was opening on Memorial Day,’’ said Paul Dergarabedian, president of a firm that tracks box-o≈ce returns.∑≤ Pearl Harbor ’s debut triggered a barrage of other Pearl Harbor– related products. Starting over a month before the premier, bookstores debuted a glossy large-format hardback called The Movie and the Moment. This book captured the attempt to blur Hollywood and history, interspersing pictures from the film with photos from 1941, telling stories about the making of the film next to accounts of the attack itself. Later came the novelized version of the story, written by Randall Wallace, the author of Braveheart.∑≥ The Internet spawned many websites related to Pearl Harbor themes. Among them, the National Geographic Society o√ered maps, photographs, eyewitness accounts, and timelines and a section to post memories or queries.∑∂ Bookstores featured tables of new and reissued books on Pearl Harbor. Every magazine and newspaper ran Pearl Harbor stories during May; there was 30 percent more news coverage of Pearl Harbor before May 2001 than at the time of even the fiftieth anniversary in 1991. The week of the film’s opening, for example, Newsweek ran a fourteen-page spread on the film and the event and used a cover photo with a scene of the movie’s stars Ben AΔeck and Kate Beckinsale embracing.∑∑ People magazine, in typical greatest generation style, did a seven-page illustrated presentation of stories from individual veterans.∑∏ Pearl Harbor sparked a craze for World War II nostalgia products in the summer of 2000. Spino√s o≈cially associated with the film, as well as freelance tie-ins, popped up everywhere. Hasbro released a new line of Pearl Harbor–themed g.i. Joe figures, trying to revive its once popular but now lagging brand. The February previews of fall women’s fashions o√ered new lines inspired by the 1940s. ‘‘If Pearl Harbor 34

Remembering Pearl Harbor

connects with people, the emotional ties to the movie will fuel the fashion trends,’’ said the entertainment editor at Women’s Wear Daily.∑π Television documentaries about Pearl Harbor promised to merge the appeal of the memory boom with that of the new reality shows, such as Survivor, which were currently sweeping the ratings. Television moguls apparently believed that audiences, primed by enthusiasm over both the Bruckheimer film and reality tv, would tune in to past stories of ‘‘real’’ challenges. At least six special tv broadcasts on Pearl Harbor spread over four nights and eleven hours just before Memorial Day.∑∫ Of all the programs that splashed onto the small screen, perhaps the oddest was the highly promoted Pearl Harbor: Legacy of Attack, shown on the National Geographic Channel and nbc. Narrated by Tom Brokaw and featuring appearances by Stephen Ambrose, it intermixed interviews with now elderly survivors and accounts of the attack itself with the current story of underwater explorer Robert Ballard (who found the Titanic ) trying unsuccessfully to locate and salvage one of the sunken Japanese midget submarines that had infiltrated the harbor on the morning of December 7. The two-hour program, with its disjointed juxtapositions of the attack and the salvage story, ended with a promoter’s dream: live underwater interior shots of the Arizona itself. In 1987 the National Park Service had planned to videotape some of the underwater site for educational purposes, but it had been forced to cancel the attempt when many survivors opposed such visual invasion of the sacred tomb.∑Ω This time, however, Brokaw’s impeccable credentials as a sanctifier of the greatest generation apparently smoothed the camera’s way. In Brokaw’s presentation, as in most of the Pearl Harbor–related documentaries, the lessons of Pearl Harbor seemed most frequently and powerfully carried by the voices of World War II veterans. Their memories, upon which the complexities of international politics hardly intruded, intermingled their own coming of age with metaphors of the country’s imagined loss of innocence. The Brokaw documentary, for example, closed by structuring the meanings of Pearl Harbor through parallels between the national and the personal. Visual images of the nation’s military rebuilding after the attack mixed with comments from vets such as ‘‘I learned to be a man.’’ Maturity, manliness, and military strength blurred together in spoken and visual images.∏≠ Many newly packaged dvds and videocassettes also flooded the emily s. rosenberg

35

market. Fox brought out a refurbished version of Tora! Tora! Tora! accompanied by a documentary about the making of the movie. Questar issued a two-disc set called Remember Pearl Harbor containing the John Ford film December 7, along with several documentaries and other features. The uncut version of Ford’s film and Frank Capra’s Know Your Enemy: Japan, with additional newsreels and interviews, came out from Kit Parker Films under the title John Ford’s December 7th: The Pearl Harbor Story. The History Channel issued the two-disc set Pearl Harbor: The Definitive Documentary of the Day That Will Forever Live in Infamy, packaging relevant programs that had aired on its channel, and World War II: The War in the Pacific. Other wartime and postwar entertainment films and newsreels had new prominence on video shelves and cable tv’s classics channels. With all the visibility, the film’s opening weekend was bound to be profitable. The $75.2 million taken in over Memorial Day weekend was the second highest in Hollywood’s history up to that time (next to The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2 ). The film, however, fell short of the overblown expectations. Unenthusiastic viewers and negative reviews created a reverse snowball e√ect: the second weekend’s attendance fell 50 percent; the third dropped another 50 percent; and the fourth sank 36 percent. Though hardly a failure, especially in some international markets (including Japan, where advertising emphasized the love story rather than the attack and some dialogue was altered), Pearl Harbor disappointed both investors and critics.∏∞ Even a historian for the Pearl Harbor Association dubbed the film ‘‘overdone overkill.’’∏≤ Before the widespread publicity for Pearl Harbor, market research had shown that young adults ages nineteen to twenty-four generally could not identify Pearl Harbor.∏≥ Despite the film’s declining audiences, however, its promotion during the spring and summer of 2001 riveted the nation’s attention to December 7, 1941, and turned Pearl Harbor into one of the most widely circulated icons of American history. Pearl Harbor became a convenient site for the fascination with spectacle, disaster, and survival that was so characteristic of massmediated, turn-of-the-century American culture. Pearl Harbor, the movie, with its associated public appearances by veterans, sketched the attack in memory and secondary memory as a place where spectators could embrace moral certitude and suspend the complexities of international a√airs. Viewers were invited to embrace the memory boom’s imagined World War II—a land of daring men and women who en36

Remembering Pearl Harbor

thusiastically took up the work of war, finished the job, and then went home to create families and raise more sons and daughters who would, in their turn, do the same. Pearl Harbor memories had become so prominent and ubiquitous in American culture by the summer of 2001 that a stranger to the planet might have imagined that the bombs had just been dropped. Less than four months after Pearl Harbor ’s premier, these freshened memories would leap back into virtually every headline in the country.

‘‘Infamy!’’ Again Political and media commentary after the attacks of September 11, 2001, elaborated Pearl Harbor allusions. ‘‘This is the second Pearl Harbor. I don’t think that I overstate it,’’ said Republican Senator Chuck Hagel from Nebraska, one of dozens of members of Congress who made similar remarks. The head of New York City’s Port Authority declared, ‘‘This is significantly worse than Pearl Harbor,’’ and the professor of strategic studies Eliot A. Cohen wrote in the New Republic, ‘‘This is our generation’s Pearl Harbor.’’ The New Yorker ’s ‘‘The Talk of the Town’’ reprinted its column from December 20, 1941, drawing parallels between the mood in New York City after both attacks. Analysts found it almost impossible to escape the rhetorical traditions associated with Pearl Harbor, such as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s supposed observation, used in the film Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), that the attack had awakened a ‘‘sleeping giant.’’ The Senate’s Republican Policy Committee, in a statement called ‘‘Americans Who Died on American Soil,’’ wrote that the ‘‘murderous and diabolical attack would awaken a slumbering giant.’’ An editorial writer at Travel Golf.com reprinted Admiral Yamamoto’s famous quote and somberly wrote, ‘‘While America slept, it condemned itself to repeat the errors of appeasement.’’ The abc news anchor Peter Jennings compiled a story on how September 11 had further stimulated Americans’ newfound interest in Pearl Harbor. And sixty years after the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress had called on folklorists to audiotape the responses of average citizens to the Pearl Harbor tragedy, its director again appealed to Americans to document on tape their thoughts and feelings about 9/11.∏∂ Not surprisingly (especially for a Texan), President George W. Bush emily s. rosenberg

37

drew upon the western rhetorical styles that had structured the Pearl Harbor story during World War II. Perpetrators, he assured Americans, would be hunted down and smoked out. He recalled the ‘‘Wanted: Dead or Alive’’ posters of the Old West, rhetorically painted Osama bin Laden’s name on them, and o√ered reward money to current-day bounty hunters. In the months that followed, he avoided any complex discussion of international a√airs, explaining the attack and America’s increasingly complicated global response within the simple framework of good versus evil. ‘‘Evil,’’ ‘‘evil ones,’’ and ‘‘evildoers’’ were the words the president continually invoked. Rummaging around in the bag of Pearl Harbor’s rhetorical traditions, Bush proclaimed at a prayer breakfast on the attack’s second-month anniversary, ‘‘The evil ones have roused a mighty nation.’’ Like FDR, Bush created new propaganda bureaus to project this message, and presidential adviser Karl Rove hurried to Hollywood to request studio cooperation in establishing helpful movie themes.∏∑ The Pearl Harbor analogy became so widely used in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that its appropriateness also became a matter of some debate and discussion. A few contrary commentators pointed out divergences: the loosely organized al Qaida network was not a nationstate, and its battle tactics had little relevance to the huge men-andmachines campaigns of World War II; Pearl Harbor was a U.S. military base, the World Trade center was an international, and civilian, financial entrepôt—a veritable United Nations of global capitalism; in World War II, FDR embraced an international coalition and vilified the impulses of isolationism and unilateralism, whereas Bush’s call for international support, phrased as ‘‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,’’ fell squarely within the anti-internationalist rhetoric of American exceptionalism.∏∏ Whether endorsing, critiquing, or moralizing over the 1941/2001 comparisons, however, commentators seemed unable to escape writing about the September attacks in the shadow of Pearl Harbor memories. The relevance of Pearl Harbor to 9/11, and vice versa, became the guiding motif behind the sixtieth anniversary ceremonies that took place on December 7, 2001, at World War II memorials in Hawaii. With more than three thousand people attending, two commemorations took place in Oahu, one at the Arizona Memorial and another, nearby, at the Punchbowl National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. The ceremonies began at 7:55, the same time that the first Japanese 38

Remembering Pearl Harbor

bombs had fallen. Most of the Pearl Harbor veterans who gathered at the memorial, including twenty-one uss Arizona survivors, were in their eighties, and doubts that they would ever gather again raised the emotionalism of the events. Repeatedly, December 7 and September 11 were symbolically connected, a kind of passing of the baton to a new, potentially great, generation. The state of Hawaii and local businesses helped bring some six hundred New York City police, firefighters, and families as guests. About 350 family members of those who had perished in the World Trade Center also attended. These New Yorkers tossed flowers into the water to float amid the rainbows of oil still leaking from the Arizona.∏π In Washington, President Bush marked the anniversary by declaring December 7 National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, and he called on federal o≈ces to fly their flags at half-sta√ on this and every December 7 in the future to honor the ‘‘greatest of generations.’’ His proclamation explicitly assigned meaning to ‘‘our collective national memory’’ of Pearl Harbor: ‘‘a symbol of American military valor and American resolve, but also a reminder of the presence of evil in the world and the need to remain ever vigilant against it.’’ Then he flew to Norfolk, Virginia, to gather with twenty-five witnesses to the Pearl Harbor attack and speak from the deck of the uss Enterprise, the first aircraft carrier to launch strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan. ‘‘What happened at Pearl Harbor was the start of a long and terrible war for America,’’ he said. ‘‘Yet out of that surprise attack grew a steadfast resolve that made America freedom’s defender.’’ His language explicitly linked his actions to the causes of World War II. ‘‘We’ve seen their kind before,’’ he said. ‘‘Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be appeased; they must be defeated.’’∏∫ Addressing the anxiety that Japanese listeners might feel over the Pearl Harbor analogies, the president directly mentioned the current Japanese alliance. Noting that Japan had passed from enemy to ally, he remarked, ‘‘Today our two navies are working side by side in the fight against terror. The bitterness of 60 years ago has passed away. The struggles of our war in the Pacific now belong to history.’’∏Ω The increased circulation of American memories of Pearl Harbor in media and politics emerged after 1991 along with diverse cultural and political phenomena. Some of these were the fiftieth-year commemorations; an emphasis in international politics on identity and restituemily s. rosenberg

39

tion for victims’ claims; a broad memory boom in American culture; the Republican revival of the mid-1990s; the determined e√ort to exonerate commanders Kimmel and Short; the mobilization of militaryassociated groups over disputes in the history wars of the 1990s; the increased circulation of popular history on tv, on the Internet, and in film; and the popular fascination with big-budget historical spectacle on the movie screen. In the decade before 2001, mention of Pearl Harbor assumed such prominence in American culture that it no longer seemed a distant event. To a new generation who had never experienced anything of World War II, it became a familiar secondary memory, which then, suddenly, became even more vividly alive on September 11, 2001. Scholars of collective memory emphasize the constant interaction between past and present in shaping the meanings of both. The ubiquity of the Pearl Harbor metaphor on September 11 shaped collective memories of both events. Hardly a stable signifier over the sixty years since the attacks, Pearl Harbor had served as a symbolic touchstone in many di√erent historical narratives.π≠ September 11, however, elevated a greatest generation narrative far above all others. Immediately after September 11, the Pearl Harbor metaphor was most frequently invoked as a relatively uncomplicated call for national unity, generational greatness, and personal commitment to a war to the end against evil and for freedom. This was the Pearl Harbor narrative that had emerged so strongly in the memory boom and in the previous summer’s obsessive interest in Pearl Harbor, the movie. The attack on Pearl Harbor thus became, at least initially, the reigning popular metaphor for action against terrorism. The ghosts of Vietnam—the involvement that had come to symbolize quagmire, dissent, purposeless violence, and a lack of any clear goals or exit strategy—were temporarily driven away. In its initial days, before the analogy between Pearl Harbor and September 11 strained to the breaking point, the ‘‘war on terrorism,’’ despite its ill-defined geographic and conceptual terrain, became Pearl Harbor: The Sequel.

Notes On the construction of ‘‘experience,’’ see Joan W. Scott, ‘‘Experience,’’ in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992). 1

40

Remembering Pearl Harbor

2 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), xx. A useful definition of ‘‘collective memory,’’ sometimes also called ‘‘social memory,’’ ‘‘popular memory,’’ ‘‘public memory,’’ or ‘‘historical memory,’’ is presented by Barbie Zelizer, ‘‘Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,’’ Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 214–216: Collective memory comprises recollections of the past that are determined and shaped by the group. By definition, collective memory thereby presumes activities of sharing, discussion, negotiation, and, often, contestation. Remembering becomes implicated in a range of other activities having as much to do with identity formation, power and authority, cultural norms, and social interactions as with the simple act of recall. Its full understanding thus requires an appropriation of memory as social, cultural, and political action at its broadest level. . . . From the perspective of memory studies, the most promising discussions in the academy have granted a fluidity to the distinction between history and memory. 3 There are a number of di√erent, sometimes interrelated traditions in writings on historical memory. For my project the seminal work by Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), has proved most useful. Halbwachs is the first sociologist to theorize memory as a social activity, that is, how di√erent memories persist in individuals who identify themselves with di√erent groups, depending on their particular present situations. His most important contributions appeared in French during the 1940s and 1950s and were translated into English in 1975. He stressed the multiplicity and social situatedness of collective memories, emphasizing that memories persist when they are useful to, and therefore reinforced by, a particular group: ‘‘Every collective memory requires the support of a group delimited in space and time’’ (22). Collective memory, according to Halbwachs, may become ‘‘historical memory’’ for future generations who were not directly involved through social institutions such as books, commemoration, festivals, and other means by which interpretations of the past are stored. Thus, an important work that builds on Halbwachs is Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989), which expands upon Halbwachs’s idea of socially constructed memory to examine the role of habit and ritual performance in solidifying memories of various social groups. Seminal works by French scholars on historical memory include Pierre Nora’s influential Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996–98), which examines French

emily s. rosenberg

41

‘‘memory sites’’; see also Nora’s collaborator Jacques Le Go√ ’s History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and Michel Foucault, who wrote about ‘‘popular memory’’ and developed the idea of ‘‘counter-memory’’—residual or resistant popular memories that withstand o≈cial constructions of the past—in Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–196. Building on these works, a special issue on memory and countermemory appeared in Representations 26 (1989). Many other examinations of memory sites illuminate the ways they both express the messages and aims of established elites and challenge o≈cial meanings. See, e.g., George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); G. Kurt Piehler, Remembering War the American Way, 1783 to the Present (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995); Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999); John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Laura Hein and Mark Seldon, eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2000); and Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). Holocaust scholars have tended to see historical memory less as an o≈cial or elite project than as the expression of the popular, collective memory of specific communities and individuals. See, among many others, Saul Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-

42

Remembering Pearl Harbor

sity Press, 1998); Edward Tabor Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking, 1995); and articles in the journal History and Memory. American scholars such as Michael Kammen, in The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), often associate collective memory with nonelite popular culture. See also George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), and Philip West, Steven I. Levine, and Jackie Hiltz, eds., America’s Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory (Armonk, N.Y.: East Gate Books, 1998). A sampling of other books that emphasize the dispersion and multiplicity of collective memories includes Raphael Samuel, Theaters of Memory (London: Verso, 1994); Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Dartmouth, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999); Hue-Tam Ho Tai, ed., The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); T. Fujitani, Geo√rey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). Alon Confino, ‘‘Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method,’’ American Historical Review 102 (December 1997): 1388–1389, and Hue-Tam Ho Tai, ‘‘Remembered Realms: Pierre Nora and French National Memory,’’ American Historical Review 196 ( June 2001): 906–923, present useful theoretical analyses. On collective memory in recent American media culture, see Paige Baty, American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and Emily S. Rosenberg A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 4 Roger Dingman, ‘‘ Reflections on Pearl Harbor Anniversaries Past,’’ Journal of American–East Asian Relations 3, no. 3 (1994): 288–290. 5 Quoted in Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 204. 6 Toru Watanabe, ‘‘1991: American Perceptions of the Pearl Harbor Attack,’’ Journal of American–East Asian Relations 3, no. 3 (1994): 273–275; Otto Friedrich, ‘‘Pearl Harbor: Day of Infamy,’’ Time, 2 December 1991, 33. 7 Dingman, ‘‘Reflections on Pearl Harbor Anniversaries Past,’’ 290– 291.

emily s. rosenberg

43

8 Watanabe, ‘‘1991,’’ 269; James Fallows, ‘‘Remember Pearl Harbor How?,’’ The Atlantic, December 1991, 22–26; ‘‘Bloody Sunday,’’ People, 9 December 1991, 40–45. 9 Barry Hillenbrand and James Walsh, ‘‘Fleeing the Past,’’ Time, 2 December 1991, 70–71; McGeorge Bundy, ‘‘Pearl Harbor Brought Peace,’’ Newsweek, 16 December 1991, 8; Ralph Kinney Bennet, ‘‘Legacy of Pearl Harbor,’’ Reader’s Digest, December 1991, 65–66; Alexander Cockburn, ‘‘Anniversaries: Pearl Harbor, Vietnam,’’ The Nation, 23 December 1991, 802–803. For backdoor interpretations published at this time, see notes 26–29 below. R. Alton Lee, ‘‘Remembering Pearl Harbor,’’ USA, 120 (November 1991): 80–85, reflects the standard view, advanced by Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept (New York: McGraw-Hall, 1981); Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986). 10 Watanabe, ‘‘1991,’’ 269–278. 11 Quoted in Thomas Mallon, ‘‘The Golden Pearl: Infamy Commemorated,’’ American Spectator, March 1992, 36–42. 12 Watanabe, ‘‘1991,’’ 275–276; Marie Thorsten, ‘‘Treading the Tiger’s Tail: American and Japanese Pearl Harbor Veterans’ Reunions in Hawaii and Japan,’’ Cultural Values: Journal of Cultural Research 6, no. 3 (2002): 317–340. 13 For example, Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1995); Michael Perlman, Imaginal Memory and the Place of Hiroshima (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); Kyo Maclear, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces ; Walter A. Davis, Deracination: History, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 14 Laura Heine and Mark Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); Laura Heine and Mark Selden, eds., Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States (Armonk, N.Y.: East Gate Books, 2000); K. Connie Kang, ‘‘Protestors Decry Japan’s New History Textbooks,’’ Los Angeles Times, 18 April 2001, B1, 7. 15 Dan Rather, cbs Evening News, 2 March 2001, linked a discussion of ‘‘blame’’ and ‘‘apology’’ in the submarine incident with the failure of Japan to apologize for brutality against Chinese people, sex slaves, and pows during World War II and with a Japanese politician’s recent implication that the United States—not Japan—was to blame for the 1941 attack at Pearl

44

Remembering Pearl Harbor

Harbor because of the embargoes it leveled against Japan. See also Richard Cohen, ‘‘How Often Must We Say I’m Sorry,’’ Union Tribune (San Diego), 1 March 2001; Tony Perry, ‘‘Once Again, Pearl Harbor Is Center of AmericanJapanese Conflict,’’ Los Angeles Times, 18 March 2001, A14; John Gregory Dunne, ‘‘The American Raj,’’ The New Yorker, 7 May 2001, 46–54. 16 See, especially, Jay Winter, ‘‘The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the ‘Memory Boom’ in Contemporary Historical Studies,’’ Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 27 (fall 2000): 69–92; Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, xv–xix; and Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory. 17 Studs Terkel, ‘‘The Good War’’: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984), 1. 18 Richard A. Hunt, ‘‘Remembering World War II: The Role of Oral History,’’ Public Historian 16 (1994): 83–88. On Pearl Harbor specifically, see, e.g., Robert S. LaForte and Ronald E. Marcello, eds., Remembering Pearl Harbor: Eyewitness Accounts by U.S. Military Men and Women (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Books, 1991). 19 Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998), xix. 20 New Jersey legislature, www.njleg.state.ng.us/9899/Bills/199. 21 Congressman Jack Quinn, press release, 6 November 2000, at www .house.gov. Examples of opposition even from those who favored veterans’ causes could be found, for example, on a public forum and discussion sponsored by the conservative website Free Republic, 6 November 2000, at www.freerepublic.com. 22 Thurston Clarke, Pearl Harbor Ghosts: The Legacy of December 7, 1941 (New York: Ballantine, 1991), xv. 23 Art Chapman, ‘‘New National Museum Gallery Explores Pacific War,’’ Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 28 June 1999. 24 Rick Marin, ‘‘Raising a Flag for Generation W.W.II,’’ New York Times, 22 April 2001. 25 Henry C. Clausen and Bruce Lee, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement (New York: DaCapo Press, 2001), 3. 26 James Rusbridger and Eric Nave, Betrayal at Pearl Harbor: How Churchill Lured Roosevelt into War (New York: Summit Books, 1991). Historians of signals intelligence have convincingly refuted the book’s main argument by pointing out that Japanese naval codes (jn-25) had indeed been broken but that a di√erent and superior code system had been introduced during 1941, a system that was not cracked until the following year. See, especially, Richard J. Aldrich, ‘‘Conspiracy or Confusion? Churchill, Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor,’’ Intelligence and National Security 7(1992): 335–346.

emily s. rosenberg

45

John Costello, Days of Infamy (New York: Pocket Books, 1994). 28 Michael Gannon, ‘‘Reopen the Kimmel Case,’’ Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute 120 (1994): 51–56. Gannon extended his arguments on behalf of Kimmel in Pearl Harbor Betrayed: The True Story of a Man and a Nation Under Attack (New York: Henry Holt, 2001). Gannon argued that Kimmel had been treated unjustly and blamed o≈cials in Washington but charged ineptitude and failure rather than a backdoor conspiracy. 29 Captain Edward L. Beach, Scapegoats: A Defense of Kimmel and Short at Pearl Harbor (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1995). 30 Edward T. Linenthal, ‘‘Anatomy of a Controversy,’’ in Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 9–62. 31 For details on various history wars in this era, see, e.g., Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York: Knopf, 1998); Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall, ‘‘Patriotic Fervor and the Truth about Iwo Jima,’’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 September 1993; and Sanford Levinson, Written in Stone (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 29–75. 32 Schultz, ‘‘Resurrecting the Kimmel Case,’’ 45–46. For the text of the hearings, see ‘‘Remarks at the Meeting of the O≈ce of the Secretary of Defense and Members of the Kimmel Family Dealing with the Posthumous Restoration of the Rank of Admiral for Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, United States Navy, April 27, 1995, Washington D.C.,’’ 4 March 2001, at users.erols.com/nbeach/kimmel.html. 33 Kevin Baker, ‘‘The Guilt Dogging the Greatest Generation,’’ New York Times, 12 November 2000. 34 Lacy McCrary, ‘‘Fighting to Restore a Father’s Rank,’’ Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 December 1998. 35 Quoted in Baker, ‘‘The Guilt Dogging the Greatest Generation.’’ 36 Quoted in Charles J. Lewis and Eric Rosenberg, ‘‘Congress Poised to Clear O≈cers Disgraced over Pearl Harbor Raid,’’ Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 29 September 2000. See also David Greenberg, ‘‘Who Lost Pearl Harbor?,’’ Slate, 7 December 2000, at slate.msn.com. 37 Lewis and Rosenberg, ‘‘Congress Poised to Clear O≈cers.’’ 38 Baker, ‘‘The Guilt Dogging the Greatest Generation.’’ 39 Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York: Free Press, 2000). 40 See, e.g., the dismissive comment in Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II (New York: Free Press, 2000), 8. 27

46

Remembering Pearl Harbor

41 Vice Admiral Robert F. Dunn, welcoming remarks before the colloquium, in David Winkler and Jennifer Lloyd, eds., Pearl Harbor and the Kimmel Controversy: The Views Today (Washington: Naval Historical Foundation, 2000). 42 Albuquerque Tribune, 7 December 2001. 43 Newsweek, 14 May 2001, 44–58. 44 Sarah Tippit, ‘‘Japanese Americans Protest New ‘Pearl Harbor’ Film,’’ Yahoo! News, 21 May 2001, at dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010 521/en/film-pearlharbor — 4.html (accessed 23 May 2001). 45 For a spoof of the e√ort to avoid o√ense, see Bruce McCall, ‘‘Blitzkrieg! The Movie,’’ The New Yorker, 2 July 2001, 35. 46 Geo√ King, Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 4–5, 32–40. 47 Ibid., 22–33, 39–49. 48 Newsweek, 14 May 2001, 44–58; Christopher Probst, ‘‘One Nation, Under Siege,’’ American Cinematographer, May 2001, 36–49; Ron Magid, ‘‘Earning Their Wings,’’ American Cinematographer, May 2001, 50–57. 49 King, Spectacular Narratives, 9. 50 Lola Smallwood, ‘‘Enough with the Hype Machine for Explosive ‘Pearl Harbor,’ ’’ St. Paul Pioneer Press, 11 June 2001, 7F. 51 King, Spectacular Narratives, 9; Smallwood, ‘‘Enough with the Hype Machine.’’ 52 Smallwood, ‘‘Enough with the Hype Machine.’’ 53 The Movie and the Moment (New York: Hyperion, 2001); Randall Wallace, Pearl Harbor (New York: Hyperion, 2001). 54 National Geographic, www.national-geographic.com/pearlharbor. 55 Newsweek, 14 May 2001, 44–58. 56 ‘‘Moment of Truth,’’ People, 28 May 2001, 51–58. 57 Julian E. Barnes, ‘‘Joe’s Back, and Looking for a Ride,’’ New York Times, 25 May 2001; Samantha Critchell, ‘‘ ‘Pearl Harbor’ Helps Inspire Revival of 1940s Style,’’ Minneapolis Star Tribune, 26 May 2001, E5. On the emergence of Hollywood spino√s, see King, Spectacular Narratives, 175–190. 58 Smallwood, ‘‘Enough with the Hype Machine’’; Claudia Rosett, ‘‘Revisiting Pearl Harbor,’’ 21 May 2001, Wall Street Journal online, www .interactive.wsj.com/articles; SB99040225358637245.htm. 59 Linenthal, Sacred Ground, 191. 60 Pearl Harbor: Legacy of Attack, abc, 27 May 2001; on ‘‘sentimental militarism,’’ see Christian G. Appy, ‘‘ ‘We’ll Follow the Old Man’: The Strains of Sentimental Militarism in Popular Films of the Fifties,’’ in Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert, eds., Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 74–105.

emily s. rosenberg

47

61 A. O. Scott, ‘‘War Is Hell, but Very Pretty,’’ New York Times, 25 May 2001, Weekend section, 1, 20. 62 Robert Sullivan, ‘‘What Really Happened,’’ Time, 4 June 2001, 70. 63 Jess Cagle, ‘‘Cinema,’’ Time, 4 June 2001, 69. 64 Charles Babington, ‘‘Bush to Address Nation,’’ Washington Post, 11 September 2001; Eliot A. Cohen, ‘‘Make War, Not Justice,’’ The New Republic, 15 September 2001. ‘‘The Talk of the Town,’’ The New Yorker, 15 September 2001; U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee, ‘‘Americans Who Died on American Soil,’’ 21 September 2001, at www.senate.gov/rpc/ releases/1999/fr092101.htm (accessed 7 November 2001); Guy E. Torrey IV, ‘‘On a Nation Shocked from Slumber,’’ 13 September 2001, www.travel golf.com/d . . . ments/editorials/torrey-wtc-disaster.htm (accessed 7 November 2001); Library of Congress, ‘‘The Day after the Day Which Will Live in Infamy: Continuing the Tradition,’’ 6 December 2001, www.loc .gov/folklife/pearlharbor/pearl-about.html. 65 ‘‘President Holds Prime Time News Conference,’’ 11 October 2001, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/10/print/20011011–7.html (accessed 30 October 2001); cnn Newsreport, 11 November 2001 (including quote). 66 Some examples of the resistance to the Pearl Harbor analogy include Stanley Ho√mann, ‘‘On the War,’’ New York Review of Books, 1 November 2001; David M. Kennedy, ‘‘Fighting an Elusive Enemy,’’ New York Times, 16 September 2001; Eugene Leach, ‘‘World Trade Center Attack—No Pearl Harbor,’’ Hartford Courant, 14 September 2001. See also Robert W. Martin, ‘‘The 9–11 Tragedy and the Attack on Pearl Harbor: Can We Compare?,’’ Military History, 7 November 2001, at www.militaryhistory.about.com/ library/weekly/aa091301a.htm. 67 ‘‘60 Years Later, ‘It’s Our Turn,’ ’’ DallasNews.com, 8 December 2001, at www.dallasnews.com/attack — on — america/spirit/stories/story .eaa48dca9b.b0.af.0.a4.c73c2.html (accessed 12 December 2001). 68 ‘‘National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day Proclamation,’’ at www .whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/12/20011207–2.html (accessed 11 December 2001); quotes from ‘‘Bush on Pearl Harbor Anniversary,’’ Dallas News.com, 7 December 2001, at www.dallasnews.com/national/story .ea7f5ab75e.93.88.fa.7c23198c8d.html (accessed 12 December 2001). 69 Quoted in ‘‘Bush Remembers Pearl Harbor Aboard uss Enterprise,’’ cnn.com, 7 December 2001, at www.cnn.ccom/2001/allpolitics / 12/07/rec.bush.peearl/index.html (accessed 11 December 2001). 70 Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live, 9–98.

48

Remembering Pearl Harbor

The First Revisionists bonner fellers, herbert hoover, and japan’s decision to surrender

. haruo iguchi

This essay explores an overlooked aspect of the response to Henry L. Stimson’s ‘‘The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb’’ in the January 1947 Harper’s magazine. The standard argument on the impact of Stimson’s essay is that it virtually silenced critics in the United States who questioned the necessity of using the atomic bomb to end the war.∞ Although Stimson’s essay did much to establish an o≈cial narrative on the end of the war, it failed to satisfy a committed group of critics within the former secretary’s own party. In the July 1947 edition of Reader’s Digest Brigadier General Bonner Fellers published his article ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender.’’ The Stimson and Fellers articles agreed about the necessity of retaining the emperor to achieve Japan’s capitulation. Both ignored Soviet military intervention as a vital factor in ending the war. But Fellers challenged Stimson’s claim that the use of the atomic bomb was unavoidable because the Japanese gave no indication they would accept unconditional surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.≤ Working with other Republicans, including former president Herbert Hoover, as well as representatives of the Imperial Household, Fellers sought to construct a conservative critique of American policy at the end of the war. In essence, Stimson’s article and Fellers’s response showcased a schism within the American political elite that cut across party lines. Both sides claimed the authority to write the o≈cial history of Japan’s surrender by virtue of their insider’s knowledge of how the war ended. Stimson wrote his article with the prodding and support of men who had been with him in the Manhattan Project. His main purpose was advocacy of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations’ wartime policies on the bomb. As the historian Barton Bernstein has explained, Stimson’s article was an attempt by a part of the American elite to seize

2

the ‘‘contested terrain’’ of early nuclear history. They hoped that by silencing criticism of the decision to use the bomb they would also build consensus for the administration’s developing postwar internationalism. As Bernstein puts it, ‘‘Creating the right history could be essential to gaining popular support for the right policy.’’≥ For his part, Fellers received considerable advice from former Republican president Herbert Hoover. Fellers’s article reflected Hoover’s critical assessment of Roosevelt’s diplomacy toward Japan before Pearl Harbor, his criticism of unconditional surrender, and his conviction that an early settlement with Japan was possible after the German surrender. But Fellers also used his article to convey Hoover’s growing concern over Soviet expansion in Asia and American occupation policy in Japan. Fellers was supported in his endeavor by General Douglas MacArthur and the conservative editors of Reader’s Digest. Although part of the American political elite, these members of the Republican Party represented the party’s prewar isolationist wing. Aware of their declining influence within the party, Fellers’s sponsors also sensed that creating public understanding of how the war had ended was essential to gaining support for the right policy, in this case one that was Asiacentered, unilateralist, and directed toward rebuilding Japan as a bulwark against communism. In seeking to win converts to his cause Fellers deliberately distorted some of the facts regarding Japan’s decision to surrender. His personal ambition and partisan interests dovetailed with the political goals of leading American conservatives. By condemning the use of the atomic bombs and claiming that a negotiated surrender had been within reach during the summer of 1945, these conservatives were among the first atomic bomb revisionists. The appropriation of their critique by New Left scholars in the 1960s demonstrated the appeal of Fellers’s counterfactual argument, but it also illustrated how much the culture of American politics had changed in only two decades. Bonner Fellers was well placed to speak with authority on the history of Japan’s decision to surrender. He served as General MacArthur’s trusted military secretary from 1944 to 1946. Until the Japanese surrender, he was also in charge of MacArthur’s psychological warfare program against Japan. Fellers’s major contribution to the American e√orts against Japan was in persuading MacArthur of the value of using the Imperial Throne to induce a Japanese surrender and carry 52

The First Revisionists

out disarmament, demobilization, and reforms in Japan. After v-j Day, Fellers also gathered historical documents and other evidence for his ‘‘Report on Psychological Warfare in the Southwest Pacific Area, 1944–1945’’ (hereafter referred to as the pwb report), which he submitted to MacArthur on March 15, 1946. Fellers’s report was based on his Pacific War experience and his postwar investigations in Japan, which included use of important historical documents such as the diary of Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal Kido Koichi and the emperor’s recollection of the war years, known as ‘‘the Emperor’s monologue.’’ The pwb report became Fellers’s earliest presentation of the argument that between the time of Germany’s surrender and the first atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, Japan and the United States had missed opportunities to reach an early settlement of the Pacific War. After his retirement from the military in November 1946, Fellers became director of public a√airs for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (vfw), a rapidly growing organization with a membership of 1.4 million World War II veterans. Fellers acted as an adviser on international relations and general policy matters in the vfw, but he also functioned as the chief liaison for the vfw in dealing with the Army, Navy, Marines, and Coast Guard as well as with columnists and feature writers. He used his position at the vfw as a platform to circulate his views on the surrender. His ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender’’ first appeared in the vfw’s journal Foreign Service before almost instantly being reprinted in the vastly more popular Reader’s Digest, with its circulation of 17 million readers. A Japanese translation of the article was published in September 1947 for Reader’s Digest of Japan.

A Meeting of Minds In order to fully understand the ‘‘missed opportunity’’ thesis presented by Fellers, it is important to understand how this argument was constructed based on a shared experience among conservative government o≈cials such as Hoover, the former ambassador to Japan Joseph C. Grew, and Fellers in trying to induce a Japanese surrender. The events that Fellers would describe took place against the background of some of the most costly campaigns of the Pacific War. As Americans and Japanese fought bloody battles in Okinawa (April 1 to haruo iguchi

53

June 23), the American public and newspapers indicated growing concern as they learned from late May onward of Japanese kamikaze attacks on American ships and mounting American casualties in Okinawa.∂ At the same time, American bombers launched devastating incendiary raids over Japanese cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. As the tempo of the war increased, the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, placed the ultimate command of the final campaigns in the hands of his successor, Harry S Truman. This sudden change in leadership helped to bring Hoover back into the government policymaking circle. During a May 1 meeting attended by Stimson, Secretary of the Navy James V. Forrestal, and Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew, who was also serving as acting secretary of state, a consensus among these three men formed to bring in Hoover as an informal adviser to President Truman. Hoover had been a hero in orchestrating the American famine relief in Europe following World War I, and both Stimson, who had been Hoover’s secretary of state, and Grew, who had been appointed ambassador to Japan by the Hoover administration, agreed with Forrestal that the U.S. government needed the former president for such a project as war was coming to an end in Europe. Forrestal had been opposing the approach advocated by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to create a pastoral Germany. Instead, Forrestal argued for the need to dismantle Germany’s war machine but retain its industrial capability. He treated the issue of Japan’s postwar economic recovery in the same manner. He was already concerned about the spread of Soviet Communism in the postwar era and he wanted to use Germany and Japan in containing the Soviet expansion. Thinking about the postwar balance of power led Forrestal to ask how the United States could achieve an early surrender of Japan.∑ The move toward de facto modification of unconditional surrender had begun on May 8, when President Truman in a White House press conference not only announced Allied victory over Germany but also called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese military, a surrender that he stated did not mean the enslavement of the Japanese race.∏ On the morning of May 28—three days after a massive air raid over Tokyo (May 24–25) which also destroyed part of the Imperial Palace, and three days before President Truman’s scheduled major speech to Congress on May 31 on the progress of the war—Truman and Hoover had an hour-long meeting, during which Hoover advised Truman not 54

The First Revisionists

only on famine relief in war-ravaged areas but also on how to deal with Japan. Truman’s request for Hoover’s advice had been made on the recommendation of Secretary of War Stimson. Before meeting the president, Hoover had told Stimson in mid-May that the United States should seek ways to negotiate peace with Japan without having to land on Japan’s main islands. Hoover stated that the continuation of the war in Asia would come at the expense of half a million to a million American lives and benefit only the territorial ambitions of the Soviet Union, which had announced in April that it would not renew its neutrality pact with Japan, expiring in April 1946. Hoover considered the new Japanese prime minister, Suzuki Kantaro, who was appointed on April 7, a moderate, and he had thought all along that the Japanese emperor was a reasonable man. Like Forrestal, Stimson, Grew, and Hoover agreed that although the military industries of Japan and Germany had to be destroyed, other industries were vital to the recovery of the world economy.π Hoover reiterated these points to Truman and suggested an early peace with Japan, a possibility that he thought had a slight chance of succeeding based on a joint declaration with Britain and, if possible, China. Although wishing to maintain peaceful relations with the Soviet Union, Hoover did not feel the need for the Soviets to be a party in his proposed declaration because they were not at war with Japan. Hoover wanted the United States to prevent a Soviet penetration into the Far East and told Truman that the Russians would declare war on Japan only at the very last moment, which would mean their expansion in the Far East would occur after the United States had sacrificed half a million to a million American lives if fighting continued to the bitter end. Hoover also suggested to Truman that a joint declaration should indicate that although the Japanese-occupied territories in China, including Manchuria, should be restored to China, Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) should be placed under a Japanese trusteeship. Hoover believed that the Koreans and Formosans were incapable of governing themselves. At the same time, he praised Japanese civilian leaders, ‘‘who are liberal-minded, who have in certain periods governed Japan and in these periods they gave full cooperation in [sic ] peaceful forces of the world.’’ He believed that ‘‘the only hope of stable and progressive government’’ in Japan was to have ‘‘this group’’ restored to power. Hoover believed that in the postsurrender period Japan should rely haruo iguchi

55

on the liberal-minded ‘‘large middle class . . . which was the product of industrialization’’ because they had previously governed Japan. The group he had identified as ‘‘middle class’’ would be more accurately described as the internationally minded political conservatives who composed Japan’s prewar ruling class. Hoover thought they were ‘‘the only hope of stable and progressive government’’ since this should ‘‘save [America] the impossible task of setting up a military or civil government in Japan with all its dangers of revolutions and conflicts with our Allies.’’ Based on his conversations with Truman on May 28, Hoover, at the request of the president, submitted four memoranda two days later. The fourth of these was a ‘‘Memorandum on Ending the Japanese War.’’ In it, Hoover stated that his proposed American declaration ‘‘should . . . insist upon the unconditional surrender of ’’ the entire Japanese military. He also cited the appointment of Suzuki Kantaro as prime minister and the Japanese desire to preserve the Imperial Throne as factors favorable to Japanese acceptance of the declaration. During his conversation with Truman, Hoover had urged the president to indicate to the Japanese that the Allies did not intend to destroy their form of government, a recommendation that was included in Hoover’s May 30 memorandum to Truman. Hoover’s vague recommendation regarding the future of the Japanese government would subsequently be transformed by Fellers into a categorical statement on the emperor.∫ Hoover’s conservatism led him to favor policies toward Japan that would end the war quickly, lift wartime economic regulations in the United States, and limit American military responsibilities in the postwar occupation. Fellers, who had been in relatively close touch with Hoover since 1939, favored the approach argued by Hoover and Grew to achieving an early peace with Japan.Ω Fellers and Hoover had long shared similar views on the conduct of American foreign policy and military strategy. Before the war, Fellers had suggested to Hoover that the famed aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and MacArthur ought to lead the noninterventionist movement and the Republican presidential campaign in 1940 to avoid American entry into the European War, a suggestion with which Hoover fully concurred.∞≠ During the war, Fellers adopted an Asia-first outlook which was heavily influenced by his Anglophobia and support for MacArthur’s struggles to gain more military resources from an administration 56

The First Revisionists

focused on defeating Hitler first. In January 1943, Brigadier General Fellers was arguing in the O≈ce of Strategic Services that ‘‘plans must remain flexible so that the main e√ort could be shifted to the Orient in case the situation in Europe warrants such action.’’∞∞ Shortly after victory over the Japanese in Hollandia in New Guinea, an operation in which Fellers made a major contribution in the campaign’s strategy, MacArthur instructed Fellers to start the Psychological Warfare Branch (pwb). Soon afterward, Fellers advocated using the emperor to induce a Japanese surrender. He argued that the emperor was only technically responsible for the war and that the militarists were the real culprits. In ‘‘Answer to Japan,’’ a background report on Japanese psychology that Fellers published in July 1944, he stated that ‘‘there were liberal Japanese leaders who wanted no war.’’∞≤ In blaming General Tojo Hideki and the militarists for Japan’s aggression, Fellers argued that the emperor was only technically guilty for the war and opposed his punishment. Fellers’s pwb aimed to alienate the militarists from the Japanese people and the emperor. In the same report he stated, ‘‘At the proper time, we should permit the driving of a wedge between the Emperor and the people on the one hand, and the Tokyo gangster militarists on the other.’’∞≥ In the ‘‘Basic Military Plan for Psychological Warfare in the Southwest Pacific Area,’’ dated August 2, 1944, Fellers called for ways to discredit the militarists in the minds of the Japanese but avoid attacking the emperor. He also sought to attack the credibility of cabinet members and induce a cabinet overthrow and suicide among political leaders. His plan made the following analysis of the relations between the emperor and Japan’s political situation: The recent fall of the Tojo Government, which had lied about its victories, reveals that the government holds the military responsible for adversity. The Emperor, who can do no wrong, is blameless but deeply concerned. When successive disasters are dealt Japanese Arms, other governments also will fall. When the homeland itself is e√ectively bombed, the people and their Emperor may destroy the military class. Then it would be logical for Conservatives to take over the Government. At the proper time, a peace on Allied terms can properly be made which, with Imperial sanction, will be acceptable [to the Japanese].∞∂

While this observation about the emperor and his people overthrowing the military was too optimistic, it implied the utility of the haruo iguchi

57

Imperial Throne to bring about an end to the war between Japan and the Allies. According to Fellers, this plan was endorsed by the pwb in the War Department without any change.∞∑ In March 1945 the pwb prepared to target the Japanese homeland for its psychological war e√ort. ‘‘The Basic Military Plan for Psychological Warfare against Japan’’ (dated March 29, 1945) was approved by General MacArthur on March 30, 1945. This plan, and its elaborated version dated April 12 that focused on implementation, described steps to be taken during the American campaign in the Philippines. Fellers continued to pursue the guidelines set in the July 1944 and August 1944 reports: ignore the emperor, concentrate on attacking the militarists, emphasize their responsibility for bringing Japan military disasters, and encourage the people to overthrow the militarists. Undoubtedly because Fellers noticed the change in the Japanese cabinet to a more moderate character headed by Suzuki Kantaro, the new plan did not seek ways to encourage the toppling of the cabinet and suicides of cabinet ministers.∞∏ Like Hoover, Fellers was very concerned about Soviet expansionism in postwar Asia. On March 28 Fellers wrote a ‘‘Memorandum for the Commander-in-Chief ’’ (MacArthur) concerning the relations between Japan and the Soviet Union. At a time when neither MacArthur nor anyone around him, including Fellers, was aware of the secret agreement that had been made at Yalta in February 1945 between Roosevelt and Stalin regarding the Soviet Union’s entrance in the war on Japan, Fellers already foresaw the likelihood of a Soviet entry into the war. ‘‘The day before the meeting of the United Nations Security Conference in San Francisco, 25 April 1945, is the day when Stalin must decide whether to renounce or renew his five-year neutrality pact with Japan,’’ Fellers predicted. ‘‘The pact terminates April 24, 1946. Rather than renew the pact, at a time he deems proper Stalin might declare war on Japan. Japan has long feared communism. After Japan’s impending collapse, it would be logical if Stalin insisted that a government friendly to him be established in Japan.’’∞π At the time Fellers wrote this memorandum, the Soviet Union was accelerating troop deployment in the Far East, and on April 5 it notified Japan that it would not renew the bilateral neutrality pact. After making this analysis, Fellers painted an optimistic picture of the ability of moderate political leaders in Japan and the Japanese 58

The First Revisionists

people to overcome military opposition to terminate the war, particularly when considering the possibility that ‘‘when the war in Germany ends, the likely participation of the U.S.S.R. in Pacific a√airs may force the peace group into quick action against the military.’’ He also continued to emphasize the need to retain the emperor and the Imperial Throne and pointed to the utility of imperial sanction to facilitate surrender: The realization of disaster is likely to dawn on the people during the period when the weight and intensity and frequency of our escorted land-based bomber attacks are at their peak. Whether or not the military clique will kill all opposition as it arises remains to be seen. The military will have a poor case. Key men are likely to commit hara-kiri. Eventually, opposition of the people to the military should succeed. [They will] throw themselves on the mercy of the United States. They feel that the American people might consider the act as an unconditional surrender. They are willing to withdraw from the areas they have conquered, would assist in and be delighted with the physical elimination of the military clique. They feel there is not enough American sentiment against the Emperor personally to justify continuation of the fight merely to overthrow his dynasty. Moreover, to overthrow the Emperor might entail the destruction of the bulk of the Japanese civil population and prolong the war. The peace group could also point out that Imperial sanction of their government would facilitate Japanese acceptance of a peace on American terms. (Italics mine)

After the war, Fellers concluded that imperial sanctions were instrumental in terminating war and disarming the Japanese forces. Remarkably, he was already thinking about using Japan as a bulwark against Communism when he wrote this March 28 memorandum, a line of thinking shared by Hoover: With the defeat of Japan and the establishment of governments in Asia friendly to the U.S.S.R., Japanese influence on the mainland will be negligible. Eventually it will be natural for Japan to look to the United States rather than Asia for leadership and trade. As a very long-range policy, it would be to our advantage if Japan turns to the United States and not to Asiatic countries. In this case, regardless of our position on the Asiatic mainland, we shall have a counter-reconnaissance screen of islands extending from Kamchatka to the Netherlands Indies which

haruo iguchi

59

looks to the United States for leadership and future commercial relations. . . . In our military and psychological warfare planning, the U.S.S.R. cannot be divorced from the Pacific war.∞∫

Fellers reiterated the points made in the March 1945 ‘‘Basic Military Plan for Psychological Warfare’’ at the Psychological Warfare Conference that he organized with MacArthur’s approval. This conference sought to create common objectives and policy for psychological warfare against Japan in areas under MacArthur’s jurisdiction. Held from May 7, the day of the German surrender, to May 8, the day Grew and Forrestal learned about the atomic bomb project and Truman made his press conference remark about unconditional surrender, the conference was attended by representatives from the major American commands in the Asia-Pacific Theaters. On the first day of the conference, Colonel H. V. White, assistant chief of sta√, g-2, Sixth Army, who was also a conference participant, issued ‘‘Interrogation Report No. 447,’’ with which Fellers undoubtedly was familiar. It noted, ‘‘It appears to us as if the Jushin [senior statesmen] and influential groups in Japan are gradually maneuvering themselves into position for ‘compromise’ or ‘graceful surrender’ ’’ and that ‘‘it would appear that a complete blockade of Japan, full preparation for an invasion, continued heavy bombings, and then, secret informal negotiations, should bring about a way to formal capitulation.’’∞Ω The authors of the report were ‘‘inclined towards the negative’’ regarding whether Japan would fight to the last, but only if unconditional surrender did not mean the end of the Imperial Throne. ‘‘Japan’s national structure is indissolubly bound up with the Throne, which has continued in one unbroken line for more than two thousand years,’’ continued the report. ‘‘The complete disintegration of Japan would signify the end of the Imperial House, an occurrence unimaginable to the majority of Japanese minds. Such being the case, any opening is made available for a graceful capitulation whereby the honor of the Throne may be upheld, it seems unlikely that fighting will continue to the bitter end.’’≤≠ The Manila Conference ended with Fellers’s final remarks that reflected the anti-Soviet and anti-Communist tone contained in his March 28 memorandum. He emphasized, ‘‘To present an American program to Japan and the Orient in the most e√ective manner possible represents a challenge of the highest order.’’ He expressed his belief that the United States was ‘‘the balance of power [in Europe] between

60

The First Revisionists

the U.S.S.R. and Britain,’’ but because America was ‘‘so far removed from Europe,’’ he doubted ‘‘if American influence can ever predominate there.’’ However, ‘‘in the Pacific should the U.S.S.R. enter the war, especially at a time when our medium bombing has reached its peak and a landing on the Japanese homeland is imminent, there is a chance that the Japanese may throw themselves on our mercy.’’ ‘‘It is the task of psychological warfare,’’ Fellers explained, ‘‘to prepare the Japanese civil population for this eventuality. Our dissemination of information to them must make it clear to the masses that it is their duty to save what is left of their country. If our campaign is intelligently handled, there is reason to believe we might shape the opinion of the Japanese public and thereby hasten the end of the war.’’≤∞ In mid-June Hoover received from Fellers a document entitled ‘‘Basic Military Plan for Psychological Warfare against Japan.’’ This contained the transcript of the Psychological Warfare Conference, including Fellers’s March 28 memorandum and other documents distributed there. Hoover acknowledged his receipt of the document and expressed his interest in the developing psychological warfare program in the Pacific.≤≤ At the same time, with American victory all but certain in Okinawa, another chance came to those policymakers wishing to modify unconditional surrender. When Forrestal, Stimson, and Grew met on June 12 to discuss Hoover’s memorandum to Truman, the three, who held the meeting at President Truman’s request, agreed with Hoover’s idea of indicating to the Japanese that unconditional surrender did not mean the destruction of the Imperial Throne. During the meeting Stimson told the other two men that such was the conclusion he and Army Chief of Sta√ General George C. Marshall had recently reached, as long as American strategic objectives could be achieved through the occupation of Japan.≤≥ On the following day, Grew used the Hoover memorandum as the basis for conveying to Truman his thoughts on preserving the Imperial Throne. In commenting on the memorandum, Grew stressed that ‘‘the non-molestation of the person of the present emperor and the preservation of the institution of the throne comprise irreducible Japanese terms.’’≤∂ After June 18, Secretary of War Stimson took the initiative to explore the idea of explicitly or implicitly allowing Japan to retain the Imperial Throne. But this idea, if made public, would have created a haruo iguchi

61

domestic political uproar, given the fact that a front-page article in the Washington Post on June 29 showed a Gallup poll in which only 7 percent of those surveyed favored sparing the Japanese emperor or using him as a puppet. In contrast, 33 percent wanted him executed, and 37 percent wanted him put on trial, given life imprisonment, or exiled. After James Byrnes became secretary of state on July 3, Grew tried to sell his idea to the new secretary. But the politically sensitive former senator supported the views of two assistant secretaries of state, Dean Acheson and Archibald MacLeish. Both served on the Secretary’s Sta√ Committee and had expressed their strong opposition to a draft statement on the retention of Emperor Hirohito and the Imperial Throne favored by Grew and submitted to Truman.≤∑ President Truman and Secretary of State Byrnes were reluctant to give an explicit allowance to preserve the Japanese Imperial Throne because of fear of domestic political backlash and the possibility that the Japanese might seek better terms for surrender. The successful detonation of the atomic bomb on July 16, about which they learned on the same day through Stimson, also undoubtedly made the president and secretary of state feel hopeful about using this weapon as an alternative to the scheduled invasion of Japan’s main islands, an invasion which would cost thousands of American lives.≤∏ Following further internal debate, the administration released a warning to Japan on July 26. The Potsdam Proclamation, as the warning was called, was issued by the governments of the United States, China, and Great Britain. Paragraph 13 warned that Japan would face ‘‘prompt and utter destruction’’ unless the Japanese government agreed to ‘‘the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces.’’ According to paragraph 12, the occupation of Japan would end ‘‘as soon as’’ the objectives of the occupation ‘‘have been accomplished and there has been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government ’’ (italics mine). Such objectives included disarmament of the Japanese military (paragraph 9), prosecution of war criminals (paragraph 10), and the removal of ‘‘all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people’’ and the establishment of ‘‘freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights’’ (paragraph 10).≤π The portion in italics in the earlier quote di√ered only slightly from Grew’s proposal of May 28, but the Declaration basically reflected his recommendation at that 62

The First Revisionists

time. In contrast, Stimson had proposed a more explicit assurance regarding the emperor. His version of paragraph 12 read, ‘‘This may include a constitutional monarchy under the present dynasty if the peace-loving nations can be convinced of the genuine determination of such a government to follow policies of peace which will render impossible the future development of aggressive militarism in Japan.’’≤∫ Stimson failed to gain approval for that specific promise, but he took some consolation in having changed the wording in paragraph 2 regarding the Allies’ willingness to prosecute the war against Japan until the latter’s unconditional surrender. Instead, the proclamation used the phrase ‘‘until she ceases to resist.’’ That suggested that unconditional surrender applied only to the military, as specified in paragraph 13, but remained silent on the issue of the unconditional surrender of the Japanese government.≤Ω The idea of explicitly allowing the retention of the Imperial Throne got stalled because of disagreements within the administration over assessing the internal political conditions in Japan. Intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages gave little indication that the military authorities in Tokyo were prepared to accept American terms. Indeed, military preparations on Kyushu revealed that Japan’s military leadership was planning to stake everything on a climactic battle on Japan’s southernmost home island. Under these circumstances, President Truman and Secretary of State Byrnes were as yet unwilling to make a promise to preserve the emperor at a time when polls showed that the overwhelming majority of Americans supported punishing Hirohito.≥≠ In the end, the Truman administration attempted to persuade the Japanese to surrender without giving explicit assurances on the fate of the emperor. When that e√ort failed, the United States unleashed its new weapons over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hoover reacted strongly to the use of atomic weapons. On August 8, after the first bomb was exploded, he told the Republican publicist John Callan O’Laughlin, ‘‘It revolts my soul. . . . The only di√erence between this [atomic bomb] and the use of poison gas is the fear of retaliation. We alone have the bomb.’’ After the war, Hoover must have found it particularly galling that his casualty estimate of half a million to a million lives was publicly used by Truman and Stimson as a rationale for dropping the bomb.≥∞ In contrast to Hoover’s gloom and disgust over the use of the atomic bomb, Fellers expressed his relief that the Pacific War was coming to an haruo iguchi

63

end. On August 12 he told his wife, ‘‘Well the Atomic bomb—Air power—and psychological warfare did the job. Of course after Mac licked them on land and Nimitz on the sea.’’ Fellers was already ignoring the Soviet entry as a contributing factor to Japan’s decision to surrender.≥≤

Revisionist in the Making The end of the war did not interfere with the developing relationship between Hoover and Fellers. The two men met when the former president visited Tokyo in early May 1946 as part of his global tour on famine relief requested by President Truman. MacArthur appointed Fellers, who had been reassigned as secretary general of the Allied Council on Japan, to work closely with Hoover while the former president was in Tokyo. Hoover stayed at the American Embassy, where Fellers also resided, and the two were together frequently.≥≥ According to Fellers, Hoover believed it was ‘‘essential . . . for the Americans to understand Japan thoroughly.’’ ‘‘If civilization is to survive . . . we must live together in harmony for the thousands of years to come, and . . . the hates and prejudices and misunderstandings of the recent war must be buried as promptly as is humanly possible.’’ Hoover acknowledged that American ‘‘hatred for Japan engendered by the war [wa]s still keen and fresh’’ and that it would be ‘‘some time yet before an unbiased presentation and evaluation of Japan can be made by the American people.’’ Nevertheless, he believed that ‘‘this [wa]s the time to collect the essential source material, so that it may be studied and evaluated and prepared for release to the American and Japanese public at the proper time.’’≥∂ Since last meeting Hoover in December 1945 in New York, Fellers had been helping him gather historical documents pertaining to Japanese military aggression beginning in the late 1920s. Fellers helped secure for Hoover the English translation of the two-volume memoir by former prime minister Konoye Fumimaro,≥∑ who had committed suicide on December 16, 1945. In addition, shortly after returning to the United States, Hoover received from Fellers the English translation of the extracts from the diary kept by the former top adviser to the emperor, Marquis Kido Koichi, lord keeper of the privy seal.≥∏ During his brief Japan trip, Hoover, in cooperation with the ghq, established 64

The First Revisionists

an o≈ce for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, a research institute he had founded right after World War I for his alma mater, to collect historical records on this subject.≥π Despite his attempts to sound like an objectively minded historian in his conversation with Fellers, Hoover remained very critical of how the war ended with Japan. During his tour of Japan, Hoover met General MacArthur, who had been the Army’s chief of sta√ during his presidency. He talked with MacArthur ‘‘alone for three hours on the evening of May 4th, for one hour on the evening of May 5th, and for one hour on the morning of the 6th.’’ The two men agreed that Japan should be made into a bulwark against the spread of Communism. They also reminisced about the Pacific War. MacArthur expressed his bitterness ‘‘about Roosevelt’s starvation of supplies to him at a time when the whole fate of the South Pacific and the Allies in Asia was at stake.’’ Hoover told the general about his May 30 memorandum to ‘‘Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished.’’ In hearing this remark, ‘‘MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria.’’ Hoover, who believed that President Roosevelt had deliberately provoked Japan so as to enter World War II, the so-called backdoor-towar thesis, declared ‘‘that the whole Japanese war was a madman’s desire to get into war.’’ According to Hoover’s records, MacArthur ‘‘agreed and also agreed that the financial sanctions in July 1941 were not only provocative but that Japan was bound to fight even if it were suicide unless they could be removed, as the sanctions carried every penalty of war except killing and destruction, and that no nation of dignity would take them for long.’’ MacArthur added ‘‘that Roosevelt could have made peace with Konoye in September 1941 and could have obtained all of the American objectives in the Pacific and the freedom of China and probably Manchuria.’’≥∫ While Hoover was in Tokyo, Fellers informed him about the emperor’s monologue, a document prepared by the emperor and his top aides, including the diplomat Terasaki Hidenari, whose wife, Gwen, was a relative of Fellers’s. Terasaki handed Fellers his translation of the monologue on May 3 after receiving authorization from the emperor and discussing the matter with Foreign Minister Yoshida Shigeru. The English version of the monologue is only a part of the Japanese version and does not include the period from after the outbreak of war in the haruo iguchi

65

Pacific to the Japanese surrender. According to Fellers, ‘‘Hoover was tremendously gratified . . . [to know] that information from the Emperor, explaining his position during the war and in forcing the peace, [wa]s being prepared.’’ On the other hand, ‘‘Because of American bitterness,’’ Hoover believed ‘‘that material from the Emperor would not be as e√ective now as a little later.’’ Nonetheless, ‘‘he would use it . . . the moment an emergency justified.’’ The ‘‘emergency’’ Hoover was referring to was most likely the possibility that the emperor might be summoned to appear in the war crimes tribunal which began on May 3.≥Ω Hoover told Fellers, ‘‘If former Premier Suzuki kept a diary, it would perhaps be among the most valuable of all documents’’ because ‘‘the appointment of Suzuki . . . was [the] Emperor’s signal to the United States that he was seeking peace.’’∂≠ On the day of his departure, Hoover told Fellers, ‘‘Go call on Suzuki for me—I have not the time—and tell him that I think his appointment was a signal the Emperor was trying to surrender.’’ When Fellers visited Suzuki with an interpreter and told him ‘‘what Mr. Hoover said, he jumped to his feet and started pacing the floor. ‘It was a signal, and we never knew why we didn’t hear from the United States on this thing.’ He repeated it was a signal!’’∂∞ During his stay in Tokyo, Hoover also told Fellers of his May 28 meeting with Truman and his May 30 memorandum to the president. According to Fellers: Mr. Hoover suggested that the President should make a public speech defining specifically the term unconditional surrender, and explaining that the United States had no intent to enslave the Japanese or interfere with their government so long as it represented a free expression of the people’s will, removed for all time the militarists and eliminated obstacles to democratic processes. Mr. Truman agreed, took notes as Mr. Hoover talked, and said he would ask the State Department to prepare a speech along the line indicated. But this speech was never made. Mr. Hoover gave the clear impression that it might easily have been Soviet influence in the State Department which insisted that the war continue until the USSR entered, and could have a hand in the peace and postwar settlement.∂≤

Hoover’s belief that Soviet agents in the State Department prevented a negotiated surrender would become a staple of conservative criticisms of the Truman administration in the immediate postwar period. 66

The First Revisionists

Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender The Fellers-Hoover project to create a documentary record of decision making at the end of the war shifted gears with the publication of Stimson’s Harper’s essay in early 1947. In mid-February Fellers contacted Paul Palmer, an editor at Reader’s Digest and an acquaintance of Fellers’s since the early 1940s. Fellers told Palmer that Emperor Hirohito had been trying to steer Japan toward surrender since February 1945. After meeting with Palmer and other Reader’s Digest editors on February 28, Palmer informed Fellers that the magazine was interested in his story. Fellers immediately began working on an essay entitled ‘‘Japan’s Decision to Surrender,’’ a draft that seems to have been attached to a letter that he sent to Palmer on March 8. (I hereafter refer to this as Fellers’s March draft.) On April 30 Palmer sent a letter to Fellers that enclosed in it two copies of the galley proofs of Fellers’s essay, one for Fellers to make last-minute changes and the other for the vfw to print in their Foreign Service magazine. From the moment Fellers hatched his idea of writing an argument against Stimson’s essay he thought of consulting with former president Hoover. In his letter to Hoover dated January 29, Fellers expressed his belief that Stimson’s essay and President Truman’s praise of it reflected their willingness to justify the dropping of the atomic bomb on noncombatants. Fellers then indicated to Hoover that he was contemplating writing against Stimson’s essay based on his ‘‘complete data’’ on Japanese endeavors to sue for peace as early as February 1945. Hoover responded to Fellers in a letter dated March 8 and received Fellers’s March draft in a letter dated March 10. In that letter Fellers repeated his belief that Truman’s praise of the Stimson essay meant that the essay was politically motivated. Fellers also speculated that Stimson’s article was published as a preemptive strike against the surging opinion around the country, particularly in churches, that the use of the atomic bomb was a war crime, a social current that could have a negative impact on Truman’s reelection bid in 1948. In writing this letter, Fellers asked Hoover whether he should publish this article and whether Reader’s Digest was the most appropriate magazine for publication. Hoover, in his March 12 letter to Fellers, indicated his approval. Furthermore, he advised Fellers that he might take a look at Navy Captain Elias Zacharias’s November 17, 1945, Saturday Evening Post article in which Zacharias also speculated on the lost chance for an haruo iguchi

67

early surrender. Hoover also advised Fellers that he could make ‘‘it perfectly plain that the Japanese were prepared to negotiate all the way from February 1945 on these di√erent occasions up to and before the time the atomic bombs were dropped; that if such leads had been followed up, there would have been no occasion to drop the bombs.’’∂≥ Fellers dutifully incorporated these suggestions into his article. On March 13 and 25 Fellers visited Hoover. During the first meeting it appears that Fellers discussed his interest in serving on the Republican National Committee. As the result of his interest in getting involved in the committee, he changed the content of his essay on the Japanese surrender into a political treatise rather than an essay on the history of the process leading to the Japanese surrender.∂∂ On May 3 Fellers visited Hoover at his residence in New York City, the Waldorf Astoria. Hoover suggested to Fellers that he incorporate into his essay Hoover’s advice to President Truman during their meeting on May 28, 1945, and the subsequent memorandum that Hoover submitted to Truman on May 30. Immediately after visiting Hoover, Fellers sent Reader’s Digest the revised version of his essay and the latter sent back the final galley on May 9. A copy of this was also sent to Japan. On May 12 Fellers told the chief editor of Reader’s Digest, Kenneth Payne, that although he wrote on page 2 of his essay that the Soviet ambassador to Japan, Jacob Malik, made harsh demands on Japan, Fellers did not have the evidence to back this argument. He stated, however, that he was sure about the fact that Malik had demanded such things as the withdrawal of Japanese fishing zones from the northern sea adjacent to the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Japanese troops from Manchuria. Fellers was clearly mistaken here. In actuality, it was the Japanese government that tried to entice Soviet interest in mediating between Japan and the Allies. Historical records show that Fellers misunderstood these facts, including the fact that Japan did not mention the withdrawal of troops from Manchuria, but instead proposed the creation of a neutral zone in Manchuria. Unaware of such mistakes, Fellers expressed his confidence that his essay would have a significant impact on American readers, most of whom believed that the atomic bombs had ended the war with Japan.∂∑ On May 9, Fellers sent a copy of his final draft to J. Woodall Greene, his trusted former subordinate in the Psychological Warfare

68

The First Revisionists

Branch and now a central member of the occupation’s Civil Information and Education section (cie), a department in charge of censorship in the ghq in Japan. Fellers asked Greene to show the article at his discretion to Terasaki Hidenari, the former diplomat and a translator of the emperor, as well as other Japanese whom Greene considered important. Greene replied that he had just obtained a copy of Stimson’s article (probably the translated version) and was now waiting for approval for the publication of Fellers’s essay.∂∏ Although the precise date is unknown, the cie approved the publication of Fellers’s article, which was featured in the September edition of Reader’s Digest Japan. Terasaki obtained Fellers’s article by September 3 from Greene. He subsequently presented its main points to Emperor Hirohito on September 12.∂π On September 19 Terasaki described to Greene his meeting with the emperor. Greene, in turn, reported this information to Fellers. Although it is unclear the extent to which Terasaki accurately presented the Fellers article to Emperor Hirohito, it is most likely that he gave a detailed description of it. According to Greene, the emperor stated that Fellers’s description of Japan’s negotiations with the Soviet Union was substantially accurate; that the important facts presented in the article were for the most part in accordance with the emperor’s memory of them; and that although Fellers overdramatized the parts describing the emperor’s decision to surrender during the meetings on August 10 and 14, he did not substantially alter the overall picture of those meetings. Greene informed Fellers that he had been told by Terasaki that the emperor was going to write a letter expressing his appreciation, but it is doubtful Fellers received such a letter.∂∫ Terasaki’s letter dated December 19, 1947, was sent in lieu of it; in this letter Terasaki informed Fellers that the emperor expressed his deep appreciation for what Fellers had done for him.∂Ω A quick reading of the article makes clear why the emperor would be gratified. ‘‘As titular leader of Japan, of course, the Emperor cannot but share technically the war guilt of his leaders,’’ began a key passage. ‘‘Yet that does not lessen the high drama of a figurehead Emperor who dared face down his own fanatic militarists, usurp their power, and compel them by sheer strength of will to surrender a defeated country to a superior enemy.’’∑≠ Not surprisingly, Hoover was also pleased with the Fellers article.∑∞ Regarding the former president’s role, Fellers had the following to say:

haruo iguchi

69

In May, the highest circles in Washington were told by former President Hoover that Suzuki’s appointment meant the Japanese were ready to capitulate, and in all probability, if a trial balloon were sent up which gave them only two concessions—the preservation of the Emperor and an ultimate liberal government of their own selection—they would submit to every other requirement. Mr. Hoover pointed out also that this gave us the opportunity to make a quick peace without Russian complication, as Russia was not at war with Japan. I do not know what steps the United States took to exploit this favorable opportunity from May to July. Obviously, however, the atomic bomb neither induced the Emperor’s decision to surrender nor had any e√ect on the ultimate outcome of the war. (Italics mine)∑≤

Fellers’s article portrayed the emperor as being far more decisive than the record available to Fellers would support. Hoover received similar treatment. The passage quoted above presents Hoover as saying that he advised Truman to o√er the Japanese two concessions: that they could keep the emperor and that they could create a liberal government of their own choosing. Hoover’s recommendation on the form of government in Japan had been less specific than Fellers’s article implied. Fellers made it appear that a liberal government in Japan was a foregone conclusion and the only concession would be in allowing the Japanese to decide its composition. In his conversations with the president and his memorandum to Truman, which Fellers saw, Hoover’s thoughts about a future Japanese government were vague. When Hoover advised Truman he treated the creation of a liberal government as something that was likely to emerge following the surrender. Hoover’s assumption was that Japan’s ‘‘liberal’’ or ‘‘moderate’’ leaders (he used both terms) would choose such a government. More striking, however, was Fellers’s omission of the territorial concessions Hoover was willing to make regarding Japanese retention of Korea and Formosa by means of trusteeships. This oversight appears deliberate. One of the biggest obstacles that confronted American advocates of a negotiated surrender during the final months of the war was that they would be branded appeasers. In trying to make the case for Hoover’s prescience, Fellers also had to avoid creating the impression that the former president was willing to conciliate Japan. He accomplished his goal by highlighting what he regarded as Hoover’s insight into the dynamics of the Japanese government and avoiding

70

The First Revisionists

any mention of the former president’s readiness to sacrifice Korea and Formosa. When comparing ‘‘Japan’s Decision to Surrender’’ (March draft) and the final version of ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender’’ that was published in Reader’s Digest, one is struck by their di√erences. The title is just the most obvious one. The March draft has fewer distortions and exaggerations than the final version, which portrays the emperor as more decisive in his leadership and the Soviet Union as more treacherous than warranted by historical evidence. Regarding the emperor’s leadership, the Reader’s Digest article stated the following: The Emperor’s personal decision to surrender and his first attempt to obtain Russian mediation trace back to February 14, 1945, after General MacArthur’s forces entered Manila, nearly six months before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. He summoned Prince Konoye— thrice premier of Japan and relatively pacifistic—to a palace conference. Pacing the floor and obviously shaken, Hirohito declared bluntly that he believed defeat to be unavoidable but that the militarists wanted to fight on. They argued that the Allied demand for unconditional surrender could only mean the abolition of the Emperor system. Konoye informed Hirohito that he did not believe America would continue fighting merely to destroy the Emperor’s dynasty. Hirohito assented, but said that with the militarists controlling all means of communication it would be impossible to deal directly with the United States. The Emperor particularly wanted to know if Konoye would assist him in surrender negotiations. Konoye readily agreed. Immediately Hirohito began to press his militarists with extraordinary vigor. The Emperor pointed out that they had lied consistently about the war’s progress. . . . Hirohito told them he was ordering Foreign Minister Hirota to open uno≈cial peace conversations through the Russian Embassy in Tokyo. The militarists . . . reluctantly agreed, in the hope that Russian mediation would prevent Soviet attack in Manchuria. Malik, Soviet Ambassador in Tokyo, proved strangely cool to Hirota and dragged out the conversation for months.∑≥

There are numerous errors in detail in Fellers’s account. The accumulated e√ect of these is to greatly misrepresent the emperor’s role in the surrender. For our purposes, however, it is necessary only to touch on the most obvious. There is no historical evidence, including haruo iguchi

71

the Konoye memoir, that supports Fellers’s contention that the emperor initiated negotiations through the Soviet Union in February 1945. That e√ort did not begin until June, when Foreign Minister Togo, not the emperor, told Hirota Koki to start negotiating with the Soviet Union. Surprisingly, Fellers got the timing of the Japanese démarche right in the March draft, but changed it in the article so that he had the emperor seeking Soviet mediation in February rather than June. Given that Hoover had instructed Fellers to highlight the Japanese e√ort to surrender in February 1945, it appears that Fellers’s reference to Japan seeking the Soviet Union’s mediation at that time was no mere mistake but a deliberate distortion.∑∂ ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender’’ also claims that Hirohito believed the United States intended to allow the continuation of the Imperial Throne.∑∑ There is no evidence that the emperor believed any such thing. Moreover, in order to make that claim, Fellers had to alter his March draft. He described Konoye as calling for negotiating peace with the Allies and arguing that if peace were achieved promptly the Allies would not abolish the emperor system. The emperor was shown replying to Konoye that the Army chief of sta√ had told him that the Allies’ demand for unconditional surrender meant the abolition of the emperor system. That exchange was altered in the final article to make it look as though Hirohito agreed with Konoye that the Allies wanted to preserve the imperial institution. There is also no record that supports the argument in the Fellers article that the emperor told Konoye during their February meeting that direct negotiation with the United States was impossible because the military controlled all means of communication and would oppose negotiations with the enemy. Readers should note that in February 1945 the emperor was feeling very uneasy about the war. The complete text of the emperor’s monologue shows that he lost hope of Japan’s victory in its war against the Allies in September 1943, when MacArthur’s forces overran Japanese troops in the Stanley Mountains of New Guinea, but he was reluctant to push for a settlement before Germany surrendered because of the provision in the Axis Pact that prohibited the signatories from unilaterally seeking peace. Later, in 1945, the emperor wanted to wait and see how the battle of Okinawa would end. Like the military he hoped that Japan might score a major victory. He thought Japan’s seeking peace would depend on that battle. 72

The First Revisionists

Perhaps the most glaring problem in ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender’’ concerned Fellers’s complete omission of the Japanese government’s response to the Potsdam Declaration. After receiving the Declaration, Premier Suzuki, awaiting a reply from the Soviet Union about the possibility of the latter’s mediation, made his famous press conference remark that it was ‘‘unworthy of public notice,’’ a remark that he meant as ‘‘No comment’’ but that was interpreted by those who supported the dropping of the atomic bombs as a justification for that decision. Stimson’s Harper’s article presented such a rationale by stating, ‘‘On July 28 the Premier of Japan, Suzuki, rejected the Potsdam ultimatum by announcing that it was ‘unworthy of public notice.’ ’’∑∏ Fellers did not point to this fact in his pwb report, the March draft, or the Reader’s Digest article. Such an omission can be explained by the fact that he wanted to avoid providing argumentative advantage to those who believed that the atomic bombs and Soviet entry into war were necessary in ending the war. In omitting any mention of Suzuki’s response to the Potsdam Declaration, Fellers ignored a key point in Stimson’s justification for the use of the bombs. But he also had to disregard or completely forget what had been his own reaction when he heard Suzuki’s comments in July 1945. When the Potsdam Declaration was announced, Fellers was initially optimistic that Japan would accept the pro√ered terms. His optimism flagged, however, after Suzuki’s reply and he became anxious about the failure of the Japanese to respond favorably.∑π As part of his e√ort to show that the emperor’s struggle to surrender began in February 1945, Fellers needed to show that the conventional military campaign against Japan had convinced Hirohito that further resistance would serve no purpose. This argument served a double purpose for Fellers in that it also allowed him to trumpet the role of conventional air power in Japan’s defeat. Like many prewar isolationists, Fellers was an air power advocate.∑∫ After the war his personal convictions and professional responsibilities overlapped. One of the main goals of the vfw in lobbying Congress and influencing American public opinion was to win support for the creation of an Air Force independent from the Army and the Navy. It will be recalled that at the time of the Japanese surrender, Fellers had written to his wife that he believed the combination of campaigns by the Army and the Navy, the atomic bomb, air power, and psychological warfare helped to achieve the defeat of Japan. He became less magharuo iguchi

73

nanimous when he began writing his article. In both the March draft and the article, he completely ignored the contribution of the Navy. Such a glaring omission was probably a legacy of the bitter Army–Navy rivalry in the Pacific that had continued right up to the surrender.∑Ω Fellers’s claim that ‘‘the atomic bomb neither induced the Emperor’s decision to surrender nor had any e√ect on the ultimate outcome of the war’’∏≠ was similar to the conclusion reached by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which had been written and submitted to the president in spring 1946 by Paul Nitze, who, along with the Survey team, had conducted research in Japan from October to December 1945. As historians have recently shown, Nitze, like Fellers, was interested in securing an independent future for the Army Air Force.∏∞

Conclusion The mistakes, overdramatizations, exaggerations, and misrepresentations in ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender’’ partly have to do with the fact that historical documents in 1945–1946 were less available for scrutiny than in later years. But given the stark contrast of the content in comparison with the pwb report and the March draft of the Reader’s Digest article, these characteristics of the article reflect not only Fellers’s and Hoover’s opinions based on their participation in the policy debates on modifying the unconditional surrender—a ‘‘missed opportunity’’ to end the Pacific War before the use of atomic weapons and the Soviet entry into the Pacific War—but also their political motives. Shortly after writing this article, Fellers resigned from the vfw and began working as assistant to the chairman of the Republican National Committee, B. Carroll Reece, a friend of his from the war years. Fellers continued in this job until 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower, with whom he had antagonistic relations since their Philippine years in the late 1930s, won the Republican nomination over Robert Taft, whom both Fellers and Hoover supported.∏≤ Fellers’s other political motives in writing his essay were to encourage anti-Communism in the United States and Japan and provide historical support for the decision to not prosecute the emperor. The latter, it was hoped, would confirm for the American public MacArthur’s wisdom in sparing the emperor and thereby pave the way for MacArthur to run for president after the signing of the peace treaty 74

The First Revisionists

with Japan, an issue which was being hotly debated in the United States and Japan at the time his article was published. That aspiration remained unfulfilled, however. By spring 1948 it was apparent that the peace treaty had to be postponed because of the rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the developments in the Chinese civil war in favor of the Communists, and the greater urgency American policymakers assigned to the task of Japanese economic recovery. As problems in Asia mounted, the Truman administration delayed action on restoring full sovereignty to the government in Tokyo. ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender’’ made Fellers and Hoover among the first atomic bomb revisionists. But they were not the only Americans to criticize in print their government’s use of the atomic bomb. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr believed that the atomic bombs were unnecessary to induce Japan’s surrender because a surrender could have been achieved by clearly indicating to the Japanese a willingness to spare the emperor.∏≥ Alexander Leighton, a member of the Strategic Bombing Survey, argued that the U.S. government was aware of the low state of morale in Japan and questioned the claim Stimson made in his article that the U.S. government did not take seriously Japan’s wish to have the Soviet Union mediate for peace because Japan had then not showed any signs of weakness. Leighton argued that even though the Japanese proposal for peace through the Soviet Union did not include troop withdrawal from important areas occupied by Japan, any negotiation starts with each side trying to make maximum demands.∏∂ As will be discussed elsewhere in this volume, some African American writers also condemned the use of the bomb, calling it an act of racist savagery. The Fellers-Hoover critique di√ered from these protests in that it was informed by an explicitly conservative agenda. For Hoover and Fellers the complicating factor of Soviet entry into the war as well as anxieties about the economic strain entailed in a lengthy occupation led them to support a negotiated settlement and a quick end to the war. Hoover and Fellers’s prewar isolationism predisposed them to view the war with Japan as the outcome of a rash policy, pursued, as Hoover put it, by a ‘‘madman.’’ Fellers shared Hoover’s antagonism toward FDR and his policies, including unconditional surrender. It is doubtful he could have survived as an aide to MacArthur if he did not. Although Fellers claimed two years after the publication of his haruo iguchi

75

article that Reader’s Digest informed him that his article had received ‘‘universally favorable’’ responses—responses with more ‘‘voluminous’’ comments than any other article the magazine had published in recent years—the Fellers papers contain only three reactions. One came from a public relations director of the Aircraft Industries Association who praised Fellers’s article and commented, ‘‘I think the Digest might well have considered adding a little slug which said ‘remember, Americans as well as Japanese died while the Russians were pulling stall.’ ’’ The other reaction was forwarded to Fellers from the Public Information Division in the War Department, which had received a protest to the article from a minister in Texas; he wanted the Department to correct an editorial comment in the September 17, 1947, issue of Christian Century which questioned the validity of the ‘‘ ‘bombs saved lives’ argument.’’ The Department decided to act neutrally and informed the minister that it suggested Fellers correspond directly with him, a correspondence that seems not to have occurred.∏∑ We do not know whether Truman and Stimson read the Fellers article. However, Fellers and Hoover probably felt a growing sense of vindication when Henry Stimson published his memoir the year after publication of ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender.’’ Joseph Grew called attention to the key passage in a letter to his former colleague Eugene Dooman: ‘‘You will be interested in Stimson’s book on active service . . . especially the passage on page 629.’’ He then quoted Stimson: ‘‘It was not the American responsibility to throw in the sponge for the Japanese; that was one thing they must do for themselves. Only on the question of the Emperor did Stimson take, in 1945, a conciliatory view; only on this question did he later believe that history might find that the United States, by its delay in stating its position, had prolonged the war. (The underlining is mine: JCG.)’’∏∏ It was a promising start. But in the end, Fellers and Hoover had to content themselves with this small victory. For the most part, the American public remained convinced that the atomic bombs had been necessary to end the war. Perhaps, as Hoover predicted, the memories of the recent conflict remained too fresh and too raw for most Americans to accept the Fellers-Hoover version of history. It was easier to feel magnanimous toward a defeated enemy—indeed, many Americans would have seen that as a national trait—than it was to think that the American government, and by extension the American public, was responsible for prolonging the war unnecessarily. 76

The First Revisionists

A larger percentage of Americans did eventually show greater readiness to believe that Communists in the State Department had sabotaged American East Asian policy. But few seemed aware of Hoover’s assertion that the bombs would have been unnecessary had it not been for the alleged machinations of Kremlin agents in the State Department who, by deliberately prolonging the war, gave the Russians time to enter.∏π Having failed to persuade Americans that the bombs were unnecessary, Hoover and Fellers remained on the margins of even their own party as it adopted an internationalist foreign policy and chose Thomas Dewey and then Dwight Eisenhower to lead them. It was not until 1965, a year after Hoover’s death, that a scholarly treatise would pick up the threads of the Hoover-Fellers argument and assert that the Americans had deliberately rejected negotiations with Japan in order to prolong the war. Unlike Hoover and Fellers, however, Gar Alperowitz argued that the war had been prolonged by nascent cold warriors bent on making a combat demonstration of the atomic bomb in order to intimidate the Soviets. One wonders what Hoover would have made of that argument. In the furor that followed, few of Alperowitz’s critics or supporters seemed able to recall that unconditional surrender had been the shibboleth of liberals. Fewer still seemed to have any inkling why a small group of conservatives had made it their cause to tell the world of ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender.’’

Notes 1 Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 458. 2 Fellers to Paul Palmer, editor of Reader’s Digest, 17 February 1947, Bonner Fellers Papers (hereafter rg 44a), Box 4, Folder 2, MacArthur Memorial Library (hereafter mml), Norfolk, Virginia; Henry L. Stimson, ‘‘The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,’’ Harper’s, February 1947, 97–107. 3 With regard to the process leading to the publication of Stimson’s Harper’s article, see the following: James G. Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 292–300; Barton Bernstein, ‘‘Seizing the Contested Terrain of Early Postwar Nuclear History: Stimson, Conant, and Their Allies Explain the Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,’’ Diplomatic

haruo iguchi

77

History 17 (winter 1993): 35–72. With regard to the process leading to Fellers’s writing of his pwb report, see Haruo Iguchi, ‘‘Bonner Fellers and U.S.-Japan Relations, June 1945–June 1946,’’ Journal of American and Canadian Studies 20 (2002): 73–80. 4 John D. Chappell, Before the Bomb: How America Approached the End of the Pacific War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), chapter 5. 5 Henry L. Stimson Diary, 8 May 1945, Henry Lewis Stimson Papers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library; William R. Castle Jr. Diary, 9 March and 29 May 1945, Vol. 49, William Richards Castle Diaries, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Castle to Hoover, 2 May and 2 June 1945, ‘‘Castle, William R.,’’ Hoover to Stimson, 15 May 1945, ‘‘Stimson, Henry L., Correspondence 1945–1950,’’ Box 223, Post-Presidential Individual File (hereafter ppi), Herbert C. Hoover Papers, Herbert C. Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa; ‘‘Miscellaneous,’’ Box 1, ‘‘Atomic Bomb File,’’ Box 2, Eugene Dooman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University; Timothy Walch and Dwight M. Miller, eds., Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt: A Documentary History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 203–204; Timothy Walch and Dwight M. Miller, eds., Herbert Hoover and Harry S. Truman: A Documentary History (Worland: Wyoming High Plains Publishing, 1992), 30–36; Richard Norton Smith, Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover (Worland: Wyoming High Plains Publishing, 1984), 321, 342–348; Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking Press, 1951), 52–53, 66; Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 208; Waldo Heinrichs, American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 154, 364– 380. 6 Iokibe Makoto, Beikoku no Nihon Senryo Seisaku: Sengo Nihon no Sekkeizu Vol. II (American Policy of Japanese Occupation) (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1985), 148–149. 7 Hoover to Stimson, 15 May 1945, Henry L. Stimson Papers. 8 Walch and Miller, Hoover and Truman, 41–42, 50–53. Hoover’s casualty estimate is mentioned on page 52 of this book and is part of his May 30 memorandum to the president. His proposal di√ered from commonly shared positions taken by Truman, Stimson, Forrestal, and Grew in that (1) Hoover emphasized the need for achieving peace with Japan before the Russian intervention on Japan by making a joint declaration with the United Kingdom, and if possible, China; (2) he believed Taiwan and Korea should continue to be part of Japan even after the Japanese surrender because they were incapable of governing themselves; and (3) he believed

78

The First Revisionists

the longer the war with Japan, the greater the possibility of American postwar economic stagnation and hence shrinking American ability to supply resources for postwar world recovery. Hoover’s recommendations on the emperor and establishing a liberal government were not clearly stated in the historical records, which were not academically discovered until the late 1970s, when Joan Ho√ Wilson introduced this episode in her article ‘‘Herbert Hoover’s Plan for Ending the Second World War,’’ International History Review 1 ( January 1979): 84–102. 9 Fellers’s early religious a≈liation may have aided his introduction to Hoover. Like Hoover, Fellers had been raised as a Quaker. He also attended a Quaker college in Indiana. 10 Fellers to Hoover, 20 September 1939, Hoover to Fellers, 22 September 1939, rg 44a, Box 3, Folder 1. 11 Fellers to John C. Wiley, ‘‘Notes on Strategic Problems for 1943,’’ 14 January 1943, ‘‘Wiley, John C., 1943,’’ Box 5, Fellers Papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 12 Annex 3, Answer to Japan, July 1944, 15; ‘‘Report on Psychological Warfare in the Southwest Pacific Area, 1944–45,’’ 15 March 1946 (hereafter pwb report), both in rg 4, United States Army Forces Pacific (usafpac), Box 56, mml. 13 Fellers opined about the emperor in the following way: As Emperor and acknowledged head of the state, Hirohito cannot side step war guilt. He is a part of, and must be considered an instigator of, the Pacific War. Both by tradition and necessity, he accepted the leadership of Tojo, who had complete control of the government. Possession of Emperor gave this fanatical leadership Imperial sanction to all acts of madness. . . . The militarists are responsible only to the Emperor, and the Emperor is without authority. Whether or not Pearl Harbor was against the Emperor’s will is of little consequence. Inescapably, he is responsible. Yet he would not have dared to stop it. . . . However, to dethrone or hang the Emperor would cause a tremendous and violent reaction from all Japanese. Hanging of the Emperor to them would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us. All would fight to die like ants. The position of the gangster militarists would be strengthened immeasurably. The war would be unduly prolonged; our losses heavier than otherwise would be necessary. . . . An independent Japanese army responsible only to the Emperor is a permanent menace to peace. But the mystic hold the Emperor has on his people and the Spiritual strength of the Shinto faith properly directed need not be dangerous. The Emperor can be made a force for good and peace provided Japan is defeated and the military clique destroyed.

haruo iguchi

79

For this and the quote in the main text, see Annex 3, Answer to Japan, July 1944, 19–23, pwb report, rg 4, usafpac, Box 56, mml. Page 17 of this report also blames Tojo for the Pearl Harbor attack. 14 Annex 4, Appendix ‘‘A,’’ 2, 6, and Appendix ‘‘E,’’ 3 (including the quote), pwb report, rg 4, usafpac, Box 56, mml. 15 Fellers to Colonel Sidney F. Mashbir, Coordinator, Allied Translation and Interpretation Services, 1 November 1944, ‘‘pwb O≈cial Correspondences,’’ Box 6, Fellers Papers, mml. In this letter, Fellers thanks Mashbir for his advice in writing the plan for psychological warfare against the Japanese homeland. See Fellers to Mashbir, 10 April 1945, ibid. 16 Annex 4 and Annex 6, pwb report, rg 4, usafpac, Box 56, mml. Pages 17 and 18 of this plan (dated April 12) reiterated and elaborated the aforementioned approach from the August 1944 plan. On the significance of Suzuki’s appointment, see Collation Section, pwb report, ‘‘Japanese Trends of Psychological Significance,’’ Report no. 10, 5 May 1945, p. 10, Box 14 , Bonner Fellers Papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 17 Annex 6, p. 22, pwb report, rg 4, usafpac, Box 56, mml. 18 Ibid. On Fellers’s impression about the usefulness of the Japanese emperor shortly after his arrival in Japan, see Iguchi, ‘‘Bonner Fellers and U.S.-Japan Relations,’’ 64. 19 ‘‘Interrogation Report No. 447,’’ p. 22, Box 14, Fellers Papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 20 Ibid., p. 31. 21 Annex 6, pp. 60–61, pwb report, rg 4, usafpac, Box 56, mml. 22 Fellers to Hoover, 3 June 1945, Hoover to Fellers, 14 June 1945, ‘‘Fellers, Bonner Correspondence, 1940–1950,’’ Box 57, ppi. 23 Minutes Meeting, Committee of Three, 12 June 1945, Folder 4, Box wd 1, Series 8, War Department, John J. McCloy Papers, Amherst College Archives, cited in Rudolf V. A. Janssens, What Future for Japan?: U. S. Wartime Planning for the Postwar Era, 1942–1945 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 293. 24 Walch and Miller, Hoover and Truman, 54–55. 25 At the time, Acheson was acting as a liaison with Congress. In the postwar years he admitted he had been wrong on this point in opposing Grew. Heinrichs, American Ambassador, 376–377; Nakamura Masanori, The Japanese Monarchy: Ambassador Joseph Grew and the Making of the Symbol Emperor System, 1931–1991 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 70– 71; Kyoko Takeda, Tennôkan no sôkoko: 1945 nen zengo (Debate over the emperor system throughout 1945) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1978), 214–215. With regard to Acheson’s comment on the Japanese emperor in the postwar years, see James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 106–107, 113–114.

80

The First Revisionists

26 Cordell Hull, in Grew to Byrnes, 16 July 1945, and reply, 17 July 1945, in Foreign Relations of the United States: Potsdam 2 (Washington: U. S. Government Printing O≈ce, 1960), 1267–1278; Heinrichs, American Ambassador, 377–378; Barton Bernstein, ‘‘Understanding the Atomic Bomb and the Japanese Surrender: Missed Opportunities, Little-Known Near Disasters, and Modern Memory,’’ in Michael Hogan ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51; Alperovitz, The Decision, 249. 27 Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Bomb: A Documentary History (Worland, Wyo.: High Plains Publishing, 1996), 40. 28 See Heinrichs, American Ambassador, 376; Nakamura, The Japanese Monarchy, 75. Nakamura is wrong to claim that he discovered the fact that Stimson rather than Grew wrote the draft Potsdam Declaration; Heinrichs had pointed this out years before. 29 Ferrell, Harry S. Trumann and the Bomb, 39; Iokibe, Beikoku no Nihon Senryo Seisaku, 198. 30 Gallicchio, The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Collapse of the Japanese Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 52–53. 31 Hoover to John Callan O’Laughlin, editor of the Army-Navy Journal, 8 August 1945, Box 47, John Callan O’Laughlin Papers, Library of Congress. In addition to the issues already mentioned about the impact on policymakers of Hoover’s May 30 memorandum, both Truman and Stimson took Hoover’s casualty estimate seriously; see D. M. Giangreco, ‘‘Casualty Projections for the U.S. Invasion of Japan, 1945–1946: Planning and Policy Implications,’’ Journal of Military History 61 ( July 1997): 541–543. Giangreco argues that in summer 1944 the American military came up with the casualty estimate of their soldiers in invading Japan’s home islands to possibly reach over a million, and this estimate did not change afterward; see 521–522, 535, 580–581. 32 rg 44a, Box 2, Folder 1, mml. Toward the end of the bloody Okinawa campaign MacArthur still thought Russian entry was necessary when Fellers noted on June 12 that MacArthur had ‘‘made it very clear to Marshall that it is of Paramount importance for Stalin to strike before we do.’’ On June 18, the day his commander of the Tenth Army in charge of the Okinawa campaign, Major General Simon Bolivar Buckner, was killed in action, MacArthur ‘‘urged Truman to induce Stalin to attack with Red Army well before our scheduled date for Olympic so that Japanese Army would have a major commitment prior to our landing.’’ See rg 44a, Box 5, Folder 27, mml. 33 ‘‘Oral History Interview with Bonner Fellers,’’ 23 June 1967, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, pp. 19–20.

haruo iguchi

81

rg 44a, Box 3, Folder 1, mml. 35 rg44a, Box 7, Folder 2, mml. 36 Fellers to Hoover, 21 May 1946, and Kido Diary extracts, in rg 44a, Box 7, Folder 23, mml. 37 ‘‘Oral History Interview with Bonner Fellers,’’ 23 June 1967, p. 22. Hoover to MacArthur, 27 August 1945, ‘‘O≈ce of Military Secretary Correspondence, ‘Hoover,’ ’’ rg 5, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Papers. 38 ‘‘Famine Emergency Committee, General—Herbert Hoover Diaries: Round World Trip,’’ 4, 5, 6 May 1946, ppi. With regard to MacArthur’s impression about Konoye, see page 6 of the 7 November 1945 memorandum of conversation between Bishop and Konoye in rg 44a, Box 7, Folder 3, mml. Konoye’s statement in this memorandum can give the impression that MacArthur got. 39 rg 44a, Box 3, Folder 1, mml. 40 Ibid. 41 ‘‘Oral History Interview with Bonner Fellers,’’ 23 June 1967, p. 20. In addition, see Fellers, ‘‘Japanese background,’’ n.d., 11–12, rg 44a, Box 3, Folder 1, mml. 42 rg 44a, Box 3, Folder 1, mml. 43 Hoover to Fellers, 12 March 1947, Fellers to Hoover, 1 March 1947, rg 44a, Box 3, Folder 1, mml. 44 Hoover’s appointment calendar has recently been made into a database that can be accessed through the Internet at www.ecommcode2.com/ hoover/calendar. This calendar shows that next to the words ‘‘Republican National Committee’’ in parentheses is Fellers’s name listed for an appointment with Hoover on 13 March. 45 See Suzuki Kantaro’s biography, Suzuki Hajime, Suzuki Kantaro Jideu (Tokyo: Jiji Tsushinsha, 1968), 282–283. See the following in rg 44a, Box 4, Folder 2 (Reader’s Digest–related), mml: Palmer to Fellers, 3 March 1947, Fellers to Palmer, 3 March 1947, Fellers to Palmer, 8 March 1947, Palmer to Fellers, 30 April 1947, Fellers to Payne, 12 May 1947. In addition, see also in rg 44a, Box 3, Folder 1 the following concerning Hoover and Fellers: Fellers to Hoover, 1 March 1947, Hoover to Fellers, 8 March 1947, Fellers to Hoover, 10 March 1947, Fellers to Hoover, 5 May 1947, Hoover to Fellers, 6 May 1947, Hoover to Fellers, 24 June 1947. 46 rg 44a, Box 2, Folder 12, mml. 47 See Terasaki’s diary entries for July, August, and September 1947 in Showa Tenno Dokuhakuroku (Emperor’s Monologue) Terasaki Hidenari Goyogakari Nikki (Tokyo: Bengei Shunju, 1991). Greene to Fellers, 30 September 1947, rg 44a, Box 2, Folder 12, mml. 34

82

The First Revisionists

rg 44a, Box 2, Folder 12, mml. 49 Terasaki to Fellers, 19 December 1947, rg 44a, Box 4, Folder 23, mml; diary entries for 19 September 1947 and 19 December 1947 in Terasaki, Showa Tenno Dokuhakuroku. 50 The passage began with the following sentences, which appeared in the Foreign Service version but not the Reader’s Digest : ‘‘Was Hirohito always a pacifist who had been made a tool of [by] the fanatic militarists without means of fighting back? I left Japan convinced that he was.’’ See a copy of the article from the July 1947 issue of Foreign Service in ‘‘Bonner Fellers,’’ ppi. 51 Hoover to Fellers, 24 June 1947; rg 44a, Box 3, Folder 1, mml. 52 Reader’s Digest, July 1947, 92–93. 53 Ibid., 91; Reader’s Digest Japan, September 1947, 16–17. 54 March draft, 1–2, 4 (for the quote), Box 4, Folder 2, mml; Terasaki, Showa Tenno Dokuhakuroku, 101–102, 115–122; Kido Nikki Kinky kai, ed., Kido Koichi Kankei Bunsho (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1966), 498. With regard to the English translation of the Konoye memoir, see the following: Fellers to Hoover, 21 March 1946, and ‘‘Memoirs of Prince Fumimaro Konoye with Appended Papers,’’ 10 June 1946, translated and reproduced by 5250th Technical Intelligence Co., Tokyo, Japan, rg44a, Box 7, Folder 2, mml; Terasaki’s 20 March 1946 diary entry in Showa Tenno Dokuhakuroku. 55 For historical records concerning the 14 February 1945 meeting between the emperor and Konoye, see the following documents: Terasaki, Showa Tenno Dokuhakuroku, 102; Kido Nikki Kinky kai, Kido Koichi Kankei Bunsho, 496–498; Hosokawa Morisada, Hosokawa Nikki (Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1978), 361–365; Nakao Yuji, Showa Tenno Hatsugen Kiroku Shuse Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Fuyo Shobo, 2003), 320, 324. In addition, see Masumi Junnosuke, Showa Tenno to son Jidai (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1998), 193–194. With regard to the English translation of the Konoye memoir, see the next note. 56 Stimson, ‘‘The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,’’ 104–105. 57 See 27 July 1945 and 2 August 1945 diary entries in the Military Secretary’s Diary, Box 5, Folder 27, Psychological Warfare Branch Collation Section, ‘‘Japan and Our Ally Russia’’ (Special Report No. 6), 3 August 1945, Subject File Box 14, Fellers Papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 58 Fellers to William J. Donovan, 27 August 1943, rg 44a, Box 1, Folder 13, mml; Fellers to Donovan, 8 April 1943, Box 5, Correspondence File, ‘‘Donovan, General William J., 1943,’’ Fellers Papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 59 Fellers to Dorothy Fellers, rg 44a, Box 2, Folder 2, mml. 48

haruo iguchi

83

60 Fellers had refrained from making such a bold claim in the pwb report and the March draft. Reader’s Digest, 92–93. 61 Barton Bernstein, ‘‘Compelling Japan’s Surrender without the abomb, Soviet Entry, or Invasion: Reconsidering the U.S. Bombing Survey Early-Surrender Conclusions,’’ Journal of Strategic Studies 18, no. 2 ( June 1995): 101–103, 126–113; Gian Peri Gentile, ‘‘Advocates or Assessment? The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan,’’ Pacific Historical Review, winter 1997, 53–79. In addition, see Fellers to Jean MacArthur, 29 March 1947, Fellers to Jean MacArthur, 15 November 1947, rg 44a, Box 3, Folder 23, mml. 62 For relations between Fellers and Reece, see rg 44a, Box 4, Folder 4, mml. For the process leading to Fellers’s resignation from the Army and joining the vfw and for the relations between Eisenhower and Fellers, see Iguchi, ‘‘Bonner Fellers and U.S.-Japan Relations,’’ 58–93. In the Philippines, MacArthur had replaced Eisenhower for Fellers as his favorite top aide. 63 Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘‘Our Relations to Japan,’’ Christianity and Crisis: A Bi-Weekly Journal of Christian Opinion 5, no. 15 (September 1945): 3–7. 64 Alexander H. Leighton, ‘‘Atomic Bomb Wasn’t Necessary,’’ Science Service (April 1947): 20–27. 65 With regard to Fellers’s claim about the reactions to his Reader’s Digest article, see Fellers to J. Woodall Greene, 31 March 1949, rg 44a, Box 4, Folder 20, mml. With regard to reactions to his article from two readers, see B. C. Goss, Public Relations Director of the Aircraft Industries Association, to Fellers, 3 July 1947, J. H. Phillips, Acting Deputy Chief of Public Information Division, War Department, to Fellers, 19 September 1947, ‘‘Reactions to Articles,’’ Box 49, Fellers Papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 66 Grew to Dooman, 10 April 1948, ‘‘Atomic Bomb File,’’ Box 2, Eugene Dooman Papers, Hoover Institution Archives. 67 Several other right-wing authors made similar accusations in the 1950s. Uday Mohan and Sanho Tree, ‘‘Hiroshima, the American Media, and the Construction of Conventional Wisdom,’’ Journal of American– East Asian Relations 11 (summer 1995): 159.

84

The First Revisionists

History and Memory in Postwar U.S.-Japanese Relations

. frank ninkovich

What part has collective memory played in the recent history of U.S.Japanese relations? Any answer to that question must reckon with the impact of memories of the Pacific War, a time of troubles that continues to be the foundational moment of contemporary politics in the Asia-Pacific region. Judging only from American media accounts, the answer is fairly simple: recollections of the wartime experience have inflamed disagreements between the United States and Japan; worse still, they may even be the source of disagreement. Things are more complicated than that, however. In a less obvious but more important way, collective memory has also been responsible for the positive features of the postwar relationship between the two countries. To understand how it has had this impact, one needs to distinguish between di√erent kinds of social or collective memory. In this essay, which focuses on the United States, I argue that historical understanding is a form of collective memory and that it has been an enormously constructive force in the shaping of postwar Japanese-American relations. Undeniably, the Pacific War has produced a rich harvest of bad memories. Pearl Harbor remains a synonym for treachery in the minds of many Americans, the use of atomic bombs against Japan continues to provoke accusations of barbarism among many Japanese and some Americans, and the ferocious combat of the island campaigns lives on in the memories of surviving soldiers on both sides. Another episode related to the war, the ‘‘Rape of Nanjing,’’ is more important for SinoJapanese relations, but it has a powerful secondary resonance in the United States by virtue of the large community of scholars and Chinese Americans who, for various reasons, continue to play up memories of this incident. All this confirms the commonsense conclusion that, as one recent volume put it, the experience of war in the twentieth century has been ‘‘a vivid, indeed a traumatic phenomenon,

3

which has left in its wake survivors who engage time and again in acts of remembrance.’’∞ At first sight, then, it would seem that problems in the JapaneseAmerican relationship are in no small measure attributable to wartime memories which, though often latent, have surfaced in times of stress to exercise a potent influence upon public attitudes and national policies.≤ Unable to put the past behind them, many Americans have nursed the suspicion that a never-say-die Japan was simply refighting the war by alternative means. Thus it was hardly unusual, fifty years after Pearl Harbor, for a journalist to conclude that remarkably little had changed. ‘‘There is a racist problem on both sides of the Pacific,’’ he wrote. ‘‘The war exacerbated anti-Oriental prejudices that had long been part of American society. I talk to many people today who simply cannot put Pearl Harbor behind them.’’≥ Although it possesses intuitive appeal (and in certain instances may well be correct), in this case the straight-line view that unpleasant memories are responsible for present-day di≈culties fails to stand up to analysis. For as soon as we shift our focus to America’s policy toward Japan in the immediate postwar years, the relatively soft and nonpunitive approach of the occupation period presents us with the challenge of explaining why ostensibly unforgettable events faded so quickly into oblivion. Given the ease with which racial images were demobilized, the seemingly bottomless reservoir of wartime hatred turned out to be surprisingly shallow. A notable attempt at wrestling with this problem has been made by John Dower, whose landmark work, War without Mercy, brought powerfully to light the dehumanizing racial images that contributed to the brutality of the fighting in World War II. In trying to explain the surprisingly benign postwar sequel to his tale of wartime interracial hostility, Dower acknowledges that there was some ‘‘repudiation of wartime racial contempt’’ in the occupation period among Americans, but he finds it implausible to assume that racial biases disappeared altogether. Instead, he argues that, ‘‘transformed’’ and ‘‘sublimated,’’ they ‘‘reemerged in less blatant guises.’’ Indeed, the stereotypes turned out to be ‘‘reversible.’’∂ When the dehumanizing wartime representations were no longer needed in the postwar years, they were flipped over into more favorable images of the Japanese people in which racial typecasting, albeit of a more benign paternalistic sort, was still at work. As Dower scathingly puts it in a more recent work, ‘‘Once policy 86

History and Memory

shifted from killing the monkey-men to turning them into democrats, it became necessary to reeducate not merely the Japanese but the American public as well.’’∑ Dower’s explanation for the short-term changeability of stereotypes hinges on the distinction between crude racial propaganda and ‘‘the calculations of power and interest made in secret at high levels,’’ which suggests that race was subordinated to weightier considerations of power. Indeed, this argument is implied in the subtitle of his book, Race and Power in the Pacific War.∏ By this line of reasoning, bitter memories of wartime experiences mattered so little because they were capable of being channeled by larger concerns of world power—‘‘the exigencies and apprehensions of the moment’’—that prompted policymakers to open the floodgates of American racial bias and later, once again for reasons of high politics, to close them.π Counterfactual speculation would seem to support this argument. For example, had sentiment on behalf of a Carthaginian peace won the day in Washington, or if revanchist sentiment had governed thinking in Tokyo, one can easily imagine memories of the war being steered in a more negative direction by governmental opinion managers. And, if somehow they found it expedient to do so as a matter of raison d’état, Japanese politicians today could release a torrent of memory by sanctioning an exploration of the wartime period. If, therefore, one proceeds from the view that the war was fought chiefly for geopolitical rather than racial reasons, one is drawn to the conclusion that postwar forgetfulness was quite deliberate, a byproduct of cold war imperatives in which the recently defeated enemy had become a valuable asset. Similarly, if one applies this interpretive stance to the present, the occasional flare-ups of racial rhetoric and rankling memories of World War II can be explained by the emergence of serious conflicts of interest between the two nations—in the case of the 1980s and 1990s, rancorous trade frictions. According to one historian who has taken this line, racial animosities lay smoldering until the 1980s, when, fanned by burgeoning trade disputes, ‘‘the unspoken agreement to suppress racial matters quickly disintegrated and all the buried concerns erupted at once, making racial friction unavoidable.’’∫ As these arguments illustrate, many historical accounts of the postwar relationship have tended to cast memory as a pliant instrument of geopolitics and interests, with supporting roles assigned to race and culture. This may be due to a bias that is quite common in the study of frank ninkovich

87

international relations: a privileging of objective circumstances in the hierarchy of causation coupled with a devaluation of the explanatory status of subjective opinions. The result is that remembering and forgetting are not viewed as primary causes but as e√ects to be explained away by other, more potent factors. The oft-heard argument that the past can be manipulated and distorted for commercial purposes in today’s mass consumption societies similarly presumes that memory, by virtue of its vulnerability to commodification, is nothing more than a servant of interests. However, there is another way of interpreting the course of events in which memory, albeit of a di√erent sort, takes primacy of place. In this alternative conceptualization, the memories were not exclusively bad and the national interest was defined by historical memory, rather than vice versa. If U.S. policymakers chose not to dwell on the war, it was because their short-term memories of the hostilities were embedded within a deeper awareness of the past. Their historical ‘‘recollections’’ rose above the direct, lived experience of the war by situating the Japanese and American pasts within a liberal vision of global modernization, a framework from which the problems of both the war and the postwar period were understood. This well-organized and capacious historical pre-understanding provided a more benign, constructive, and cooperative vision of U.S.-Japanese relations from which to shape postwar policy toward Japan than a view that focused only on international conflict. The wartime experience and postwar problems had to be placed in a historical context because, as human beings, we are all historical creatures. ‘‘The sense of the past is an organ of the human mind,’’ says Edward Shils, one of many prominent thinkers who see historicity as a given of the human condition.Ω Whether we are aware of it or not, our memories are always situated within broader historical and temporal outlooks. Like a collection of photographs, memories are organized in a mental archive. If stored in a jumble, without contextual relation to one another, they are useless as a collection. Retrieving one or even a few memories may succeed in evoking a time and a place, but unless they are placed in a series or embedded in an ordered context they are unlikely to connect with or help illuminate other elements of the collection. A historically untethered collective memory would be a kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of disconnected and ungrounded images. It would be a cultural equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease, in which a 88

History and Memory

society disconnected from its past would be helpless to deal with the present. But can this historical understanding properly be called memory? Some scholars think not. For example, Michael Hogan, in Hiroshima in History and Memory, draws a sharp distinction between history and memory. ‘‘Whereas history is objective, memory is subjective, selective, and present-minded,’’ he says.∞≠ But this scheme, which appears to be drawn from the pioneering work on memory of the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, is too rigid a way to conceptualize collective memory. The kind of historical memory to which I refer di√ers from the kinds of media-driven images and personal recollections that tend to exist in the public mind, but it di√ers also from the kinds of transcriptions of the past that are produced by historians. Between the presentist politics of memory and the relatively detached study of history lies an intermediate realm of historical interpretation, a form of understanding that is an amalgam of personal experience, historical learning, and culturally acquired predispositions. Because it is pressed into the service of politics, this historical sensibility is more ideological than the professional study of history. Because it is learned, remembered, and used to organize experiential memories, it deserves to be acknowledged as both a condition of remembering and as a form of collective memory. This kind of memory is not driven by interests as we commonly conceive of them, that is, the realities of power and economic needs. But if memory is not tied to interests, is it tethered veridically to the past or is it simply free-floating and subjective? My sense is that it lies somewhere between these two poles. Prompted in part by a growing realization of the unreliability of memory, the tendency today is to see it as protean and unanchored, as something shaped by the swirling discursive currents of the present.∞∞ By contrast, historical understanding, because it is less presentist and more respectful of the weight of the past, and because its scholarly legitimacy is based on the observance of rules of evidence, di√ers significantly from the radical postmodern contention that memory is only a ‘‘text’’ that is capable of being torn up and rewritten the way that screenwriters often change beyond recognition the novels that inspire movies. But while memory is connected to the past, it is hardly a faithful copy of what went before. The novelist Barbara Kingsolver nicely put her finger on this central ambiguity when she wrote that memory is ‘‘a relative to truth but not its frank ninkovich

89

twin.’’∞≤ Hence it is possible for memories to be manipulated and recreated within this broader historical context, too. In the case of the United States and Japan, the perception of cooperation over the historical long term did indeed produce a policy bias toward reconciliation and a reluctance to dwell on the war. But it also allowed memories to age, transform, and mellow ‘‘naturally’’ at the same time that it did not blot out the unpleasant features of the wartime past or prevent the occasional revival of bad memories. If historical understanding is essential to collective memory, then it follows that a more objective understanding of history requires that one grasp the impact of historical understanding as a subjective process. To speak of memories of the war as if they were simply a kind of politically shaped putty, or, in a postmodern idiom, to suggest that memories are principally manufactured in the present without any solid connection to the past, obscures the role played by historical understanding at the time and cripples our contemporary ability to reconstruct what actually happened and why it happened.∞≥ In the case of the postwar years, the course of U.S. policy toward Japan is best explained by the overcoming of wartime recollections. I develop this argument in three ways. First, I suggest that wartime rancor might well have softened on its own, in which case no geopolitical deus ex machina is required to explain its passing. Second, I argue that policymakers were governed neither by shifting currents of public opinion nor by realpolitik. Instead, I hope to show how considerations of race and power, as well as other factors, were framed within a larger historical perspective. This temporally deeper, transgenerational form of historical memory formed a solid foundation for policy judgments that enabled American statesmen to pursue moderate policies in the occupation of Japan. Third, I end with a few broader reflections about how the postwar relationship with Japan has been absorbed into this historical framework. Why wasn’t the postwar relationship more harsh? One would think that a policy of retribution would have been easy to impose—indeed, that it would have been the natural thing to do at a time when wartime memories were still fresh, before time had drawn some of their sting, before recollections were repressed, or before a growing distantiation from the events provided a new and less harsh perspective on the war. If the Australians, the Chinese, or the Soviets had been allowed a 90

History and Memory

major say, the occupation would have been in all likelihood more punitive. If the kinds of memories, both short and long range, that motivated U.S. allies had taken control of policy in the postwar years, the history of Japanese-American relations in the second half of the twentieth century would have been entirely di√erent. Indeed, it seems plausible to speculate that tougher policies would have left in their wake a legacy of enmity and distrust, thereby breeding still more conflict between the societies. Instead, the relationship has developed along far more satisfactory lines than a focus on the traumas of wartime experience alone might have predicted. For a time, anyway, it seemed that harshness would be the rule. In Gallup polls taken during the war, unforgiving images of Japan became more intense as time went on. In June 1942, only 25 percent of those polled considered Japan to be the chief war enemy, with 50 percent naming Germany. By February 1943, the numbers had reversed, with 53 percent choosing Japan as enemy number one, while only 34 percent chose Germany.∞∂ This was part of a broader change of outlook in which sentiment grew for using force as needed against aggressor nations following the war and for assuring control of aggressors.∞∑ Early in 1945, for example, 92 percent of the public believed that Japan and Germany should be ‘‘kept permanently disarmed.’’∞∏ On balance, public sentiment was decidedly more anti-Japanese than anti-German.∞π By November 1944, the overwhelming majority of respondents, some 88 percent, believed that the Japanese leaders should be severely punished. One poll provided some ‘‘typical comments’’ to back up the numbers: ‘‘We should string them up and cut little pieces o√ them—one piece at a time.’’ ‘‘Torture them to a slow and awful death.’’ ‘‘Put them in a tank and su√ocate them.’’ ‘‘Kill them, but be sure to torture them first, the way they have tortured our boys.’’ ‘‘Let them have it wholesale; get rid of every one of them.’’ ‘‘Take them to Pearl Harbor and sink them.’’ ‘‘Put them in Siberia and let them freeze to death.’’ ‘‘Turn them over to the Chinese.’’ ‘‘Put them in foxholes and fire bombs and grenades at them.’’ ‘‘Kill them like rats.’’

frank ninkovich

91

It is notable that only four in every one hundred questioned as to the means of punishing Japanese military leaders suggested that we ‘‘treat them justly, handle them under International Law, (or) demote them.’’∞∫ Very strong stu√. These kinds of attitudes not only formed a powerful base of support for terror bombings and the employment of nuclear weapons against Japanese cities, but they also help to explain the persistence of a hard residue of anti-Japanese opinion among a minority segment of the U.S. population. Indeed, 85 percent of the respondents approved of the use of the atomic bomb, displaying a rare acrossthe-board unanimity that showed little variation among respondents of di√erent age, sex, or education. A considerable hardening of sentiment had taken place since January 1944, when only 43 percent of a sample agreed that the use of poison gas against Japanese cities would be appropriate if American pilots were executed. A similarly vindictive attitude emerged in response to questions concerning the emperor’s fate. A June 1945 survey found that 33 percent advocated executing him, and another 37 percent supported either imprisonment, judicial determination, or exile. Only 4 percent favored doing nothing on account of his being ‘‘only a figurehead for the warlords,’’ and a minuscule 3 percent suggested that the allies ‘‘use him as a puppet to run Japan.’’∞Ω Public attitudes continued to grow markedly tougher in the months before and after v-j day. In July 1944, although 53 percent of those asked advocated strict control of Japan and punishment of war criminals and another 14 percent suggested ‘‘extreme harshness,’’ 33 percent advocated treating the people fairly and reeducating them. However, by the last few months of the war, more than 60 percent of Americans polled believed that the Japanese people approved of atrocities committed against U.S. prisoners of war. By September, as the surrender agreement went into e√ect, 61 percent agreed that the United States was ‘‘not tough enough’’ in its occupation policies, while only 32 percent believed it was ‘‘about right.’’≤≠ But opinion soon began to mellow. In 1947 General Douglas MacArthur’s political adviser, the career foreign service o≈cer George Atcheson, insisted that the American people had ‘‘an objective and non-emotional attitude toward Japan. While they do not forget, they are not vengeful and their eyes are turned toward the future.’’≤∞ Subsequent polls proved him right. In 1949, after being asked their opinion of General MacArthur’s handling of an occupation which by that time 92

History and Memory

had been relaxed considerably, 55 percent indicated general approval, while another 26 percent volunteered their ‘‘enthusiastic approval.’’ Feelings toward the Japanese people had softened, too: 34 percent felt friendly toward them, 30 percent neutral, and another 29 percent nursed ‘‘unfriendly’’ feelings. At the same time, 64 percent of those polled disagreed with MacArthur’s statement that the Japanese had met the terms of surrender and were now entitled to a peace treaty; 72 percent, meanwhile, favored a revival of Japanese military strength to fight Communism, if need be, a figure that rose to 76 percent by January 1951, at the height of the fighting in Korea. This figure would decline following the Korean armistice, although it dropped only to 63 percent. By September 1951, the proportion of interviewees with ‘‘friendly feelings’’ toward Japan had risen to 51 percent, while the unfriendly sentiments remained at a steady 25 percent.≤≤ By the 1960s, these trends had settled in. Indeed, views of Russians as a people were more negative than those of the Japanese. These positive sentiments were reciprocated to a significant degree. As Atcheson told Truman early in 1946, ‘‘We have made a good impression both as a nation and on the level of the individual American soldier. If the Japanese really like any foreigners, they like us. Toward the Russians there is a deep-rooted fear and hatred.’’≤≥ Despite occasional problems, this aquifer of goodwill has yet to dry up. Since 1981, when asked by the Japanese prime minister’s o≈ce to choose three from a list of many nations in response to the question ‘‘What countries do you like?,’’ the Japanese people have tended to choose the United States by a wide margin over other nations (with the exception of Switzerland). At the same time, when asked to name countries that they dislike, Japanese rank the United States among the least villainous powers. In March 1994, only 8 percent said they disliked the United States, in contrast to 50 percent who disliked the Russians.≤∂ After taking into account the inevitable ups and downs, one recent public opinion survey concludes that, ‘‘viewed over the long term, the suspicion that existed after the war seems largely to have disappeared.’’≤∑ But what do all these polling numbers mean? For one thing, it is quite possible that the wartime memories would have faded into moderation by themselves even without the onset of the cold war; if so, there is no need to posit changing geopolitical calculations to explain their softening. It seems likely that wartime hatreds were to some extent the product of war propaganda, which led naturally to the frank ninkovich

93

expectation that the Japanese would be ‘‘sullen, resentful and very likely non-cooperative toward the invaders.’’≤∏ But because stereotypes are, by definition, distorted or untrue, it is not surprising that mutual exposure in a peaceful postwar environment should have revealed a di√erent and quite unexpected side to the character of the former enemies. As an American educator returning from a postwar tour of Japan remarked, ‘‘After the surrender both Americans and Japanese were surprised. The Japanese were surprised at the good conduct of the US soldiers and the Americans at the cooperative conduct of the Japanese. The frequent prophecies regarding the conduct of the Japanese were not realized; there were no mass murders, no assassinations, no guerrilla warfare, no passive resistance.’’≤π The relatively troublefree occupation changed how many Americans, who had been primed to expect the worst, thought about the Japanese people. No doubt some people’s views were softened by the realization that the United States needed Japan as an ally in the burgeoning cold war in Asia, but an array of other factors also contributed to changing American attitudes. While excruciating memories remained, memories can never re-create the pain of original experience, which partly explains why they tend to fade in intensity over time. For combat veterans, memories can have complex, not easily predictable consequences. Soldiers do not necessarily wind up hating each other so much as they wind up loathing war.≤∫ Wartime enemies often form a community of victims, who, like opponents in a boxing ring, have more in common than not. Because memories are always ‘‘relived’’ in a new context, they may evoke shame, mortification, and other complex feelings quite di√erent from the negatively charged emotions of the original event. Moreover, wartime experiences appear to rank high among those past events that many people prefer to forget soon after the fact.≤Ω In what seems to be a natural history of collective memory, the subject drops out of public consciousness for a time following a war (Vietnam being a good recent American example), only to be revived when an aging wartime generation becomes concerned with its historical legacy. Finally, the generation that emerged out of World War II, once it did take over the policy reins, hewed to the same nonrevanchist course plotted by early postwar policymakers. This intergenerational continuity again suggests that a deeper kind of memory has been at work. Hatred and suspicion born of bad wartime memories remained, to be sure, but they constituted a distinct minority viewpoint in the spec94

History and Memory

trum of opinion on Japan. For most people, those unwelcome recollections of the past were relegated to an out-of-the-way gallery in the museum of memory. But the ‘‘natural’’ waning of hatreds presupposes that the balm of peace was given the opportunity to work its healing ways. Here is where U.S. policymakers, the people who mattered most in shaping the postwar relationship, enter the story. It was they who decided against a policy of vengeance, retained the emperor, minimized the reparations to be extracted from Japan, and shielded Japan from the more punitive desires of their allies in the Pacific War. This is not to say that the war was forgotten, for they did emphasize the continuing control of Japan in the interest of security, and it is clear that the occupation period was a time of severe hardship for the Japanese people. But policy was made from a standpoint in which the most e≈cacious form of control was not punishment but integration into a liberal global order in which control would become relaxed, even superfluous, as Japan became a member in good standing of the international community. All told, the conduct of policymakers suggests that they ‘‘remembered’’ the war quite di√erently from the public or those who had done the actual fighting.≥≠ They were, undoubtedly, sensitive to public opinion, but references to public desires were used instrumentally, as a way of legitimating both hard-line and softer postwar policies. For example, those pushing for a punitive stance pointed to the large number of people who advocated execution of the emperor, whereas those who favored a more moderate approach to the occupation argued that public opinion was uninformed and not to be trusted.≥∞ In any case, for hard-liners and soft-liners alike, there is little evidence to suggest that the ferocity of the war had any significant influence upon postwar planning. This spirit of moderation is traceable to the ability of policymakers to rise above wartime memories by situating the wartime experience in a broader historical context. An understanding of history always entails an unavoidable degree of historical construal in which the interpreter must answer the question: Which past? In the case of U.S. policymakers, arriving at a diagnosis of the source of Japan’s problems and recommending appropriate solutions required that they choose from a menu featuring two broad outlooks, two possible histories, each of which involved looking much farther back in time beyond the frank ninkovich

95

war’s immediate origins. One history minimized the significance of the war in the larger temporal scheme of things; the other saw the war as the inevitable outcome of deep-rooted historical trends. The first position, advocated by Japanese moderates and sympathetic Americans like Joseph Grew and the ‘‘Japan crowd’’ in the State Department, interpreted Japan’s expansionist drive in the 1930s as a ‘‘stumble’’ or misstep in what otherwise was a series of sure-footed strides toward a modern, liberal society that had been made since the Meiji Restoration.≥≤ There was a good deal of admiration among proponents of this view for what Japan had accomplished in its rapid ascent to modern status, as well as an element of self-blame bred of the understanding that Japan had been schooled in a curriculum of imperialism that Western tutors had introduced to Asia, only to change the rules of the game after World War I. Because Japan needed only to be gently set right in order to resume her journey toward liberal modernity, root-and-branch reform was not only unnecessary, but impossible of fulfillment in the first place. As one memo argued, ‘‘The conquering nation cannot impose its form of government, ideals, or way of life upon a conquered nation except by permanent military occupation and immigration.’’≥≥ The second view of history, a ‘‘structural’’ perspective that was most commonly associated with General MacArthur’s Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (scap) bureaucracy in the first few years of the occupation, argued that Japanese militarism was so deeply embedded in the society’s major institutions that the war had been a natural outcome. According to one memo expressing this point of view, ‘‘The roots of Japanese militarism are embedded in the totalitarian social, political and economic [institutions] built up over the past 70 years.’’ The systematic impoverishment of farmers and workers had made for weak demand at home and led inevitably to a search for guaranteed markets abroad by military means. Consequently, the occupation needed to assure a rise in the Japanese standard of living by promoting land reform, creating labor unions, breaking up the industrial cartels, or zaibatsu, and more. This kind of ‘‘radical and direct intervention’’ in Japan’s internal a√airs, the memo recognized, ‘‘would be ine√ective unless undertaken with determination and maintained until a democratic and popular regime is fully established.’’ It would also involve ‘‘a considerable period of occupation.’’≥∂ There was also a recognition on the part of those who adhered to 96

History and Memory

this structural interpretation that a thoroughgoing rearrangement of institutions would have to be accompanied by deep cultural reform. One planning document of early 1946 argued that most Japanese ‘‘in greater or lesser degree’’ shared ‘‘a common attitude of mind’’ in which could be detected ‘‘the persistence of feudal concepts, including class stratification, the glorification of the military, and a habit of subservience to authority.’’ This mentality included ‘‘a belief in the superior qualifications of the Japanese people for world leadership, closely connected with the cult of emperor-worship,’’ plus ‘‘extreme racial consciousness, and an anti-foreign complex, which, however, is often combined with great admiration for foreign achievements and learning.’’ The memo ended on a reassuring note by insisting that ‘‘it will not be necessary to recast all Japanese cultural concepts,’’ but it was not at all clear about the degree of resistance that would be encountered or the amount of e√ort that would be required to e√ect all the desirable changes.≥∑ These contending outlooks, which did conceptual battle throughout the 1940s in the negotiation of postwar planning documents and a struggle for control of the occupation, were so fertile that they have given birth to intellectual descendants that continue to be active in the historiographical and policy debates of our time.≥∏ Although usually stated as either/or options in the abstract, actual policy was a blend of the two. A representative expression of how the two perspectives were balanced against each other came in a memo from Joseph Ballantine, the director of the O≈ce of Far Eastern A√airs, to the acting secretary of state, Joseph Grew. The memo pointed out that ‘‘there are obvious disadvantages to both a plan which envisages complete control over Japan by the Allies and to one in which the role of the Allies is largely supervisory.’’≥π Ballantine made the case for a middle way in which both perspectives would be enshrined in occupation policy, but in the end it was the more moderate view that rose to the top. Paralleling the course taken by the occupation in postwar Germany, the liberal interpretation of the past became dominant, while the progressive and more punitive approach became the junior partner. What follows is a brief review of their respective impacts upon several important issues surrounding the end of the war and the occupation: the future of the imperial institution, the degree to which reform would be pursued under the occupation, the impact of geopolitics upon the course of the occupation, and the perceived readiness of the Japanese people for democracy. frank ninkovich

97

For a time, historical disagreements regarding the emperor institution were at the heart of the debate over which course to pursue in Japan. In the discussion of unconditional surrender that dominated the war’s closing days, Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew contended that an agreement to preserve the imperial institution in some form would save many lives, given the tenacity being displayed by Japanese forces. With such an o√er on the table, Grew had earlier argued, ‘‘they will be a√orded a method of saving face without which surrender will be highly unlikely.’’ Grew insisted that any move to get rid of the institution would not be e√ective in any case, as it was sure to be reimposed ‘‘the moment our backs are turned.’’ More important, however, he insisted that besides assuring prompt surrender, it would also contribute to the e√ectiveness of the occupation and the permanency of any reforms enacted. Indeed, the throne could become ‘‘the cornerstone for building a peaceful future for the country.’’≥∫ In support of his case for a mild occupation, Grew articulated a view of the past that minimized the sociocultural depth of the causes of Japanese expansionism. ‘‘Japan does not need an emperor to be militaristic nor are the Japanese militaristic because they have an emperor,’’ he maintained. ‘‘In other words, their militarism springs from the military clique and cult in the country which succeeded in gaining control over the Emperor himself and rendered powerless the Emperor’s advisers.’’ In his view, General Tojo and the military establishment ‘‘were just as much military dictators as were the Shoguns in the old days and the Emperor was utterly powerless to restrain them regardless of his own volition.’’ In July 1945, Stimson made a complementary historical argument about Japanese modernization to Truman. ‘‘Japan,’’ he said, ‘‘is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely di√erent mentality from ours. On the contrary, she has within the past century shown herself to possess extremely intelligent people, capable in an extraordinarily short time of adopting not only the complicated technique of Occidental civilization but to a substantial extent their culture and their political and social ideas.’’≥Ω Grew and Stimson were drawing upon a well-established point of view that, following its emergence in the nineteenth century immediately following the establishment of relations between Japan and the United States, Japan had gone on to log three-quarters of a century of policy experience. Overwhelming all other ideas was a sense of amaze98

History and Memory

ment at the remarkable degree of progress toward modernization made by the Japanese in so short a time. Eight years before the Meiji Restoration, the Atlantic Monthly had already set the tone: The real vigor, thrift, and intelligence of Japan, its great and still advancing power, and the rich promise of its future are such as to reward the most attentive study. Its commanding position, its wealth, its commercial resources, and the quick intelligence of its people—not at all inferior to that of the people of the West, although naturally restricted in its development—give to Japan, now that it is about to emerge from its chrysalis condition, and unfold itself to the outer world, an importance far above that of any other Eastern country.∂≠

Another article in the Atlantic noted that the Japanese ‘‘are applying their newly acquired knowledge with a vigor and ingenuity worthy of Europeans.’’∂∞ E. H. House, an early Japanologist, foresaw for ‘‘a time overstrained e√ort and forced vitality, then a period of prolonged depression and anxiety, and subsequently a laborious but certain rise to a respectable, perhaps a prominent, position among the civilized countries of the world.’’∂≤ Also present in late nineteenth-century accounts of Japan by Americans was a great deal of admiration for Japanese art and aesthetic sensibilities generally, which for some observers was indicative of ‘‘a high level of true civilization.’’∂≥ ‘‘Is not this the very hour when the wonderful flowering of the Japanese mind could best influence, and for most good, the Western mind?’’ asked another essay.∂∂ There were, to be sure, powerful negative cross-currents as well in American views of Japan. Racial ideas assigning an inferior status to any but Anglo-Saxon peoples enjoyed wide currency in the nineteenth century, although one must always be careful when discussing the racial views of this period to understand that references to racial di√erences were often framed in ways that today would be recognized as cultural arguments. Indeed, by referring to religion, gender, culture, ethnicity, and more, race was a much fuzzier concept then than it is today.∂∑ Within this context, suspicions that modernization was only superficial, that feudal institutions and habits remained at the core of Japanese society, and that Japan was modernizing simply to beat the Westerners at their own game were commonly voiced. Even as sensitive and sympathetic an observer as William Elliot Gri≈s wondered whether Japan’s transformation was only skin deep. ‘‘For years to frank ninkovich

99

come.’’ he wrote, ‘‘it will be a question of interest as to how far the recent revolutions mean a return to ancient forms and customs.’’∂∏ Negative views surfaced with periodic regularity in fears of a Yellow Peril and in occasional disputes between the two governments over policy in China. But race was an extraordinarily fluid conceptual category and, overall, the dominant tone of American opinion was an expectation that Japan would eventually, as Theodore Roosevelt put it, join the ranks of the civilized powers—‘‘civilized’’ as Americans defined the term, of course.∂π This broadly optimistic ‘‘horizon of expectation’’ would continue to dominate thinking about Japan’s future.∂∫ The surrender agreement left ambiguous the future of both Hirohito and the emperorship, but the very decision not to insist on abolition of the imperial institution, if only for the limited purpose of guaranteeing a swift end to the war, was indicative of a belief that the emperor exercised a powerful hold on the Japanese people. A postwar Gallup poll, in which 92 percent of the Japanese sampled favored retaining the emperor, only underscored the enormous symbolic importance of the throne. Thus there were conflicting considerations that needed to be taken into account, even by the sizable number of policymakers who felt that Hirohito ought to be tried as a war criminal. George Atcheson, for example, believed as a matter of principle that the emperor should be tried, but on practical grounds he realized that this would require a prolonged occupation that few believed could be pulled o√. While under secretary of state, Dean Acheson at one point called Grew ‘‘the Prince of Appeasers,’’ only to admit later that he had been absolutely correct.∂Ω Nearly everyone agreed that the emperor was a great asset to the occupation. Early in 1947, Atcheson wrote to Truman, ‘‘It is a fact, unacknowledged by the leftists, that the great majority of the Japanese people are conservative in their politics and social thinking.’’∑≠ If trying Hirohito as a war criminal was likely to create turmoil in Japan and require additional occupation troops over a prolonged period of time, it would also become a hot potato in American politics. The matter was settled when MacArthur came down on the side of those who believed that destroying the imperial institution or trying the emperor would lead to political chaos. He also realized, better than most people, that occupations have a limited shelf life. Adopting such a position required no small degree of intellectual subtlety. The paradoxical character of the problem—promoting mod100

History and Memory

ernization by relying upon premodern conceptions of authority—was expressed by Atcheson in a letter to Truman, in which he argued that ‘‘the Japanese have an ingrained feudalistic tendency to attach themselves to the powerful. During the next decade it seems probable that we shall be the Power of which they will seek to be a satellite. It will likely be the age of Japan’s imitation of things American—not only of American machines but also American ideas.’’∑∞ MacArthur shared this view. While acknowledging the force of a profoundly premodern mentality, he continued to believe that Japan was in a ‘‘tuitionary condition’’ and susceptible to the implantation of modern forms. Notwithstanding his eccentricities, he embodied, conceptually and administratively, the tensions and the strains within the American view of Japan.∑≤ With the decision to retain a desacralized emperor in the new constitution drafted in 1946, it was unclear whether this would be a case of old wine in new bottles or whether the removal of atavistic institutions by the occupation would allow Japanese development to flow in a liberal direction. ‘‘The question,’’ as earlier put by Nelson T. Johnson, ‘‘is when we have destroyed Japanese belief in the divinity of their land and their own divine origin as the vassals of a divinely ordained Emperor, will the human emperor emerge and survive as a symbol of government—as the English king has survived. . . . This should be our hope in planning for a Japan thirty years from now if we are to have stability and security in the Pacific.’’∑≥ But the expectation of this positive outcome was less a gamble than an act of historical faith. When it came to deciding on the scope of American intervention in Japanese society and culture, once again the result was a compromise. Although Japan’s problems were framed, time and again, by reference to the persistence of feudal legacies, there was also a widespread recognition that Japan was quite modern in many ways, and that perhaps its failings were partly attributable to Western importations. According to one paper: It is true that the reforms instituted to date under scap are based almost exclusively on Western ideas. It is apparently overlooked, however, that Japan has already avidly absorbed many western ideas and at the time the occupation commenced had a western system of industrial economy, with many western style legal and commercial institutions, a western form of government, and, generally speaking, a completely

frank ninkovich

101

feudalistic social pattern. Unfortunately, in copying the western economic and political style Japan had used many of the wrong models. The purpose of the current US reform program has been to substitute better models and to bring the feudalistic aspects of Japanese society up to date.∑∂

Far from being a simple matter of de-feudalization, then, occupation reform also entailed the removal of unwholesome influences and institutions that had been copied from Western nations with strong feudal legacies of their own. This view of Japan’s aggressive behavior as part of a broader ideological problem was implicit in the American belief that the war was a product of a global fascist conspiracy. Historical arguments were also brought to bear on the issue of the Japanese people’s readiness for democracy. Nearly everyone commented on the obedience of the Japanese people and their unquestioning respect for authority. Though this trait could easily have been interpreted to mean that the Japanese people were insu≈ciently prepared for democracy by virtue of their history of subordination, policymakers concluded that the fledgling institutions of democracy created in prewar Japan would soon be capable of taking flight on their own. On balance, American views tilted toward optimism that the good past would triumph over the bad past. Writing to the president in January 1947, Atcheson noted, ‘‘I believe that the average Japanese possesses his share of the average human being’s love of freedom. I also believe that the Japanese have turned their faces toward us and, in the knowledge that the past is behind them, they look to a new kind of future and to the United States and American democracy as their example for the future.’’∑∑ As John Emmerson put it, ‘‘Democracy, whatever it was, had won out; it had been too strong to resist. In the vacuum of defeat the Japanese people . . . were ready to reject the past and clutch the straw held out by the former enemy.’’∑∏ Once again, a middle way was adopted, as o≈cials sought to strike a balance between control and allowing the Japanese to chart their own democratic course. It was not simply a case of the United States imposing ‘‘unconditional democracy’’ on the Japanese people, as some critics of the occupation have argued.∑π Complicating matters still further was the emergence of cold war geopolitics in Asia, a development that, in theory at least, posed a mortal threat to both the liberal and the structural approaches to occupation policy.∑∫ At the extreme, geopoliticians tend to believe that

102

History and Memory

a concentration on internal, domestic circumstances is short-sighted and confuses priorities. Hoping that cold war realism would trump ideology, many conservative Japanese expected an end to occupation reforms once the Americans came to recognize their need for Japan as an ally. And indeed, some American policymakers saw things precisely this way. Writing from Moscow, John Paton Davies argued that the United States needed to change its focus from reforming Japan to taking seriously the greater menace of the Soviet Union. ‘‘The American and Soviet frontiers meet in the Japan Sea. At present we occupy Japan. If we withdraw from Japan without having assured ourselves of a favored position there, Japan may in all probability sooner or later be captured by the Soviet Union. The tables will have been turned and we shall be confronted with Japan as a ‘place d’armes’ of the only other first-class power.’’∑Ω In other words, concentrate on geopolitical realties and economic recovery, and forget about the reforms. The turning point seemed to come with the critical report on occupation policies filed by George Kennan, following his February 1948 mission to scap in Tokyo. As his views gained ground, what Kennan deprecatingly called the ‘‘scholasticism’’ of ‘‘a relatively small group of people’’ seemed on the verge of being discarded in favor of a new approach in which geopolitics would take priority.∏≠ In practice, however, the challenge was never taken so seriously as to contemplate the complete abandonment of reform as the underlying principle of occupation policy. In response to Davies’s argument, which implied giving up on reform altogether, John Emmerson suggested a more moderate course. ‘‘Our acts in Japan should not be conditioned by a fear of Communism so strong that we lean toward the very elements we have set out to destroy,’’ he insisted. ‘‘We shall assure ourselves of a ‘favored position’ in Japan if we succeed in e√ecting lasting reforms, in giving impetus to a genuine liberal movement, and in starting the process of democratization in Japanese education.’’∏∞ In response to Kennan’s report, the State Department’s O≈ce of Far Eastern A√airs urged the United States to maintain the course already charted: ‘‘The completion of the essential elements in the reform program should be fully encouraged.’’∏≤ Geopolitics would be blended into the policy mix, but even Kennan was careful not to advocate an outright abolition of reform. Instead, he suggested a halt for the purpose of allowing a Japan su√ering from psychological disequilibrium to enjoy a breathing spell from what he frank ninkovich

103

considered to be a dizzying pace of change. There would be backtracking on some reforms, especially on the purges and on economic deconcentration,∏≥ and an undoing of others, but the basic elements of the reform package—popular sovereignty, democratization, and demilitarization, all enshrined in the new constitution of 1947—would stay in place. Those who adhered to the neo-Wilsonian view that was the credo of the cold war, despite occasional concessions to realpolitik, could not a√ord to compromise on the fundamentals of a vision that was committed to the preservation and extension of a global democratic civilization.∏∂ By 1948, the occupation had encountered the law of diminishing returns and the ‘‘reverse course’’ was put into e√ect. As in Germany and in American domestic politics, neo-Wilsonian internationalists and their cold war ideology triumphed over ‘‘progressives’’ who saw no threat from the Soviet Union. Obviously, had either of the two contending historical views won the day and been carried out in full, the postwar relationship would have been quite di√erent. But it seems fair to say that, in the end, neither orientation swept the field before it. U.S. policy during the occupation and after struck a balance between control and full reintegration, between punishment and mercy, and between reform and continuity. Japan was demilitarized, although in a thoroughgoing way that few had expected; the emperor institution was maintained, albeit in a desacralized form; land reform was enacted, labor unions legalized, and sweeping purges were launched, but conservative prewar elites continued to exercise influence; and a democratic system of politics under a new constitution was installed, even as the Japanese people appeared reluctant to make a clean sweep and start afresh. What is important, for my argument, is that while the competing perspectives di√ered on means, each shared the goal of creating ‘‘a Japan properly discharging its responsibilities in the family of nations.’’∏∑ If these historical views were as influential as I have suggested, the conclusion is unavoidable: the historical interpretation of prewar developments that spanned three-quarters of a century was more important than the war in determining the course of the U.S.-Japanese relationship. It is even conceivable, as a counterfactual speculation, that the postwar relationship might have proceeded as it did had the war never happened. Akira Iriye has argued in Power and Culture that ‘‘the defeated Japanese, as well as the victorious Americans, were ready to return to an earlier period and resume their partnership in the world 104

History and Memory

arena.’’∏∏ Obviously, there could be no complete return to the 1920s, if only because the war did create a complex of historically peculiar structures and relationships: the occupation, the peace treaty and the security pact, the forward position of U.S. power in the Pacific, and the end of the diplomacy of imperialism in China and the Pacific, to name but a few, not to mention the new global eminence of the United States. But the idea of cooperation long antedated the war, and many of the negative aspects of the bilateral relationship, which have centered largely around trade disputes in the past twenty years, did not require a war as a prior condition of their occurrence. After all, the United States has had contentious trade disputes with other nations as well, including European allies who are racially and culturally closer to the United States. How much more nasty were U.S.-Japanese trade quarrels as compared to U.S. disputes with European allies over grain exports, poultry, bananas, and what-not, or with France over the export of mass media or the alleged Americanization of the world? At least no Japanese has yet to destroy a McDonald’s. A brief comparison of Japan and Germany—which were often mentioned in the same breath in postwar discussions of policy—might be instructive here for the purpose of pointing out how dissimilar postwar circumstances a√ected the outcomes of U.S. relations with both nations.∏π The United States did view the Japanese and the Germans di√erently from the standpoint of race, but at the same time one is struck by the cross-cultural similarities in the way that Americans defined the shortcomings of the two nations.∏∫ The same conflicting desires for control, cultural transformation, and liberal development that one finds in thinking about Japan were present in American occupation policy toward Germany. The Germans, too, were widely supposed to have a ‘‘bad’’ culture, with Nazism thriving in the fertile soil of an allegedly authoritarian German national character. In the wake of the death camp revelations, perceptions of Germany were far more negative in the early postwar period than were those of Japan. Nevertheless, today’s images of Germans and Germany are resoundingly favorable. American trust of the Germans was put to a test in 1989, when, in finally committing to the reunification of Germany after many years of sham enthusiasm for the idea, President George H. W. Bush stated that the German people had changed fundamentally since 1945. ‘‘They are a totally di√erent country from what they used to be,’’ he said.∏Ω frank ninkovich

105

What accounts for this transvaluation of the American view of a culture that at one time was seen as a petri dish for the breeding of totalitarian ideas? A number of developments have contributed to this makeover. First, West Germany was merged into broader European economic, political, and military institutions that had the e√ect of ‘‘containing’’ Germany while at the same time integrating it into a dense regional network of democratic societies. By virtue of German membership in the Common Market and European Community, trade disputes were played out on a multilateral field. West Germany was also rearmed, though not without considerable trepidation, and, despite some lingering undercurrents of suspicion about the dangers of German nationalism, became a good European, a reliable ally of the United States, and an upstanding nation committed to democratic values. By the late 1960s, it had passed the democratic test of alternation of parties. Unlike in Japan, the German polity disappeared at war’s end, which allowed the occupation to wipe clean the political and ideological slate. The postwar division of Germany also contributed to making it possible for the Germans to do a good job of debating the past and of coming to terms with it, including the contention that the Nazi experience emerged out of deep-seated cultural tendencies and problems that antedated the Nazi period.π≠ By contrast, the regional environment in East Asia presented a very di√erent range of policy options. External circumstances, as much as the internal reluctance on the part of Japan to confront its prewar history, need to be taken into account when trying to explain why Japan has not achieved the degree of liberal integration once thought desirable. Because the Asian situation was culturally more diverse, politically more complex, ideologically more intense, and militarily more explosive, there was no opportunity for a merger into close-knit supranational political or defense institutions. Whereas the Germans were major contributors to European defense, the U.S.-Japanese treaty, for a variety of reasons, produced a much more lopsided relationship. Economically, there was no possibility, given Far Eastern circumstances, of creating an Asian equivalent of the Marshall Plan, with its emphasis on close regional economic cooperation. This helps to explain the delay in the recovery of the Japanese economy, which would be restarted only by the jolt provided by the Korean War. Unfortunately, in discussions of Japan and Germany it is not always made clear

106

History and Memory

that regional obstacles as well as national peculiarities contributed to a di√erentiation of outcomes.π∞ Despite the more troubling Japanese story, Japan has also been absorbed into the larger narrative of modernization and peaceful globalization that has guided U.S. foreign policy throughout the twentieth century. Postwar events, fortified by victory in the cold war, have on balance maintained the vitality of the liberal internationalist American view of history, and, despite problems in the relationship, the favorable view of Japan’s integration into an open global society has also been upheld. For those who view Japan as a nation dominated by a neomercantilist policy of particularism in trade, a rigid corporatism in its domestic a√airs, and a commitment to preserving its cultural uniqueness—all policy orientations that suggest a repackaging of past practices or an opportunistic repainting of signs—this is much too optimistic, even starry-eyed. Indeed, critics like Chalmers Johnson argue that ‘‘the assumptions of political and economic convergence between Japan and the United States are nonsense.’’π≤ Whatever the correctness of the structural interpretation of Japan’s history, I believe that any explanation of U.S. foreign policy, if it is to tell a convincing story, must pay attention to the role played by nonstructural factors of this kind. The issue in this essay is not whether the historical outlook I have described was accurate or wise, although I believe that a strong case on its behalf can be made on pragmatic grounds. I have sought only to establish that makers of foreign policy acted upon historical ideas in constructing a relationship that, whatever its problems, has also enjoyed considerable success. In any case, critiques of the policy e√ectiveness of the American reading of history can only be made counterfactually, in comparison to other possible outcomes. One possibility would have been to tolerate or actively participate in a competitive diplomacy of imperialism in Asia; another would have been to try to continue a ‘‘cooperative’’ Open Door approach to China, which itself depended on a form of imperialism; still another was a continuation of U.S.-Soviet wartime cooperation, the favored approach of holdover New Dealers. U.S. policymakers would have encountered impossible di≈culties in any attempt to implement either of the first two alternatives because the Pacific War marked a historical point of no return for both nations in which militarism and older alternatives like the diplomacy of imperialism

frank ninkovich

107

and the Open Door were swept into the dustbin of history. The pursuit of a more thoroughgoing program of structural reforms would have been equally problematic. Even if the occupation had managed to scrounge up enough political support in the anti–New Deal climate of postwar Washington, it is not certain that it would have produced a better result.π≥ As for whiggism, that larger historical vision never consisted of unalloyed optimism. The problems that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s stand in the same relation to the larger optimistic historical outlook on Japan as the doubts of the nineteenth century, the fear of a Yellow Peril, or the various criticisms of Japan that arose from within the Open Door framework that lasted into the early 1930s. Because American policy contained within itself an ever-present element of doubt about Japan and its commitment to globalization and Westernization, it was never uniformly optimistic or inattentive to the existence of serious challenges to its fulfillment—and it is still not. The American liberal internationalist outlook was elastic, complex, and durable, capable of absorbing the shocks not only of the minor crises that have plagued Japanese-American relations since the nineteenth century, but even the major earthquake of World War II. This historical framework encompassed and accommodated the possibilities for both pessimism and optimism, war and peace, racial hatred and cultural understanding, fear of the Japanese ‘‘Other’’ and admiration of its civilized qualities. The capacity to deal with traumatic crises and contradictory tendencies was a characteristic of American internationalism generally throughout the twentieth century. Optimistic it may have been; simple-minded it was not. U.S-.Japanese relations since the end of World War II show how one kind of collective memory transcended another in the thinking of the American generation that experienced the war. The war was absorbed into a longer historical narrative in which it became an important, but hardly the principal, event. The postwar period added some new chapters to this story that featured the emergence of quite unanticipated problems, chief among them being Japan’s emergence as an economic challenger (and, perhaps more troubling, Japan’s more recent status as an enfeebled economic giant) and a military protectorate. But these problems, too, were placed in a larger historical context by U.S. policymakers. They became the latest dramatic episodes in a continuing saga 108

History and Memory

of Japanese modernization and American internationalization, a tempestuous tale whose many serious crises were nevertheless subsumed under an optimistic and inclusive liberal vision of global progress. Of course, this argument raises more questions than it answers. For one thing, it is one-sided, an illustration only of the American position. An extension of this line of inquiry would require a similar assessment of Japanese historical views, their influence on policy, and their continuity and discontinuity over time. ‘‘History,’’ it has been argued, ‘‘is forgotten by the victors’’ because ‘‘they can a√ord to forget.’’π∂ For the United States, the transcendence of wartime memories proved to be fairly easy because the war’s meaning harmonized with a deeper understanding of the past. According to this view, the war was fought not for nationalist motives, not out of race hatreds, not for incompatible economic interests, but on behalf of a global conception of advancing civilization that was central to the American conception of national identity. For Japan one would expect to find not only di√erent historical visions but also an absence of the kind of continuity that one finds in the American case.π∑ To dig deeper would also require an inquiry into how those views have been modified for each nation as a result of mutual interaction. To what degree do Americans and Japanese today share a common understanding of global history, and to what extent are their policymakers prepared to guide both nations in the pursuit of that understanding? This kind of inquiry would require penetrating evaluations of issues such as race, culture, and perceptions of national uniqueness, with a view to obtaining an accurate reading of each nation’s attitudes toward a globalizing world. Other questions also abound: Where do these historical outlooks come from? How are they formed? How do they relate to questions of identity and interest and geopolitics? Obviously, how such historical understandings become ingrained in policy mentalities is a huge topic that cannot be pursued in this essay. Because everything on this earth is subject to change, these views are not fixed, nor should they be. But in what ways should these respective historical understandings be changed, and how? For if the story I have sketched here suggests that Americans have transcended their memories of the Pacific War, it also makes quite clear that they managed to do so only by remaining locked in to their liberal view of history. If one is to believe postmodernist arguments, these historical outlooks are arbitrary and unstable ‘‘discourses’’ that change through ‘‘contestation’’ in frank ninkovich

109

which discursive ‘‘interventions’’ loom large. Perhaps we are indeed entering an era in which the end of history is the beginning of memory, in which memory takes the form of an endless play of significations. Viewed in this way, memory is more an active agent and derivation of contemporary history than an organically connected residue of the past.π∏ But the remarkable persistence across time of the historical outlook that I have discussed suggests that the core ideas that shape historical memory, which were capable of surviving even earth-shattering events like the Pacific War, are unlikely to be swayed by fleeting and often inconsequential contemporary concerns. That should come as no surprise, because for Americans who were familiar with the story of Japan’s past, the war confirmed and reinforced the validity of their image of history. From a still broader perspective, the remarkable stability of this view since 1945 owes to the successes of global modernization. Its demise is not likely unless globalization itself self-destructs as a historical process. The durability across time of historical perspective would seem to leave little room for altering the trajectories of great nations with patterns of memory that are deeply embedded in their ideologies and cultures.ππ But that is a mistaken inference to draw, I believe. To be sure, if one sees the relationship as being driven by a clash of interests or of fundamental cultural values, then the two nations are fated permanently to be on a collision course. But if one eschews structural or geopolitical explanations and acknowledges the role played by historical interpretation, then both the past and the future become more open and the clashes between the United States and Japan lose their air of inevitability. A formula in which di√ering interests drive ideas makes automatically for conflict as the natural state of a√airs in which power is the only possible arbiter, but an explanatory approach that allows for the possibility that ideas can define interests, or redefine them, would seem to leave more room for change. ‘‘What is given in and through history,’’ says one thinker, ‘‘is not the determined sequence of the determined but the emergence of radical otherness, immanent creation, non-trivial novelty.’’π∫ Surely there is something odd about arguments, made at a time when the world is going through one of its most turbulent periods of change, which suggest that the troubles of the past portend only similar problems in the future or that new problems are bound to be determined by the old. While the bigger picture suggests a future of ideological immobility 110

History and Memory

or, at best, glacial change, a more fine-grained appraisal of American images of Japan would likely find greater reason for optimism about the possibilities for reasonable accommodation. Take thinking about race, for example, which many writers and intellectuals tend to treat as if it were a historical constant. The truth is that there has been a sea change in thinking about the topic over the past three-quarters of a century, accompanied by significant movement for the better in actual race relations, though obviously the utopia of racial equality is not on the horizon. A widespread if sometimes grudging respect for Japan’s modernity has emerged, especially as regards its manufacturing skills and its capacity to innovate technologically, but not to the exclusion of its many cultural achievements. Moreover, the locus of disputes, even in matters concerning trade, has shifted to cultural ground. Whatever the di≈culties of resolving them, disputes about culture as opposed to culturally driven conflicts are at least self-conscious wars of words.πΩ Or take internationalism as a worldview, an ideology that many writers assume to be an ethnocentric or Americocentric perspective. Here, too, a more detailed examination is likely to disclose a much greater understanding and appreciation of foreign cultures; the very fact that in recent years a vigorous debate on multiculturalism has been taking place in the United States is evidence of this. At the same time, it would show an increasing appreciation in other societies for a global vision, which is not uniquely American, that the United States for a brief historical moment took the lead in advancing. Considerations of this sort also raise the question of how and to what extent these views, which are analogous to a computer operating system that normally runs unobtrusively in the background, can be modified by being foregrounded and made the object of self-conscious rational discussion. The point of a humanistic scholarly interrogation of the past is to arrive at an understanding of how human beings have shaped and been shaped by their histories, an understanding that is inevitably applied to our approaches to present-day problems. The only alternative to cultural and geopolitical determinisms is to acknowledge that a creative reinterpretation of the past also brings with it the possibility for a creative reinterpretation of the present. According to the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Man can project his emancipation and anticipate an unlimited and unconstrained communication only on the basis of the creative reinterpretation of cultural heritage. . . . He who is unable to reinterpret his past may also be incapable of frank ninkovich

111

projecting concretely his interest in emancipation.’’∫≠ But that requires an understanding of the past’s importance in the first place. It is a conceit too often found among academics that scholarly knowledge or rational discussion can dramatically change the world for the better. That rarely happens. Yet, as this essay has argued, historical understanding does count for something when it comes to the making of policy. Perhaps a better understanding of that understanding may count for something, too.

Notes 1 Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3. See also Arthur G. Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998). 2 Another example of American prickliness: President Bill Clinton received some harsh criticism for his studied avoidance of triumphalism when he spoke of the end of the Pacific War rather than refer to v-j Day. 3 Hobart Rowen, ‘‘U.S.-Japan Rift Very Likely to Get Worse,’’ Houston Chronicle, 12 November 1991. See also Urban C. Lehner, ‘‘Fifty Years Later, Pearl Harbor Divides U.S., Japan,’’ Wall Street Journal, 6 December 1991. 4 John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 310. 5 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: Norton, 1999), 213. 6 Dower, War without Mercy, 28. 7 Ibid., 309. For Dower’s view on the causal importance of social structures and their connection to geopolitical calculations, a position that is especially relevant to the issues that are discussed later in this essay, see John W. Dower, ‘‘E. H. Norman, Japan and the Uses of History,’’ in John W. Dower, ed., Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E. H. Norman (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 3–101. 8 Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 217. Dower, War without Mercy, 313, says, ‘‘The old pejorative stereotypes are resurrected.’’ 9 Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 51–52. For some other arguments about historical understanding as a condition of action, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1985), especially 235–274, where he discusses the historicity of

112

History and Memory

understanding as ‘‘e√ective history’’; Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 3: 258–259. See also Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 428. 10 Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4. For the history-memory distinction, see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 21, a work that is widely acknowledged to be the starting point for theoretical discussions of collective memory. David Thelen, ed., Memory and American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) is the standard introduction to memory as a field for historical research. But see also Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, eds., The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). For social scientific treatments, see James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rimé, eds., Collective Memory of Political Events (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Robert S. Wyer Jr. and Thomas S. Krull, Memory and Cognition in Social Context (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989). Schema theory bears some obvious resemblances to what I have in mind, though there are some points of di√erence. The classic articulation of schema theory is by F. C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1932). Brief introductions can be found in Sandra P. Marshall, Schemas in Problem Solving (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3–61; Gillian Cohen, George Kiss, and Martin Le Voi, eds., Memory: Current Issues, 2nd ed. (Bristol, Pa.: Open University, 1993), 26–43, √. However, given the cultural and ideological approach that I am employing here, it is not clear that there is much benefit to be derived from employing what has been called ‘‘a largely technological approach to memory.’’ On this point, see Maurice Bloch, ‘‘Internal and External Memory: Di√erent Ways of Being in History,’’ in Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York: Routledge, 1996), 216. Of all the social scientific accounts I have sampled, Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) appears to be the closest approximation in the literature to what I have in mind. For a discussion of the historical-cultural approach to political culture, see Thomas U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 9–15.

frank ninkovich

113

11 See Keith Jenkins, Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1999) for an extreme argument about the irrelevance of the past. 12 As quoted in the New York Times, 19 August 2001, section 4, p. 5. 13 Peter J. Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 3. For the tension between memory and historical consciousness, see David Gross, Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 106–107. A good example of the scholarly uses to which the history-memory distinction can be put is Diane Barthel, Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historical Identity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), which draws a contrast between the idealization of the past and the commercialization of memory in the present and analyzes the tensions between these two poles. Historical understanding di√ers from collective memory in that it is transgenerational, elitist, reliant to some extent upon academic historical narratives, institutionally anchored, broader and deeper in its understanding of the past, and more tightly connected to foreign policy. Demonstrating this assertion would take at least another essay. 14 George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 (New York: Random House, 1972), 1: 338, 370. 15 Ibid., 469. 16 Ibid., 485, 491. 17 Ibid., 388. 18 Ibid., 477. 19 Ibid., 522, 483, 512. 20 Ibid., 534. When adjusted for education, only 46 percent of college graduates advocated more toughness. 21 Atcheson to Marshall, in Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter, frus ), 1947, vol. 6: The Far East (Washington: U.S. General Printing O≈ce, 1972), 187. 22 The Gallup Poll, 2: 806, 932, 964, 1178, 1007. 23 Atcheson to Truman, 4 January 1946, frus , 8: 91. 24 ‘‘Time to Recognize US-Japan Success Story,’’ Christian Science Monitor, 21 July 1995. 25 Everett Carll Ladd and Karlyn H. Bowman, Public Opinion in America and Japan: How We See Each Other and Ourselves (Washington: AEI Press, 1996), 58. There have been ups and downs, to be sure. At the time this essay was first conceived, the Ehime Maru incident brought to the surface some raw feelings between the two nations. See, e.g., Howard W. French, ‘‘Taking the Measure of Su√ering,’’ New York Times, 4 March 2001, 16. Nevertheless, 72 percent of Japanese in a Pew opinion poll taken in the

114

History and Memory

summer of 2002 had a ‘‘somewhat or very favorable view of the U.S.’’ In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, that favorable opinion has dropped considerably, but this appears to be a global phenomenon rather than a product of specifically Japanese-American frictions. 26 Annex to Grew to Stimson, 28 June 1945, in frus 1945, vol. 6: The British Commonwealth, The Far East (Washington: U.S. General Printing O≈ce, 1969), 559. 27 Memo by Dr. George E. Blakeslee on the Far Eastern Commission’s trip to Japan, 26 December 1945–13 February 1946, in frus , 8: 165. Of course, not all American soldiers behaved well. For a brief discussion of their ‘‘undemocratic and unspiritual behavior,’’ that is, rapes and assaults, see Toshio Nishi, Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1982), 47–49. See also Dower, Embracing Defeat, 211; Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Keystone: The American Occupation of Okinawa and U.S.-Japanese Relations (College Station: Texas a&m University Press, 2000), 37–38, 73–74. But then such behavior needs to be judged in relation to occupations elsewhere. For Soviet troops in Germany, see Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 69–90. 28 See, e.g., Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 133–134. 29 See, e.g., Seth Mydans, ‘‘Japanese Veteran Writes of Brutal Philippine War,’’ New York Times, 2 September 2001, section 1, p. 8. 30 For the di√erence of viewpoint between fighting men and those not engaged in combat, see Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 13–44. 31 Memorandum, Grew to Secretary of State, 3 January 1945, frus 1945, 6: 515–516. 32 Waldo H. Heinrichs Jr., American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966); John W. Dower, Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945–1952 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1989), 11–36. Italian and French apologists after World War II also resorted to the use of a longer historical perspective in an attempt to minimize the importance of the fascist and Vichy experiences. 33 Annex to memo by Grew, 4 August 1945, ‘‘Memo Submitted to the War Department,’’ frus 1945, 6: 585. 34 frus 1945, 6: 862.

frank ninkovich

115

35 State War Navy Coordinating Committee (swncc) 162/2, ‘‘Reorientation of the Japanese,’’ 8 January 1946, ibid., 106. 36 One detects here a critical ‘‘progressive’’ interpretation of history not unlike the kind that has been widely applied to an understanding of U.S. foreign relations. But this outgrowth of New Deal internationalism, like the New Deal itself, would prove to be short-lived. Despite the many points of agreement between contemporary critics of U.S. policy toward Japan and those who advocated a more radical course for the occupation, the outlook behind the structural reform program—with its emphasis on modernization, trust busting, deracination, and integration of Japan into a progressive world order—was far more liberal and internationalist in a classical sense than the neoprogressive sensibility that would soon replace it. Among American diplomatic historians, at any rate, the neoprogressive New Left historians who emerged in full flower in the 1960s were more critical of structural shortcomings in the United States and more relativist and/or pluralist in their evaluations of other societies. Indeed, their view of America’s place in the world verged at times on isolationism. The absence of a pluralist sensibility among progressives of the 1940s helps to explain why advocates of a more moderate occupation could characterize the harsh structural approach as being ‘‘based more on a Western view of the situation than on informed analyses of Japanese character and history.’’ William J. Sebald, With MacArthur in Japan: A Personal History of the Occupation (London: Cresset Press, 1965), 78. 37 Ballantine to Grew, 6 August 1945, in frus 1945, 6: 588. 38 Memorandum of Conversation by the Acting Secretary of State [Grew], 28 May 1945, frus 1945, 6: 545–547. 39 Ibid., frus 1945, 6: 546; Stimson to Truman, 2 July 1945, in David F. Schmitz, Henry L. Stimson: The First Wise Man (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2001), 184. After stating his case to President Truman, Grew noted for the record that the president said ‘‘his own thought had been following the same line.’’ 40 ‘‘Japan,’’ Atlantic Monthly 5 (1860): 722. 41 ‘‘The Future of American Shipping,’’ Atlantic Monthly 47 (1881): 171. 42 E. H. House, ‘‘The Present and Future of Japan,’’ Harper’s 46 (1873): 864. 43 ‘‘The Japanese Spring,’’ in A Traveler’s Companion: A Collection from Harper’s Magazine (New York: Gallery Books, 1991), 432. 44 ‘‘The Flowering of a Nation,’’ Atlantic Monthly 28 (1871): 315. For a fine overview of some of the intellectual cross-currents, see Joseph M. Henning, Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion, and the Formative Years of AmericanJapanese Relations (New York: New York University Press, 2000). European

116

History and Memory

perceptions are treated in Jean-Pierre Lehmann, The Image of Japan: From Feudal Isolation to World Power 1850–1905 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978). Sheila Johnson, The Japanese through American Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), makes the rather humdrum case that American images of Japan contain both negative and positive elements. 45 Immigration restriction against Orientals in the United States was an unmistakable indicator of racism, but popularly influenced legislation cannot automatically be construed as an index to the thinking of policymakers, especially if one assumes, as I do, that American internationalism was elite-driven. 46 William Elliot Gri≈s, ‘‘Nature and People in Japan,’’ The Century 39 (1889): 231. 47 Theodore Roosevelt to Cecil Spring Rice, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951–54), 4: 760. 48 The term is taken from Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1985), especially 267–288. 49 See James Chace, Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 106. 50 Atcheson to Truman, 5 January 1947, in frus , 1947 6, 158. 51 Atcheson to Truman, 4 January 1946, in frus , 1946, 8: 92. 52 Biographies of MacArthur such as Michael Schaller’s Douglas MacArthur: The Far Eastern General (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 135–157, give MacArthur’s policies a decidedly conservative tilt because they focus chiefly on economic policies and the general’s less than enthusiastic approach to trust busting in the occupation’s opening phases. They also make it appear as if MacArthur’s calculations as well as those of policymakers in Washington were driven more by national politics than by international considerations. No doubt politics were involved, but given the long existence of these historical perspectives on Japan and their indispensability in providing a conceptual framework for the occupation, it seems likely that a debate over their respective vices and virtues would have taken place with or without MacArthur’s presence. 53 Memo by Nelson T. Johnson, Secretary General of the Far East Advisory Commission, 7 February 1946, in frus , 1946, 8: 160, 161. 54 Annex to memo by Saltzman to Director of O≈ce of Far Eastern A√airs (fea), April 1948, in frus 1948, vol. 6: The Far East and Australasia (Washington: U.S. General Printing O≈ce, 1974), 732. 55 Atcheson to Truman, January 5, 1947, in frus 1947, vol. 6, The Far East (Washington: U.S. Government Printing O≈ce, 1972) 6: 159.

frank ninkovich

117

56 John K. Emmerson, The Japanese Thread: A Life in the U.S. Foreign Service (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), 251. 57 Nishi, Unconditional Democracy. 58 With the emergence of geopolitical considerations, the blend of policy considerations was composed of the three major approaches to the historical study of foreign relations in the United States: realism, radicalism, and culture/ideology. 59 Memo by Joseph Davies in Moscow, 10 August 1946, in frus 1946, 8: 286. 60 George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 368–396; Kennan to Lovett, 23 March 1948, in frus 1948, 6: 689. Some historians believe that anti-Communism emerged as a powerful motive for a soft peace even before the surrender, most notably in the person of Joseph Grew. But given Grew’s long prewar record of praying for liberal elements in Japan to reverse the nation’s expansionist course, it is not captious to suggest that he might have advocated precisely the same policies if the Soviet Union had not existed. In 1941, after switching to a hard line, Grew hoped, following the discrediting of the expansionist leaders, that ‘‘a regeneration of thought may ultimately take shape in this country, permitting the resumption of relations with us and leading to a readjustment of the whole Pacific problem.’’ See Joseph Grew, Ten Years in Japan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944), 445. Or see Akira Iriye’s argument that postwar policy was the result of ‘‘a pre–Cold War definition,’’ in Akira Iriye, ‘‘Continuities in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1941–49,’’ in Yônosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye, eds., The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 379. 61 Memo by Emmerson, 9 October 1946, in frus 1946, 8: 339. 62 Annex to memo by Saltzman to Director of O≈ce of fea, response to the Kennan report, 9 April 1948, in frus 1948, 6: 733. 63 The criticism of scap’s trust busting as economic radicalism or ‘‘near communism’’ can be confusing. The debate between those who favored maintaining the zaibatsu and those who favored deconcentration resembles, if anything, the contest between advocates of the New Nationalism and the New Freedom in the presidential campaign of 1912. No doubt those who opposed trust busting did so not because it was intended to produce market competition and a middle class, but because they believed it was likely to generate economic chaos in postwar Japan and thus the conditions for communization of the country. 64 For the general argument about Wilsonianism, and for the more specific claim that the cold war cannot help but be misunderstood by realist historians who purport to describe the unrealistic projects of policymakers,

118

History and Memory

see Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). Regrettably, the book deals hardly at all with postwar Japan. 65 Memo by Joseph Grew, 28 May 1945, in frus 1945, 6: 551. 66 Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941– 1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 265. For a critique of Iriye’s argument, see John W. Dower, ‘‘Rethinking World War II in Asia,’’ Reviews in American History 12 (1984): 155–169. 67 See, e.g., Harold G. Moulton and Louis Marlio, The Control of Germany and Japan (Washington: Brookings, 1944). 68 For the argument that di√erences between the two nations outweighed similarities and that the similarities consisted largely of clichés, see Bernd Martin, Japan and Germany in the Modern World (Providence, R.I.: Berghahn Books, 1995), xii. 69 Frank Ninkovich, Germany and the United States: The Transformation of the German Question Since 1945, updated ed. (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 167. 70 Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). 71 ‘‘Japan’s Historical Amnesia,’’ editorial, Los Angeles Times, 1 March 1999, 4; Francis Fukuyama, ‘‘A Sorry Situation,’’ Wall Street Journal, 28 February 2001, A22; David McNeill, ‘‘An Unwelcome Visit from the Uyoku,’’ New Statesman, 26 February 2001, 32–33. 72 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 235. 73 Olivier Zunz, in Why the American Century? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) points out how anomalous, and hence necessarily short-lived, was the application of New Deal ideas in postwar Japan. 74 Peter Burke, ‘‘History as Social Memory,’’ in Thomas Butler, ed., Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 106. 75 For one such e√ort, see Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For an argument that detects fairly constant images in both societies, see John Dower, ‘‘Graphic Japanese, Graphic Americans,’’ in Akira Iriye and Robert Wampler, eds., Partnership: The United States and Japan, 1951–2001 (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001), 301–333. 76 ‘‘Prospecting for Truth in the Ore of Memory,’’ New York Times, 10 March 2001, B9, 11. 77 For example, Anthony Smith, ‘‘Towards a Global Culture?,’’ in M. Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1990): 171–191, argues that a global cul-

frank ninkovich

119

ture is impossible because, among other reasons, there are no world memories capable of generating su≈cient unity. 78 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1998), 184. Castoriadis may appear to be arguing on behalf of cultural uniqueness, but as I understand him he is making a case for the inventiveness of culture. 79 See, e.g., Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 162, who describes the central tension in today’s globalizing world in terms of ‘‘capital versus culture.’’ This book is a good indicator of how progressive sensibilities have shifted over time. 80 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thomson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 97.

120

History and Memory

Cold War Diplomacy and Memories of the Pacific War a comparison of the american and japanese cases

. takuya sasaki

In a classic study of the uses of history for policymakers, Ernest R. May wrote, ‘‘Framers of foreign policy are often influenced by beliefs about what history teaches or portends. Sometimes, they perceive problems in terms of analogies from the past. Sometimes, they envision the future either as foreshadowed by historical parallels or as following a straight line from what has recently gone before.’’∞ This essay, starting from May’s premise, assumes that to an important degree Japan and the United States based their foreign policy in the cold war years on their understanding of World War II in general and the Pacific War in particular. Questions to be explored are: What kind of memories has the Pacific War bequeathed to the United States and Japan? In what ways have American and Japanese memories of the Pacific War been transformed into legacies and lessons? How have the two nations applied these legacies and lessons to their foreign policy issues in these years? Relying primarily on secondary sources, this essay does not, nor could it purport to, o√er a wholly new perspective on the field, where we have greatly benefited from an abundant and extensive literature. Rather, I aim to provide a broad and critical overview of the evolution of the interrelations between both nations’ war memories and their foreign conduct in the cold war years. I place major emphasis for analysis on memories of foreign policy makers, although I also discuss the interaction between policymakers and the general public over war memories. My argument begins with discussion of a number of the war’s legacies and lessons for the two countries. Following that is an examination of both nations’ views of the Soviet threat and the cold

4

war. After illustrating an interrelationship between their respective war legacies and foreign policy formulation, I focus on the issue of nuclear forces and foreign policy. In conclusion, I o√er some suggestions for making use of the memories of the Pacific War toward a constructive Japan-U.S. relationship.

The Legacies and Lessons of the Pacific War For the American people, the Pacific War was a good war in many ways. The United States entered it by way of Japan’s ‘‘sneak’’ attack on Pearl Harbor, fought it for democratic principles against a totalitarian regime, and won a decisive victory. The war confirmed America’s own self-image that it was on the right side of history. Being converted to internationalism, the American people grew fully confident of taking an active foreign policy abroad in the postwar world. Also, Americans became convinced that su≈cient military preparedness was the critical element in defending national security. While in the interwar years the United States had mainly relied on economic, financial, and cultural rather than military measures to promote the national interest and international stability, the Pacific War demonstrated the absolute validity of military power in maintaining world peace. Pearl Harbor was one of two decisive events—the other was Munich —that shaped the basic assumption of postwar American national security policy. The Japanese surprise attack demonstrated not only that isolationism was no longer tenable but also that constant vigilance against a hostile power and a strong military establishment in peacetime were indispensable. Preventing another Pearl Harbor–type of attack became the foremost task for American policymakers. In economic terms, World War II had successfully expanded the American economy. The gross national product (gnp) jumped from $91 billion in 1939 to $220 billion in 1945, salaries and wages of workers more than doubled, and unemployment was virtually eliminated. The economic lesson from the war was that in the face of a grave international situation, the United States could expend enormous resources for military purposes while maintaining a high standard of living. World War II seemed to confirm the policymakers’ view that autocratic government of a foreign country would inevitably lead to aggres122

Cold War Diplomacy

sive behavior overseas and present a serious military threat to peaceloving democratic nations. Accordingly, they believed, democratizing the totalitarian Axis regimes should be a matter of the highest priority once military occupation started. Related to this assumption, American o≈cials firmly believed that the Great Depression and the following chaotic economic situation in the 1930s gave rise to totalitarian regimes and their autarkic practices, which in turn triggered the outbreak of World War II. The United States was now determined to integrate the defeated nations, including Japan, into a world of liberal capitalist internationalism once it achieved the objectives of occupation policy. The Pacific War played an essential part in rectifying racial and ethnic discrimination at home. Since Washington had to refute the Japanese charge that the United States was fighting for white people, it could not a√ord to neglect remedying legal discrimination that existed against citizens of Chinese ethnic background. In 1943, following the announcement of the end of the extraterritorial unequal treaties with China, the United States repealed the immigration law dating to 1882 that had banned Chinese immigrants and their eligibility for naturalization. (Three years later, Congress granted the same status to Filipinos and Asian Indians.) The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration took these steps even while it forced 120,000 Japanese Americans residing on the West Coast to resettle throughout the western states.≤ Quite naturally, the Japanese people had a fundamentally di√erent outlook on the Pacific War. For them, it was the worst experience in history. In spite of tremendous military spending and powerful armed forces, Japan not only su√ered an overwhelming defeat but also witnessed the total devastation of its homeland. It also lost all its colonies. Hiroshima and Nagasaki came to symbolize the sheer destructiveness and inhumanity of war. Most Japanese grew profoundly skeptical of the usefulness of military power in protecting their well-being. The sickening revelations about the numerous atrocities committed in the occupied territories and Japanese mistreatment of war prisoners and civilian internees further aroused the people’s disgust at the war and the military. Through the International Military Tribunal for the Far East the Japanese people knew for the first time, among other things, the Kwantung Army’s plot and extensive involvement in the Manchurian Incident and the Nanjing Massacre of 1937. The war also turned the Japanese economy into a complete shamtakuya sasaki

123

bles; many were forced to face hunger and starvation. The rice harvest of 1945 dropped to a new low, half of the 1933 level. The Japanese government became gravely worried over the prospect that about 10 million people might die of famine. Only timely American food relief averted massive starvation. As a result of the war Japan lost a third of its national wealth. It was not until the mid-1950s that Japan’s economy finally returned to the prewar level. In the case of Japan, the war had not paid in any respect. Through these experiences, the Japanese people gained a strong sense of revulsion against war and military power. The public consensus was that the Pacific War was a terrible mistake and that this kind of mistake should never be repeated. Conveniently forgetting that they had enthusiastically supported the war, the Japanese people felt somehow victimized by it, blamed the military for starting it, and were determined to reestablish Japan’s international position by means other than military. This public perception stimulated an almost enthusiastic embrace of the new constitution, in which Article 9 renounced the use of arms to resolve international conflict. The sheer reluctance of the Japanese people to take military measures in any international dispute might be one of the most significant lessons that they had drawn from the Pacific War. Suddenly, the United States and Japan found themselves changing sides as to their perception of the e√ectiveness of military power in protecting national security. Also, in striking contrast to the case of the United States, which was to embark on an active, dynamic, and global foreign policy, Japan became cautious, almost timid in taking an active part in international a√airs outside its vicinity, and grew rather reactive to external events. Japan’s egregious fiasco in constructing the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere and its utter defeat in the Pacific War had largely determined this passive attitude.≥

The Outbreak of the Cold War Soviet foreign actions in 1939–1940 had already impressed American policymakers as reminiscent of the military expansion by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. In particular, Soviet actions against Poland, Finland, and the Baltic nations infuriated them. In early December 124

Cold War Diplomacy

1939, President Roosevelt, who had refrained from publicly attacking Soviet conduct since the USSR’s conclusion of the nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany, announced a moral embargo on airplane sales against ‘‘nations obviously guilty’’ of the ‘‘unprovoked bombing and machine gunning of civilian populations from the air.’’ He had clearly in mind three nations: the Soviet Union, Germany, and Japan. In the same month, the American chargé in Iran approvingly reported back the warning of the Iranian minister of finance that ‘‘not unlike Japan in the Far East, the Soviets were now planning a ‘new order’ for the Middle East by adroit opportunism and a cynical defiance of reason and justice.’’∂ The following summer, the State Department’s Loy Henderson, who was to become a chief architect of the Truman Doctrine some years later, leveled an implicit criticism against the Roosevelt administration’s apparently conciliatory attitude toward the Soviet Union: ‘‘Is the Government of the United States to apply certain standards of judgment and conduct to aggression by Germany and Japan which it will not apply to aggression by the Soviet Union[?]. . . . Is the United States to continue to refuse to recognize the fruits of aggression regardless of who the aggressor may be, or for reasons of expediency to close its eyes to the fact that certain nations are committing aggression upon their neighbors[?]’’ His colleague Edward Page Jr. shared the same view of the Soviet threat. In October 1940 Page observed that although the Soviet Union had concluded a series of nonaggression agreements with neighboring nations such as Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Rumania, the Soviet army had invaded Poland and the Baltic nations and occupied the Bessarabian and Bucovina provinces of Rumania. This Soviet behavior demonstrated, he charged, that the nonaggression agreements ‘‘were wantonly swept aside in a manner legally and ethically indistinguishable from the aggressive acts committed by Germany, Italy, and Japan.’’ Soviet leaders ‘‘have never departed from the ultimate aim to enlarge their domain and to include under the Soviet system additional people and territories.’’∑ While these anti-Soviet perceptions became gradually submerged under the surface with the outbreak of German-Soviet hostilities in June 1941, they resurfaced toward the end of World War II. Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew, who had been an American ambassador to Japan in the 1930s, issued a dire warning in May 1945: ‘‘As a ‘war to end wars,’ the war will have been futile, for the result will be takuya sasaki

125

merely the transfer of totalitarian dictatorship and power from Germany and Japan to Soviet Russia which will constitute in future as grave a danger to us as did the Axis.’’∏ In a speech in October 1945, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes reiterated the belief prevalent among his subordinates that there exists a close interrelationship between the internal behavior of states and their external behavior. ‘‘We have learned by bitter experience in the past ten years that Nazi and Fascist plans for external aggression started with tyrannies at home which were falsely defended as matters of purely local concern. We have learned that tyranny anywhere must be watched, for it may come to threaten the security of neighboring nations and soon become the concern of all nations.’’ These views were no longer restricted to the Department of State. In June 1945, Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal asserted that the dynamics of the philosophy of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Hirohito ‘‘tended toward the concentration of power in the state.’’ Three months later, he claimed a racial a≈nity between the Japanese and the Russian people in contending that the Soviets were not trustworthy. ‘‘The Russians, like the Japanese, are essentially Oriental in their thinking. . . . It seems doubtful that we should endeavor to buy their understanding and sympathy. . . . There are no returns on appeasement.’’π That President Harry S Truman naturally and dramatically made use of the ominous image of the former Axis enemies in explaining a new course of American foreign policy was not therefore surprising. In his major address to a joint session of Congress on March 12, 1947, he announced, ‘‘The peoples of a number of countries of the world have recently had totalitarian regimes forced upon them against their will’’ and declared that it must be ‘‘the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’’∫ Truman showed exactly the same response when he heard the news of the Korean War in June 1950; his immediate reaction was to search for a parallel in recent history: ‘‘I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria. I remember how each time that the democracies failed to act it had encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier.’’ Six months later, in a State of the Union message to Congress, Truman again expressed his strong conviction: ‘‘If the democracies had stood 126

Cold War Diplomacy

up against the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, or the attack on Ethiopia in 1935, or the seizure of Austria in 1938, if they had stood together against aggression on those occasions as the United Nations has done in Korea, the whole story of our time would have been di√erent.’’Ω With the coming of the cold war to Asia and the Chinese military intervention in the Korean War, the totalitarian analogy was now also applied to China. In responding to the Indochina Crisis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote a letter to British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill on April 5, 1954, urgently asking for ‘‘united action’’ to counter the Chinese military menace and invoking their common memories: ‘‘We failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini, and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. . . . May it not be that our two nations have learned something from that lesson?’’ The following year, in the midst of the Taiwan Strait Crisis, Eisenhower again wrote to Churchill, claiming, ‘‘I compared the aggressiveness of the Red Chinese in the Formosa Strait with that of the Japanese in Manchuria and the Nazis in Europe in the 1930s. Concessions were no answer.’’∞≠ All of these views illustrated the dominant view of American foreign policymakers on the cold war: the United States was again waging a fierce struggle against a powerful totalitarian state set on world conquest. In that sense, the cold war was World War III. For most Japanese, the cold war was a totally di√erent story. The last thing the Japanese people would have imagined was that their prewar military actions had influenced in some way the American views of the Soviet threat. Neither would they have conceived that Pearl Harbor had formed a lasting lesson for American policymakers. Rather, as Prime Minister Naruhiko Higashikuni’s comment of September 1945 demonstrated, as soon as the war was over, the Japanese started to equate Hiroshima and Pearl Harbor, obviously trying to evade the responsibility for having started a war: ‘‘People of America, won’t you forget Pearl Harbor? . . . We people of Japan will forget the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb. . . . The war is ended. Let us now bury hate.’’∞∞ Naturally, then, in stark contrast to the American people, who regarded the cold war as another world war, the Japanese people saw it as something imposed by outside forces. Nonetheless, many conservative Japanese welcomed the outbreak of the cold war. They expected that a U.S.-Soviet struggle would lead to a less harsh Allied control of Japan and promote Japan’s early reentry into international society. takuya sasaki

127

Future Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, who had been arrested as a Class A war criminal, noted in his diary dated August 11, 1946, that his Sugamo Prison inmates agreed in seeing the breakup of the Grand Alliance ‘‘as a good chance for revival of Japan,’’ and because of this new international situation, ‘‘his spirits soared for the first time in a long time.’’∞≤ As Kishi expected, the cold war in Asia changed the American policy toward Japan. When Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall in his January 1948 speech strongly advocated Japanese economic reconstruction in the face of the Communist threat in Asia, Yoshida felt encouraged. Two months later, George F. Kennan, director of the Policy Planning Sta√ of the State Department, came to Tokyo to consult with General Douglas MacArthur, a visit which paved the way for the adoption of National Security Council (nsc) 13/2. This document argued that ‘‘economic recovery should be made the primary objective’’ of U.S. policy in Japan ‘‘for the coming period’’ and that the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (scap) should be advised to terminate the reparations program soon, thus shifting the goal of occupational policy from democratization to economic rehabilitation. It did not take long before war criminals, including Kishi, were released.∞≥ With the coming of the cold war to Asia, the Japanese government had determined to rely for its security on the United States. As early as the summer of 1947, Foreign Minister Hitoshi Ashida proposed to an American o≈cial an agreement by which, in case of contingency, the United States would defend Japan by sending armed forces. In May 1950, Prime Minister Yoshida informed Joseph Dodge, scap’s financial adviser, through his special representative, Ikeda Hayato, of Japanese readiness to accept the presence of American forces for the security of Japan. This formula became the prototype of the Japan-U.S. security pact of 1951. The Korean War accelerated this evolutionary trend in American policy toward Japan. It expedited the Japanese economic recovery, redoubled the American e√ort to arrive at a Japanese peace settlement, and led to concluding a security pact with Japan. The Truman administration, in setting forth principles on the Japanese Peace Treaty in November 1950, proposed that the former Allied powers should renounce reparations claims in principle and should place no restriction on the Japanese economic recovery and rearmament. These terms formed the basic framework of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. 128

Cold War Diplomacy

To the great satisfaction of the Japanese government, the San Francisco Treaty provided for a lenient peace, thanks in large measure to the good o≈ces of the U.S. government. John Foster Dulles successfully quelled complaints and protests from Western allies such as the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand. The Treaty did not ban Japanese rearmament, nor did it demand punitive reparations from Japan. It only stipulated that Japan did have to pay reparations to the former Allied powers according to its limited resources.∞∂ Meantime, much to the distress of other Asian countries, Japan failed to face up squarely to the part it had played in the bitter history of the 1930s and 1940s. The Japanese people were satisfied simply to see a number of former military and government o≈cials prosecuted and executed. That the United States did not insist on the matter once the cold war started was essential in allowing Japan to turn a deaf ear to its Asian neighbors. Although these countries continued to voice their concern, they were not powerful enough to sway Japan and the United States. The international ostracism of China, which had su√ered the most from Japanese aggression, was an additional and even crucial element in the playing out of this issue. Following the San Francisco conference, Washington, by helping Japan’s application to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tari√s and Trade, further hastened to integrate Japan into the U.S.-led multilateral economic system. Because of the cold war, the Japanese people were able to reap enormous political and economic benefits under the military umbrella provided by the United States, while remaining complacent about blaming their military for what had happened in the Pacific War and averting su≈cient atonement for their own war atrocities. This stance received American tacit assent, for the United States had an enormous stake in rebuilding a strong and anti-Communist Japan to contain Communism in Asia.∞∑ Still, the American transformation of Japan into a liberal democratic and prosperous society has stood as a brilliant success. This has been the most enduring legacy of the American occupation of Japan. Common democratic values have formed a firm bond between the two nations and have constituted the cornerstone for maintaining a stable Asia-Pacific region. This achievement was all the more remarkable and even ironic because General MacArthur, who had been responsible for takuya sasaki

129

a series of democratic reforms, was an ardent anti–New Dealer and a staunch conservative.

The Evolution of the Cold War Paul H. Nitze, who was soon to become the very embodiment of the postwar national security policy, visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the fall of 1945 as a member of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. After the survey, Nitze submitted a summary report on the Pacific War, wherein he emphasized the need for civil defense measures, scientific research and development, e√ective intelligence capabilities, unification of the armed forces, and the maintenance of military strength. Nitze referred to the lesson of Pearl Harbor in the concluding part of the report: ‘‘The Japanese would have never attacked Pearl Harbor had they not correctly assessed the weakness of our defenses in the Pacific and had they not incorrectly assessed the fighting determination of the United States when attacked.’’ Nitze’s summary report on the Pacific War was important since it could be regarded as the forerunner of nsc 68 and nsc 5724 (the Gaither Report), two significant nsc documents in cold war history. Nitze turned out to be the principal figure who drafted these nsc papers.∞∏ In nsc 68 of April 1950, Nitze argued for an immediate, large-scale buildup of conventional and nuclear forces, the cost of which, he estimated, would reach approximately $50 billion annually. This figure was more than three times the defense budget for fiscal 1950. Interestingly, Nitze claimed that the military expansion proposed in nsc 68 was not only a realistic way to counter the mounting military threat of the Soviet Union but was also an alternative to a surprise attack against the Soviet Union. In rejecting a preventive war, nsc 68 pointed out that such a course would be morally ‘‘repugnant’’ and ‘‘corrosive’’ to many Americans. The implication was clear: the United States had a moral obligation to refrain from launching a Pearl Harbor–type of attack. Obviously, Pearl Harbor cast a moral restraint on the conduct of American foreign relations. In pleading for a dramatic increase in military spending in nsc 68, Nitze cited the economic lesson of World War II: ‘‘In an emergency the United States could devote upward of 50 percent of its gross product to these purposes [military expenditures, foreign assistance, and 130

Cold War Diplomacy

military investment] (as it did during the last war). . . . One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full e≈ciency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living.’’ The Korean War, which broke out before long, pushed the defense budget up to $50 billion without seriously hurting the economy, an evolution that apparently bore out the analysis of nsc 68.∞π In November 1957, Nitze reiterated the gist of nsc 68 in nsc 5724, which o√ered a highly critical assessment of the Eisenhower administration’s containment policy. Rejecting the administration’s fiscal conservatism, Nitze again pointed out the economic expansion during World War II: ‘‘This country is now devoting 8.5% of its production to defense, and 10% to all national security programs. The American people have always been ready to shoulder heavy costs for their defense when convinced of their necessity. We devoted 41% of our gnp to defense at the height of World War II and 14% during the Korean War.’’∞∫ Those who participated in the making of the Gaither Report were prominent bipartisan figures like Robert Lovett, John McCloy, William Foster, and Nitze. This document formed the blueprint of national security policy for the coming Democratic administration, in which all of them were to serve in various capacities. In the heyday of the cold war, Pearl Harbor also provided policymakers with a symbolic and useful metaphor for explaining to the public the grave international situation; Pearl Harbor had metamorphosed into a convenient policy tool for government o≈cials. In the late 1950s, when the Soviet military threat seemed to rise sharply, the most frequent comparison to be used was Pearl Harbor. As early as June 1955, Senators Henry Jackson and Clinton Anderson, warning in a letter to President Eisenhower that Soviet possession of an intercontinental ballistic missile could well lead to a ‘‘nuclear Pearl Harbor,’’ demanded that he should put the missile program on a ‘‘wartime footing’’ and give it the highest national priority.∞Ω Then, in October 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. In the wake of this shocking news, Edward Teller, the father of the h-bomb, commented that the United States had lost ‘‘a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.’’ Senator W. Stuart Symington of the Senate Armed Services Committee described Sputnik as a ‘‘technical Pearl Harbor’’ and asserted that takuya sasaki

131

the Soviet satellite refuted the Eisenhower administration’s claim that the United States maintained a qualitative military lead over the Soviet Union. Lyndon Johnson, Senate majority leader, stated in his opening remarks in the Senate hearings, ‘‘We meet today in the atmosphere of another Pearl Harbor.’’ Joseph W. Alsop, one of the most influential journalists in the postwar period, observed in his January 1960 column that the United States was lagging behind the Soviets in missile capabilities and warned that ‘‘something much worse than Pearl Harbor can now be the result.’’≤≠ Even President Eisenhower, who emphatically refuted the Pearl Harbor analogy in the missile gap controversy, resorted to this metaphor in defending a secret aerial reconnaissance over Soviet territory. When the u-2 a√air aborted his visit to Moscow in May 1960, Eisenhower justified the spy mission by saying in a press conference, ‘‘No one wants another Pearl Harbor.’’≤∞ The Pearl Harbor analogy was again frequently invoked during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the two superpowers closer to nuclear war than any other crisis in the cold war years. According to Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow: In the debates recorded on Kennedy’s tapes, Pearl Harbor has a presence as pervasive as Munich. . . . Absent Pearl Harbor, the whole debate about the Soviet missiles in Cuba might have been di√erent. . . . Most important of all, Pearl Harbor served as a conclusive example of the proposition that a secretive government might pursue its ambitions, or relieve its frustrations, by adopting courses of action that objectively seemed irrational or even suicidal. This proposition haunts discussion of Soviet motives and possible Soviet reactions during the missile crisis.≤≤

Secretary of State Dean Rusk later recalled that when he heard the Federal Bureau of Investigation report that Soviet diplomats were destroying sensitive documents at their embassy in Washington, it reminded him that Japanese diplomats had burned documents the night before Pearl Harbor. On the other hand, some Ex Comm (Executive Committee of the National Security Council) members worried about ‘‘a Pearl Harbor in reverse.’’ Under Secretary of State George Ball, for instance, argued that a prompt air strike was a kind of attack that the Soviet Union might carry out. Similarly, Attorney General Robert Kennedy explained that such an attack was ‘‘not in our traditions.’’ His remark infuriated Dean Acheson, who believed the analogy was inap132

Cold War Diplomacy

propriate because the president repeatedly warned against installment of the nuclear weapon in the hemisphere. Nonetheless, apparently touching the nerves of other participants in the Ex Comm, Kennedy’s warning was instrumental in winning their support for the naval blockade. As nsc 68 had predicted, moral inhibitions figured prominently in the ultimate rejection of a preventive war strike like Pearl Harbor.≤≥ In formulating Japan policy, the United States was determined to prevent a resurgence of Japanese militarism. Its defense rebuilding should not lead Japan to the dominant position in the Asia-Pacific region that it had occupied in the 1930s. Kennan, the key architect of the shift in occupation policy, contended in January 1948 that ‘‘our primary goal’’ was to ensure that American security ‘‘must never again be threatened by the mobilization against us of the complete industrial area [in the Far East] as it was during the second world war.’’ The security pact with Japan was considered one of the indispensable vehicles for restraining Japan. As in Europe, U.S. cold war diplomacy in Asia was to implement a dual containment of the former enemy, Japan, and the present enemy, international Communism.≤∂ The Joint Chiefs of Sta√ memorandum dated April 9, 1954, to Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson illustrated the case: ‘‘It is believed that so long as the United States furnishes the principal o√ensive air and naval elements of the combined military forces in the Far East, adequate safeguards against the recrudescence of Japanese military power as an aggressive force would be provided.’’ Thirty-six years later, the first Bush administration recited the same view in its report on the strategic framework for the Asian Pacific Rim: ‘‘As Japan extends its regional economic influence, latent regional concerns may resurface. Increases in Japanese military strength undertaken to compensate for declining U.S. capabilities in the region could prove worrisome to regional nations, especially if they perceive Japan is acting independent of the U.S.-Japan security relationship.’’≤∑ Richard M. Nixon and Henry H. Kissinger were the most prominent public figures who expressed this outlook bluntly. On the eve of the first Sino-U.S. summit meeting, held in February 1972, Kissinger advised Nixon to explain to the Chinese that the United States did not oppose rearmament of Japan, but did oppose a ‘‘nuclear Japan.’’ Nixon agreed with him, saying that U.S. policy was to ‘‘keep Japan from takuya sasaki

133

building its own’’ nuclear bomb and to ‘‘oppose Japan ‘stretching out its hands’ to Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia.’’ Both mentioned the danger that if the United States did not restrain Japan, the latter could emerge as the major military power in the area.≤∏ Like the repeal of the anti-Chinese immigration act, foreign policy considerations were again evident in the revision of the 1924 Immigration and Naturalization Act. In order to neutralize Soviet propaganda regarding U.S. racial policies, Congress approved the McCarranWalter Act of 1952, which repealed the 1924 Act, thus removing racial bars on immigration and naturalization and allocating a small annual immigration quota to Japan and other nations of the Asia-Pacific region.≤π Equally, the foreign policy implication of African Americans’ legal status was grave. As Eleanor Roosevelt observed, civil rights ‘‘isn’t any longer a domestic question—it’s an international question,’’ one that might largely determine the course of the cold war. The attorney general stated in December 1952 in a brief for the cases involving segregation in public schools, ‘‘It is in the context of the present world struggle between freedom and tyranny that the problem of racial discrimination must be viewed. . . . Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubt even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.’’ Dean Acheson concurred: ‘‘Other peoples cannot understand how such a practice [the segregation of schoolchildren on a racial basis] can exist in a country which professes to be a staunch supporter of freedom, justice, and democracy.’’ One of these cases led to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.≤∫ By taking the initial steps toward eliminating systematic discrimination against minorities, the United States demonstrated to the world that it was going to fulfill, albeit gradually, its public commitment to democratic principles. To a significant extent, the Vietnam War, the most colossal blunder in American history, was a product of the Pacific War. Major foreign policy makers like John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara belonged to the same generation who shared firsthand experiences of Munich, Pearl Harbor, and World War II. They firmly believed that the United States had to repel the military aggression of the totalitarian regime of North Vietnam. Rusk never tired of invoking the lesson of World War II. In March 1965, he asked, ‘‘Can 134

Cold War Diplomacy

those of us in this room forget the lesson that we had on this issue of war and peace, when it was only 10 years from the seizure of Manchuria to Pearl Harbor: about two years from the seizure of Czechoslovakia to the outbreak of World War II in Western Europe?’’ On another occasion he repeated the theme: ‘‘Once again we hear expressed the views which cost the men of my generation a terrible price in World War II. We are told that Southeast Asia is too far away—but so were Manchuria and Ethiopia.’’ Johnson too defended his Vietnam policy by stressing the lessons of history: ‘‘Like most men and women of my generation, I felt that World War II might have been avoided if the United States in the 1930’s had not given such an uncertain signal of its likely response to aggression in Europe and Asia.’’ Johnson echoed the theme in a speech on April 7, 1965: ‘‘The central lesson of our time is that the appetite of aggression is never satisfied. To withdraw from one battlefield means only to prepare for the next.’’≤Ω These policymakers adhered to the unshakable conviction that the United States could provide whatever resources were necessary to prevail in Vietnam. In this respect, the economic lesson of the Pacific War was again evident. Johnson declared to the nation in 1964, ‘‘We have the resources and we have the will to follow this course as long as it may take.’’ McNamara informed his military advisers in 1965, ‘‘There is an unlimited appropriation available for the financing of aid to Vietnam. Under no circumstances is a lack of money to stand in the way of aid to that nation.’’≥≠ By the early 1970s, the Vietnam War, not World War II, came to figure prominently in the minds of American people. The lessening tension with the Soviet Union and China and the arrival of an era of détente furthered the trend. As a result, the memories of the Pacific War receded steadily into the background and those of the Vietnam War began to haunt subsequent American foreign and military policy. Unlike the United States, Japan was not convinced that its security was seriously threatened by the Soviet Union or China. Especially toward China, Japan felt historical and cultural a≈nity interwoven with a guilty conscience. Besides, as Prime Minister Yoshida predicted an eventual breakup of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the alliance’s inherent unnaturalness reinforced the view that China did not pose a grave military menace. Moreover, Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, a deep sense of takuya sasaki

135

pacifism, and the public’s profound aversion to revival of militarism imposed a constant constraint against building the Self-Defense Forces and explain the caution of the Japanese in handling the defense program. When John Foster Dulles pressed the Japanese government to start an all-out rearmament program in 1951, Yoshida resisted the request by referring to the Japanese constitution, the negative e√ect of huge military spending upon economic recovery, and Japan’s Asian neighbors’ security concerns. Although Yoshida promised a limited rearmament plan, he regarded it as a price to satisfy the United States rather than as a step to counter the Communist threat. Successive Japanese administrations followed the Yoshida Doctrine, whereby Japan, relying for its military security on the United States, should focus on economic development and proceed with defense programs carefully. Inevitably, the pace of the Japanese defense e√ort became a constant source of contention with the United States.≥∞ While enjoying the benefits brought by the cold war, Japan did not want to embroil itself deeply in it. The U.S. government knew that Japan’s moderate e√ort on defense was in tune with Japanese public feeling. A study of the Psychological Strategy Board in May 1952 stated, ‘‘For many Japanese, the prospect of immediate involvement in another war is viewed with decided revulsion, a circumstance which injects an emotional and irrational element into popular opinion regarding rearmament.’’ National Intelligence Estimate (nie) 41–58, dated December 23, 1958, noted, ‘‘Popular opposition to the idea of rearmament as well as to its cost will continue to restrict Japan’s defense e√ort.’’ Dated February 9, 1960, nie 41–60 observed ‘‘widespread, but at present quiescent, neutralist sentiment in Japan.’’≥≤ Reflecting the popular perception, the Japanese Upper House adopted a resolution in 1954 against the deployment overseas of the Self-Defense Forces. In proposing the resolution, a major sponsor rea≈rmed the lesson of the Pacific War as follows: ‘‘As we start to build the Self Defense Forces . . . it is our solemn obligation to the people that we should never repeat such a mistake as we committed in the past.’’ In 1976, the Takeo Miki administration determined that Japan should limit defense spending to 1 percent of gnp ‘‘in the interim period.’’ It also set strict guidelines for arms exports which banned arms sales to the Communist bloc and nations involved in international conflict. It was only in 1976 that the United States and Japan began to consult on defense cooperation in certain contingencies.≥≥ 136

Cold War Diplomacy

In marked di√erence from the example set by the United States, Japan’s approach to its own racial and ethnic discrimination against minority groups has been lukewarm at best. In the Pacific War Japan had supposedly fought for the liquidation of European and American colonialism in Asia and had promised in the Declaration of the Great Asian Conference of 1943 the abolition ‘‘of systems of racial discrimination.’’≥∂ Nonetheless, after Japan was defeated in 1945, it subsequently failed to enact any specific legislation to deal with the matter. Much remains to be done in the matter of widespread discrimination against Korean and Chinese residents. In addition to the Japanese failure to confront racism, numerous statements delivered by prominent conservative politicians who glorified the brutal rule over the Korean Peninsula and other areas of Asia rea≈rmed the prevailing impression in Asia that Japan failed to learn an important lesson from the Pacific War and continued to evade its war responsibility. According to a Korean diplomat who participated in normalization talks with Japan, Yoshida once remarked, ‘‘There are three men I detest most. . . . One of them is Dr. Syngman Rhee of South Korea. . . . When I was consul general in Shenyang, Manchuria, in the prewar years . . . I visited the Korean Peninsula several times. . . . I understand that Japan, educating the people and developing the industrial infrastructure, agricultural and forestry industries, ruled the Peninsula well and wise[ly]. I cannot comprehend why the Korean people, not to mention Dr. Rhee, bitterly loathe the Japanese.’’≥∑ This kind of remark was not unusual in certain conservative quarters. As the historian Tadashi Aruga points out, these people had not been forced to acknowledge the horrible deeds of Japanese imperialism simply because Japan lost all its colonies after being defeated by the United States; the anti-Japanese resistance forces in East Asia were not decisive in expelling the Japanese power. Owing to the Pacific War, Japan escaped the painful process of decolonization.≥∏ Against this background in the 1950s and 1960s, Japan normalized diplomatic relations with other Asian nations which had not attended the San Francisco Peace Conference and proceeded with the reparations negotiations. In these negotiations, Japan not only whittled down its war reparations but also virtually converted the reduced reparations into an economic aid program that promoted the Japanese economic repenetration into Asia. The United States encouraged this approach. Acheson had explained to Yoshida that the reparations fortakuya sasaki

137

mula would ‘‘in fact be of benefit to the Japanese economy in that it would enable Japan to employ its excess industrial capacity, give employment to the people and reestablish trade channels.’’ When Senator Mike Mansfield asked Raymond Moyer, the Asian program o≈cer of the Foreign Operations Administration, in 1954 whether reparations would facilitate Japanese ‘‘penetration’’ of the Southeast Asian markets, Moyer assured the senator that they ‘‘will immediately get the Japanese into business . . . and trade will follow.’’≥π On this issue, too, the United States was prepared to step in. The massive American military and economic aid given to the Southeast Asian nations was in a sense an indispensable supplement to their reduced reparations from Japan.

The Issue of Nuclear Weapons Since its inception, the policy of containment had firmly integrated nuclear forces as a vital component. President Truman approved nsc 30 in September 1948, requiring the National Military Establishment to be ready to utilize ‘‘promptly and e√ectively all appropriate means available, including atomic weapons,’’ in the event of hostilities. Still, Hiroshima and Nagasaki cast a long shadow over American foreign conduct.≥∫ In the 1950s, three major crises occurred in which a nuclear option was debated inside government: the Korean War, the Indochina Crisis of 1954, and the first Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1954–1955. In all of these cases, the United States decided not to launch a nuclear attack. While the reason was di√erent in each case, one important factor against the use always came into play: the United States must consider the moral dimension of the atomic attack, especially if it employed the weapon again against Asians. Just before Truman’s casual remark at the end of November 1950 on use of the atomic bomb in the Korean conflict, John Emmerson, a Japan expert in the State Department, had written to Dean Rusk, assistant secretary for Far Eastern a√airs, that atomic bombardment would be disastrous to America’s standing in the international community. Indeed, hearing Truman’s press conference a few weeks later, several Asian nations stressed to administration o≈cials the racist implication of using nuclear bombs against Asians.≥Ω Although Truman repeatedly claimed that he was not troubled by 138

Cold War Diplomacy

the bombings of the two Japanese cities, he was clearly hopeful that he would never be forced to make a comparable decision. In May 1948, in touching on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he told the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, ‘‘I gave the order for the others, and I don’t want to have to do it again, ever.’’ In his last State of the Union message, Truman stated, ‘‘We have entered the atomic age. . . . War today between the Soviet empire and the free nations might dig the grave not only for our Stalinist opponents, but also of our own society, our world as well as theirs. . . . Such a war is not a possible policy for rational man.’’∂≠ The attitude of Truman’s successor, Eisenhower, toward nuclear weapons is not easy to grasp. On the one hand, he adopted a strategy of massive retaliation in which nuclear weapons occupied a prominent role. In October 1953 nsc 162/2 stated, ‘‘In the event of hostilities, the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be available for use as other munitions.’’ Eisenhower publicly expressed readiness to employ the atomic bomb in certain circumstances. But he was deeply cautious in actually approving its use. He later claimed that in 1945 he had opposed the use of the atomic bombs against the Japanese, contending, ‘‘Our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use’’ of the weapon. He reiterated the moral element during the Indochina Crisis: ‘‘You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God.’’∂∞ Again, the moral factor played a key role in shaping the Eisenhower administration’s stance toward the nuclear test suspension talks. When the administration finally agreed to the Geneva Conference in the fall of 1958, international opinion was the essential factor. In supporting such negotiations, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles advised the president that ‘‘steps must be taken to put clearly before the world the U.S. devotion to peace and to reduction of arms burden. Only by concrete actions can we counteract the false picture, all too prevalent abroad, of the United States as a militaristic nation. . . . The slight military gains appear to be outweighed by the political losses, which may well culminate in the moral isolation of the United States in the coming years.’’∂≤ The issue of nuclear forces reappeared in the American political scene in the first half of the 1980s. In response to the Reagan administration’s largest peacetime defense buildup and a series of reckless remarks on nuclear war made by administration o≈cials, including takuya sasaki

139

the president, antinuclear nongovernmental organizations generated the Nuclear Freeze Movement, which instantly gained unprecedented, popular support. The first massive movement of this kind in American history called on the Reagan administration to take a more positive posture toward arms control with the Soviet Union. Jonathan Schell, author of the bestseller The Fate of the Earth, vividly described the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in spreading his antinuclear message. The nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez, who had been aboard a scientific plane over the Hiroshima area on August 6, 1945, and later participated in developing the thermonuclear bomb, had by the early 1980s warned of the disastrous ecological e√ect of nuclear war upon the earth. The total destruction of the two cities was instrumental in projecting the horrific image of nuclear war onto the consciousness of the American people.∂≥ The irony of the Nuclear Freeze Movement was that Ronald Reagan also became equally horrified by the prospect of nuclear war, and he turned out to be a zealous crusader against nuclear weapons. In his memoirs Reagan recollected the sobering experience: ‘‘The Pentagon said at least 150 million American lives would be lost in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union—even if we ‘won.’ . . . The planet would be so poisoned the ‘survivors’ would have no place to live. . . . My dream, then, became a world free of nuclear weapons.’’ In order to realize his dream, Reagan was ready to go beyond nuclear freeze, since, according to him, nuclear freeze could not further the cause of peace: ‘‘A freeze now would make us less, not more, secure and would raise, not reduce, the risks of war.’’ Reagan’s proposal was, of course, the Strategic Defense Initiative (sdi), which, at least in his judgment, was the only way to eliminate the danger of nuclear war.∂∂ While it is still controversial whether or not the sdi moved the Soviet government to make a series of diplomatic concessions that finally led to the end of the cold war, several Soviet policymakers did acknowledge that the sdi forced them to admit that they could not outspend the United States on military buildup. If that was the case, then Reagan’s moral uneasiness about nuclear weapons, undoubtedly provoked by the frightening image of nuclear war, contributed toward bringing the cold war to an end.∂∑ In Japan, being antinuclear with respect to the atomic bomb was the national consensus. The Lucky Dragon incident, which occurred in 1954, initiated an all-out antinuclear movement in the country. The 140

Cold War Diplomacy

crew of the Japanese fishing boat who were injured by the first U.S. deliverable hydrogen bomb in the Bikini Atoll were reported in Japan as the third nuclear victims. The United States knew of the intense antinuclear feeling prevalent among the Japanese; as the State Department observed, ‘‘Deep-seated pacifist, anti-nuclear inhibitions stemming from Japan’s pre-war and wartime experiences are likely to dominate Japan’s defense policies for the immediate future.’’ Still, the U.S. government grew concerned over the possibility of a nuclear Japan following China’s detonation of an atomic bomb in October 1964. In January 1965, Dean Rusk asserted, ‘‘Japan should think not in terms of an independent nuclear capability but of long-term defense cooperation with the U.S. and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which is effective whether an attack is conventional or nuclear.’’∂∏ In the same month, Vice President–Elect Hubert H. Humphrey told Japanese Foreign Minister Miki Takeo his impression that Japan and other countries such as India were ‘‘giving consideration to becoming nuclear powers in their own right.’’ He remarked that the United States would strongly oppose any competition in the nuclear arms race in Asia and emphasized that ‘‘American nuclear power is the only safeguard for other nations.’’ His message was obvious: Japan should not engage in the production of nuclear weapons. Miki assured his counterpart. ‘‘Japan, of course, had the capacity to produce nuclear weapons since it could produce plutonium.’’ However, he continued, nuclear energy should be used for peaceful purposes instead of for arms: ‘‘Japan should not enter into atomic power politics.’’∂π Reflecting the Japanese public’s consensus against the atomic bomb, the administration of Sato Eisaku laid down in December 1967 three antinuclear principles: that Japan would not possess, manufacture, or introduce nuclear weapons into Japanese territory. Four years later, the Lower House passed a resolution on these principles. The Japanese ambassador to the United States, Shimoda Takeso, assured an American audience in December 1967, ‘‘The present consensus is that Japan should not develop its own nuclear deterrent, and our government is cooperating with the United States to bring about the conclusion of a non-proliferating treaty.’’∂∫ Still, a number of powerful Japanese conservatives remained ambivalent about the antinuclear principles. Former Prime Minister Yoshida in mid-1962 publicly stated that Japanese nuclear armament must not be ruled out. Future Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato, whose constitutakuya sasaki

141

ency was a district of the Hiroshima prefecture, startled his most trusted aide by remarking in 1958 that ‘‘Japan has to go nuclear’’ for self-protection. Prime Minister Sato, who was to receive a Nobel Peace Prize for his antinuclear principles, did in fact make several remarks against his public stand while in o≈ce. In September 1969 he described the antinuclear principles to Ambassador Alexis Johnson as ‘‘nonsense’’ and stressed the importance of the nuclear umbrella provided by the United States. On another occasion Sato stated, ‘‘The fact of the matter is that a nuclear nation has a substantial voice over a nonnuclear nation,’’ suggesting the necessity of nuclear possession.∂Ω Nonetheless, the special committee of experts formed by Sato to study a nuclear option arrived at the conclusion in early 1970 that because of technological, political, diplomatic, and strategic restraints, Japan should not produce its own nuclear weapons and should rely on nuclear protection extended by the United States. The Defense Agency’s White Paper of 1970 explained that although Japan was able to possess a small nuclear bomb ‘‘jurisprudentially,’’ it refused to do so as a matter of policy. Japan signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1970 and ratified it in 1976.∑≠ That the Japanese government needed six years to ratify the treaty demonstrated an uneasiness prevalent among the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s conservative legislators. Furthermore, the Japanese government had no intention of strictly enforcing its antinuclear principles. Prime Minister Sato, in negotiating the return of Okinawa, allegedly concluded a secret agreement with President Nixon in 1971 whereby the United States reserves the right to introduce nuclear weapons into the island in case of emergency. The Japanese government also has acquiesced in the transit of American nuclear vessels into Japanese territory.∑∞ Despite several ill-conceived remarks made by Japanese leaders and their evasiveness on applying the antinuclear principles, a majority of the Japanese people strongly oppose Japan’s nuclear development from moral and ethical viewpoints and agree to limit the defense program to the field of conventional forces. The large antinuclear movement in the early 1980s further strengthened this widespread consensus. Still, this consensus has been directed against Japanese nuclear possession, not against the nuclear deterrence extended by the United States. In this respect, as former Prime Minister Miyazawa Kiichi admitted in an interview, ‘‘The Japan-U.S. security pact in a sense has protected Article 142

Cold War Diplomacy

9 of the Japanese constitution.’’ Many Japanese have accepted, albeit reluctantly, the nuclear umbrella provided by the United States.∑≤

Conclusion Not surprisingly, memories of the Pacific War a√ected both American and Japanese foreign policy in many ways. Nevertheless, while the cold war was still going on, the United States and Japan did not need to come to grips with each other’s memories of the Pacific War in a way to promote mutual understanding. A strong and stable Japan as a bulwark against communism took precedence over everything else. Washington and Tokyo regularly ducked Pearl Harbor, Bataan, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and failed to conduct frank discussions of their di√erences on these incidents. Their failure partly explains why, with the receding Soviet military threat and the rapid rise of Japanese economic power in the late 1980s, the Japan-U.S. relationship took a marked downturn. In responding to the cumulative trade deficit with Japan, the veteran journalist Theodore White, who had been aboard the battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945, to see the ceremony of surrender, declared in 1985 that the Pacific War was still under way and that Japan was winning. Some Americans began to argue for containing Japan; bashing Japan became popular in the United States. In response to this anti-Japanese trend, deep resentment arose in Japan. The instant success of The Japan That Can Say No (1989), coauthored by Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara, reflected this new trend. The overwhelming military prowess the United States displayed in the Gulf War in 1991 gave birth to a new word, ken-Bei (dislike of the United States). The fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor might have been an excellent opportunity to put the matter to rest, but it settled nothing. The Miyazawa administration did not o√er any express apology for the attack; President George H. W. Bush, who had apologized to and compensated Japanese Americans for their wartime internment in 1990, said in an interview that he had no intention of apologizing to the Japanese for the atomic bombing. The fiasco over the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum in 1995 reinforced the impression in Japan that the American people were not willing to understand Japanese sensitivity to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.∑≥ takuya sasaki

143

Developments have acquired a new momentum in recent years. The California State Legislature passed a law so that former pows could sue Japanese companies for their wartime forced labor. The U.S. Congress enacted the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998 and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act in 2000. The primary objective of the latter is to direct the president to declassify all classified Japanese Imperial Government records of the United States relating to the experimentation and persecution by the Japanese government or its allies ‘‘of persons because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion.’’ When Foreign Minister Tanaka Makiko and Secretary of State Colin Powell, attending ceremonies in San Francisco in September 2001 that commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Peace Treaty, rea≈rmed the close Japan-U.S. alliance, former American pows demonstrated nearby and vowed to force Japan to compensate them. Similar demonstrations were staged by several Chinese and Korean American organizations. Nine months later, the Bataan veterans observed the sixtieth anniversary of their Death March and repeated a request for an apology and compensation from the Japanese government.∑∂ Meanwhile, in July 2001, Japan’s Education Ministry approved a controversial history textbook for junior high school students. The following month, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro paid a visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, where fourteen Class A war criminals are buried. China and South Korea swiftly condemned the visit. Koizumi repeated his visits to the shrine in April 2002 and January 2003, again drawing sharp criticism at home as well as from abroad.∑∑ This series of events illustrates that we are still living with the manifold ramifications of the Pacific War; they also suggest profound foreign policy implications for Japan and the United States: memories of the Pacific War, still casting a powerful shadow on the conduct of the two countries, are taking on great importance and a√ecting the bilateral relationship. While the horrendous 9/11 attacks and the ensuing events have absorbed public attention, the two nations still need to confront and address some fundamental di√erences over the bitter memories of the Pacific War and find a way to deal with the matter.∑∏ Fortunately, we have shared liberal democratic values, developed interdependent economic bonds, established solid defense cooperation, fostered open societies, encouraged cultural interaction, and opened multiple communication channels. In particular, maintenance 144

Cold War Diplomacy

of liberal democracy and the Wilsonian international economic system and e√orts directed toward eliminating racial and ethnic discrimination are basic lessons we could share. If we have any reason to be optimistic about settling the complicated questions left to us by our war memories, it is due to these new legacies of the past sixty years.∑π Notes This article was originally prepared at the Workshop on Public Memory, Tokyo, 22–24 June 2002, and was summarized at the 118th annual meeting of the American Historical Association, 8–11 January 2004, Washington, D.C. It appeared, in a slightly di√erent form in Rikkyo Hogaku 66 (October 2004): 42–70. I am deeply grateful to Professors Chihiro Hosoya, Akira Iriye, and Ryo Oshiba for providing opportunities to discuss the essay, and to Marc Gallicchio, Haruo Iguchi, Frank Ninkovich, and Ma Xiaohua for valuable suggestions. I am indebted to Dennis J. Nolan for checking the English translation. 1 Ernest R. May, ‘‘Lessons’’ of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), ix. 2 For a general discussion of how historical analogies and war memories influenced American foreign policy decisions, see Thomas E. Lifka, The Concept ‘‘Totalitarianism’’ and American Foreign Policy, 1933–1949, 2 vols. (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1988); May, ‘‘Lessons’’ of the Past ; Yuen Foong Khong, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Goran Rystad, Prisoners of the Past? The Munich Syndrome and Makers of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War Era (Lund, Sweden: CWK Gleerup, 1982). Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998) and Studs Terkel’s ‘‘The Good War’’: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: Pantheon, 1984) are excellent studies of how the American people remember World War II. On the racial aspect of the Pacific War and on the revision of the anti-Chinese immigration act, see John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986); Ma Xiaohua, Maboroshi no shin chitsujo to Azia taiheiyo: Dainiji sekai taisenki no Bei-Chu domei no atsureki (Illusionary New Orders and the Asian-Pacific: The Chinese-American Alliance in the War against Japan, 1941–1945) (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2000). 3 On the Japanese historical analogies and war memories, I have relied on Shinichi Arai, Senso sekinin ron (The Treatise on War Responsibility) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995); Kiichi Fujiwara, Senso wo kiokusuru (Re-

takuya sasaki

145

membering Wars) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2001); Yoichi Funabashi, ed., Ima rekishi mondai ni do torikumuka (How Should We Deal with History Issues at This Point?) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001); Chihiro Hosoya et al., eds., Taiheiyo senso (The Pacific War) (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1993); Chihiro Hosoya, Taiheiyo senso no shuketsu (The Ending of the Pacific War) (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1997); Yutaka Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensokan: Sengoshi no naka no henyo (The Japanese Conception of War: Its Transformation in Postwar History) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995); Daizaburo Yui, Nichi-Bei: Sensokan no sokoku (The Friction between the Japanese and American Conception of War) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995). 4 On this point, highly informative is Lifka’s The Concept ‘‘Totalitarianism’’ and American Foreign Policy, especially 159–211. Roosevelt’s statement is quoted in Travis Beal Jacobs, America and the Winter War, 1939–1940 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1981), 98. The Iranian minister’s remark is found in Chargé in Iran to the Secretary of State, 1 December 1939, in Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter, frus ): 1940 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing O≈ce, 1958), 3: 625. 5 Henderson memorandum, 15 July 1940, in frus , 1940, 1: 390; Washington: U.S. Government Printing O≈ce, 1959, Page memorandum, 3 October 1940, in frus , 1940, 3: 228–229. 6 Grew memorandum, 19 May 1945, in Joseph C. Grew, Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904–1945 (Boston: Houghton MiΔin, 1952), 2: 1445–1446. 7 Byrnes speech in Lifka, The Concept ‘‘Totalitarianism’’ and American Foreign Policy, 376; Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (New York: Viking, 1951), 72–73, 95–96. 8 Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States of America: Harry S. Truman, 1947 (Washington: U. S. Government Printing O≈ce, 1963), 178–179. 9 Harry S Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956), 332–333; Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States of America: Harry S. Truman, 1951 (Washington: U. S. Government Printing O≈ce, 1965), 10. 10 Eisenhower to Churchill, 5 April 1954, in David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart: The Relationship between Britain and America in the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1988), 214; Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953–1956 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), 479. Gordon Chang stresses that anti-Asian racism formed a pervasive part in the Eisenhower administration’s policy toward Asia in general and China in particular. See Gordon H. Chang, Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 170–174.

146

Cold War Diplomacy

11 Richard B. Finn, Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 48. Rightly sensing an attempt to shirk responsibility for having attacked Pearl Harbor in this remark, Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson angrily responded, ‘‘Nothing could show more clearly than this statement the failure of the Japanese to understand the nature of their conduct or the mind of the American people. . . . Pearl Harbor is not a symbol of hate for Japan but a symbol of Japanese perfidy.’’ Ibid. However, it was President Truman who had established the linkage between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima when he justified the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese city by arguing, ‘‘I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. . . . When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.’’ Truman to Samuel McCrea Cavert, 11 August 1945, in Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 96–97. 12 Kishi’s diary in Yoshihisa Hara, Kishi Nobusuke: Kensei no seijika (Nobusuke Kishi: A Politician of Power and Influence) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), 127. Kishi noted two years later that in order to prevent ‘‘the communization of East Asia’’ and the Chinese Communists’ military victory, the United States, instead of providing the Nationalist government with ‘‘dollars and arms,’’ should employ its military forces, including ‘‘the Japanese voluntary army.’’ Ibid., 129. 13 Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 118–140; Osamu Ishii, Reisen to Nichi-Bei kankei (The Cold War and the JapaneseAmerican Relations) (Tokyo: Japan Times, 1989), 47–49; nsc 13/2, 7 October 1948, in frus , 1948, 6: 858–862. 14 On the Truman administration’s policy toward the Japanese Peace Settlement, see Chihiro Hosoya, Sanfuranshisuko kowa heno michi (The Road to the San Francisco Peace Treaty) (Tokyo: Chuokoron-sha, 1984). 15 Yui, Nichi-Bei, 158–166. 16 ‘‘Summary Report (Pacific War),’’ 1 July 1946. Records of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, rg 243, National Archives, Washington (microfilm version), 30–32. On Nitze’s experience in Japan, see Paul H. Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost: At the Center of Decision. A Memoir (New York: G. Weidenfeld, 1989), 40–44. An editorial in the Army and Navy Journal demonstrated the lasting lesson of Pearl Harbor in September 1945 when it stated that Pearl Harbor would not have happened if the American people, ‘‘then rooted to pacifism,’’ had allowed Congress to have enough appropriations for defense. Rystad, Prisoners of the Past?, 37.

takuya sasaki

147

17 nsc 68, ‘‘United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,’’ 14 April 1950, in frus , 1950, 1: 237–292. 18 nsc 5724, ‘‘Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age,’’ 7 November 1957, in frus , 1955–1957, 19: 639–661. On the Gaither Report and its impact upon containment, see David L. Snead, The Gaither Committee, Eisenhower, and the Cold War (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999), especially 129–181. 19 Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet Satellite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 23, xvi, 67. 20 Snead, The Gaither Committee, 80; New York Herald Tribune, 28 January 1960. 21 Michael Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the u -2 Affair (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 265. 22 Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4, 143, 189. 23 Rusk interview in Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 303. Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin refutes the news that the Soviet diplomats burned the files. See Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow’s Ambassador to America’s Six Cold War Presidents (1962–86) (New York: Times Books,1995), 80. The most comprehensive study of the Cuban Missile Crisis is Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, ‘‘One Hell of a Gamble’’: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958–1964 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). 24 Kennan statement quoted in Melvyn P. LeΔer, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 253. Kennan showed again in 1977 his nagging uneasiness about a Japan that would get loose from the Japan-U.S. security pact: ‘‘Japan’s industrial power . . . is so tremendous a factor in world a√airs that it can hardly help constituting a force either for great good or for great bad. So long as we have a close and solid relationship with the Japanese, we can hope to prevent it from becoming the latter. If we lose that relationship, we cannot tell.’’ George F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little Brown, 1977), 108. 25 The jcs to Wilson, 9 April 1954, in frus , 1952–1954, vol. 12 (part 1), 417; the Bush administration’s report on the strategic framework for the Asian Pacific Rim, 19 April 1990, in Chihiro Hosoya, Tadashi Aruga, Osamu Ishii, and Takuya Sasaki, eds., Nichi-Bei kankei siryoshu, 1945–97 (Collection of Documents on the Japanese-American Relations, 1945–97) (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1999), 1176. Even a former Japanese ambassador to the

148

Cold War Diplomacy

United States admitted that the Asian nations saw the Japan-U.S. security pact as an important ‘‘brake’’ against the revival of Japanese militarism. Takeshi Yasukawa, Wasureenu Omoide to korekarano Nichi-Bei gaiko (Unforgettable Memories and Future Japan-U.S. Diplomacy) (Tokyo: Sekaino Ugokisha, 1991), 92. 26 James Mann, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998), 43–44. See also Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations throughout History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 355–356. 27 Alexander DeConde, Ethnicity, Race, and American Foreign Policy: A History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 140–141. On American race relations and their foreign policy implications in the cold war period, see Thomas Borstelman, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 28 Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 146; C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd. rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 132, 146–147. 29 Rusk and Johnson quoted in Rystad, Prisoners of the Past?, 51–52, 48, 49. 30 Johnson and McNamara in John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 262. 31 Yonosuke Nagai, Gendai to Senryaku (Modern Times and Strategy) (Tokyo: Bungeishunju, 1985); Makoto Iokibe, Nichi-Bei senso to sengo Nihon (The Japanese-American War and Postwar Japan) (Osaka: Osaka Shoseki, 1989), 193–204. On the evolution of Japan’s postwar security policy, I have also relied on Akihiko Tanaka, Anzen hosho (National Security) (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shimbun Publishers, 1997). 32 Roger Buckley, US-Japan Alliance Diplomacy, 1945–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 72; nie 41–58, ‘‘Probable Developments in Japan’s International Orientation,’’ 23 December 1958, in frus , 1958–1960, 18: 114; nie 41–60, ‘‘Probable Developments in Japan,’’ 9 February 1960, in frus , 1958–1960, 18: 288. 33 Tanaka, Anzen hosho, 140–141, 264, 296. 34 Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941– 1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 118–120. 35 Dongo-Jo Kim, Kan-Nichi no wakai (The Korea-Japan Reconciliation), trans. Takehiko Hayashi (Tokyo: Saimaru Shuppankai, 1993), 317. John Foster Dulles knew Japanese subtle racism and was ready to capitalize

takuya sasaki

149

on it. On January 29, 1951, he stressed to the political representative of the British liaison mission in Tokyo the desirability of inviting Japan to join ‘‘an elite Anglo-Saxon club.’’ frus , 1951, vol. 6 (part 1), 825–826. See also Takeshi Igarashi, Sengo Nichi-Bei kankei no keisei (The Evolution of the Postwar Japan-U.S. Relationship) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1995), 302–304. 36 Tadashi Aruga, ‘‘Nichi-Bei kankei ni okeru taiheiyo senso’’ (The Pacific War in the Japanese-American Relations), in Hosoya et al., Taiheiyo seno, 547–548. On this point, see also Yoshibumi Wakamiya, Sengo hoshu no azia kan (Postwar Conservatives’ Conception of Asia) (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, 1995). 37 William S. Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947–1955 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 203–204. 38 nsc 30, ‘‘United States Policy on Atomic Weapons,’’ 30 September 1948, in frus , 1948, vol. 1 (part 2), 624–628. 39 John L. Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 119. 40 J. Samuel Walker, ‘‘The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Historiographical Update,’’ in Michael J. Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24–25; S. David Broscious, ‘‘Longing for International Control, Banking on American Superiority: Harry S. Truman’s Approach to Nuclear Weapons,’’ in John L. Gaddis, Philip H. Gordon, Ernest R. May, and Jonathan Rosenberg, eds., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 20, 19. 41 nsc 162/2, ‘‘Basic National Security Policy,’’ 30 October 1953, in frus , 1952–1954, vol. 2 (part 1), 593; Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 312– 313; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The Presidency (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 184. 42 Dulles to Eisenhower, 30 April 1958, in frus , 1958–1960, 3: 605. On Dulles’s concern, see also Memorandum of Conversation with the President, 19 March 1958, John Foster Dulles Papers, White House Memoranda Series, Box 6, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas. Like Eisenhower, Dulles too had demonstrated intense moral reservations about the atomic bombing of Japan in the summer of 1945. See Neal Rosendorf, ‘‘John Foster Dulles’ Nuclear Schizophrenia,’’ in Gaddis et al., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, 64–66. 43 On the Nuclear Freeze Movement, consult David Cortright, Peace Works: The Citizen’s Role in Ending the Cold War (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); John Lofland, Polite Protesters: The American Peace Movement of the 1980s (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1993); Fumihiko Yoshida, Sho-

150

Cold War Diplomacy

gen: Kaku yokushi no seiki (Testimony: A Century of Nuclear Deterrence) (Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun, 2000), 49–52, 279–284. 44 Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 549–550, 574. 45 See, for example, former Foreign Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh’s statement in William C. Wohlforth, ed., Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 32–33. But see also Ambassador Dobrynin’s disagreement in his In Confidence, 610–612. 46 State Department background paper, ‘‘Visit of Prime Minister Sato, January 11–14, 1965,’’ 7 January 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson Papers, National Security File: Country File, Japan, Box 253, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Austin, Texas; Dean Rusk memorandum for the President, ‘‘Visit of Prime Minister Sato, January 11–14, 1965,’’ undated, Johnson Papers, National Security File: Country File, Japan, Box 253. 47 Memorandum of conversation between Humphrey and Miki, 13 January 1965, Johnson Papers, National Security File: Country File, Japan, Box 250. 48 Tanaka, Anzen hosho, 221–225; Shimoda address at the JapanAmerica Society of Washington, 1 December 1967, Johnson Papers, National Security File: Country File, Japan, Box 252. 49 Masaya Ito, Ikeda Hayato to Sono Jidai (Ikedu Hayato and His Times) (Tokyo: Jiji Tso shinsha, 1985), 234–235; Sato comments reported in the Kobe Shimbun, 10 June 2000, Asahi Shimbun, 17 June 2002. 50 Department of State Policy on the Future of Japan, 26 June 1964, Johnson Papers, National Security File: Country File, Japan, Box 250; Boei cho (The Defense Agency), Nihon no boei—Boei hakusho ( Japan’s Defense: The White Paper on Defense) (Tokyo: Boei cho, 1970), 36; Yoshitaka Sasaki, ‘‘Kakusenryaku no nakano Nihon’’ ( Japan in the Nuclear Strategy), in Yoshikazu Sakamoto, ed, Kaku to Ningen (Confronting Nuclearism) (Tokyo: Iwanumi Shoten, 1999), 1: 251–265. 51 Kei Wakaizumi, Sato’s confidential emissary, admitted in his memoirs that he was instrumental in working out this secret agreement. See Kei Wakaizumi, Tasaku nakarishiwo shinzemuto hossu (I Would Like to Believe That There Was No Alternative) (Tokyo, 1994). 52 Miyazawa’s interview in Yoshida, Shogen, 317–318. 53 On the Japan-U.S. relationship since the late 1980s, see LaFeber, The Clash, 379–395. See also Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 446– 449. 54 Thomas (Library of Congress), www.thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/ F?c106:5:./temp/c106Hw2U06:e106644 (accessed 3 December 2003); San

takuya sasaki

151

Francisco Chronicle, 9 September 2001; International Herald Tribune, 28 May 2002. 55 On issues of memory and history in Asia, see Gerrit W. Gong, ed., Remembering and Forgetting: The Legacy of War and Peace in East Asia (Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1996); Gerrit W. Gong, ed., Memory and History in East Asia and Southeast Asia: Issues of Identity in International Relations (Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2001). 56 Yukio Matsuyama, a leading journalist for Asahi Shimbun, warned that a Japan-U.S. alliance which is not founded on common sharing of historical memories might be unexpectedly fragile when a dynamic change of international politics occurs. Yukio Matsuyama, Jiyuu to setsudo (Freedom and Moderation) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001), 26. 57 Recently, two publications that have commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco Peace Treaty demonstrate the common sharing of the postwar experiences of the two nations. Chihiro Hosoya and A50 Editorial Committee, eds., Japan and the United States: Fifty Years of Partnership (Tokyo: Japan Times, 2001); Akira Iriye and Robert A. Wampler, eds., Partnership: The United States and Japan, 1951–2001 (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001).

152

Cold War Diplomacy

Constructing a National Memory of War war museums in china, japan, and the united states

. xiaohua ma

War in the twentieth century was a traumatic phenomenon which left behind it survivors who engage time and time again in acts of remembrance. Memorializing the significant events that marked the twentieth century has become an important part of the landscape in China, Japan, and the United States.∞ In the past several decades, there has been a proliferation of museums and monuments in these three countries to commemorate events that occurred during World War II. The communal remembering of an event is a highly selective act, involving complex choices about how and what to preserve, record, and symbolize. Every time a memorial or a museum is constructed to commemorate the war in China, Japan, and the United States, the process of memorializing becomes inevitably political—embedded in practical as well as ideological and aesthetic issues. The choice between a museum and a monument as the vehicle for memorializing, along with decisions about which historical facts are selected, emphasized, diminished, or eliminated, are deliberately political acts. To understand the roles and e√ects of public memory in the process of nation building, this essay focuses on the establishment of a special kind of museum, the war museum, to analyze how war memories have shaped and reshaped postwar relations in the Asia-Pacific region. I focus on the construction of war museums in China, Japan, and the United States in the past two decades to examine the domestic and international environment in which they were constructed and ask how those circumstances have constrained postwar relations between and among the three countries. By comparing di√erent memories of

5

war, we can see how a nation reproduces in memory the conditions of nationalism.

Historical Memory in International Relations: The Emergence of War Museums in China In November 2000, Japan’s major newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, carried out a survey based on the following question: ‘‘This summer, there were some controversies over Japanese history textbooks and Prime Minister Koizumi’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine. Do you think the history problem [rekishininshiki mondai ] is important or not important in China-Japan and Japan-Korea relations?’’ The results are listed in the table below. As the survey shows, over 80 percent of the Chinese respondents believed that the history issue was important in Chinese-Japanese relations. Also, people in South Korea held the same attitude as the Chinese. There is a slight gap between Japanese responses and those of Chinese and Koreans; still, nearly 70 percent of the Japanese respondents considered the history problem to be important in Japan’s relations with its neighboring countries. How and when did the history problem become a factor a√ecting postwar international relations, in particular, Japan’s relations with its neighboring countries? To what extent has this factor constrained Japan’s relations with other countries, China and the United States in particular? The history problem, or more specifically, the problem concerning people’s historical memory of the war, started in 1982, when several Japanese newspapers reported that the Japanese Ministry of Education had ordered the authors of the history textbooks to alter their accounts of the war, most famously by deleting the term ‘‘invasion’’ and substituting the word ‘‘advance’’ to describe the Imperial Army’s assault on China. It later transpired that although the Ministry of Education had sought to have the authors soften their descriptions of Japan’s invasion, such changes were not required in order to receive certification. Nevertheless, Beijing’s sharp protests served notice on the Ministry that the Chinese expected to have a voice in how the Japanese presented the war to students.≤ Textbooks used in a nation’s schools are usually a domestic issue. However, the controversies over Japanese textbooks after 1982 have 156

Constructing a National Memory of War

table. Importance of Historical Memory in International Relations (%) Very Important

Important

Not Very Important

Not Important

Other

Japan

21

46

24

4

5

China

66

21

10

2

1

South Korea

32

58

9

1

0

Source: Asahi Shimbun, 25 December 2001

repeatedly spilled across national borders since the subject—war—is an international event, and particularly since the war in the Asia-Pacific region involves the treatment of racially, ethnically, or religiously different peoples who live both within and beyond national borders. When we examine Japan’s relations with its neighboring countries after 1982, we can see that no factor is more sensitive than the history problem, particularly issues concerning historical memory of the war, which have remained in dispute today. When Japanese newspapers reported that the Ministry of Education ordered the writers of history textbooks to change the term ‘‘invasion’’ to ‘‘advance,’’ China’s Renmin Ribao, an o≈cial newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, began to complain that ‘‘Japan ignores historical fact.’’≥ The words used for criticism at that time were quite abstract. There was no detailed description of how Japan tried to distort history. This may have been because 1982 was the tenth anniversary of Sino-Japanese normalization and the Chinese government did not want the textbooks issue to a√ect the good relations that had been formally established in 1972. One week later, after Japanese high o≈cials criticized ‘‘China’s interference in Japan’s domestic a√airs,’’ the Chinese government protested strongly through diplomatic channels. On July 30, 1982, Renmin Ribao reported that Matsuno Takayasu, the minister of national land, declared, ‘‘There was no ‘invasion’ to be used when the war started so it is time to eliminate it from the textbooks. Otherwise our younger generations would not respect our ancestry since they would think that they did something really bad in history.’’∂ Immediately Matsuno’s statement aroused Chinese concern, which led xiaohua ma

157

directly to China’s cancellation of Minister of Education Ogawa Heiji’s formal visit.∑ On August 9, Matsuno created more controversy when he stated publicly that ‘‘8,000 Japanese soldiers were killed and 12,000 Chinese died in Nanjing. There was no massacre at all.’’∏ The denial of the Nanjing Massacre by a Japanese high o≈cial shocked the Chinese and inspired an immediate revival of Chinese memory of their wartime su√ering. Of course, wartime memories had never completely disappeared in China. Chinese political culture after 1945 kept memories of the war alive through a number of songs and movies concerning China’s fight against the Japanese army. But as a matter of political urgency, preserving wartime memories remained secondary to other issues in Chinese political life. Japanese high o≈cials’ denial of Japan’s wartime crimes symbolized by the Nanjing Massacre, however, provoked Chinese resentment. Immediately, major Chinese newspapers reported Matsuno’s statement. An editorial in Renmin Ribao criticized his statement as ‘‘the most absurd view in world history’’ and warned the public to ‘‘be aware of the revival of Japanese militarism.’’π Later, the media began to focus on reporting the witnesses’ bitter personal memories of Japan’s atrocities and appealed to the Chinese people to ‘‘never forget that the war caused tremendous disasters by Japanese aggressors.’’∫ Meanwhile, historians and scholars in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shengyang held various symposiums to commemorate the thirty-seventh anniversary of the triumph of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan. They considered Japan’s revision of history textbooks as ‘‘a signal for the revival of Japanese militarism’’ and exerted pressure on the government to reinforce public education on the war.Ω Finally, on August 12, a special exhibition entitled ‘‘Historical Exhibits of the Nanjing Massacre Committed by Japanese Aggression’’ was opened in the Museum of Nanjing. This was the first public exhibit to show Japan’s wartime crimes and inhumanity in that city.∞≠ Chinese nationalist sentiment was highlighted on the day of the commemoration of the thirty-seventh anniversary of the end of the war. A number of events to commemorate the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, which began Japan’s large-scale invasion of China below the Great Wall, the Nanjing Massacre, and the Manchurian Incident (in Chinese, the 9.18 Incident) were held throughout the country. On August 15, Wu Xueqian, the vice foreign minister, informed Japanese 158

Constructing a National Memory of War

Ambassador Katori Yasumori, ‘‘How to confront the history of Japan’s invasion to China is a fundamentally significant issue in China-Japan relations’’ and asked that Japan ‘‘rectify the distorted history immediately.’’ Wu expressed China’s ‘‘deep remorse’’ for the cancellation of Minister of Education Ogawa’s formal visit, but he added that Prime Minister Suzuki Zenko’s visit might also have to be canceled.∞∞ Consequently, this crisis vanished after Prime Minister Suzuki promised to deal with the textbook issue, and the quarrel was settled in a ‘‘friendly mood’’ during his o≈cial visit commemorating the tenth anniversary of Sino-Japanese normalization.∞≤ As a result of the textbook controversy in 1982, the Chinese government decided that it was necessary to build public facilities to educate the younger generations ‘‘not to forget China’s tremendous disasters caused by Japanese aggressors.’’ On August 15, 1985, the day of the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the Chinese people’s victory against Japan, that decision led directly to the opening of the Memorial Museum of the Nanjing Massacre and the Museum of Unit 731’s Biological Warfare Crimes.∞≥ Rather than commemorating the victims, initially the purpose of the two museums as their titles imply, the aim of the museums was to expose and reveal Japan’s wartime crimes and inhumanity. August 15, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender, was chosen for the opening ceremonies at both museums to stress the significance of China’s victory against Japanese aggression. Later, museums to commemorate various war incidents were constructed throughout China. For example, on July 7, 1987, the Museum of the War of the Chinese People’s Resistance against Japan was opened on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. The war museum in China is thus a direct product of the Chinese struggle against Japan’s historical amnesia. Generally speaking, the scale of war museums constructed in China in the 1980s was small and their function was rather simple: mainly to expose Japan’s brutality while emphasizing Chinese su√ering and resistance. As important facilities to expose Japan’s wartime inhumanity, the war museums later became embedded with strong political and strategic meanings. As such, they assumed greater importance as the domestic and international environments changed.

xiaohua ma

159

1. The ruins of Unit 731’s ‘‘Death Factory,’’ which was bombed by Unit 731’s soldiers themselves before they withdrew from the China front. Museum of Unit 731’s Biological Warfare Crimes. Photograph by Xiaohua Ma.

Memory as ‘‘National Humiliation’’: Chinese Remembrance of the War in the Early 1990s On the eve of the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the 9.18 Incident, a number of commemorative events were held throughout China. On September 18, 1991, the September 18th Incident Museum was founded in Shengyang, in northeast China. This museum was built at the original site where the Japanese army staged an attack on the Manchurian railroad as a pretext for launching the invasion of Manchuria on September 18, 1931. The museum, a huge marble calendar monument with a width of thirty meters and a height of eighteen meters, was inscribed with ‘‘September 18, 1931’’ on the left. Etched on the right is ‘‘The Japanese army bombed the railroad and calumniated that Chinese did it. Japan used this excuse and provoked an aggressive war in China. From that day on, the Chinese people had to resist and fight against the Japanese aggressors.’’ Inside the calendar monument was an exhibition hall to show Japanese wartime crimes in China, as well as the fourteen-year enslavement of the Chinese and resistance against the Japanese army. After the museum was built, however, great social changes took place in China. In the early 1990s the main character of Chinese society was under exploration and construction. Economic reforms in the 1980s brought about a series of changes in Chinese politics, economics, culture, and even ideology. The reforms sparked hope for the revival of the country’s economy and resulted in the increased flow of foreign capital, culture, and products. From the geopolitical perspective, China’s political environment also changed after Germany’s reunification and the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union. In addition, the intensive criticism and economic sanctions of the international community after the Tiananmen Square Incident in 1989 embarrassed the Chinese government. Under these circumstances, the issue of how to maintain Chinese Communist prestige while achieving political solidarity and stability became a matter of intense concern within government circles. The task of finding a way to convince the Chinese people to uphold ‘‘Chinese-style socialism’’ rose to prominence on the political and educational agendas. On July 1, 1991, the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Chairman Jiang Zemin called on the whole society to pay more attention to the education of socialism and patriotxiaohua ma

161

2. Calendar Monument of the September 18th (9.18) Incident. Historical Museum. Photograph by Xiaohua Ma.

ism through the lessons learned from modern history in order to promote ‘‘national confidence and pride.’’∞∂ On the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the 9.18 Incident, the Chinese government promulgated a resolution: ‘‘A Comprehensive Program to Reinforce History Education in the Junior High Schools.’’ Meanwhile, the central government ordered the local governments to ‘‘systemize history education to enhance national patriotism by concentrating on war memorial days and the day of national humiliation.’’∞∑ On September 18, 1991, an editorial entitled ‘‘Self-Esteem, Self-Respect and Self-Confidence’’ in Renmin Ribao appealed to the public ‘‘not to forget the day of national humiliation’’: September 18th, 1931, the beginning of Japan’s invasion of China.∞∏ A series of events had been held to commemorate various war incidents before 1991, but there had been no mention of ‘‘the day of national humiliation’’ in public. On September 18, 1991, however, the term ‘‘Day of National Humiliation’’ was first used in the major government newspapers.∞π An editorial in Guangming Ribao a≈rmed the importance of museums in the process of educating people’s historical perspectives and supported using history museums to enhance the ‘‘Chinese spirit of patriotism.’’∞∫ Later, Renmin Ribao continuously published articles and commentaries to call on Chinese to ‘‘Never Forget National Humiliation, Do Vitalize China’’ (Wuwang guochi, zhengxing zhonghua ).∞Ω This shibboleth subsequently became a symbol of political solidarity as well as a popular slogan in the mass media and political culture. The political campaign of ‘‘Never Forget National Humiliation, Do Vitalize China’’ was highlighted on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war. To commemorate the anniversary of ‘‘China’s first triumph in the war against foreign aggression in modern history,’’ the government decided to expand the Museum of Chinese People’s Resistance against Japan and the 9.18 Incident Museum since the original museums were too small to meet the social and political needs. Expansion of the 9.18 Incident Museum began in 1997 and was completed and opened to the public on September 18, 1999, on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The expanded museum, the September 18th Historical Museum, which covers 31,000 square meters, has 12,600 square meters in the construction area and 9,180 square meters in the exhibition area. The museum is composed of three parts: the Calendar Monument of xiaohua ma

163

3. The Alarm Bell ( Jingshizhong) inscribed with ‘‘Never Forget National Humiliation’’ in the September 18th Historical Museum. Photograph by Xiaohua Ma.

the September 18th Incident, the Alarm Bell Pavilion ( Jingshizhong) inscribed with ‘‘Never Forget National Humiliation,’’ and the Victory Monument (Kangzhan shengri jinianbei). The three memorials symbolize the whole process of the war in China, starting from September 18, 1931, through the Chinese people’s fourteen-year struggle and final victory in 1945. The museum serves a political purpose by seeking to provide an ‘‘educational base of patriotism.’’ The exhibition, starting from Prelude Hall, creates a majestic scene, with white relief sculptures and black marble floors, which symbolize the beautiful land of northeastern China. In the middle of the hall is a huge copper torch crowned by a sculpture of an ever-burning flame, symbolizing the unyielding fighting spirit and heroic martyrs of the Chinese people. To help more visitors understand the significance of the exhibits, the pedestal of the torch is inscribed in four languages (Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian) with the words ‘‘The Chinese people will never forget September 18th, 1931, the day of humiliation for the Chinese nation.’’≤≠ In order to show the whole historical process of this ‘‘national humiliation,’’ the exhibits use hundreds of pictures and documents to detail Japan’s atrocities in China. For example, the exhibits in the Second Exhibit Hall, ‘‘The Anti-Japanese Struggle and the People in Northeastern China,’’ display how Japanese soldiers used machine guns to slaughter Chinese civilians and even killed all the villagers, including children, when the Japanese army took over Pingdingshan, a northeastern village. The exhibits also use pictures to present how Chinese were buried alive by the Japanese army when Nanjing was occupied and how live Chinese were used for experiments by Unit 731. The exhibits chronologically present the process of how Japan attempted to conquer China, politically, economically, and culturally. In all, the 9.18 Historical Museum exhibits present the tremendous calamity and grievous losses of the Chinese people during the war. Museums have strong political and strategic implications when the historical facts are highly selected or ignored. Public museums are representatives of o≈cially selected, organized, and transmitted knowledge and information. Thus they are products of public presentations of national collectivities and identities. Modern museums, by employing modern technology such as lights, music, and electronic equipment, give visitors a more vivid and deeper impression than history books can provide. In doing so, museums can transmit knowledge and xiaohua ma

165

information that meets social, political, and even strategic needs. In fact, the Chinese government had been ashamed of showing the ‘‘humiliating history’’ to the public before the 1980s, but now it began to encourage people to learn from this ‘‘darkest page’’ in Chinese history in order to stress Chinese solidarity under the leadership of the Communist Party during the long ordeal. The exhibits deliver the message that the Chinese Communist Party was the only driving force to take leadership to save the country at the crucial moment, symbolized by the final victory of the war. Thus, the Chinese people’s fourteen-year resistance against Japanese aggression is proposed as the foundation for a shared experience and identity—a national heroic spirit. By showing China’s su√ering and tremendous losses—the ‘‘national disaster’’ (Guonan )—to the younger generations, the museums are not suggesting that the Chinese people have lost their confidence and dignity. Rather, creating an imagined community of victimhood and nationhood through a shared experience and memory —the ‘‘national humiliation’’(Guochi )—helps to promote Chinese political solidarity and national collectivities. Visitors are admonished that the Chinese people must contribute to the construction of a powerful and prosperous country under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. The museum’s presentations provide concrete examples to drive home the message that ‘‘China will be invaded and her people will be humiliated as long as she is backward’’ (Luohou jiuyao aida ). According to the museum’s parting message, creating a shared memory symbolized by national humiliation helps people in a unified China to contribute to ‘‘the building of our powerful socialist country with Chinese characteristics under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.’’ War, however, is now a past experience. China needs to survive in a more global and diversified international environment. To criticize Japan’s militarist past does not mean that China should make a clear break with its neighbor. Instead, the Chinese people should use the lessons learned from the past to promote good relations with Japan. The final exhibit hall, ‘‘The Peoples of China and Japan, Taking Lessons from History, Are Expecting Peace,’’ shows China’s commitment to find a road to reconciliation with the former aggressor. The exhibits use numerous pictures and documents to illustrate how Chinese and Japanese made e√orts to promote good relations soon after the war ended, symbolized by Japanese war orphans in China and Japanese 166

Constructing a National Memory of War

civilians’ visits to China and their e√orts before Sino-Japanese normalization in 1972. In all, the exhibits attempt to tell future generations that the relationship between China and Japan has a long history and tradition. The war caused tremendous su√ering for the Chinese people. However, that was only a short period compared with the ‘‘history of friendly intercourse for two thousand years between the two countries.’’ By using the quotation of a well-known poem written by Lu Xun (one of the greatest writers in modern Chinese history) in the final exhibit, the museum further demonstrates that the friendship, the ‘‘brotherhood’’ between the two countries, is more important than anything else. It implies that China pays more attention to the present and the future even though Japanese aggression inflicted terrible hardships on the Chinese people. Meanwhile, unconsciously it reflects a sense of Chinese national dignity—forgiveness, generosity, and tolerance—to the international community. Those sentiments are symbolized by the Monument to the Chinese Foster Parents, erected in the middle of the exhibition hall and donated by former Japanese war orphans in China, who returned to Japan after being taken care of by their Chinese parents after the war was over. In general, though there were some skirmishes concerning historical memory, Chinese-Japanese relations in this period became rather relaxed after a non–Liberal Democratic Party (ldp) leader, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi, expressed ‘‘deep remorse and heartfelt apology’’ for Japan’s wartime conduct on August 15, 1995. On the same day, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry stated that the ‘‘Japanese government’s attitude toward self-criticism and apology is positive,’’ though he warned the public to ‘‘be aware [that] some Japanese are still trying to glorify the war.’’≤∞ Yet, a potential crisis between China and Japan was averted as memory was not frozen in the past. Instead, it could be transformed and reshaped as the international environment and domestic politics changed.

To Fight over Memory of the War: Japan’s Moral Recovery in the Early 1990s One of the most distinctive characteristics of Japanese society in the postwar era has been an educational emphasis on peace. Historian Yui xiaohua ma

167

Daizaburo has suggested, however, that this peace curriculum, what he calls ‘‘one-country pacifism’’ (ikoku heiwa shugi ), has resulted in ignorance of Japan’s war responsibility.≤≤ According to a government survey in 1967, only 17 percent of Japanese respondents thought that the war was ‘‘bad.’’ By 1972, only 26 percent of Japanese considered that ‘‘Japan did bad things in the war,’’ but at the same time over 46 percent held the opinion that ‘‘Japan had no choice but to fight.’’≤≥ Another government survey in 1975 showed that Japanese memories of the war were ‘‘the shortage of food and materials’’ (70 percent), ‘‘atomic bombs’’ (47 percent), and ‘‘Japanese army’s brutality’’ (14 percent); ‘‘Asian countries’ disasters caused by Japanese aggression’’ ranked last (9 percent).≤∂ As the survey shows, the Japanese view of the war was focused on ‘‘hardships and su√ering,’’ which was rooted in a sense of victimization or a sense of ‘‘victim consciousness’’ (higaisha ishiki ). The international criticism of Japanese textbooks in 1982, however, broke Japan’s international isolation. Japan’s major newspapers, such as Asahi Shimbun, continuously reported foreign criticism of the nationalist textbooks. In the late 1980s, particularly after the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989, the Japanese began discussing the war far more frankly than in earlier decades. There was wide media coverage of Asian grievances, such as the Nanjing Massacre, Chinese and Korean slave labor, ‘‘comfort women,’’ and the grisly human experiments of Unit 731. The stance of Japanese government leaders changed significantly as a result of the media stories as well as strong pressure from overseas. In September 1986, Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro admitted in the Diet that Japanese e√orts in the war in Asia were ‘‘wrong’’ and ‘‘an invasion,’’ though he insisted that the war with the United States was di√erent.≤∑ Resistance to this trend was substantial. After Motojima Hitoshi, the mayor of Nagasaki City, said in public that the emperor should be considered responsible for the war, he was shot by a member of a rightwing patriotic group.≤∏ The Motojima incident demonstrated how sensitive the issue of war responsibility remained. Yet Motojima’s statement shows that Japan began to be more self-critical. This tendency can be clearly seen in the 1991 Peace Announcements of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which explicitly acknowledged Japan’s wartime aggression and responsibility. These changes were a direct response to foreign as well as domestic critics of Japan’s war and colonial rule. A number of lawsuits demanding an apology and compensation were lodged with 168

Constructing a National Memory of War

Tokyo courts on behalf of the victims of Japan’s aggression and colonialism. The lawsuits included the victims of the Nanjing Massacre, survivors of wartime slave labor, and the ‘‘comfort women.’’ The issues concerning Japan’s aggression were hotly debated in the early 1990s. Under these circumstances, a public facility to commemorate the war not only from the victims’ perspective but also from a view of selfcriticism emerged, the Museum of Peace Osaka International Center (Peace Osaka). Peace Osaka is located in Osaka Castle Park, the center of Osaka. It was cofounded by the Osaka prefecture and municipal governments on September 17, 1991, the United Nation’s International Day of Peace, as a ‘‘symbol of a peaceful city.’’ Japan had been involved in numerous wars in the past century, but it is the only country without a war museum. Ironically Japan’s oldest museum, Yushukan (in Japanese, Museum for Heroes) at Yasukuni Shrine, built in 1882 as the first national institution to preserve weaponry and soldiers’ relics, has deep connections with war, particularly with the Greater East Asia War, which it justifies as an attempt to ‘‘liberate East Asia.’’ Approximately one hundred peace museums were constructed throughout Japan in the past five decades, starting with the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Nagasaki Atomic Museum in 1955, shortly after the end of the American occupation. Like most of the peace museums in Japan, the purpose of Peace Osaka is to collect, preserve, and exhibit the materials related to peace to educate the younger generations on how to understand the significance of peace. Peace Osaka functions in the same way as most peace museums in Japan, which are mainly designed to educate younger generations to understand how war damages human society by educating visitors about Japan’s bitter wartime experiences. How Japan’s actions in Asia are dealt with is an important and closely watched element in any of its public museums. Peace Osaka appeals to the people to avoid the agony of war. How does Peace Osaka attempt to transform its message to show a new Japanese identity in the international community? Peace Osaka consists of three permanent exhibit halls: Exhibit Hall A, ‘‘U.S. Bombing on Osaka and Civilian Life in Wartime’’; Exhibit Hall b, ‘‘Fifteen-Year War’’; and Exhibit Hall c, ‘‘Voice for Peace.’’ Before entry into Hall a, there is an introduction, which reads, ‘‘The Japanese people were responsible for having caused great hardships to xiaohua ma

169

the people of the fifteen-year war. . . . Through a dispassionate and unpretentious reflection of this fifteen-year war, each of us must constantly strive to exert our e√orts toward the attainment of lasting global peace.’’≤π In this way, the exhibits start by acknowledging Japan’s war responsibility while mentioning Japanese wartime su√ering. To understand the museum’s aim and perspective on the war, Exhibit Hall B provides a clear demonstration of how Japan has struggled with itself over memories of the war and sought to find a new national identity in a wider world in the early 1990s. Hall B presents how Japan initiated its aggression in China and other Asian countries and why the war finally came to an end. The exhibits are composed of five sections, detailing Japan’s invasion of China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific region and then the end of the war (the U.S. atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The whole exhibit pays the most attention to Japan’s wartime conduct and behavior in China as well as in other Asian countries. A large number of pictures with detailed descriptions illustrate Japan’s wartime crimes, such as the Nanjing Massacre, Unit 731’s human experiments, slave labor, and the bombing of civilians in Chinese cities. The display also shows that ‘‘Japanese immigrants in Manchuria, one part of Japan’s territorial conquests, became victims of the war’’ in a special exhibit, ‘‘Japan’s Surrender and Japanese Immigrants in Manchuria.’’ For Peace Osaka, to publicize and assess Japan’s ‘‘dark past’’ does not mean that Japan has lost confidence and national dignity. Rather, it shows Japan’s e√ort to overcome its militarist past to seek a new place in the international community—to contribute to a ‘‘lasting peaceful world.’’ This purpose, which is to ‘‘educate the younger generations to understand the disaster of the war and the importance of peace in order to enable this museum to be an international center to deliver peace information and contribute to world peace,’’≤∫ can be seen clearly in its construction project. Through a large number of historical pictures and documents the exhibit illustrates the calamity and grievous losses of the Chinese and other Asian peoples, not by concealing the history of Japanese militarism, but by publicizing, critically assessing, and admitting responsibility for that history to show Japan’s commitment to make a clean break with the war legacy. ‘‘Bodies were disposed of by burning, or being thrown into the Yangtze River,’’ explains the narrative of the Nanjing Massacre exhibit.≤Ω To cover the Nanjing Massacre, the exhibit uses a number of pictures and docu170

Constructing a National Memory of War

ments, including displays of Chinese history textbooks (with some Japanese translations) to describe Chinese views of the incident. Thus, rather than asserting national myths and presenting irredentist narratives as the core components of nationhood, Peace Osaka focuses on the representation of a more globalized and diversified world as well as the place of Japanese identity in the international community. The exhibits seek to create a consensus of condemnation of Japan’s militaristic past and exclude reference to past glories. From this point of view, it is the first public museum in Japan to exhibit the Japanese wartime experience while refraining from presenting a feeling of ‘‘victim consciousness.’’ As its mission states, Peace Osaka is a place to ‘‘commemorate those who died not only in Japan, but also the victims in the Asian countries caused by Japan’s invasion and colonial rule.’’≥≠ By criticizing Japan’s military past, Peace Osaka tells us that Japan has attempted to make a clean break with the dark past in order to find a road toward reconciliation with its neighboring countries. Therefore, Peace Osaka is a pioneer public museum intended to educate younger generations on how to view the past from a victim’s perspective and also how to use that lesson to learn respect for di√erent people in the world. More important, it can also be seen as evidence of Japan’s e√orts to embrace moral responsibility for its wartime conduct and behavior. Furthermore, the self-criticism of Peace Osaka indicates that Japan has attempted to choose a strategy of ‘‘moral recovery,’’ the recovery of national dignity and credibility in the world. In the wake of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, however, controversies erupted over how to reestablish Japan’s ‘‘national dignity.’’

Memory or Amnesia? Museum Wars in the Late 1990s As Peace Osaka’s exhibits show, after government procrastination and intense e√ort as well as international pressure, Japan began to make attempts to grapple with the issue of war responsibility. In 1993, when the ldp’s hegemony over Japanese politics was broken for the first time, non-ldp Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro admitted that Japan’s war was ‘‘definitely an aggressive war.’’≥∞ However, these advances also resulted in fierce opposition. Inside the Diet, ldp members who insisted that Japan’s war was for ‘‘justice’’ firmly opposed making any apology for the war in 1994. These Diet members were xiaohua ma

171

represented by the Congressmen’s Council of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the End of the War (Shusen gojushunen giin renmei) and the Committee for History Investigation (Rekishi kento iinkai), which led to the publication of a propaganda book entitled An A≈rmative Summation of the Greater East Asia War (Daitoa Senso no Soukatsu ) on August 15, 1995.≥≤ Outside the Diet the opposing forces mainly came from a number of nationalist groups and organizations, including Japan’s War Bereaved Families Association (Nippon yizokukai) and the National Council for Defending Japan (Nippon o mamoru kokumin kaigi), which proclaimed ‘‘the justification and glory of the Greater East Asia War.’’ In addition, a group of nationalist academics initiated a campaign to ‘‘reform history education,’’ represented by Fujioka Nobukatsu’s Reform of Modern History (Kindaishi no jugyo kaikaku) and Nishio Kanji’s Association for Writing New History Textbooks (Atarashi rekishi kyokasho o tsukurukai). History, as an encounter with truth telling, has strong political and strategic meanings, while the facts are selected, emphasized, or eliminated. Japan’s textbook debate has received much international attention. But museums, as one of the main facilities for social education about the past, have been far more bitterly contested within Japan than the history textbooks. Certainly museums, as the main places to collect, preserve, explain, and exhibit historical material and documents, must tell the truth. However, which part of the historical facts should be selected or forgotten is dependent on di√erent historical values as well as di√erent political strategies. Thus, how a museum selects or ignores the facts not only reflects a certain historical perception of war, but also a√ects the way future generations are educated, as well as providing a political strategy. To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, both central and local governments in Japan considered building museum projects for the war victims in 1995. In the late 1970s, Japan’s War Bereaved Families Association repeatedly exerted pressure on the government for a national facility devoted to those soldiers who lost their lives for the nation. In 1992, the Ministry of Welfare decided to construct a national museum, Memorial Museum for War Victims (Senbotusha tsuido heiwa kinenkan), chronicling the events of World War II. However, disputes developed over how and what historical facts to select. Controversies over whether or not to display Japan’s wartime conduct were heated and finally led to the resignation of three liberal 172

Constructing a National Memory of War

historians on the committee.≥≥ Under strong pressure from Japan’s War Bereaved Families Association, one of the largest and strongest interest groups in postwar Japanese society, in January 1995 the Ministry of Welfare canceled its original project and transformed it from a war memorial into a bland exhibition of Japanese wartime life. A government spokesman explained simply that ‘‘it is di≈cult to interpret historical facts in a popular way.’’≥∂ Consequently on March 27, 1999, Showakan Museum, Japan’s first national museum to commemorate wartime life, was opened in the center of Tokyo, near Yasukuni Shrine. Showakan, by showing Japanese civilians,’ particularly women’s and children’s, su√ering during the Showa period, which was mainly wartime, presents victimization as an experience shared equally by Japanese and other Asians. This perspective seems to resonate with the Japanese people, who su√ered greatly under American bombing in the final months of the war. Disputes over remembrance of wartime behavior also exploded in another national museum for commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, Tokyo’s National Memorial Museum for Peace (Heiwa kinen tenji shiryokan). Opened on November 30, 2000, this museum showed a similar strategy for remembering the war by stressing Japanese soldiers’ hardships, particularly in the final months after the Soviet o√ensive in northeastern China (Manchuria), and later their experiences as slave laborers in Siberia. Both of the national museums discouraged self-criticism and deflected attention away from Japan’s war responsibility. ‘‘Japanese people, all of us did su√er severely in the war,’’ the exhibit concludes. ‘‘We can never forget those soldiers who su√ered in the war and were forced to work after the war in very cold Siberia before finally being allowed to return to their motherland.’’≥∑ This sense of shared victimization in universal terms is proposed as the foundation for a shared experience and identity in a unified Japan, a memory of Japanese (civilians’ and soldiers’) hardships in the war. To create an imagined community of victims by a shared experience and memory in universal terms, Japan ingeniously eludes its moral responsibility for the war. Thus the museum’s political stance shows the public’s penchant to forget and the government’s fostering of collective amnesia. This form of collective amnesia is not merely confined to the context of the national museums. In 1995 the Tokyo metropolitan government made a decision to build the Peace Memorial Museum of Tokyo xiaohua ma

173

4. One corner in the Memorial Museum of Peace illustrates Japanese soldiers’ hardships in World War II. Photograph by Xiaohua Ma.

5. A pamphlet published by the National Memorial Museum of Peace illustrates how Japanese, mainly nonpensioned veterans, postwar internees, and repatriates, remembered the misery of war.

(Tokyo to heiwa kinenkan), like Peace Osaka, to commemorate the victims of the U.S. bombing of Tokyo. To understand the whole historical process of the war objectively, the preparatory committee considered a comprehensive exhibit to present how Japan started the war. Similar controversies over the treatment of Japan’s wartime conduct and behavior followed. The opposing forces, mainly from a number of nationalist groups, such as Fujioka’s Citizens’ Committee to Consider the Peace of Tokyo (Tokyo no heiwa o kangaeru kai), initiated a vigorous protest campaign in conservative newspapers and journals. In a commentary in Sankei Shimbun, Fujioka criticized the preparatory committee for being ‘‘ignorant’’ of the war and claimed that ‘‘the greatest war crime in World War II was U.S. bombs on Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo.’’≥∏ He strongly opposed any exhibits to present Japan’s wartime conduct and insisted that the best way to show ‘‘Japan’s face’’ was to create a ‘‘national myth’’ by showing Japanese pride and e√orts to build a peaceful world.≥π Finally, in August 1999, under strong nationalist pressure, the Tokyo metropolitan government decided to cancel its project due to ‘‘financial di≈culty.’’ Cancellation seemed to signal that museums that asked visitors to confront not just the nature of war, but more complicated questions of responsibility and reparations, must be founded far away from the political capital. In the meantime, the opposing forces initiated an o√ensive directed at Peace Osaka. In October 1996, due to the controversy over museum construction on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, ldp leaders in the Diet started an investigation of public museums. They subsequently declared that ‘‘the government should not encourage building public museums based on some specific ideology,’’ a direct criticism of Peace Osaka.≥∫ This statement seemed a signal for the nationalists and conservative media to lash out at Peace Osaka. Immediately a commentary in Sankei Shimbun denounced the museum for using ‘‘false and horrible pictures’’ to ‘‘self-abuse’’ ( jigyaku ) Japanese.≥Ω Members of Fujioka Nobukatsu’s Association for the Advancement of a Liberalist View of History (Jiyushugi shikan kenkyukai) initiated a ‘‘museum war.’’ Of all the pictures in the exhibits, that of the Nanjing Massacre may be the most intractable. ‘‘It is absolutely ‘self-flagellation,’ ’’ Fujioka pointed out. ‘‘The exhibit of the Nanjing [Massacre] was a complete fabrication,’’ and claims of Japanese atrocities were ‘‘wartime propaganda . . . just a rumor.’’∂≠

176

Constructing a National Memory of War

To critics like Fujioka, the depiction of the massacre was the most obvious evidence of a harmful Japanese tendency toward ‘‘self-flagellation.’’ By calling attention to Japanese brutality, the exhibit would destroy Japanese pride and weaken Japan as a state for the twenty-first century. According to Fujioka, elimination of all the ‘‘self-abusive’’ exhibits was the best way for the younger generations to ‘‘promote a sense of national pride.’’ He insisted that ‘‘all nations have a right to interpret their history in their own way.’’ Thus, to eliminate Japan’s ‘‘dark past’’ from the exhibits not only would contribute to a surge of Japanese national pride, but would also help solidify a more selfassertive Japanese identity.∂∞ To promote Japanese national pride, the nationalist groups began to exert pressure on the Osaka government, ordering Peace Osaka to withdraw all the ‘‘self-abusive’’ exhibits, including the pictures of the Japanese army’s invasion of Shanghai with gas masks and the bombing of Chongqing, Nationalist China’s wartime capital. A number of nationalists in Osaka, mainly supported by the Association of Japan’s Public Opinion (Nippon yoron no kai), formed the Citizens’ Committee to Correct War Exhibits (cccwe, Senso shiryo no henkou tenji o tadasu kai) on March 1, 1997, requesting the government to stop the financial support of Peace Osaka.∂≤ Many nationalists who favored ‘‘correcting history’’ in Japan, such as Fujioka Katsunobu and Ara Kenichi (a well-known writer), supported their campaign. Ara criticized the exhibits at Peace Osaka as a ‘‘distortion of the facts,’’ and even asserted that all the members in Peace Osaka must be ‘‘communists,’’ though they were not.∂≥ The conservative newspaper Sankei Shimbun played an important role in this political campaign. On March 4, 1997, a commentary in Sankei Shimbun criticized Peace Osaka’s exhibits of the Nanjing Massacre and requested the museum to ‘‘immediately reexamine all the exhibits of the war.’’∂∂ Having been attacked by the nationalist forces, Peace Osaka decided to withdraw some pictures without identified sources in Japan in July 1997. Most of the self-critical exhibits remained. The case of Peace Osaka implies that Japan, at least at the civilian level, has successfully transformed into a civil society due to the pacifism education after World War II, which completely di√ered from the wartime tradition of militarism. The nationalist forces attempted to arouse public concern to force Peace Osaka to withdraw all the exhibits of Japan’s war-

xiaohua ma

177

time aggression. The e√ect, however, was contrary to their expectation. Eventually they shifted their strategy as the international environment changed.

Double Memory as ‘‘Rape’’: The Transformation of Chinese Remembrance in the Late 1990s The turn of the century became a crucial point in the memory disputes between China, Japan, and the United States. Three persons, Iris Chang, John Rabe, and Azuma Shiro, played significant roles in these debates, though Azuma has seldom been mentioned in Japan. The publication of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II in 1997 and John Rabe’s diary in 1998, as well as the failure of Azuma Shiro’s lawsuit in the Supreme Court of Tokyo in 1998, all intensified tensions between the three countries.∂∑ Chang’s book won virtually unanimous praise in major U.S. papers and landed on the New York Times ’s bestseller list for ten weeks and sold more than 125,000 copies in four months, a record in the forty-eight-year history of its publisher.∂∏ Chang was interviewed on Good Morning, America and abc invited her and the Harvard historian William Kirby to an abc special documentary for the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre on December 11, 1997.∂π Meanwhile, studies on Japan’s wartime atrocities, particularly on the war in China, achieved a breakthrough in this period.∂∫ All this ignited old debates. To protest Chang’s book, on January 23, 2000, cccwe held a conference entitled ‘‘The Greatest Lie of the 20th Century: ‘The Nanjing Massacre’ ’’ at Peace Osaka. The conference denied that Japanese soldiers had conducted mass rapes and slaughter against Chinese civilians in the occupied city. From the perspective of the nationalists, the revelation of Japan’s wartime atrocities would prevent Japan from perpetuating a national myth: the glory of the past. They treat Japan’s wartime crimes such as the Nanjing Massacre as a dangerous blow to Japan’s moral and political foundations as well as its reputation in the international community. ‘‘People think by analogy that because the Germans committed a Holocaust, Japanese must have done something like that too,’’ explained Higashinakano Shudo, a professor at Asia University. ‘‘But you must look at the facts,’’ he added. ‘‘It was 178

Constructing a National Memory of War

groundless war propaganda.’’∂Ω Ironically Peace Osaka, Japan’s first public museum to house permanent exhibits on the Asia-Pacific War, including the American atomic bombs and Japan’s brutal military campaign in China and other Asian countries, was innovatively transformed into a nationalist fortress. The Japanese nationalists’ denial of the Nanjing Massacre and their statement that the massacre was ‘‘the greatest lie of the 20th century’’ further infuriated the Chinese people. The publication of John Rabe’s diary and the failure of Azuma Shiro’s lawsuit in 1998 had already aggravated Chinese resentments. The nationalist refusal of Japan’s wartime crimes, in Iris Chang’s words, Japan’s ‘‘second rape,’’∑≠ immediately set o√ a wave of Chinese condemnations both o≈cial and popular and provoked emotionally strong Chinese responses. The next day the Japanese government and media computer systems were attacked; all pages containing the phrase ‘‘Nanjing Massacre’’ were rewritten in Chinese or in English instead,∑∞ an informal protest and a byproduct of globalization. Before the rally was held, the Chinese government newspaper, Renmin Ribao, had repeatedly reported nationalist activities at Osaka and Chinese protests.∑≤ Meanwhile, Teng Anjun, the vice general consul in Osaka, had negotiated with the Osaka government to forbid the nationalist groups from using the center for the rally. The city o≈cials responded, however, that Peace Osaka was a public place and the refusal would be ‘‘an infringement of free speech.’’∑≥ On January 18, the Chinese government negotiated with the Japanese Foreign Ministry, but the response was ‘‘The [Peace Osaka] center is not within the jurisdiction of the central government.’’ Sankei Shimbun seized this opportunity to condemn China’s ‘‘blatant interference in [ Japan’s] domestic a√airs.’’∑∂ After the rally was held at Peace Osaka the Chinese immediately unleashed a storm of criticism. Tang Jiaxuan, the Chinese foreign minister, criticized ‘‘a handful of ultra-rightists who are still trying to reverse the verdict on Japan’s aggressive war.’’ Tang voiced China’s ‘‘extreme regret and strong indignation’’ to Japanese Ambassador Tanino Sakutaro, even though the Foreign Ministry reiterated Murayama’s statement that Japan caused tremendous damage to the Chinese people during the war.∑∑ Immediately, the major newspapers in China reported the nationalist rally in Peace Osaka. Jiefangjun Bao, the o≈cial newspaper of the Chinese army, used two pages to report the whole incident, under the xiaohua ma

179

headline ‘‘History Can Never Be Distorted.’’ China Daily, the o≈cial English-language newspaper, even used color pictures to report how some Japanese and Chinese students in Japan demonstrated in front of the center to protest nationalist activities after condemning Japan’s ‘‘falsification of history.’’ ‘‘By planning the rally, Japanese ultra-rightists want to distort history, paper over the aggression and undermine Chinese-Japanese friendship,’’ observed the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao. ‘‘We must be aware of the revival of Japanese militarism,’’ he warned. Renmin Ribao published an editorial denouncing those Japanese who ‘‘want to beautify the war’’ and pointed out that ‘‘how to confront history is a fundamental [issue] in Chinese-Japanese relations.’’∑∏ The next day hundreds of Chinese rallied in front of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum and the September 18th Historical Museum and later submitted formal protest letters to the Japanese and Osaka governments.∑π For several days, the Chinese government and news media attacked the conference and rally as the work of people eager to ‘‘falsify history and raise tensions between the two countries.’’ The New York Times reported the rally at Peace Osaka on that day. Finally, on January 28, Chinese Americans demonstrated in New York and San Francisco to protest Japan’s denial of its war atrocities.∑∫ From the Chinese perspective, the war in Asia, particularly the fourteen-year war in China, matched and even exceeded the casualties and destruction on the whole European front. Moreover, Japan’s crimes were especially abhorrent, particularly in regard to the massacres in Nanjing and other areas as well as Unit 731’s human experiments and bacteriological warfare. Those crimes rank as one of the modern era’s most horrifying acts of barbarism and inhumanity. Nationalism, according to the historian Ernest Gellner, is ‘‘the feeling of anger aroused by the violation of principle.’’∑Ω Japan’s nationalist repudiation of wartime crimes thus easily provoked the immediate eruption of Chinese resentment and anger. Having examined the strong emotional responses of the Chinese and the Japanese after Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking was published in 1997, Nicholas Kristof, Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in China, said in an interview, ‘‘The war is really one of the crucial issues for East Asia, not only in the past but in the coming decades.’’ He added, ‘‘If there is another war in Asia, I think that it will have roots not just in disagreements yet to arise but in the 1930s and 40s.’’∏≠ 180

Constructing a National Memory of War

6. The Nanjing Massacre in Chinese memory. One monument in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum shows how Chinese su√ered in the war. Photograph by Xiaohua Ma.

7. The Nanjing Massacre in memory and history. The ‘‘Bell for Peace’’ in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum. Photograph by Xiaohua Ma.

Chinese anger over what they viewed as Japan’s deliberate distortion of wartime memories continued to simmer over the next few years. Publication of nationalist junior high school textbooks which downplayed Japan’s wartime aggression and Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro’s 2001 visit to Yasukuni Shrine—which honors the souls of Japan’s war dead, including the war criminals—further heightened the tensions between Japan and its neighboring countries and reignited old debates and memories. Under these circumstances, China observed the seventieth anniversary of the September 18th Incident. Various commemorative events were held throughout China in 2001. Early in the year the government decided to rearrange the exhibits in the 9.18 Historical Museum, which was reopened to the public on September 18, 2001.∏∞ The rearranged museum retained the basic themes of the former exhibits, presenting the Chinese people’s su√ering and resistance during the war against Japan. However, the new exhibits paid more attention to three themes: (1) the northeastern people’s struggle and resistance, (2) Chinese solidarity and heroism in the war against Japan, and (3) awareness of the revival of Japanese militarism. The exhibits stressed the significance of the September 18th Incident in world history as well as in Chinese-Japanese relations. To revive Chinese memories of the war, the exhibits focused on the words ‘‘Never forget history and let it repeat’’ while emphasizing ‘‘Never forget the national humiliation.’’ Compared to the former exhibits, what changed most is the last hall, ‘‘Taking History as a Mirror: Hope for Peace and Vigilance against the Revival of Japanese Militarism.’’ The old exhibit hall had emphasized ‘‘the two thousand years of friendship’’ between China and Japan; the new exhibit hall, as its title implies, concentrates on Chinese anxiety concerning ‘‘the revival of Japanese militarism.’’ To remind future generations not to forget the wartime su√erings, the exhibit uses numerous pictures and documents to show how some Japanese have attempted to ‘‘glorify’’ or ‘‘justify’’ the war, although the exhibit also shows that Chinese and Japanese people have been making e√orts to promote the relationship between the two countries. For example, the exhibit displays pictures of former Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei and Chairman Mao Zedong’s conversation in Beijing and various cultural communications between Chinese and Japanese people. But displays showing Japanese o≈cials’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine, xiaohua ma

183

Fujioka and Nishio’s ‘‘history reform’’ movement, and the failure of Azuma Shiro’s lawsuit in the Supreme Court of Tokyo illustrate Chinese awareness of Japan’s ‘‘history revision.’’ Chinese o≈cials were most upset by Prime Minister Koizumi’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine, which Chinese view as a symbol of Japan’s unwillingness to confront its militarist past. There is a special corner in the 9.18 Incident Museum to introduce the role of Yasukuni Shrine in Japan’s aggression and strong Chinese protests against Koizumi’s visit throughout the country in August 2001. All this exemplifies that some Japanese have been attempting to ‘‘beautify’’ and ‘‘justify the war.’’ Thus the conclusion of the museum exhibit calls on the whole society to ‘‘be always on guard against the revival of Japanese militarists.’’ To remind Chinese to ‘‘always be aware of the revival of Japanese militarism,’’ the editorial ‘‘Never Forget National Humiliation’’ appeared in Wenhuibao on September 18, 2001, appealing to the Chinese not to forget the wartime ordeal. The editorial further admonished readers to not ‘‘let the bitter history repeat’’ since ‘‘some Japanese have denied or even beautified the war and have continued hurting Chinese feeling.’’∏≤ Similarly, the editorial ‘‘To Tell the Next Generations’’ in Renmin Ribao insisted that the Chinese people must tell future generations not only about wartime su√ering but also about Japan’s attempt to ‘‘obliterate its past crimes’’ against the Chinese people.∏≥ This sense of double memory, both the physical (wartime) and the mental (postwar) trauma, is intended to be used as the foundation and common ground for a collective Chinese nationalism in order to accelerate national solidarity and social progress. The conclusion of the exhibits warns, ‘‘If you forget su√ering it will come again.’’ Thus the exhibition appeals to the public: ‘‘Everybody should contribute to the prosperity of our motherland’’ as ‘‘backwardness means that Chinese will be bullied and humiliated again.’’ In general, the growing spread of nationalism in China and Japan in the 1990s intensified the gap between the people in the two countries. China’s excessive criticism of Japan’s ‘‘revival of militarism’’ led to its refusal to acknowledge Japan’s peaceful progress after 1945. In fact, Japan is no longer the same militaristic country that it was in World War II. A survey carried out in 1997, however, shows that the Chinese image of Japan was deeply influenced by their wartime experiences of ‘‘aggression’’ and ‘‘militarism.’’∏∂ Other factors also intensified the conflicts between the two coun184

Constructing a National Memory of War

tries. The continuous economic downturn in the 1990s destroyed Japanese confidence and accelerated the rise of conservatism, which contributed to Japan’s failure to make an appropriate judgment to deal with the war issues. Under the pressure of the conservatives Japan mistakenly evaluated China’s position and could not face the fact that China, as a rising power in the post–cold war world, emerged and began to compete with Japan, not only economically but in world politics. When Chinese President Jiang Zemin made a historic visit to Japan in 1998, asking for a formal apology for its wartime aggression, Japan refused. The first visit of a Chinese head of state to Japan after World War II ended unhappily and later led to mutual recriminations. Repeated Chinese demands for an apology over the next several years eventually led to Japanese complaints of ‘‘apology fatigue.’’ Undoubtedly this vicious circle contributed to further escalation of extreme nationalism in Chinese and Japanese society. Further contributing to this escalation in the 1990s was the rapid development of globalization, which accelerated the transmission of information as well as the ‘‘migration’’ of memory.

Memory across Borders: Ethnic Power in Making a ‘‘Memory Community’’ Most Americans remember World War II as ‘‘the Good War.’’∏∑ In his book The Good War’s Greatest Hits Philip D. Beidler analyzes how this collective memory, the Good War, was culturally formed by wartime propaganda and reinforced in the aftermath of victory through books, the news media, movies, songs, and television in a particularly American way.∏∏ The Good War, however, also contained incongruities. Chinese Americans experienced su√ering under the discriminatory laws enacted in 1882, and internment produced a di√erent memory of the war for Japanese Americans. Shadow over ‘‘the Good War’’: The Asian American Struggle in Multicultural America

As the American historian Ronald Takaki points out, the war came to ‘‘bomb the color line’’ and finally won a ‘‘double victory,’’ not only a victory over fascism abroad but also a victory over racism in America.∏π xiaohua ma

185

The war directly led to the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1943 and allowed a 105-person quota for Chinese entry to the United States per year because of the wartime Chinese-American alliance. The repeal helped to pave the way not only for greater racial tolerance toward Asians in the United States but for multiculturalism in general after the war.∏∫ Even more important than the changes in American discriminatory laws were the changes in American ideology and in the Asian American community, particularly after the civil rights movement in the 1960s, which resulted in a fundamental shift in immigration policy in 1965 and the increasing flow of Asian immigrants. Before the war the Chinese American community was largely shut out of the mainstream of American society because of the discriminatory laws. American wartime good feeling toward China improved the positive images and reputation of Chinese Americans due to their contribution to the war e√ort. It is estimated that almost twenty thousand Chinese Americans served in the U.S. Armed Forces during the war.∏Ω Moreover, the Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team’s combat record in Europe prompted President Harry Truman to declare, ‘‘You fought not only the enemy, you fought prejudice and you won.’’π≠ Asian Americans’ ‘‘success’’ during World War II fighting for democracy and freedom enabled them to be ‘‘the model minority’’ in the postwar era. Eventually, Asian Americans came to address the incongruities of the Good War in the postwar era. Japanese Americans struggled for an o≈cial apology and redress from the U.S. government for their wartime internment, finally triumphing in 1988. They built the Japanese American National Museum in order to ‘‘promote understanding and appreciation of America’s ethnic and cultural diversity by preserving, interpreting and sharing the experience of Japanese Americans.’’π∞ Their political campaign asking the federal government to construct the Japanese American Memorial in Washington, D.C., was successful; the museum was completed in 2002. In all these endeavors Asian Americans have exemplified how to sustain ethnic identity in the ‘‘memory community’’ of multicultural America. By the 1980s, despite being a tiny fraction, less than 3 percent, of the population, Asian Americans made up 9 to 25 percent of the entering classes at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton, and the California Institute of Technology.π≤ With regard to every aspect of education typically treated as a measure of success, such as years of schooling, grades, performance on stan186

Constructing a National Memory of War

dardized tests, and fields of study, Asian Americans are regarded as ‘‘a model minority.’’π≥ Chinese Americans, the largest Asian American ethnic group, through economic and educational success in the postwar era have been contributing to a rise of their own identity as Americans. For example, to foster a deeper understanding of America’s diverse heritage by researching, preserving, and sharing the history, rich cultural legacy, and contributions of Chinese Americans, Chinese immigration museums were established in the city centers of San Francisco and New York in the early 1980s. In 1988, Chinese Americans in southern California formed the Friends of the Museum of Chinese American History and convinced the City of Los Angeles to allocate 2,500 square feet (increased to 7,200 square feet in 2001) in the downtown area to build the Chinese American Museum.π∂ Meanwhile, the Chinese, used to being regarded as ‘‘unsuited for political participation’’ because they were not equipped for the ‘‘highly competitive, aggressive and masculine-oriented [American] culture,’’π∑ began to break their silence and participate politically after the 1980s. In 1984, the Chinese American Political Association, a nonpartisan, nonprofit educational and political organization, was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area, aiming to raise the political awareness of Chinese Americans and to encourage their activities in the political process of the United States. By the 1990s, Chinese American political participation resulted in the election of the first Chinese American governor (Washington), congressman (Oregon), and cabinet o≈cer (Elaine Lan Chao, deputy secretary of transportation in the George H. W. Bush administration and secretary of labor in the George W. Bush administration). Surprisingly, the typical Chinese American politician serving in Washington was not born in the United States, but in China. When the American veterans’ movement for Japan’s war redress started in the late 1980s, a number of Chinese American organizations and social groups were founded, for example, the Chinese Alliance for Memorial and Justice (New York, 1987), the Alliance in Memory of Victims of the Nanking Massacre (New York, 1991), the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War (based in northern California, 1992), the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia (U.S.- and Canada-based worldwide organization, 1994), and the Association for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia (East Coast area, 1995). These grass-roots organizations xiaohua ma

187

were created to urge the general public in the United States, China, Japan, and other countries to force the Japanese government to shoulder responsibility for its transgressions and o√er an unambiguous apology and compensation to the victims of its war atrocities. The activists mainly are Chinese Americans (including both Chinese- and American-born) and other Asian Americans (Korean and Japanese) as well as Jewish Americans.π∏ Their lobbying activities led the California Assembly to pass a resolution on August 24, 1999, calling on ‘‘a clear and unambiguous apology’’ by the Japanese government for its war crimes. This bill was introduced by Japanese American Assemblyman Mike Honda, who later introduced a similar bill, the ‘‘Justice for United States Prisoners of War Act,’’ in the House of Representatives after he was elected congressman in 2001.ππ Congressman Honda asserts that the Asian American struggle is for ‘‘justice,’’ saying, ‘‘The issue is not whether Japan can, on technical ground, elude responsibility, the question is whether justice has been done.’’π∫ In a Newsweek interview, Honda explained that he introduced the compensation bill ‘‘because I believe that the act of reconciliation and apology brings about much greater respect for those who have the maturity to say it.’’ He added, ‘‘Apologies bring people together. That to me is a mature person, a mature country, a mature community.’’πΩ But the question is how to keep a country mature. To Keep Memory Alive: Chinese American Remembrance of the War

With the growth of the American veterans’ redress movement in the 1990s, Chinese Americans’ grass-roots campaign expanded as well. Japanese high o≈cials’ repeated denials of Japan’s wartime crimes and moral responsibilities provoked Chinese American resentment. The outrage within the Chinese community intensified when Congressman Ishihara Shintaro told Playboy magazine that the ‘‘Nanking Massacre was totally a lie.’’ Throughout the decade, some Japanese high o≈cials consistently denied Japan’s wartime crimes. Even Minister of Justice Nagao Shigeto proclaimed that Japan’s war aim was to ‘‘liberate East Asia.’’ ‘‘The so-called ‘Nanjing incident,’ ’’ he declared in a media interview on May 4, 1994, ‘‘was just a fabrication.’’∫≠ Chinese Americans denounced these statements in protests in New York and San Francisco. But Japanese denials also prompted them to 188

Constructing a National Memory of War

consider other responses to Japan’s historical amnesia. As Iris Chang explained in The Rape of Nanking, she was motivated to write the book because of ‘‘the stubborn refusal of many prominent Japanese politicians, academics, and industrial leaders to admit, despite overwhelming evidence that the Nanking massacre had even happened.’’ Thus, she wrote to ‘‘memorialize one of the bloodiest massacres of civilians in modern times,’’ to ‘‘shed light on how the Japanese, as a people, manage, nurture, and sustain their collective amnesia—even denial—when confronted with the record of their behavior through this period.’’∫∞ By the early 1990s a new wave of immigration was contributing to the increase in Chinese American power. By 1989 over fifty thousand Chinese students, the elite of Chinese society, had been sent to the United States after China’s ‘‘open door policy’’ in 1979.∫≤ Among those were a large number who achieved success both in academia and the high-tech business. They became a strong influence on U.S.-China relations.∫≥ In their memory, no Asian peoples had su√ered from Japanese tyranny as much as the Chinese had. Japan’s wartime crimes, such as the Nanjing Massacre, biological warfare and human experiments of Unit 731, ‘‘comfort women,’’ and slave labor, though they still loomed painfully large in Chinese American memory, seemed almost to have disappeared into a black hole of oblivion in the memory of the rest of the world. That was the message of Chang’s book: Japan’s wartime atrocities, the holocaust in Asia, had been forgotten in the world. How could Chinese Americans keep the memory alive in order to arouse public concern in the United States and Japan? In the late 1990s Chinese Americans began their campaign of public education for the ‘‘forgotten holocaust’’ in Asia. In the San Francisco Bay Area, a social group, the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, opened a series of exhibits on Japanese wartime atrocities at the old Navy Library on Treasure Island, California, in 1998. The exhibit focused on Unit 731’s biological warfare experiments as well as the Nanjing Massacre.∫∂ Their activities devolved into a project to build a museum to ‘‘preserve the true history of World War II in Asia.’’ On March 1, 2000, to ‘‘inform the American people about the egregious crimes of horror committed by [the] Japanese army and to educate future generations with the historical lessons learned from the Chinese Holocaust and to prevent Japanese militarism from reviving lest the Holocaust repeat,’’ the Chinese Holocaust Museum of the xiaohua ma

189

United States (its temporary name) was opened in Oakland, California.∫∑ The first exhibit in this museum included photographs of 2 million abandoned Japanese poisonous chemical bombs and weapons in Jilin province in northeastern China (this exhibit is the first ever outside China) and human experiments and biological warfare of Japan’s Unit 731. This exhibit, including 120 photographs, graphics, and original documents, was supported by the Museum of Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japan, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum, the 9.18 Incident Museum, and the Museum of Crimes of Biological Warfare Unit 731, as well as various members and groups of the Chinese community in the United Stated, including Anna Chennault, widow of the World War II hero General Claire Lee Chennault of the American Volunteer Group (also known as the Flying Tigers). In addition, to arouse public concern and revive the memory of the forgotten holocaust in Asia, the museum began arranging various rotating exhibits in major U.S. cities. For example, from March 8 to April 2, 2000, the museum sponsored the ‘‘Untold Atrocities of World War II in China Exhibit,’’ a photography exhibition with narratives both in English and Chinese at California State University at Sacramento. The exhibit featured photos of the Rape of Nanjing, ‘‘comfort women,’’ and Japanese germ warfare Unit 731. Moreover, to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre and the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the museum held a special exhibition entitled ‘‘Never Forget’’ at St. Mary’s Cathedral in San Francisco in December 2001.∫∏ On the East Coast, the museum held various events, including ‘‘Exhibition of the Unit 731 of Japanese Military During World War II’’ at American University in Washington, D.C., from November 29 to December 3, 2001, sponsored by the Taiwanese Student Association and the Chinese Student Association. To Chinese Americans, Japan’s wartime crimes—‘‘the Chinese Holocaust’’—is so unprecedented in history that it was more horrific and devastating than the Jewish Holocaust. Whereas the Jewish Holocaust has been integrated into history and social science courses taught in most high schools in the United States, the Chinese Holocaust is relatively unknown to American young people. The campaign to integrate the war in China into the World War II history curriculum in U.S. high schools led San Francisco public education authorities to pass a resolution to implement it in the San Francisco high schools. In July 2000, the members of the museum committee visited Wash190

Constructing a National Memory of War

ington, D.C., and New York on the occasion of celebrating the sixtythird anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. In a welcome ceremony, sponsored by the Chinese American community in Washington, they called on all Chinese communities in major American cities to support building a magnificent Chinese Holocaust Museum in the nation’s capital. Many community leaders from grass-roots associations, such as the Chinese Alliance for Memorial and Justice, and the Alliance in Memory of Victims of the Nanking Massacre, as well as Republican activist Anna Chennault, and even o≈cials from the Chinese Embassy and the Taipei Economic and Cultural O≈ce participated in the ceremony to support their campaign.∫π At present a large-scale museum to commemorate the Holocaust in Asia is under preparation. The grass-roots-founded World War II in Asia Memorial Foundation, Museum of Humanity aims to ‘‘commemorate all the victims [who] su√ered and died under the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II in Asia.’’∫∫ Initially, the name of the museum was to be Museum of Imperial Japan Atrocities in World War II or Datusha (‘‘holocaust’’ in Chinese) Memorial Museum. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,∫Ω suggested not using the word ‘‘holocaust’’ as the term originated in the Old Testament and is inappropriate for an essentially Chinese experience which has no close tie to the Old Testament. The project was renamed the Museum for Humanity.Ω≠ According to the committee’s working plan, the Museum for Humanity (its tentative name) in Washington will consist of memorial areas and resource facilities (theater, auditorium, learning and education center). The memorial areas include four halls: the Permanent Exhibition Hall, Special Exhibition Hall, Temporary Exhibition Hall, and the Hall of Remembrance, as well as an atrium called the Hall of Witness. The Permanent Exhibition Hall will be divided into five parts: (1) China Hall, commemorating Chinese wartime experiences; (2) East Asia Hall, focusing on the wartime experiences of Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan; (3) Southeast Asia Hall, covering the wartime experiences of Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, with sections devoted to Singapore, Vietnam, and Indochina; (4) Prisoner of War and Internee Hall, detailing the experiences of American, Australian, British, Chinese, Dutch, French, Filipino, and New Zealand prisoners and internees; and (5) Hall of Bacteriological Warfare by Unit 731 and Unit 100, and a Special Exhibition Hall devoted to the xiaohua ma

191

Nanjing Massacre, designed for ‘‘the most terrible massacre in human history at one time in one city’’ and a Hall of Remembrance devoted to the nation’s memorial for the victims of the holocaust in the Pacific.Ω∞ A main feature of the Asian American movement after the 1990s was to combine their activities with the American veterans’ campaign. They argued that Japan would not enjoy credibility in the international community without coming to terms with its past.Ω≤ Their recent campaign, though the result is still uncertain, has shown that to create a shared memory symbolized by the forgotten holocaust in Asia encourages Asian Americans to promote their ethnic identity to ‘‘preserve the history of World War II in Asia’’ in the ‘‘memory community’’ of multicultural America. Congressman Mike Honda viewed redress for the war victims as a basic human rights issue and stressed, ‘‘We are supporting these people (Chinese Americans) to fight for justice.’’Ω≥ To Asian Americans, preserving World War II history and sharing their wartime experiences is intended to contribute to American political democracy. On the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, Asian American groups demanding reparations for war victims demonstrated in San Francisco, including holding an outdoor concert at the San Francisco Civic Center. Their activities aroused concern in both the Japanese and American governments. Thomas S. Foley, then U.S. ambassador to Japan, seemed to miss the point of the protests when he explained that former pows and others had no basis to seek reparations because the United States and Japan had waived all claims against each other under the peace treaty.Ω∂ On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, an editorial in the New York Times pointed out that the U.S.Japan alliance helped Japan’s economic rebirth, but the U.S. strategy played a role in fostering Japan’s historical amnesia.Ω∑ An editorial in the Japan Times stated that the treaty enabled Japan to rejoin the international community, helped strengthen its economic ties with other Asian countries, and gave it a foothold for postwar economic reconstruction. Thus Japan should use its alliance with the United States as an anchor to increase bilateral cooperation in the fields of politics and the economy and make a greater international contribution. At the same time, the Japan Times editorial stated that Japan should seek long-term stability in its relations with China and South Korea and push active diplomacy in East Asia.Ω∏ Deciding how to remove historical obstacles and overcome the shadows of the past to 192

Constructing a National Memory of War

reach a common ground for political and economic stability and prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region is indispensable for China, Japan, and the United States.

Conclusion: A New Task for History Education in the Global Era According to a survey carried out in California in 2001, slightly more than half of Californians insisted that Japan owes the United States an apology for World War II crimes, although 59 percent of the respondents also said the United States should not apologize for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan.Ωπ Meanwhile, in answer to a question from a fifty-one-year-old man from Hiroshima who asked how many times Japan should apologize to China, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji responded in conversations with Japanese citizens on a tbs television program, ‘‘Japan has never apologized to the Chinese people for its wartime aggression in any of the o≈cial documents.’’ He added, ‘‘China will not keep demanding apologies from Japan, but we want you to consider that.’’Ω∫ The fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war o√ered a unique opportunity for people to celebrate reconciliation and reunion. Rather than decreasing the conflicts, however, as the apology debate shows, the gap between China, Japan, and the United States has been further intensified, and to some extent it has reinforced the enmity and mistrust associated with their di√erent positions during the war. The disputes surrounding the remembrance of the Asia-Pacific War, as manifested in war museums, lead one to ask if it is possible for the people in the Asia-Pacific region to build a common ground to share memories of the war. With regard to the debate on the issue of sharing memory, the Harvard historian Iriye Akira points out that history is not the exclusive product of one country, but ‘‘a shared product of human beings.’’ΩΩ How can history, a ‘‘shared product of human beings,’’ be shared in the twenty-first century? And what kind of role should historians and educators play in the process of educating the younger generations to interpret this ‘‘shared product’’? The ‘‘memory war’’ in the museums of China, Japan, and the United States is merely one example of how war memories have rexiaohua ma

193

shaped postwar international relations in the Asia-Pacific region. As we have seen, war museums, the main facilities for the communal remembrance of the unfortunate past, are prone to ideological controversy. Determining how to educate people to understand this ‘‘shared product of human beings’’ will not only be an important issue for the people in the Asia-Pacific region, but will be a new challenge for historians in the world to confront.

Notes 1 Three incidents related to the Asia-Pacific War—the Nanjing Massacre, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima— have an unusually large number of memorials. These range from small monuments to huge multimillion-dollar museums. 2 ‘‘Issues: History Textbooks,’’ Memory and Reconciliation in the AsiaPacific, n.d., George Washington University, Washington, D.C., www.gwu .edu/memory/issues/textbooks/index.html. 3 Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), 27 July 1982. 4 Renmin Ribao, 30 July 1982. 5 On August 1, the Chinese government decided to cancel Minister Ogawa Heiji’s visit to China and informed the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Renmin Ribao, 2 August 1982. 6 The Chinese government has claimed that over three hundred thousand were killed in the incident. Asahi Shimbun, 10 August 1982. 7 Renmin Ribao, 14 August 1982. 8 Beijing Zhoubao (Beijing Weekly), 17 August 1982, 10–13. 9 Beijing Zhoubao, 24 August 1982, 7–8. 10 Ibid., 9. 11 Beijing Zhoubao, 17 August 1982, 8. 12 Renmin Ribao, 30 September 1982; Asahi Shimbun, 30 September 1982. 13 Due to the requests of scholars and local people in Nanjing and Harbin, both of the local governments decided in late 1982 to construct a museum to commemorate the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731’s biological warfare; construction was completed in August 1985. These data were based on my interviews carried out on 18 and 29 August 2004. 14 Renmin Ribao, 2 July 1991. 15 Guangming Ribao, 18 September 1991. 16 Renmin Ribao, 18 September 1991.

194

Constructing a National Memory of War

17 I have systematically investigated the major Chinese newspapers and have not found the term ‘‘the Day of National Humiliation’’ in public before 1991. This term began to be used in the major newspapers, for example, Renmin Ribao, Jiefang Ribao, and Guangming Ribao (newspapers mainly for the intellectuals) and Gongren Ribao (Workers’ Daily) on September 18, 1991. 18 Guangming Ribao, 19 September 1991. 19 For example, Jiao Guocheng, ‘‘Wuwang Guochi, Zhenxing Zhonghua’’ (Don’t Forget National Humiliation, Do Vitalize China), Remin Ribao, 23 September 1991. 20 This section is mainly based on my visits and interviews with the director and sta√ of the museum in January 2000. All the quotations, including the titles of the exhibits, in this section are quoted from the original English narratives of the museum exhibits. 21 Renmin Ribao, 16 August 1995. 22 Yui Daizaburo, Mikan no Senryokaikaku (An Unfinished Reform in the Occupation) (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1989), 285. 23 Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no Sensokan ( Japanese View of War) (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1995), 125. 24 Ibid., 198. 25 Asahi Shimbun, 17 September 1986. 26 This was the first case of a Japanese high o≈cial shot in public after World War II. Asahi Shimbun, 19 January 1990. 27 Quoted from the original narrative in the introduction of Exhibit Hall A, Museum of Peace Osaka International Center (Peace Osaka). 28 Heiwa Shiryokan Kihon Keikaku (An Outline of the Peace Museum), a pamphlet published by the Osaka government in June 1988. 29 This section is based on my visits and interviews in Peace Osaka in 2001–2002. The quotation is from the original English narrative of the exhibits. 30 Osaka Kokusai Heiwa Senta Kensetsu Kiroku (Construction Record of Peace Osaka International Center), Peace Osaka, 17 September 1991. 31 Asahi Shimbun, 11 August 1993. 32 Liberal Democratic Party, Daitoa Senso no Soukatsu (An A≈rmative Summation of the Greater East Asia War) (Tokyo: Tendensha, 1995). The main arguments in this book are the Greater East Asia War was not an invasion, but a just war to ‘‘liberate Asian countries’’; the Nanjing Massacre and ‘‘comfort women’’ were fabrications; and it is the government’s responsibility to revise the current history textbooks because Japanese textbooks are teeming with negative terms such as ‘‘aggression’’ and ‘‘invasion.’’ 33 Asahi Shimbun, 16 August 1994.

xiaohua ma

195

Asahi Shimbun, 31 August 1994 and 24 January 1995. 35 Quoted from a pamphlet published by Heiwa Kinen Tenji Shiryokan, Tokyo, 2001. 36 Sankei Shimbun, 3 January 1998. 37 Fujioka Nobukatsu, ‘‘Heiwai kinenkan kensetsu iinkai koubo no henkoudo’’ (The Mistakes of Members’ Recruitment in the Peace Museum Construction), Seiron, August 1998, 274–289. 38 ‘‘Pisu osaka e no uyuku no kougeki’’ (The Right Wing’s Attack on Peace Osaka), Senso Sekinin Kenkyu (Research on Japanese War Responsibility), no. 19 (1998): 42. 39 Sankei Shimbun, 22 October 1996. 40 Fujioka Nobukatsu, ‘‘Airisu chan ‘za reipu obu nanking’ no kenkyu’’ (An Examination of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking ), Seiron, May 1998, 220–229. The controversies over the Nanjing Massacre are not the main concern of this essay. The best treatment of Japanese memory of and arguments about the Nanjing Massacre in Japan is Kasahara Tokushi, Nanking Jiken to Nihonjin (The Nanjing Incident and the Japanese) (Tokyo: Kashiwashobo, 2002). In English, see Joshua A. Fogel, ed., The Nanking Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 41 Fujioka Nobukatsu, ‘‘Heiwai kinenkan kensetsu iinkai koubo no henkoudo’’ (The Mistakes of Members’ Recruitment in the Peace Museum Construction), Seiron, August 1998, 274–289. 42 Sankei Shimbun, 2 March 1997. 43 Ara Kenichi, ‘‘Pisu osaka wa itsumade rekishi o waikyoku o tsuzukeru no ka?’’ (How Long Can Peace Osaka Keep Distorting History?), Seiron, December 1997, 108–116. 44 Sankei Shimbun, 4 March 1997. 45 Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Penguin Books, 1997); Erwin Wickert, ed., The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe (New York: Knopf, 1998). Rabe’s diary in Chinese was published in the same year. John Rabe was a Nazi Party member and served as head of the International Safety Zone Committee when Nanjing was occupied by the Japanese army in 1937. Azuma Shiro was a former solider on the Chinese front. His wartime diary Waga Nanking Puraton (My March to Nanjing) was published in 1986 (Tokyo: Aokishoten) and was translated into Chinese in 1998. The diary discusses his involvement in the slaughter of Chinese civilians in Nanjing. Azuma’s former wartime friend sued him in the Supreme Court of Tokyo for telling lies in the diary. Azuma lost the lawsuit in December 1998. There was wide media coverage in China of his suit, and later he visited China asking for 34

196

Constructing a National Memory of War

moral support. Chinese people showed him great sympathy and a support campaign started throughout China after 1998. For the Chinese view of Azuma Shiro’s lawsuit, see Sun Ge, ‘‘Nichu sensou kanjo to kioku no kouzu,’’ (Emotion, Memory, and the Sino-Japanese War) Seikai, April 2000, 158–169. 46 San Francisco Chronicle, 26 July 1998. 47 Interview with Iris Chang on abc’s Good Morning, America, 7 December 1997; ‘‘John Rabe—’The Good Nazi,’ ’’ documentary, abc Nightline, 11 December 1997. 48 Many books on Japan’s wartime atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre and Unit 731 warfare crimes were published in this period. For example, Joshua A. Fogel, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Hua-ling Hu, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000); Tim Brook, ed., Documents on the Rape of Nanking (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Jame Yin and Shi Young, eds., The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs (Chicago: Innovative Publishing Group, 1996); Tien-wei Wu, New Materials on the Pacific War Disclosing Japanese Army’s Biological Warfare (Society for Studies of Japanese Aggression against China, 1997); Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932–45 and the American Cover Up (New York: Routledge, 1994). 49 Howard W. French, ‘‘Japanese Call ’37 Massacre a War Myth, Stirring Storm,’’ New York Times, 23 January 2000. 50 Chang, The Rape of Nanking, 199. 51 The hacker attack incident lasted for about one week. In the attack, the Science and Technology Agency website was rewritten with messages such as ‘‘Japan has no courage to the truth of history. It’s the disgrace of Asian[s],’’ and demands for Japan’s o≈cial apology. Asahi Shimbun, 24–30 January 2000. Later, a Chinese computer hacker claimed sole responsibility, saying the electronic vandalism was justified by Japan’s refusal to apologize for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre. New York Times, 31 January 2000. 52 Renmin Ribao, 13–21 January 2000. 53 Sankei Shimbun, 18 January 2000. 54 Sankei Shimbun, 19 January 2000. 55 Asahi Shimbun, 24 January 2000; Renmin Ribao, 20–21 January 2000. 56 Jiefangjun Bao, 24 January 2000; China Daily, 24 January 2000; Renmin Ribao, 24 January 2000. 57 Beijing Zhoubao, 1 February 2000, 9. 58 Beijing Zhoubao, 15 February 2000, 7.

xiaohua ma

197

59 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 1. 60 San Francisco Chronicle, 26 July 1998. 61 This section is mainly based on my visit to the 9.18 Incident Museum on September 19, 2001. All the quotations, including the titles of the exhibit halls, are from the original English narratives in the museum exhibits. 62 ‘‘Wuwang Guochi’’ (Never Forget National Humiliation), Wenhuibao, 18 September 2001. 63 ‘‘Jiang Gei Zusun Ting’’ (To Tell the Next Generations), Renmin Ribao, 19 September 2001. 64 The survey question was ‘‘What comes to your mind first about Japan?’’ Over 80 percent of Chinese respondents answered ‘‘Japanese aggression’’ and ‘‘militarism.’’ This survey was carried out by Zhongguo Qingnianbao (Chinese Youth Daily) in 1997 and reported in Asahi Shimbun, 17 February 1997. 65 Studs Terkel, ‘‘The Good War’’: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 66 Philip D. Beidler, The Good War’s Greatest Hits: World War II and American Remembering (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). 67 Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000), 7. 68 For wartime U.S. relations with China, see ‘‘The Sino-American Alliance During World War II and the Lifting of the Chinese Exclusion Acts,’’ American Studies International, no. 2 ( June 2000): 39–61; Xiaohua Ma, Maboroshi no shinchitsujo to ajia taiheiyo (Illusionary New Orders in the Asia Pacific: Chinese-American Alliance in the War against Japan) (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2000). 69 Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 299–300. 70 Chester Tanaka, Go for Broke: A Pictorial History of the Japanese American 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team (Richmond, Calif.: jacp, 1982), 171. 71 Quoted from a pamphlet published by the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. 72 Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850–1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 141– 142. 73 By the 1980s the journalist Bruce Nelson hailed ‘‘people of Asian ancestry’’ as the ‘‘nation’s best-educated and highest income racial group.’’ Bruce Nelson, ‘‘Asians Come on Strong,’’ Los Angeles Times, 10 October

198

Constructing a National Memory of War

1982. Using preliminary 1980 census data a Newsweek cover story pointed out that ‘‘Asian-Americans now enjoy the nation’s highest median family income: $22,075 a year compared with $20,840 for whites.’’ Martin Kasindorf, ‘‘Asian-Americans: A ‘Model Minority,’ ’’ Newsweek, 6 December 1982. 74 This museum was opened to the public in 2003 due to a successful fund-raising campaign and e√orts by Chinese Americans. For details, see Chinese American Museum, www.camla.org/. 75 R. H. Lee, The Chinese in the United States of America (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 140. 76 Many Japanese American activists in California joined the Chinese American movement. For example, Japanese American Cli√ord Uyeda, a former president of the Japanese American Citizens League, was cochairman of the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition in San Francisco. 77 Chalmers Johnson, ‘‘Japan Should Pay for Individuals’ Su√ering,’’ Los Angeles Times, 31 March 2000. 78 Sonni Efron, ‘‘Pursuit of World War II Redress Hits Japanese Boardrooms,’’ Los Angeles Times, 10 January 2000. 79 Newsweek ( Japanese edition), 24 May 2000, 29. 80 Mainichii Shimbun, 5 May 1994. Later, Minister Nagao was forced to resign from the cabinet. 81 Chang, The Rape of Nanking, 12, 15. 82 Peter H. Koehn and Xiao-huang Yin, eds., The Expanding Roles of Chinese Americans in U.S.-China Relations, (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 23. 83 For details, see Sufei Li, ‘‘Navigating U.S.-China Waters: The Experience of Chinese Students and Professionals in Science, Technology, and Business,’’ in ibid., 20–35. 84 San Francisco Chronicle, 26 July 1998. 85 ‘‘The Project of the Preparatory Committee for the Chinese Holocaust Museum of the United States,’’ www.chineseholocaust.org/commit tee.html. 86 China Daily, 17 December 2001. 87 ‘‘N0.3, The Third Issue, August 2000,’’ Chinese Holocaust Museum, www.chineseholocaust.org/chmq3.html. 88 Wayne Chang, ‘‘Our Pressed Money Drive for Our Memorial Museum Project Has Been a Big Success,’’ 21 August 2000, Association for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, www.AOHWA.org/. 89 The Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded in 1977 in the name of the Viennese concentration camp survivor and Nazi hunter to keep alive the memory of the genocide of the Jews and to campaign for tolerance and

xiaohua ma

199

human rights. Rabbi Abraham Cooper is a Jewish American human rights activist. He criticizes Japan’s wartime crimes and brutalities against humanity. He interviewed some former soldiers of Unit 731 in Japan and appealed to the Japanese government to enact legislation that would create a permanent bureau within the National Diet Library to investigate and preserve documents about Japan’s wartime crimes against humanity. In addition, the center lobbied Attorney General Janet Reno and the Pentagon for the release of U.S. documents concerning the amnesties given to Japanese war criminals, including those who supervised Japan’s biological and chemical warfare program on human experiments of Unit 731. Ralph Blumenthal, ‘‘Japanese Germ-War Atrocities: A Half Century of Stonewalling the World,’’ New York Times, 4 March 1999; Sonni Efron, ‘‘U.S. Rabbi Presses Japan to Investigate Its War Crimes,’’ Los Angeles Times, 19 February 2000. 90 ‘‘World War II in Asia Memorial Foundation, Museum of Humanity: Planning Resumed,’’ 7 July 1999, Association for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, www.AOHWA.org/. 91 ‘‘World War II in Asia Memorial Foundation—Museum of Humanity (tentative name), Executive Summary of a Working Plan,’’ April 2000, Association for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, www.AOH WA.org/. 92 ‘‘Nihon kigyo no senso sekinin’’ (War Responsibility of Japanese Company), Newsweek ( Japanese edition), 24 May 2000, 26–28. 93 Michael Dobbs, ‘‘Lawyers Target Japanese Abuses: World War II Compensation E√orts Shift from Europe to Asia,’’ Washington Post, 5 March 2000. 94 Yomiuri Shimbun, 21 January 2000. 95 New York Times, 4 September 2001. 96 Keizo Nabeshima, ‘‘Last Chance to Face the Past,’’ Japan Times, 3 September 2001. 97 San Francisco Chronicle, 5 September 2001. 98 Japan Times, 15 October 2000. 99 Iriye Akira, ‘‘Rekishi Toha Nanni Ka?’’ (What Is History?), Asahi Shimbun, 6 June 2001.

200

Constructing a National Memory of War

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

. waldo heinrichs

On January 30, 1995, the Smithsonian Institution announced the scrapping of the exhibit at its National Air and Space Museum (nasm) commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the surrender of Japan and the end of World War II. This painful outcome issued from months of intense national controversy over the texts, pictures, and artifacts planned for the show, in essence over how the nation should remember the ending of the war. Ultimately the Smithsonian, assailed from all sides and threatened with loss of funding from its membership and members of Congress, had capitulated. Originally nasm had envisioned a complex exhibit featuring the forward portion of the fuselage of the b-29 Superfortress Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Accompanying the bomber would be related displays of the strategic context, the development of the bomb, the decision to use it, the mission to drop it, the destructive e√ects at Ground Zero, and the atomic legacy. Left for the public to view after scrapping were the restored forward fuselage of the plane, the casing of the bomb, and a video of the crew. The Smithsonian had considered the exhibit significant, worthy of a major e√ort. Indeed, as a much-heralded war commemoration at the most heavily visited museum in the United States, it would seem to have been a winner. Yet museums are inherently vulnerable to conflict. As Steven C. Dubin says in Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum, museums ‘‘solidify culture, endow it with tangibility,’’ and are therefore worth influencing or controlling. They become arenas where power is gained and lost, exercised and resisted, in a political process which witnesses hard-fought contests over symbols.∞ This was especially true during the culture wars of the 1990s, when controversial exhibits roused intense criticism from conservative forces. For the Enola Gay case, controversy was entirely counterproductive in the sense that the exhibit was never mounted and seen. Neverthe-

6

less, the controversy itself, as a historical event, provides an opportunity to examine an aroused collective memory when it is challenged, in this case the memory of World War II veterans. An added advantage is that the Enola Gay fiasco left a rich legacy of documentation. The nasm’s original script of 303 pages was revised four times in response to unceasing criticism. Each addition, deletion, or change of wording captures a bit of memory in contention. Charges and responses in a wide array of national, regional, and local newspapers and news magazines as well as solicited critiques and internal memoranda of nasm provide an opportunity to study this case of public memory in ample and precise ways.≤

Origins of the Exhibit nasm acquired the Enola Gay in 1949, and, as veterans of b-29 operations insistently pointed out, it had yet to be placed on public display over forty years later. Left unguarded on a remote runway at Andrews Air Force Base, it had been ravaged by souvenir hunters and nature. Recognition of its significance finally led to renovation that took ten years and cost roughly $1 million. However, it proved di≈cult to find adequate space to display the aircraft. With a wingspan of 141 feet the Enola Gay would barely fit in the museum, and its weight, with that of cranes to assemble it, would threaten floor supports. The Washington Fine Arts Commission opposed erection of temporary housing on the Mall next to nasm. An alternative was to display it in a museum extension for large planes that nasm hoped to build at Dulles Airport, but Congress failed to provide funding. The Smithsonian and nasm stepped carefully in mounting an exhibit, recognizing from the first that a display of the bomber that destroyed Hiroshima and inaugurated the nuclear era would be controversial and that funding would be scarce. Veterans were demanding display of the Enola Gay elsewhere if not at nasm. They were proud of the plane as an instrument for bringing a quick end to a bloody war and wanted that message conveyed to younger generations. Some, like Paul W. Tibbets Jr., pilot of the Enola Gay (named after his mother), also revered the plane as a technological triumph, ‘‘probably the most beautiful piece of machinery that any pilot ever flew.’’≥ To these airmen

202

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

of World War II, the Enola Gay was a symbol of their contribution in a just war. Before they died they wanted to see it honored and intact; no excuses were acceptable. Presenting the Smithsonian a contradictory view was Admiral Noel Gayler, in 1945 an operations o≈cer of a naval task force bombing Japanese ports. To him, the Enola Gay was distinctive only in the sense that it delivered the first nuclear weapon used against human beings. By exhibiting the plane, ‘‘we cannot fail to give the impression that we somehow are glorifying that mission or taking pride in it.’’ That ‘‘huge, gleaming Enola Gay would convey a celebration of raw power,’’ he warned. For many the airplane was ‘‘too potent a symbol of events that by their nature, provoke strong emotional reactions among many people.’’∂ A possible solution to these dilemmas and constraints gradually emerged. The museum could at least accommodate the forward portion of the Enola Gay fuselage, fifty-six feet long and ten feet wide. Through the Plexiglas nose, visitors would see the bombsight and cockpit. A truncated b-29 would upset the veterans but was the price one paid for securing a privileged site on the Mall. Of advantage was that the plane would be less overwhelming and allow room for an exhibit of broader scope. Crucial in bringing on the Enola Gay exhibit was a change in the leadership of the Smithsonian and nasm. In 1984 Robert McCormick Adams, provost of the University of Chicago, was put in charge of the Smithsonian to move its flock of national museums beyond collecting and celebratory functions to a more critical and scholarly role. He determined to create intellectually challenging exhibits ‘‘that make people uncomfortable.’’ Three of these created substantial discomfort: ‘‘The West As America,’’ with its depiction of frontier racism and exploitation; ‘‘Science in American Life,’’ with its share of failures and dangers, such as the Challenger, Love Canal, and ddt; and ‘‘A More Perfect Union,’’ commemorating the Constitution by displaying the unconstitutional internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. Adams was prodding the Institution toward the current intellectual ferment of the universities with its critical, skeptical, anti-elitist viewpoint, widening ambit of cultural and multicultural interests, and race and gender concerns.∑ To further that aim he brought Martin Harwit, an astrophysicist at Cornell, to nasm as director in 1987. Harwit, a war refugee from

waldo heinrichs

203

Czechoslovakia, came to the United States in 1946 at the age of fifteen. He attended Oberlin and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the mid-1950s, as an army technician, he witnessed the hydrogen bomb tests at Eniwetok and Bikini and was deeply a√ected by their appalling destructiveness. At Cornell Harwit designed satellite-borne telescopes and cofounded and cochaired a program on the history and philosophy of science and technology. He seemed well qualified to move nasm in new directions and was determined to provide an Enola Gay exhibit. Harwit in turn pressed his sta√ for greater scholarly commitment and more innovative and thought-provoking exhibits. He also recruited sta√, in particular Dr. Thomas D. Crouch as chair of the Aeronautics Department and Michael J. Neufeld as curator of World War II aviation. Crouch, with a doctorate in social history from Ohio State University, had published extensively on the history of flight and served as curator at the National Museum of American History for the exhibit on the interned Japanese Americans. Neufeld was a Canadian, a graduate of the University of Calgary, with teaching experience at Colgate and Johns Hopkins. His scholarly interests lay in German history and the development of German rocketry in World War II. In 1991, he began preparing proposals for an Enola Gay exhibit. By the end of 1992 the restoration of the Enola Gay was nearing completion and it became apparent that the plane would be ready in time for participation in the commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, for which large crowds of visitors to Washington might be expected. Neufeld, appointed lead curator for the exhibit, now formulated detailed exhibit plans that served as a basis for the final decision by Secretary Adams and provide important evidence of the curator’s conception of the exhibit. Neufeld and Crouch, born after World War II, were bound to see nuclear weapons di√erently than veterans of the war who felt saved by them. As Neufeld told the Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle, the atomic threat was a constant nightmare: we ‘‘grew up cowering under the bedclothes expecting World War III to drop on us any minute.’’∏ Neufeld was a teenager, Crouch in his twenties during the height of antiwar protests in 1968–1971 and shared the critical perspective of Vietnam-era historians. ‘‘Until recently,’’ Neufeld wrote, ‘‘discussing the atomic bombings would have been a contradiction to the heroic/ progressive presentation of aerospace technology’’ at nasm. Now circumstances favored innovation and he intended to use the Enola Gay 204

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

as the centerpiece for ‘‘an exhibit about the wartime development of the atomic bomb, the decision to use it against Japan, and the aftermath of the bombings.’’π At this fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombing, Neufeld pointed out, nasm had ‘‘an opportunity and an obligation to help visitors understand this pivotal moment in the history of the twentieth century.’’ Symbolizing the centrality of the bomb to the exhibit would be a picture of the mushroom cloud at the entrance. Visitors would pass through a section discussing the decision to drop the bomb before they saw the Enola Gay because of the need to ‘‘confront directly the preconceived notions’’ of some that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes and of many others that they were fully ‘‘justified because they prevented an invasion and thus saved lives— however doubtful that assertion now seems to many historians.’’ This portion of the exhibit would be the most di≈cult ‘‘but also the most crucial since it goes to the heart of the ethical dilemmas.’’∫ Using recent historical scholarship, he would seek to capture ‘‘some of the complexity and ambiguity of the debate over the morality and necessity of using the atomic bomb.’’Ω Neufeld found particularly helpful in planning the exhibit a 1990 summing up of recent historiography on the bomb decision by J. Samuel Walker, which he distributed to exhibit team members. Walker had found consensus among scholars that ‘‘the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.’’ The museum would not join in the debate but would present a ‘‘nuanced’’ picture of decision making in both nations.∞≠ No less important in the view of Tom Crouch would be a presentation of the e√ects of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This portion of the exhibit would be his responsibility. Americans, he said, ‘‘prefer to end the story with a view of the mushroom cloud as seen from 30,000 feet.’’ Fifty years after the bombs were dropped, ‘‘the time has surely arrived,’’ said Crouch, ‘‘to tell the full story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a complete and honestly balanced way.’’ The exhibit would take the visitor to Ground Zero and present not only the devastation but the human su√ering, with pictures of the victims—bloody face, scarred back, charred body, and all. The exhibit would conclude by pointing out ‘‘the debatable character of the atomic bombings and their role as one of the starting points for the nuclear age and Cold War.’’∞∞ waldo heinrichs

205

The curators recognized that the exhibit was bound to be controversial (though not to the extent that it became so). Neufeld hoped that placing it under the mantle of an nasm program on air power in World War II might reduce its salience and ‘‘minimize controversy.’’ Nevertheless, the exhibit would be worthless, they felt, unless it took the blinders o√ the American public. It could not avoid examining the process by which the U.S. government decided to use the atomic weapon and the physical e√ects on the ground in Japan. Crouch believed nasm ‘‘has an obligation to help our visitors place pressing issues of our national life in historical perspective . . . to probe, to ask some di≈cult questions, perhaps even to make our visitors a bit uncomfortable.’’ Otherwise, nasm would become ‘‘little more than Disneyland with wings.’’∞≤ Secretary Adams, who had initiated the era of uncomfortability at the Smithsonian, was himself discomforted by nasm’s plans. The centrality of the atomic bomb in the exhibit, he told Harwit, posed an unacceptable risk to the Smithsonian. ‘‘This should be an exhibit commemorating the end of World War II,’’ he insisted, ‘‘taking note of the atom bomb’s central role in one theater, and seeing that decision point as a decisive determinant’’ of subsequent strategic and political thinking. Along that line, the visitor should first see not atomic imagery and text but images of the war’s ending, first in one theater, then the other, and tension on the home front as people awaited the end. The story of the bomb and its use would follow. Also worrying Adams was imbalance in the treatment of su√ering, the Japanese bombing victims receiving far more attention than the American forces engaged in bloody island invasions. On the issue of casualties, Adams pointed out, Barber Conable, a veteran of the Pacific War, former head of the World Bank, and member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, was displeased that prospective American losses in an invasion of Japan were not mentioned.∞≥ Adams’s criticisms arose principally from fear of political attack on the Smithsonian. Where an attack might come from was impossible to say, he told Harwit, but it would probably be heavy. His defense strategy was to emphasize the commemorative aspect, expand the nonatomic components, strive for empathetic balance, and submerge the airplane in a complex display program. Harwit added his voice with a blunt warning to Neufeld to be less dramatic and one-sided in his script headings, subheadings, and opening paragraphs. This ex206

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

hibit, ‘‘more than any one can think of, does not need any added drama. If anything the labels must be dispassionate, even bland.’’∞∂ Bringing the curators into line required strong action. Tom Crouch, Neufeld’s supervisor, responded angrily to Adams’s criticism. ‘‘If the Secretary really wants . . . an exhibition in which the atomic bombing of Japan will only be a part, then we have to go back to the drawing board.’’ It was a mistake to think that ‘‘tweaking the introduction’’ would fool visitors. Some, perhaps many, ‘‘are going to be upset by the powerful images, objects, stories, and voices of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki unit.’’ Was this an exhibition ‘‘to make veterans feel good,’’ or one that would lead to thinking about ‘‘the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan’’? He did not think he could do both. Harwit did think so. He wrote each curator asking whether, in the face of the secretary’s criticism, his professional ethics required him to withdraw from the project, with a reply needed the next day. Both replied that they wished to continue. To reflect the revised conception of the exhibit, with emphasis on the war, the order of topics in the title was reversed. It became The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War.∞∑

Scripting the Exhibit Crouch, Neufeld, and two assistant curators wrote the script in five months. Dated January 12, 1994, Crossroads contained by rough estimate 20,000 words of text for 255 wall labels and 217 captions accompanying photographs, maps, documents, diagrams, and artifacts.∞∏ This was by no means considered a final script; rather, it was distributed for internal and outside advisory review. The exhibit would be housed in a gallery about seventy feet square filled with individually shaped display rooms and corridors fitted together in sequence, like a cross between a labyrinth and a jigsaw puzzle. Crossroads had an introduction commemorating Victory in Europe Day and five main components: (1) the war in the Pacific as it drew to a close, (2) the decision to use the atomic bomb, (3) the development of the bomb and the Enola Gay mission, (4) the impact of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and (5) the cold war and nuclear arms race. From text, sketches, and diagrams one can envision what this exhibit that never happened would have looked like. waldo heinrichs

207

On the left as the visitor entered the exhibit would be newspaper headlines hailing v-e Day, followed by photographs of celebrations, German prisoners, and survivors of a concentration camp. The text would turn attention immediately from this ‘‘total victory in a just cause’’ to the ongoing, intensifying war in the Pacific. Ahead, entering Unit 1, ‘‘A Fight to the Finish,’’ one would face an enlarged photograph of a Marine using a flamethrower against a Japanese-held cave on Okinawa. Dominating the same wall would be a photomural of the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill smoking from kamikaze hits. The wall as a whole would convey the ferocity and tragedy of the fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa: in a picture the blank face and ‘‘two-thousand-yard stare’’ of a battle-worn Marine; a case containing the hachimaki (headband) and senninbari (thousand-stitch wrapper), items worn by kamikaze pilots on their missions; an American veteran writing of the ‘‘brutish, primitive hatred’’ of Marines and Japanese for each other, ‘‘as characteristic of the horror of war in the Pacific as the palm trees and islands’’; a kamikaze veteran remembering the ‘‘pale, drawn faces’’ of kamikaze pilots, ‘‘youths, their bodies overflowing with life . . . waiting their turn to die’’; and a photo of the upturned faces of a carrier gun crew, tensely watching for suicide planes. Suspended overhead would be an original twenty-two-foot Ohka, the Japanese piloted suicide bomb powered by an early jet engine. On the far wall would be projected Movietone newsreels of the war era. In the text, the curators would dwell almost exclusively on 1945, the immediate context of ending the war. Japanese expansion in the 1930s, Pearl Harbor, and the war from 1941 through 1944 would receive four paragraphs and no photographs. From island assaults the visitor would turn to the opposite wall and the conventional bombing campaign of 1945 that devastated Japan’s major cities. Wall labels would trace the step-by-step transformation of strategic bombing in World War II from discrete to citywide targets and firestorms. Visually it would be a blunt, grim story showing bombs, bombers, a graph of rising tonnage dropped, and piles of civilian dead in Dresden and Tokyo. General George C. Marshall would be quoted as saying, before Pearl Harbor, that if war came the United States would ‘‘set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out.’’ Following that statement would be the admission of a b-29 pilot who partici208

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

pated in a 1945 firestorm raid on Tokyo that the blaze would ‘‘haunt me forever.’’ It was ‘‘the most terrifying sight in the world and, God forgive me, the best.’’ Next to that would be a report from a survivor on the ground that he could not tell if the bodies were men or women: ‘‘They weren’t even full skeletons.’’ A final section would amplify the context of the exhibit by representing life on the home front. It would show a Japan verging on collapse with declining production and increasing deprivation from bombing and blockade yet disciplined and determined to fight on. It would detail the use of Koreans and Chinese as slave labor and mention the brutal treatment of prisoners of war. Americans, on the other hand, far removed from war fronts, would be shown overcoming unemployment in a booming war economy, yet restless after three years of war, fearful of coming casualties, experiencing social tensions from new patterns of work and residence, and exhibiting racial discrimination. Remembering Pearl Harbor and learning of Japanese atrocities, they would be described as detesting the enemy. The text would quote the eminent historian Allan Nevins: ‘‘Emotions forgotten since our most savage Indian wars were reawakened.’’ Several photographs would stand out: Japanese high school girls learning to operate machine tools; stern-faced members of a local American ration board; a band of Japanese women training to use bamboo spears. The visitor would move on to Unit 2, showing the development of the atomic bomb and the decision to use it. Michael Neufeld, who wrote the unit’s script, considered it the intellectual center of Crossroads.∞π With fifty-two text labels, most of them longer than usual, it would be more a reading than a sensory experience—with one exception. The room would be a rectangle, about twenty-five feet long. Along the opposite wall and sidewalls would be seven reading stations, each with its texts and photographs of the scientists and statesmen involved. The exception, looming behind the visitor, would be the squat, ten-foot-long casing of ‘‘Fat Man,’’ a plutonium bomb like the one dropped on Nagasaki. The visitor would read a comprehensive, well-organized, and richly informative account of the scientific and technological development of the bomb and the intricate set of circumstances bearing on its use, from the splitting of the atom by Lise Meitner and Otto Hahn in 1938 to the final order to drop the bomb in 1945. Viewed in a special case would be the original of Albert Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt waldo heinrichs

209

in 1939 warning that nuclear theory had reached the point where the creation of atomic weapons was a possibility, alongside the petition of atomic scientists in 1945 urging that their use be withheld. The narrative of Unit 2 would be largely informative, not argumentative, but seven ‘‘sidebar controversies’’ inserted at appropriate points of decision would present the principal arguments advanced by revisionist historians. The first sidebar would ask whether the bomb would have been dropped on Germany if it had been ready in time, that is, whether it was ‘‘easier for Americans to bomb Asians than ‘white people.’ ’’ The text answer would be that ‘‘most, if not all’’ historians agreed that Roosevelt would have used the weapon against Germany if it had been available before surrender. In several sidebar issues, the text would be relatively neutral, simply setting forth the arguments on both sides. On the question of whether a warning or demonstration might have avoided the need to use the weapon, the claims that a warning might endanger Allied prisoners of war and a demonstration might be ine√ective or a failure would face the counterclaim that these alternatives never received careful attention. On the issue that American leaders ignored a Japanese peace initiative undertaken through Moscow, those who saw use of the bomb as a means of impressing the Soviet Union would contend against those who considered the Japanese initiative as ‘‘far from clear in its intentions.’’ However, here the text would administer a tap on the wrist: seen in hindsight, ‘‘the United States should have paid closer attention to these signals from Japan.’’ On the broader question of the importance of the Soviet factor in the decision to drop the bomb, the text would note that most scholars had rejected intent to intimidate the Soviet Union as the dominant factor, but agreed that it provided ‘‘one more reason for Truman not to halt the dropping of the bomb.’’ On several critical issues, the text would be more judgmental. On the question of whether the war would have ended sooner if the United States had guaranteed the emperor’s position, the text would argue against the view that it required the shock of the atomic bombs and Soviet entry into the war to force a surrender. Without reference to historians, the text would assert that, had a guarantee been provided, which ‘‘in e√ect . . . happened after the atomic bombings,’’ the two nations ‘‘might ’’ (emphasis in original) have reached agreement. The truth could never be known, it would conclude, but this was

210

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

possibly ‘‘a lost opportunity to end the war without either atomic bombings or an invasion of Japan.’’ The text would engage more directly in controversy on the sensitive question of whether an invasion of Japan was inevitable if the atomic bomb had not been dropped. It would present the judgment of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946 that Japan would have surrendered before the end of 1945 if not prior to November, when the invasion of Kyushu was scheduled, alongside the view of those who were skeptical of that outcome. Next, the text, again without reference to historians, would contend, ‘‘Some combination of blockade, firebombing, an Emperor guarantee, and a Soviet declaration of war would probably have forced a Japanese surrender, but to President Truman an invasion appeared to be a real possibility.’’ On the larger question of whether the decision to drop the bomb was justified, the text would adopt the view of scholars that Truman’s primary concerns were saving American lives and shortening the war. It would insist that there were alternatives but allow that these were clearer in hindsight and speculative. On all these issues Neufeld was maneuvering between the prevailing popular view that the bomb was necessary to avoid invasion, save lives, and end the war and the revisionist argument that both the bomb and the invasion were unnecessary. He accepted Truman’s concerns but chided the government for failure to examine alternatives carefully and went some distance toward his own blunter revisionist view, expressed in internal memoranda. While avoiding, so far as possible, contention with existing views, he sought to remove public blinders by showing that the decision to use the bomb was not a closed book, that alternatives existed, and that debate continues. That way the visitor might be more open to examining the consequences of the decision to use the bomb and pursue the nuclear arms race that derived from it during the cold war and after. Leaving Unit 2, the visitor would be confronted with the Enola Gay itself. Shorn of wings and tail, it would look like a huge, glass-nosed, space-age projectile. In the bomb bay, one would see the straps and stabilizers that held the bomb, and on the floor below the casing of a ‘‘Little Boy’’ uranium bomb such as fell on Hiroshima. Unit 3, featuring the Enola Gay, would tell the story of the design, production, and deployment of the b-29 and the evolution of the incendiary bombing of

waldo heinrichs

211

Japan. It would then focus intensively on the 509th Composite Wing, recruited and trained to carry out atomic missions, and finally on Enola Gay and Bockscar and their missions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The unit would be a classical nasm o√ering, at once commemorative, celebratory, and technological, with the longest text and most pictures in the exhibit, including pictures of all the airmen in the 509th. Above a passageway next to the aircraft would be a projection screen showing film of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, including the atomic explosions. Passing under the screen, the visitor would enter a room with a photomural of the Hiroshima explosion seen from the ground, serving as backdrop for a single display of a clock from one city and a watch from the other, frozen on the moments of the explosions. This would be the transition to Unit 4, the somber world of Ground Zero and the emotional heart of the exhibit. The visitor would proceed through a gallery showing photographs of the explosion clouds in time sequence and then into the main exhibit. Two intertwining themes would run through Unit 4: a technical and clinical explanation of the nature and e√ects of the explosion— blinding flash, crushing blast, consuming heat, and radiation—and the human pathos of it. Artifacts loaned by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Nagasaki International Culture Hall would include school uniforms, a wooden clog, a water bottle, and a lunchbox with charred food inside. Where possible pictures of the owners taken earlier would accompany the artifacts. One would also see a sheet of metal crumpled by the blast, coins melted by the heat, a fused rosary, the shadow of leaves imprinted on bamboo stalks by the flash. Most a√ecting would be the testimonials and pictures of what was experienced and seen: flattened landscapes, the search for children never found, the massed, fibrous scar tissue of flash burn victims, the imprint of clothing patterns on the skin, the charred corpses of a mother and child and a young boy. The narrative and a√ective themes of the display reinforce each other in establishing the distinctiveness of the atomic explosion. In important ways the visitor would be reminded of the Dresden and Tokyo firestorms, yet the awesomeness and pervasiveness of destruction from one bomb and the multiple e√ects of the explosion would strike one as unique. After the experience of Unit 4, sustaining interest in Unit 5, the surrender of Japan and the legacy of the bomb, would be a challenge. 212

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

The surrender, presented in seven wall labels with pictures, would be straightforward and informed. The text would note the revisionist argument that the bombs were not necessary since peace agreement was already possible if the emperor’s position were guaranteed, and that in any event the second bomb was unnecessary. These matters it would leave as ‘‘hotly contested’’ and conclude that the surrender was doubtless a ‘‘critical legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’’ The aim of the final section, the legacy of the bomb, would be to suggest the profound e√ects which use of the bomb had on postwar international relations. News of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘‘spurred [the Soviet Union] into a crash program’’ to build the bomb. Other nations followed; diplomacy to secure international control failed; the world moved on to a more diverse and powerful nuclear armory and nuclear-tipped missiles. A huge graphic would illustrate the buildup of nuclear weapons. The cold war ended, but the ‘‘nuclear dilemma’’ would remain and was ‘‘not about to disappear’’ given the threat posed by proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Quotations from statesmen about nuclear weapons and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would line the wall above the table where the visitor filled out a comment card.

The Air Force Association Assault When Secretary Adams was wondering where an attack on the exhibit might come from, he might have asked which governmental organization had the greatest interest in nasm. Then his thoughts might have lighted on the Air Force and its public relations arm, the Air Force Association (afa). According to Richard Kohn, the afa, a private organization, is ‘‘a large, powerful advocate for a strong national defense and a chief connecting link between the Air Force and its industrial suppliers.’’∞∫ Membership includes many veterans but also activeduty service men and women and civilians. As Kohn pointed out, the Air Force lacked commemorative space of its own in Washington; the Air Force Museum was at Wright-Patterson Air Base in Dayton, Ohio. The other services had historical centers, monuments, and statuary in Washington. The National Air and Space Museum, inspired by General H. H. Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces in World War II, was held by the Air Force as its informal domain. waldo heinrichs

213

At the center of the Air Force community’s perspective was its cherished vision of air power as the primary and decisive strategic weapon, as a representation of technological prowess, and as warfare without the prolonged agony and bloodshed of ground combat. The b-29 represented the culmination of the Air Force’s triumphant role in World War II. The Enola Gay was an icon of this organizational memory. A fight had been brewing since General Monroe Hatch, director of the afa, received one of the July 1993 exhibit planning documents from a b-29 veteran in correspondence with Harwit. Hatch informed the nasm director that he disliked it. A meeting and correspondence ensued which suggested that nasm was standing firm. Seeking to engage afa constructively, Harwit sent him the Crossroads script of January 1994. Now convinced that nasm would not change course, Hatch, with the editor in chief of the Association’s Air Force Magazine, John T. Correll, decided to initiate a public campaign to raise political pressure against nasm. Correll, a skilled dialectician and formidable adversary, wrote two articles on the coming exhibit for his magazine. With the circulation on March 15, 1994, of reports on which these articles were based, nasm knew it had a fight on its hands.∞Ω The primary afa criticism of Crossroads was its lack of balance, that is to say its partiality toward Japan, even on moral issues. This was particularly true of Unit 4, with its heart-rending scenes of devastation and su√ering and pathetic personal items recovered from the rubble, like the child’s lunchbox. Correll compared the stack of bodies pictured in the aftermath of the Tokyo firestorm raid with the single picture of American casualties, an ‘‘antiseptic’’ photograph of dead Marines on the beach at Iwo Jima.≤≠ In contrast to this emphasis on Japanese su√ering, according to afa, treatment of Japanese aggression, atrocities, and brutality was totally inadequate. Barely mentioned were the Rape of Nanjing, treatment of prisoners of war, the use of slave labor, and scientific experiments on human victims, to say nothing of Pearl Harbor. Adverse comparison extended to the home fronts: Japanese high school girls pictured working in a factory and American teenagers ‘‘with time on their hands,’’ queuing for a Frank Sinatra concert. If anything, the script made it appear that the United States was morally deficient in prosecuting the war, seeming, in Correll’s words, ‘‘brutal, vindictive, and racially motivated.’’ He particularly noted a two-sentence statement that would be repeatedly quoted in the follow214

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

ing controversy: ‘‘For most Americans, this war was fundamentally di√erent than the one waged against Germany and Italy—it was a war of vengeance. For most Japanese it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.’’≤∞ Correll stated the underlying objection of afa to the exhibit candidly in a memorandum of April 7, 1994: ‘‘It is part of a pattern in which the Smithsonian depicts US military air power in a negative way.’’ That pattern originated with Secretary Adams and the ‘‘cultural reinterpretation that . . . swept the Smithsonian complex’’ during his tenure. He pointed to the current exhibit at nasm on air power in World War I as a prime example of that hostility. The objective was to ‘‘debunk and discredit air power’’ by presenting it as unwholesome and ine√ective warfare wrapped in romantic treatment of air combat.≤≤ Repeatedly, by all participants in the controversy, the word ‘‘balance’’ was used, meaning a revision of the plan or script to bring it closer to each one’s own conception of the ending of the war. The afa wanted to contract what it saw as excessive and excessively favorable or sympathetic material on Japan and extend the scope of the exhibit back through the war years into the 1930s to illuminate Japanese militarism, aggression, responsibility for the war, and atrocities. The curators were primarily interested in 1945 as the start of the nuclear age. By direction of Adams and Harwit they had added Unit 1 to provide balance and context. With a complex story to tell in limited space, they were undoubtedly reluctant to add more material that was not directly relevant. Pearl Harbor had already been remembered in 1991. Developing was an encounter of di√erent remembered pasts, one mustered to protect institutional power, the other deriving from the critical perspective and public concerns of a younger generation. At the least, contention for an appropriately balanced exhibit implied reconstitution without elimination of components, thereby serving as a useful framework for negotiation. The afa spread the Correll critique far and wide. News clippings it collected show thirty-five states represented as well as Japan, Germany, Britain, and France. A powerful lobbying organization, afa had the experience and skills necessary for an e√ective media campaign and well-established relations with members of Congress and their sta√s. Initiating the campaign was a news release informing the public that an afa report found plans for the exhibit marginally improved but still ‘‘skewed’’ toward the Japanese victims, that a ‘‘negative attitude toward waldo heinrichs

215

airpower is pervasive,’’ that veterans had protested the ‘‘politically biased’’ plans for exhibiting Enola Gay, that the exhibit appeared to be part of a trend at the Smithsonian of ‘‘politically correct reporting,’’ and that ‘‘incredibly, it gives the benefit of opinion [on morality] to Japan, which was the aggressor.’’ Included was the American ‘‘war of vengeance’’ quotation. During the rest of 1994 afa personnel participated in twenty-eight radio interviews or talk shows. They provided background material and interviews for thirty-one television shows, including abc Nightline and The McNeil-Lehrer Report. Similar activity occurred during the controversy in 1995.≤≥ The afa clipping collection suggests a highly successful campaign. It contains over six hundred items from 1994 and 1995. Clippings from the local press (116 newspapers in 1994) were not selected for representation of public opinion but sent in voluntarily by members, most of whom probably supported the afa campaign. The afa itself tracked and clipped the national newspapers and news magazines represented in the collection. Support of the afa position in this collection was most extensive in the South but predominant in all regions. Letters, opinion columns, and editorials in support of nasm were infrequent if not rare. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Times strongly supported the afa position, the Washington Post tilted that way, and the New York Times reported the controversy but stayed neutral, as did a number of other well-known newspapers. Due to the ripple e√ect of television appearances, the interest of conservative syndicated columnists, the story’s appeal and availability to the wire services, and the repeater e√ect of newspaper chains, the Correll critique pervaded the press.≤∂ A press survey for the period January 1 to August 10, 1994, by the Smithsonian public a√airs o≈ce reached a similar conclusion: fiftyfive editorials negative toward nasm, three neutral, and five positive.≤∑ Aside from an occasional letter to the editor from Harwit or interview with Crouch or Neufeld, nasm had no voice, indeed had no capability of waging war for public support.

Veterans Remember What veterans read, heard, or saw about the exhibit was a jolt. They wrote their newspaper editors and the Smithsonian using strong words 216

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

to describe how they felt: ‘‘shocked,’’ ‘‘dismayed,’’ ‘‘horrified,’’ ‘‘outraged,’’ ‘‘stunned,’’ ‘‘utterly appalled,’’ ‘‘mad as hell.’’ Repeatedly they used the term ‘‘slap in the face.’’≤∏ Their shock is partly explained by the hyperbole that crept into reports as the script was selectively interpreted by afa and reinterpreted by editors and columnists. John Correll’s interview on the Je√ Kamen radio show o√ers an example. Correll pointed out that nasm was using the Enola Gay ‘‘as a prop to tell the Smithsonian’s version of the atomic bomb story.’’ Kamen interjected, ‘‘You mean that it was a terrible, evil thing that we did. . . . Is that their basic line?’’ Correll did not deny it, answering, ‘‘The—well, we—feel that it lacks balance.’’≤π Veterans would have taken issue with the script even if they had read the original themselves. In the form that reached them, however, it was immensely provocative and challenging, a case, to use Time magazine’s word for it, of ‘‘upsidedownspeak.’’≤∫ They reacted in anger, condemning Crossroads as tendentious, an insult to the country and to veterans, a betrayal, and a gross distortion. Those responsible ‘‘stink,’’ ‘‘should be ashamed,’’ ‘‘should be run out of town.’’≤Ω The exhibit was a shock to veterans because it fundamentally contradicted their characterization of the conflict by reversing the roles of the enemy and their own country. Now the claim was that Japan was the victim, America the aggressor. The representation of Japan as a besieged nation sending out peace feelers, ‘‘defending its unique culture against Western imperialism,’’ and the victim of unremitting and devastating bombardment of whole cities, and America as ‘‘Yankee imperialist,’’ waging a war of vengeance, seemed ludicrous.≥≠ They knew that Japan under the military had been the aggressor. As moviegoers in the 1930s, their generation had seen the March of Time and Fox Movietone newsreels depicting the Rape of Nanjing and Japanese aircraft sinking the American gunboat Panay in the Yangtze River.≥∞ In the military they had marched to theaters to see the Why We Fight indoctrination films picturing totalitarian aggression and conquest and the Japanese emperor, astride a white horse, reviewing his troops. They recalled the Life magazine photograph of a Chinese baby, crying and alone, sitting in the rubble of the bombed-out Shanghai railroad station. Veterans invariably remembered Pearl Harbor and the Bataan Death March of 1942, an atrocity the details of which emerged during the recovery of the Philippines. Many kept a timeline in their minds, waldo heinrichs

217

like a pocket indictment, of the advance of Japanese forces from Manchuria and China onward, stage by stage, punctuated with atrocities.≥≤ Survivors of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps told of their treatment, which, said one, was ‘‘harsh, bitter, [and] inhumane . . . beyond normal human comprehension.’’≥≥ Any implication that the United States was the aggressor seemed absurd. Japan had seized an empire by force in East Asia. It had initiated war by attacking and seizing American territory. A nation at war will fight to win. Motives of revenge, ‘‘payback’’ for Pearl Harbor, should be understood as the dynamics of mortal combat. ‘‘Most Americans now alive,’’ wrote Nick Clooney in the Cincinnati Post, ‘‘do not understand what it is like being involved in an all-out shooting war which the nation might lose.’’≥∂ Similarly, while Japanese were undoubtedly seeking to preserve their culture, their principal aim was, as the revised script put it, ‘‘to save their nation from destruction.’’ Plainly, in the Smithsonian history, Americans wore the black hats; they were the ‘‘bad guys.’’≥∑ The script had identified racism on both sides, following John Dower’s book, War without Mercy. It noted longstanding ‘‘anti-Asian racism’’ under the heading ‘‘The Yellow Peril’’ as a factor in American hatred of Japan. It quoted Allan Nevins on American ‘‘detestation’’ of Japan and referred to the internment of Japanese Americans during the war in the context of the prevalence of discrimination on the home front. These not surprising statements emerged from the press in the form of curator descriptions of the American forces as ‘‘racist aggressors,’’ ‘‘ruthless racists,’’ and ‘‘blood-thirsty racist killers.’’≥∏ The original script’s assertion that Japan sought to protect its unique culture against Western imperialism (‘‘Not a good sentence,’’ Tom Crouch admitted) inspired columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. to suggest that the curators were infected with the ‘‘new history’’ conviction that Western culture was incurably imperialistic. That connection in hand, he denied that the atomic bomb was ‘‘intended to enforce the mastery of a Western white race, or ‘imperialism’ over an Asian people,’’ an assertion the curators never made. Along the same line, U.S. News and World Report noted that a ‘‘dark, perverse vision of arrogance and racism runs through the exhibit.’’≥π Similar was treatment of the issue of war crimes. In a planning document of 1992, Neufeld had pointed out that visitors would come with a wide variety of beliefs, including the conviction that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes. In October 1994 Yoder, referring to 218

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

that document, wrote that the curators seemed to think that the exhibit should be ‘‘framed as a moral mishap, if not a war crime.’’ The phrase that the Enola Gay crew was ‘‘only following orders,’’ added in the second script, seemed to an internal reviewer ‘‘redolent of the defenses advanced by accused Nazi war criminals,’’ and was removed from the third script. The Wall Street Journal noted the same ‘‘not-sosubtle suggestion.’’ By September, the script was bare of intimation that the crew had any doubts about their mission. Nevertheless, in October, Paul Bramell of the Washington Times reported that the ‘‘script suggested that the men who dropped the bomb were like the Nazis who claimed at Nuremberg that they were just ‘following orders.’ ’’ The atomic bombings ‘‘were not war crimes,’’ said the Biloxi Sun Herald. ‘‘Even to hint that America’s decision somehow transcended the bounds of wartime propriety’’ was an a√ront to Truman and the honor of those who carried out the missions.≥∫ Crossroads as mediated by the press infuriated veterans of World War II because it challenged their redeeming sense of having shared in a just war. Experience in the war varied widely according to branch of service and distance from the front lines, but all veterans prized the belief that they had taken part in a mighty endeavor to overcome powerful nations that posed a threat to their country’s existence and to freedom everywhere. That belief had helped service men and women turn from the negative memories of war, whether the horror of combat or the drudgery of supply services, and resume life. For many (in one poll 39 percent were unaware of the controversy) the Enola Gay controversy raised questions, doubts, and old fears.≥Ω Especially worrying was the prospect that a Smithsonian venue would place a national imprimatur on this warped version of the past. Veterans recognized that their generation was passing and were fearful of losing a definition of their war experience that they could leave with pride to following generations. Gerald F. Linderman, in his illuminating study, The World within War: America’s Combat Experience in World War II, carries the idea of segregated memory a step further. He points out that, of the 16 million Americans in military service during World War II, fewer than 1 million took part in ground combat for an extended period. Yet these infantrymen su√ered 70 percent of the casualties. What he finds from the letters and recollections of some five hundred of these veterans is that war was a numbing, alienating, disintegrative experience, far removed from the heroic model taken for granted at home. On Okinawa waldo heinrichs

219

there were thousands of cases of neuropsychiatric breakdown. With prolonged combat, typical of the American army, the soldiers withdrew into a separate world of killing and dying. Finding war entirely repugnant and experience of war impossible to explain at home, they were in ‘‘painful suspension’’ between two worlds. When discovering to their amazement that they survived the war, Linderman says, they were determined to ‘‘put the war behind them as rapidly and thoroughly as possible,’’ and that meant repression of memory.∂≠ Veterans remembered the final outcome of the war. Their letters recounting where they were and how they felt at that moment form the largest category of correspondence on the Enola Gay exhibit. The gathering of assault divisions and air and naval forces had given warning that one more huge battle to finish the war, this time on Japanese soil, was approaching. After the Philippines campaign, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and, for troops redeploying from Europe, the fighting from Normandy to the Rhine, the thought of that battle was oppressive indeed. Relief at the news of Hiroshima and soon after the Japanese surrender was enormous. One who had fought on Okinawa recalled, ‘‘We knelt in the sand and cried. For all our manhood, we cried. We were going to live!’’∂∞ Veterans were heavily invested in the conviction that the use of atomic bombs had saved their lives. So were their wives and children, who also wrote to newspapers, Congress, and the Smithsonian. War experience and the Crossroads script intersected at Unit 2, the discussion of alternatives to use of the bomb. The original script, as we have seen, set forth the argument that a combination of blockade, conventional bombing, an emperor guarantee, and a Soviet declaration of war would probably have (‘‘might have’’ in the second script) induced surrender without invasion or use of the atomic bomb, yet to President Truman, without benefit of hindsight, an invasion appeared to be a real possibility. Here Michael Neufeld was trying to establish alternatives to use of the atomic bomb worthy of present discussion without inviting attack from those wedded to the belief that the bomb saved the day. At the heart of the discussion about invasion was the question of how much it would cost in American lives. That question bedeviled Truman and his advisers, historians since, and all parties to the Enola Gay controversy. Casualty estimating is at best informed speculation. At the time, it varied according to bureaucratic need, whether for hospital beds, replacement soldiers, or Purple Heart decorations. It 220

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

was usually based on unstated premises, models, and mathematics. Users were easily mistaken in what a particular number covered: what period of time, what piece of territory, what kind of casualty (dead, wounded, nonbattle, missing). Which estimates were put forward depended at times on the fears or ambitions of commanders. Estimates for the invasion of Kyushu in November 1945 and for the invasion of the Tokyo plain the following March varied widely then and are still evolving and contested. Those in the high range of half a million or more would strengthen the case for use of the bomb; those in the same order of magnitude as past campaigns such as the Philippines and Normandy would help argue for alternatives. Neufeld was confident, on the basis of research cited by Walker, that ‘‘the traditional justification’’ for use of the bomb, of half a million or more dead, was ‘‘no longer tenable.’’ He accepted that the casualty question was not resolved but insisted that it was debatable on political and military grounds quite separate from the issue of morality. One could still argue for the correctness of Truman’s decision, but it was ‘‘clearly in the Smithsonian’s charge, ‘the increase and di√usion of knowledge,’ to make this scholarly research accessible to the public.’’∂≤ In the script, picking his way carefully through this thicket, Neufeld dismissed the figure of half a million or more dead as too high. His initial estimate, before the script, of twenty thousand to thirty thousand, too low, did not appear. His middle-range compromise, restricted to the Kyushu invasion, suggested that ‘‘many tens of thousands of dead were a real possibility.’’ Vague as it was, such a figure would allow for a total casualty estimate, dead and wounded, for Kyushu alone, of 268,000, following the Okinawa ratio of casualties to total combatant force.∂≥ This was not high enough for veterans. The preferred estimate of combat soldiers was 1 million. ‘‘No one who has seen actual Japanese bunkers and the thousands of American graves on the Pacific islands and who knows the ferocity of the Japanese defense regrets dropping the bomb,’’ wrote Irving Justman, whose 40th Division was assigned to the Kyushu invasion. ‘‘Home alive in ’45’’ was the motto for Earl Barackman, who had ‘‘fought his way from Leyte Gulf to the shores of Japan. . . . My generation understood what had been done and we never looked back.’’ Hal King’s 165th Field Artillery Battalion, told to expect 60 percent casualties, was convinced they would ‘‘die on the beaches.’’∂∂ Repressed memory surfaced on this poignant issue; comwaldo heinrichs

221

bat veterans needed to retrieve it to make such statements. Columnist Chalmers Roberts, who had inspected the hilly terrain and shallow beaches of Kyushu shortly after the surrender and interviewed Japanese military personnel, subscribed to the fear of huge casualties.∂∑ What Neufeld had tried to accomplish in the casualty wall label went nowhere in the press. Columnists and the American Legion sought to pin Neufeld to low numbers: ‘‘Many tens of thousands,’’ he had said. ‘‘Only tens of thousands?’’ Pat Buchanan rejoined. Given the complexity of the issue, confused estimates were bound to appear, such as comparing estimates of total casualties with estimates of the dead alone, or mixing up estimates for Kyushu with those for Kyushu and the Tokyo plain. Marianne Means of Hearst referred to a script ‘‘filled with snide references to ‘controversies’ that questioned United States motives in not seeking a slower way to end’’ the war. Richard K. Shull wrote sarcastically of a revised script which suggested that estimates of a million American casualties were wildly inflated for propaganda purposes.∂∏ The press rarely examined Neufeld’s set of historical controversies except to denigrate one or more of them. While press discussion of Unit 2, the decision to drop the bomb, gravitated toward arguments over how many Americans might die, Unit 4, Ground Zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, raised controversy over how much of death the visitor should have to see. Tom Crouch’s objective was to bring home to the visitor that the atomic bomb was a distinctive agent of destruction in a new order of weaponry. He believed the best way to accomplish that purpose was to open the visitor’s mind and senses to the devastation and human tragedy caused by the bomb by situating the visitor at Ground Zero. The atmosphere would be ‘‘gloomy and oppressive. . . . Photos of victims, enlarged to life-size, stare out at the visitor.’’ The reality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki needed to be experienced, ‘‘however upsetting that might be to some.’’∂π In May 1994, he began hearing about ‘‘real discomfort.’’ More pictures and information became available when nasm copyrighted its successive scripts and began distributing them to veterans organizations, wire services, and the Washington Post and Washington Times in the hope of a more accurate and balanced treatment.∂∫ Poor quality photocopying occasionally made pictures grotesque and washed out detail, but what was there, with imagination and label text, usually permitted identification. The Washington Times, which judged Unit 4, Ground Zero, to have 222

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

received ‘‘the heaviest fire,’’ joined the attack. The script ‘‘gruesomely rehearses the e√ects of the bomb . . . lots of grisly photographs of all the burns and wounds they su√ered.’’ Why was this exposure so important for visitors ‘‘unless the museum wants to discredit the dropping of the bomb by wallowing in the graphic depictions of the consequences.’’ The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a growing number of veterans did not wish to have ‘‘their wartime sacrifice overshadowed by gruesome photos of dead children and radiation victims . . . with carbonized remains of a schoolgirl’s meal, melted religious artifacts, a clock frozen at 8:15 a.m.’’ Then, referring to afa’s criticism of imbalance and unfairness, it asked where photos were of such Japanese atrocities as the Bataan Death March. Guy Gugliotta, with a Washington Post byline, wrote in the Winchester Star of suspicion ‘‘among many veterans’ groups’’ that Enola Gay would become ‘‘the feature attraction in a disagreeably graphic morality play.’’ Particularly objectionable to veterans, said an editorial in the Biloxi Sun Herald, were the ‘‘horrors and destruction of the bomb . . . to be depicted in such shocking realism that parents accompanied by children will be warned ‘parental discretion is advised.’ ’’ Greg Mitchell, a friend of the exhibit, writing in the Los Angeles Times, pointed out that Americans had never come to terms with the atomic bombings. Previously they had taken the Hiroshima landscape in stride, but this time it was di√erent: nasm had gone ‘‘a step further, including in the panorama charred bodies and items belonging to dead schoolchildren.’’ Already the exhibit was ‘‘drawing flak, proof of how raw the wound remained.’’ The Veterans of Foreign Wars complained that the photographs of victims were ‘‘excessive and exploitative.’’∂Ω As the situation worsened for nasm in the summer of 1994, Constance Newman, under secretary of the Smithsonian, suggested a meeting with American Legion o≈cials with whom she had dealt in her previous position as head of the Federal O≈ce of Personnel Management. Gaining support of the Legion, with a membership of 3 million, might provide a counterweight to the seemingly implacable criticism of the afa. Initial meetings were encouraging to the point where the Legion leadership agreed to delay a resolution condemning the exhibit on condition that agreement could be reached on the script. On September 21, 1994, the Legion and nasm began line-by-line negotiation of the script that took three sessions and thirty-six hours to complete.∑≠ waldo heinrichs

223

In the course of these negotiations, Ground Zero lost most of its emotional force. The museum’s position was not helped when, in the midst of the negotiations, Richard Hallion, o≈cial historian of the Air Force, noted in a Washington Post story the ‘‘insistent focus of Harwit, Crouch, and Neufeld on the ‘visceral’ devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’’∑∞ From a comparison of what went into the Ground Zero exhibit in the first script and what was left in the fifth and final script, it is apparent that the Legion sorted the Ground Zero pictures, artifacts, testimonials, and texts into two categories, those of or related to humans a√ected by the bombs, and all the rest. Pictures of charred bodies, of the injured, of any children, dead or alive, or children’s clothing and personal items, like the well-known lunchbox and a clog with a darkened outer portion outlining a foot—all these were discarded. Retained were pictures of flattened urban landscapes, rubble, fused, crumpled, and broken materials and objects, shadows imprinted on nearby objects by the flash, and rescue workers who escaped the bomb. The Legion made a few exceptions, allowing an emblematic picture of a burn victim’s scars, for example. This representational procedure, however, contradicted the curators’ objective by showing what appeared to be idiosyncratic injury rather than the distinctive e√ects of an atomic blast on masses of people, which would require several pictures. Frequently the question was asked, ‘‘Is this picture necessary?’’ The loss of a particular picture or testimonial might not have seemed critical, but repeated over time it weakened the exhibit in the manner of death by a thousand cuts. On the subject of representation, it is notable that a rosary fused by heat and a photo of the ruins of the Catholic Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki were withdrawn. Altogether, including some removed earlier, approximately twenty-eight of the seventy representations in Ground Zero were scrapped, and these were emotionally the most powerful ones. A number of observers saw the expurgation of the script in terms of a disconnection between the American public and historical experience. Asahi Shimbun spoke bluntly: ‘‘To ignore the results of warfare, to say, ‘I don’t even want to look’—that’s downright childish, isn’t it?’’ ‘‘What motive, besides squeamishness about the truth,’’ asked the Philadelphia Inquirer, ‘‘can explain the deletion of photos and artifacts depicting the bomb’s awful power?’’ Jo Becker, executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, accused the American Legion of 224

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

wanting to ‘‘shield’’ the American public from the realities of the bombing: ‘‘Inclusion of any human element seems to be out of the question.’’ Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, writing to the New York Times, noted that after years of avoiding the issue of the use of the atomic bomb—‘‘a collective form of psychic numbness—any reopening of the scar makes us feel uneasy.’’∑≤ The question remains why the American Legion became so painstakingly involved with that section of the script. Undoubtedly they were protecting the veterans’ conception of the just war against tainting by images of mass civilian casualties. It is also conceivable, following the argument of Linderman and the term ‘‘visceral devastation’’ used by Hallion, that the American Legion was representing the views of combat veterans who read about Ground Zero images that were all too familiar and that evoked memories too painful to bear.

Conclusion In early August 1994, Martin Harwit wrote a letter to the Washington Post seeking to appease critics by pointing out the dilemma posed for nasm by two divergent views in the country about the dropping of the atomic bombs: one, held by veterans, the patriotic and just war view; the other, ‘‘more analytical, critical . . . concerned with historical context . . . complex and . . . discomfiting,’’ concerned with the legacy of the bombs. A week later Meg Greenfield of the Post editorial board replied with a scolding. She pointed out that underlying Harwit’s comparison was an assumption of di√erence in intellectual sophistication. The problem lay with the curators’ failure to perceive that ‘‘embedded’’ in their exhibit were not ‘‘universal ‘objective’ assumptions that all thinking people must necessarily share’’ but political opinions.∑≥ Apparently, wrote columnist Charley Reese, there was the ‘‘dumb, patriotic view and the smart, sophisticated anti-American view.’’ A Washington Times columnist now referred to the Enola Gay as ‘‘a symbol of the cultural conflict between the Washington elite and the generation that fought and won the war.’’ The Indianapolis Star regretted the ‘‘increasing evidence that [the Smithsonian] is succumbing to the negativism and elitist guilt that characterizes much of today’s social and cultural discourse.’’∑∂ In this way Smithsonian elitism, associated with carping about America and intellectual hauteur, came into waldo heinrichs

225

the feverish political discourse of the culture wars in the 1994 congressional election campaigns, alongside political correctness and revisionism. Elitism had resonance in this campaign season, dominated as it was by populist rhetoric against the establishment. This period, between July and November, was critical for the exhibit. Opposition swelled and nasm found no way to appease or overcome it. Secretary Adams retired at the end of the summer to a professorship at Johns Hopkins. Revised scripts appeared in May, August, and October, each promptly followed by an afa critique, including the current emotive box score of items sympathetic to Japan against items sympathetic to America. Correll gave credit where changes had been made but invariably called for more. Most of the press followed suit, with persistent criticism, never satisfied or never quite satisfied, at times unaware of changes made addressing the criticism, at other times aware but finding the curator mind-set still infecting the script. A few newspapers, the Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, supported the exhibit in principle but found di≈culties in detail. The New York Times stood aloof but accurately reported news, which usually happened to be statements of criticism. The tide of opposition raised the prospect for the Smithsonian of losing the exhibit and, worse, its funding. Some thirty thousand subscribers wrote the Smithsonian, many canceling their memberships.∑∑ Congressional opposition, facilitated by the afa, arose in August and September. Twenty-four members of Congress sent a letter criticizing imbalance in the exhibit. A sense of the Senate resolution condemned the current script as revisionist and o√ensive to World War II veterans. Individual members of Congress spoke of firing those responsible. The Republican victory in November sealed the fate of the exhibit. The American Legion took advantage of a change in the agreed-upon script by Harwit to withdraw from negotiation and demand cancellation. The Smithsonian obliged on January 31, 1995, reducing the exhibit to the forward fuselage of the Enola Gay and a video. In May, Harwit was forced to resign. Under a new secretary of the Smithsonian, nasm shifted course toward a more traditional role.∑∏ A comparison of the last script, the fifth, of January 1995, with the first makes one wonder why the opposition had any further cause for complaint. Desperately trying to satisfy critics, nasm had made major changes in the tone and substance of the exhibit. Su≈cient representa226

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

tions of death and disfigurement had been removed from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki unit to no longer require display of a ‘‘Parental Discretion Required’’ sign. The same treatment was applied to the conventional bombing of Japan: virtually all quotations and pictures testifying to the awesomeness and horror of the Tokyo firestorm raid were removed. The museum had heeded afa’s demand for balance. It planned to extend the exhibit backward in time to 1937 to provide details and images of Japanese aggression from the Rape of Nanjing to Pearl Harbor and to inform Americans about their war against Japan from 1941 to 1945 with due attention to American casualties. The number of quotations from the war memoir of Marine Private E. B. Sledge about death in combat on Peleliu and Okinawa was increased from one to six, but there remained only one photograph of a dead Marine, the original picture described as ‘‘antiseptic.’’ Removed from the kamikaze story was the remembrance of a kamikaze pilot of the youth of his fellow pilots waiting their turn to die, a piece of ‘‘oozing romanticism’’ according to the Wall Street Journal.∑π Above all, the final script toed the line on issues relating to the decision to use the atomic bomb: President Truman saw the bomb as a way to end the war and save lives. The controversy sidebar format was discarded; historians and their di√erences disappeared. Nevertheless, most of the alternatives made an appearance, if only to be rejected. With regard to the Japanese peace initiative, an expanded text on American deciphering of Japanese communications informed the visitor that the Japanese were insisting on more than a guarantee of the emperor, making the initiative worthless. The text accepted that the Soviet Union was a factor in decisions about Japan and the bomb but did not explain how, and reasserted that Truman’s decision was based on shortening the war and saving lives. Truman rejected modification of unconditional surrender, said the text, because allies and the American public would strongly object. In the text, the issue of giving a warning or demonstration of the bomb came before the Interim Committee and was found wanting. This was a traditional interpretation. Surprisingly, casualty estimates were varied and vague. Final agreement with the American Legion had rested on the Okinawa ratio of 35 percent of the invading force, or 268,000, but Professor Barton J. Bernstein had found evidence that the size of the force General Marshall had in mind was only 190,000, which would yield a much smaller waldo heinrichs

227

casualty figure. That had been the straw that broke the camel’s back for the Legion. Harwit did not use that lower figure but merely changed the script to read that with a huge invasion force the operation would be much more costly, adding that after the war Truman often said that the invasion would have cost half a million to a million American casualties. This was the higher range Neufeld believed was no longer tenable.∑∫ Not only was the curator’s e√ort to establish a more questioning attitude toward the bomb a failure, but Unit 5, his e√ort to address the legacy of the atomic bomb, was eliminated. After a more extended narrative of the Japanese surrender and the beginning of the occupation, the script devoted one wall label to the legacy. The atomic bombs that ended the war, it said, showed how devastating these weapons could be and provided ‘‘perhaps the most compelling reason why they have not been used since.’’ Crossroads had also been renamed Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II. Harwit was pleased to see that the chronology of the subtitle was finally correct. In a sad tale such as the Enola Gay controversy we are inclined to ask what went wrong, why did it fail, and who was at fault. Certainly there are many answers: a transition of leadership at the Smithsonian and political naïveté at nasm; a skilled political campaign by afa to reassert its influence at nasm; a press, especially columnists, mostly content to pass on or inflate the afa story or stand by; veterans determined not to disturb their comforting way of viewing the past; and a public stirred by cultural issues in an election year. Perhaps this is not the way to look at the controversy; understanding it better o√ers a wider perspective. Surely the Enola Gay project was an extraordinary enterprise. In spite of all the handicaps and contradictions, the script was an impressive achievement to begin with. It had a vast array of informative, important, understandable information, and intriguing, arresting images and artifacts. By the time of the second revision in August it was more accurate, tighter, and less likely to o√end unnecessarily. This improvement was due to the work of many experts, especially those in the outside advisory group and the o≈cial military historians. It was due as well to the courage and dedication of Harwit and his curators, who managed, in the midst of what Neufeld called a ‘‘maelstrom,’’ to keep their essential messages intact until August 1994 and to improve the script. What they created finally is worth remembering, for the exhibit— 228

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

script and planned gallery—is a fascinating representation in itself of the contorted and compartmentalized American public memory in 1994 of that pivotal but obscure time a half century earlier that stood between war and peace. In the summer of 1995 American University opened its own commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, using about fourteen items scheduled for the nasm exhibit, including five discards that showed dead or injured men, women, and children and videos of a mother who lost a child and a schoolgirl who later died. Few of the 2,923 visitors to the exhibit objected. A sampling of comment cards describe it as ‘‘moving,’’ ‘‘disturbing and compelling,’’ ‘‘powerful,’’ ‘‘awesome,’’ ‘‘heartbreaking,’’ ‘‘stirring,’’ ‘‘haunting,’’ ‘‘arresting without being overly shocking,’’ ‘‘impossible to forget,’’ and ‘‘poignant.’’ They speak of the ‘‘horror of the bomb,’’ ‘‘the sadness’’ of the victims, ‘‘the tragic e√ects,’’ ‘‘the terrible use of a terrible weapon,’’ ‘‘the human devastation and loss,’’ ‘‘the tears in my eyes,’’ and ‘‘the hurt I feel.’’ Several regretted that the Smithsonian and American University exhibits had not been combined ‘‘to go hand in hand.’’∑Ω

Notes 1 Steven C. Dubin, Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 1999), chap. 6. 2 I am grateful to John T. Correll, editor in chief of Air Force Magazine, published by the Air Force Association, for providing me with a set of the Association’s bound documents on the Enola Gay controversy. This set consists of the following bound volumes: ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong: Analysis of the Enola Gay Controversy,’’ part 1, March 1994–December 1996; part 2, ‘‘Documents and Clippings’’; part 3, ‘‘Supplementary Documents’’; ‘‘Enola Gay Coverage, 1994,’’ ‘‘Enola Gay Coverage, 1995’’; ‘‘The Enola Gay Debate [Documents], August 1993–May 1995’’; The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War, January 12, 1994 (first script of the exhibit), Air Force Association, Arlington, Va. I am also grateful to Mr. Correll for allowing me to use the Air Force Association’s library and the Association’s copies of the second, third, and fourth scripts. I am grateful to Linda St. Thomas, public a√airs o≈cer of the Smithsonian Institution, for providing me with a copy of the fifth script, and to Bill Cox of the Smithsonian Archives for assistance in finding materials there. My thanks to Edward J. Drea for providing me with

waldo heinrichs

229

materials on the controversy and to Dr. Tom Crouch for giving me time for discussion on two occasions. 3 As quoted in Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of the Enola Gay (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996), 17. 4 On mounting the exhibit, see ibid., chaps. 1–13; Richard H. Kohn, ‘‘History and the Culture Wars: The Case of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay Exhibition,’’ Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (December 1995): 1038–1039. The Harwit memoir and Kohn article have been of great use. Also helpful have been Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifshultz, eds., Hiroshima’s Shadow (Stony Creek, Conn.: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998); ‘‘Hiroshima in History and Memory: A Symposium,’’ Diplomatic History 19 (spring 1995): 197–365. 5 Minutes of nasm Research Advisory Committee Meeting, 24–26 October 1988, Letters 1987–1991, and Michael J. Neufeld memo, ‘‘The ‘Enola Gay,’ the Bomb, and nassm,’’ 12 May 1992, Folder 6, Box 1, Enola Gay Exhibition Records, 1988–1995 (hereafter eg Records), National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Harwit, Exhibit Denied, 31, 53. 6 On Adams, Harwit, Michael Neufeld, and Tom Crouch: Kohn, ‘‘History and the Culture Wars,’’ 1038–1040; Harwit, Exhibit Denied, 26, 51; Ken Ringle in Washington Post, 26 September 1994. 7 Neufeld memo, ‘‘Enola Gay,’’ 12 May 1992, eg Records; Harwit, Exhibit Denied, 188. 8 Neufeld memo, ‘‘Enola Gay,’’ 12 May 1992, eg Records; ‘‘A Proposal: Hiroshima and Nagasaki: A Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibit at the nasm. Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 2. 9 Neufeld memo, ‘‘Enola Gay,’’ 12 May 1992, eg Records. 10 Neufeld memo to Harwit and others, 25 April 1994; ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 2; J. Samuel Walker, ‘‘The Decision to Use the Bomb: An Historiographical Update,’’ Diplomatic History 14, no. 1 (winter 1990): 110. 11 Crouch memo to Harwit, 12 March 1994, Folder 6, Box 1, eg Records. 12 Ibid.; Neufeld memo to Harwit, 12 March 1994, Folder 6, Box 1, eg Records. 13 Harwit, Exhibit Denied, 178, 184–193; Neufeld memo to Edward Linenthal, 9 March 1995, Enola Gay/Hiroshima Nagasaki (eg /hn) Advisory Board Folder, Box 9, eg Records. 14 Harwit, Exhibit Denied, 184. 15 Ibid., 179–193; Neufeld memo to Edward Linenthal, 9 March 1995, eg /hn Advisory Board File, Box 9, eg Records.

230

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

16 Crossroads original script, 12 January 1994. The following section is entirely based on this script and sketches of the exhibit rooms in ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 2. 17 nasm Exhibition Planning Document, July 1993; ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 2. 18 Kohn, ‘‘History and the Culture Wars,’’ 1049–1053. 19 On the afa attack: ‘‘War Stories at Air and Space,’’ and ‘‘The Decision That Launched the Enola Gay,’’ reports by John T. Correll, in ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 1; Correll memo to Monroe Hatch, 7 April 1994, enclosing Correll’s analysis of Crossroads script, 7 April 1994, Correll memo of meeting with nasm, 23 November 1993, and Monroe Hatch to Harwit, 12 September 1993, in ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 2; Harwit to Hatch, 31 January 1994, in ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 3; W. Burr Bennett Jr. to Correll, 6 August 1993, Correll to Hatch, 10 August 1993, and Enola Gay Chronology, 1993–1995, in afa, ‘‘Enola Gay Debate.’’ 20 Correll analysis of Crossroads script, 7 April 1994. 21 Correll, ‘‘War Stories at Air and Space,’’ in ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 1. 22 Ibid. 23 afa press release, 16 March 1994, in ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 3; afa list of sta√ appearances on television and radio, ‘‘Enola Gay Coverage,’’ 1994 and 1995. 24 Ibid. 25 Clippings summary, 10 August 1994, Press Media Folder, Box 9, eg Records. 26 Cleveland Plain Dealer, 21 May 1994; Sentinel [Orlando], 5 August 1994; Omaha World Herald, 4 September 1994, ‘‘Enola Gay Coverage, 1994’’; Letters on File, 6, 7 September 1994, Box 6, eg Records. 27 wwrc-am radio interview, 8 April 1994, transcript attached to Mike Fetters memo to Harwit, 11 April 1994, Press Media Folder, Box 9, eg Records. 28 Lance Morrow, ‘‘Hiroshima and the Time Machine,’’ Time, 19 September 1994. 29 Elizabeth H. Poe in Argus Press, 7 June 1994; Letters on File, 6, 7 September 1994, Box 6, eg Records. 30 Robert L. McCann to Smithsonian, 6 September 1994, 6 Sept. 1994 Folder, eg Records; Letters in 6 September 1994 Folder and Frances Robinson Mitchell to Neufeld, 4 November 1994, Folder 5, eg Records; B. W. Simons Jr. to Smithsonian, 28 March 1994, Folder 3, Box 13, eg Records; Emmett Tyrrell in Washington Times, 2 September 1994. 31 Robert L. McCann to Smithsonian, 6 September 1994, 6 September

waldo heinrichs

231

1994 Folder, Box 6, eg Records; Edward C. Bearss, National Park Service, to Tom Allison, nasm, 6 January 1995, ‘‘War in the Pacific’’ Review Committee Comments, Box 12, eg Records. 32 See, e.g., Kansas City Star, 21 August 1994. 33 Grayford Payne quoted in Ken Ringle, Washington Post, 26 September 1994. 34 Nick Clooney in Cincinnati Post, 9 May 1994; Kevin O’Brien in Cleveland Plain Dealer, 28 August 1994; Tom Teepen in Lakeland, Fla., Ledger, 6 September 1994. 35 Washington Times, 4 October 1994. 36 Newsweek, 29 August 1994; Chicago Tribune, 9 September 1994; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November 1994; U.S. News and World Report, 10 October 1994; Dallas Morning News, 3 October 1994; Crossroads script, 12 January 1994, 100: 42–44. 37 Edwin M. Yoder Jr. in Active Years, October 1994; U.S. News and World Report, 10 October 1994. 38 ‘‘A Proposal: Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’’ in ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 2; Yoder in Active Years; Mark Jackson memo to Alfred Goldberg, 18 July 1994, Military History Advisers Folder, Box 9, eg Records; Paul Bramell in Washington Times, 4 October 1994; Bob McHugh in Biloxi Sun Herald, 6 May 1994, 26 June 1994; Wall Street Journal, 29 August 1994. 39 Washington Post (poll), 24 February 1995. 40 Gerald F. Linderman, The World within War: America’s Combat Experience in World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1; chap. 4 (‘‘Fighting the Japanese: War Unrestrained’’), 344, 353, 356, 359, 361. See also Paul Fussell. ‘‘Thank God for the Atomic Bomb,’’ in Bird and Lifshultz, Hiroshima’s Shadow, 211–222. Linderman gives a figure of 26,211 cases of neuropsychiatric breakdown (‘‘combat fatigue’’). However, according to the o≈cial army history of the Okinawa battle, that figure is for ‘‘non-battle casualties,’’ of which ‘‘a large percentage’’ were psychiatric cases. See Roy Appleman et al., Okinawa: The Last Battle (Washington: U.S. Government Printing O≈ce, 1991), 384–386. 41 David E. Watts, letter to editor, Jacksonville Daily News, 13 January 1995. 42 Neufeld memo to Harwit and others, 25 April 1994, in ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 2. 43 Crossroads script, 12 January 1994, 260-L5, 54. 44 Justman and Barackman letters to editor, Los Angeles Times, 9 August 1994; King letter to editor, Wall Street Journal, 7 October 1994. 45 Chalmers Roberts in Philadelphia Inquirer, 27 August 1994.

232

The Enola Gay and Contested Public Memory

46 Pat Buchanan in Nashville Tennesseean, 12 February 1945; Marianne Means in Post and Courier, 29 August 1994; Richard K. Shull in Indianapolis News, 27 September 1994. 47 nasm Exhibition Planning Document, July 1993 and ‘‘Fifty Years On’’ Planning Document, in ‘‘Revisionism Gone Wrong,’’ part 2. 48 Washington Times, 11 August 1994. On script distribution: Mike Fetters to Harwit, 28 October 1994, Folder 6, Box 1, eg Records. 49 Washington Times, 11 August and 15 October 1994; Philadelphia Inquirer, 22 May 1994; Winchester Star, 24 June 1994; Biloxi Sun Herald, 26 June 1994; Greg Mitchell in Los Angeles Times, 3 August 1994. 50 Harwit, Exhibit Denied, 285–288, 326–329. 51 Ken Ringle in Washington Post, 26 September 1994. 52 Philadelphia Inquirer, 18 October 1994; Asahi Shimbun as quoted in Washington Post, 29 June 1995; Jo Becker, letter to the editor, New York Times, 11 October 1994; Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, letter to the editor, New York Times, 11 October 1994. 53 Harwit in Washington Post, 7 August 1994; Meg Greenfield, editorial, Washington Post, 14 August 1994. 54 Charley Reese in Grand Rapids Press, 30 August 1994; Paul Bramell in Washington Times, 4 October 1994; Indianapolis Star, 17 October 1994. 55 Washington Post, 28 June 1995. 56 Washington Post, 19 May 1995. Among new exhibits planned was ‘‘Flight Time Barbie,’’ Barbie dolls by Mattel Inc., dressed as stewards and astronauts. 57 Wall Street Journal, 29 August 1995. 58 Harwit, Exhibit Denied, 345–346, 380–383. 59 I am grateful to George Arnold, curator of special collections at American University Library, for making available the university’s papers on the Hiroshima-Nagasaki exhibit of 1995.

waldo heinrichs

233

War Memories across the Pacific japanese visitors at the Arizona memorial

yujin yaguchi .

7

The Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which commemorates the surprise attack on a U.S. territory by Japanese forces in 1941, is one of the most recognized landmarks in the United States. Designed by the architect Alfred Preis and built in 1960, it is dedicated to the more than one thousand men who perished on board the battleship Arizona on December 7, 1941. The memorial stands over the battleship, which remains sunken under the water to this day. The contrast between the bright white color of the memorial under the blue Hawaiian sky and the rusty surface of the old ship in the water generates a powerful feeling among many visitors. Located about a thirty-minute drive from Waikiki, the memorial is one of the most popular sites for tourists from the U.S. mainland who come to Hawaii, attracting nearly 1.5 million people a year. The Arizona Memorial has also attracted the attention of scholars, many of whom are interested in furthering the understanding of the ways such places form and condition social memories of the war and understanding of the nation. Edward Linenthal provides a historical overview of the memorial and explains the continuous e√orts of the National Park Service to prevent this ‘‘sacred site’’ from being ‘‘contaminated’’ by contested interpretations of the memorial. Kathy Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull analyze how the memorial serves to neutralize the presence of U.S. forces in Hawaii for the tourists while reinforcing the discourse of U.S. nationalism as well as white masculinity in the supposed paradise in the Pacific. In describing the making of the film shown at the visitors center, Geo√rey White identifies a continuing tension between the attempt of the National Park Service sta√ to show a balanced historical analysis of the event and the desire of many visitors to find a site strongly devoted to the promotion of patriotic national memory. Emily Rosenberg shows how di√erent images of Pearl Harbor

have been evoked over the past six decades in multiple and at times contested ways in response to the various changes and tensions in contemporary American culture. These analyses show that the majority of Americans find the Arizona Memorial to be one of the most important patriotic national monuments and that the experiences of the visitors at the memorial generally enhance their identification with and celebration of the eventual victory of the United States in this ‘‘good war.’’∞ In contrast with such monuments as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., whose design and reception is said to produce competing meanings of the site as well as of the past, the intended significance of the Arizona Memorial seems rather clear.≤ The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, located in the nation’s capital and dedicated to the people who fought in the war the United States lost, allows its visitors to read di√erent narratives of the wartime experience and reflect upon the personal losses as well as the contemporary national policies and social conditions that led the nation into that debacle. The Arizona Memorial, more than six thousand miles away from the capital and located in one of the most important military facilities of the United States, o√ers a more uniform meaning of the earlier war and its significance. Ferguson and Turnbull argue that the ‘‘neverfully-replaced loss that the death of someone close to us leaves is literally palpable at the Vietnam Wall but is abstract and abstracted by the Arizona Memorial.’’≥ While individual losses are by no means discounted at the site, the memorial in Pearl Harbor abstracts these losses into the larger discourse of national commemoration.∂ The foregrounding of the national loss seems all the more important in this newest state of the union, a state that was once an independent kingdom and in which the U.S. government was directly and illegally involved in its overthrow in 1893. By enshrining the individual U.S. deaths on this island in the Pacific at the start of World War II as supreme sacrifices paid to the nation, the memorial positions the area as integral to the United States and orients its visitors toward a heightened sense of national-subject position as Americans. However, in a state where the economy is in significant part sustained by global tourism, visitors to the site are not limited to American nationals. In particular, every day, among the many visitors from the U.S. mainland, one can find Japanese tourists walking through the museum located at the visitors center, watching the introductory film

yujin yaguchi

235

with translation headsets, riding the Navy boat to the memorial, and gazing at the sunken battleship that was bombed by Japanese planes more than sixty years ago. Edward Linenthal describes how some U.S. visitors to the memorial see the presence of these Japanese as ‘‘physical defilement’’ of this sacred site. Complaints about the irreverent attitude of Japanese visitors are not uncommon (though very few cases are actually substantiated).∑ Linenthal cites an incident in which an American man who mistook a group of Filipino visitors for Japanese asked the superintendent, ‘‘Why are those Japs here?’’∏ While expressions of such a negative feeling against the Japanese visitors are neither condoned nor accepted among the sta√ of the memorial (nothing in the visitors center and the memorial shows overt hostility to Japan or the Japanese people), this question of why the Japanese come and, more important, what the memorial means to them remains unexplored. In her discussion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Marita Sturken suggests that a memorial is not simply a site where the sense of past is reinforced; it is also a site where history becomes reinscribed through articulation. She argues that the Vietnam Memorial needs to be understood within the ‘‘context of a very active scripting and rescripting of the war’’ by the visitors for whom memories take the form of ‘‘cultural reenactment’’ that enables their ‘‘catharsis and healing.’’π So often in the studies of national memorials, these visitors who are articulating and scripting various forms of history are uncritically defined as the citizens of the nation that is commemorated at the site. But in the case of the Arizona Memorial, visitors are clearly not only Americans. This essay focuses on Japanese experiences of the memorial in order to investigate the meaning of a national memorial for those who are not only noncitizens of that nation but are in fact citizens of the nation that caused the very tragedy remembered at the site. What is it that they are remembering at the memorial, and what kind of history are they seeing at the site? What kind of past is scripted and rescripted? What kind of memories are reenacted for their catharsis and healing? In short, how do these visitors construct the significance of the memorial? And how, in turn, does this memorial condition their identity?∫ Based on observations from fieldwork conducted on the site from April to August 2002 and from reading visitors’ voluntary survey questionnaires, I show that many Japanese see the historic significance of the memorial di√erently from visitors from the U.S. mainland. At the same 236

War Memories across the Pacific

time, I also argue that, despite the di√erent meanings Japanese visitors tend to find in the memorial, the significance of the Arizona Memorial as a national memorial remains strong, as it enhances the nationalist orientation of Japanese visitors. In that respect, whereas many Japanese visitors (often unwittingly) de-Americanize the significance of one of the most important American memorials from their non-U.S. perspectives, their attitude embraces the essentialized notion of the nationstate and therefore is consistent with the perspectives of many of the American visitors to the site. The globalized flow of capital and people through international tourism today brings people of di√erent national identities to sites where the American national identity is celebrated, thereby producing multiple understandings of such sites within the framework of contemporary international relations.

Japanese Visitors to Hawaii and to the Arizona Memorial Hawaii receives about 7 million visitors every year from all over the world. The Japanese have particularly been drawn to the islands since the restriction on foreign travel for pleasure was lifted in 1964. During the years of economic prosperity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the number of visitors from Japan to Hawaii grew rapidly, reaching 2 million in 1996. While the economic stagnation as well as the heightened security concerns of travelers in the late 1990s and during the early part of the next decade caused a decline in the number of visitors to about 1.5 million a year, Hawaii remains one of the most popular vacation destinations among the Japanese. The state of Hawaii promotes the islands aggressively in Japan because its economy depends heavily on the money spent by these visitors.Ω The overwhelming majority of visitors from Japan stay for at least some time on Oahu (where Honolulu is located), though in recent years an increasing number are flying to other islands in search of the ‘‘real’’ Hawaiian experience.∞≠ The average length of their stay on the island is less than six days, and many spend most of their time shopping and enjoying the beach. A few venture out to areas outside of Waikiki to visit ‘‘cultural sites’’ such as the Bishop Museum and Honolulu Academy of Arts, both of which can be accessed by trolley buses operated by tour companies. The exact number of Japanese visitors to the Arizona Memorial is yujin yaguchi

237

unknown because the Park Service does not keep a complete tally of di√erent nationals who visit the site. A visitors survey conducted in 2000 estimates the figure to be less than 10 percent of all visitors.∞∞ This would mean that about 150,000 Japanese visitors, or about 10 percent of the total who arrive in Hawaii, come to the memorial every year, a number which is in sharp contrast to the number of visitors from the mainland United States, for whom the experience is considered ‘‘a must.’’∞≤ Group tours constitute a significant portion of Japanese visitors to the memorial. A half-day tour of Pearl Harbor from Waikiki generally costs between $40 and $50. It leaves from Waikiki hotels early in the morning and includes tours of both the Arizona Memorial and the uss Bowfin Museum, located just across from the visitors center, where a submarine that was known as the ‘‘Pearl Harbor avenger’’ during the war is displayed. A half-day or one-day tour of Oahu, costing anywhere between $80 and $300, also includes a stop in Pearl Harbor. But while seeing the introductory film at the visitors center and taking the boat trip to the memorial takes at least seventy-five minutes, many of these tours take only about thirty minutes—just enough time for the visitors to walk through the small museum located at the visitors center and view the memorial from the shore. In recent years, the number of Japanese visitors who come on their own by either taking the local bus or taxi or renting a car is increasing. Depending on the time required to wait before they can see the film and take the boat ride, which can be up to three hours during the busy summer months, many also simply decide to walk around the visitors center and look at the memorial from the shore. These visitors are not inclined to ‘‘waste’’ so much time at the memorial because their visit is often scheduled as a brief stopping point on their tour of the island. Accordingly, there is a great degree of di√erence in how Japanese visitors tour the memorial. Some spend only half an hour or less, while those who do the entire tour, consisting of the introductory film and the boat ride to the memorial, will spend at least one and a half hours in the area. The visitors I interviewed during my fieldwork were those who took the entire tour. Those who answered the visitor survey questionnaire were also mostly visitors who spent a significant amount of time at the memorial. Therefore, it must be remembered that the information used in this essay is based on a relatively select group of people: those who decided to spend some time at the memorial and 238

War Memories across the Pacific

after the tour were willing to share their feelings and experiences by filling out the questionnaire or in personal interviews. When I first began doing research at the memorial, I had expected to see fewer young visitors because I assumed they would be interested in activities other than this kind of history lesson during their vacation in Hawaii. However, the ages of the visitors seemed to vary considerably. While those who came on tour buses tended to be middle-aged and older, quite a few young men and women, often as couples or in groups, showed up on their own. The summer of 2002 might have been exceptional because the film Pearl Harbor had just been released in Japan and was well received, particularly among the younger fans of action films and of the actor Ben AΔeck. Similarly, the occupational backgrounds of the visitors varied considerably, and both sexes were represented. Overall, the profiles of Japanese visitors to the memorial were diverse, just like the profiles of the visitors to Hawaii, which, unlike two or three decades ago, are no longer predominantly middleclass men.∞≥ The motivations for coming to the memorial seemed equally diverse. Some, as just mentioned, had been influenced by the film. Older people tended to say they wanted to come because they remembered the wartime experience and wanted to see ‘‘where it all started.’’ Some came because it was one of the stops made during the island tour. Many others, particularly those who came on their own rather than with a tour, had come simply because they had run out of places to go or wanted to do something di√erent from shopping and sunbathing. Most of these people had been in Hawaii previously and were looking for a new experience. They had very little specific knowledge about the attack since the incident is not emphasized in Japanese history education.∞∂ Only after going through the tour did many realize the extent of the damage the Japanese attack caused in Pearl Harbor and expressed great surprise to learn that so many people died on that day.

Whose National Memorial? As mentioned earlier, the National Park Service, which jointly operates the site with the Navy, distributes visitor survey questionnaires to those who wish to leave their impression of the memorial. The questionnaires are available in both English and Japanese and ask a series of yujin yaguchi

239

questions with regard to visitors’ impressions of the museum, film, memorial, and other aspects of the site. The questionnaire also provides a blank box where visitors are free to write their impressions or comments about the place. Over the years, a number of Japanese visitors have filled out this form and I had access to approximately four hundred completed forms. The comments reveal a great deal about the variety of feelings the memorial triggered in the minds of these Japanese visitors. Among these, one theme that appears consistently is the visitors’ desire to define the memorial as a monument dedicated to peace. There is constant use of phrases such as ‘‘War is terrible,’’ ‘‘No more war,’’ and ‘‘Peace is important.’’ A seventy-six-year-old woman wrote, ‘‘War is the worst thing’’ and demanded that ‘‘the leaders should exercise responsibility and care for the people so that they will be able to live out their lives happily as human beings.’’ A twelve-year-old girl wrote, ‘‘[After the tour] I felt that war is a very bad thing. It is the same as making people die.’’ A twenty-six-year-old man noted that the ‘‘good point’’ about the memorial is that he was ‘‘able to realize again the tragedy and emptiness of wars as well as the reason why the war happened.’’ Finally, a sixty-two-year-old man argued, ‘‘It is important to leave this as a memorial forever so that we can confront this unfortunate incident in the past and establish an everlasting peace between the United States and Japan. I thank god that I am able to visit this place in this way at a peaceful time.’’∞∑ The tendency of the Japanese visitors to regard the Arizona Memorial as a peace monument is conditioned by the fact that many war sites in Japan, such as the museums in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Okinawa, are generally dedicated to the idea of spreading peace.∞∏ A strong antiwar message is embedded in the narratives of such museums, as they define the Japanese citizens during World War II as tragic victims of bombings and attacks by their enemies. Japanese visitors bring this perspective when viewing the sunken battleship and find a parallel tragedy in the narrative that describes the dead sailors of the Arizona as hapless victims who perished on a quiet Sunday morning without fully realizing what was happening. ‘‘Even though it was an unavoidable war,’’ wrote a fifty-year-old woman, ‘‘it is regrettable that young lives were destroyed in the water. I hope the peace will last.’’ While such a way of interpreting the site within the cultural context of war memorials in Japan is understandable, it is nevertheless in sharp 240

War Memories across the Pacific

contrast to the way most American visitors understand the site. To the visitors from the mainland United States, the memorial celebrates the courage of American sailors that led to the eventual victory over Japan. But at the same time, it also shows a low point in U.S. history, when it was ‘‘suddenly and deliberately’’ attacked by enemy forces and su√ered a devastating loss of life and ships. Thus, the memorial pays respect to the unfortunate sacrifice of the sailors and provides a lesson in failure that should never be repeated. It reminds visitors of the importance of never letting the nation’s guard down and of the need for investing in protecting the nation’s territory and its assets.∞π The fact that the number of visitors to the site increased significantly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, was interpreted by several park rangers as evidence that many American visitors continued to share this way of understanding the site as a rallying point for national defense. Because the majority of the Japanese see the Arizona Memorial as a site dedicated to opposing wars, many expressed a strong desire to see references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which, in Japan, serve together as a metonymic symbol of peace, in the museum exhibit. A woman I interviewed said: I have been in Waikiki since the end of June [two months]. The most impressive place I have visited so far is the Arizona Memorial. I even recommended my friend from ukulele class to go there. When I saw the film, I just could not hold back my tears. As I listened to the Japanese translation, I remembered a peace rally I attended in Nagasaki fifteen years ago. I could almost hear the cry of the people and felt a strong pain in my heart. Tears kept running even after the film and I had to wear my sunglasses. When I went to the memorial and stood above the sunken ship, I felt horrified. More than one thousand people are still inside the ship. I wrote in the questionnaire that the film shown at the Arizona Memorial should also be shown in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In turn, the memorial should also show a film on the a-bombs. This is to show that both nations su√ered a great deal and there is no happiness in wars.

Similarly, a thirty-two-year-old woman wrote in a questionnaire, ‘‘I want Americans to know about Japan, about a-bombs, about the reality Japanese faced, too’’ because such a mutual understanding ‘‘leads to our agreement that war should never be repeated.’’ A fiftyfour-year-old schoolteacher wrote, ‘‘Our lesson to the Japanese should yujin yaguchi

241

be ‘Remember Pearl Harbor,’ and to Americans it should be, ‘Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’ ’’ A twenty-three-year-old man captured this sentiment in another way: ‘‘You emphasize that a large number of Americans was killed. But you should also discuss Hiroshima and Nagasaki so as to show the horror of wars.’’ Such a way of contextualizing the Arizona Memorial within the framework of the use of a-bombs and promotion of peace is quite at odds with the way the National Park Service and Navy present this site today. The only direct reference to the bombing of Japan in the museum appears in a video presentation that explains the historic events before and during the war, originally produced by the History Channel. Otherwise, the memorial avoids direct references to atomic bombs and mostly focuses on the events leading up to the attack and the fate of U.S. sailors on that day as well as the subsequent development of the war, particularly the remarkably rapid recovery of many of the ships that were damaged by the Japanese attack. As one ranger privately told me, the Park Service would like to ‘‘avoid getting into any controversy about the use of a-bombs—we do not want another Smithsonian case here.’’ Japanese visitors see in the Arizona Memorial the first chapter of a longer historical narrative that ends with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby defining the sunken battleship as an essential prelude to the story of the horrible war as well as the mistake committed by the Japanese government, whereas the memorial is presented to Americans as the dedication to an incident that united the spirit of Americans and led them into a victorious war. Not only do many Japanese position the memorial di√erently in their framework of history from many of the U.S. visitors, but they also feel their physical di√erence from others at the site: they become extremely conscious that they are Japanese. Many visitors to the memorial, whether American or Japanese, gain a heightened sense of national subject position as the whole environment—exhibits, films, outdoor displays, and souvenirs in the gift shop, as well as the battleship itself—presents a discourse based on the story of a battle between the United States and Japan. These materials urge visitors to internalize the boundary between the two countries and identify themselves nationally rather than with any other variables of identity. Moreover, this sense of national di√erence is also perceived through the experience of having a di√erent language and appearance from the majority of the visitors. Many Japanese are linguistically unable to comprehend 242

War Memories across the Pacific

the film without purchasing a translation headset and cannot (or are not inclined to try to) read the labels in the museum and panels located along the shore, which are written only in English. Moreover, they look distinctively di√erent from most of the other visitors, who, unlike the demographic distribution of Hawaii, are mostly white men and women from the mainland United States. A nineteen-year-old female was ‘‘surprised to see there were more white people and fewer Japanese people around.’’ ‘‘The whole time I was on the tour,’’ she continued, ‘‘I kept thinking that this happened because of what we Japanese did and felt very sad.’’ This experience of marginality further reinforces their sense of di√erence at the site. Yet, at the same time, Japanese visitors also consider themselves an integral part of the site because they see themselves as the descendants of the agent of the attack whose actions constitute a critical element in the making of this site. When they are confronted by the description of the Japanese attack, Japanese visitors feel intensely ‘‘embarrassed,’’ ‘‘sorry,’’ and ‘‘responsible’’ for what happened. A man who was born a year before the attack wrote on the comment sheet, ‘‘The war was begun because the Japanese were arrogant and complacent.’’ He continued, ‘‘As one of them, I feel sorry.’’ A sixtyfive-year-old man began, ‘‘First of all, I would like to express my sincere apology to the United States.’’ A seventy-two-year-old woman lamented, ‘‘What a stupid thing we did, even now my heart aches.’’ This urge to apologize is seen not only among the older generation but also among the younger generation. A twenty-eight-year-old woman wrote, ‘‘I am filled with a feeling of apology,’’ while a fourteen year old said, ‘‘Up until now, I had a bit of grudge [against the United States] for dropping the a-bombs. But I saw this from the American perspective for the first time and realized that our ancestors did a very bad thing. I am so ashamed and want to apologize.’’ Thus to many Japanese the memorial itself is also theirs, even though they feel alienated and marginalized from the setting. This is a place to reflect upon the actions of their ancestors and apologize on their behalf and pray for peace in the world. A twenty-six-year-old woman visited the memorial ‘‘without thinking much about it,’’ but ‘‘when the whole tour was over’’ she felt ‘‘terrible.’’ She felt so shocked that she urged the Japanese to ‘‘think more deeply’’ than she did if they decide to visit the place. The combination of their physical and linguistic di√erences as well yujin yaguchi

243

as the narrative structure of the memorial that emphasizes and displays the historic tension and animosity between the United States and Japan positions many Japanese to claim their Japaneseness strongly. Repeatedly, comments begin with the phrase ‘‘Nihonjin to shite’’ or ‘‘As Japanese.’’ In this respect, despite the di√erent meanings the Japanese tourists find at the site, the e√ect of the Arizona Memorial as a national memorial remains strong. There was, however, one memorable exception I encountered during my research at the memorial. This was a moment when the nationalist discourse of the site was transformed into a more tangibly personal one. One day, an old Japanese man came with his wife, children, and grandchildren. He had come to Hawaii because one of his grandchildren was getting married. As I spoke to his son, I learned that it had been the old man’s wish to see the memorial. ‘‘Grandpa wanted to visit here for the first time in almost sixty years,’’ he said. This old man was one of the pilots who attacked the harbor in 1941. While I was talking to his son, the man said very little and kept staring at the harbor from the shore. Then he finally said, ‘‘Natsukashii des,’’ a phrase that loosely translates as ‘‘It reminds me of old days.’’ I decided to introduce this veteran to an American survivor of the attack who happened to be serving as a ‘‘witness volunteer’’ on that day. This man had been on board the uss Pennsylvania on December 7, 1941, and was badly wounded as a result of the attack. He later retired in Hawaii and decided to return to Pearl Harbor as a volunteer to share the story of that day with visitors. I knew he had been in touch with some Japanese veterans previously and would be interested in meeting with this man. The conversation between the two was brief but suggestive of how those who can claim ‘‘We were there on that day’’ can appropriate this public site and personalize it. The American survivor asked the Japanese man what kind of plane he was flying, whether it was a bomber or attack plane. The Japanese veteran in turn asked the American which ship he had been on board that day. Upon hearing the answer, he grinned and said, ‘‘I don’t think I attacked you.’’ ‘‘No kidding,’’ the American jokingly retorted and said, ‘‘I remember seeing you from the deck!’’ The two men then smiled, hugged each other, took photos, and parted. The conversation between these two old veterans, which was not unlike a dialogue from a high school reunion, repositioned the event 244

War Memories across the Pacific

into a personal story rather than the more generalized nationalist narrative of the past presented at the memorial. Of course, as Marie Thorsten shows in her analysis of the series of encounters between American and Japanese veterans of the Pearl Harbor attack during the decade of the 1990s, the personal framing of the memory of the attack by the veterans conceals as much as it reveals. The veterans’ sense of ownership over knowledge of the event often precludes di√erent ways of historicizing the incident. As Thorsten argues, these encounters, despite their significance, ultimately bring ‘‘limited emotional convergences in enemies with common experiences, while leaving untouched a vast body of unanswered questions.’’∞∫ Nevertheless, this encounter between the two old men and their personal reminiscence of the event signaled a notable exception to the strongly nationalized public memory most visitors derive from this site. At the same time, it showed how such tangibly personal relations to the site, something not unlike what frequently happens at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, are easily engulfed and silenced by the more public discourse of international history and relations at this memorial.

Erasing Competing Voices Japanese visitors’ tendency to see a nationally framed history strengthens other exclusionary forces at the memorial. That is, their strong identity as Japanese nationals deflects their attention from such issues as ‘‘capitalist economic expansion, nationalism, and military domination that exist in common across national borders.’’∞Ω The most vivid example of this is a complete lack of reference to and interest in what this site had been prior to World War II. Because this site is defined as the ‘‘beginning’’ of a seminal event in the history of U.S.-Japan relations, it is di≈cult for Japanese visitors to imagine the area before that beginning. Not surprisingly, few, if any, ask what Pearl Harbor had been prior to the Japanese attack. Despite the emergence of strong interest in Native Hawaiian culture and tradition in recent years among some Japanese tourists, the significance of this area for Native Hawaiians—this had actually been an important and sacred fishing ground for Native Hawaiians for many generations before the militarization—is hardly explored.≤≠ Moreover, because the memorial defines itself as the place where the conflict between the two nations began, yujin yaguchi

245

visitors generally do not question the significance of the war outside the place. What happened as a result of the attack to Japanese immigrants and to people of Japanese ancestry in Hawaii, for example, is a question that was never posed while I was there. Notable incidents such as the quick implementation of martial law and internment of almost fifteen hundred residents of Japanese ancestry as well as the enlistment of Nisei soldiers to fight against Japan were neither explained nor inquired about. As the rhetoric of the memorial locates the time and space of the war in the United States only in Pearl Harbor, there is almost a complete erasure of the history of local life in and around the area.≤∞ Furthermore, inasmuch as the Japanese understand this memorial as a site for the remembrance of the history of a tragedy and the celebration of the subsequent peace between the two nations, the memorial transforms World War II into a conflict between Japan and the United States, thereby erasing the significance of Japan’s colonialist engagement that had existed long before the attack in 1941. True, the museum at the memorial as well as the introductory film shown in the theater mention the events leading to the war, which include Japanese aggression into China. But the e√ect of ‘‘This is where it started’’ is so strong that the history of Japanese activities in Asia prior to the incident is relegated to the background, if not to oblivion. The repeated request by Japanese visitors to have Hiroshima and Nagasaki included in the museum exhibit is indicative of how the memorial encourages a binational approach to the understanding of World War II. Many argue that references to Hiroshima and Nagasaki would tell the story of the war in its ‘‘entirety’’ because that way ‘‘people can see the beginning and the ending.’’ While this type of rhetoric is, as explained earlier, usually couched in terms of a desire to show the ‘‘folly of fighting wars’’ and to ‘‘spread peace in the world,’’ the plotting of the narrative in such a way serves to erase what had occurred years before this ‘‘beginning.’’ The Arizona Memorial enables the Japanese visitors to gain a linear narrative that positions the attack on Pearl Harbor as a terribly mistaken and yet necessary process through which the Japanese were ultimately able to turn themselves into a peaceful people and establish a normalized relationship with the United States. After looking at the sunken battleship in the water, many visitors felt ‘‘grateful’’ for the peace and good relationship with the United States they enjoy today. The memorial enables Japanese 246

War Memories across the Pacific

visitors to internalize a binary narrative of the war as Japan versus the United States and thereby to reconfigure Japan’s experiences in the war as a ‘‘necessary condition for its postwar peace and prosperity under U.S. hegemony’’ while erasing and absolving the Japanese aggression in Asia.≤≤ Finally, the nationalist orientation to the understanding of the Pearl Harbor attack enables Japanese visitors to see and define themselves as members of an international community interested in maintaining the stability of the world. By doing so, Japanese visitors can ally themselves with the Americans as members of today’s world community who have a vested interest in and responsibility for maintaining peace in the world. Some of them were especially touched by the recording of the words of President George H. W. Bush, broadcast on the boat as it returns to the visitors center from the memorial, derived from a speech he gave at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the attack in 1991. In that speech the former president and veteran of World War II specifically stated that he had ‘‘no rancor against the Germans or Japanese.’’ One visitor wrote that she found in this phrase the ‘‘depth and width of the American mind and felt grateful.’’ The visitors interpreted Bush’s remark as a gracious gesture of forgiveness by the leader of the U.S. government, which, in turn, required them to work hard to promote peace, friendship, and understanding between the two countries. This feeling was particularly notable during my research, partly because it was only shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Japanese visitors defined the Pearl Harbor attack as an international incident that was fundamentally di√erent from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Regardless of how apologetic they were, they viewed the 12/7 attack as a national act stemming from the need—however unjustifiable it may have been—to conduct a war against the nation of the United States. They viewed the Pearl Harbor incident, which served as the de facto declaration of war by the nation of Japan against the United States, as essentially and qualitatively di√erent from the terrorist attacks, which could not be attributed to any particular nation. While explicit comparisons between the Pearl Harbor attack and the terrorist attack were being made in the United States, most Japanese visitors vigorously denied that there were any parallel structures linking the two incidents.≤≥ Instead, they kept emphasizing the importance of binational collaboration between Japan and the United States to maintain peace responsibly in the world.≤∂ In that respect, the yujin yaguchi

247

Japanese understanding of the Pearl Harbor attack enabled the possibility of an international understanding between the United States and Japan while positing a common uncivilized other that potentially stood against them.

Conclusion Over the years, scholars have investigated various sites of national commemoration in the United States to understand and critique how such sites serve to condition the identities of visitors. Di√erent analyses show that the significance of such memorials is often layered with complexities, as those who visit such sites see and experience the memorials di√erently, a√ected by their sex, race, class, place of birth, personal experiences, and other factors.≤∑ One factor that remains relatively unexplored is the visitors’ citizenships and their national identities. In the United States, there is often an underlying assumption that these memorials are seen and experienced by people who identify themselves as Americans. But that is far from the case at the Arizona Memorial and is likely not so at any other well-known memorial either, given the current state of global tourism and the movement of people across national boundaries. Based on interviews and questionnaires obtained during fieldwork conducted at the site, this essay has shown that the significance of the Arizona Memorial as a national memorial remains strong among both Japanese and American visitors. True, the Japanese sense of national belonging, which is primarily generated through their feeling of distance from the victims of the attack as well as from other visitors at the site, di√ers from the patriotic nationalism of the many American visitors who identify strongly with the victims. Nonetheless, the memorial produces an equally strong feeling of national identity among the Japanese visitors. I want to end by suggesting that the Arizona Memorial needs to be considered in relation to other tourist sites in Hawaii. In particular, the significance of the site should be understood in relation to Waikiki, where the majority of Japanese visitors stay while in Oahu. Because the presence of the Japanese tourists is so economically important for the local economy, Waikiki is carefully set up to satisfy their various demands. Hotels and restaurants as well as many shops have signs in Japa248

War Memories across the Pacific

nese and sta√ who speak Japanese. Waikiki is so convenient for the Japanese that some visitors from Japan even comment rather disapprovingly and disappointedly that ‘‘Hawaii is pretty much the same as Japan.’’ A thirty-minute trip to the Arizona Memorial, however, provides these Japanese visitors with an entirely di√erent feeling. The contrast between Japanese-dominated Waikiki and the American-dominated national memorial in Pearl Harbor is so striking that the Japanese visitors frequently note in the survey questionnaire that they are surprised and feel rather unsettled to find ‘‘so few Japanese here, unlike Waikiki.’’ At the same time, this lack of Japanese presence and the Americanness of the site satisfy their expectations as tourists in America. Here is a site that is definitely not ‘‘pretty much the same as Japan,’’ a place where the Japanese are made to feel ‘‘other.’’ This feeling of marginality, which is in sharp contrast with their experience in Waikiki, further enhances their international perspective on the site and enables them to script and rescript their experience within a nationbased framework. This scripting, while o√ering the possibilities for deAmericanizing the significance of this American monument, simultaneously submerges other possible perspectives to the site. Most visitors are unable to see the memorial and the past it represents in ways that are not bound by a framework of nations. Neither is the historically contested sense of the place as part of a former independent kingdom, which did not belong to either of the two nations that serve as the constitutive elements of the memorial today, recognized. Many Japanese visitors, in that respect, forget as much as they remember through this intense lesson in history.

Notes 1 Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Kathy E. Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull, Oh, Say, Can You See? The Semiotics of the Military in Hawai’i (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Geo√rey M. White, ‘‘Moving History: The Pearl Harbor Film(s),’’ in T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The AsiaPacific War(s) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 267–295; Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

yujin yaguchi

249

2 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 3 Ferguson and Turnbull, Oh, Say, Can You See?, 148. 4 It is important to note that the National Park Service makes a considerable e√ort to mark the site as a ‘‘sacred tomb’’ of the sailors who died on the day of the attack. Therefore, some rangers and volunteers not only inform the visitors of the number of sailors and civilians killed but also relate individual stories of some of those who died on the day, such as their name, age, place of birth, and siblings (often brothers were on board the same ship) and what they were doing on the day. 5 White explains that a part of the reason the National Park Service decided to make a new film for the visitors’ center was because some visitors thought the first film was too ‘‘deferential’’ to the Japanese as it referred to the ‘‘brilliance’’ of Isoroku Yamamoto as a strategist. While I was working as a volunteer at the site, I heard several complaints about the ‘‘attitudes of the Japanese.’’ In most of these cases, the visitors mistaken for Japanese were Chinese nationals from the Chinese mainland, who tended to come in larger tour groups (and therefore were often somewhat loud) and whose understanding of the memorial clearly di√ers from that of the Japanese. 6 Linenthal, Sacred Ground, 192. 7 Sturken, Tangled Memories, 75, 17. 8 On these issues, see also Geo√rey M. White, ‘‘Memory Wars: The Politics of Remembering the Asia-Pacific War,’’ Asia Pacific Issues 21 (1995): 1. 9 State of Hawaii, Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, 2004 Annual Visitor Research Report, 7. Available at www3. hawaii.gov/dbedt/images/User — FilesImages/visitorstats/annual/2004 — Annual — Visitors — Research — Report — Final — a1988.pdf (accessed September 2005). 10 Ikezawa Natsuki, Hawaii Kiko ( Journey through Hawaii) (Tokyo: Shin Chosha, 1996); Yujin Yaguchi and Mari Yoshihara, ‘‘Evolutions of ‘Paradise’: Japanese Tourist Discourse about Hawai’i,’’ American Studies 45, no. 3 (fall 2004): 81–106. 11 Visitor Services Project Cooperative, Park Studies Unit, uss Arizona Memorial Visitor Survey, 2000. 12 In 2004, the total number of visitors to Hawaii from the U.S. mainland was just over 4.5 million. Given that the majority of the 1.5 million visitors to the Arizona Memorial are assumed to be Americans (though no certain figures are available), it can be estimated that about 20 to 30 percent

250

War Memories across the Pacific

of the American visitors to Hawaii go to the memorial, which is at least twice as many as the number of the Japanese visitors. 13 Yujin Yaguchi, Hawaii no Rekishi to Bunka (History and Culture of Hawaii) (Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2002). 14 The attack on Pearl Harbor is invariably included in Japanese history textbooks, but often schools spend very little time on the attack. My personal observation at Japanese universities suggests that very few students know much about the attack. Few remember the date of the attack, and even fewer can correctly estimate how many were killed on that day. Most think the number of deaths caused by the Japanese attack was less than one hundred. 15 These comments were all in Japanese and have been translated by the author. 16 A notable exception is Yushukan Museum at Yasukuni Shrine, where the nation’s past wars are glorified as courageous and necessary battles against Western imperialism. The museum’s message is controversial, and despite the increasing trend toward nationalism in Japan it has not gained widespread support or enjoyed as many visitors as the Hiroshima Peace Museum. 17 Kurt G. Piehler, Remembering War the American Way (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1995), 152; Linenthal, Sacred Ground, 182. 18 Marie Thorsten, ‘‘Treading the Tiger’s Trail: American and Japanese Pearl Harbor Veterans Reunions in Hawai’i and Japan,’’ Cultural Values: Journal of Cultural Research 6 (2002): 338; see also Linenthal, Sacred Ground, 203. 19 Lisa Yoneyama, ‘‘For Transformative Knowledge and Postnationalist Public Spaces: The Smithsonian Enola Gay Controversy,’’ in T. Fujitani et al., Perilous Memories, 337. 20 Yaguchi and Yoshihara, ‘‘Evolutions of ‘Paradise’ ’’; Yujin Yaguchi, ‘‘Hula in Japan,’’ paper presented at the Association for Asian American Studies, Los Angeles, 2005. 21 A similar point is raised by Ferguson and Turnbull in their analysis of American visitors at the memorial. 22 Yoshiyuki Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 13, 35. 23 Geo√rey White, ‘‘Pearl Harbor and September 11: War Memory and American Patriotism in the 9–11 Era,’’ in Laura Hein and Daizaburo Yui, eds., Crossed Memories: Perspectives on 9/11 and American Power (Tokyo: Center for Pacific and American Studies, University of Tokyo, 2003); Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live, 174–189.

yujin yaguchi

251

24 Because many visitors believed in the importance of an international approach to peace, some were actually quite critical of George W. Bush’s unilateralist policy in bombing Afghanistan and his strong push for attacking Iraq. Many mentioned that they were baΔed by the total lack of e√ort by the U.S. government to pursue peace through international cooperation. 25 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

252

War Memories across the Pacific

Memory and the Lost Found Relationship between Black Americans and Japan

. marc gallicchio

Most Americans, and nearly all Japanese, would be surprised to learn that for the first four decades of the twentieth century Japan played an important role in the worldview of African Americans. Black Americans’ interest in Japan was widely known at the time. Japan figured prominently in the era’s black press and in the speeches and published works of many prominent African Americans. In the 1930s pro-Japanese groups appeared in black communities in most of the major cities of the North and Midwest. The Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) also incorporated Japan into its early eschatology.∞ Finally, during World War II black American attitudes about Japan became a matter of intense national concern. Until recently, the memory of that moment had all but faded from public awareness. This memory lapse is puzzling for several reasons. For almost forty years prominent African American leaders had publicly connected the fate of their constituents to the status of Japan in world a√airs. During that period, the image of Japan presented by black leaders helped shape a public narrative about U.S.-Japan relations which in many ways conflicted with the dominant white narrative about the origins of the Pacific War. Following the war, reminders of black Americans’ earlier a≈nity for Japan occasionally surfaced in scholarly studies and contemporary literature. For various reasons, however, the memory of that earlier experience has seemed so jarring and out of tune with the postwar beliefs of black Americans that it has only recently begun to receive sustained attention.≤ The broad outlines of African Americans’ interest in Japan have long been available through the public record. Recently declassified records have added depth and detail to that story. The freshet of new documentation does not, however, explain why the story was lost in

8

the first place.≥ Here it is helpful to refer to some of the contributions of scholars interested in the development of collective memory. According to a recent survey by historians, African Americans are more likely than their white counterparts to place their individual memories in the context of a broader national history.∂ Another theory holds that ‘‘the creation and maintenance of collective memory is a dynamic social and psychological process.’’ Members of a group need to talk and think about an event to keep it alive. This interaction is ‘‘critical’’ to the assimilation of an event into the collective memory.∑ Both of these theories, with some modification, describe aspects of the African American experience with Japan before World War II. During the prewar era, African American discussions of Japan often linked international events a√ecting Japan to analogous problems that black Americans faced at home. In this respect African Americans successfully connected their own experiences to a larger story of international struggle. These public discussions of international events helped shaped a separate narrative of U.S.-Japan relations that seeped into the collective memory of many black Americans. In the period of international tension immediately preceding Pearl Harbor portions of that memory were retrieved and widely disseminated, at first through the black press and then in the white-owned media. But what if a group ceases to talk about an event? Societies may wish to deliberately forget or erase unpleasant memories. But deliberate acts of self-deception are not the only way that societies can forget. One theory holds that only those events that transformed the lives of the concerned group are likely to survive across generations. Moments of turmoil or political upheaval such as the 1848 revolutions in Europe, the Korean War, or, it is predicted, the first Persian Gulf War, that result in no major ‘‘institutional alterations’’ are ‘‘much less likely to become part of a society’s collective memory’’ than events that produce lasting change.∏ Although these theories about collective memory refer to events, they o√er some suggestions for interpreting a less sharply defined phenomenon such as the African American experience with Japan. I suggest that black Americans ceased talking and thinking about Japan in a particular way because such rhetoric no longer o√ered much hope of producing desirable results. Indeed, during the first year of World War II these previously held public attitudes about Japan threatened to undermine African American e√orts to win full citizenship. After a 256

Black Americans and Japan

brief period of turmoil, that moment of crisis passed without permanently harming the e√orts of civil rights advocates. Having produced no lasting political change in black American life, and having lost any political usefulness, the memory of prewar interest in Japan faded. Theories about remembering and forgetting raise questions about what, if anything, fills the void created by a case of selective amnesia. In the example presented here, it appears that black Americans’ embrace of a new popular narrative helped displace the earlier account of the coming of the Pacific War. The new narrative, the story of Double v, fit more readily into the collective memory being shaped during the postwar years of the civil rights struggle. It left little room for previously held ideas about Japan as an ally in the struggle for equal rights. By the 1980s and early 1990s scholars began to rediscover the forgotten story of black American interest in Japan. At that moment relations between Japan and the United States seemed conducive to a renewed interest in Japan among black Americans. That interest, combined with new scholarly e√orts, might have rekindled some of the forgotten memories of the prewar era. Instead, a new unfavorable image of Japan lodged itself in the collective memory of black Americans, and the idea of Japan as an ally in the quest for racial equality receded further from view.

Black Internationalism and Japan During the years when much of the world came under the sway of Europeans or the descendants of Europeans in America, black Americans constructed a view of world a√airs that drew a connection between the discrimination they faced at home and the expansion of empire abroad. This ideology of ‘‘black internationalism’’ stressed the role of racism in world a√airs. As a corollary to that main principle, black internationalists held that nonwhite peoples, most of whom lived in a state of colonial subjugation, shared a common interest in overthrowing white supremacy and creating an international order based on racial equality.π For the first four decades of the twentieth century, African American perceptions of Japan developed within the framework of black internationalism. Identification with or admiration for Japan led many African Americans to construct a counternarrative of American marc gallicchio

257

policy in Asia that portrayed Japan as a victim of prejudice and, in some cases, as a champion of nonwhite peoples in the years before Pearl Harbor. Most white Americans fashioned a popular narrative that presented the Mukden incident, the Rape of Nanjing, and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor as connected steps in a calculated plan of aggression and imperial expansion. Many black Americans held to an alternative explanation for the war that rationalized Japanese actions and blamed the United States for threatening Japan’s existence. This counternarrative began in 1905, not 1931. The milestones on this road to the Pacific War were Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905, the rejection of Japan’s request for a racial equality clause in the League of Nations Charter, and the Japanese exclusion provision in the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924. These ideas reached the black public through the black press and the e√orts of Marcus Garvey, the most successful mass leader of African Americans in the interwar period. Garvey is best known for his emphasis on self-reliance in the black community through his Universal Negro Improvement Association (unia) and for his chimerical back-to-Africa schemes. At rallies, however, and through his own publication, the Negro World, Garvey and his lieutenants regularly instructed unia members to take comfort from the favorable correlation of forces emerging in the nonwhite world. Japan came in for special attention in this regard. At a rally in Los Angeles, unia vice president J. D. Gordon admonished members not to support the anti-Japanese movement in California. Gordon explained that the ‘‘Japanese are our best friends because they injected into the peace conference the equality of races without regard to color.’’∫ Similarly, because they viewed white racism as the main cause of friction between Japan and the United States, unia spokespersons interpreted the Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922) as an attempt on the part of the white world to weaken Japan.Ω Garvey’s indictment in 1923 for mail fraud and his subsequent deportation in 1927 e√ectively ended the unia as a force for the mobilization of black Americans. Nevertheless, his ideas, especially his positive views of Japan, outlived the unia. Although historians once regarded Garvey’s arrest and deportation as the end of his influence over black Americans, it now seems clear that elements of Garveyism survived throughout the 1930s even without the charismatic Jamaican at the helm. Throughout the North and Midwest, Garvey’s followers and poten258

Black Americans and Japan

tial successors organized and chartered race-based self-help groups modeled on the unia.∞≠ Two of the most important were the Development of Our Own, located in Detroit, and the Pacific Movement of the Eastern World. Nakane Naka, a Japanese immigrant by way of Canada, incorporated the Development of Our Own in Michigan in 1933. To gain adherents among black Americans, Nakane took the alias Satokata Takahashi and claimed he was a Japanese major and representative of the Black Dragon Society, a Japanese patriotic organization. The Pacific Movement of the Eastern World began as an o√shoot of the Development of Our Own. Its leader, Policarpio Manansala, attended unia meetings in the Midwest and later visited Nakane’s organization. Seeing Nakane’s success, Manansala, a Filipino, began to present himself as a Japanese citizen named Dr. Ashima Takis. Eventually, Manansala and his associates formed chapters in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Kansas, Pittsburgh, and New York. The New York organization benefited from the assistance of Robert O. Jordan, a former unia member. Like the Development of Our Own, the Pacific Movement highlighted Japan’s role as champion of the darker races and promised Japan’s support for black Americans. The unia successor groups never approached the half-million membership historians attribute to Garvey’s organization.∞∞ It is nevertheless significant that during the 1930s, those who sought to organize or profit from the impoverished inhabitants of northern ghettoes used their alleged connections to Japan as a way to win the confidence of African Americans. Despite the meteoric trajectory of his own career, it seems clear that Marcus Garvey continued to influence African American ideas about Japan well after his arrest. Assessing the Development of Our Own and the Pacific Movement, the fbi paid a left-handed tribute to the Jamaican’s influence by noting that ‘‘the fountainhead from which stem most of the crack-pot [N]egro organizations seeking escape from social and economic restrictions is the Universal Negro Improvement Association.’’∞≤ Black Americans did not need to belong to the unia or join the vaguely subversive groups led by Nakane or Manansala to learn how Japan provoked white hostility by furthering the cause of racial equality. The black press retailed such views to its readers on a regular basis throughout the interwar era. By the outbreak of World War II, black weeklies had a circulation of one and a half million. These papers were read aloud, passed among families, and available in small businesses marc gallicchio

259

frequented by African Americans. Scholars estimated that one in three urban families subscribed to one of the major black newspapers and that ‘‘practically all Negroes who can read are exposed to the influence of the Negro press.’’ But ideas presented in the black press were also passed by word of mouth so that they reached even those who could not read.∞≥ As the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal explained, the black press was a ‘‘fighting press.’’ It forcefully represented black demands for equality and single-mindedly interpreted local, national, and international news in terms of its e√ects on African Americans. In doing so the black press embraced ‘‘the whole race world’’ and defined ‘‘the Negro group to the Negro himself.’’ More than any other institution in black life, the press created a sense of group identity and consciousness among African Americans.∞∂ In addition to creating a sense of solidarity among black Americans, the black press also contributed to the growing conviction that the black fight for equality was part of a larger global struggle. Reports on Mohandis Gandhi and the Indian independence movement appeared more frequently in black weeklies during this period. In the mid1930s, the plight of Ethiopia commanded greater attention. Sympathetic stories on Japan also appeared throughout the interwar period, figuring most prominently during periods of international tension. Commenting on this trend in the early 1920s, the sociologist Robert Park observed that black Americans’ internationalist approach to race relations made them citizens of the world and led them to seek alliances and develop loyalties beyond the borders of the United States.∞∑ Park referred specifically to Pan-Africanism, but he could easily have included Japan in his analysis. The black press welcomed Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905 as a blow to the myth of white supremacy. During the Paris Peace Conference ending World War I, black reporters and columnists similarly applauded Japan’s e√orts to write a racial equality clause into the League of Nation’s charter.∞∏ Like Garvey, columnists writing for the black press viewed the Washington Naval Conference as a white attempt to check the rising power of a nonwhite nation. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples’ James Weldon Johnson declared that ‘‘the chief purpose in calling a conference is not to place a limitation on armaments but to place a limit upon the influence of Japan in the Far East.’’∞π Favorable attitudes about Japan and the Japanese persisted, even 260

Black Americans and Japan

when such views ran counter to the immediate economic interests of black Americans. Despite their support for immigration restriction as a means of improving African Americans’ economic opportunities, the major black weeklies opposed the Japanese exclusion provision in the 1924 Immigration Act. Black commentators denounced the measure for singling out the Japanese on racial grounds and viewed white exclusion of the Japanese as part of a larger pattern of discrimination through which whites maintained their economic supremacy over all nonwhite Americans. Some of this sympathy for Japan evaporated after Ozawa Takao, a Japanese living in the United States, sued to gain citizenship on the grounds that he was white. For the most part, however, because of the infrequent contacts between African Americans and Japanese, black attitudes about Japan were shaped more by international developments than by the actions of Japanese in the United States.∞∫ That pattern held during Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the subsequent creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo. Few observers of the black press could have been surprised when African American commentators defended Japanese actions and condemned the verdict reached by the League of Nations. Once again it appeared that whites were applying a double standard to Japan, condemning it for acts that white nations committed with impunity.∞Ω Black reaction to the crisis so alarmed the American Communist Party that several of its leading black members wrote a rebuttal denouncing the ‘‘robber war of Japanese imperialism.’’≤≠ Their e√orts proved unavailing. During a tour of Asia in 1936–1937, the prominent black scholar and founding member of the naacp, W. E. B. Du Bois, wrote several favorable columns about Japanese imperialism for the Pittsburgh Courier.≤∞ Following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the black press featured numerous editorials, columns, and news stories favoring Japan. Home from his Asian trip, Du Bois defended Japanese rule in Asia as ‘‘the only world leadership that did not mean color or caste.’’ Dismissing American concern for China as cant, Du Bois complained that ‘‘the same spirit that animates ‘the white folks nigger’ in the United States’’ motivated the Chinese to scorn Japan’s leadership in Asia.≤≤ According to the New York Amsterdam News, whose editors opposed the Japanese invasion, the war had become the topic of intense debate on Harlem street corners. The Associated Negro Press’s William Pickmarc gallicchio

261

ens, who was also an o≈cial in the naacp, was reported as defending Japan against criticisms in the white press.≤≥ ‘‘With Japanese troops parading in Shanghai last week,’’ observed the Pittsburgh Courier, ‘‘the white Powers definitely lost ‘face.’ England, France, the United States and the others were told who was boss in Asia and they couldn’t do anything about it. At least there is one part of the earth no longer ruled by white imperialism.’’≤∂ Even the Crisis, the usually circumspect journal of the naacp, featured an article ascribing to Japan a key role in the destruction of white supremacy. According to George Schuyler, by leaving ‘‘erstwhile haughty whites cowering in shell holes of Shanghai,’’ Japan’s swift conquest of coastal China hastened the rise of a ‘‘black internationale’’ that would usher in an era of racial equality.≤∑ By 1940, the tendency among African Americans to sympathize with Japan had become so widespread that Ralph Bunche, a young black scholar, listed it as one of the ‘‘popular theories’’ prevalent among the black masses and educated elite. According to Bunche, this ‘‘racialism of the Garvey type’’ led to an ‘‘optimistic fatalism’’ that the darker races would eventually come out on top. Accordingly, ‘‘the heroic struggle of the British Indians for independence is acclaimed: Japan’s rise to power in the East—even her invasion of China—is regarded as a great source of encouragement.’’≤∏ Considerable indirect and circumstantial evidence exists to support Bunche’s claim of widespread pro-Japanese sentiment among black Americans. Letters to newspaper editors supporting Japan and reports in the press of debates taking place in black neighborhoods provide a picture of divided communities concerned about American policy toward the war in China. Agents working for the Chinese government and Americans seeking aid for China took it for granted that black opinion, especially elite opinion, favored Japan.≤π On the other hand, black Communists worried about lower-class blacks’ susceptibility to Japanese propaganda.≤∫ The revival, however limited, of Garvey’s movement also revealed sympathy for Japan among some of the most destitute African Americans in the North. Unfortunately, hard figures on black public opinion at this time are not available. Most opinion research services did not conduct systematic surveys of black opinion in the interwar period. Moreover, nonwhites, the standard designation pollsters applied to African and Asian Americans, constituted only a small fraction of the sample. The available evidence does, however, suggest a greater inclination among black 262

Black Americans and Japan

Americans to view Japan favorably. The admittedly meager data showed blacks more inclined than whites to see Japan defeat the Soviet Union in the event of a war between the two countries. Black Americans also expressed more opposition than whites to an arms embargo against Japan. In assessing these returns, the political scientist Alfred Hero concluded that black identification with the Japanese and white sympathy for the Russians on the basis of race probably helped explain the di√erent responses between blacks and whites, but that these factors ‘‘were not particularly strong ones.’’≤Ω Elsewhere, however, Hero speculated that black Americans’ answers, especially on questions pertaining to race, probably di√ered according to the race of the person conducting the survey.≥≠ Although it was unavailable to him at the time he wrote, evidence existed already that supported Hero’s hypothesis that the race of the pollster influenced the answers black Americans were likely to provide. Opinion researchers working for the federal government’s O≈ce of Facts and Figures had reached a similar conclusion in early 1942. Alarmed by black apathy toward the war e√ort, the pollsters sought more concrete information on which they could base their propaganda e√orts. Regarding the question ‘‘Would Negroes be treated better under Japanese rule?’’ they found that the race of the questioner significantly a√ected the answers given by black respondents. White pollsters found that only 8 percent of those surveyed believed they would be better o√; black questioners recorded that 18 percent of those questioned thought they would be better o√. The survey also showed that in both samples, ‘‘The better educated appeared to be more kindly disposed to Japanese rule than the less educated.’’≥∞ The researchers believed that black Americans had developed favorable attitudes toward Japan ‘‘as kindred colored peoples’’ as the result of ‘‘some years’’ of Japanese e√orts through personal contacts and the use of printed matter. The most common answer black respondents gave for why they could expect better treatment from the Japanese was that the ‘‘Japanese are also colored, and, therefore, would not discriminate.’’ African Americans were twice as likely to provide that answer to black pollsters than to white ones.≥≤ The O≈ce of Facts and Figures’ conclusion that black sympathy for Japan resulted from ‘‘some years’’ of exposure to the idea that a racial a≈nity existed between Japanese and other nonwhites implies, at least vaguely, the creation of a black collective memory about Japan. During marc gallicchio

263

the twenty-year interwar period sympathetic coverage of Japan in the black press frequently portrayed that nation as a victim of white racism. Popular discussion of this subject presented it in terms familiar and readily accessible to black Americans. Japan’s success had earned it the enmity of the white world in much the same way black economic success aroused the wrath of whites. China’s reliance on white aid in its struggle against Japan was likened to the behavior of a submissive Uncle Tom. Within this discourse familiar dates and events held special significance. Hikida Yasuichi, a Japanese educator and a sometime employee of the foreign ministry with extensive contacts among black intellectuals, identified Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905, the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and the Japanese exclusion provision of the 1924 Immigration Act as key moments in the of growth African American interest in Japan.≥≥ George Schuyler also saw the Russian-Japanese War as a key moment in the ‘‘inevitable’’ struggle between the United States and Japan.≥∂ In trying to dispel the idea of Japan as a champion of the darker races, the columnist J. A. Rogers actually o√ered a partial corroboration of Hikida’s observations. Rogers identified Japan’s victory over Russia as a key moment in his developing admiration for Japan. Although Japanese colonialism in Korea bothered him, he sided with Japan again during the 1913 dispute over alien land legislation in California. That admiration grew when Japan defeated Germany in Asia during World War I. Gradually, however, Rogers grew disenchanted with Japan’s mimicry of the white nations in everything from dress to its dealings with China.≥∑ Although Rogers wrote to persuade his readers to reject Japanese propaganda, other columnists and editors continued to criticize America’s treatment of Japan, even after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In presenting their own interpretation of the origins of the Pacific War, black Americans ran the risk of provoking the federal government into taking action to silence their dissent in a time of national crisis. Nevertheless, editorials, columns, and letters to the editor in black newspapers analyzed the conflict in Asia in terms intimately familiar to many African Americans. Drawing on their own vernacular memory, black writers described Japan as keeping one step ahead of a lynch mob, while China was depicted as an Uncle Tom nation that even allowed the Europeans to post whites-only signs in Shanghai’s parks.≥∏

264

Black Americans and Japan

Black Internationalism and the Double v These expressions of support for Japan did not end immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor. As in 1904, the powerful emotions unleashed by Japan’s humbling of whites produced a brief moment of divided loyalties. Sociologist Horace Cayton recalled that as an American he did not desire a Japanese victory, but as a black man he cheered the spectacle of white men being humbled by the people they derided as ‘‘little yellow bastards.’’ J. Saunders Redding expressed the same feeling of elation before reaching the sober conclusion that life would be worse under the Axis. Similar stories abound. Black workers joked about the sinking of the British warships Repulse and Prince of Wales and otherwise made barbed references to American and British military incompetence.≥π The historian Rayford Logan recalled that Lawrence Reddick recorded some of these street sayings and deposited them in the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection on African American Culture. ‘‘Leave me alone. I’ve got the Japs on my side,’’ was one he recited from memory.≥∫ Field workers for the O≈ce of Facts and Figures reported that black children showed ‘‘a pronounced disposition in their play to pretend that they are Japanese soldiers.’’≥Ω Shortly after the Japanese attack, the journalist George Schuyler cynically declared ‘‘that no matter what a large proportion of Negroes say in private about Japanese aggression and the magnificent retreats, they are publicly behind the government 100 percent. What other alternative have they, except to go to jail?’’∂≠ Government o≈cials worried that these expressions of sympathy for Japan might lead to actual subversion on the part of African Americans. The federal government moved to preempt such a development by simultaneously investigating Japanese influence among black Americans and launching a propaganda e√ort aimed at persuading black Americans to support the war e√ort.∂∞ On several occasions it also seemed that the government might seek to charge black publishers with sedition.∂≤ Under intense scrutiny from the federal government it appears that black protest organizations, the naacp and the Urban League, may have remained silent about the internment of Japanese Americans out of fear that defense of even Japanese Americans might create further suspicion of possible black American ties to Tokyo.∂≥

marc gallicchio

265

African Americans became more cautious in presenting their competing narrative, but they did not abandon it. During the war, black leaders warned government policymakers that racism had become a matter of national security. To drive home this point they asserted that Americans’ sense of racial superiority was responsible for the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor.∂∂ In making the elimination of racism at home a goal of the war, African Americans showed that their memories of the war would di√er from those of white Americans. Shortly after the outbreak of the war, the naacp responded to the lynching of a black man in Sikeston, Missouri, with the rallying cry ‘‘Remember Pearl Harbor . . . and Sikeston, MO.’’∂∑ For its part, the Pittsburgh Courier began displaying a Double v on its papers to express African Americans’ commitment to victory over the forces of tyranny abroad and at home. The paper also took up the cause of Doris ‘‘Dorie’’ Miller, a black messmate who became a hero at Pearl Harbor when he went topside on the uss West Virginia and began firing a .50 caliber machine gun, despite never having been trained to use the weapon. With the Courier in the lead, black leaders used the example of Miller’s heroism to demand full access to combat roles for black servicemen.∂∏ In time, the Double v would be remembered as a symbol of African American patriotic struggle for the right to fight. When victory became imminent, black leaders urged government o≈cials to remember history as African Americans remembered it. Seeking the lessons of history, black leaders argued that the failure to enshrine racial equality in the League of Nations charter and the gratuitous insult embedded in the Immigration Act of 1924 counted as much as the lessons of Munich. Reporting on the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, Du Bois asserted that passage of the repeal would show that ‘‘war with Japan was unnecessary since a similar yielding to Japan would have avoided the chief cause of the war.’’∂π In mid-1944 the Chicago Defender columnist John Robert Badger informed his audience that Japan had acquired the Caroline and Marshall Islands, in which Americans were presently fighting, as a form of compensation for the U.S. failure to support inclusion of a racial equality clause in the League covenant.∂∫ During the Dumbarton Oaks Conference to establish the United Nations, black periodicals reminded readers that American opposition to the racial equality clause in the League covenant started the United States down a road 266

Black Americans and Japan

that led directly to Pearl Harbor. An even more terrible race war seemed in the o≈ng, all agreed, if the United States did not learn from that mistake.∂Ω For the most part, American o≈cials did not heed that advice. The looming challenges to the small gains made by black Americans during the war cast a pall over the final campaigns in the Pacific. Although the Defender attributed the question ‘‘Why are Negroes pro-Japanese?’’ to ‘‘a nasty little crowd of white race rabble rousers,’’ other close observers of the black community believed that many African Americans retained some sympathy for the enemy.∑≠ The columnist Ralph Matthews claimed that ‘‘if left to our dictates’’ many African Americans would sit out the Pacific War. ‘‘Most colored soldiers,’’ he added, ‘‘would rather shoot Germans than Japs, just like most whites would rather shoot Japs than Germans.’’ Nevertheless, Matthews concluded, as patriotic Americans, black gis would do their patriotic duty and ‘‘destroy all enemies of the state.’’∑∞ S. I. Hayakawa, a Japanese American columnist for the Defender, believed there was considerable ‘‘subterranean sympathy for Japan’’ among black Americans.∑≤ Those feelings surfaced briefly at the end of the war in the mixed reaction of black Americans to the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Following the use of the atomic bombs, a poll in the Baltimore Afro-American showed black Americans fully supportive of the government’s unconditional surrender policy. The black press also sought to highlight the contributions of African Americans to the making of the bomb.∑≥ But editors and commentators also worried about the racial implications of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Langston Hughes doubted that the bombs would have been used on Germany, because it was a white nation. The editors of the Defender and the AfroAmerican also wondered if the attacks were final acts of a racial war.∑∂ Roy Wilkins, editor of the naacp’s The Crisis, George Schuyler, and Horace Cayton reacted to the celebrations at the war’s end by denouncing the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as barbaric racist acts. Du Bois lamented that the defeat of Japan would slow the progress of nonwhites everywhere.∑∑ More than a month after Japan’s surrender, the Defender columnist Lucius Harper wrote that it was ‘‘indeed regretful that we hear so many Negroes expressing their sorrow at Nippon’s downfall, believing that a victorious Japan would tolerate no discrimination of color and race.’’∑∏ For more than two decades the black press, Marcus Garvey’s massmarc gallicchio

267

based organization, and his imitators had contributed to a public discussion of the significance of Japan’s rise to power for black Americans. Some black Americans viewed Japan as an important symbol that destroyed the myth of white superiority. Others believed that Japan would directly aid black Americans and other victims of discrimination by taking up the cause of racial equality in international politics. And even if Japan did not champion their cause, at the very least Japan’s power would force the American government to alter its racial policies or face a race war in the future. To interpret international politics in such a way, black Americans took themes from their own collective experience, their remembered past, and applied them to the U.S.-Japan relationship. They also identified key moments in that relationship—the Russo-Japanese War, the Paris Peace Conference, and the 1924 Immigration Act—and assigned them greater significance than did most white Americans. The war restrained but did not prevent many black Americans from remembering the origins of the Pacific War di√erently from most other Americans.

The Double v Ascendant In the aftermath of the war, the struggles at home, the onset of the cold war, and the reinvigoration of black protest movements led to the creation of a new narrative that black Americans and a growing number of whites could embrace. The new narrative, the story of the Double v, was created through a process similar to the one the historian Robert McGlone calls rescripting.∑π The rescripted narrative ‘‘deleted incongruous memories,’’ making recollections of the war fit more readily into the collective memory being shaped during the postwar years of the civil rights struggle. This rescripted narrative of the Double v left little room for previously held ideas about Japan as an ally in the struggle for equal rights. By the early 1960s black Americans’ prewar and wartime identification with Japan seemed irrelevant to the lives of African Americans. This new story emphasized black Americans’ contributions to the war, their overcoming adversity to serve their country, and the hostility they faced at war’s end. It is the now familiar saga of the Double v, victory over fascism at home and abroad, and the fight for the right to fight. The icons in this narrative are A. Philip Randolph, whose March 268

Black Americans and Japan

on Washington Movement pressured the government into creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission, Dorie Miller, and the fighter pilots of the all-black Tuskegee Airmen. To a great extent that story is still being told in public commemorations. Academic scholarship also passed over the subject of African American attitudes toward Japan. The growing cold war consensus filed the sharp edges o√ ideological disagreements and presented American history, including recent events, as a triumph of common sense and shared values. Prewar criticisms of American policy in Asia did not fit into this postwar narrative. African American characterizations of the Pacific War as a race war quickly fell out of view and faded from public memory. The extent to which such views remained a part of the private African American discourse is less easily determined. The historian Reginald Kearney recalls that when his father spoke of his wartime experiences the elder Kearney confided that most black gis harbored ambivalent feelings about the Japanese. According to Kearney’s father, many black soldiers believed that the United States was fighting Japan to defend white supremacy in Asia.∑∫ Occasionally, black authors provided public reminders of the mixed feelings that Kearney’s father shared in private. In Lonely Crusade (1947), Chester Himes’s protagonist, an unemployed college graduate, is thrilled by rumors that Japanese planes have attacked Los Angeles. Concerning the Japanese, Himes’s hero thinks, ‘‘He wanted them to come so he could join them and lead them on to victory: even though he himself knew that this was only the wishful yearning of the disinherited.’’∑Ω Similarly, in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947), Ras the Exhorter, a West Indian immigrant to Harlem, tells black Communists the only allies they should seek are black, yellow, and brown.∏≠ These reminders of black Americans’ empathy or even enthusiasm for Japan did not find a place in the public memory of black Americans. Such attitudes were out of step with the integrationist goals and nonviolent strategy of the growing civil rights movement. Himes dismissed his protagonist’s thoughts as a momentary yearning; Ellison’s Ras is portrayed as a madman.∏∞ The American alliance with Japan occasioned little comment in the black press. What did appear nearly inverted Japan’s previous image in the black publications. Writing about the prevalence of signs barring Japanese from specified trains and public accommodations during the marc gallicchio

269

occupation, the journalist Ralph Matthews noted that the conquerors had given the Japanese a sense of what it felt like to be humiliated. Nevertheless, Matthews added, the Japanese showed no resentment. ‘‘The Japanese,’’ he wrote, ‘‘are either the shrewdest actors or the greatest Uncle Toms in the world. And there are fleeting moments when I lean strongly toward the former concept.’’∏≤ An interested reader employed the same dichotomy after the United States and Japan signed the peace treaty. The reader, J. H. Jenkins, criticized American e√orts to rearm Japan and, like Matthews, wondered if the Japanese were ‘‘extremely clever diplomats’’ or the ‘‘world’s prize Uncle Tom’s.’’∏≥ The following decade saw further erosion of the prewar image of Japan as a foe of white supremacy or victim of Western hypocrisy. C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America (1961), the first serious study of its subject, only briefly mentioned the role of Japan in the movement’s eschatology and factional disputes.∏∂ In 1960, a Japanese delegate to the United Nations criticized South Africa’s apartheid, and Minister of Foreign A√airs Kosaka Zentaro spoke on behalf of the un’s mediation e√orts between colonial powers and rebel forces in Africa. In the course of his statement, Foreign Minister Kosaka reminded listeners that Japan had proclaimed the principle of racial equality ‘‘since the Versailles [sic ] Peace Conference.’’∏∑ African American commentators did not remark on this evocation of the past. Whether they overlooked Japan’s statements at the un or regarded them as unimportant is unclear. By 1963, however, the editors of the Afro-American were more concerned with what they perceived as Japan’s ‘‘condescending attitude toward the present racial conflict throughout the U.S.’’∏∏ Although black Americans’ prewar and wartime identification with Japan seemed irrelevant to the lives of African Americans in the early 1960s, the sociologist Harold Isaacs thought that story was worth remembering if white Americans were ever to understand the changing worldviews of African Americans. Isaacs, who served as a China correspondent for Newsweek during the war, had written a pioneering study in the 1950s about American perceptions of Asia. When he turned his attention to the New World of Negro Americans Isaacs may have been the first postwar author to present African Americans’ interest in Japan as the product of a decades-long process. The question he posed to his friend, the black scholar and civil rights activist Rayford Logan, suggested how little attention African American attitudes about Japan had received in the postwar period. ‘‘Dear Ray,’’ Isaacs 270

Black Americans and Japan

wrote, ‘‘A quick question: Is there such a thing as any Negro reaction to Japan’s victory over Russia in 1905?’’∏π In his published study Isaacs noted that indeed there had been a reaction to the Russo-Japanese War and reminded his readers that ‘‘the Japanese had for a long time aroused ambivalent emotions in the nonwhites elsewhere in the world.’’∏∫ Isaacs saw Du Bois as a major propagandist for the view. Noting Du Bois’s tendency to romanticize ‘‘Negroness and blackness,’’ Isaacs observed that ‘‘Du Bois’ color astigmatism appears even more strongly in the way he dealt with the phenomenon of Japan.’’∏Ω Isaacs pointed out, however, that despite their ambivalent feelings toward Japan, black Americans rejected Japanese propaganda and committed themselves to making World War II a war against racism at home and abroad. Nevertheless, Isaacs cautioned readers that they should not take too much comfort from the fact of black loyalty. ‘‘It is now twenty years later,’’ he wrote ‘‘and they are still fighting that fight. It has been a long, long time and it seems worth noting that Elijah Muhammad, leader of the race-chauvinist ‘Black Muslims’ whose recent rapid growth as a movement among Negroes is a reflection of their despair and discouragement in the struggle, was jailed in 1942 for impeding the draft by teaching his Negro followers that their true interest lay in the victory of their racial kin, the Japanese.’’π≠ By the mid-1960s, the splintering of the civil rights movement, the rise of Black Power advocates, and the reemergence of various black nationalist movements recalled earlier episodes of militant defiance of white authority in the United States. As the radicals of the 1960s told their stories, traces of earlier African American attitudes about Japan reappeared. In his posthumously published autobiography, Malcolm X provided a glimpse of the wartime mood in Harlem toward the Japanese. Recalling that ‘‘spies’’ for the American government watched Harlem for signs of trouble, Malcolm told how he sought to avoid the draft by loudly proclaiming that he was ‘‘frantic to join . . . the Japanese Army.’’π∞ In another memoir, the journalist and sociologist Horace Cayton described his outrage when he learned of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which he regarded as an act of racial barbarism.π≤ John Oliver Killens’s novel And Then We Heard the Thunder (1968) contains a discussion of the black internationalist perception of Japan. Grant, one of the soldiers in the story, explains that the United States provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor because the Americans did marc gallicchio

271

not want to see Japan achieve its destiny, ‘‘which is to lead the colored people to rule the world.’’π≥ The same year Killens’s novel appeared, Roi Ottley’s wartime study of black America, New World A’Coming, was reissued. Ottley’s survey of African American attitudes during the war contained a lengthy treatment of Japanese influence among black Americans under the chapter titled ‘‘Made in Japan.’’π∂ Several years later the first collection of oral histories of black soldiers appeared. Compiled by Mary Penick Motley, The Invisible Soldier was produced to counter what Motley believed was the widespread impression among a new generation of African Americans that there was ‘‘no black history before 1965 . . . and that all before this date is somehow tainted with slavery and ‘tomism.’ ’’π∑ The Invisible Soldier celebrated the valor of black gis, but it also recounted the special hardships they endured fighting in a Jim Crow army. Although none of the more than sixty veterans interviewed mentioned any prewar sympathies for Japan or described the Pacific War as a race war, one did speak of the Japanese in a manner reminiscent of George Schuyler immediately after Pearl Harbor. Describing the island campaigns in the Pacific, Sta√ Sergeant Bill Stevens remembered how the Japanese were often derided as ‘‘monkey men’’ and that ‘‘the big bad American Marines’’ thought they would have little di≈culty defeating ‘‘a colored people.’’ Instead, Stevens recalled, ‘‘The Japanese beat the shit out of our legendary marines.’’π∏ These reminders of earlier black American sympathy for Japan and of the divided loyalties created by the racial implications of the Pacific War did not make much of an impression on the collective memory of African Americans. The standard textbook on African American history does not mention the subject.ππ It appears that white historians found it more necessary to explain what appeared as a historical oddity. In these instances, historians viewed African American interest in Japan as a temporary and misguided enthusiasm. Given that these studies were about American society during the war, it is understandable that the authors did not look beyond the war years for the roots of black interest in Japan. Nevertheless, the e√ect was to present African American attitudes about Japan as a phenomenon unconnected from earlier black history and irrelevant to the future. In other words, it was barely worth remembering.π∫

272

Black Americans and Japan

But various pieces of the black internationalist critique of America did gain adherents during the Vietnam War era. In much the same way that the Black Power movement led to a rethinking of civil rights history in America, the Vietnam War prompted a critical reconsideration of American foreign policy in the twentieth century. This in turn led to a rethinking of American policy toward Japan. In these more explicitly critical interpretations, the Pacific War was not some anomalous ‘‘Good War’’; rather, it was part of a larger pattern of American expansion, in which racism played a fundamental role. John Dower’s War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986) is the most celebrated and highly regarded presentation of this view. In it, Dower reprises an argument first made by black Americans: that the catastrophes of Pearl Harbor and Singapore resulted from American and British racists underestimating Japanese military prowess.πΩ Other historians echo Horace Cayton, George Schuyler, and Langston Hughes in depicting the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as motivated by racism. It appears that the dissemination of these views is beginning to reawaken the memories of black Americans, or they are providing black Americans with a scholarly imprimatur for expressing views they have long held. One of the di≈culties historians are likely to face in dealing with this material is in identifying the vintage of such memories. In other words, have the interviewees carried these memories with them for decades and are now expressing them publicly, or are they the synthetic products of more recent stimuli? The memoir of Nelson Peery demonstrates the perils involved in the process of recording these memories. Peery, an infantryman in the 93rd Division, ended the war in the Philippines. He began his memoir immediately after the war but did not complete it until the early 1990s. It was published in 1994, the year that the debate over the Smithsonian museum’s Enola Gay exhibit began. In his memoir, Peery recalls that upon hearing about Hiroshima, he and his black comrades immediately concluded that the atomic bomb would never have been used on whites. In an interview he gave to the historian Robert Je√erson several years later, Peery embellished this story with information that almost certainly came out of the debate over the Enola Gay exhibit in 1994. Asked about the bomb, Peery recalled that he and his friends had heard that the Army was expecting forty-five thousand to a hundred

marc gallicchio

273

thousand casualties if it invaded Japan. According to Peery, he and the other men in his outfit knew that the later figure of one million casualties was something made up after the war.∫≠ This is doubtful. It is highly unlikely that soldiers would have been familiar with the closely guarded casualty projections being produced by the general sta√ in the summer of 1945. The casualty figures that Peery cites first became public during the Enola Gay controversy and were widely debated in the press. Peery’s ‘‘revised’’ memory is one example of the pitfalls one faces in using oral histories to reconstruct the past. How much of his interview and memoir is remembered, and how much is filtered through other experiences? Another problem concerns the nature of the questions one is asked and the atmosphere in which interviewees are called on to answer them. For example, a survey of Internet sites, museum exhibits, and black publications, including The Crisis and the popular magazines Ebony and Jet, suggests that commemorations of African American service in World War II remain firmly embedded in the patriotic narrative of the Double v.∫∞ Although mostly in the heroic mode, these commemorations address the issue of American racism more forthrightly than does Tom Brokaw’s enormously popular The Greatest Generation, which comes close to segregating the issue of race from its other topics.∫≤ It seems likely that unless one asks a specific question about race, the Japanese, and the Pacific War, these issues will never be discussed. This raises an interesting question: To what extent do the people staging the events or interviews create or shape the memories they record? In Peery’s account, Japan appears as a victim of American racism. There is no mention of Japan as the champion of the darker races or as a country that served as a model for future black militants. In large measure it seems that contemporary African American images of Japan make those earlier views seem anachronistic. Japan’s postwar transformation into an ally of the United States and the silent agreement in both countries to avoid discussion of the war’s racial imagery and rhetoric made previous black attitudes about Japan seem like relics of the distant past.∫≥ In retrospect it appears that the 1980s may have presented the most fertile conditions for a rekindling of some collective memory about African American attitudes toward Japan. As John Dower has noted, the rising tensions created by Japan’s surging economy and the sagging 274

Black Americans and Japan

fortunes of the American middle class awakened racial antipathies that had remained dormant since the end of the Pacific War. The repeated use of familiar racial stereotypes in the press and the surge of sensationalist novels and polemics warning of Japan’s master plan to dominate the world harked back to the days of the Yellow Peril.∫∂ During the same period many African Americans became disa√ected by what they perceived as the federal government’s unwillingness to address their domestic concerns. President Ronald Reagan contributed further to that perception by opposing a boycott of the white supremacist government of South Africa and promoting instead a policy of ‘‘constructive engagement.’’ For many observers it seemed as though at home and abroad the administrations of Reagan and George H. W. Bush were turning back the clock on the gains of the previous two decades.∫∑ There were, of course, important di√erences. The United States and Japan remained allies despite their economic competition, and the political, economic, and social status of most African Americans was vastly greater than it had been during the early decades of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, with all of the talk of economic ‘‘warfare’’ one can imagine that black Americans might find some vicarious satisfaction in the way Japan’s successes unnerved an American government that seemed, at best, indi√erent to their plight. Finally, the mid-1980s also saw the first big wave of World War II commemorations that included a revival of the controversy over the use of the atomic bomb to end the Pacific War. Conditions seemed ripe for ‘‘remembering’’ the prewar African American a≈nity for Japan. Unlike the prewar era, however, the Japan of the 1980s made little e√ort to present itself as the vindicator of the downtrodden. As black Americans soon learned, the ‘‘Japan that could say No’’ was also capable of saying outrageous and o√ensive things about race. Nor did it help that Japan was widely but mistakenly believed to have been awarded ‘‘honorary white’’ status from the apartheid regime of South Africa.∫∏ Today, black Americans are far more likely to remember that on various occasions during the 1980s and early 1990s, Japanese public o≈cials expressed racist opinions about African Americans and other minorities in the United States. African American commentators and activists have also noted the unwillingness of Japanese firms to locate their American subsidiaries in urban areas and the use of egregious black stereotypes to merchandise products in Japan.∫π marc gallicchio

275

The moment for recovery was lost. It seems doubtful that the recent spate of books and articles about African American perceptions in the prewar era will do much to alter this trend. Declassification of fbi files and the opening of military and naval intelligence records has allowed historians to reconstruct a more detailed history of this encounter. In most of these accounts, prewar black American admiration for Japan is taken as a precursor of the militancy that emerged after the war or as an example of the dangers that Washington courts when it ignores racial justice at home. In either case, the story is told with the understanding that most readers will be surprised to discover that black Americans once viewed Japan as the champion of the darker races.∫∫ That was the tone Ishmael Reed took when he retold the story of black enthusiasm for Japan in Japanese by Spring (1993), a seriouscomic novel about prejudice and academic politics at the fictional Jack London College. In the midst of a Japanese takeover of the college, Benjamin ‘‘Chappie’’ Puttbutt, the black narrator, is kidnapped by a mysterious stranger who turns out to be his grandfather. Later that evening the astonished Chappie listens to his grandfather explain that the United States provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor and that Japan was defending Asia from American imperialism. Later Chappie learns that during the 1930s, the Japanese agent Satokata Takahashi recruited his grandfather to propagandize among black Americans on Japan’s behalf.∫Ω It seems clear that Reed believes that, like Chappie, readers will regard the elder Puttbutt’s story as a revelation. Life nearly imitated art in the case of Adelaide Cromwell Hill, whose father was approached by a Japanese educator seeking support among black Americans for Japanese policy not long before the outbreak of the Pacific War. Recalling the event six decades later, Professor Cromwell Hill said she did not understand the purpose of the visit at the time. It became clearer to her, however, as a result of her participation in a conference on ‘‘Blacks and Asians: Encounters through Time and Space.’’ At the time of the conference, Cromwell Hill was editing her grandfather’s letters, some of which were from John Bruce, an important black journalist in the early 1900s. Cromwell Hill noticed that Bruce’s letters contained many favorable comments about Japan.Ω≠ She did not, however, make any connection between Bruce’s admiration for Japan and the unexplained visit of the Japanese stranger to her house sixty years ago. During the conference the pieces fell into place for her. She realized that the educator, probably Hikida Yasuichi, believed her 276

Black Americans and Japan

father would be sympathetic to Japan because he was black. Cromwell Hill was certain that her father would not have responded favorably to Hikida’s overtures. She added, however, that the Japanese educator would have had a better chance of success with her grandfather, who was a strong believer in the solidarity of nonwhite peoples.Ω∞ It is unlikely that black internationalists’ prewar perceptions of Japan will ever become lodged in the collective memory of African Americans. For Professor Cromwell Hill, the important elements of that story remained disconnected family memories until her fortuitous participation in a conference provided the impetus for seeing them in a di√erent context. Perhaps black American interest in what Harold Isaacs called ‘‘the phenomenon of Japan’’ seems so detached from the present that it does not even provoke curiosity. Japanese by Spring ’s American reviewers were so concerned with what Reed had to say about present-day debates over multiculturalism that they did not even refer to the elder Puttbutt’s strange tale of life as a Japanese agent.Ω≤ Four decades of public discussion in black communities about Japan produced little of lasting consequence, either positive or negative, for most African Americans. Although federal agencies closely watched black leaders and organizations for evidence of subversion, for the most part the government did not persecute black Americans for their controversial statements about Japan. Nor did the government respond favorably to black internationalists’ arguments about the ways that racism at home imperiled the nation’s security. Instead, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt relied on propaganda campaigns and symbolic gestures like the repeal of Chinese exclusion to stave o√ demands for more substantial reform. In the end, there was little to point to but the grim satisfaction that many black Americans reportedly experienced at seeing whites humbled by Japan. That feeling, however real at the time, was too ephemeral to be transmitted across generations. Another explanation for this amnesia is that retaining such memories would serve no practical purpose for African Americans. Most groups do not commemorate their mistakes.Ω≥ And the prewar African American interest in Japan would seem to qualify as a mistake. Any thoughtful recollection of this episode is likely to produce uncomfortable reminders about the perils of self-deception. For when all is said and done, one is left confronting the stark fact that Imperial Japan marc gallicchio

277

never exhibited a genuine interest in the welfare of African Americans or the colonial peoples of Asia and Africa.Ω∂ Recognizing this, George Lipsitz has suggested that black Americans’ earlier fascination with Japan may have been an unpleasant but necessary detour on the road to a more progressive destination.Ω∑ In this case one could add that one of the advantages that the creation of collective memory has over scholarship is that it allows those who are remembering their past to steer clear of the dead ends and blind alleys taken by their predecessors. For the present, African Americans’ collective memory about Japan will be dominated by recollections of the scandalous comments of Japanese public figures. Many well-meaning people on both sides of the Pacific appear to recognize this problem. They have held conferences, published articles, and produced films to erase negative stereotypes and build a closer relationship between black Americans and Japanese.Ω∏ As part of this e√ort, the interested parties have emphasized the need for each group to learn more about the other’s history and culture. Nevertheless, as they try to build a new relationship it seems doubtful that they will wish to recall the time when many black Americans viewed Japan as the champion of the darker races.

Notes 1 According to Fard Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam, Japan was building a ‘‘Mother Plane’’ that would destroy white civilization. The historian Gerald Horne suggests that ‘‘Japan’s influence was so pervasive within the Nation of Islam that even today remnants of those now-forgotten days are reflected in the invocation by some nationalist rappers of the concept of the ‘Asiatic Black Man.’ ’’ Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man : The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 66, 82; Gerald Horne, comment on ‘‘Liberalism and the Left: Rethinking the Relationship,’’ Radical History Review (spring 1998). 2 Vincent Harding, The Other American Revolution (Atlanta: Institute of the Black World, 1980); Ernest Allen Jr., ‘‘When Japan Was the ‘Champion of the Darker Races’: Satokata Takahashi and the Flowering of Black Messianic Nationalism,’’ Black Scholar 24 (1994): 23–46; Reginald Kearney, African American Views of the Japanese: Solidarity or Sedition? (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1998); George Lipsitz, ‘‘ ‘Frantic to join . . . the Japanese Army’: Beyond the Black-White Binary,’’ in George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity

278

Black Americans and Japan

Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 184–210; Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Gerald Horne, ‘‘The Asiatic Black Man? Japan and the ‘Colored Races’ Challenge White Supremacy,’’ Black Renaissance 4 (spring 2002): 1. 3 Gerald Horne speculates that white Americans have treated this episode like a nightmare, and ‘‘then, like a child awaking from a bad dream, promptly consign[ed] this awful memory to the mind’s dustbin.’’ Horne, ‘‘The Asiatic Black Man?’’ 4 Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 147–162. 5 James W. Pennebaker and Becky L. Banasik, ‘‘On the Creation and Maintenance of Collective Memories: History as Social Psychology,’’ in James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rime, eds., Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997), 4. 6 Ibid., 17. 7 Gallicchio, Black Internationalism, 1–5. 8 Report of Bureau Agent H. B. Pierce, 25 April 1921, in Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983–85), 3: 364. 9 Garvey’s interest in international developments worried federal security o≈cers. Much of the information about the proceedings at unia meetings comes from reports made by fbi informants and agents working for the O≈ce of Naval Intelligence (oni) or the Military Intelligence Division (mid) of the Army. Report by Bureau Agent Adrian Potts, 18 January 1921; George Van Dusen, mid, to J. Edgar Hoover, fbi, 19 March 1921; George Washington to Harry Dougherty, 28 April 1921; Marcus Garvey Address at Olympia Theater, 13 November 1921; J. J. Hannigan, Commandant 12th Naval District, to Director oni, 3 December 1921; all in Hill, Garvey Papers, 3: 136–138, 258, 375–376; 4: 174–175, 233–237; Kearney, African American Views, 60–62. 10 Allen, ‘‘When Japan was the ‘Champion of the Darker Races.’ ’’ 11 John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York: Knopf, 1988), 321; Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, eds., To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 406. 12 ‘‘Japanese Influence and Activity among the American Negroes,’’ in Robert A. Hill, ed., The fbi ’s racon : Racial Conditions in the United States during World War II (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 513.

marc gallicchio

279

13 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Transaction, 1962), 2: 909. 14 Ibid., 908, 910–911. 15 Robert Ezra Park, ‘‘Negro Race Consciousness as Reflected in Race Literature,’’ American Review (September–October 1923), reprinted in Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture (New York: The Free Press, 1950), 284– 300. 16 ‘‘Mongolians to Query Race Question at Peace Conference in Paris,’’ Cleveland Advocate, 30 November 1918, 1; ‘‘Japan Heard From,’’ Philadelphia Tribune, 1 March 1919, 4; ‘‘Japanese Again Bring Up Race Question,’’ New York Age, 22 March 1919, 1; ‘‘Japan Forces Race Issue,’’ New York Age, 29 March 1919, 4; Kearney, African American Views, 54–58. 17 ‘‘Japan in Jeopardy,’’ New York Age, 23 July 1921; ‘‘Japan versus China,’’ New York Age, 24 December 1921; ‘‘The Japanese Delegation,’’ New York Age, 7 January 1922; ‘‘Washington a Blaze of Color to Welcome Delegates to Disarmament Conference,’’ Associated Negro Press report, Philadelphia Tribune, 12 November 1921; Kelly Miller, ‘‘Open Letter to President Harding,’’ 30 November 1921, reprinted in Kelly Miller, Race Adjustment and the Everlasting Stain (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 187. 18 David J. Hellwig, ‘‘Afro-American Reactions to the Japanese and Anti-Japanese Movement, 1906–1926,’’ Phylon 38 (winter 1977): 93–104; Kearney, African American Views, 67–71; Gallicchio, Black Internationalism, 52–57. 19 Mark Solomon, ‘‘Black Critics of Colonialism and the Cold War,’’ in Thomas Paterson, ed., Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 205–239; Kearney, African American Views, 72–74; Gallicchio, Black Internationalism, 66. 20 ‘‘War in the East,’’ Negro Worker, May 1932, reprinted in Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, 1910–1932 (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1973), 718–729. 21 Du Bois’s columns appeared under the title ‘‘Forum of Fact and Opinion,’’ 6, 13, 20 February and 1, 13, 20, 27 March 1937, Pittsburgh Courier. 22 ‘‘Forum of Fact and Opinion,’’ Pittsburgh Courier, 25 September 1937, 23 October 1937, 12. 23 ‘‘Japan Gets Cheers and Boos,’’ New York Amsterdam News, 4 September 1937, 14; ‘‘Dean William Pickens Advises China to Deal with Japanese,’’ Pittsburgh Courier, 18 December 1937, 14. The Amsterdam News also carried several letters to the editor expressing pro-Japanese sentiments. See ‘‘That’s Cussin ’Em,’’ 9 October 1937, 14; ‘‘Conflict in China,’’ 8 January

280

Black Americans and Japan

1938, 12; ‘‘That’s Resolving,’’ 15 January 1938; ‘‘Egging for a War,’’ 5 March 1938, 12, all in the New York Amsterdam News. 24 ‘‘The World This Week,’’ Pittsburgh Courier, 11 December 1937. 25 ‘‘The Rise of the Black Internationale,’’ Crisis (August 1938): 255–257. 26 Myrdal, American Dilemma, 808. 27 Ernest Price to Marian Anderson, 17 April 1939, Marian Anderson Benefit, American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression Files, Littauer Center of Public Administration, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; J. Edgar Hoover to Brigadier General Edwin M. Watson, 30 November 1939, transmitting ‘‘Report on Japanese Propaganda in the United States,’’ O≈cial File 10 B, Folder 12, Box 11, Justice Department, fbi Reports, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Papers, Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y. Hoover forwarded the report with a note explaining that he was informed that it had been prepared for Madame Chiang Kai-shek. 28 ‘‘Japanese Imperialism and the Negro People,’’ 24 April 1934, Federal Surveillance of Afro-Americans, 1917–1925 (Frederick, Md., 1986), (microfilm roll 20, frames 602–604); ‘‘Is Japan the Champion of the Colored Races?,’’ August 1938, Negro Troops File, Chronology 1939–1945, World War II, Schomburg Center Clipping File 1925–1947, Alexandria, Va., 1986. 29 Alfred O. Hero Jr., ‘‘American Negroes and U.S. Foreign Policy: 1937–1967,’’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 13 (1969): 2, 220, 223–224. 30 Another problem with the early surveys was that they focused on the North at a time when most African Americans lived in the South. Ibid., 221–222. 31 ‘‘Survey of Intelligence Materials,’’ 27 May 1942, O≈ce of Facts and Figures, Bureau of Intelligence, William Hastie Papers, Part 2, Civil Rights, reel 36; Microfilm edition of the William H. Hastie Papers, Frederick, Md., 1986. 32 Ibid. 33 Hikida’s report is in the section titled ‘‘Japanese Influence and Activity among the American Negroes,’’ in Hill, The fbi ’s racon , 510. 34 ‘‘Views and Reviews,’’ Pittsburgh Courier, 20 December 1941, 6; Schuyler, ‘‘Black Internationale,’’ 255–257, 274–277. 35 ‘‘Rogers Says,’’ Pittsburgh Courier, 6 December 1941, 7. 36 ‘‘Our Stake in the Far Eastern Crisis,’’ Baltimore Afro-American, 6 December 1941, 4; Pittsburgh Courier, 6 December 1941; ‘‘Letters,’’ Baltimore Afro-American, 28 February 1942, 4, and 28 March 1942, 4. 37 Horace Cayton, ‘‘Fighting for White Folks?,’’ The Nation, 26 September 1942, 267–268; Kearney, African American Views, 93, 109; John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 173–176.

marc gallicchio

281

38 The Reddick papers are closed for processing at present, but see Rayford Logan to Harold Isaacs, 17 July 1961, Isaacs Folder, Box 166–14, Rayford Logan Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 39 Survey of Intelligence Materials, in Hastie Papers. 40 ‘‘Views and Reviews,’’ Pittsburgh Courier, 31 January, 1942, 6. 41 ‘‘Ever Present Negro Problem,’’ 12 May 1942, Henry L. Stimson Diaries, Stimson Papers, Yale University Library, New Haven, Conn. (microfilm); Entry for 24 May 1942, Harold Ickes Diaries, Ickes Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (microfilm); H. G. Nicholas, ed., Washington Despatches (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 47; Hill, racon , 1–49. 42 Patrick S. Washburn, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press During World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), especially 66–135. 43 Cheryl Greenberg, ‘‘Black and Jewish Responses to Japanese Internment,’’ Journal of American Ethnic History 14 (winter 1995): 22–23. 44 ‘‘Underestimating Japan,’’ Pittsburgh Courier, 20 December 1941, 7; ‘‘We Have Not Begun to Fight,’’ Baltimore Afro-American, 3 January 1942, 1; ‘‘The World Today,’’ Pittsburgh Courier, 10 January 1942, 1. 45 Hill, racon , 8–9. 46 The Naval Historical Center maintains a website that contains biographical information on Miller and documents relating to his actions at Pearl Harbor. A write-in campaign was begun to have Miller admitted to the Naval Academy. Miller received the Navy Cross in 1942. ‘‘Ship’s Cook Third Class, Doris Miller, usn,’’ at www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq57–4.htm. See also the interview with the Courier war correspondent Frank Bolden, n.d., at www.newseum.org/warstories/interviews/wmv/journalists/journalistmo vie.asp?id=26&anecdotenum=3&filename=bio — bolden — 3#. 47 ‘‘Jim Crow against Chinese,’’ New York Amsterdam News, 23 October 1943, p. A. 48 ‘‘World View,’’ Chicago Defender, 8 July 1944. 49 ‘‘Pearl Buck Sees U.S. Isolated by Color Prejudice,’’ Chicago Defender, 4 December 1943, 6; ‘‘Pearl Buck Recalls: Race Issue Ducked after World War I,’’ Pittsburgh Courier, 30 September 1944; ‘‘Equality Ignored at Peace Talks,’’ Baltimore Afro-American, 14 October 1944; Domenic Capeci, Race Relations in Wartime Detroit: The Sojourner Truth Housing Controversy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 53; ‘‘Race Equality in the Peace,’’ Crisis 51 (October 1944): 312; Walter White to W. E. B. Du Bois, 3 October 1944, Papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, Ann Arbor, Mich., University Microfilms, 1986, reel 56, frame 426.

282

Black Americans and Japan

50 Even ‘‘Speed Jaxon,’’ an adventure comic strip in the Defender, portrayed the Japanese as a more admirable enemy because they also were targets of white prejudice. ‘‘A Contagious Disease,’’ Chicago Defender, 25 December 1943, 14; ‘‘Speed Jaxon,’’ Chicago Defender, 30 January 1943, 12 and 6 February 1943, 12. 51 The editors of the same paper also alleged that the Pacific War was really a race war. ‘‘Watching the Big Parade,’’ Baltimore Afro-American, 9 June 1945, 4; ‘‘Fighting a Racial War,’’ Baltimore Afro-American 28 July 1945, 4. 52 ‘‘Second Thoughts,’’ Chicago Defender, 18 June 1945, 15. 53 ‘‘Hirohito Must Go,’’ Afro-American, 18 August 1945; Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 198. 54 ‘‘Here to Yonder,’’ Chicago Defender, 18 August 1945, 12; ‘‘A New Low in Thinking,’’ Chicago Defender, 15 September 1945, 14; Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 199. 55 Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 198–199; Kearney, African American Views, 122; Horace Cayton, Long Old Road (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), 276. 56 ‘‘Dustin o√ the News,’’ Chicago Defender, 22 September 1945, 1. 57 The process is only similar in that McGlone does not apply his argument to large groups. He also includes the creation of false memories as part of this process. Robert G. McGlone, ‘‘Rescripting a Troubled Past: John Brown’s Family and the Harper’s Ferry Conspiracy,’’ Journal of American History (1989): 1182–1183. 58 Kearney, African American Views, xiv. 59 Chester Himes, Lonely Crusade (New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1986), 46. 60 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1982), 281, 283. 61 A fictional black character resembling Robert O. Jordan, a proJapanese follower of Marcus Garvey, also appeared in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Mother Night (1961). When he was arrested in 1942, the press referred to Jordan as the ‘‘Harlem Hitler.’’ 62 ‘‘This Week: Did Japan Yield to U.S. Request?,’’ Baltimore AfroAmerican, 18 August 1951, 4. 63 ‘‘Too Naïve for Words,’’ Baltimore Afro-American, 15 September 1951, 4. 64 C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Erdmans, 1994), 16, 25. 65 Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms and the U.S. Occupation of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 205.

marc gallicchio

283

66 ‘‘Japan Straddles Fence on Race Problems,’’ Baltimore Afro-American, 27 July 1963, 12. 67 Harold Isaacs to Rayford Logan, 2 December 1959, Box 166–14, Correspondence Files, Rayford Logan Papers, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C. 68 Harold Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (New York: John Day, 1963), 29–30. 69 Ibid., 214–216. 70 Ibid., 30. 71 Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove, 1964), 105. 72 Cayton, Long Old Road, 276. 73 John Oliver Killens, And Then We Heard the Thunder (New York: Knopf, 1968), 260. ‘‘General’’ Grant’s discussion of Japan appears on 257–260. 74 Roi Ottley, New World A’Coming (New York: Arno, 1968). 75 Mary Penick Motley, ed., The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), 17. 76 Ibid., 77–78. 77 Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom. 78 Neil A. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975), 104–105; Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941–1945 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), 100–101; John Morton Blum, v Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 182–183, 195. 79 Dower, War without Mercy, 98–106. 80 Nelson Peery, Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary (New York: New Press, distrib. by W. W. Norton, 1994), 270; Peery interview with Robert Je√erson, 9 December 1994, in author’s possession. 81 Kevin Chappell, ‘‘Blacks in World War II,’’ Ebony, September 1995, 58–60; Lerone Bennett, ‘‘Chronicles of Black Courage: W. Hastie’s Resignation as Civilian Aide to the Secretary of War, 1943,’’ Ebony, September 1949, 72; ‘‘Brigadier General Benjamin Davis, Sr. Honored with Black History Commemorative Stamp,’’ Jet, 17 February 1997, 23–24; Lest We Forget . . . African Americans in World War II, compiled by Bennie J. McRae Jr., at www.coax.net/people/lwf/ww2.htm; ‘‘The Triple Nickles,’’ 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion 1944–1947, at www.triplenickle.com/; ‘‘The Men of Montford Point, The First Black Marines,’’ at members.aol.com/ Nubian Song/montford.html; 366th Infantry Regiment Veterans Association home page, www.wiz-worx.com/366th/index.html. 82 Compare Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Ran-

284

Black Americans and Japan

dom House, 1998), with Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston: Little Brown, 2000) and Maggi M. Morehouse, Fighting in the Jim Crow Army: Black Men and Women Remember World War II (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 83 Koshiro, Trans-Pacific Racisms. 84 John W. Dower, ‘‘Graphic Japanese, Graphic Americans: Coded Images in U.S.-Japanese Relations,’’ in Akira Iriye and Robert A. Wampler, eds., Partnership: The United States and Japan, 1951–2001 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2001), 301–332; John Hunter Boyle, Modern Japan: The American Nexus (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), 358–360. 85 Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 259–263; Kelley and Lewis, To Make Our World Anew, 575, 583; Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 475–477, 491–493. 86 According to Masako Osada, ‘‘Legally, ‘honorary whites’ never existed. The Japanese were classified as Asiatics and later Coloureds.’’ Masako Osada, Sanctions and Honorary Whites: Diplomatic Policies and Economic Realities in Relations between Japan and South Africa (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), 209. 87 James B. Treece, ‘‘Nakasone’s Ugly Remark Says a Lot about Today’s Japan,’’ Business Week, 13 October 1986; ‘‘Japanese Slurs on Blacks Causing Rift between Them,’’ Jet, 31 October 1988, 12; ‘‘cbc on Japanese Slur: Bush Must Speak Out,’’ Black Enterprise, December 1990, 17. For a brief summary of these issues, see Paige L. Cottingham and Milton Morris, Survey Report: Considering How Black Americans View the Japanese (Washington, D.C. : Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 1991); Kearney, African American Views, 129–148; Frank Williams, ‘‘The Struggle of African Americans in Japan,’’ Japanese 280 Projects (n.d.) at www.sla.purdue .edu/academic/fll/Japanese/jpn280/projects/Williams.htm (accessed 26 February 2001). 88 Harding, The Other American Revolution ; Allen, ‘‘When Japan Was the Champion of the Darker Races’’; Kearney, African American Views; Lipsitz, ‘‘ ‘Frantic to Join’ ’’; Gallicchio, Black Internationalism. 89 Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring (New York: Penguin, 1996), 60–62, 176–177. 90 In 1912 Bruce wrote an unpublished short story, ‘‘The Call of a Nation,’’ in which the Japanese, ‘‘the Yankees of the Orient,’’ won a series of military victories over the racially arrogant United States, thereby forcing all Americans to unite in defense of their homes. Peter Gilbert, ed., The Selected Writings of John Edward Bruce: Militant Black Journalist (New York: Arno, 1971), 6–7, 99–100.

marc gallicchio

285

91 Author’s notes from panel, ‘‘Blacks and Asians: Encounters through Time and Space,’’ Boston University African American Studies Program, 12–14 April 2002. 92 Jim Trageser, ‘‘Why Use Subtlety When a 2x4 Will Do?,’’ American Reporter, n.d.; Fred Little, ‘‘ ‘Blackademic’ Aims to Ride Japanese Wave,’’ Daily Yomiuri, 16 May 1993, 7; ‘‘Whittling Down the Groves of Academe,’’ St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 April 1993, 5C; Chris Goodrich, ‘‘Bluster Turns Satire into Pay-Back Tale,’’ Los Angeles Times, 20 April 1993, E2; Edward Hoover, ‘‘Blood on the Syllabus,’’ New York Times, 7 March 1993, section 7, p. 11; Tony Green, ‘‘The Culture Wars,’’ St. Petersburg Times, 11 April 1993, 7D. See also ‘‘Academia Nuts: Talking with Ishmael Reed,’’ Newsday, 14 February 1993, 32. All of these articles were reproduced at www.prince ton.edu/howarth/557/japanese7.html. 93 There are, however, exceptions. See Roy F. Baumeister and Stephen Hastings, ‘‘Distortions of Collective Memory: How Groups Flatter and Deceive Themselves,’’ in Pennebaker et al., Collective Memory, 277–278. 94 David Levering Lewis has observed that W. E. B. Du Bois’s perceptions of Imperial Japan’s program of expansion were composed of ‘‘two parts misunderstanding and one part cynicism.’’ Lewis, DuBois, 391. 95 Lipsitz, ‘‘Beyond the Black-White Binary,’’ 188, 209–210. 96 For examples, see the recommendations in Cottingham and Morris, Considering Japan, 20–23; Hisako Yanaka, African Americans and Japanese Firms in Georgia, a report for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, Washington, D.C., 2001; Hisako Yanaka, ‘‘Building Bridges between Young Japanese and African Americans,’’ in Katherine Anne Ackley, ed., Perspectives on Contemporary Issues: Readings across the Disciplines (New York: Harcourt, 1997), 372–376; Michael E. Cottman, ‘‘Racism in Japan: Negative Images of Blacks Fuel Friction and Misunderstanding,’’ Emerge 9 (August 1993); Frank McCoy, ‘‘Black Business Courts the Japanese Market,’’ Black Enterprise 24 ( June 1994); Sharnice Nicole Floyd Eaton, ‘‘Looking at Japan through African-American Eyes,’’ African American Magazine 2 (October 1999), 7. The last three articles were found at the website of the Ethnic News Service, www.enw.softlineweb.com/ethnic.htm.

286

Black Americans and Japan

Entangled Memories china in american and japanese remembrances of world war ii

. daqing yang

Writing more than thirty years ago, well before any traces of the current ‘‘memory boom,’’ Akira Iriye noted that ‘‘there is no question that images about the past constitute part of one’s vocabulary and mental equipment; indeed ‘lessons’ derived from the past are often an important part of the language of international a√airs.’’∞ It is now widely accepted that as long as perceptions and images of the other constitute an integral part of the interactions between collective entities, memories of past encounters necessarily must be taken into consideration when analyzing the current conditions. Starting from this assumption, this essay explores public memory as a potential asset and liability in international a√airs. To what extent do memories of past conflict continue to threaten current cooperation? To what extent can memories of past cooperation serve to ameliorate present conflict? In the wake of the economic frictions of the late 1980s and the Enola Gay controversies of mid-1990s, studies of Japanese and American memories of World War II have now become a growth industry. Understandably, most have focused on di√erent perceptions of key events, such as the Pearl Harbor attack and the atomic bombs, to name two most important symbols.≤ An often-overlooked area in the current English-language scholarship is the Sino-Japanese conflict before it became part of the global war in 1941. Before Japan and America clashed in the Pacific, more than half a million Japanese soldiers had already become casualties in China, with nearly two hundred thousand dead. The loss on the Chinese side, both military and civilian, was in the millions. By 1941, 65 percent of Japan’s army was stationed in China (including Manchuria), reduced to 31 percent in 1945. Even after 1941, 57 percent of Japan’s war expenditure was spent in China.≥ As one military historian put it, the Sino-Japanese conflict was truly

9

Asia’s Great War, and one of the most horrific struggles in human history.∂ How has the Sino-Japanese conflict (1931/7–1945) been remembered in America and Japan since the war? How does the different remembrance of Japan’s war in China in public memories of World War II a√ect the postwar transpacific relations between the two allies? A word about terminology and methodology is in order. I borrow the definition of ‘‘public memory’’ from John Bodnar, who considers it ‘‘a body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand both its past, present, and by implication, its future.’’∑ As such, Bodnar argues, public memory is ‘‘a product of elite manipulation, symbolic interaction, and contested discourse.’’ I am particularly interested in the dominant narratives, as well as their enabling conditions and advocates. In a broader sense, the subject of my analysis can also be considered the ‘‘politics of remembering,’’ which I understand to be influenced by ‘‘structures of power and desire that variously sustain, erase, and transform memories of past events.’’∏ Therefore, I pay special attention to elites in political and intellectual circles (especially, academic and popular historians) as well as in popular culture (such as filmmakers and fiction writers). Admittedly, the relationship between these areas is by no means fixed in time, nor are their boundaries clearly demarcated. These areas do, in my view, provide a rough parameter for studying how societies remember past events.π Obviously, this approach leaves out a great deal: newspapers and magazines, television and other electronic media, memorials and commemoration, to name just a few, are largely absent.∫ This essay makes no pretense of being comprehensive temporally, nor is it an archive-based case study of a particular era, both of which have much value to recommend them; instead, I have chosen to highlight some salient trends while giving more weight to recent developments in the transpacific public memory of World War II in Asia.

The Sino-Japanese War in American Memories Writing a few years ago, the historian Carol Gluck reiterated a common wisdom: Americans know far more about the war against the Nazis and about the war against Japan than about the war in Asia.Ω When cbs conducted a poll in early 1994 with the question ‘‘What 288

Entangled Memories

countries did the United States fight against in WWII?,’’ those who answered Germany formed the largest group, at 39 percent, compared with 22 percent who answered Japan.∞≠ Indeed, when the war in Asia is remembered, it is America’s war against Japan that began with Pearl Harbor and ended with the atomic bombs. Sheila Johnson counted some thirty-four New York Times bestsellers dealing with Japan between 1942 and 1987. Many of them, especially works by John Hershey, John Toland, Walter Lord, and Gordon Prange, covered the war years; hardly any dealt with the China War in a substantial way.∞∞ In part, this can be attributed to the more prominent roles played by Americans in the war itself. But there is more to it than that. The conflict between China and Japan, beginning from the Japanese takeover of Manchuria in 1931 and escalating into full-scale war after 1937, occupied at best a remote secondary place for most Americans. Nevertheless, the changing international as well as domestic environment also helps explain the waning and waxing of the Sino-Japanese War in American public memory. The United States was far from a neutral bystander of Japan and China in the 1930s and 1940s. Even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, public sentiment in the United States was largely on the Chinese side. Leading to the condemnation of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria were reports of Japanese brutalities in China after the outbreak of conflict in 1937, transmitted through newsreels, such as the bombing of Chinese cities. After the war broke out in the Pacific, the alliance between Nationalist China and the United States was formally cemented. Chiang Kai-shek now achieved the rank of one of the world’s leaders, by the side of Churchill and Roosevelt. American military advisers, headed by General Joseph Stilwell, helped train and equip Chinese forces in a joint e√ort to fight the Japanese enemy in the China-Burma-India Theater. Chinese resistance groups rescued American pilots who landed in China after bombing missions over Japan. The only scenario that did not play out was joint operations in China’s coastal areas that would lead to an invasion of Japan.∞≤ China was expected to be the regional policeman after Japan’s defeat. The beginning of the cold war in East Asia drastically altered the geopolitical picture in the region.∞≥ So far as the victory of Chinese Communists and the war against Japan could be linked, it is no small wonder that some Americans wondered whether their country had fought the right enemy all along. Seeing a threat from World Commudaqing yang

289

nism in Asia, the United States formed a military alliance with its former adversary at the end of the occupation and continued using Okinawa as a key base for an American military presence. During the cold war, to be sure, the China War was not totally ignored by academic historians, typically those who worked on Chinese history and politics. Some went to the war years to look for sources of the fall of the Kuomintang and the rise of the Communists. Studies of the so-called base areas even became a mini field unto itself.∞∂ Popular works placing the China War at the center, by academics or otherwise, were rare, however. Alvin Coox’s Year of the Tiger, which deals with the first year of the China War, was published in Japan in the mid-1960s.∞∑ The impact these works had on the public’s memory of the war was perhaps negligible.

Memory As Nostalgia: Veterans and China Hands Before the Communist victory in 1949, China attracted many Americans of all political persuasions: missionaries, businessmen, journalists, serious scholars, revolutionaries, and adventurers. Many of the most influential English-language writings on China were written during or about that conflict, forming a vital dimension of the U.S. understanding of China.∞∏ The image of heroic Chinese gallantly resisting Japanese militarism became influential through such publications as Henry Luce’s magazines and the writings of Edgar Snow and others who had traveled to the Communist base areas. Sentiments and sympathies made a di√erence. The American public was galvanized, calling for ‘‘nonparticipation in Japanese aggression.’’ By early 1941, American pilots under Major General Claire Chennault’s American Volunteer Group, also known as the Flying Tigers, were already in China. After the war and through the intense debate over ‘‘who lost China,’’ those who had sided with Chiang Kai-shek helped keep the wartime cooperation alive. General Chennault and his Chinese-born wife, for example, were both highly visible figures.∞π True to the tradition of the ‘‘great men’’ version of history, the man and his mission continue to fascinate American readers, as new books are being published to this day.∞∫ In contrast, many former American participants in the war e√ort in China who had sympathies for the Communists fell silent in the McCarthy era. Even while Chiang Kai-shek still claimed the legacy of 290

Entangled Memories

leading China during the war against Japan, the Sino-Japanese conflict also became a source of tension for U.S. policy toward Communist China. From Edgar Snow to the China hands in the State Department, America seemed to have shown an increasing degree of sympathy for Chinese Communists during wartime. In the postwar period, however, American perception of Beijing was shaped more by the experience of the Korean War, and later the Vietnam War, when Beijing was considered the aggressor. It was not until the early 1970s, when the climate between the two countries warmed up, that a number of American participants published their diaries or memoirs.∞Ω

Shifts in Geopolitics and Global Trends Geopolitical calculation always played a role for political elites as they balanced history with contemporary interests. Even before the cold war spread to Asia, a number of American strategic thinkers found certain logic in wartime Japanese behavior in Asia. John Foster Dulles, who was to play a major role in the peace settlement with Japan, thought that while the United States and other Western powers should resist Japan’s attempt to dominate China, at the same time they should provide Japan with alternative outlets in a more open global arena. ‘‘They would doubtless have much preferred to get raw materials and find markets elsewhere [outside China],’’ Dulles wrote in 1940. ‘‘As, however, these possibilities gradually shrank, they then looked to China feeling that if the western white race put trade barriers up against them at least they should have a free hand with the adjoining yellow race.’’ Lecturing at the University of Chicago in 1950, George Kennan also acknowledged that whether Japan ‘‘had also to be ranged against us in war in the early 1940s was of course primarily our problem.’’ The U.S.-Japan conflict might well have been avoidable had there been ‘‘a policy carefully and realistically aimed at avoidance of war with Japan and less encumbered with other motives.’’≤≠ The threat from Chinese (and Soviet) Communism in Asia became the paramount concern to the United States, serving as the basis of its military alliance with its former adversary, Japan. The historic visit by Richard Nixon in the early 1970s proved to be a turning point of sorts in America’s knowledge of China in general, and public memory of the war in China in particular. Probably the first daqing yang

291

popular history in the postwar United States on the war in China was Barbara Tuchman’s Stilwell and the American Experience in China.≤∞ Although still placed in the context of the ‘‘American experience in China’’ rather than seeing the war as a China-Japan conflict, the book no doubt raised the general level of knowledge about the conflict in the Far East. Although the book was largely set in the American war against Japan, it was far from a flattering account of the Chinese Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek. Still, published shortly after the ‘‘reopening of China’’ and winning a Pulitzer Prize, it signaled the return of China in popular historical consciousness in America. It was around this time that the conflict between Japan and China itself became the subject of books. Works, mostly by nonacademic historians, include The Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1941 by Frank Dorn, a former U.S. military observer in China, and When Tigers Fight, by the British author Dick Wilson.≤≤ Whatever its bias may be, the translation of Ienaga Saburô’s Pacific War into English added a critical perspective from the Japanese about Japan’s war in Asia.≤≥ After diplomatic relations between the United States and China were established in 1979, the earlier tension between Taiwan and mainland China in the American memory of the war in China was gradually resolved: both the Nationalists and the Communists were wartime allies. This process was hastened also because the Chinese government began to reassess the wartime united front with the Nationalists. Bilateral exchanges between the United States and China, including their militaries, deepened throughout the 1980s. Surviving members of the Flying Tigers, despite their earlier association with Chiang Kai-shek, were now welcomed back to China by the Beijing government. Reunions with Chinese who had assisted their missions were organized. Mrs. Chennault, a prominent figure in the Republican Party, now became a regular visitor to Beijing. One Chinese studio even released a feature film in 1980 entitled An American Pilot, popularizing the wartime cooperation at a wider level. Other participants were given opportunities to relate their wartime experiences. In 1987, for instance, thirty-five American journalists who had covered the China war met with twenty scholars to review the journalistic reporting of the period.≤∂ That America’s war in the Pacific has been a favorite subject for Hollywood is no surprise. Featured in many wartime productions, China disappeared completely from the American cinema after 1949. 292

Entangled Memories

It was not until the 1980s that the Sino-Japanese conflict finally made it into the realm of popular culture via the silver screen. Several films made in the United States and elsewhere included portrayal of the war in China and reached a wide audience. The Last Emperor, by the Italian director Bertolucci, gave unprecedented focus to the Japanese invasion and occupation of northeastern China in this grand saga of modern China. Also in 1987, Steven Spielberg directed Empire of the Sun, the reminiscence of a young British boy in Shanghai who became a prisoner of the Japanese. The film showed little of the Chinese experience; nonetheless, it gave Americans another close look at the war in China, if not Chinese in the war, from 1941 to 1945. A number of feature films made in China by a new generation of directors gained international recognition as well as an American audience. Some of these films portrayed the war with Japan through Chinese experiences. Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth in 1984 was an early example. A few years later, Red Sorghum, by another Chinese director, contained a scene of Japanese atrocity in rural China.≤∑ Even though still limited when compared with films about the European theater, change was clearly in the air. This was in rather stark contrast to America’s relations with Japan. In 1982, only 7 percent of Americans thought of World War II (and an additional 5 percent thought of war cities) when asked the question ‘‘Can you tell me what other word or phrase comes to mind as soon as you hear the word Japan?’’ In comparison, 21 percent of those polled thought of Japanese cars.≤∏ Throughout the 1980s, however, World War II memories returned to U.S.-Japan relations as economic friction escalated between the two countries.≤π John Dower’s War without Mercy, a prize-winning critical study of wartime racism on both sides of the Pacific, was published in 1985 in part as the author’s admonition to his fellow Americans against resurgent racial stereotypes.≤∫ Perhaps the significance was not entirely lost on some Japanese observers that Theodore White, who wrote a scathing article on the menace of Japan for the New York Times Magazine, was a veteran reporter from the China war.≤Ω Some journalists and popular writers readily used ‘‘war’’ to describe current problems in U.S.-Japan relations. A special issue of a popular history monthly in Japan cast U.S.-Japan relations as predominantly a history of American racial prejudice, and went on to list other ‘‘wars,’’ including a Japanese-American whaling war, finance war, rice war, technology war, and real estate war. In 1992, a book titled daqing yang

293

The Coming War with Japan was published in the United States, claiming proudly on its cover to be ‘‘The #1 Bestseller in Japan.’’≥≠ In the context of economic frictions, therefore, the language of war—past and future wars—became convenient tools for groups in both countries. Memories of past war, therefore, are given a current touch.

Memory as Identity: Ethnic Groups Up to the late 1980s, the American memory of the war in Asia revolved around the ‘‘American experience’’ in China, perhaps exaggerating that role. Since the 1990s, however, Chinese Americans have played an increasingly visible role in channeling the memory of World War II in the United States. Over the years, they have staged protests against visits to the United States by prominent Japanese and publicized Japan’s war crimes through exhibitions. Galvanized by the controversies over war history in Japan in the 1980s, many such groups located in New York, California, and Canada formed a Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II.≥∞ The memory of World War II in the United States entered a new phase in 1997, when the Chinese American writer Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking. The book, despite its problematic use of sources and often emotional tone, made the New York Times bestseller list in no small part thanks to the overwhelming support of Asian American groups. The book’s subtitle, The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, reflects the belief among many that the Asian dimension of the war has been all but forgotten in the United States.≥≤ Chinese Americans active in reviving a memory of the Chinese dimension of World War II are a diverse group in terms of profession and background. The Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War and similar organizations were founded in the early 1990s. Many members are first-generation immigrants from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, making this a case of ‘‘migration of memory.’’ Many American-born Chinese Americans take an active interest in these memorial groups as part of a new ethnic pride and consciousness. Although the latter phenomenon had begun only in the late 1960s and owed its genesis to the civil rights movement,≥≥ it also drew inspiration from Jewish Americans. While many Americans, including Jewish Americans, question whether the Holocaust really belongs to America, 294

Entangled Memories

it is not a coincidence that Chinese Americans like Iris Chang were appropriating the vocabulary to call attention to the Japanese devastation in China as an Asian holocaust. Now that the United States, not directly involved with the Holocaust, has built the U.S. Holocaust Museum on Washington’s most important ‘‘public memorial strip,’’ Chinese Americans are emulating what they consider to be the success of Jewish Americans when they call for a museum dedicated to the victims of Japan’s aggression in Asia.≥∂ Grass-roots support for Chinese American demands found allies in other groups, such as American pows and Jewish and other Asian American organizations. In 1999, Mike Honda, a Japanese American assemblyman in California, spearheaded legislation that would allow former victims of wartime Japanese corporations to sue their American subsidiaries in Californian courts. Since then he has been elected a member of the U.S. Congress and continues to champion the cause of pows. The San Francisco Board of Education has adopted a resolution to enhance coverage of the Asian aspect of the war in the school curriculum.≥∑ The participation of Japanese Americans in these e√orts can also be explained by the newly emerging Asian American identity in the United States and justified by a sense of the responsibility of democratic citizenship. In early 1999, a West Coast branch of the Japanese-American Citizens League (jacl) adopted a resolution supporting the innocent civilian victims of Japan’s wartime atrocities in China. It acknowledged that ‘‘many Chinese Americans in the U.S. and their families, part of today’s Asian Pacific American community, were among these victims [of the military government of Japan] and are currently seeking support from the jacl and others,’’ and also noted that ‘‘Japanese Americans were also innocent victims of World War II.’’≥∏ Asian American identity was not unproblematic on the issue of war memory, to be sure. After the outbreak of the war in China in 1937, for instance, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans were often mobilized for their own respective mother countries. After Pearl Harbor, Korean nationalists such as the leader of the Sino-Korean People’s League in fact agitated for the forced evacuation of the Japanese from the West Coast.≥π Not surprisingly, such divisive memories of the past are largely suppressed in the present interest of forming an Asian American identity in the United States. Second- and third-generation Asian Americans seem to have little knowledge of the wartime condidaqing yang

295

tions of Asian Americans except for the internment experience and the membership of Japanese Americans in the 422nd Battalion. In other words, ethnic Asian American memories of World War II also have their blind spots.

The China War in Japanese Memories: The Pacific War and the Struggle against the West For much of the postwar era, the Pacific War has been the dominant motif in remembering World War II in Japan. Much has been said about the American occupation and the reorientation of Japan, when American dominance during and after the occupation, as James Orr puts it, ‘‘encouraged a fixation on Japan’s relation to its postwar sponsor and gives the impression that the war was remembered and indeed commemorated in most arenas as a conflict between Japan and the United States.’’≥∫ Pamphlets issued by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, such as The Pacific War, while containing much on Japan’s war in China, nonetheless set the framework: while Japan’s aggression began in China, it was the war in the Pacific that counted the most. The same can be said of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Contrary to some criticism, after Japan’s surrender the Tribunal in fact placed China at the center. It not only set 1928 as the beginning of Japan’s invasion of China, but it also made much of the crimes committed by Japanese armed forces in China. The Rape of Nanjing was a centerpiece. At the same time, as with other aspects of the Allied occupation, the Tribunal was largely an American a√air, despite the presence of a Chinese judge and a Chinese prosecutor. Still, as B. V. A. Roling, who sat on the bench on behalf of the Netherlands East Indies, pointed out later, the Asian perspective was lacking in the Tokyo trial.≥Ω The United States had a direct role in shaping Japan’s war memories during the period of occupation. The most egregious example of the coverup was Japan’s infamous bacteriological warfare Unit 731, which had performed, among other things, live experiments on about three thousand Chinese. In what became clear only in the 1980s, the United States pardoned key Japanese implicated in the unit’s activities in exchange for their valuable research results, mostly gained through live

296

Entangled Memories

human experiments. To be sure, this deal had just as much impact on the American memory of the war in Asia. It was not until the early 1980s that publications began to unveil the secret. Incidentally, although the Soviet Union conducted a trial of Japanese suspected of bacteriological warfare in Khabarovsk in 1951, the Nationalist government in China did not follow suit, as Manchuria quickly descended into civil war.∂≠ If Pearl Harbor is the dominant symbol of Americans’ remembrance of the war in the Pacific, then Hiroshima can be said to be the counterpart for the Japanese memory of that war. Continued Japanese su√ering from nuclear tests as well as concerns about future nuclear warfare helped solidify Hiroshima’s centrality in Japan’s war memory. A survey of its educated readers by a publishing newsletter in Japan in 1956 showed that only 2 out of 181 replies indicated Japan’s ‘‘responsibility of aggression toward Asia.’’∂∞ In his extensive interviews with Japanese who experienced the war, Ted Cook confirmed that the term ‘‘Pacific War’’ tended to free them from having to refer to the invasion of China.∂≤ A number of postwar Japanese films of the war, as film critic Sato Tadao noted, typically abbreviated the preliminary stage of the war in China and began with 1941, reinforcing ‘‘the idea that the Pacific War was impossible to avoid [for Japan].’’ If these films had included the context of the war in China, in his view, America’s demand for withdrawal would have been justified.∂≥ The America-centric Pacific War paradigm did not go unchallenged. Hayashi Fusao, a former Communist who underwent tenkô (ideological conversion) during the war, fired the first salvo. Writing in sixteen installments in the influential monthly opinion journal Chûô kôron in 1963–1964, Hayashi characterized the ‘‘Greater East Asian War’’ as the finale of a hundred years’ war and, in doing so, revived a key element of the wartime ideology, namely, that Japan’s real enemy had been the United States and not Asia. As Peter Duus pointed out, wartime justifications ‘‘lie just beneath the surface of political consciousness, like shells left over from a battle long ended.’’ Indeed, beginning in the mid-1980s, numerous conservative politicians and commentators would openly defend Japan’s wartime record as selfdefense against Western encirclement, causing those shells to detonate.∂∂ Interestingly enough, it is always Japan’s neighbors, China and Korea in particular, who make the loudest protests against alleged

daqing yang

297

‘‘distortions of history.’’ The United States, the target of such revisionism, has remained conspicuously silent except for occasional reports and commentaries in the media. It is worth noting that even during the occupation era the U.S. authorities probably turned a blind eye to the memory making by conservative Japanese politicians. In the southern part of Okinawa, where a fierce battle was fought between the Japanese garrison and invading U.S. troops in the spring of 1945, a monument was erected near the site where the Japanese commander, Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima, committed suicide. The monument was built by the Okinawa Association of War Bereaved Families (Okinawa Izoku Rengokai) in 1962, when Okinawa was still under American occupation. Erected to ‘‘pass on forever the extraordinary bravery’’ of General Ushijima and the ‘‘selfless support of Okinawa residents to the 22nd Army,’’ the monument was named Tower of Dawn (Reimei no tô) and bore the calligraphy of none other than former Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru.∂∑ By the late 1990s, there was a revival of the view of the Pacific War as a righteous war in the popular culture. The film Pride, which depicted General Tojo Hideki as a loving family man and a loyal servant of the country (and emperor), bypassed China and Korea but emphasized the inspiration India drew from Japan’s war against Anglo-America. Interestingly, the film’s producers and backers had seriously contemplated releasing the film in the United States, but abandoned the idea upon realizing the potential backlash. The popular cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori published a series of war-related works that came to be known as Sensô-ron (Treatise on War). In this best-selling work, Kobayashi reiterated Japan’s noble aim to liberate Asia. Other works in this genre found new support for the long-held conspiracy theory behind Pearl Harbor in Robert Stinnett’s book Days of Deceit.∂∏ Whether this was rearguard defensiveness out of desperation (as with the film) or a new type of assertive nationalism (as in Stinnett’s book) is open to debate.

The Rise of the Fifteen-Year War Paradigm There have always been individuals and groups in postwar that have striven to keep alive the memories of Japan’s war in China as the more important war. The prize-winning author Hotta Yoshie, for instance, published a novel in the early 1950s on the Nanjing Massacre, a subject 298

Entangled Memories

virtually untouched since the time of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial.∂π A group of Japanese veterans who were repatriated from China in the mid-1950s set up an organization devoted to exposing Japan’s war crimes in China and promoting Japan-China friendship and normalization.∂∫ Meanwhile, decolonization in Asia and Africa and enthusiasm for Asian national independence surrounding the Bandung Conference also contributed to a gradual tendency to portray the story of Asian peoples’ liberation from Western and Japanese colonialism.∂Ω In the early 1960s Tsurumi Shunsuke, the Harvard-educated philosopher, coined the phrase ‘‘Fifteen-Year War’’ and changed the framework of public discourse on the war. Its imprecision notwithstanding, the phrase provided a powerful alternative to the Pacific War paradigm. In 1960, the director Masaki Kobayashi produced a six-part film called The Human Condition, depicting the brutal treatment of Chinese prisoners by the Japanese military police in Manchuria near the end of the Pacific War. The film’s screenwriter also wrote a bestselling novel that was turned into a three-part melodrama in the early 1970s under the title War and People, which exposed the Japanese plot to seek control of Manchuria in the 1930s.∑≠ Also in the 1960s, the Japanese scholar Ienaga Saburo brought the first of several lawsuits against the Ministry of Education for withholding approval for his history of Japan. Ienaga’s complaints about the ministry’s use of the textbook certification process to whitewash history were supported by the Japan Teacher’s Union, which began publishing critiques of nationalistic textbooks in 1965.∑∞ In 1967, Ienaga published The Pacific War, a thematic study that highlighted how Japanese racial and cultural prejudices led to aggression in China.∑≤ America’s war in Vietnam, with Japan as a base for many of the bombing raids, as well as the Sino-Japanese rapprochement in the early 1970s reinforced China as a major motif in Japan’s war memories. For the first time, the liberal Asahi Shimbun in 1970 wrote of Japan’s war responsibility toward Asia in an editorial on August 15. The Asahi reporter Honda Katsuichi’s reportage of Japanese wartime atrocities in China, serialized in the newspaper and its weekly magazines, was a shocking revelation to Japanese readers. Although an intense debate followed its publication, the ‘‘innocence’’ of the Japanese population was forever lost.∑≥ In the 1970s, Japanese textbooks began to devote greater space to Asian liberation movements and Asian war su√ering.∑∂ With the shift in the cold war political paradigm that began in the daqing yang

299

1970s and culminated in the Soviet Union’s collapse in the late 1980s, the foundational narrative weakened its hold on Japanese society.∑∑ In the 1990s, the term Asia-Pacific War became widely used. Internally, the breakdown of the myth of Japanese homogeneity led to an internal di√erentiation of memory, thus further complicating the U.S.-Japan binary of war memory. In particular, the battle of Okinawa demonstrated the tension between Okinawa natives and Japanese during that tragedy.∑∏ Demands by Japanese and Korean residents in Japan led to greater awareness of the Korean victims of the atomic bombs.∑π

A Two-Front War? In Japan, there is growing recognition, albeit not always publicly stated, among a wide spectrum of the population that Japan owes an apology to Asia for its colonialism and wartime aggression, but not to the United States. The historic resolution passed in the Japanese Diet on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war made clear Japan’s aggressive behavior in Asia. In the same breath, it also emphasized that the behavior took place in the age of colonialism worldwide: ‘‘On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, this House o√ers its condolences to those who fell in action and victims of wars and similar actions all over the world. Solemnly reflecting upon many instances of colonial rule and acts of aggression in the modern history of the world, and recognizing that Japan carried out those acts in the past, inflicting pain and su√ering upon the people of those countries, especially in Asia, the Members of this House express a sense of deep remorse.’’∑∫ Even though this watered-down version of the resolution was boycotted by many Japanese Diet members, barely squeaked though with less than half of the Lower House voting for it, and was never submitted to the House of Councilors, it nonetheless represented a consensus of some sort. Echoing the Tokyo University historian Kitaoka Shin’ichi, the prominent political scientist Kumon Shumpei described the war as ‘‘a war of aggression and also a war that the Japanese had persuaded themselves was necessary for safeguarding their own country.’’∑Ω For many Japanese today this dual character of the war still has much persuasive power. In a recent speech, for instance, former Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro, an ex-Navy man and a close friend 300

Entangled Memories

of Ronald Reagan, argued that the war with the United States and Britain was ‘‘an ordinary war’’ among the Powers, whereas Japan’s war in Asia was ‘‘a war of aggression.’’∏≠ Such views seem to have found a receptive audience in Japan.

Asset or Liability? During much of the postwar era, present bonds of strategic necessity between the United States and Japan helped overcome the past, if temporarily.∏∞ Thus, it was possible that on December 7, 1964, Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Sato Eisaku awarded the First Class Order of the Rising Sun—the highest award a foreign citizen can receive—to U.S. Air Force General Curtis LeMay, chief of sta√ of the United States Air Force. When outraged Diet members accused LeMay of being responsible for wartime destruction and questioned the government’s justification for such a gesture, Prime Minister Sato replied, ‘‘There are all kinds of discussions about wartime issues. Right now, Japan and the U.S. are continuing friendly relations. We’re maintaining friendly relations with our wartime enemy, the U.S. Since this gentleman has rendered highly distinguished service to the building of our sdf [Self-Defense Forces] after the war, I think it is only natural that we let the past be past, forget the matter already, and thank him and reward him for his contribution based on new circumstances.’’∏≤ Countering the specific criticism that LeMay should be held responsible for the atomic bombing, the director of the Self-Defense Agency clarified that according to his research, LeMay left the 20th Air Corps on July 16, weeks before its 393rd Wing dropped the a-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Amazingly, reflecting the early postwar preoccupation with nuclear bombing at the expense of the ‘‘conventional’’ bombing over Japan, nobody raised the issue of the firebombing of Japanese cities, for which LeMay had been a major advocate and practitioner!∏≥ Still, as one Diet member noted: Although [LeMay] is a war criminal, because of the connection to the sdf, it is di≈cult for the Bureau of Decorations not to award him a medal at the Tenth Anniversary [of the founding of sdf]. This is what we call a dilemma, isn’t it? But when I heard the lamentation from folks in Hiroshima, I had a strange feeling. When we think of the day when

daqing yang

301

Foreign Minister Hirota [Koki] was condemned as a war criminal and hanged, what a historic irony it really is that we give this professional military man this Rising Sun medal!∏∂

Still, if it was always possible to find some trace of lingering animosity and distrust toward Japan among American policymakers,∏∑ the opposite must also be true. For quite some time into the postwar, there were many personal continuities on both sides of the Pacific. This was despite the purging and punishment of suspected war criminals during the American occupation of Japan. By the mid-1960s, however, as a result of economic and political developments in Japan and in the region, American and Japanese perceptions on China were converging. Or, as Edwin Reischauer put it, the Japanese were ‘‘beginning to see even the key issue of China in a new light.’’∏∏ Interestingly enough, just as America and Japan were both pursuing realignment with China, memories of the China War also came to complicate the matter. Memory of Japan’s war in China, then, has come to serve several functions in the U.S.-Japanese remembrance of World War II.

Complicating Memories First, the war in China problematized that otherwise well-established binary remembrance. In this sense, the presence of Chinese Americans (and Korean Americans) has always complicated the U.S.-Japan memory of the war. In the early 1970s, for instance, Toshi and Iri Maruki, two well-known Japanese painters, brought their famed murals of Hiroshima victims to the United States on a traveling exhibition. In California they were asked by a Chinese American how they would react if Chinese painters would bring paintings of the Rape of Nanjing to Japan. This encounter became the catalyst for the two painters, as they embarked on a soul-searching journey about Japan’s war in China. This e√ort led to the production of a mural on the very subject of Nanjing a few years later, followed by paintings on the Okinawa battle and Auschwitz, among others.∏π The work of the Marukis, which initially can be seen as part of the ‘‘Japanese as victims’’ narratives, became broadened to include ‘‘Japanese as perpetrators,’’ to eventually that of the universality of human capability for evil in time of war. The same was taking place within Japan. Hiroshima, long the symbol of

302

Entangled Memories

Japanese victimhood, lost some of that peaceful and passive image when Japanese activists pointed out the city’s long history as a military garrison town, starting from the seat of the Imperial Headquarters in the war against China in 1894 to 1895. Some groups in the United States welcomed the new Asian remembrance. Wartime Japanese brutalities in China and elsewhere in Asia seem to lend justification to the firebombing of Japanese cities and ultimately the use of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They also sat well with World War II veterans, given their own demand for respect at home and apology and compensation from Japan. Indeed, many Asian laborers had worked side by side with American pows under Japanese occupation. Chinese Americans thus found a highly influential ally in American pows. Although they joined the condemnation of Japan’s wartime practice of the ‘‘comfort women’’ system, however, it is not clear how American veterans would respond to feminist criticism of continued sexual exploitation of Asian women outside American military bases in Asia after the war. Not all complications were equally appreciated or even well placed. In the late 1980s, the Japan Society in New York organized a screening of wartime Japanese films as part of an e√ort to reassess wartime Japanese culture. While the program received rave reviews among the American audience, it drew angry protests from the Chinese American community. More recently, in 1995 the American University in Washington, D.C., opened a nuclear history institute, with exhibits from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and o√ered summer courses on the nuclear age. The mayor of Hiroshima spoke of the need to abolish nuclear weapons, and survivors of the Hiroshima blast told their stories. As the opening of the o≈cial a-bomb exhibit proceeded, another exhibit opened quietly elsewhere on the American University campus. Some Chinese Americans put up a collection of photographs detailing Japanese atrocities in China during the 1930s. One of the organizers of this exhibit said that looking at Hiroshima and Nagasaki misses the point, ignores the rest of the war. ‘‘The purpose of this exhibit,’’ according to her, ‘‘is to show there are a lot of victims—actually, 30 million Chinese were killed before the bomb was dropped.’’ While the University president, in welcoming the Japanese guests, said that it was ‘‘time to erase suspicion, fear and distrust, and look to the future,’’ the Chinese Americans said, yes, they want to look to the future, too—without losing sight of this part of the past.∏∫ daqing yang

303

Taking note of that past conflict between Japan and China has contemporary relevance for the U.S. policy in Asia. For one, it highlights the deeply embedded fault lines between Japanese and Chinese national identities, often inflaming current conflicts of interest in other areas. Edwin Reischauer, the former U.S. ambassador to Japan, noted in the late 1960s, ‘‘Quite frankly, I cannot imagine anyone in Asia who doesn’t trust us more in military a√airs than they do the Japanese, including the Chinese.’’∏Ω If Reischauer can be faulted for being less critical about the U.S. role in Vietnam, he was probably not far o√ the mark when it comes to Japan and China. Since the 1980s, media reports about the ‘‘memory war’’ in China and Japan reminded American audiences of the potential for conflict.π≠ The repeated Chinese warning against the revival of Japanese militarism, then, can be used to justify a continued U.S. military presence in East Asia as a stabilizing force. As memories became more entangled in recent years, Japan’s war in China has been used instrumentally. For instance, the Chinese (and other Asian) grievances against wartime Japanese excesses have also been embraced by American pows demanding compensation and an apology from the Japanese government or companies. In some cases, they were deployed to reinforce memories based on wartime imagery of Japanese as a brutal people. This was most obvious during the 1995 Enola Gay debate. Various groups in the United States, in an e√ort to justify the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, suddenly found Asian victims of Japanese aggression a convenient counterweight. Had the United States not dropped the bombs on Japan, the argument goes, millions more Asians would have died as a result of Japanese occupation. Such a message seemed to have struck a chord with many Chinese Americans. A storefront in San Francisco’s Chinatown featured signs supporting the a-bomb decision on exactly such grounds. A number of websites, some with clear white racist leanings, nonetheless used Chinese wartime su√erings to demonize the Japanese. If there are attempts to use the China war strategically to address issues in current U.S.-Japan relations, there are also countere√orts not to let the war in Asia disturb those relations or business transactions. More recently, some popular culture memory products have taken this tack. The latest Hollywood blockbuster on the Pacific War presented a slightly di√erent picture. The film Pearl Harbor distanced America from the conflict in Asia before Pearl Harbor, portraying its hero as a 304

Entangled Memories

volunteer pilot with the raf in Europe, to such an extent that the Japanese attack in 1941 became even less comprehensible. The movie ends with the morale-boosting Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, whose crew was expected to land in ‘‘friendly areas’’ in China with the assistance of Chinese guerrillas. In contrast to the earlier portrayal of the Chinese rescue of downed American pilots, the directors reduced the China scene to the minimum. Whether such an arrangement was based on the film’s expected large revenue from the Japanese is a matter of speculation, but it is also in tune with the general mood of the country of de-emphasizing U.S.-China wartime cooperation.π∞ To be sure, the movie is not really about American memories of the war, for, as Ian Buruma acidly pointed out, the makers of Pearl Harbor ‘‘have no memory of any war.’’ The way the filmmakers framed the story line reflected more about their estimate of public acceptance and interest, both in the United States and in Japan.π≤ Transnational capitalism, in this case, had a visible hand in crafting a memory product.π≥

Transpacific Anxieties? In his meeting with U.S. o≈cials in 1960, Japanese Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato noted that the People’s Republic of China posed a di≈cult problem for Japan since ‘‘there are strong feelings in Japan on this issue. Unlike the United States, the Japanese people feel a sense of kinship to Mainland China due to geographic propinquity, long historical ties, and a sense of guilt regarding the last war.’’π∂ Many writers in Japan and in the West speak of Japan’s guilty feeling toward China in the postwar era. It was not hard to imagine in the cold war era that a sense of guilt, plus the lure of the China market, could be seen as pulling Japan away from the United States. The existence of such feelings among Japanese is often assumed, yet it is not well documented. If the opinion polls in Japan are to be trusted, the number who thought the war in China was ‘‘bad’’ (instead of ‘‘can’t be helped’’) was less than 30 percent, not a particularly high figure.π∑ It is not always obvious, moreover, which China Japan was guilty about. Because Japan maintained its diplomatic relations with Taiwan until 1972 (and in some cases even after that), such guilt might be moderated by the strong sentiment within Japan’s conservative circles that it was the magnanimity of Chiang Kai-shek that the Japanese should feel indaqing yang

305

debted to. Whether the gratitude was real or instrumental, the ‘‘war guilt’’ served well as a rhetorical tool.π∏ If the United States has a subliminal fear of a guilt-ridden Japan that is beholden to China, the fear on the part of some Japanese is of China using the wartime Sino-American alliance to weaken America’s trust in Japan. In his book Alliance Adrift, the prominent Japanese journalist Funabashi Yôichi described an instance when a ranking Chinese general visiting the U.S. Holocaust Museum began ranting to his o≈cial American guide that Japanese atrocities in China were even worse than the Nazi genocide. The episode later reached the ears of the Japanese ambassador in Washington, who expressed strong indignation at what he termed a huge injustice.ππ On his first visit to the United States in October 1997, Chinese President Jiang Zemin made a stopover in Hawaii. His first public act on American soil was to lay a wreath at the uss Arizona in honor of Americans who died in the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One newspaper considered this gesture a reminder of the ‘‘deadly ties’’ between the United States and Japan more than half a century ago.π∫ In April 2002, Hu Jintao, the anointed successor to Jiang, also stopped in Hawaii and paid tribute to American service personnel at the uss Arizona Memorial, underscoring his aim to ‘‘to enhance mutual understanding and advance the constructive and co-operative relationship between China and the US.’’πΩ Such gestures could be disturbing to the Japanese. After all, as many Japanese historians have pointed out, one of Japan’s biggest failures before World War II was losing in the realm of American popular opinion to the Chinese. Understandably, many Japanese view with worry the growing prominence of the ethnic Chinese dimension in American remembrance of World War II. That the author of the popular book The Rape of Nanking was a Chinese American convinced quite a few in Japan that Beijing was using overseas Chinese to harm U.S.-Japan relations by reviving the memory of World War II. In a recent interview, Saitô Kunihiko, the former Japanese ambassador to the United States, and the writer Ishikawa Yoshimi both expressed concern and puzzlement at the influence of ethnicity in the American remembrance of the China War. According to Ishikawa, Chinese Americans are using World War II to advance their own political interests in the United States as well as to gain favor with Beijing. In his view, Japanese Americans are joining the Chinese Americans because they no longer 306

Entangled Memories

have their own agenda after the settlement of the wartime internment issue. Regarding Jewish American groups such as the Simon Wisenthal Center, which has actively supported the Chinese American demands, former Ambassador Saito admitted that he was perplexed: ‘‘Japan has not caused any trouble to the Jews, why on earth do you join at all?’’∫≠ Such sentiment is not uncommon in Japan and is occasionally magnified in more nationalistic presses as a worldwide conspiracy against Japan. Such anxieties are not totally unfounded. The Nixon shock of 1971, when the ever-faithful Japanese ally was informed of the U.S. president’s decision to visit Beijing only minutes before the public announcement, has left a huge psychological scar on the minds of Japanese o≈cials and commentators. By the 1990s, the Nixon shock had been reinforced by the phenomenon known as ‘‘Japan passing,’’ when President Bill Clinton’s failure to stop over in Tokyo on his visit to China in 1998 caused considerable indignation and anxiety in America’s ally. Given the close relationship between memory and power, many American and Japanese political leaders are understandably apprehensive about China using war memory to undermine what former U.S. Ambassador Mike Mansfield has termed ‘‘the most important bilateral relationship in the world, bar none.’’ Although many Americans are also frustrated that the Japanese government seemed unable to overcome the history problems in its relations with its Asian neighbors, they find the suggestion that the United States can gently pressure Japan on these matters highly problematic, given America’s deep entanglement in the transpacific memory. A widespread Japanese demand for an o≈cial U.S. apology for the a-bombs is certainly going to rock U.S.-Japanese relations.∫∞ To Beijing, the timely reminder of wartime Sino-American cooperation is one of the few ways to appeal to American understanding at a time of increasing hostility toward China. Already, in the post-Tiananmen era that also coincided with the demise of the Soviet Union, China has emerged as the greatest threat to the United States (until September 11, that is). The inauguration of the new Bush administration seemed to have made such e√ort even more di≈cult, as Washington replaced the ‘‘strategic partnership’’ with ‘‘strategic competitor’’ in its characterization of U.S.-China relations. Ironically, despite Washington’s deliberate e√orts to leave Beijing in the cold, the discovery of the wreckage of a World War II–era U.S. aircraft in the moundaqing yang

307

tains of southwestern China provided the first occasion of o≈cial contacts between the Chinese and American military.

Conclusion: Memory and Power in a Triangular Relationship As this essay has shown, a combination of international geopolitics and ethnicity and group identity has contributed to a greater recognition of the Chinese (or Asian) dimension of World War II in Asia in American and Japanese public memory. Changing international conditions help set up new frameworks of remembrance: just as the cold war confrontation between a U.S.-led alliance, which included Japan, and China helped freeze some memories of World War II, the rapprochement with mainland China in the 1970s created widespread interest in both the United States and Japan in each country’s war experience in China. Internally, the continued presence of veterans and the rise of ethnic minority politics help sustain or highlight collective memories of subnational groups, although here, too, international conditions also mattered. For better or worse, transnational media are playing an ever greater role in channeling memories across national borders, as can be seen in the numerous websites on the war in China that are located in virtual space. The Chinese director Jiang Wen’s latest film, Guizi laile (The Devils Have Come), depicted far more complex relations between Japanese soldiers and Chinese peasants during the war than previously seen. Having gained international recognition with a major award at Cannes, it is making its way to a limited audience in the United States. A recent Japanese-produced documentary featuring on-camera confessions by a group of Japanese veterans about their crimes in China has enjoyed surprising popularity in Japan, and an English version is being screened on college campuses and at academic conferences.∫≤ The History Channel has shown a number of documentaries on the Asian aspects of World War II. What does this development mean for the relations among the three countries across the Pacific? A joint poll conducted by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun and the Wall Street Journal in 1997 asked the question ‘‘Which country has closer relations with China?’’ In striking similarity, around half of those polled in both Japan and the United States picked the United States,

308

Entangled Memories

compared with approximately 36 percent in both countries who thought Japan had closer ties with China. Yet a much larger percentage (55.6 percent) of Japanese respondents in the same survey also considered China to be the most important country diplomatically in the next twenty years, compared to 32 percent of American respondents.∫≥ The discrepancy in responses to the second question, despite the similarity to the first, suggests that for many Japanese at least, China remains a country that is increasingly important but still somewhat psychologically distant. In the meantime, Sheila Johnson has written about the phenomenon of ‘‘migrating Asian stereotypes’’ in the American perception of Asia: that Americans are not likely to be simultaneously fond of both Japan and China. Indeed, the history of U.S.– East Asian relations, with wartime publications and propaganda and postwar cold war alliances, seems to bear this out.∫∂ A triangular relationship, even without equal distance among its components, has its inherent internal uncertainties. Managing historical memories in this context is not an easy task. It is not my intention, by highlighting the dissonance in the transpacific memories of the war, to belittle the impressive accomplishment of rebuilding postwar friendship and prosperity between the United States and Japan, onetime bitter adversaries. Various opinion polls conducted in the United States around the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II showed that a clear majority of Americans no longer held a grudge against Japan for the Pearl Harbor attack. True, the issue of the atomic bombing is still divisive, as seen in the controversies over a planned stamp issue that would commemorate the atomic bombings with the caption ‘‘Atomic Bombs hasten war’s end, August 1945’’ and over the Enola Gay exhibit. Even here, many Americans are at least sensitive to Japanese feeling (though still supporting the decision to use the atomic bomb).∫∑ In the human history of reconciliation, this can be considered a success story. It is my intention, however, to remind us that forgetting about some salient aspects of the past, however justified it may be at one time, may also entail a hidden instability. Not having confronted such a problematic past—and certainly not just on the China war—was a major cause for anxieties on both sides of the Pacific when its place in the public memory surged in recent years. As one recent work that focused on Asia-Pacific war memories put it, memories are ‘‘perilous,’’ not just because they are precarious or endan-

daqing yang

309

gered or in need of recuperation, but also because they continue to generate a sense of danger for various peoples throughout the region.∫∏ Memories are often shaped by considerations of power because they constitute an important psychological dimension of power. Will these transpacific anxieties continue in the remembrance of World War II? What is to be done? In ending his book on the history of American– East Asian relations, Akira Iriye observed more than thirty years ago, ‘‘If Chinese, Japanese, and Americans could develop a new vocabulary to facilitate mutual association, if they could liberate themselves from the burden of the past—if someday that were brought to pass, then the trans-Pacific community of peoples would in fact emerge and make its unique contribution to the development of human understanding.’’∫π This is not yet the reality, but there are now important e√orts under way toward achieving such a goal. As I have argued in this essay, the elimination of anxieties over war memory also depends on perceptions of current geopolitical and economic interests. As such, they are not likely to go away. Both the Japanese and the U.S. governments have undertaken to bring about greater access to relevant documents. The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, established under the Murayama cabinet, has now opened a highly convenient online database, providing through the Internet the index and digital image information of historical records about modern Japan-Asia relations held and made available to the public by Japanese government agencies. In late 2000, the Clinton administration adopted the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act and the Japanese War Crimes Provisions of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, aimed at locating and publicizing records on Japan’s war crimes in Asia and the Pacific.∫∫ Though still in their early stages of operations, both projects have conducted themselves in a highly professional manner. In a clear e√ort to shape future public memories of the war across the Pacific, independent and respected scholars from the three countries have embarked on a joint study to explore the social, military, and political aspects of the SinoJapanese War. The success of such endeavors, not just as a project of collaborative research but also its ultimate influence on how the public remembers the war, though by no means guaranteed, o√ers perhaps the best hope to overcome some of the anxieties.

310

Entangled Memories

Notes 1 Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American–East Asian Relations (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 329. 2 Works generally within a binational framework include Michael Hogan, ed., Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Laura Hein and Mark Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997). In Japanese, for example, Yui Daizaburô, Nichibei Sensôkan no Sokoku: Masatsu no Shinso Shinri ( Japan and the United States Perspective on War: A Deep State of Mental Friction) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995). 3 Quoted in Yoshida Yutaka, Nihonjin no sensôkan: Sengoshi no naka no henyô ( Japanese Views of War) (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1995), 102. Yoshida’s book is the best survey of postwar Japanese war memories in any language. For a book in English that has taken much from Yoshida’s work, see George Hicks, Japan’s War Memories (London: Ashgate, 1998). 4 Theodore F. Cook Jr., ‘‘China War: A Bibliographical Exploration of Major Works in English on the ‘China War’ and ‘Sino-Japanese Relations’ in the World War II Era,’’ papers presented at the Harvard conference on Sino-Japanese War (1931–1945), www.fas.harvard.edu/asiactr/sino-japane se/chinaWarBib.pdf. 5 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 15. Another commonly used concept is ‘‘collective memory,’’ which seems to place greater emphasis on the memory of a collective entity. As will become clear, this concept is useful in breaking down an ‘‘American memory’’ of World War II into di√erent groups and their memories. 6 I borrow this concept from T. Fujitani et al., eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 2. 7 In a study of U.S. tv news coverage, a group of Japanese researchers defined memories of war as ‘‘not mere war-related facts and information. They include interpretations, opinions and assertions related to an event called war and also various lessons learnt from experiences in war.’’ Kensuke Kohno et al., ‘‘How Have Memories of War Been Transmitted?,’’ nhk online at www.nhk.or.jp/bunken/book-e. 8 To gauge popular memory through the analysis of cultural products such as film and literature is not unproblematic. While they certainly reflect at least what some people think of a certain subject and what the audience may encounter, these products themselves are not precise indications of how a society remembers the past. Still, George Lipsitz argues that

daqing yang

311

‘‘the infinitely renewable present of electronic mass media creates a crisis for collective memory.’’ Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), viii. 9 Carol Gluck, foreword in Loyd E. Lee, ed., World War II in Asia and the Pacific and the War’s Aftermath, with General Themes (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), xi. For a comparative study, see Daizaburô Yui, ‘‘Between ve Day and vj Day: A Contrast in American Perceptions of World War II,’’ in Takashi Inoguchi and Lyn Jackson, eds., Memories of War: The Second World War and Japanese Historical Memory in Comparative Perspective (Tokyo: unu Report, 1998). 10 Roper Center at University of Connecticut Public Opinion Online. The breakdown of some one thousand respondents is quite interesting. The younger the individual, the more likely he or she is to respond ‘‘no answer/don’t know.’’ Whereas equal percentages (23) of men and women chose Japan, more men (45 percent) than women (35 percent) picked Germany. Two percent answered Russia, and 2 percent of those ages 19 to 29 answered China. 11 Sheila K. Johnson, The Japanese through American Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 15. 12 For military developments, see Ronald Spector, Eagle against the Sun (New York: Free Press, 1985). 13 For a survey of the triangular relations, see Warren I. Cohen, ‘‘China in Japanese-American Relations,’’ in Akira Iriye and Warren I. Cohen, eds., The United States and Japan in the Postwar World (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1989), 36–60. 14 Chalmers Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Revolution in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962); and Lloyd Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984) belong to the former; the latter genre starts with Van Slyke, Chinese Communist Movement: A Report of the United States War Department, July 1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968). 15 Alvin Coox, Year of the Tiger (Tokyo: Orient/West, 1964). For surveys of English-language sources and secondary works, I have relied extensively on the following: Steven Phillips, ‘‘English Language Primary Sources on China at War, 1937–1945,’’ and Theodore F. Cook Jr., ‘‘The China War: A Bibliographical Exploration of Major Works in English on the ‘China-Japan Conflict’ and ‘Sino-Japanese Relations’ in the Second World War Era,’’ both prepared for the ‘‘Conference on the China War, 1937–1945,’’ Tokyo, 11–12 January 2000. 16 A partial list includes Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (New York: Random House, 1938); Theodore White, Thunder out of China (New York:

312

Entangled Memories

William Sloane, 1946); Agnes Smedly, Battle Hymn of China (New York: Knopf, 1943). 17 Claire Lee Chennault, Way of a Fighter: The Memoir of Claire Lee Chennault, ed. Robert Horz (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949); Anna Chennault, Chennault and the Flying Tigers (New York: Ericsson, 1963). 18 Martha Byrd, Chennault: Giving Wings to the Tiger (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987); Jack Samson, Chennault (New York: Doubleday, 1987); Daniel Ford, Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and the American Volunteer Group (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1991). There is also a website, www.flyingtigersavg.com. 19 David D. Barrett, Dixie Mission: The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan, 1944 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Joseph W. Esherick, Lost Chance in China: The World War II Dispatches of John S. Service (New York: Random House, 1974). 20 Dulles to Lord Lothian, 3 January 1940, quoted in Ronald Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (New York: Free Press, 1982), 443; George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (New York: New American Library, 1951), 72. 21 Barbara Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China (New York: Macmillan, 1970). The book was subsequently published in Chinese translation in mainland China. 22 Frank Dorn, The Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1971); Dick Wilson, When Tigers Fight : The Story of the SinoJapanese War, 1937–1945 (New York: Viking, 1975). 23 Ienaga Saburo, Pacific War, 1931–1945: A Critical Perspective on Japan’s Role in World War II, trans. Frank Baldwin (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 24 Stephen R. MacKinnon and Oris Friesen, China Reporting: An Oral History of American Journalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). The editors noted that largely due to the lastminute absence of Joseph Alsop, a staunch supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, the meeting was less polemically heated than it might have been. 25 Tômon Jin’ni and Yuzuki Hiroshi, Gaikoku eiga ni miru Ajia Taiheiyô sensô (Foreign Films Look at the Asia Pacific War) (Tokyo: San’ichi shinshô, 1995). 26 Roper Center at University of Connecticut Public Opinion Online. 27 As Emily Rosenberg shows, Pearl Harbor is the most potent symbol in American memory of the war with Japan. Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 28 The Japanese translation of this book seemed not to have made the same impact as it did in the United States. Occasionally, a selective reading

daqing yang

313

of this book has been used to support the argument that Japan was provoked by American racism. See Nishio Kanji, Kokumin no rekishi (The National History) (Tokyo: Fusosha, 1999). 29 Theodore H. White, ‘‘The Danger from Japan,’’ New York Times Magazine, 28 July 1985. 30 Rekishi dokuhon (Rinji zôkan): Toskushû Himerareta Nichi-Bei kankeishi ‘‘Kichiku Ei-Bei,’’ (Popular History [Special Issue]: Hidden Relations between Japan and the United States. ‘‘Devil Animals. England and America’’) no. 536 (December 1990); George Friedman and Meredith Lebard, The Coming War with Japan (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991). 31 For a glimpse of their activities, see Alliance for Preserving the Truth of [the] Sino-Japanese War, at www.sjwar.org and Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II, at www.global-alliance.net. 32 Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). For a review article that discusses both the strength and the weakness of her books, see Daqing Yang, ‘‘Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing,’’ American Historical Review 104, no. 3 ( June 1999): 842–865. 33 L. Ling-chi Wang, ‘‘Roots and Changing Identity of the Chinese in the United States,’’ Daedalus 102, no. 2 (spring 1991): 200–202. For comparative studies of ethnic memory in the United States, see Bodnar, Remaking America, chapter 3, ‘‘The Construction of Ethnic Memory.’’ 34 For a highly critical view on such developments, see Ian Buruma, ‘‘Passport to the Su√ering Club,’’ The Independent (London), 3 July 1994. See also Ian Buruma, ‘‘The Joy and Peril of Victimhood,’’ New York Review of Books, 18 April 1999. 35 See Chinese Alliance for Commemoration of the Sino-Japanese War Victims, at www.ww2.0rg.hk. 36 See, e.g., ‘‘Humanitarian Support for Chinese Victims of Japan’s Wartime Atrocities’’ (adopted 7 February 1999), at www.angelfire.com/ ny2/village/. 37 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Di√erent Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 366. 38 James J. Orr, Victim as Hero: Ideologies of Peace and National Identity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 31. 39 Interview in Chûô kôron, August 1983, quoted in Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensôkan, 66. 40 John Powell, ‘‘Japan’s Germ Warfare: The U.S. Cover-up of a War Crime,’’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1980; Sheldon B. Harris, Factory of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–1945 and the American Cover-up (London: Routledge, 1994). Powell wrote a piece in April 1952

314

Entangled Memories

accusing the United States of employing Japanese individuals involved in bacteriological warfare, which aroused anger from the U.S. authorities. In Japanese, see Morimura Sei’ichi’s exposé, Devil’s Gluttony, published in the early 1980s (Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1985) and more recent works by the historian Tsuneishi Kei’ichi. Devil’s Gluttony was originally serialized in the Japanese Communist Party’s newspaper. In the 1980s, some American pows alleged that they were also victims of human experiments, but there was no credible evidence. The U.S. government in the late 1990s banned Japanese suspected of such crimes from entering the country. Ironically, the first group to be denied entry consisted of several Japanese veterans who planned to travel to the United States to bear witness to their involvement. 41 Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensôkan, 103–104. 42 Cook, ‘‘China War.’’ 43 Tadao Sato, ‘‘Japanese Films about the Pacific War,’’ trans. Kana Moll, in Philips West et al., eds., America’s Wars in Asia: A Cultural Approach to History and Memory (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 58. 44 Hayashi Fusao, Daitôa sensô konteiron (A≈rming the Great East Asian War) (Tokyo: Banchoshobo, 1965). For a discussion in English, see Peter Duus, ‘‘Japan’s Wartime Empire: Problems and Issues,’’ in Peter Duus et al., eds., Japan’s Wartime Empire, 1931–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), xi–xlvii. In 1983 Braddon Russell, an Australian expow, published The Other Hundred Years War: Japan’s Bid for Supremacy, 1941–2041 (London: Collins, 1983). 45 Observation based on author’s visit, summer 1998. The choice of ‘‘dawn’’ here implies more than the bravery of Ushijima and the ‘‘selfless’’ Okinawans—itself a postwar myth that unraveled in the 1980s. It suggests rebirth. Committing suicide with Ushijima was Lieutenant General Chô Isamu of Rape of Nanjing notoriety. 46 Kobayashi Yoshinori, Sensô-ron (On War) (Tokyo: Tendensha, 1998); Nishio Kanji, Kokumin no rekishi (Tokyo: Fuso sha, 2000). Stinnett’s book appeared in Japanese translation almost immediately and received rave reviews from conservative intellectuals, including the Kyoto University professor Nakanishi Masateru. 47 The work and life of this fascinating Japanese writer is my next research project. 48 One of their books, on Japanese atrocities in northern China, almost became a bestseller when pressure from the right wing forced the publisher to cancel reprints. 49 Orr, Victim as Hero, 8. 50 Sato, ‘‘Japanese Films abut the Pacific War,’’ 61. 51 Ienaga’s long court battle against the Japanese government over the

daqing yang

315

screening of history textbooks was not widely known in the United States until the 1980s. Orr, Hero as Victim, 73; Ienaga Saburô, Japan’s Past, Japan’s Future: One Historian’s Odyssey, translated and introduced by Richard H. Minear (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). 52 As noted previously, an English-language version of The Pacific War was published in 1978. 53 Honda’s 1971 book, Chûgoku no tabi (Travels to China) and his later investigative reports on the Nanjing Massacre have been translated into English as The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999). 54 Orr, Victim as Hero, 97–103. 55 Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memories: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17. 56 Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor (New York: Pantheon, 1991). 57 See, e.g., Lisa Yoneyama, ‘‘Hiroshima’s Korean Atom Bomb Memorial and the Politics of Ethnicity,’’ in Hein and Selden, Living with the Bomb, 202–231. 58 Translated by the Secretariat, House of Representatives, quoted in Ryuji Mukae, ‘‘Japan’s Diet Resolution on World War Two: Keeping History at Bay,’’ Asian Survey 36, no. 10 (October 1996): 1012. 59 For a highly critical view of the Diet resolution, see Kitaoka Shin’ichi, ‘‘The Folly of the Fiftieth-Anniversary Resolution,’’ Japan Echo, autumn 1995, 66–74 (originally published in the influential monthly Chûô kôron ). 60 Former Prime Minister Nakasone’s speech at a dinner reception following the ‘‘Conference on Reconciliation in the Asia-Pacific’’ attended by the author, Tokyo, February 2001. 61 During President George W. Bush’s visit to Japan in February 2002, he delivered a speech to the Diet in which he spoke of the alliance between Japan and the United States during the past ‘‘a century and a half.’’ It was not clear whether this was a simple error or an overenthusiastic celebration of the friendly ties. 62 The date of the award is listed on a U.S. Air Force o≈cial site, www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/afp/awardcl.htm. Discussion in the 47th Diet, 7 December 1964. For complete transcripts of Diet interpellations, see the online database at Japan’s National Diet Library, www.ndl.gov.jp. There was said to be spirited debate in the press about this issue as well. 63 For an excellent discussion of LeMay’s role and the responsibilities of his superiors, see Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), chapters

316

Entangled Memories

8 and 9. See also Thomas M. Co√ey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (New York: Crown, 1986), 436–437. 64 Transcript of Diet interpellation, 15 December 1964, at www.ndl .gov.jp. 65 Priscilla Clapp and Morton Halpern, ‘‘U.S. Elite Images of Japan,’’ in Akira Iriye, ed., Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 217–220. 66 Edwin O. Reischauer, ‘‘Our Dialogue with Japan,’’ Foreign A√airs 45 ( January 1967): 237. 67 For a publication of their major works in English, see John W. Dower and John Junkerman, eds., The Hiroshima Murals: The Art of Iri Maruki and Toshi Maruki (New York: Kodansha International, 1985). 68 ‘‘Nuclear Institute Opened 50 Years after Hiroshima,’’ cnn, 8 July 1995, transcript at Lexus/Nexus. 69 Elaine H. Burnell, ed., Asian Dilemma: United States, Japan and China (Santa Barbara: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1969), 123. 70 For instance, cnn reported on the Chinese commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre. cnn World Report, 21 December 1997, transcript 97122106V04. 71 In his review of the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! Akira Iriye predicted in 1995 that a new Pearl Harbor film ‘‘certainly would contain some information on Japanese aggression in Asia.’’ Akira Iriye, ‘‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’’ in Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon, and David Rubel, eds., Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York: Holt, 1995), 231. Japan is the largest export market for U.S.-made films. Sheila Johnson has suggested gauging public sentiment about the past if a film strikes a broadly responsive chord in the audience. Sheila Johnson, ‘‘Those Nasty Japs Again: War Memories and the Movies,’’ JPRI Critique, June 1997. 72 Ian Buruma, ‘‘Oh! What a Lovely War,’’ Guardian, 28 May 2001. Buruma also raised questions about Ben AΔeck’s observation about ‘‘honorable Japanese’’ in the film, noting that Japanese behavior in the China War was anything but honorable. 73 Another indication is that the film dropped many racial epithets that were common among gis during the war. 74 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 22. The online version is available at www.state.gov/www/about — state/history/frusXXII. 75 Yoshida, Nihonjin no sensôkan, 125. 76 As Wada Haruki has shown recently, however, the idea that Chiang Kai-shek proposed to ‘‘repay hatred with benevolence’’ was turned into a myth, often to the advantage of a Japanese government that was unwilling

daqing yang

317

to pay reparations to Chiang’s government in the first place. Wada Haruki, ‘‘Economic Cooperation in Place of Historical Remorse: Japanese Postwar Settlements with China, Russia, and Korea in the Context of the Cold War,’’ in Banno Junji, ed., The Political Economy of Japanese Society, Vol. 2: Internationalization and Domestic Issues (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 107–140. 77 Funabashi Yôichi, Alliance Adrift (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1999), 421–422. 78 ‘‘A Wreath to Remind Americans That China Was W.W.II Ally,’’ Straits Times (Singapore), 29 October 1997, 21. For a predictable Japanese reaction to similar e√orts by Chinese o≈cials, see Funabashi, Alliance Adrift, 421–422. 79 South China Morning Post, 29 April 2002. 80 ‘‘Rekishi rinshiki kara kyokuron o haise,’’ (‘‘Eliminate extreme views in historical understanding’’) Ronza, May 2000, 126–137. 81 For one such suggestion, see Nicholas D. Kristof, ‘‘The Burden of Memory,’’ Foreign A√airs 77, no. 6 (November/December 1998). One high-ranking State Department o≈cial was quoted by Funabashi Yoichi as describing the suggestion of U.S. intervention as ‘‘flawed thinking.’’ Funabashi, Alliance Adrift, 441. 82 Riben quizi ( Japanese Devils), directed by Matsui Minoru and produced by Oguri Ken’ichi. English translation by Linda Hoaglund. More information at www.japanesedevils.com. The Japanese producers emphasized the essentially pacifist message to their potential American audience, especially in the wake of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan. See interview posted at Asia Society, www.Asiasociety.org. 83 Nikkei website at www.nikkei-r.co.jp/nikkeipoll/tokubetsu.htm. 84 Johnson, The Japanese through American Eyes, 10. 85 A cbs –New York Times poll in December 1994 asked, ‘‘These days, do you think most Japanese hold it against the United States for dropping atomic bombs on Japan, or don’t they hold it against us, or don’t you know enough about it to have an opinion?’’ Responses were 40 percent yes, 23 percent no, and 30 percent did not know enough. The stamp was not issued. On the stamp controversy, see Steven Brull, ‘‘After Smithsonian Step, a Message for U.S.,’’ International Herald Tribune, 18 February 1995. 86 Fujitani et al., introduction, Perilous Memories, 3. 87 Iriye, Across the Pacific, 329. 88 For o≈cial websites, see Japanese Center for Asian Historical Records (jacar), www.jacar.go.jp/f — e.htm, and U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, www.archives.gov/iwg/.

318

Entangled Memories

Concluding Remarks

. marc gallicchio

We began this book with the understanding that memory could be contested, imposed, resisted, distorted, and revised. Emily Rosenberg’s essay amply demonstrates the mutability and instability of collective memories of what for Americans is perhaps the most recognizable event of World War II. In the decade before September 11, 2001, these memories seemed to be everywhere in American culture, floating freely on separate planes (or on the Internet) and occasionally colliding into each other. As Rosenberg notes, the interactions between these memories and the present gave new meanings to both. To use one example from her essay, the e√ort to restore rank to Admiral Kimmel and General Short could be embraced by those who sought to remind the public about another popular Democratic president’s alleged neglect of the military after the cold war. The attacks of September 11 sidetracked those e√orts and, as Rosenberg notes, suddenly elevated the heroic narrative of the greatest generation above all others. As with the broader public, policymakers may find personal experiences and historical memories interacting with the present to reconfigure both. Bonner Fellers and Herbert Hoover challenged the emerging dominant narrative on the use of the atomic bombs in order to modify occupation policy and vindicate prewar isolationist policies. Hoover no doubt understood that his wing of the Republican Party stood little chance of regaining public favor in a political culture that viewed war against Japan as inevitable and the atomic bombs as necessary. Shorn of its conspiratorial overtones the Hoover-Fellers argument regarding America’s part in bringing on the Pacific War survived into the cold war era and became part of the Realist critique of American foreign policy. But their belief that Soviet agents in the State Department sabotaged peace e√orts to prolong the war became a poor relation to the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories described by Emily Rosenberg. As Rosenberg noted, the Pearl Harbor controversy is the one historiographical debate that professors in the United States can be certain their students will have heard about. Few students, members of

the general public, or even professors will be aware of Hoover’s claim that Soviet sympathizers deliberately prolonged the war. That theory found some adherents among like-minded ideologues after the war. It survives today on the far right of American politics in its own memory community, also known as the John Birch Society.∞ One need not accept this argument about the bomb’s use to recognize that something has been lost in our remembering of the period Waldo Heinrichs describes as that ‘‘obscure time a half century earlier that stood between war and peace.’’ Some of that obscurity might recede if we recalled that the American debate over unconditional surrender was part of a larger partisan contest about the meaning of victory that extended the ideological battleground of the New Deal into the realm of international a√airs, and that it was conservative Republicans who argued most strenuously for modifying unconditional surrender.≤ Remembering the appeal of Hoover’s conspiratorial argument to diehard isolationists or those who would become members of the Asia first wing of the Republican Party might also shift historians’ attention away from the quarrelsome issues raised by the Smithsonian exhibit and direct them toward a deeper inquiry into the origins of postwar American politics. Haruo Iguchi writes that Hoover’s views about unconditional surrender were shaped by his personal experiences. To some extent that was true also of Joseph Grew and Henry Stimson. As Frank Ninkovich reminds us, however, American occupation policy emerged out of a sustained debate over the meaning of modern Japanese history. In some ways this was a continuation of the debate over unconditional surrender between root-and-branch advocates of New Deal–style reform and proponents of a more limited policy designed to put a lapsed Japan back on the liberal modernizing track. In discussing the development of occupation policy Ninkovich introduces the idea of historical understanding as a form of memory that is distinct from history but also unlike collective memory in that it is, among other things, elitist, reliant to some extent on academic understanding of the past, and more enmeshed in policymaking. In this regard it is helpful to recall that academic specialists on Japan such as Hugh Borton and George Blakeslee played prominent roles in the development of postwar plans for the occupation. For good or ill their ideas mingled with those of diplomats like Joseph Grew, Joseph Ballantine, and Eugene Dooman, whose professional and personal experi320

Concluding Remarks

ence ensured that discussions of Japan’s future would be informed by historical understanding. The premium that these Japan experts placed on historical understanding helps to explain their opposition to the more ardent advocates of progressive occupation policies. Ninkovich concludes that this form of elite collective memory mattered in policymaking and thus requires further study. Takuya Sasaki’s essay reinforces that conclusion while simultaneously indicating how rare such historical understanding might be among policymakers. Debates about occupation policy were Japan-specific or grounded in quasi-historical explanations about the rise of fascism in the 1930s. During the cold war, however, as Sasaki shows, American o≈cials’ shared memories of the war against Japan became more like bromides and aphorisms that were readily transferable to unrelated issues and crises. Detached from context, the lessons of Manchuria and Pearl Harbor became universal warnings to policymakers who ignored them at the nation’s peril. This tendency to distill the lessons of the past into policy axioms recently reached new heights in irony when policymakers used the lessons of the Japanese occupation to soothe public anxieties about the chances for democracy in postinvasion Iraq. Historians were appalled by the facile historical comparisons policymakers made between postwar Japan and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.≥ Nevertheless, for policymakers seeking to allay public fears about the cost of an invasion, there was no denying the comparison’s appeal. In a post–September 11 world suffused with images of Pearl Harbor and ‘‘the greatest generation’’ one could inspire a new greatest generation to take up the challenge by reminding them that after World War II the United States had transformed another dictatorship into a democracy. Referring to the hatred aroused during the war, Ninkovich notes that victory made it easy for Americans to forget the past. Sasaki shows that in dismissing Japan’s ‘‘emotional and irrational’’ opposition to rearmament Americans found it easy to forget Japan’s past as well. It is hardly surprising that the lessons the Japanese public drew from the Asia-Pacific War di√ered from those of most Americans. The durability of those lessons was still evident in the responses of Japanese visitors to the Arizona Memorial. It is interesting to see, as Sasaki illustrates, that key Japanese politicians remained ambivalent about such fundamental issues as nuclear weapons. For them it appears that the lessons of the war competed with traditional assessments of the marc gallicchio

321

importance of military power in international a√airs. Thus far the Japanese public’s memory of the Asia-Pacific War, transmitted across generations, has outweighed the allure of traditional great power status. Collective memory of the war helped forge a new identity for Japan as a nation dedicated to peace. But this was not a clear-cut victory. As Sasaki reminds us, Japanese reliance on the American nuclear umbrella meant that collective memories of the Pacific War would exist uncomfortably in the shadow of the very weapons that had ended it. During the 1990s, the promoters of museums and memorials in the United States and Japan became uncomfortably familiar with the unpredictable directions e√orts at shaping collective memories might take. The very concreteness of museums, writes Waldo Heinrichs, makes them sites worth contending over. The Enola Gay exhibit became controversial in part because it erupted within a cultural context where there was no shortage of dry powder waiting for a spark. As both Heinrichs and Rosenberg note, the ‘‘greatest generation’’ phenomenon, the Republican ascendancy in Congress, and the history wars fed o√ each other. Given this context and in light of the simmering controversy that already existed around revisionist interpretations of the atomic bomb, any attempt to mount an exhibit that questioned the dominant narrative of the war’s end was bound to encounter criticism. Generational di√erences compounded the controversy, but, as Heinrichs explains, the curators at the Smithsonian also inadvertently antagonized well-organized powerful opponents in the Air Force Association and the American Legion. Equally intriguing for students of collective memory is his suggestion that it was possible that ‘‘the American Legion was representing the views of combat veterans who read about Ground Zero images that were all too familiar and that evoked memories too painful to bear.’’ The opponents of the Enola Gay exhibit showed little confidence in the ability of museum patrons to evaluate materials on their own and reach their own conclusions. Certainly this was true of the many critics who denounced the exhibit without bothering to read its muchrevised script, or criticized artifacts they never saw. But as Xiaohua Ma and Yujin Yaguchi show, despite the solidity of museums and memorials as memory sites, the lessons they impart to visitors are fluid and unpredictable. No doubt the curators of Peace Osaka were aghast at seeing their museum used to promote a nationalist agenda. It is likely 322

Concluding Remarks

that at least some of the Arizona Memorial’s supporters would be disturbed to learn that for Japanese visitors the site reinforces a generalized belief in the tragedy of all wars. Nevertheless, as Ma suggests, it appears that the government of the People’s Republic of China holds to an instrumentalist view of memory, treating it as something that can be flicked on and o√ at will with guaranteed results. In this case, as Ma notes, Chinese leaders see war museums as means for reinforcing national identity in uncertain times at home and abroad. It would be interesting to assess the results of those e√orts by learning more about how Chinese visitors respond to the various museums she describes. It would also be interesting to note regional variations in the reconstruction of Chinese memories of the war. The commemoration of the Flying Tigers in Chongqing and Kunming, described by Daqing Yang, and the preservation of General Joseph Stilwell’s headquarters as a museum in Chongqing hint at these possibilities. The sale of Flying Tigers t-shirts at the Stilwell Museum further illustrates how memory is reconstructed for local consumption. During the war, Stilwell feuded bitterly with Flying Tigers commander Claire Chennault. Those disputes are unimportant to Chinese vendors, who see nothing untoward in linking memories of the two men for commercial or political purposes. China’s market-oriented economy has begun to a√ect the process of memorializing in other areas, including Chinese Communist Party history. Today, Chinese on ‘‘Red tours’’ walk parts of the route traversed by party founders on the Long March. In this respect, China’s fashioning of historical memory into commodities seems similar to practices in the United States and Japan. In other respects China’s experience di√ers. For example, the Chinese have avoided the internal public debates over war remembrances that have flared in Japan and the United States. But China’s expanding role in the global economy may lead to more questioning of orthodox views of the past. In recent years, a small number of scholars have taken advantage of Hong Kong’s looser restrictions on publishing to produce histories based on a ‘‘people’s’’ view of the past. These studies use oral histories and the personal memories of participants and eye witnesses to probe such controversial topics as the Great Leap Forward and the famine of the late 1950s. For now, however, the party’s views dominate. The reasons are obvious. As one critic has explained, ‘‘The most important base for the ruling party ideology is a favorable description of party history.’’∂ marc gallicchio

323

Japanese nationalists readily appreciate this connection between past and present. They hope to impart a new sense of national identity through veneration of war dead at Yasukuni Shrine and the establishment of patriotically centered museums. In doing so, they confront a well-entrenched collective memory about the meaning of the Pacific War. As Yaguchi shows, Japan’s peace education, whatever its deficiencies, has made its imprint on Japanese visitors to the Arizona. For Japanese today, memories of Japan’s war in China may be open to challenge and revision, but the visible devastation the Asia-Pacific War wrought in Japan places limits on the mutability of those memories. Certainly much of the Japanese public would find distasteful the celebratory tone that seems an essential element of war museums elsewhere. Before the war, African Americans counted on the shared memory of racial prejudice to create a mutuality of interests across the Pacific. When African American intellectuals thought about Japan’s reception into the international community they saw parallels to their e√orts at integration into American society. This was a di√erent historical understanding from the one that guided American policymakers. Interpretations about Japan’s treatment were made more compelling by relating them to experiences ingrained in the vernacular memory of black Americans. Although some African Americans visited Japan and some Japanese circulated in black American communities, the African American interest in, in some cases fascination with, Japan developed at a distance. That distance probably made it easier to abandon the most controversial aspects of black internationalism after Pearl Harbor. The Double v campaign and the injunction to ‘‘Remember Pearl Harbor and Sikeston, Missouri, too,’’ could more safely accommodate calls for domestic and international reform. The fight for the right to fight was an uphill struggle, but it eventually came to be seen as the beginning of the end of legalized segregation in America. For the most part this is an American story in which Japanese receive little mention. Like the debates over Pearl Harbor, the furor over the Enola Gay, and celebrations of the greatest generation, commemorations of African American service in the war are an internal a√air. Omitting references to the Japanese has made it easier to integrate black Americans into the broader narrative of American war memories. The story of Dorie Miller is now a staple of Black History Month presentations. His iconic status was confirmed when his bravery was portrayed in the movie Pearl Harbor.∑ 324

Concluding Remarks

Japan’s actions in China complicated matters for black Americans, who had to explain how a nation thought to be concerned with racial equality could seek to dominate another oppressed nation. Today, remembering Japan’s war in China also complicates matters for the larger American public and for Japanese as well. Daqing Yang shows that for most Americans Japan’s war in China forms a minor part of a secondary memory that is centered on the European theaters of World War II. The postwar conditions in China may have posed the greatest obstacle to widespread commemoration of America’s role in China. The civil war and Chinese Communist victory made the ‘‘loss of China’’ look like America’s defeat. That was a story that did not fit easily into the triumphal narratives that structure most commemorations of the war. For the People’s Republic of China, commemoration of the wartime alliance between the United States and China has become an asset in its diplomatic portfolio. This trend continues.∏ But one wonders how such obviously selective remembrances will be reconciled with the history that came afterward, especially since memories of those events, particularly the Korean War, are likely to be fresher for many Chinese. As Yang makes clear, avoidance of ‘‘problematic pasts’’ can breed anxieties on both sides of the Pacific when dormant memories are revived. Certainly this is true of Japan today. Japan’s invasion of China has been di≈cult for the Japanese to reconcile with their modern identity as a peaceful nation. Reminders of aggression and atrocity in China conflict sharply with an identity formed around the memories of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Individual e√orts on the part of Japanese to remember and atone for those actions have never been lacking. But they failed to significantly shape the postwar generation’s collective memories of the war. The recent ‘‘memory wars’’ across the Pacific have been bitterly contested because the stakes are great. For Japanese politicians seeking to transform Japan into a more traditional great power, the memory of Japan’s fifteen-year war in China remains a serious obstacle. Various groups on both sides of the Pacific recognize this and have formed alliances to preserve the memories of their su√ering at the hands of the Japanese. As they see it, to allow outspoken Japanese politicians to dismiss those memories would make them victims of Japanese aggression for a second time. Comparisons to the Holocaust, even if the name is not used, remind the world of the terrible devastation Japan inflicted upon China. marc gallicchio

325

It also labels contemporary Japanese politicians pariahs by implying that they are Holocaust deniers. This rhetorical escalation is aimed at the Japanese, but its e√ects may spread wider. If so, American remembrances of the wartime alliance with China are likely to be disturbed by questions about what the United States was doing while the Japanese army ran amok in China. There will most likely be more di≈cult questions asked in the near future. For the time being, it appears that conflicting memories of the Asia-Pacific War will continue to a√ect transpacific relations. It also seems likely that the social and cultural dynamics of nations and groups interacting across the Pacific will continue to influence how those memories are formed and used. As we have seen, the inherent instability of those interactions is what accounts for the unpredictability of the past in U.S.–East Asian relations.

Notes 1

John F. McManus, ‘‘Dropping the Bomb,’’ New American, 21 August

1995. 2 Several historians have discussed the position of conservatives in and out of the government in the debate over unconditional surrender. But further investigation seems necessary. Brian Villa, ‘‘The U.S. Army, Unconditional Surrender, and the Potsdam Proclamation,’’ Journal of American History 63 ( June 1976): 66–92; Marc Gallicchio, The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Fall of the Japanese Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 52–53; and Michael D. Pearlman, Warmaking and American Democracy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 267–274. 3 John W. Dower, ‘‘A Warning from History: Don’t Expect Democracy in Iraq,’’ Boston Review, February–March 2003; ‘‘History, Japan Occupation, and Analogy,’’ on the website of the Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, at communication.ucsd.edu/911/jap an.html. 4 ‘‘The Luding Bridge Battle, Modern China’s Founding Legend, a Myth?,’’ Christian Science Monitor, 22 May 2006. 5 ‘‘Beyond the Movie: A Brave Man called Doris,’’ National Geographic Channel at www.nationalgeographic.co.in/explore/pearlharbor/ mov — story.html; ‘‘Frequently Asked Questions: Ship’s Cook Third Class Doris Miller, usn,’’ Naval Historical Center, 29 June 2001, at www.history

326

Concluding Remarks

.navy.mil/faqs/faq57–4.htm; ‘‘Moments to Remember with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Part One,’’ Moments to Remember, at www.northstarprograms .com/partone.htm. A petition drive has been started to posthumously award Miller the Congressional Medal of Honor. Anne B. Jolis, ‘‘Art Exhibit a True Learning Experience,’’ Gloucester County Times, 31 January 2005. 6 In March 2004, I gave a lecture at Chongqing University describing how American military o≈cers’ advisory role during World War II led them to support Jiang Jeishi’s Nationalists against the Communists in the civil war that followed. I was followed to the podium by a college dean who said that the important thing to remember was that during the war Americans had come to help the Chinese.

marc gallicchio

327

. contributors marc gallicchio was a Fulbright visiting lecturer at the University of the Ryukyus in 2004–2005. His book The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (2000) won the Robert H. Ferrell Senior Book Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He teaches at Villanova University. waldo heinrichs retired from teaching in 1996 as Dwight E. Stanford Professor of History of American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University. He is the author of Joseph C. Grew and the Development of the United States Diplomatic Tradition (1966), Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (1988), and Diplomacy and Force: America’s Road to War, 1931–1941 (1996). haruo iguchi is an associate professor at Nagoya University, where he specializes in the history of U.S.–East Asian relations. He was a Fulbright research scholar in 2005–2006 and a recipient of a 2004 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Award for Pacific Region Studies. He is the author of Unfinished Business: Ayukawa Yoshisuke and U.S.-Japan Relations, 1937–1953 (2003). xiaohua ma is an associate professor in the faculty of international studies at National Osaka University of Education. She was a visiting scholar in the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard University (2002–2004) and recipient of a 2004 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Award for the Pacific Region Studies. She won the Best Book Award from the Japanese Association of American Studies for Maboroshi no Shinchitsujo to Ajia Taiheiyo: Dainijisekaitaisenki no Beichu-Domei no Atsureki, 1941–1945 (Illusionary New Orders in the Asia-Pacific: The ChineseAmerican Alliance in the War against Japan, 1941–1945; 2000). frank ninkovich is a professor of history at St. John’s University. Among his many publications are U.S. Information Policy and Cultural Diplomacy (1995), The Wilsonian Century (1999), and The United States and Imperialism (2001).

emily s. rosenberg is DeWitt Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College. She is the author of Spreading the American Dream: American Cultural and Economic Expansion, 1890–1945 (1982); Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy (1999), which won the Ferrell Senior Book Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations; and A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (2003). takuya sasaki is a professor in the Department of Law and Politics at Rikkyo University, where he specializes in American diplomatic history and the history of the cold war. Among his publications are A History of American Foreign Relations Since World War II, with Fumiko Nishizaki, Naoki Kamimura, and Otsuru Chieko (2002, in Japanese); and Documents: Japanese-American Relations, 1945–97, coedited with Chihiro Hosoya, Tadashi Aruga, and Osamu Ishii (1999, in Japanese). yujin yaguchi is an associate professor of American studies in the Center for Pacific and American Studies at Tokyo University. He is the author of ‘‘Remembering a More Layered Past: Americans, Japanese, and the Ainu,’’ Japanese Journal of American Studies (2000), and Hawai no Reikishi to Bunka (History and Culture of Hawaii; 2002). daqing yang is an associate professor of history and international a√airs at George Washington University. He received an Abe Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council Center for Global Partnership (2003– 2004) and is the author of ‘‘Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing,’’ American Historical Review (1999). He currently serves as a codirector of the Memory and Reconciliation Program in the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at George Washington.

330

Contributors

. index Acheson, Dean, 62, 100–102, 132–33 Adams, Robert McCormick, 203, 215, 226 A≈rmative Summation of the Greater East Asia War, An, 172 African Americans: black press and, 259–60; causes of Pacific War and, 258; China viewed by, as Uncle Tom, 264–65; collective memory of, 256–57; forgetting by, 277–78, Hiroshima-Nagasaki and, 266; Japanese viewed by, as Uncle Toms, 270; pro-Japanese, 259, 262–64, 267; self-help groups and, 259 Air Force Association (afa), 26; campaign of, against Crossroads script, 213–16, 228, 322 Alliance Adrift, 306 Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War, 187, 294 Alperowitz, Gar, 77 Ambrose, Stephen, 29, 35 American Legion, 222, 224–25 American Pilot, An (film), 292 American University HiroshimaNagasaki exhibit, 229, 303 Amnesia (historical). See Forgetting Anniversaries: of end of Asia-Pacific War, 2, 4, 158, 172, 193, 204, 300, 309; of founding of Chinese Communist Party, 161; of founding of People’s Republic of China, 163; of Manchurian Incident, 161, 183; of Nanjing Massacre, 178; of Pearl Harbor, 17, 19, 23, 38, 143,

247; of San Francisco Peace Treaty, 144, 192 Apology controversies; 1, 143, 167–69; apology fatigue and, 185; U.S. and Hiroshima-Nagasaki, 17, 193, 307 Arizona Memorial, 306; Japanese views of, 241–44, 246–47; meanings of, 235; National Park Service and, 17, 234, 239, 242; Pearl Harbor anniversaries at, 19, 38; Vietnam Veterans Memorial compared to, 235–36 Article 9 ( Japanese Constitution), 2, 124, 135–36 Asahi Shimbun, 3; poll of, on historical memory, 157 Asian Americans, 294–96; as model minority, 186–87 Asia-Pacific War: definition of, 7; sixtieth anniversary of, 2, 4 Atcheson, George, 92–93, 101–2 Badger, John Robert, 266 Ballantine, Joseph, 97, 320 Bataan Death March, 144, 217, 223 Beach, Edward L., 26, 28 Beidler, Philip D., 185 Bernstein, Barton, 51–52 Biological Unit 731, 160, 165, 189– 90, 296 Black internationalism: definition of, 257; Japan and, 258–65 Bodnar, John, 288 Brokaw, Tom, 22–23, 33, 35, 274 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 134

Bunche, Ralph, 262 Buruma, Ian, 304–5 Bush, George H. W., 17, 19, 23–24, 29, 105, 143 Bush, George W., 30; Pearl Harbor invoked by, 37–39, 307 Byrnes, James, 63, 126 Casualty estimates, of invasion of Japan, 220–21, 227–28 Cayton, Horace, 265, 267 Chang, Iris, 178–79, 189, 294 Chennault, Anna, 190–91, 292 Chennault, Claire Lee, 190, 290, 323 Chiang Kai-shek, 289–91 China, Japanese invasion of, 289. See also People’s Republic of China China hands, 291 Chinese: international memorial groups and, 187, 191; Japanese discrimination against, 137; views of, on postwar Japan, 184 Chinese-American alliance, 185, 289 Chinese American Museum, 187 Chinese Americans, 294, 301, 304, 306 Chinese Communist Party, 166, 323 Chinese exclusion, 123; repeal of, 134, 185, 266, 277 Chinese Holocaust Museum, 189– 91 Citizens Committee to Consider the Peace of Tokyo, 176 Citizens Committee to Correct War Exhibits, 177 Clinton, William J., 23, 25, 27, 30, 307 Cold war, 94, 102, 321; comparison of American and Japanese views of, 127; outbreak of, 124–30; neoWilsonian policy and, 104; U.S. victory in, 18, 107 Collective memory, 16, 40, 41 n2, 256; African Americans and, 256–

332

Index

57; historical understanding and, 85 Comfort women, 3, 168–69, 189 Conable, Barber, 206 Cook, Ted, 297 Correll, John T., 214–15, 226 Costello, John, 26, 28 Cromwell Hill, Adelaide, 276–77 Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Origins of the Cold War. See Enola Gay exhibit controversy Crouch, Thomas D., 204–5; Crossroads script and, 222; purpose of nasm and, 206–7 Cuban Missile Crisis, 132–33 ‘‘Day of National Humiliation’’ (China), 163 Days of Deceit, 29, 298 Devils Have Come (film), 308 Dewey, Thomas, 77 Dorn, Edward, report of, 28 Double v campaign, 324; during Pacific War, 265–66; Pittsburgh Courier and, 266; postwar era and, 268–69, 274 Dower, John, 86–87, 218, 273–75, 293 Dubin, Steven C., 201 Du Bois, W. E. B., 261, 266–67; color astigmatism of, 271 Dulles, John Foster, 129, 136, 139, 291 Duus, Peter, 297 Eisenhower, Dwight, 74, 77, 132; on nuclear weapons, 139 Empire of the Sun (film), 293 Enola Gay (b-29), 201–2, 214 Enola Gay exhibit controversy, 26– 27, 143, 273–274, 309; Crossroads script and, 207–13; Ground Zero depictions and, 205, 222–24, 322 Fellers, Bonner: ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender’’ and, 51, 67–77;

Hoover and, 52, 56, 64, 68; in Japan, 64; MacArthur and, 52, 56–58; in New York, 68; reaction of, to Hiroshima-Nagasaki, 63; Republican National Committee and, 68; on unconditional surrender, 60; views of, on emperor, 56–59 Fifteen-Year War, 299 Flying Tigers. See Chennault, Claire Lee Forgetting: by Japan, 1, 124, 159; reasons for, 87–88, 256, 277–78; rescripting, 268; by victors, 109 Formosa, 55, 70–71 442nd Regimental Combat Team, 186, 296 Fujioka Nobukatsu, 172, 176–77 Funabashi, Yoichi, 1, 306 Gaither Report (nsc 5724), 128, 131–32 Gallup Polls: on American postwar views of Japan, 93; on American wartime views of Japan, 91–92; on Japanese views of emperor, 100; on unconditional surrender, 62 Garvey, Marcus, 258–59 Germany, 105–6 Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, 189, 294 Globalization, 110, 237 Gluck, Carol, 288 ‘‘Good War, The’’ (Terkel), 21 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, 124 Greatest generation, 16, 23, 30, 40, 310, 322 Greatest Generation, The (Brokaw), 22, 274 Grew, Joseph C., 53–54, 96; Hoover memorandum and, 61; Stimson’s memoirs and, 76; views of, on

emperor, 98–99, 320; warnings of, on Soviets, 125–26 Halbwachs, Maurice, 16, 41 n3, 89 Hallion, Richard, 224–25 Harper’s, 51, 67, 73 Harwit, Martin, 203; criticism of, on Enola Gay script, 206–8; explanation of, of Crossroads script, 225; resignation of, 226 Hayakawa, S. I., 266 Hayashi, Fusao, 297 Hikida, Yasuichi, 264, 277 Himes, Chester, 269 Hirohito (Emperor), 3; death of, 168; surrender and, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 100, 301 ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle to Surrender,’’ 51, 67–77 Hiroshima murals, 301 Hiroshima-Nagasaki: African American views on, 266; American University exhibit on, 229, 303; end of Pacific War and, 51, 205; fiftieth anniversary of, 20; influence of, on U.S. policy, 138; Japanese views on, 123, 127, 224, 246–47, 297; New Left historians and, 52; victims of, 20. See also Apology controversies; Enola Gay exhibit controversy Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, 169, 212 Historical memory, 85, 88, 95–96, 109 Historical understanding, 85, 88; occupation of Japan influenced by, 95–96, 109 ‘‘History wars,’’ 16, 27 Hogan, Michael, 89 Hollywood and Pearl Harbor, 30– 34, 304–5 Holocaust, 20, 295, 306; Asian, 189– 190, 294–95, 325–26

index

333

Honda, Mike, 188, 192, 295 Hoover, Herbert: communists in State Department alleged by, 66, 77, 319–20; fdr’s diplomacy criticized by, 52, 75; HiroshimaNagasaki and, 63, in Japan, 64– 66; Soviet expansion and, 52; Suzuki and, 55, 66–67; Truman advised by, 54–56 Hotta, Yoshie, 298 Hu Jintao, 2, 306 Human Condition (film), 299 Hussein, Saddam, 321 Ienga, Saburo, 291, 299, 315 n51 Immigration Act of 1924, 258, 266 International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 123, 296 Invisible Soldier, 272 Iriye, Akira, 104, 193, 287, 310 Isaacs, Harold, 270–71 Ishihara, Shintaro, 188 Japan: economic downturn in, 108, 184; as economic threat, 16, 18; South Africa and, 270, 275, trade wars with, 105, 293 Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, 310 Japan crowd: emperor and, 97–98, 100; Japanese modernization viewed by, 96, 320 Japanese: internment of, 19, 143, 265, 295; peace education of, 168; postwar views of, on emperor, 100; views of, on HiroshimaNagasaki, 123; views of, on invasion of China, 305; war memories of, 168 Japanese-American Citizens League, 295 Japanese American National Museum, 186 Japanese by Spring (Reed), 276–77 Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (2000), 144, 310

334

Index

Japanese Peace Treaty, 128, 144 Japanese war orphans, 166–67 Japan’s War Bereaved Families Association, 172–73 Japan That Can Say No, The, 143, 275 Jewish Americans, 188, 306 Jiang Wen, 308 Jiang Zemin, 161, 185, 306 John Birch Society, 320 Johnson, Chalmers, 106 Johnson, Sheila, 309 Kearney, Reginald, 269 Kennan, George 103, 128, 133, 291 Kido, Koichi, 53, 64 Killins, John Oliver, 271 Kimmel, Edward, 24 Kimmel, Husband: Pearl Harbor controversy and, 24, 27, 29; relieved of command, 24; supporters of, 31, 319 King, Geo√, 31–32 Kingsolver, Barbara, on memory, 89–90 Kishi, Nobusuke, 128 Kobayashi, Yoshinori, 298–99 Kohn, Richard, 213 Koizumi, Junichiro, 3, 144, 156, 183– 84 Konoye, Fumimaro, 64–65, 71–72 Korea, 55, 70–71 Korean War, 106, 126–28, 131, 325 Kristof, Nicholas, 180 League of Nations charter, 260, 266 LeMay, Curtis, 301 Liberal Democratic Party (ldp), 171 Liberal internationalism, 107–8, 111, 129, 145 Lindbergh, Charles A., 56 Linderman, Gerald F., 219–20, 225 Linenthal, Edward, 234, 236 Lipsitz, George, 278 Logan, Rayford, 265, 270

Lowenthal, David, 15 Lucky Dragon, 140

Museum of Unit 731 Biological Warfare Crimes, 159

MacArthur, Douglas: emperor and, 74–75, 100; Fellers and, 52; Hoover and, 65; presidential ambitions of, 74–75; progress of occupation of, 93, 101, 128 MacLeish, Archibald, 62 Malcom X, 271 Manansala, Policarpio (Dr. Ashima Takis), 259 Manchurian Incident (1931), 127, 261; Chinese remembrance of, 158; lessons of, 135, 321. See also September 18th Incident Museum Manila Conference (1945), 60 Marshall, George C., 208, 227 May, Ernest R., 121, 132 McGlone, Robert, 268 Meiji Restoration, 96, 99 Memorial Museum for War Victims, 172 Memory: avoidance of, 87, 129, 309; boom, 16, 21–24, 32, 321; as commodity, 4, 6, 33–34, 88, 323; policy influenced by, 51–52, 95–96; revision of, 274; theories of, 5, 40, 85–90, 219, 245, 288. See also Collective memory; Historical understanding Miller, Doris (Dorie), 266, 269, 324 Ministry of Education ( Japan), 2, 144, 156, 183 Monument to the Chinese Foster Parents, 167 Mottley, Mary Penik, 272 Munich analogy, 122, 132, 134 Museum for Humanity. See Chinese Holocaust Museum Museum of Peace Osaka International Center, 169–71, 176–79, 322 Museum of the War of the Chinese People’s Resistance against Japan, 159

Nagasaki Atomic Museum, 169 Nagasaki International Culture Hall, 212 Nakane Naka (Satokata Takahashi), 259, 276 Nakasone, Yasuhiro, 168, 300–301 Nanjing Massacre, 85, 158, 189; Japanese denial of, 176, 178, 188, 296, Japanese novel on, 298; mural of, 301 Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum, 159, 180–81, 190 National Air and Space Museum (nasm), 201–2, 216. See also Enola Gay exhibit controversy National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), 260, 262, 265–66 National Memorial Museum for Peace, 173 Nation of Islam (Black Muslims), 255, 270–71 Nazism, 105–6, 125–26 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (1998), 144, 310 Neufeld, Michael J., 204–5; purpose of nasm and, 206; Crossroads script and, 211, 220 Nevins, Allan, 209 nhk, 3 Nishio Kanji, 172 Nitze, Paul, 74; nsc 68 and, 130–31 nsc 68, 130 Okinawa: American bases on, 4, 290; battle of, 4, 53–54, 72, 219– 20, 227, 300–301; occupation of, 298, reversion of, 142 Okinawa Association of Bereaved Families, 298 Okinawans, 5, 300 Orr, James, 2, 296 Ottley, Roi, 272

index

335

Pacific War, The (Ienaga), 292, 299, 315 n51 Peace Memorial Museum of Tokyo, 173–75 Peace Osaka. See Museum of Peace Osaka International Center Pearl Harbor: ‘‘backdoor-to-war’’ and, 18, 25, 28–29; fiftieth anniversary of, 17, 19; as metaphor, 16, 18, 130–32, 321; September 11, 2001, compared to, 37–40 Pearl Harbor Association, 36 Pearl Harbor (film), 16, 30–37, 40, 239, 304–5, 324 Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, 23, 39 Pearl Harbor Survivors Association (phsa), 17, 23 Peery, Nelson, 273–74 People Magazine, 18 People’s Republic of China: history education in, 163; textbook controversies and, 1–2 Persian Gulf War, 17 Potsdam Proclamation, 62–63, 73 Prange, Gordon, 29 Pride (film), 298 Prisoners of War (pows): allied, 20; Bataan march of, 144; Japan sued by, 144, 192, 301–4 Psychological Warfare Branch (pwb), 53, 57–61 Public opinion, 157, 308–9; African American, 262–63; Japanese, 305, U.S., 288–89, 293. See also Gallup Polls Punchbowl National Cemetery, 19, 38 Rabe, John, 179 Randolph, A. Philip, 268 Rape of Nanking, The (book), 178, 188, 294, 306 Rape of Nanking (Nanjing). See Nanjing Massacre Reader’s Digest: ‘‘Hirohito’s Struggle

336

Index

to Surrender’’ in, 51, 53, 67–68; lessons of Pearl Harbor and, 18 Reader’s Digest Japan, 53, 68 Reagan, Ronald, 139–40, 275 Red Sorghum (film), 293 Reed, Ishmael, 276 Renmin Ribao, 157–58, 163, 179–80 Republican National Committee, 68, 74 Republican Party: isolationists vs. internationalists in, 52, 74, 77, 319–20; 1994 election and, 27 Rescripting, 268 Revisionism, 27, 52 Ricoeur, Paul, 111 Rodgers, J. A., 264 Roosevelt, Franklin D.: atomic bomb and, 210; ‘‘backdoor-towar’’ and, 18, 25, 28, 65; Chinese exclusion repealed by, 123, 277; death of, 54 Rusk, Dean, 132, 134–35, 138, 141 San Francisco Peace Conference, 137 Sato, Eisaku, 141–42, 301 Schell, Jonathan, 140 Schuyler, George, 264–65, 267 Self-Defense Forces ( Japan), 136 September 18th Incident Museum, 161–65, 179, 183, 190 September 11, 2001, 15, 144; Pearl Harbor compared to, 37–40, 241, 247 Shils, Edward, 88 Short, Walter, 24, 29, 319 Showakan Museum, 173 Soviet Union: atomic bomb and, 210; entry of, into war, 58; Japanese war criminals tried by, 297 Spector, Ronald, 24 Sputnik, 131–32 State Department (U.S.), 62, 96, 103, 125, 138, 141, 291; communists in, 66, 319–20. See also Japan crowd

Stilwell and the American Experience in China (Tuchman), 292 Stimson, Henry L.; 61, 320; ‘‘Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb’’ and, 51, 67, 73; Potsdam Proclamation and, 62–63, on Soviet expansion, 54 Stinnett, Robert B., 29, 298 Strategic Defense Initiative, 140 Suzuki, Kantaro; 55, 58; diary of, 66–67; Potsdam Proclamation and, 73 Tadashi, Aruga, 137 Taft, Robert, 74 Taiwan. See Formosa Takaki, Ronald, 185 Terasaki, Hidenari, 65, 68–69 Textbook controversies, 2, 144, 156– 57, 171–72, 183 Time Magazine, 18 Tojo, Hideki, 3, 56, 98 Tokyo air raids, 209, 301 Tora! Tora! Tora!, 36–37 Tourism: in Hawaii, 235–38; on Pacific battlefields, 4; Red tours and, 323 Treatise on War (Kobayashi), 298 Truman, Harry S, 62–64, 67, 186; advised by Herbert Hoover, 54– 56; as new president, 54; on nuclear weapons, 139, 227 Truman Doctrine (1947), 125–26 Tuchman, Barbara, 292 Tuskegee Airmen, 269 Unconditional surrender, 54, 60–61 United Nations, 266 uss Arizona survivors, 39 uss Bowfin, 238 uss Enterprise, 39 uss Greenville, 20

uss John C. Stennis, 34 uss Pearl Harbor, 23 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 74– 75, 130, 211 Veterans: African American, 272– 74; American movement for Japan’s war redress and, 187, 192, 301–4; Enola Gay controversy and, 216–25; repressed memories of, 220–22; war memories of , 94, 202–3, 206, 216–18, 244–45, 322 Veterans of Foreign Wars: Enola Gay exhibit controversy and, 223; Fellers and, 53, 73; Foreign Service (magazine) of, 53, 67; KimmelShort controversy and, 28; lobbying by, 73 Victim mentality of Japan, 2 Vietnam, 299; legacy of, 40; revisionist historians and, 27, 273; Vietnam generation and, 21–24 Walker, J. Samuel, 205, 221 War and People (television), 299 War without Mercy. See Dower, John Washington Naval Conference (1921–22), 258–60 White, Geo√rey, 234 White, Theodore, 293 Yamamoto, Isoroku, 37 Yasukuni Shrine, 3, 144, 156, 169, 183–84, 324 Yellow Earth (film), 293 Yellow peril, 108, 275 Yoshida, Shigeru, 128, 135–37, 141, 298 Yui, Daizaburo, 168 Zacharias, Ellis, 67 Zaibatsu, 96

index

337

marc gallicchio is a professor of history at Villanova University. He is the author of The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (2000) and The Cold War Begins in Asia: American East Asian Policy and the Fall of the Japanese Empire (1988) and coeditor, with Jonathan Utley, of Diplomacy and Force: America’s Road to War, 1931–1941 (1996). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The unpredictability of the past : memories of the Asia-Pacific war in U.S.–East Asian relations / edited by Marc Gallicchio. p. cm. — (American encounters/global interactions) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3933-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-8223-3945-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. World War, 1939–1945—East Asia. 2. World War, 1939– 1945—Pacific Ocean. 3. Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895. 4. Collective memory. 5. East Asia—Foreign relations—United States. 6. United States—Foreign relations—East Asia. I. Gallicchio, Marc S., 1954– d767.u58 2007 940.54%25—dc22 2007008324