Information regimes during the Cold War in East Asia 9780367499433, 9781003048183

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Information Regimes During the Cold War in East Asia

Morgan and his contributors develop the concept of the Information Regime as a way to understand the use, abuse, and control of information in East Asia during the Cold War period. During the Cold War, war itself was changing, as was statecraft. Information emerged as the most valuable commodity, becoming the key component of societies across the globe. This was especially true in East Asia, where the military alliances forged in the wake of World War II were put to the most severe of tests. These tests came in the form of adversarial relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as pressures within their alliances, which eventually caused the People’s Republic of China to break from Moscow, while Japan for a time during the 1950s and 1960s seemed poised to move away from Washington. More important than military might, or economic influence, was the creation of “information regimes” – swathes of territory where a paradigm, ideology, or political arrangement were obtained. Information regimes are not necessarily state-centric and many of the contributors to this book focus on examples which were not so. Such a focus allows us to see that the East Asian Cold War was not really “cold” at all, but was the epicentre of an active, contentious birth of information as the defining element of human interaction. This book is a valuable resource for historians of East Asia and of developments in information management in the twentieth century. Jason Morgan is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Global Studies at Reitaku University, Japan.

The Cold War in Asia

Series Editor: Professor Malcolm H. Murfett

A series of books that both explores and addresses some of the more important questions raised by the Cold War in Asia. This series isn’t confined to single country studies alone, but welcomes contributions from research scholars who are tackling comparative issues within Asia during the time of the Cold War. Quality is our goal and this series reflects this objective by catering for work drawn from a number of disciplines. If you work in the broad field of Cold War studies don’t hesitate to get in touch with the series editor Professor Malcolm Murfett at King’s College London ([email protected]). Books, both single authored and edited manuscripts, should preferably be within the 60,000–100,000-word range, although we are also interested in shorter studies (25,000–50,000 words) that focus on elements of the Cold War struggle in Asia. If you are working on a project that seems to fit these guidelines, please send a detailed proposal to the series editor. Every proposal will, of course, be subject to strict peer review. If the proposal is supported by experts in the field, it will be our aim to begin publishing the next volumes of this series within a year to eighteen months of the issuing of a contract to the author. We look forward to hearing from you. Information Regimes during the Cold War in East Asia Edited by Jason Morgan

For the full list of titles in the series, visit www.routledge.com/The-Cold-Warin-Asia/book-series/CWA

Information Regimes During the Cold War in East Asia Edited by Jason Morgan

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Jason Morgan; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jason Morgan to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the author for his individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-49943-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04818-3 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by codeMantra

For NT, affectionately

Contents

List of contributors Series editor foreword Preface Acknowledgments

ix xi xiii xv

PART ONE

Diplomacy, public diplomacy, and espionage 1

Behind the curtains: how Soviet intelligence masters and Japanese journalists brought about Soviet–Japan diplomatic normalization—without the return of the northern territories

11

13

T A K I Z AWA IC H I R Ō

2

Saving China, losing China: the transformation of a prewar to Cold War information regime

30

E Z A K I M IC H IO A N D J A S ON M OR G A N

3

Piecing together the “broken dialogue”: ambassador Douglas MacArthur and the controversy over Professor Edwin O. Reischauer’s Foreign Affairs article R OBE R T D. E L DR I D G E

57

viii Contents PART TWO

Knowledge networks and scholarship 4

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization): Pak Kyǒng-sik ­ and Zainichi identity as inspired by North Korea

75 77

C H I Z U K O T. A L L E N

5

The effect of Chinese communism on an Australian in British Malaya, 1950–1971: escaping ideology by nearly “going native”

97

A N DE R S C OR R

PART THREE

Ideologies, religion, and culture

123

6

125

Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan K E V I N D OA K

7

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea as a diplomatic subject

143

DAV I D A . T I Z Z A R D

8

The Club of Rome in East Asia: U.S.-led populationcontrol information regimes and waging the Cold War in the Far East

163

J A S ON M OR G A N

Index

187

Contributors

Chizuko T. Allen  Faculty Member in Asian Studies, University of Hawai’i, Mānoa Anders Corr Principal, Corr Analytics, Inc. and Publisher, Journal of Political Risk Kevin Doak Professor, Georgetown University Robert D. Eldridge Visiting Researcher, Nakasone Peace Institute Ezaki Michio Policy Analyst Jason Morgan  Associate Professor, Reitaku University and Assistant Editor, ­JAPAN Forward Takizawa Ichirō  Former Professor, The National Defense Academy of Japan and MIA and Russian Institute Certificate, Columbia University. David A. Tizzard Assistant Professor, Seoul Women’s University

Series editor foreword

One of the joys of being in the academic world for so long has been to see young scholars and late developers emerge from wherever to begin making their mark. This series will seek to assist both sets of researchers as well as the established professionals who are looking for a canvas broad enough to display their latest work to the best effect. My intention for this new series, which Routledge has supported from the outset, is that it should really move away from the traditional model of seeing the Cold War as a confrontation between the usual suspects. We want to move on from the “same old, same old” version of things to embrace the latest research into areas of Asian history and culture. If you have a manuscript that deserves to see the light of day in this area and be recognized for what it brings to our knowledge of the Cold War in Asia, this series is meant for you. Much nonsense is spoken in the academic world about the impact factor being only valuable if it comes from certain elitist presses. It is high time that this misleading and suffocating idea was rejected. At Routledge, we are committed to giving your work as much visibility as possible. Ultimately, this is where the impact is felt. We believe our readers will see some real value added in this series as it ranges over new themes and territories that have been ignored for too long. It is evident that higher education will have to change radically in the aftermath of Covid-19. It will not be good enough to retreat back into the old cave again. Change is coming. Be a part of it. Professor Malcolm Murfett Department of War Studies, King’s College London May 2020

Preface

This book is the fruit, and artifact, of a long series of conversations among scholars and editors on the nature of information and the historical realities of the Cold War. My initial intention in proposing such a volume was to explore, from a variety of viewpoints, how information was seen and used as a key component of struggle in the Cold War, and how Cold War history (and, indeed, the history of any other time or place) might be differently, and perhaps even better, understood by foregrounding, not states or classes or historical processes, but rather the thing that we all do throughout our lives, namely, seeking to understand information and then to steward it to maximum effect. This is not necessarily as grand a thing as it sounds. Knowing that gyudon is cheaper at Restaurant Y but that Restaurant X, which also has good gyudon, is closer, I can decide to visit Restaurant X and so feed myself efficiently. The gyudon advertisers, and advertisers for other restaurants, have tried to influence me as best they could, and I have taken that information and used it to my own advantage. This is a miniature information regime, and information regimes small and large are everywhere. When a child, or even a dog, tries to hide from the consequences of an action, or when a cat sneaks up on a bird, there is information being exchanged. We respond to what we know, and to what others think we know, and so on. But when this becomes a political question, when states and constituted bodies and big ideas are involved, and when lives are at stake and entire empires at risk of being undermined, then the daily information struggle takes on an entirely different kind of urgency and immediacy. It becomes absolutely essential, for reasons embedded in the institutional and organizational impulses of humans, that someone, or some group, believe X and not Y. If I am among hostile forces, I must learn to shape my informational flow in order to maximize whatever advantage I might be able to claim. This is much more involved than propaganda, much different than advertising, much deeper than dissembling or feinting. This is information as a specifically human field, and further a political, deeply mapped field which permeates our lives as inevitably public actors on various stages of political consequence. Whether we think of ourselves as political people or not, this kind of informational shaping becomes part of who we are, takes form among our beliefs, and, in the process of rearranging our

xiv Preface environment, in turn, rearranges us. We are always shaping information, and we are always taking in information that has been shaped by others. From white lies about strange outfits to selective reporting of key facts in order to influence the outcome of wars, human beings are informational beings and are constantly adapting to changing informational settings. This fully participatory nature of information is what I mean by an information regime. It is to see information as a bedrock element of human life, along with food, shelter, water, power, and life, an element just as basic to our existence as anything else we require for survival and flourishing. Information regimes qua history and qua historiographical hermeneutic constitute a people’s history in the sense of taking in the full view of the human person as knowing subject and reintegrating information into the study of history, foregrounding informationshaping as the very stuff of historical engagement and change. Seeing things as people on the ground saw them, recreating thought processes in real time, and inviting the reader to relive the past in all of its cerebral and emotional complexity is the goal of information regime history. The way we think we understand history is often not the way things really were. This book is an attempt to wed the modern and the postmodern, to establish informational differánce among solid fact, to show how information flows around and through and against events, and to open up a new vista for the study of the past. In editing this volume, I learned more about information regimes than anyone. The Cold War is an enormously complex phenomenon-cum-event-cumhistorical process, and jumping into this thorny tangle to test a new mode of historical knowing took courage and gumption and plenty of knowledge and expertise. The scholars who worked on this volume have, I think, succeeded in rising to the challenge. They have certainly earned my respect. The contributors changed my thinking about information, history, and scholarship in exciting ways. If this book does the same for you, then it will have succeeded as an information regime in its own right.

Acknowledgments

Jason Morgan wishes to thank the series editor, Malcolm Murfett, Routledge editors ShengBin Tan and Simon Bates, the contributors for their excellent chapters, and the anonymous reviewers whose helpful suggestions and insightful comments made this a better book overall. Special thanks are due to Reitaku University, which provided an ideal place for the work of scholarship, and to my Reitaku colleagues, especially Andrew MacNaughton and Kawakubo Tsuyoshi, for their support to this project. The Historical Awareness Research Committee, in particular Katsuoka Kanji, Nishioka Tsutomu, Takahashi Shirō, and Yamashita Eiji, also deserves a note of appreciation, as do the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, the team at Seiron and the Sankei Shimbun, Komori Yoshihisa, Naitō Yasuo, Archie Miyamoto, June Dreyer, Aldric Hama, the Institute of Moralogy, and the editors and staff at JAPAN Forward and WiLL.

Introduction

The Cold War was a period of roughly a half century, from the close of World War II in 1945 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when much of the world was split along the divide between two giant empires, the Soviet Union and the United States. While there were certainly active military conflicts during the Cold War—for example, on the Korean Peninsula, in Southeast Asia, in Eastern Europe, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, and in Latin America—the Cold War was, by definition, a period of restraint wherein both empires refrained from openly engaging one another in direct, full-scale military hostilities. However, the term “Cold War” conceals a much larger reality: during the Cold War, war itself was changing, as was statecraft and nearly every other human activity and institution. During the twentieth century, information emerged as the most valuable commodity, eventually becoming the key component of societies across the globe. The Cold War was militarily “cold” for the same reason that cyber warfare (including interference in elections and overall political processes) is “hot”: hidden in plain view in the moniker “Cold War” is the rise of information as the newest and most important feature of human existence. This was especially true in East Asia during the Cold War. In East Asia, the military alliances forged by the two imperial superpowers in the wake of World War II were put to the most severe tests. These tests came in the form of adversarial relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as of pressures within the alliances, pressures which eventually caused the People’s Republic of China to break away from Moscow even while Japan, for a time during the 1950s and 1960s, seemed poised to break away from Washington. But there was more at stake than military advantage. During the Cold War, the old ways of state-to-state and person-to-person interaction withered away. Even more important than military might, and even more important than economic influence, was the creation of “information regimes,” or swaths of territory (whether geographically contiguous or not) where a consensus, paradigm, ideology, shared set of assumptions, spiritual inflection, or political arrangement obtained. Information regimes are not necessarily state-centric. Indeed, one of the aims of this book is to break free of state-centrism when thinking about the Cold War in East Asia. Doing so will allow scholars and other researchers to see the East Asian Cold War as not “cold” at all, but as the ground of an active,

2 Introduction rambunctious, contentious, tumultuous birth of information as the defining element of human interaction in the postwar. “Information regimes” is rather novel in historical analysis, being heretofore most commonly used as a marketing term. For example, in an essay in the June 2000 issue of Organization Science, “When Market Information Constitutes Fields: Sensemaking of Markets in the Commercial Music Industry,” N. Anand and Richard A. Peterson “suggest that in competitive fields, the market serves as a magnet around which groups of actors consolidate, and that cognition of markets occurs through the creation, distribution, and interpretation of a web of information about the ‘market’.” But “information regimes” here connotes far more than product branding. The touchstone for this much more capacious use of “information regimes” as a historical heuristic is a 2013 lecture which Prof. Alfred McCoy (University of Wisconsin-Madison) delivered at the University of Carolina titled, “Epistemology of Empire: Asian Wars, Information Regimes, and the Future of US Global Power.” To the best of my knowledge, McCoy’s work marks the first time that “information regimes” has been used in a world-historical context to denote the actions of states and the exercise of political and military power. McCoy has argued, for example, that there have been three “information regimes” in U.S. history: the first caused by the 1898 insurrection in the Philippines, the second by the Vietnam War, and the third by the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. McCoy lays out his “information regime” approach most notably in Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009) and In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (2017). In his 2013 lecture, McCoy suggested that scholars look “beyond the iron binary of economic and military power” in assessing imperia in the modern world. Inspired by McCoy’s call to shift from seeing states and political actors solely in terms of economic systems and military arrangements, in this volume a wide array of thinkers and experts look afresh at the Cold War in East Asia through the lens of “information regimes,” which I broaden from McCoy’s usage to take in every aspect of how information is used to form and maintain patterns of thought and general outlooks on the world. Unlike Benedict Anderson’s wellknown “print capitalism” approach, “information regimes” here includes far more than the creation of nationalist sentiment. “Information regimes,” as a category and as a heuristic, foregrounds information, and not nation-states, as the key element of Cold War struggle, especially in East Asia. Where information is at stake, and where politics turns on information, there will be a contested information regime—“winning hearts and minds,” after all, has always been a much, much bigger project than one carried out by a particular military or government. Other scholars have attempted to study information during the Cold War, but in more limited ways. For example, there is a voluminous literature on Cold War spycraft and disinformation, or the use of information to undermine and destabilize areas under enemy control (see, e.g., Disinformation, by Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald Rychlak (2013)). Outside of the Cold War in

Introduction  3 East Asia, there are also important books on the use of information by states and empires, along with corporations and other major institutions, to influence populations within their own sphere of influence. For example, Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1962), Edward Bernays’ Propaganda (1928) and Case for Reappraisal of U.S. Overseas Information Policies and Programs (with Burnet Heshey) (1970), and Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922) and Cold War (1947) were all early attempts to foreground information as the primary means for investigating societies and warfare. Culture, too, has often been studied in a Cold War context, and vice versa. For example, Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Pavk, and Thomas Lindenberger’s Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern & Western Societies (2012), Andrew Defty’s Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda 1945–53: The Information Research Department (2004), and Judith Devlin and Christoph H Muller’s War of Words: Culture and the Mass Media in the Making of the Cold War in Europe (2013) see information and culture as ways to examine the Cold War outside of McCoy’s “iron binary” of economic and military power. Other works, such as Xiaobing Li’s The Cold War in East Asia (2017), Odd Arne Westad’s The Cold War: A World History (2017), David S. Painter’s The Cold War: An International History (1999), S.J. Ball’s The Cold War: An International History, 1947–1991 (1998), and Richard J. Crockatt’s The Fifty Years War: The United States and the Soviet Union in World Politics, 1941–1991 (1994), situate the Cold War in a world history context, attempting to limn the much broader outlines of the Cold War in its impact on regions far distant from Moscow and Washington. However, none of these works breaks free of the state-centric Cold War paradigm. Even Odd Arne Westad’s helpful and insightful Reviewing the Cold War: Approaches, Interpretations, Theory (2000) maintains a view of the Cold War as a contest of states and an exercise in state-originating, statedirected power. In that light, this book represents a new approach to studying the Cold War in East Asia, as well as the modern world of information and informational exchange. The essays assembled here all show how both states and non-state actors adapted to the rise of information as the key organizing principle of human interaction, with information regimes being the default operational paradigm for countries and governments, as well as for private citizens, even while engaged in everyday activities. Increasingly during the Cold War, information was the driving factor of shared life in East Asia. Thus, shifting our focus from “Cold War” stalemate to feverish informational activity will open broad new avenues for future research, freeing both scholars and laymen alike to reconsider the Cold War, not as bookended by empires, but as alive with attempts to form gravitational centers of information. In Part One, “Diplomacy, Public Diplomacy, and Espionage,” Japanese scholar of Russian history and politics and former National Defense Academy of Japan professor Takizawa Ichirō sheds light on the opening gambit of the 1956 Japanese-Soviet negotiations over the initiation of diplomatic relations. Takizawa’s research has uncovered that two Soviet intelligence officers stationed

4 Introduction in Japan played very important roles in starting and carrying out negotiations with the Japanese side, and also in cultivating a pro- Soviet information regime in Japan which proved enormously beneficial for the Soviets. One of the Soviet officers was Andrei Ivanovich Domnitsky, who, under cover of darkness one night and with the help of a left-wing Japanese journalist, snuck through the backdoor of the prime minister’s private residence to hand-deliver a private letter to Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichirō, setting the diplomatic negotiations into motion. Domnitsky was unknown until a few years ago, when Takizawa unearthed Soviet documents which revealed that Domnitsky had been a professional naval intelligence officer with extensive operational experience in the Far East theater during World War II. The other Soviet officer to greatly influence Japanese-Soviet relations in the Cold War in East Asia was Sergei Tikhvinsky, who died in February of 2018 at the age of 99. Tikhvinsky had been a China hand, and was residing in London when he was hastily summoned to head the Soviet diplomatic mission in Tokyo. Takizawa’s exciting new research details the activities of Soviet diplomat-spies in Japan, showing the crucial importance of information during the Cold War, especially in Japan, and the creation of localized information regimes as vital for influencing individuals and influencing state and even international policy. Japan continues to be at a disadvantage, territorially and in other ways, as a result of the information regime fostered in the Cold War by two heretofore unknown Soviet information warriors. In the second chapter in Part One, Ezaki Michio, a policy analyst and scholar of modern Japanese political history, and I investigate the shift in information regime cocooning the Chinese mainland and Taiwan during the prewar period and into the early Cold War. During the era of intensive Christian missionary work in China—an information regime in and of itself—missionaries and other Westerners often spoke of “saving” China. This was an equivocation, however, because some spoke of saving China by converting its people to Christianity, some spoke of saving China from Japan, others spoke of saving China from capitalism and for communism, and some conflated two or all three of these things. The YMCA in prewar China, for example, was infiltrated by agents from the Communist International (Comintern) run out of Moscow, and, while some YMCA executives maintained the Christian soteriology that had impelled early missionaries to the Middle Kingdom, others began subtly to shade their message to mean political salvation, not through Jesus, but through Marx and Engels, later Lenin, and eventually Stalin. By the time the American government figured out what was really happening, it was too late, and the information regime had shifted, from hopefully working to save China, to blaming others for its loss. We revisit the role of espionage agencies in Japan during the Cold War, showing how information was crucial to shaping dialogue and narratives about “war” and “peace,” “security” and “alliance.” Think tanks, publications, symposia, and other organizations and institutions are often viewed as agents of state power within a given Cold War regime, but Ezaki and I attempt to show the fluid and contested nature of the behind-the-scenes reality. During the Japanese prewar and wartime period, state actors infiltrated organs

Introduction  5 of Japanese government, including the research firms and offices of the South Manchurian Railway Company, but these state agents’ interactions with the individuals who provided information and cooperation to the Soviets and other governments were extraordinarily complex, and were ultimately dependent on the creation of highly localized “information regimes” for capturing and maintaining the allegiance of Japanese nationals to foreign causes. This complexity was multiplied manyfold when joined to other transnational dynamics comprising the United States, Japan, Taiwan, and China in the Cold War. In the third and final chapter of Part One, expert on the history of JapaneseAmerican relations Robert D. Eldridge, visiting researcher at Nakasone Peace Institute, writes about a key moment in the Cold War in East Asia, Edwin O. Reischauer’s famous 1960 Foreign Affairs article “The Broken Dialogue” and the debate it precipitated over whether, and to what extent, the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo should engage with left-wing Japanese intellectuals. Building on his earlier work, such as The Origins of the Bilateral Okinawa Problem: Okinawa in Postwar U.S.-Japan Relations, 1945–1952 (Routledge, 2001), The Return of the Amami Islands: The Reversion Movement and U.S.-Japan Relations (Lexington, 2004), and Iwo Jima and Ogasawara in U.S.-Japan Relations: American Strategy, Japanese Territory, and the Islanders In-between (Marine Corps University Press, 2014), as well as books on the Senkaku Islands and the Japan Self-Defense Forces, Eldridge shows how Reischauer, then a professor at Harvard University, faced intense pressure from Douglas MacArthur II and the American foreign policy establishment after asserting in Foreign Affairs that the “broken dialogue” between the United States and Japan was largely the result of Americans’ refusal to engage with voices critical of the security treaty arrangement, the foundation of the postwar U.S.-Japan alliance. Eldridge’s chapter is an in-depth exploration of a particular, but momentous, battle over the creation of an information regime, as the U.S. government tried, but ultimately failed, to impose limits on an information regime being created by public intellectuals (largely in Japanese, as Reischauer had native Japanese ability) beyond the control of the American authorities. The creation of an information regime is often a negotiation between individual and state actors, and Eldridge’s essay highlights the tensions and possibilities of individuals engaging states in the battle over information. The next part, “Knowledge Networks and Scholarship,” comprises two essays combining intellectual history with a keen understanding of how ideas work in context and how information is contested in real historical time. In “Kyōsei Renkō (Forced Mobilization): Pak Kyǒng-sik ­ and Zainichi Identity as Inspired by North Korea,” Korea specialist Chizuko T. Allen, a faculty member in Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, examines the role that a few Korean scholars played during the Cold War in reshaping most Koreans’ perceptions of the period of Japanese annexation of Korea (1910–1945). Japan is often accused today of having committed crimes against Koreans before and during World War II, but how much of this is historical, and how much has been generated by a Cold War-era information regime? Allen shows that Pak Kyŏngsik’s (1922–1998) writings greatly influenced the way that both Koreans and

6 Introduction Japanese remembered the prewar and wartime past, thus demonstrating how Cold War sensibilities produced an information regime of Japanese brutality and oppression which continues as the dominant paradigm in East Asian historiography. The Korean nationalist historical paradigm that emphasizes Japanese brutality in the colonial era did not spring up from the Korean people’s collective experience, but, instead, emerged largely from Korean scholars’ writings published in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s. When the Korean residents in Japan divided into two opposing camps, following the division of the Korean Peninsula in the late 1940s, Pak took the side of North Korea and began teaching at North Korean schools in Tokyo. Under the influence of socialist historical views, Pak wrote critically on Japanese colonialism with a special focus on the wartime mobilization of Korean men and women. His portrayal of imperial Japan as the oppressor and Koreans as the victims not only found audience and followers in Japanese intellectual circles, but cast a long shadow on South Korean perceptions of their recent past. This information regime, Allen argues, distorted later historiography and continues to replicate Cold War mentalities even in twentyfirst-century East Asia and beyond. In the second and final chapter of Part Two, Anders Corr, PhD in political science (Harvard) and currently a political analyst specializing in Asia, focuses his attention on ideologies of British imperialism and Chinese communism in Malaya during the Cold War. Corr’s unique approach centers on the diary of Tom Nunan, an Australian tin miner in Malaya from 1950 to 1971. Nunan lived in a time and place of conflicting information regimes, and his diary, and Corr’s research, shows how those information regimes were navigated on the ground. Chinese communism mobilized Chinese insurgents in Malaya against British imperialism starting shortly after the end of World War II. Labeled “The Emergency” of 1948–1960 by the British, this insurgency negatively impacted the mining businesses upon which Nunan depended for his livelihood. The Emergency also hastened the development of Malay nationalism and Malaysia’s independence, which further impacted British and Australian business and social life through Malayanization. As a result, British economic and political power in Malaya shifted in the late 1950s and 1960s to Chinese and Malays, respectively, indicating the rise of a major information regime during the Cold War in East Asia, namely Chinese communism. This, coupled with a concomitantly emergent Malayanization, eroded the prior British imperial or colonial information regime described and lived by Nunan in the early 1950s: “white superiority” in a land of “exotic adventure.” Nunan demonstrates that individual historical actors maintain their agency: he sought to escape both British and Chinese communist information regimes and hierarchies by nearly “going native.” The information regime of Cold War Chinese communism extended far beyond the borders of the People’s Republic of China, and Nunan’s life and ethnically diverse friendships, including with Malays, Chinese, and Eurasians, show how individuals could, and did, counter the ideology of both Chinese communists, who sought to paint British colonialism monolithically as “racist oppression,” and British colonists, who sought to maintain racial and economic hierarchies

Introduction  7 through policies of exclusion. Information regimes always grow in complexity the closer historians approach the events on the ground, and Corr’s essay is a perfect validation of this axiom. The essays in the third part, “Ideologies, Religion, and Culture,” show the multifunctionality of information regimes as an organizing principle as well as the fruitfulness of tightening the approach. In the first chapter, “Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan,” Kevin Doak, a professor at Georgetown University and a specialist in Japanese law, religion, and political philosophy, writes about Japanese Catholicism during the Cold War, seeing important continuities between pre- Cold War and Cold War Japan which greatly reinforce not only his own argument, but also the book’s central focus on the importance of information over states and political arrangements. Doak foregrounds the role of Catholicism in Cold War Japan as a useful means of responding to the volume’s emphasis on non-state actors in the Cold War. Catholicism was a global “information regime” that brought non-Japanese into dialogue with Japanese through publications in the Japanese language. The Catholic Church, as a global entity, also provided a non-state institutional support for anti-communism. These aspects of the Catholic information regime during the Cold War in Japan come out most strongly through the work of Tanaka Kōtarō, a Catholic and the Chief Justice of the Japanese Supreme Court during the decade of the 1950s. In its rulings, the Tanaka Court became a key player in the Cold War in Japan. But Tanaka and other Catholics like Bishop Yoshigoro Taguchi saw their anti-communism in a continuous line with their prewar activism, not as merely doing the work of the United States. It is this, localized Japanese anti-communist information regime that Doak fleshes out in his penetrating chapter. One of the most fascinating aspects of Doak’s retelling the history of Catholicism in postwar Japan is how it reveals an autonomous space for anti-communist Japanese, independent of the largely Protestant, if not outright secular, Cold War ideology stemming from the United States, both during the Occupation period and afterward. Anti-communism in Cold War Japan is often understood to have been a by-product of the American Occupation of Japan and subsequent American political and military influence in the archipelago, but this view overlooks a variety of anti-communist traditions inside of Japan, in particular the Japanese Catholic articulation of anti-communist views before and during the Cold War. Doak therefore examines the ways in which Japanese Catholics such as Tanaka responded to the writings of Pope Pius XI and Pope Leo XIII, Jesuit Pedro Arrupe, and Marxists Tosaka Jun, Tokuda Kyūichi, and Shiga Yoshio, as well as to events such as President Plutarco Elías Calles’ persecution of Catholics in Mexico (the “Cristero War”) and the arrest of Cardinal József Mindszenty in Soviet-dominated Hungary, in formulating an anti-communist Cold War information regime in Japan grounded in Japanese Catholicism rather than in American political considerations. This is a multifaceted, multi-modal information regime, and it remains as understudied today as it was influential during the Cold War in U.S.-dominated postwar Japan.

8 Introduction In the second chapter, “The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea as a Diplomatic Subject,” David A. Tizzard, assistant professor at Seoul Women’s University, traces the lineage of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK: North Korea) as a diplomatic subject, finding in the Cold War the defining Gestalt of North Korea’s international posture, including its Juche ideology on the domestic front. The DPRK’s emphasis on diplomacy during this period signaled a shift in focus from hard power elements to ones designed to improve and promote the image of the state abroad through the use of three specific and differentiated channels of distribution, a three-track information regime. Tizzard shows how categorization and combination, skillfully applied, have allowed North Korea to survive and even thrive, at least politically, in the realities of the Cold War. With many of the great powers reluctant to engage the DPRK diplomatically, North Korea tactically focused on the Third World, prestigious international sporting events like the FIFA World Cup, and external domestic social movements such as the Black Panthers. The use of the three-track information regime ultimately proved successful, as the DPRK solidified its position and survived the Cold War, and the Korean War, unconquered. Seeing the Cold War as the “Gestalt” of “North Korea as a diplomatic subject,” Tizzard makes full use of the information regime concept to interrogate perceptions and received bodies of knowledge in new ways. Tizzard sees Juche ideology as the hermeneutic of continuity in the creation of the North Korean diplomatic subject, and projects the “Cold War” forward from 1991 to show the deep historical continuities rendered visible by the “information regimes” approach. Finally, the third chapter in Part Three, “The Club of Rome in East Asia: U.S.Led Population-Control Information Regimes and Waging the Cold War in the Far East,” is my attempt to bring a kind of people’s history approach to the study of the Cold War in East Asia. Much “people’s history” is written from a Marxist or Marxian standpoint, but here I view “people” differently, not as agents of class struggle, but as biopolitical beings, living creatures who necessarily interact with their environment in political ways. The United States, as hegemon of the Pacific during the Cold War, was initially buoyed by a massive swell in production which not only helped the United States win World War II and secure its place as the ruler of half the globe, but also set it on course for what Henry Luce called “the American century.” However, as Harvard scholar Charles Maier has noted, in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the American experiment changed in profound ways. Notably, the United States as an empire shifted from one relying on production to one relying on consumption. Americans and their government began to go deeply into debt. Deficit spending skyrocketed with the war in Vietnam and the myriad Great Society initiatives, Nixon took the United States off the gold standard, Eurodollars and petrodollars confounded the greenback’s global dominion, and the United States began to return to its earlier, eugenicist tendencies in seeking to regulate the consumption of resources by poor, nonwhite people in order to ensure the ongoing first-world consumption lifestyle of an increasing number of Americans. Under the direction of Henry Kissinger, the United States issued NSSM-200, a program for population control, rooted

Introduction  9 in the emerging unease over a “population bomb” and fostered by the Club of Rome and globalist-internationalist institutions such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. The information regime of population control was carefully crafted to appeal to leaders and citizens of Asian countries, but the reality in Washington was entirely different. In this way, the U.S. government skillfully manipulated perceptions in advance of its own interest, a classic example of the creation and maintenance of an information regime. This information regime was crucial to the waging of the Cold War in East Asia, and helps complicate and granularize our understanding of information as the bedrock of economic warfare. Taken altogether, these eight chapters stand, not only as important research in their own right, but as a new departure in Cold War history in East Asia, seeing “information regimes” as a powerful tool for rethinking and critically reassessing human interaction. As the world awakens to the power of information, it is time to apply these insights about information’s primacy to the past and see bigger diachronic continuities, continuities even giving tacit shape to the “Cold War” (which was “cold” only in the old, outdated sense of war) and other forms of human interaction. History is not solely about power. By continuously foregrounding the rhetorical, the political, the intellectual, the ideological, and even the spiritual as really deployed by a variety of actors, “information regimes” as an organizing principle opens up virtually limitless possibilities for telling the story of the Cold War much more richly, realistically, and humanly than has been possible under the standard categories (military, economic, diplomatic, and so forth) thus far. Because people act deliberately and for reasons usually precipitated from some set of beliefs, (mis)understandings, and intellectual commitments, “information regimes”—which sees people as always-already in an intellectual-behavioral milieu, and always-already in some way both influenced by and influencing others’ mindsets—is a holistic way of understanding the Cold War past as a time when information became central to other endeavors. On that score, and by contrast, some may wonder whether I am not perhaps using “information” so capaciously as to render the term too loose as an overarching concept. To be sure, I have framed “information regimes” modularly so that new interpretations of the term could be added as various scholars explore the heuristic for themselves. “Information regimes” is an open-source idea, one that I myself have borrowed and reprised. But there is a contour in the pieces, a pattern in the field. “Information” is not mere data, or other bits of coded material or even the endless stream of words that informs (in both senses of the term) how a given group of people thinks, believes, and behaves. In this sense, “information” is used in a much more disciplined fashion than is Anderson’s “print capitalism.” Anderson understands the totality of printed material to form an “imagined community,” thus extending the implied meaning of “information” infinitely to the horizon. “Information regimes,” conversely, implies directed, intentionally arranged, “aimed” information, used by some person or people to change some specific person or group’s way of thinking and, as a consequence, way of acting.

10 Introduction One of the best examples of how “information regime” should be understood as a concept comes from Chizuko T. Allen’s chapter on Korean residents in Japan during the Cold War. Allen’s work focuses on how Pak Kyŏng-sik, a Korean activist and professor, deliberately created an entirely new paradigm of historical misunderstanding in order to influence other Koreans (and, eventually, people in other countries) in their views about Japan and the overall dynamic of U.S.-Japan relations during the Cold War. What Allen describes is a paradigmatic example of an information regime—a product of human will and strategic communication (even—especially—if inconsistent or untrue) designed to bring about a desired result. An information regime is a way of looking at the Cold War past that puts people and their decisions first, and shows how information, even more than military power, economic ideologies, or diplomatic maneuvering, influenced Cold War actors on the ground. As many will no doubt be aware, the opening of new archives and the passing away of old information regimes is opening up big tracts of rhetorical space for questioning received historical narratives. But without a holistic analysis, neither archives nor revisionism tells us how information was deployed in real time, by whom, and what the effects were. During the Cold War, information was so central to societies that states had to compete with a vast array of other influencers of public opinion and individual action. As one early reviewer for this volume pointed out: Scholars also realize that a statist and official perspective does not tell the complete story of the Cold War experience. A focus on other areas like information, media, and non-official industries is required to present a more wholistic picture of the Cold War. I share this sentiment exactly. Information Regimes in the Cold War in East Asia is a first step on the long road of rethinking the Cold War by seeing the information that people wrangled over as central to understanding the Cold War, not as history or as event, but as lived informational warfare.

Part one

Diplomacy, public diplomacy, and espionage

1

Behind the curtains How Soviet intelligence masters and Japanese journalists brought about Soviet–Japan diplomatic normalization—without the return of the northern territories Takizawa Ichirō

Introduction Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev’s (1894–1971) “de-Stalinization campaign” began after Josef Stalin died on March 5, 1953. This campaign coincided with the aggressive push of the Soviet Union’s “peaceful co-existence” strategy worldwide. The Soviet leadership under this new co-existence paradigm was well aware of the geopolitical and strategic value of Japan. However, the Soviet Union had no diplomatic relations with Japan, which was inside the sphere of influence of the United States. This greatly hampered the Soviet Union’s ability, at which it was highly proficient, to use intelligence plotting and maneuvering to stir up anti-American forces and drive a wedge between the United States and an ally.1 The Soviets were urgently seeking to set up an embassy in Japan which could serve as a base for both diplomacy and espionage. Khruschev was even prepared to return to Japan the islands of Habomai and Shikotan, illegally occupied by the Soviet Union since the final days of World War II, as a reward for Japan’s agreeing to the restoration of diplomatic relations.2 But before this could happen, the Soviets first needed to open negotiations with the Japanese government. The first “trial balloon” designed to feel Japan out over the possibility of restoring diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union was sent up in the fall of 1954. Japan responded positively. The timing was especially fortuitous because in December of 1954, the prime ministership of Japan passed to Hatoyama Ichirō, who viewed with hostility the outgoing prime minister, the anti-communist Yoshida Shigeru (1878–1967). This was a change in the political landscape highly favorable to the Soviet Union.3 The Soviets did not waste the opportunity. The next month, in January of 1955, Andrey (Andrei) Ivanovich Domnitsky, from the Soviet fishing industry negotiating delegation located in Mamiana, Tokyo, accompanied Kyodo News Agency reporter Den Hideo (1923–2009) to the palatial Hatoyama residence, known as Otowa Mansion. Entering by the back door, the two men met with the master of the household himself, Prime Minister Hatoyama.

14  Takizawa Ichirō According to Den Hideo’s later testimony to the Diet, Den and other leftleaning Kyodo News Agency reporters were asked by members of the Soviet fishing industry negotiating delegation (actually Soviet intelligence agents) to arrange a confidential meeting between Domnitsky and Hatoyama at the diplomatic mission (actually the successor to the Soviet Embassy which, while technically no longer in existence, continued to function under the guise of a temporary negotiating delegation in Tokyo for conducting negotiations pertaining to fisheries).4 In order to prevent anyone from the Yoshida Shigeru faction from discovering the plan, the Kyodo reporters discretely conveyed the Soviet side’s request to Sugihara Arata (1899–1982), a foreign policy advisor to Hatoyama who was pro-communist and who hated Yoshida. Sugihara relayed the Soviets’ designs to Hatoyama, and thus Domnitsky’s visit to the Hatoyama mansion was effected.5 In general, this arrangement whereby left-leaning public figures mold public opinion and move among the members of the Soviet diplomatic mission (or, today, the Russian Embassy) has not changed substantially since Den’s time. This points to a serious but almost entirely overlooked aspect of Japan’s Cold War, namely, that a negative information regime of defenselessness in the face of foreign espionage operations contributed to a series of diplomatic defeats for Japan, not least vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. Every country in the world has laws designed to thwart spies—except for Japan, which is left unprotected from espionage because of this legal loophole. Nor has this negative information regime abated. If anything, it has only intensified. As the March 2019 personnel shakeup involving former International Olympic Committee Takeda Tsunekazu makes clear, the entire operation was an intelligence stratagem designed to ensure that Takeda would be replaced with someone friendly to Russia.6 This scheme culminated with the nomination of a well-known pro-Russian judo athlete, Yamashita Yasuhiro, as Takeda’s replacement.7 Even at the level of sports diplomacy, Japan, nominally an ally of the United States, continues to be maneuvered into positions favorable to the power, not to its far east, but to its immediate west.

A negative information regime The authors of this negative information regime are primarily the Japanese themselves. The example of Sugihara Arata stands out. Sugihara was even more anti-Yoshida Shigeru than Hatoyama Ichirō was. Before World War II, Sugihara had served in such important posts as the head of the international legal affairs bureau (“treaties bureau”) in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1946, however, after the war had ended, Sugihara was caught up in Foreign Minister Yoshida Shigeru’s “Red Purge” and run out of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Thereafter, Sugihara nursed an unyielding hatred for Yoshida. Sugihara would go on to serve as the Defense Agency Director General (from March 19 to July 31, 1955) and was affiliated with Fukuda Takeo, the leader of the pro-Soviet, pro-communist faction within the LDP. Other prominent members of this faction included well-known pro-Soviet politicians like Abe Shintarō (1924–1991)

Behind the curtains  15 (Shinzō’s father), former prime minister Mori Yoshirō, and others. Because those with ideological predilections such as these made common cause with Soviet intelligence agents in initiating diplomatic negotiations, it is little wonder that subsequent developments did not align with Japan’s best interests. It was against this background that the Soviet Union secured yet another opportunity in its engagement with Japan. The nexus of the negative information regime inside Japan and the global reach of Soviet espionage was populated by figures playing private roles often very different from their public personae. For instance, during his visit to the Hatoyama residence, Domnitsky personally presented Hatoyama with the “Domnitsky letter on the normalization of relations between the Soviet Union and Japan,” dated January 25, 1955. It was to hand-deliver this letter that Domnitsky had visited Hatoyama, a rendezvous arranged by pro-communist members of the Japanese fourth estate. Thereafter, and as a result of this unofficial contact, United Nations observer ambassador Sawada Renzō (1888–1970) and permanent Soviet representative at the United Nations Arkadii Aleksandrovich Sobolev (1903–1964) took over and entered into an official diplomatic channel in New York.8 This is the basic account, but the question remains, though: Who was this man Domnitsky, the Soviet who, with help from a Japanese counterpart, was able to enter unobserved into the Hatoyama residence? There is nothing written about Domnitsky’s life in any books on the history of Japan-Soviet relations, whether in Western languages or, it goes without saying, in Japanese. It seems that self-styled “Russia experts” in Japan had no interest in finding out who Domnitsky really was. That no one in Japan has followed up on Domnistky’s proffered bona fides is consistent with Japan’s studied ignorance about Russia: for example, few in Japan have pointed out that Eufemii Vasilievich Putyatin (1803–1883), who was raised to the title of count for leading around by the nose his negotiations partner, Kawaji Toshiakira (1801–1868), during the dawn of Russo-Japanese diplomatic relations history, was an emissary from the intelligence wing of the Russian Imperial Navy.9 However, all of this began to change, ironically, with the collapse of the communist superstate in Russia. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, records from the Soviet intelligence agencies began to be leaked and posted online. The number of such records was enormous, but after a meticulous search, I finally found what I was looking for. I presented my findings a few years later, on September 20, 2009.10 It turns out that Domnitsky was a genuine and authentic career spy working for the Soviet navy’s intelligence bureau.

The life and times of Andrey Ivanovich Domnitsky Andrey (Andrei) Ivanovich Domnitsky was born in 1909. The year of his death is unknown. The events of the intervening years—that is, the outline of his life’s work—make it undeniable that Domnitsky was a full-fledged communist agent. In October of 1931, he entered the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army of the Soviet Union, and in 1932 joined the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. From

16  Takizawa Ichirō October of 1931 to May of 1932, he served in the Signal Battalion as a regular soldier, and from May of 1932 to August of 1933, he was the assistant officer in charge. From August of 1933 to March of 1935, he was a trainee in the political commissar course, during which time he also took Japanese in a foreignlanguages course. He was clearly preparing for intelligence work in East Asia. From March of 1935 to February of 1938, Domnitsky was the adjutant to the commanding officer of the border reconnaissance post affiliated with the intelligence section of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. From February of 1938 to February of 1939, he was the senior officer in the cryptographic department of the Pacific Fleet’s coastal monitoring unit. From February of 1939 to March of 1940, Domnitsky was an interpreter with the intelligence service at Pacific Fleet headquarters, and from March of 1940 to June of 1942 was the leader of an espionage group for the same Pacific Fleet headquarters intelligence service. From June of 1942 to September of 1943, Domnitsky was the leader of the First Group, and from September of 1943, he became the leader of the Second Group of the Eighth Section at the intelligence service of the Pacific Fleet’s General Headquarters. From August to September 1945, he took part in the Soviet Union’s war against Japan. Domnitsky’s work history is the typical career course for an intelligence officer. The Soviet records show that from 1935 onward, Lieutenant Commander Domnitsky participated in countless special espionage operations for the intelligence wing of the Soviet Pacific Fleet and carried out intelligence activities “within the territory of a latently hostile nation in the Far East.” “Hostile nation” refers, of course, to Japan. Domnitsky was thus undercover in Japanese territory doing reconnaissance and spy work. Also, according to the Soviet records, “From 1942 to 1943, [Domnitsky] sent those under his command on secret missions to enemy territory, where they carried out intelligence operations and gained valuable information.” Until this revelation from the Soviet archives, it had been unknown in Japan that the Soviet Union had been able to infiltrate military intelligence agents into Japanese territory. The records state that “The officers who took part in these operations under his [i.e., Domnitsky’s] command were awarded medals.” Domnitsky, too, was also decorated for this work. The medal records for Domnitsky in the archives clearly detail the particulars of Domnitsky’s decorations. According to the records, in July of 1944, Domnitsky was awarded two Orders of the Red Star. In July of 1945, Domnitsky was decorated with the Order of the Patriotic War, Second Class, for meritorious service in the battle for occupied Port Arthur. In September of 1945, he was awarded with the Order of the Red Banner. Of these awards, the two medals Domnitsky received in July of 1944 were a reward for his intelligence work against Japan.11

The depth of Cold War politics in Japan Domnitsky’s case was hardly an outlier. Given Cold War Japan’s negative information regime of defenselessness in the face of espionage onslaughts from

Behind the curtains  17 abroad, there were many others who infiltrated the intellectual and political life of the country and influenced the course of postwar Japanese history. In order to flesh out the extent of Soviet, and then Russian, espionage activities in Japan in particular, let us first examine the nature of those regimes and then turn to a case of Soviet-Russian Cold War/post-Cold War espionage in Japan even more illustrative of the true scope of the negative information regime than is Domnitsky’s. Both the former Soviet Union and the present-day Russian Federation can be described as uniquely totalitarian states run by secret police forces.12 For these police forces, there is no distinction between diplomacy and intelligence work. Many Russian foreign service officers stationed abroad have either covert or open ties to intelligence agencies such as the SVR (the successor to the KGB, Russia’s intelligence bureau for overseas espionage) and the GRU (the headquarters for Russian military intelligence). In other words, many Russian diplomats and other foreign service officers must be viewed for what they were, and are: spies.13 There is another figure who, in his brilliant career, embodies the truth of this fact of widespread Russian espionage in Japan. Like Domnitsky, this figure played a major role in preliminary Japan-USSR negotiations after World War II. Ostensibly, this figure was a foreign service officer, but in actuality he was a KGB officer masquerading as a foreign service officer. Who was he? In fact, although his name is the farthest thing from a household term in Japan, this man has exerted a profound pro-Soviet, and then pro-Russian, influence on Japanese politics—indeed, on the very geographical extent of Japan as a nation-state—for decades, from the prewar period up to as late as the summer of 2016. If the negative information regime of Japan’s defenseless in the face of espionage work from abroad can be embodied in one person, it would be this mysterious man. This man’s mission against Japan remained consistent throughout his career because the main points of contention between Japan and the Soviet Union were so little changed during the postwar. The focus of this KGB officer’s diplomatic and espionage activities vis-à-vis Japan has almost always been the northern Japanese islands which Russia now occupies. This territorial dispute has naturally been at the center of Japan-Soviet, and then Japan-Russian, diplomatic interactions during that time as well. For example, ever since returning to power in December of 2012, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō has pursued diplomatic negotiations with Russia with exceptional persistence, not even hesitating to publicly proclaim that during his time in office, he would resolve the territorial disputes between Russia and Japan—apparently unaware that imposing time limits on diplomatic negotiations is tantamount to handing the victory to one’s opponents.14 Unfortunately, Abe is not alone in being diplomatically outmaneuvered by the Russians. In the 1997 Krasnoyarsk Agreement, then-president of Russia Boris Yeltsin (1931–2007) successfully used the disputed northern territories as bait, swindling then-prime minister Hashimoto Ryūtarō (1937–2006) into providing Russia with several hundred billion yen under the rubric of “economic cooperation.”15 Almost 20 years later, Abe has stumbled into the same snare as his predecessor. Hashimoto was the first victim of Russian wiles, and Abe the second. From the

18  Takizawa Ichirō perspective of the Russians, both Hashimoto and Abe must seem very easy to deceive. However, Vladimir Putin, after securing a three-hundred-billion-yen monetary offering from Japan, began signaling around the end of 2018 that he would be bringing negotiations with PM Abe to a close. In 2019, Putin started raising obstacles to negotiation by imposing conditions unacceptable to the Japanese side, such as that the four northern islands under dispute have their names changed and that Russian sovereignty over them be recognized, and also by demanding the abrogation of the US-Japan security arrangement. At a meeting of a Russian trade association held in Moscow on March 15, 2019, Putin declared that “momentum has been lost in the negotiations with Japan.”16 There are three possible reasons that Putin has cut off negotiations with Abe which had been ongoing for several years. The first is that, while the three hundred billion yen that he received from Japan was less than initial targets, Putin cut his losses in light of the fact that it would be impossible to get any more, given ongoing sanctions against Russia. Second, Putin may have judged that it would be in Russia’s best interest if, instead of pursuing negotiations with Abe to the bitter end, the Russian side were to wait until the appearance of yet another easy target—victim number three after Hashimoto and Abe—and thus obtain yet another payment of several hundred billion yen sometime later on. Third, while it goes without saying that Russia had zero intention from the outset of returning the disputed territories, in order to draw Japan in and lead her along, it was necessary to hold out the possibility of the islands’ being handed back over to Japan. The Russians kept up this performance skillfully and convincingly, but such a performance has a built-in time limit and Putin may have decided that the show could no longer go on.17

Sergei Tikhvinsky It was obvious from the beginning that this was how the affair would end. Abe paid no heed to admonitions from experts well-versed in Russian diplomatic politics and instead lent his ear only to the honeyed words of mediators, profiteers, and ex-convicts in service around him. Among these latter types are Suzuki Muneo, a notorious Russian agent who was jailed for a year for his pro-Russian misconduct, Satō Masaru, a dismissed foreign ministry hand and Suzuki’s protégé, and Iijima Isao, a former aide of ex-PM Koizumi Jun’ichirō who once openly boasted of his close connection with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum tycoon and Putin’s protégé.18 The results of such an approach are as we now see. For several years now, those in Abe’s circle who whisper into his ear have joined forces with publicists and self-promoters in the employ of outside groups friendly to Russia. This gale of Russian influence in Japan is hardly unique to Abe and his circle. Indeed, there have been dozens of open and/or covert pro-Russia front groups and organizations in Japan, namely, the “Japan-Russia Society,” once headed by ex-PM Hatoyama Yukio, the “Japan-Russia Association of Mayors of Japan Sea Coastal Cities,” the MOF-assisted “Japan-Russia Youth Exchange Center,”

Behind the curtains  19 and the semi-covert “Mosukuwa Kai (Moscow Society),” whereat Japanese correspondents formerly stationed in Moscow meet regularly and clandestinely with Russian Embassy members who are, needless to say, GRU or KGB apparatchiki. The list goes on and on. These groups have run a campaign to damage the legitimate legal basis for Japan to request the return of the northern territories, and they have been helped along gladly by sympathizers in the Japanese media. A grouping of these publicists and self-promoters, who have run a perfectly coordinated campaign set to the tune coming from Moscow, hurried to reverse course, in order to align with Putin’s remarks cited earlier, from declaring that the islands will revert to Japanese control, to declaring that the islands will not revert to Japanese control. But it is precisely in the fog of this diplomatic and political confusion and double-dealing that we pick up the bright thread of Soviet, and later Russian, influence on Japanese internal affairs going back deep into the Cold War past. In the midst of the latest round of propaganda offensives by the Russian state, on June 1, 2016, the leftist Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, which editorializes in the same vein as the Asahi Shimbun, trotted out one Sergei Tikhvinsky, a veteran Russian “diplomat,” under the headline: “Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration, Resolution to be effected by handover of two islands, says former diplomat and negotiator.” The Mainichi thus provided a platform for Tikhvinsky unilaterally to advance the position of the Russian side. Six days later, the Mainichi ran yet another interview with Tikhvinsky along similar lines under the headline of “The Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration: Sixty years after the agreement, a former Soviet diplomat reflects on the negotiations from that time.”19 When there is a repetition of the same propaganda articles, it is an unmistakable indication that Russian agencies are working behind the scenes to shape public opinion. In fact, ten years before the Mainichi articles appeared, Tikhvinsky had made another appearance, in a piece in the October 19, 2006 edition of the left-wing Tokyo Shimbun newspaper headlined: “Fifty years of the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration: Speaking with Mr. Tikhvinsky.” The Tokyo Shimbun piece from 2006 was essentially the same as the Mainichi pieces from ten years later. The gist of these appearances is that Tikhvinsky, who emerges at every key turn in JapanSoviet and Japan-Russia negotiations over the disputed territories and repeats, time and again, pronouncements that redound to Russia’s national interest, is a propagandist. Repetition is one of the fundamentals of propaganda, and Japanese newspapers are only too happy to help the Russians politically propagandize the people of Japan.

Tikhvinsky’s career The Mainichi Shimbun introduced Tikhvinsky in this way: During the negotiations to normalize relations [between Japan and the Soviet Union], Mr. Tikhvinsky was a member of the negotiating team and also working at the Soviet Embassy in the United Kingdom. From May of

20  Takizawa Ichirō 1956, Tikhvinsky was staying in Tokyo as an emissary (equivalent to an ambassador) of the Soviet Union, and was working in a coordinating role with the Japan side. After returning to the Soviet Union from Japan in April of 1957, Tikhvinsky became a China expert in the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Now living in an elderly care facility in Moscow, Tikhvinsky continues to write about the diplomatic history of China and Russia.20 According to numerous documents obtained from the Russian archives and cited severally throughout this essay, from 1954 to 1956, Tikhvinsky was the KGB rezident, or station chief, assigned to the United Kingdom. He was thus an elite member of the Soviet intelligence world, pretending to be a Soviet diplomat to the United Kingdom but in reality the head of the embassy—so powerful that he was able to order even the ambassador around. It was while rezident in London that Tikhvinsky got his relocation orders, to Japan, so that he could be the behind-the-scenes puppeteer of the Japan-USSR negotiations scheduled to begin imminently in Tokyo. Tikhvinsky was therefore the de facto first postwar KGB rezident stationed in Japan, and the de facto orchestrator of the Cold War information regime of Japan’s ineffectual diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union (and other nations carrying out virtually unchecked espionage against Japan). Japan’s current style of diplomatic engagement with Russia is essentially a continuation of the Cold War information regime of Soviet dominance in espionage against Japan that Tikhvinsky virtually single-handedly created. Tikhvinsky’s full name was Sergei Leonidovich Tikhvinsky. He was born on September 1, 1918, the year after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, as the son of an army doctor in Leningrad (called Petrograd at the time, today called St. Petersburg). In 1934, Tikhvinsky entered the Komsomol (the AllUnion Leninist Young Communist League), as did many other young people in the Soviet Union. Tikhvinsky graduated from middle school in 1935 and entered the literature department of Leningrad University, where he majored in Chinese language. Thereafter, Tikhvinsky built a career in government as a “China hand.” In 1939, following his graduation from Leningrad University, Tikhvinsky started working at the NKVD (The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the predecessor to the KGB). In August of 1938—that is, while still a student at Leningrad University— Tikhvinsky underwent practical training in espionage and spycraft at the NKVD. Tikhvinsky was first assigned to the NKVD personnel department, but then was loaned out as an interpreter to the NKVD State Security Management Bureau, Fifth Department (in charge of foreign countries). In 1939, Tikhvinsky became a top-level operative within the Fifth Department, and on May 10, 1939, became the head of the Thirteenth Section (China Section) of the Fifth Department of the NKVD. After that, he visited the Soviet consulate in Urumqi for overseas training, returning to the Soviet Union in 1940. In March of 1941, Tikhvinsky became the department head of the Fifth Department of the First Directorate of the NKGB (the successor to the NKVD), and in that same year graduated from the Chinese language faculty

Behind the curtains  21 of the Moscow Institute of Oriental Studies (the equivalent of a graduate school). On August 11, 1941, Tikhvinsky became the head of the Second Section of the Seventh Department in the First Directorate of the NKGB (although this was due to an organizational restructuring, and so was not a promotion). On November 30, 1941, he became the head of the Second Section (for Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tuva [Tyva]) of the Seventh Department of the First Directorate of the NKGB, and on July 1, 1942 a member of the Second Department (responsible for China) of the NKGB First Directorate, Fourth Department. On May 4, 1943, he became the head of that same department. At the end of 1943, Tikhvinsky took up his first overseas post as an intelligence officer disguised as a diplomat, arriving in Peking during the heavy fighting in the civil war between the armies of Nationalist (Guomindang) leader Chiang Kai-shek and the People’s Liberation Army of Mao Zedong. In December of 1943, Tikhvinsky became the second secretary at the Soviet Embassy in China (although his rank as an intelligence officer was lieutenant colonel). In December of 1946, he became the vice-consul of the consulate general of the Soviet Union to Peking, and from April of 1948 to August 2, 1949 was the consulate general of the Soviet Union to Peiping. On October 2, 1949, he was made the councilor of the embassy of the Soviet Union in China, and in June of 1950 again returned to the Soviet Union after witnessing Mao Zedong’s victory and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. From July of 1950 to June 7, 1951, Tikhvinsky was the head of the Fifth Section of the Third Department of the Intelligence Council of the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Intelligence Council—the head of which was Vyacheslav Molotov (1890–1986), a man in Stalin’s inner circle—was a comprehensive intelligence organization, possessing very powerful authority, comprising the GRU (military intelligence) and what today is known as the SVR (the intelligence bureau for overseas espionage). Tikhvinsky joined this agency while he was still young, which means that his abilities had been recognized. The Intelligence Council was a gathering of powerful people in the intelligence world at the time, and it formed a personnel network spanning both the military and the political realms. From June 7, 1951 until December of that same year, Tikhvinsky was the head of the Intelligence Council’s Third Department, and on January 15, 1952 became the second acting vice-director of the First Directorate (overseas intelligence bureau) of the Soviet Ministry of State Security (MGB). From July 26, 1952 to March 17, 1953, Tikhvinsky was the second vice-director of the First Directorate (overseas intelligence bureau) of the Soviet Ministry of State Security (MGB).

Tikhvinsky and global espionage Returning from Peking to Russia, Tikhvinsky flawlessly performed his work at the Ministry of State Security and then rose to the upper echelons of that

22  Takizawa Ichirō Ministry’s First Directorate, the inner citadel of the Soviet Union’s espionage work abroad. A little over one month following the death of Josef Stalin, Tikhvinsky was transferred on a short-term assignment to New York, the “ground zero” of the intelligence war against the West, under the guise of a high-ranking figure in the United Nations. Tikhvinsky’s stay at the United Nations was brief, lasting less than one month, but the work with which he was tasked was extremely important. Most likely, Tikhvinsky’s assignment was not to carry out a one-off espionage job, but rather to keep in line the more than 200 Soviet spies thronging a United Nations that had been rocked by news of Stalin’s demise.21 It is believed that Tikhvinsky’s top-secret mission was to quell any disturbances among the spy ranks, communicating to them (in order to prevent any unforeseen situations—such as asylumseeking or defections to the West—from taking place in the time of shock caused by the dictator’s death) that the new leadership in Moscow had no intention of carrying out purges within the intelligence agencies. Tikhvinsky was in New York from April 18 to May 11, 1953, serving as the aide to the second United Nations Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961), and as the head of the United Nations Secretariat Department of Safety and Security. It goes without saying that Tikhvinsky was also attending to his real profession, espionage, behind the scenes. This points to another key auxiliary player in the formation of a pro-Soviet information regime in Cold War Japan: the United Nations. Although widely admired in Japan (United Nations University is located in downtown Tokyo, for instance), the United Nations has long been a hotbed of Soviet, and later Russian, spy work, much of it aimed at gaining an advantage over Japan. For example, the aforementioned Dag Hammarskjöld was a communist and also a Soviet spy.22 In fact, many United Nations Secretaries General were influenced by the Soviet Union.23 Many of those sent from Japan to the United Nations have also been of similar political disposition: for example, Akashi Yasushi, an UnderSecretary-General at the United Nations who ran for mayor of Tokyo in 1999.24 After returning to the USSR, from June 3, 1953, to December 9 of that same year, Tikhvinsky was the aide to the head of the Second Directorate (at the time the coordinating office for Soviet espionage activities overseas) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Nineteen fifty-three was also the year in which Tikhvinsky would begin his real and extensive espionage work abroad. He was 45 years of age and hitting the full stride of his work as an intelligence agent. Having emerged from Stalin’s purges unscathed and won the full trust of the new leadership, Tikhvinsky was assigned to London, one of the world’s most ruthless intelligence battlegrounds where elite spies from around the world converged. His rank was the KGB resident, the head of the KGB rezidentura. Tikhvinsky had reached the peak of his career as a local intelligence executive. From December of 1953 to March of 1954, Tikhvinsky was the rezident of the MVD (the precursor to the KGB) in London, and from March 1954 to November of 1955 the London rezident of the KGB. All the while, Tikhvinsky was masquerading as the councilor of the Soviet Embassy to the United Kingdom.

Behind the curtains  23

Tikhvinsky and Soviet information operations against Japan Tikhvinsky built on the momentum of his nearly two years’ service in London to increase his reputation even further at the new leadership position. Tikhvinsky was sent to Tokyo as the commanding officer for in-country friendship-building intelligence operations vis-à-vis Japan—a project launched by the Khrushchev regime, which had made “thaw” and “peaceful coexistence” new policy mainstays. An espionage ace was thus withdrawn from London and transferred to Tokyo. Also, as has only recently been learned, Khrushchev was resigned to the fact that he would have probably have to return two of the Japanese islands the Soviet Union was illegally occupying in order to sign a peace treaty with Japan. When these two facts are considered together, it is clear that the Soviet Union was relatively heavily invested in rapprochement with Japan, and was prepared to pay the price to achieve it. However, the Japanese side, which had little information at its disposal, was unable to grasp the true state of affairs of its counterpart. Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichirō had been paralyzed on one side of his body as a result of a cerebral infarction, and he ended up being reduced to tears when he learned that Khrushchev had had a wheelchair ramp installed over the stairs leading up to the Kremlin entrance specifically for Hatoyama’s use. Hatoyama was thus absolutely unfit for tough negotiations with the Soviets. He was obsessed with the “hostage card” of the Japanese soldiers who were imprisoned in Siberia and immediately lost his nerve when confronted with the issue. Minister of Agriculture Kōno Ichirō (1898–1965), a man brimming with ambition who had been made a plenipotentiary negotiator on a par with the prime minister, was blinded by fishing rights—without securing which it would have been impossible to take the prime ministership he coveted—and traded away claims for the islands in exchange for fish.25 The end result was that diplomatic relations were established after the Japanese side signed a joint declaration with the Soviets without having effected the return of even one island. It was an absolute diplomatic fiasco for Japan.26 The negotiations process leading up to the signing of the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration of October, 1956 was the covert work of Tikhvinsky, a behindthe-scenes instigator putting his shrewd acumen into practice in Tokyo. But he was not alone. While there are no publicly available documents detailing the dayto-day operations by Tikhvinsky on this score, the pro-Soviet raconteuring of (then) University of Kyoto professor Inoki Masamichi (1914–2012) is a matter of public record. Prof. Inoki, acting almost in the capacity of a public relations officer for the Soviet Union, hailed the “territory-less signing of the peace treaty.”27 Many suspect that Prof. Inoki was himself somehow involved with the USSR.28 As the chief-of-delegation (and therefore de facto ambassador) of the Soviet Union to Japan from May of 1955, Tikhvinsky was in charge of intelligence activities during the negotiations between Japan and the USSR. After the negotiations had culminated in the signing of the joint declaration, however, Tikhvinsky again receded backstage as the political advisor for the Soviet Embassy

24  Takizawa Ichirō of Japan from 1957, most likely building a Soviet intelligence network within Japan. After returning to the Soviet Union, Tikhvinsky distanced himself from in-country diplomatic intelligence work and devoted his time to a new career in research.

Tikhvinsky and East Asia during the Cold War Asia was the center of Tikhvinsky’s career. Beginning with his appointment as the head of the Asia section of the foreign cultural exchange committee during the Soviet Union’s ministerial meeting in June of 1957, Tikhvinsky became the director of the China Research Institute, followed by an appointment as the vice-director of the Asia Ethnicities Research Institute, the head of the China section of the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and finally the vice-director of that Institute. In December of 1965, Tikhvinsky returned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, taking up the post of the head of the Asia division of the diplomatic policy planning department and the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ department of diplomatic history. In October of 1986, Tikhvinsky was made the dean of the Diplomatic Academy. In tandem with some of the aforementioned appointments, from 1958 to 1960, Tikhvinsky was the head of the Oriental history department of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Also during part of the above-detailed period, from April of 1969 until 1974, Tikhvinsky was the Soviet representative to the UNESCO administrative council.29 Tikhvinsky was also active in academic work, acting as an editor, from 1973 to 1982, of the journal Modern History and Contemporary History. In 1982, Tikhvinsky was on the board of governors of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and also served as a key figure and head of the secretariat of the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ department of history.30 It is clear not only from his actions but also from his titles that Tikhvinsky was involved in both diplomatic and intelligence work. Working up the ranks of the state security apparatuses, Tikhvinsky was made a GB (state security) first lieutenant in 1939, a GB senior captain (March 14, 1940), a GB major (February 11, 1943), and a GB lieutenant colonel (August 16, 1943), eventually being promoted to full colonel. Within the ranks of foreign service officers, on May 5, 1956, Tikhvinsky was raised to a minister extraordinary and plenipotentiary first class, and on December 6, 1967 to an ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary. Tikhvinsky received, among many other medals, the Order of Lenin (1984) and the Order of the October Revolution (1975), plus the Order of the Red Star (twice, once on June 25, 1954, and once again on August 19, 1955) as a reward for his intelligence work in London and Tokyo.31

Conclusion It is fully apparent from the above that the former head (the equivalent of an ambassador) of the Soviet Union’s diplomatic mission to Japan (the equivalent

Behind the curtains  25 an embassy) was a dyed-in-the-wool intelligence operative of the USSR. Tikhvinsky died in February of 2018, just shy of his hundredth birthday. True to the Japanese proverb that even at a hundred the sparrow never forgets how to dance, right up to his final days Tikhvinsky was pushing boldly forward with propaganda and intelligence work, using as his counterpart pro-communist newspapers in Japan to maintain, and even advance, the pro-Soviet information regime formed during the Cold War. One thing that has remained the same pre- and postwar, and across the changes from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation, is that, for the Russians, diplomatic activities and espionage activities are one and the same. This is exemplified in the career of Sergei Leonidovich Tikhvinsky. Because of this consonance of diplomacy and spycraft, the Soviets and then the Russians have been able to build a record of achieving major diplomatic and political successes. It is a matter of common knowledge that the present Russian Embassy in Japan is home to an astounding number of intelligence agents, a state of affairs which holds true for the major Russian embassies scattered around Western democracies. One of the most important tasks for a Russian intelligence agent based in Japan is recruiting local collaborators. It is a fact that Russian agents visit wellknown university campuses in Japan and snare promising students. Professors already caught by the Russians also help with recruitment efforts.32 Japanese universities are, by and large, left-wing, and are filled with scholars who are proRussia, pro-China, and/or pro-North Korea. Many of their recruitment efforts are carried out in the open, with no restrictions whatsoever. Students recruited to be Russian agents are blandished with cash and gifts, and are recommended for important ministerial jobs, such as at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The reality is that, at the National Defense Academy, pro-Russia, pro-Chinese, and anti-American scholars already recruited to be spies achieve prominent positions in the school. And in Japan in general, the worlds of politics, finance, academics, education, the mass media, and even sports and entertainment are heavily populated with people—no fewer than several thousand, at the very least— cooperating with Russian intelligence work. This large number means that notorious Russian agents are able to pretend that internal power struggles occur, with the performance even extending to staged battles in court. But the information regime remains the same. Japan’s loss in World War II is the cause of Japan’s assuming a posture of helplessness in the face of foreign influence. The information regime of refusal even to countenance the possibility of—much less counter—espionage by foreign agents on Japanese soil stems from the Japanese people’s having lost their sense of national belonging and forgotten their duty to defend their own country. Of the G7 countries, the only one without any counter-espionage laws is Japan—the only country where, not coincidentally, a Cold War information regime of preemptive surrender to espionage took root. Articles 83–86 of the penal code, those dealing with espionage, were even deleted from the Japanese lawbooks. Today, as during the Cold War, Japan remains virtually defenseless against Russian espionage.

26  Takizawa Ichirō

Notes 1 See, e.g., Thomas Boghardt, “SEMPER VIGILIS: The U.S. Army Security Agency in Early Cold War Germany,” Army History, no. 106 (Winter, 2018), 6–28. 2 For the standard account, see, e.g., James William Morley, “The Soviet-Japanese Peace Declaration,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 3 (September, 1957), 370–379. See also Peggy L. Falkenheim, “Some Determining Factors in Soviet-Japanese Relations,” Pacific Affairs, vol. 50, no. 4 (Winter, 1977–1978), 604–624 and Tessa Morris- Suzuki, “Lines in the Snow: Imagining the Russo-Japanese Frontier,” Pacific Affairs, vol. 72, no. 1 (Spring, 1999), 57–77. 3 On Yoshida and Hatoyama and their political context, see, e.g., Kenneth E. Colton, “II. Pre-War Political Influences in Post-War Conservative Parties,” The American Political Science Review, vol. 42, no. 5 (October, 1948), 940–957. 4 See Parliamentary Record, 123rd Diet Session, Foreign Affairs Committee, no. 5, April 16, 1992. 5 As for Den Hideo (1923–2009), his grandfather was baron Den Kenjirō, the former Governor-General of Taiwan. Although of noble birth, Den Hideo had moved to the left and pretended to be a “moderate social democrat,” a favored cover for communists. Den Hideo later moved from reporting to newscasting, at the TBS network. Taking full advantage of his disarming demeanor, Den became widely popular among female viewers and was eventually elected as a Diet representative. During the AsamaSansō Incident in February of 1972, Den spoke out in defense of the United Red Army, which had acted with the utmost brutality in committing murder, taking hostages, and killing two police officers during the final shootout. This defense tarnished Den’s reputation and also exposed him as a communist sympathizer. 6 On the Takeda affair, see Justin McCurry, “Japanese Olympic Chief to Quit Amid Corruption Allegations Scandal,” The Guardian, March 19, 2019. 7 Yamashita’s pro-Russian views are well known. See, e.g., Damien Sharkov, “Putin’s Judo Diplomacy: Japan’s PM Wants Olympian to Fight Russian Leader,” Newsweek, September 7, 2017 and Jo Adetunji, “Vladimir Putin Releases Judo Instruction DVD,” The Guardian, October 7, 2008. 8 On Sobolev and Soviet policy toward the United Nations in general during the first two decades of the Cold War, see, e.g., Henry J. Tessandori, “Soviet Foreign Policy as Reflected in the Hungarian and Czechoslovak Crises,” Naval War College Review, vol. 22, no. 2 (October, 1969), 59–90. 9 Roshia chōhōshi 95, “Mittei Puchāchin,” Gekkan Chian Fōramu, January 2016. On Putyatin’s role in the Treaty of Shimoda between Japan and Russia, see George Alexander Lensen, “Russians in Japan, 1858–1859,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 26, no. 2 (June, 1954), 162–173. 10 My report can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmZ4p1uPOqY&hl=ja. 11 For a history of Domnitsky’s career, see В. М. Лурье “ВОЕННО-­МОРСКАЯ­ РАЗВЕДКА СССР (1918—1960-е­гг.) СПРАВОЧНИК” С­а­н­к­т­-П­е­т­е­р­б­у­р­г,­ББК (“Voenno-morskaya razvedka SSSR (1918–1960) Spravochnik,” Sankt-Petersburg, BBK V.M. Lurye) http://forum.patriotcenter.ru/index.php?topic=30421.60; http:// voenspez.ru/index.php?topic=30421.180. 12 For a detailed history of, and a compelling argument for the continuity between, the Soviet and Russian secret police agencies, see Vladimir Bukovsky, tr. Alyona Kojevnikov, Judgment in Moscow: Soviet Crimes and Western Complicity (Westlake Village, CA: Ninth of November Press, 2019). 13 For just a few examples of this, see Daniel Fried, “When Diplomats and Spies Must Go: Expelling Russians, Then and Now,” Foreign Affairs, April 3, 2018, Matthew Lee and Josh Lederman, “Here’s Why the US Let Dozens of Russian Spies Operate in the US for Decades,” Business Insider, March 27, 2018, and Lauren Gambino, Sabrina Siddiqui, and Shaun Walker, “Obama Expels 35 Russian Diplomats in Retaliation for US Election Hacking,” The Guardian, December 30, 2016.

Behind the curtains  27 16 Gazeta Kommersant, No. 45, March 15, 2019. 17 See, e.g., Takizawa Ichirō, “Kesshite isoguna! Tai-Ro ryōdo kōshō,” Gekkanshi Hanada, August 2016, 236–245. In the summer of 2018, PM Abe dismissed Mōri Tada’atsu, the head of the Russia desk in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who expressed views similar to my own. 18 On Suzuki, see James D.J. Brown, “Japan-Russia Relations and the Miraculous Revival of Suzuki Muneo,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 17, issue 18, no. 3 (September 15, 2019); on Satō, see Gavan McCormack, “Ideas, Identity and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: The Sato Masaru Phenomenon,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, vol. 8, issue 44, no. 1 (November 1, 2010); on Iijima, see “Iijima Isao moto shushō hishokan, ‘henjin’ wo michibiita ‘kaizō’ no jōhō senryaku,” Sankei News, February 7, 2016. On Deripaska, see Andrew C. McCarthy, “Russian Oligarch Scoffed at FBI’s Collusion Theory,” National Review, July 6, 2019. 21 See Takizawa Ichirō, “Kokuren ni sukutta kyōsanshugi,” Seiron, October 2006, 115–125. 24 See Takizawa Ichirō, “Kokuren ni sukutta kyōsanshugi,” Seiron, op. cit. 28 See Okuhara Tadahiro et al., Inoki Masamichi no daihaiboku: Soren wo aishitsuzuketa zen Bōdai kōchō no ‘genron yokuatsu’ saiban no shinsō (Tokyo: Nisshin Hōdō, 1983).

30 On Tikhvinsky’s career path, see Н.В.­ Петров, “Кто­ руководил­ органами­ госбезопасности, 1941–1954 гг., Справочник­ Год: 2010 Издательство: “Звенья”; Международное­общество­“Мемориал” Москва” (N.V. Petrov, “Who Controlled the Security Organs, 1941–1954. A Reference Book”, International Society Memorial: 2010, Moscow), http://shieldandsword.mozohin.ru/personnel/tihvinskiy_s_l.htm; https://peoplelife.ru/282938; https://infosphere.top/вики/Тихвинский_Серкей_ Леонидович/; http://vslovar.org.ru/v2/55959.html; http://isaran.ru/?q=ru/ fund&guid=A1FFE40A-EBDF-5F68-A362–9CBC15E8DB12&ida=1. ­ 31 See Petrov, “Who Controlled the Security Organs,” op. cit. 32 For a detailed explication of how such activities work at campuses in the United States and in other countries around the world, see, e.g., Daniel Golden, Spy Schools: How the CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017).

28  Takizawa Ichirō

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Behind the curtains  29 Morris- Suzuki, Tessa. “Lines in the Snow: Imagining the Russo-Japanese Frontier”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 72, no. 1. Spring, 1999. Muraki, Tadamasa. “‘Roshiagēto’ no ganso wa Bei Minshutō (3): Hopukinsu wa Soren supai ka”. Chian Fōramu. January 2018. Okuhara, Tadahiro, et al. Inoki Masamichi no daihaiboku: Soren wo aishitsuzuketa zen Bōdai kōchō no ‘genron yokuatsu’ saiban no shinsō. Tokyo: Nisshin Hōdō, 1983. Parliamentary Record (Japan). 123rd Diet Session, Foreign Affairs Committee, no. 5. April 16, 1992. Petrov, N.V. Who Controlled the Security Organs, 1941–1954. Moscow: International Society Memorial, 2010. Roshia chōhōshi 95. “Mittei Puchāchin”. Chian Fōramu. January 2016. Sharkov, Damien. “Putin’s Judo Diplomacy: Japan’s PM Wants Olympian to Fight Russian Leader”. Newsweek. September 7, 2017. Takizawa, Ichirō. “Japanese- Soviet Negotiations towards the Opening of Diplomatic Relations 1955–1956”. Unpublished paper, Russian Institute of Columbia University. May, 1970. Takizawa, Ichirō. “Kesshite isoguna! Tai-Ro ryōdo kōshō”. Hanada. August, 2016. Takizawa, Ichirō. “Kokuren ni sukutta kyōsanshugi”. Seiron. October, 2006. Tessandori, Henry J. “Soviet Foreign Policy as Reflected in the Hungarian and Czechoslovak Crises”. Naval War College Review, vol. 22, no. 2. October, 1969. Uchida, Kenzō. “11: Japan’s Postwar Conservative Parties,” in Robert E. Ward and Sakamoto Yoshikazu, eds., Democratizing Japan: The Allied Occupation. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987, 305–337. Yomiuri Shimbun. April 2, 1956, 1. Zagorsky, Alexei V. “Three Years on a Path to Nowhere: The Hashimoto Initiative in Russian-Japanese ­ Relations”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 74, no. 1. Spring, 2001.

2

Saving China, losing China The transformation of a prewar to Cold War information regime Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan

Introduction: the development of a two-pronged information regime In July of 1938, a volume titled What War Means was published in New York. Edited by Harold John Timperley, Australian national and special correspondent to China for the British Manchester Guardian, the book was, and remains, often cited as verifying the Nanking Massacre.1 Much less frequently remarked is that Timperley, overtly a special correspondent to China, was in reality working for the Chinese Nationalist Party.2 What War Means was a propaganda book edited by Timperley at the request of the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [Guomindang], KMT). According to a report recently discovered by Asia University professor Higashinakano Shudo titled “Outline of Operations: International Propaganda Office, Central Propaganda Department,” Timperley was acting on the orders of the KMT in preparing and finding a publisher for the volume.3 July of 1938 also saw the formation, in the United States, of an organization tasked with accusing the Japanese of military aggression and urging the U.S. government to cut off trade with Japan. The organization was named “The American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression” (hereafter referred to as the “American Committee”).4 The American Committee was heavily associated with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and other Christian organizations in the United States and East Asia, and Christianity was the bedrock of the development of the pro-KMT, anti-Japan information regime in the United States.5 But the Nationalists were not the only Chinese-linked entity trying to influence public opinion in America.6 In 1937, the American League against War and Fascism, originally constituted in 1933, was rebranded the American League for Peace and Democracy. These “American Leagues,” which also sought out influence among Protestant Christian groups in the United States, were unlike the American Committee in that the Leagues were founded, funded, and largely staffed by Communists, the Nationalists’ enemies on the continent. Unlike the American Committee, the American Leagues’ propaganda work was coordinated, not from China, but from Moscow by the Comintern, the Communist

Saving China, losing China  31 International founded by Lenin in 1919. In a speech made in 1920, Lenin had said that the primary conflict to be exploited was the mutual animosity brewing between Japan and the United States, and that a confrontation between those two countries would be beneficial for Communism. More than 20 years prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Comintern had begun building a united Pacific front to isolate and eliminate the Soviet Union’s real Asian rival, Japan.7 In keeping with this plan, and in accordance with the new Stalinist realities in the Soviet Union, Communists in the United States took up the charge of instigating war between the two rising Pacific powers.8 While sprung from very different sources, what Timperley’s book and the American Committee on the one hand, and the American Leagues (and their affiliated associations, such as the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), on which more below) on the other have in common is that they ultimately grew out of a complex information regime which had been in the making since the nineteenth century. The hallmark of this prewar and wartime information regime was “saving China.” With the rise of missionary activity in China and the subsequent involvement of missionaries in American politics, the theme of “saving China”—spiritually, materially, and, later, from the Japanese— became the dominant information regime for many Americans in East Asia and at home in the United States. With the transfer of leadership of the Nationalist Party from Sun Yatsen to Chiang Kai-shek, the overriding consideration in Chinese politics for concerned Americans was the putative Christianity of Chiang and his wife, Soong Meiling. In Chiang-Kai Shek, Americans began to see a real prospect for the Christianization of China— a continuation of the religious “save China” information regime from the missionary nineteenth century. Other, more secularly minded parties in the United States thought that China would be saved, not by religion, but by the Communists, and not from disbelief, but from the Nationalists, the capitalists, and foreign domination. With the outbreak of war between China and Japan in July of 1937, and then between the United States and Japan in December of 1941, these two narratives, religious and secular, merged, and Americans united to save China from the Japanese. When Chiang fled to Taiwan in 1949, however, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao Zedong claimed ascendancy, the narrative changed again, to one of a lost cause and bitter recriminations. The “save China” narrative, unified during the war, again split, and American leftists heralded the defeat of Chiang and the Nationalists, while the American governmental establishment, and conservative American public opinion overall, deeply lamented the loss of China, a heavy blow at the beginning of the Cold War. The manifold “save China” information regime became, with the advent of the Cold War, the “lost China” information regime. Hopes for “saving China” had been dashed in the same person as he who once seemed poised to deliver the long-cherished promise of a Christian Far East, while similar hopes for saving China had been realized, for American Communists, in the form of the victory of Mao and the establishment of the CCP as the ruler of, eventually, China proper, Tibet, East Turkestan, Manchuria, and part of Mongolia. Whether China had been “saved”

32  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan or “lost” depended on one’s political perspective, but in any event the Cold War marked the beginning of a new era of conflicting American epistemes about the East Asian mainland. In this paper, we describe the formation of these dual information regimes— China saved and China lost— showing how the former took shape and then became the latter during the earliest days of the Cold War. Whatever the political or religious motivation, individuals and organizations, both secular and religious, were devised or co-opted for shaping public and professional opinions about East Asia— a Cold War practice with deep roots in the pre-Cold War turbulence in China. We shall also show how the two information regimes overlapped and comingled in surprising ways. While the Nationalists and the Communists were usually in a state of war in China, or at the very least armed standoff, in the West, the Communists proved adept at infiltrating and coopting Nationalist propaganda outfits, eventually bringing Nationalist points closer to the Communist line.

The outbreak of war and the effort to form a unified information regime The Second Sino-Japanese War started in July 1937, triggered by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on the outskirts of Beijing. Though the Japanese government initially held to the policy of not expanding the war beyond Beijing, the Japanese Army, faced with the maneuverings of a foe highly adept at conventional and information warfare, chose to expand the front to Shanghai and then to Nanking. It soon became clear to everyone that the summer skirmishes had touched off what would be a long war of attrition and entrenchment. Public opinion in other countries, and especially in the United States, would have to be molded one way or the other, as material, moral, and military support from abroad would be vital to winning such a protracted war. On December 25, 1937, immediately after Nanking fell to Japanese forces, the CCP held a Central Committee meeting and announced the “Declaration of the Chinese Communist Party on the Current Situation,” urging the worldwide staging of anti-Japanese propaganda campaigns. In May of 1938, the Comintern sent out the following orders to Communist parties and labor unions worldwide: 1) Further promote international campaigns to support China and spread propaganda decrying the sinful Japanese and praising the heroic Chinese 2) Hold anti-Japanese rallies and demonstrations more frequently 3) Organize and expand such activities as to represent the Chinese people’s animosity toward Japan (boycotting Japanese products and refusing port labor to unload Japanese products and load war supplies for Japan).9 Fewer than three months after these instructions were sent out, the American Committee was established out of the American League for Peace and Democracy

Saving China, losing China  33 for the purpose of spreading propaganda and urging boycotts against Japan. The battle within the information regime for control over opinion and, ultimately, American resources and military involvement had begun. Despite the complexities of the situation on the ground in China, and despite, or because of, the skill with which the Chinese side engaged in information campaigns, the American Committee asserted that the cause of the Sino-Japanese War lay in militarist Japan’s aggressive policy, and that, because the United States largely provided the Japanese Army with fuel and war supplies, the U.S. government should embargo Japan in order to prevent her from making further war on China. These kinds of statements appeared in a booklet titled America’s Share in Japan’s War Guilt, 60,000 copies of which were published simultaneously with the establishment of the Committee.10 Subsequently, on August 1, the American Committee distributed 22,000 copies of War Guilt in pamphlet form to all of the members of Congress (both the Senate and the House of Representatives), colleges and universities, Christian bodies, women’s organizations, business associations, international relations societies, and labor unions across the country. The American Committee’s far-reaching public-relations drive boasted among its founders the world-renowned author and activist Helen Keller and noted public intellectual and Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr of Union Theological Seminary. With such prominent public figures involved, the American Committee successfully attracted much attention from the mass media.11 The American Committee’s 1937 public-relations blitz, which included printing and mailing 60,000 copies of an 80-page booklet as well as an additional 22,000 copies in pamphlet form, would have required an enormous number of manhours and great financial support. Apart from the publishing costs, each copy of the booklet and pamphlet would have had to be put into an envelope, which would then be addressed by hand and mailed— all of this at no small expense in money or time. How did the American Committee come to be established as a clearinghouse of opinion on East Asia, and what kind of groups were underwriting and funding it? In Maboroshi no shin chitsujo to Ajia Taiheiyō (The Asia-Pacific and the illusion of a new order), Osaka Kyoiku University professor Ma Xiaohua reveals that the idea of the American Committee was initially conceived by Harry Price, a former professor at Yanjing (Beijing) University, and his younger brother Frank Price, a famed missionary stationed in China.12 Upon learning that 80 percent of the Japanese Army’s fuel was being imported from the United States, the exprofessor Harry Price consulted with his missionary brother Frank, who was in New York for a short vacation, and together they tried to persuade their “Chinahand” acquaintances in New York to influence public opinion in the United States in favor of China and sanctions against Japan. Simple altruism does not quite tell the whole story of this development, however. In addition to his missionary work, Frank Price was also the Chief of Staff at the English-language Editorial Committee of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s Central Propaganda Department, according to the aforementioned document of the Nationalist Party unearthed by Prof. Higashinakano.13 The list of the

34  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan American Committee’s founders also reveals one other member of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s Propaganda Department: Earl Leaf, former special correspondent to China for the UP News Agency.14 According to the autobiography of Zeng Xubai, manager of the International Propaganda Office, Leaf was in charge of the New York office of the Transpacific News Service, which was a propaganda machine of the Nationalist Party.15 George Fitch was also listed among the founders. At the beginning of 1938, Fitch was supposed to have been in Nanking during its occupation by the Japanese Army. How, then, was it possible for Fitch’s name to be listed among the founders of the American Committee in New York? Fortunately, translations of some of Timperley’s letters are included in Nankin Jiken shiryōshū: (1) Amerika kankei shiryō hen.16 According to these letters, it was Timperley’s idea, as an advisor to the Chinese Nationalist Party’s Central Propaganda Department, to have Fitch spread propaganda alleging atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in then-occupied Nanking. Fitch escaped from Nanking and flew from Shanghai to be in the United States in April, presumably for the purpose of carrying out Timperley’s and the Central Propaganda Department’s orders to visit America. It was most likely that Fitch met Price, another agent for China, in New York and joined in the consultation over the establishment of the American Committee.17

Benefactor of Christianity, Chiang Kai-shek Even more important to the formation of a pro-China information regime in the United States was that George Fitch, one of the authors featured in Timperley’s What War Means, was also a chief staff member of the Chinese YMCA (a worldwide purveyor of “muscular Christianity”).18 Fitch was not the only YMCA-connected person on the list. Margaret Forsyth of the YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) North American Federation was also among the Committee’s founders. Forsyth’s and Fitch’s listing indicates that, behind the scenes, the YMCA, the YWCA, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Government were in close cooperation. The founding of the American Committee, steeped in the pre-existing missionary information regime of “saving China,” became one of the vehicles for revising Americans’ salvific outlook on China from purely supernatural to also include political dimensions. The YMCA North American Federation, established in 1864 after the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin guaranteed the freedom of mission work in China, placed particularly heavy emphasis on spreading the Gospel in that country. But the YMCA was not strictly a church. The YMCA differed from other mission groups in that, wherever YMCA associates went to carry out missionary work, they built assembly halls instead of churches and stationed full-time workers (called “work secretaries”) to manage the assembly halls.19 The halls were the site of a wide range of educational and medical service activities, such as teaching English to local youths around the mission.20 The first YMCA assembly hall in China was built in Tianjin in 1897, and by 1924 there were 313 Chinese work secretaries

Saving China, losing China  35 employed. Besides the Chinese staff, nearly 90 Americans were sent to China from the North American YMCA, and Fitch was one of them. In tandem with the overwhelmingly influential YMCA in China, various other Protestant groups founded colleges and universities in rapid succession.21 As of 1916, there were 24 universities in China, of which 14 were private Christian universities founded and run by Christian missions. But the Treaty of Tianjin was made precarious by the rise of Communism in China. In 1923, the Chinese Nationalist Party shifted to a united front coalition with the CCP, and the latter began to organize students and workers to advance a particularly xenophobic brand of nationalism, often, as in the Chinese past, very hostile to Christianity. The Christian universities were hit especially hard by this sloganeering campaign. Students at Christian universities held demonstrations and strikes almost daily, demanding the abolition of the required religious education curriculum and the restraint of YMCA activities. The tumult led to a drop of 30 percent in the number of students entering Christian universities in 1927, and some universities even faced the possibility of closing.22 It was Chiang Kai-shek who saved the Christian universities from the antiforeigner attacks of the radical student movements. Domestic Chinese politics help explain, in part, Chiang’s unexpected move. The “All-China Student Union,” which had been leading the student movements, was maneuvered by the CCP.23 Zhou Enlai, who would go on to be the deputy to Mao Zedong through even the worst of the Cultural Revolution some 40 years later, played a key role in directing the protests against the Christian schools.24 Fearing at the time that the Nationalist Party might be taken over by the Communists, Chiang Kai-shek broke with his erstwhile allies and suppressed the Communists in Shanghai in April of 1927. The Nationalist-Communist alliance broke apart in July. It was as a part of this internal maneuvering between the two rival domestic factions for control of China that the Christian colleges and universities were contested, first by the Communists seeking to use them as platforms for anti-foreign agitation, and then by the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, who quelled the university uprisings while wresting power back from his Communist adversaries. Chiang’s intervention in the fate of Christian colleges and universities in China and his defiance of the Communists’ attempts to delegitimize Christianity as foreign interference could be seen as part of Chiang’s much bigger drive to pacify China and bring the Western powers to the Nationalists’ side. These efforts included an intense public-relations campaign targeted at the West, and at the United States in particular. Chiang began the Northern Expedition in July of 1926 to subdue the remaining warlords in China and Manchuria, and by June of 1928, had occupied Beijing and brought almost all of China under Nationalist control. It was in December of 1927, in the middle of this expedition and shortly after suppressing the Communist attack on Christian education in China, that Chiang Kai-shek married the prominent Christian and graduate of elite American educational institutions Soong Meiling. After becoming the head of the Nationalist Government in Nanking, the capital of Chiang’s freshly unified China,

36  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan Chiang was baptized in October 1930, thus seeming to solidify his dual role of defender of secular order and champion of spiritual uplift.25 American Christian societies such as the YMCA naturally applauded Chiang’s conversion and battlefield success. To be sure, Chiang, a protégé of Sun Yatsen—“China’s George Washington”—presented a rather strange figure for missionaries. Chiang’s title was “Generalissimo,” after all, and he was wellknown for his violent and bloody crackdowns on Communists. As a 1942 Life article put it, though: Missionaries in China explain the contradiction [i.e., between “Chiang’s life of violence, his ruthless treatment of Communist students during the white reaction of 1931–34” and the “rather gentle faith which he professes”] by saying that Chiang is an ‘Old Testament Christian’.26 Given this historical background, it becomes clear why, to many American Christians and YMCA members, the Second Sino-Japanese War became personified by Chiang Kai-shek, the “heroic supporter of Christianization” in China, struggling against the “heathen Japanese.”27 Taking full advantage of his cultivated image as a defender of the faith in the Far East, Chiang appointed Wang Zhengting (Chengting Thomas “C.T.” Wang) to be the Nationalists’ ambassador to the United States. Wang, who had already served as the Foreign Minister, had in the past been the head of YMCA secretaries in China.28 The effects of sending Wang to the United States were seen immediately. For example, the American Committee had been established with the support of the YMCA North American Federation. Most likely, detailed consultations over the launching of the committee were repeatedly held among Ambassador Wang, Fitch, and the agents Price and Leaf from the Chinese Nationalist Party’s Central Propaganda Department. Also, under the leadership of John Raleigh Mott, president of the YMCA World Federation, three international mission institutes, all enjoying close relationships with China, established a national campaign organization called “The Church Committee for China Relief (CCCR)” in July 1938, at the same time of the establishment of the American Committee. Former President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Harper Sibley became the chairman of the CCCR, 29 with Mott as the deputy chairman, and the CCCR came to have tremendous political influence over 125,000 Protestant churches and nearly as many related mission institutes.30 But not everyone was as optimistic as Mott, Wang, Price, and their group. Stanley Hornbeck, for example, an old acquaintance of Ambassador Wang Zhengting and also an advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State (as well as the immediate supervisor of Alger Hiss beginning in 1939), asserted that a propaganda campaign was needed in order to change the isolationist air prevailing in American society and to boost public interest in Asian issues. Although not listed on its documents, Hornbeck quietly supported the establishment of the American Committee.31 Hornbeck also tried to convince Secretary of State Cordell Hull that if China and others should fail to stop Japanese aggression, then the United

Saving China, losing China  37 States and Japan would eventually clash in the arena of international politics and sooner or later would have to decisively confront each other.32 In any event, the Nationalists’ propaganda efforts soon paid off. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had previously held a neutral position toward the Sino-Japanese War, now, with the intention of checking Japan, decided to grant a $25 million lease to the Chinese Nationalist Government in December of 1938.33 The 125,000 churches under the CCCR umbrella translated to millions of potential voters, a number that no politician could afford to ignore. It was also in the same month, December 1938, that the American Committee became even more powerful. Roger Greene, the former American consul general stationed in Hankou, China, was appointed the American Committee chairman, and former Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, a renowned hardliner toward Japan, became the honorary chairman.34 These appointments were officially announced after the new year, on January 19, 1939. The next day, Song Ziwen (T.V. Soong), Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law, sent a congratulatory telegram to honorary chairman Stimson on behalf of the Chinese Nationalist Government. The telegram read to the effect that the establishment of the American Committee was an epoch-making event in the efforts to prevent Japan’s aggression against China, and that trade sanctions against Japan would mean a victory for China as well as herald peace and justice for the world.35 Almost exactly one year later, on January 11, 1940, Stimson published a letter in the New York Times recommending legislation to prohibit war exports to Japan.36

The Institute of Pacific Relations The YMCA’s influence extended even farther than this, and in some very surprising directions, given the institution’s richly Christian heritage and identity. Such influence can be seen, for instance, in the decision made by the IPR, a world-leading think tank on Asia-Pacific issues, to publish the think tank’s Inquiry Series criticizing Japanese aggression in reference to the Sino-Japanese War. “Saving China” was coming to involve much more than missionary work and religious proselytization. As the baptized ascendancy of Chiang Kai-shek attests, there was a clear political undercurrent to muscular Christianity in China. The missions in the Middle Kingdom needed saving from more than just other faiths; the Chinese people overall also needed saving from a secular threat, the Japanese.37 This provided the context for the Communist Parties’ (in China, in the Soviet Union, and in the United States) involvement in, and exploitation of, the conflicts in China, and the leveraging of those conflicts for maximum advantage for the Soviet Union. In time, Communists would infiltrate the American Committee, thus presaging the eventual victory of Mao Zedong over Chiang and the Nationalists and the “loss” of China in the Cold War narrative. The confluence of missionary and political activism can be clearly discerned in the Institute for Pacific Relations’ Pacific Relations, a vehicle for disseminating Communist information-regime points to the West and a front for Asia-related Comintern activities in East Asia, Europe, North America, and beyond.38

38  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan Although later a clearinghouse for Communist propaganda, the establishment of the IPR grew out of the Pan-Pacific YMCA Conference held in Hawaii in July 1925 by the YMCA North American Federation. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the current situation in the Pacific region by assembling the YMCA work secretaries who were stationed in various parts of Asia. The key contributor to the establishment of the IPR was J.R. Mott, then president of the YMCA North American Federation and later, as outlined earlier, deputy chairman of the CCCR and president of the YMCA World Federation.39 Later, the IPR also began to recruit outside experts not affiliated with the YMCA. However, as the presence of IPR Secretary General Edward Clark Carter (on whom more below) indicates, the core of the IPR was invariably comprised of people involved in some capacity with the YMCA. Missionary work bled organically into politics, and politics, in turn, flowed back into the churches and Christian organizations in China and the rest of Asia (and beyond). The integration of religion and politics was further confirmed by the presence of the Australian delegate to consultations on the IPR Inquiry Series, Harold J. Timperley. After having compiled What War Means, Timperley, still an agent for the Chinese Nationalist Party’s Propaganda Department, went to the United States, where he engaged in information-shaping operations on behalf of the IPR. Timperley was thus hardly alone in his efforts. Nor was he first. In February 1938, barely two months after the surrender of Nanking but still some five months before What War Means was released, IPR Secretary General Edward Clark Carter (the former secretary of YMCA India) suggested to local IPR branches that a full inquiry into the Far East conflict be made.40 Taken aback by this plan, but already having been alerted to the China-friendly stance of the IPR headquarters, Japanese representatives expressed strong objection to what was being termed “The Inquiry.”41 Notwithstanding the Japanese protests, Secretary General Carter consulted with IPR branches in other countries, and in December 1938, the IPR finally decided to publish its Inquiry Series. The IPR had powerful backing in doing so, notably by the Rockefeller Foundation, which had been financing the IPR’s work on the Inquiry Series. Jerome Davis Greene, IPR director general, was the brother of Roger Sherman Greene II, director of the Rockefeller Foundation (and also director general of the American Committee). The Greenes were members of a missionary family that had been active in Japan and had taken a keen interest in China.42 After its success in publishing the Inquiry Series, the IPR undertook a fullscale effort to publish booklets denouncing Japan’s aggression against China. One such publication was “Know Your Enemy: Japan,” distributed to various militaries and governments to foment the impression of Japan as a militaryfascist state. The IPR also cooperated in the production of the film by the same name. Know Your Enemy: Japan, directed by It’s a Wonderful Life auteur Frank Capra, presents as a serious documentation the Tanaka Memorial, a hoax on a par with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which testified to Japan’s alleged ambition to conquer the world.43 The “Japan as a fascist state” information regime, carefully crafted by the IPR, the YMCA, and the Soviet Union, not only

Saving China, losing China  39 tremendously influenced the foreign policies of various countries in Europe as well as North America, but also determined the framework of later American Occupation policy against Japan during the early days of the Cold War. Thus, the American Occupation, both an expression of and a countervailing undercurrent to the emerging Cold War paradigm in East Asia, was overshadowed in many ways by the IPR and the YMCA, as well as by the transition from those institutions’ prewar and wartime drive to “save China” to the larger Cold War narrative that China had been lost.44

Internal Ministry of Foreign Affairs Documents In addition to the IPR-YMCA politico-religious network, there was another Comintern-backed group manipulating information regimes in East Asia in the run-up to the Cold War. In 2002, the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records published online formerly classified documents now housed in the National Archives of Japan, the Diplomatic Record Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA), and the Military Archives of the National Institute for Defense Studies. Of particular interest is a confidential document dated July 20, 1938, and labeled Kimitsu Daigohyakurokujūgō: Tōchihō ni okeru Shina gawa senden ni kansuru ken (Internal Document No. 560, re: Propaganda conducted by the Chinese in this area). This document, which was sent to Foreign Minister Ugaki Kazushige by Consul General Wakasugi Kaname in New York, explains that: [. . .] the Chinese Nationalist Party, Christian/humanitarian groups, and the American Communist Party [. . .] communicate with one another. [. . .] The most radical attackers of Japan in the United States are the American Communist Party and its front organizations. They aim to worsen the relationship between Japan and the United States, and directly support and encourage the Chinese to maintain their resistance for as long as possible, and, thus, indirectly weaken Japan’s pressure against the Soviet Union. [. . .] Under cover of these front organizations, the Communists, while disguising their true identity, can easily mingle among various sections of American society and have succeeded in building up great influence.45 The document then explains the front organizations of the American Communist Party, focusing in particular on three: The American League for Peace and Democracy acts in accordance with the guiding policy of the U.S. Communist Party. The league is a huge organization with branches in 109 cities in 24 states across the U.S., covering 2,000 groups and 3 million members. Under this league, the Conference for China Relief was established and, with guidance by Phillip Jaffe, they conduct the most energetic activities, organizing anti-Japanese boycotts and strikes to protest Japanese aggression against China, and lobbying Congressmen for a ban on Japanese trade.

40  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan The Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) is recognized to have a close relationship with the Communist Party. In particular, Frederick Vanderbilt Field, central figure of the IPR U.S. Branch, is editorial manager of Amerasia magazine, whose editor-in-chief was Philip Jaffe.46 The editorial department of Amerasia and the IPR offices are located in the same building, and Jaffe, who is in effect the leader of the American Committee due to his leadership of the American League for Peace and Democracy, is a friend of Earl Browder, secretary general of the American Communist Party.47 The American Friends of the Chinese People was established in 1933 as an anti-Japanese propaganda organ under the auspices of the American Communist Party, but at present it serves as a training center for activists participating in anti-Japanese actions. Maxwell Stewart (editor of The Nation) is the president.48 Some of the most influential names, publications, and organizations in the United States were thus at the service—under the auspices of the Nationalists, the Communists, or sometimes both— of the effort to create an information regime in the United States of a China in need of saving from Japan, a push which would culminate in war between America and the Japanese Empire. Another MOFA document, Kimitsu Dairoppyakunanajūnanagō (Internal Document No. 677), dated August 18, reported that the American Committee was established as a front organization for the American Communist Party and the American League for Peace and Democracy. Superficially, the report continued, it feigns non-involvement with the Communist Party in order to win over those who have anti-Communist ideas. But the real identity of the American Committee is the American League for Peace and Democracy.49 Indeed, Jaffe, leader of the American League for Peace and Democracy, and Stewart, president of American Friends of the Chinese People, were among the founders of the American Committee. China Today, an organ of American Friends of the Chinese People (identified as a front organization of the Communist Party U.S.A. by Internal Document No. 560), had on its editorial committee Thomas Arthur Bisson, who was also a research associate at the Foreign Policy Association. Bisson, too, was listed among the founders of the American Committee.50 If the analyses made by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan are correct, then the American Committee, begun and touted as an extension of Nationalist concerns in China, was actually an affiliate of the American League for Peace and Democracy and was thus ultimately controlled by Communist agents such as Philip Jaffe and by the Comintern in Moscow.51 The information regime of “saving China” changed, during the 1930s and under the deliberate efforts of the Comintern, from one of saving China spiritually to saving China from the Japanese and also, unbeknownst to the Nationalists themselves, from the Christian generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek.

From saving China to losing China When it first began publication, Amerasia was generally perceived as simply a magazine specializing in Asian affairs. So, it is doubtful whether people like

Saving China, losing China  41 ex-Secretary of State Stimson, who had accepted the honorary chair of the American Committee, advisor to the Secretary of State Hornbeck, who indirectly supported the Committee, and Professors Price and Fitch from the YMCA, both of whom had been working for the Chinese Nationalist Party, were aware of the fact that the Communist Party U.S.A. had founded Amerasia as a propaganda front. Perhaps all that Stimson, Hornbeck, Price, and Fitch knew about Stewart, Bisson, and Jaffe was that these three were merely another group of intellectuals exercised about fascism and wishing to “save” China from Japan. This mood overall is reflective of the generally ambiguous disposition of Americans toward Communism during the 1930s and the subsequent period of U.S.-USSR alliance during World War II. Unlike in Japan, whose territories in Manchuria, the Korean peninsula, China proper, and elsewhere (including the northern Japanese islands) were directly exposed to invasion by the Soviet Union, the American public before and during World War II was relatively indifferent to the potential threats of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. In fact, it was not until late 1939 that the American government, specifically the FBI, tightened their surveillance and monitoring of the American Communist Party. And it was only in 1946, after World War II ended, that the American government finally obtained evidence that the Communist Party U.S.A. had been in charge of gathering intelligence and disseminating disinformation for the Comintern. The earlier information regime, which missionaries and Communist agents working in tandem had focused on “saving” China (spiritually and materially, as well as politically from the Japanese, or for the Communists under Mao Zedong), shifted, in light of the discovery by American counter-intelligence agencies working in the United States and also in East Asia and elsewhere, to a new information regime, one framing the Cold War in East Asia in terms of the “loss” of China. This new information regime mirrored the original one, and involved many of the same players (albeit now cast in very different roles). The standard historical interpretation has become that Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was largely responsible for turning the mood of the United States in a definitively anti-Communist direction during the early years after America’s victory in World War II and the emergence of the Cold War standoff with her erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. Although little remembered today, however, Dr. Anthony Kubek, a history professor at the University of Dallas, was instrumental in forging the new information regime of China lost, perhaps even more so than was Sen. McCarthy and the HUAC. A review of Kubek’s The Amerasia Papers in the conservative highbrow journal Modern Age, for example, provides a precis of the new understanding of China as lost to the best efforts of the West, and that due to the machinations of Communists who had infiltrated the American government and the various institutions and organizations attempting to control the flow of information out of China. As Henry M. Adams writes in Modern Age: [The Amerasia papers] are highly classified United States government documents, some 1700 or more, concerning Asian-American relations

42  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan during the Second World War, which were channeled into the unauthorized hands of the editorial staff of Amerasia, a New York City magazine of that time specializing in Asian affairs, and which were seized on June 6, 1945 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from the office of that magazine. In Part I [of Prof. Kubek’s “scholarly three-part introduction” to the Amerasia papers] he gives us a compact, detailed historical survey of Kuomintang- Communist relations from the days of Dr. Sun Yat-sen to the fall of the Chinese mainland to Communism, an event for which, as these documents show, errors in the Far Eastern policy of the United States government are largely to blame. The history of this tragic event Dr. Kubek has elaborated at greater length and in greater detail in his book, How the Far East Was Lost, American Policy and the Creation of Communist China, 1941–1949 (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1963). [. . .] On the 6th of June 1945 [after an Office of Strategic Services officer, in February of that year, noticed in Amerasia that sections of his secret report on Thailand had been reprinted verbatim] [.  .  .] Philip Jaffe and Kate Mitchell, editors of Amerasia, journalist Mark Gayn and Naval Lieutenant Andrew Roth, and Emmanuel Larson and John Stewart Service of the State Department, were arrested [by the FBI]. [. . .] In conclusion Kubek asserts that there are ‘two facts which can no longer be disputed: (1) During the years of World War II an aggressively pro- Communist magazine office in New York, populated by individuals whose connection with international communism was old and deep, furtively obtained and copied many highly classified documents of the United States government; and (2) the official policy of the United States government in support of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China was actively opposed and subverted during World War II by a few junior American career diplomats on station in China, John Stewart Service conspicuous among them. [. . .] These documents of World War II provide a clue to the catastrophe that befell China a few short years later’.52 Much more than a function of a McCarthyian “Red Scare,” then, it was American intelligence agencies’ turn to a fact-based view of Communist infiltration of the United States which was especially effective in changing the U.S. information regime regarding China to one of loss. It was not a rhetorical flourish, but a geopolitical reality, and one realized, ironically, some 20 years too late. This reassessment of the previous generation of American engagement with China would culminate in the conservative American consensus that China had been lost and that Chiang Kai-shek—the man once lionized as China’s potential savior— had been the one who, betrayed by certain people in the U.S. government, had lost it. Brian Crozier and Eric Chou’s 1976 book, The Man Who Lost China: The First Full Biography of Chiang Kai-shek, tells the tale in the title and throughout. Although harshly reviewed, the fact that the book was written apparently without the use of Chinese-language sources speaks volumes.53 The

Saving China, losing China  43 once-flourishing trade in information between China and the West had virtually dried up. China had, indeed, been lost. Just three years after the Chiang biography appeared, the U.S. government recognized the People’s Republic of China as the government of China, bringing to completion President Richard M. Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s 1972 visit to Beijing by derecognizing Taipei and leaving Taiwan isolated (save for a handful of small countries that did not similarly acquiesce in the fact of mainland China’s rule by the CCP). The information regime of “lost China” was embodied by Chiang Kai-shek and then by his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, and by the Taiwan under their rule. Once the beacon of hope for saving China, the Chiang regime had become the enduring reminder of its perdition. What had changed since the creation of the Comintern and the full-scale propaganda campaigns carried out by Chinese operatives, partisans, and agents through the 1920s and 1930s? The intervening conflagration of World War II was a major turning point, of course. With the outbreak of hostilities between Japan and the United States, the propagandists’ work was largely consummated.54 Pearl Harbor obviated the need for further instigation between the Soviet Union’s two Pacific counterparts, and likewise between China’s occupier and that occupier’s most formidable opponent. But something more profound had taken place. Stalin’s nationalization of Communism—his ruthless drive for “socialism in one country”—had altered the original information regime of world-conquering Leninism almost beyond recognition. Where once the Communists and the Americans had vied over who would “save China”—from the Japanese, for Marx, for Lenin, for Mao, or for Christ—in the emerging Cold War the Americans looked back on their old internationalist fervor with no small degree of self-reproach. There had been a betrayal of the internationalist dream of the prewar, a reversal of the information regime of Far Eastern soteriology into one of “China lost,” the Far East abandoned. By contrast, American China scholar John King Fairbank, who had been helpful toward the Comintern-controlled IPR, blamed the turn on McCarthyism, as did many of Fairbank’s fellow “liberals” (as Fairbank described himself).55 But Fairbank also acknowledged a parallel dynamic at work, namely the realization that the putatively universal Marxism-Leninism of the 1920s and 1930s had failed to work in China— and so, it must be added, had the competing universalism advocated by Protestant missionaries to the Middle Kingdom.56 Not even democracy, Fairbank admits, had worked in China as Americans thought it would.57 The bifurcated information regime of the prewar— Chiang Kai-shek for Christian democracy, or Mao and the Communists for Marxism-Leninism— had collapsed into a new realization that China would defy all attempts at foreign universalism. The desire to save China remained, but the Cold War brought a dawning realization of the practical difficulty of the task. As Senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote in October of 1948: The vital importance of ‘saving China’ cannot be exaggerated. But there are limits to our resources and boundaries to our miracles.58

44  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan After decades of trying to “save China,” the Americans, and indeed the rest of the world, began withdrawing from the Chinese front in the wake of Japan’s defeat in World War II. Whether considered from the “conservative” or “liberal” Cold War standpoint, though, this slow turn from striving to save China to coming to terms with its loss was fraught with American involvement, or the studied lack thereof. The terms for this were largely laid out in the “China White Paper” of 1949, prepared by Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s team in the United States State Department and meant to explain (away) how China had been lost to the Communists under Mao Zedong. The wider context suggests that China was not “lost” to the Communists; a strategic decision was made to engage with what came to be seen as the ascendant political force in the region. For example, the “Dixie Mission” by U.S. military and government representatives lasted from July of 1944—when the American side visited Mao and the Communists in their post-Long March redoubt in Yan’an— to early 1947, by which time it was apparent that the Nationalists would not be able to hold China. Indeed, the Dixie Mission was halted just two months after the Marshall Mission, under U.S. Gen. George C. Marshall, itself ended in failure. Materiel support for Chiang Kai-shek had been temporarily suspended while Marshall was in China, and once the Marshall Mission had failed (and the Communist-friendly Dixie Mission succeeded), it was clear that the U.S. government had already come to terms with the new arrangement on the mainland.59 The Introduction to the 1967 reissue of the 1947 Acheson “China White Paper” is remarkably forthcoming in its assessment of why the United States had, not so much “lost” China as made a strategic decision to let events there play out as they would: Until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, American attitudes toward China were shaped by the missionary and the trader, who operated under the system of the unequal treaties forced on China by the Western powers. The United States benefitted fully from such treaties— and even contributed to their final form by adding the concept of extraterritoriality—but because Americans had not taken the initiative in setting up and enforcing the treaty system, the American people felt little responsibility for its inequities. In time, Americans came to feel that their behavior in China contrasted favorably with the selfishness of the European powers and Japan, and this feeling was greatly heightened by the idealism and moral fervor of the American missionary effort. The trader and the businessman— advocating free trade and opposing exclusive spheres of influence— represented America’s economic stake in China. But this was never more than a very small part of American overseas investment. In the end, therefore, there grew up a split between our attitudes and our actions. Having no great political or economic stake in China, we were inclined to frame our China policy in moral terms; but for the same reason, we were unwilling to back our policies, however just, against the conflicting

Saving China, losing China  45 policies of nations with higher stakes in the game. There was no conscious duplicity on our part. Our China policy reflected our feelings as a nation; if we were reluctant to back these feelings, it was because our vital interests were not really involved in China.60 Acheson’s “White Paper” did little to assuage the suspicions of those who thought that the United States had betrayed Chiang Kai-shek and handed China to the Communists.61 If anything, it was the Korean War, much more than World War II, that shifted the political landscape in East Asia and within the United States, realigning old ideological commitments and rearranging the field of rhetorical information-regime contestation vis-à-vis China.62 As Cold War realities sobered Americans’ earlier optimism, the “lost China” information regime took hold of American intellectual life and political outlook.63 The old dream of “China saved” had been co-opted by information warfare of a different order than Christianity or democracy in a way that very few who espoused the original “save China” information regime could ever have suspected.64

Notes 1 See, e.g., Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, “Review: The Nanking Massacre: Now You See It,…,” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 56, no. 4 (Winter, 2001), 521–544, esp. 524–526 and Daqing Yang, “Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing,” The American Historical Review, vol. 104, no. 3 (Jun., 1999), 842–865, esp. 851. On Timperley and the archival evidence for his involvement in KMT propaganda abroad, see “‘Nankin jiken’ sekai ni hirometa Gōjin kisha, Kokumintō senden kikan de katsuyaku, Taihoku no shiryō de hanmei,” Sankei Shimbun, April 16, 2015. 2 Timperley was the first foreign correspondent resident in Nanking. See William E. Daugherty, “China’s Official Publicity in the United States,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 1 (Spring, 1942), 70. 3 Higashinakano Shudo, Nankin Jiken: Kokumintō gokuhi bunsho kara yomitoku (Tokyo: Soshisha, 2006), esp. 13 ff. 4 See Warren W. Tozer, “The Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont, George E. Sokolsky and American-East Asian Relations by Warren Cohen,” The Journal of American History, vol. 66, no. 1 (Jun., 1979), 203–204 and Wayne S. Cole, “The Road from Isolation: The Campaign of the American Committee for NonParticipation in Japanese Aggression, 1938–1941 by Donald J. Friedman,” The American Historical Review, vol. 74, no. 3 (Feb., 1969), 1114–1115. 5 Much of this activity was eventually denoted by the blanket term “China Lobby,” the network of influence flowing from China (usually connoting, before and during World War II, the Nationalist camp) to the United States. For a partisan view of the China Lobby, see, e.g., Warren I. Cohen, “Review: Who’s Afraid of Alfred Kohlberg?” Reviews in American History, vol. 3, no. 1 (Mar., 1975), 118–123. See also Kristopher C. Erskine, “American Public Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics: The Genesis of the China Lobby in the United States, and How Missionaries Shifted American Foreign Policy between 1938 and 1941,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 25, no. 1 (2018), 33–59, reviewed by T.J. Park at H-Diplo, ­ Article Review no. 846, April 4, 2019, and Shuge Wei, “News as a Weapon: Hollington Tong and the Formation of the Guomindang Centralized Foreign Propaganda System, 1937–1938,” Twentieth-Century ­ China, vol. 39, no. 2 (Apr., 2014), 118–143.

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Kentarō, “21 seiki no boranteia no tōmen suru kadai: heiwa to kōseina chikyū shakai no tame ni,” Boranteiagaku Kenkyū, vol. 2 (October, 2001), 5–19. See Jerry Israel, “‘For God, for China and for Yale’: The Open Door in Action,” The American Historical Review, vol. 75, no. 3 (Feb., 1970), 796–807. See Xiaohong Xu, “Belonging before Believing: Group Ethos and Bloc Recruitment in the Making of Chinese Communism,” American Sociological Review, vol. 78, no. 5 (Oct., 2013), 773–796. See also Yoshino Sugawara, “Toward the Opposite Side of ‘Vulgarity’: The Birth of Cinema as a ‘Healthful Entertainment’ and the Shanghai YMCA,” in Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, ed., Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China: Kaleidoscopic Histories (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). See Kwang-Ching Liu, “Early Christian Colleges in China,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 20, no. 1 (Nov., 1960), 71–78. See, e.g., Elizabeth Green, The Student Movement in China (San Francisco, CA: The American Committee for Fair Play in China, 1926), Bulletin #4, and Lewis Hodous, “The Anti-Christian Movement in China,” The Journal of Religion, vol. 10, no. 4 (1930), 487–494. See also Lincoln Li, Student Nationalism in China, 1924–1949 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). For a detailed analysis of this movement and its backers, see Tatsuro Yamamoto and Sumiko Yamamoto, “II. The Anti- Christian Movement in China, 1922–1927,” The Far Eastern Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 2 (Feb., 1953), 133–147. See Frederick C. Teiwes, “Mao and his Lieutenants,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, nos. 19/20 (Jan.–Jul., 1988), 1–80. See also Benjamin Yang, “Complexity and Reasonability: Reassessment of the Li Lisan Adventure,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 21 (Jan., 1989), 111–141. For an important examination of U.S.-directed propaganda on the military front, see Shuge Wei, “Beyond the Front Line: China’s Rivalry with Japan in the EnglishLanguage Press over the Jinan Incident, 1928,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 1 (2014), 188–224. Theodore H. White, “Chiang Kai-shek: The Leader of Fighting China Plays a Commanding Role in the Allied War Effort and the Destiny of All Asia,” LIFE, March 2, 1942. On the outsize role that Time-Life and Henry R. Luce played in U.S.-China affairs, see Robert E. Herzstein, Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For an example of the American public’s support for Christian China under similar circumstances, see Bruce A. Elleman, “The Soviet Union’s Secret Diplomacy Concerning the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1924–1925,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 53, no. 2 (May, 1994), 459–486. For American missionaries’ views of Chiang Kaishek, see, e.g., George W. Berkeley, “Reviewed Work: Taking Christianity to China: Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom, 1850–1950 by Wayne Flint,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 64, no. 4 (Nov. 1998), 770. On “heathen Japanese,” see the ironical Kinza Riugé M. Hirai, “The Japanese Life and Customs as Contrasted with those of the Western World (With the Treaty Question),” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, vol. 26, no. 1 (1894), 123–158. On Wang’s involvement with the YMCA, see Stefan Hübner, “Uniting the East via Western Amateur Sports Values: Asian Integration, the Olympic Ideal and the Far Eastern Championship Games,” in Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski, eds., Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration (Singapore: NUS Press, 2016), 75–98. The Harper Sibley papers are archived at the University of Michigan under the Kautz Family YMCA Archives, Y.USA.26. https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/7/ resources/862. See also Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, “Christianity and State-Building in Republican Chaozhou, South China,” in Friederike Assandri and Dora Martins, eds.,

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31 32

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From Early Tang Court Debates to China’s Peaceful Rise (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 67–88. JACAR (The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, the National Archives of Japan), ref. B02030591100, Zai Nyū Yōku sōryōjikan Shōwa jūninen jūichigatsu nijūshichinichi kara Shōwa jūsannen kugatsu jūyokka Shina gawa senden kankei daiikkan (Gaimushō Gaikō Shiryōkan). See “Subject and Correspondence File, 1842–1966,” Box 7, listed in “Register of the Stanley Kuhl Hornbeck papers,” Hoover Institution Archives, collection number 67008. Register archived at http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/hoover/reg_340.pdf. On Hornbeck and China, see, e.g., Stanley K. Hornbeck, “The Situation in China,” News Bulletin (Institute of Pacific Relations) (Jan., 1927), 1 & 15–20, Arthur Waldron, “John Van Antwerp MacMurray: A Wilsonian Realist Follows the China Star, 1914–1935,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 69, no. 3 (Spring, 2008), 465–486, and Chalmers Johnson, “Reviewed Work: The John Doe Associates: Backdoor Diplomacy for Peace, 1941, by R.C. Butow,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 2 (Feb., 1976), 334–337. See also Frederick C. Adams, “The Road to Pearl Harbor: A Reexamination of American Far Eastern Policy, July 1937-December 1938,” The Journal of American History, vol. 58, no. 1 (1971), esp. 91 ff. At Chiang’s request, the United States and London soon offered a much larger loan, of $500 million and £150 million, respectively. See Walter LaFeber, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina: 1942–45,” The American Historical Review, vol. 80, no. 5 (Dec., 1975), 1281. See Warren W. Tozer, “Reviewed Work: The Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont, George E. Sokolsky and American-East Asian Relations, by Warren I. Cohen,” The Journal of American History, vol. 66, no. 1 (Jun., 1979), 203–204 and Wayne S. Cole, “Reviewed Work(s): The Road from Isolation: The Campaign of the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression, 1938–1941, by Donald J. Friedman,” The American Historical Review, vol. 74, no. 3 (Feb., 1969), 1114–1115. On Soong’s wider diplomatic role, especially in the context of Japan, the United States, and China, see Michael M. Sheng, “America’s Lost Chance in China? A Reappraisal of Chinese Communist Policy toward the United States before 1945,” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 29 (Jan., 1993), 135–157. For Soong’s role in the development of later U.S. policy toward East Asia, see Athan Theoharis, “Roosevelt and Truman on Yalta: The Origins of the Cold War,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 2 (Jun., 1972), 210–241. Letter appears in Hon. Henry L. Stimson, What One Person Can Do toward Ending America’s Arming of Japan (New York, NY: American Committee for NonParticipation in Japanese Aggression, 1940) (eight-page booklet). On the Institute of Pacific Relations, see, e.g., Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (San Pedro, CA: GSG & Associates, 2004), Yamaoka Michio, Taiheiyō Mondai Chōsakai kenkyū (Tokyo: Ryukei Shosha, 1997) and Taiheiyō Mondai Chōsakai, 1925–1961 to sono jidai (Tokyo: Shunpusha, 2010), and Yui Daizaburō, Mikan no senryō kaikaku: Amerika chishikijin to suterareta Nihon minshuka kōsō (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1989). See Ezaki Michio, “War Responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party, the USSR, ­ See also FBI Report: Institute of Pacific Relations, and Communism,” SDH-F. ­Espionage—R., ­ April 11, 1950, p. 75 (IPR file, Section 8) (accessed via Conservapedia, “Edward C. Carter”), and Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). See, e.g., John R. Mott, “War Y.M.C.A.,” The Journal of Education, vol. 88, no. 3 (July 18, 1918), 75 and Jon Thares Davidann, A World of Crisis and Progress: The American YMCA in Japan 1890–1930 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press,

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1998), also reviewed by A. Hamish Ion in The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 2 (May, 2000), 428–429. See Edward C. Carter, “Mei Lan-Fang in America,” Pacific Affairs, vol. 3, no. 9 (Sep. 1930), 827–833, Edward C. Carter, China and Japan in Our University Curricula (New York, NY: American Council and Institute of Pacific Relations, 1929), and Edward C. Carter, “Reviewed Work: Red Star over China, by Edgar Snow,” Pacific Affairs, vol. 11, no. 1 (Mar., 1938), 110–113. For details on the Inquiry Series, see, e.g., Paul F. Hooper, “The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies,” Pacific Affairs, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring, 1988), 98–121, esp. 112 ff. On Jerome Greene’s views on China and Japan, see, e.g., Jerome D. Greene, “Reviewed Work: Japan’s Policies and Purposes: Selections from Recent Addresses and Writings, by Hirosi Saito,” Pacific Affairs, vol. 9, no. 2 (Jun., 1936), 281–284. On Roger Sherman Greene, see Frank Ninkovich, “The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change,” The Journal of American History, vol. 70, no. 4 (Mar., 1984), 799–820. Capra’s film, grounded in the counterfactual information regime surrounding the Tanaka Memorial, later served as a source for prosecuting the Nanking Massacre at the Tokyo Trial (International Military Tribunal for the Far East). On the Tanaka Memorial, see John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1987), 22. One of the pivots of the “save China” to “lost China” information-regime shift was John Stewart Service, the State Department official who had provided hundreds of classified documents to Philip Jaffe, precipitating the “Amerasia affair.” See M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government (New York, NY: Threshold Editions, 2013), Maochun Yu, “Reviewed Work: Honorable Survivor: Mao’s China, McCarthy’s America, and the Persecution of John S. Service, by Lynne Joiner,” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 69, no. 3 (Aug., 2010), 880–881, and John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 25–27. See JACAR (The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, the National Archives of Japan), ref. B02030591100, Zai Nyū Yōku sōryōjikan Shōwa jūninen jūichigatsu nijūshichinichi kara Shōwa jūsannen kugatsu jūyokka Shina gawa senden kankei daiikkan (Gaimushō Gaikō Shiryōkan). On Philip Jaffe and the “Amerasia affair” (Jaffe’s arrest by the FBI for possession of classified State Department documents), see Kenneth S. Chern, “Politics of American China Policy, 1945: Roots of the Cold War in Asia,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 91, no. 4 (Winter, 1976–1977), 631–647, and Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The Japanese delegate attending the IPR International General Assembly for 1936 was Ozaki Hotsumi, co-conspirator of Kremlin double agent in Japan and China Richard Sorge. The classic account in English of Sorge and Ozaki is Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring (expanded ed.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). For a full wealth of documentary evidence in Japanese, see Gendai Shiryōka, Zoruge jiken (vols. 1–3) (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1962). Our thanks to the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies, Tokyo, for providing these reference volumes in Japanese. Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2000). The Nation published essays from the Soviet Union by Walter Duranty, a KGB operative. Stewart was a member of the Communist Party U.S.A. and a close friend of CPUSA leader Earl Browder.

50  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan

Saving China, losing China  51

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52  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan Daugherty, William E. “China’s Official Publicity in the United States”. The Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 1. Spring, 1942. Davidann, Jon Thares. A World of Crisis and Progress: The American YMCA in Japan 1890–1930. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1998. Degras, Jane, ed. The Communist International: 1919–1943 Documents, vol. III, 1929– 1943. Marxists.org. Dower, John. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1987. Elleman, Bruce A. “The Soviet Union’s Secret Diplomacy Concerning the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1924–1925”. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 53, no. 2. May, 1994. Erskine, Kristopher C. “American Public Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics: The Genesis of the China Lobby in the United States, and how Missionaries Shifted American Foreign Policy between 1938 and 1941”. Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 25, no. 1. 2018. ———. “Frank and Harry Price: Diplomatic Back Channels between the United States and China during World War II”. American Journal of Chinese Studies, vol. 24, no. 2. Oct., 2017. Evans, M. Stanton and Herbert Romerstein. Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government. New York, NY: Threshold Editions, 2013. “Extracts from a Resolution of the ECCI Presidium on the Policy of the Chinese Communist Party”. World News and Views, vol. 18, no. 35. July 16, 1938, 831. Ezaki, Michio. Amerikagawa kara mita Tōkyō saiban shikan no kyomō. Tokyo: Shodensha Shinsho, 2016. ———. Kominterun no bōryaku to Nihon no haisen. Tokyo: PHP Shinsho, 2017. ———. Nihon senryō to haisen kakumei no kiki. Tokyo: PHP Shinsho, 2018. ———. Nihon wa dare to tatakattanoka? Tokyo: Wani Books, 2019. ———. Shiritakunai dewa sumasarenai. Tokyo: Kadokawa, 2018. ———. “War Responsibility of the Chinese Communist Party, the USSR, and Communism”. SDH-F, ­ 2016. http://www.sdh-fact.com/essay-article/319/. ­ ­ Fairbank, John King. Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir. New York, NY: Harper Colophon, 1982. FBI Report: Institute of Pacific Relations, Espionage—R. April 11, 1950, p. 75 (IPR file, Section 8) (accessed via Conservapedia, “Edward C. Carter”). Field, Frederick Vanderbilt. “Reviewed Work: Japan in China, by T.A. Bisson”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 11, no. 3. Sept., 1938. Garver, John W. “Chiang Kai-shek’s Quest for Soviet Entry into the Sino-Japanese War”. Political Science Quarterly, vol. 102, no. 2. Summer, 1987. Gendai, Shiryōka. Zoruge jiken (vols. 1–3). Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1962. Gillin, Donald G. “Reviewed Work: Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, by Chalmers A. Johnson”. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 23, no. 2. Feb., 1964. Godley, Michael R. “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: Sun Yatsen and the International Development of China”. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 18. Jul., 1987. Goldman, Stuart D. “The Forgotten Soviet-Japanese War of 1939”. The Diplomat. August 12, 2012. Green, Elizabeth. The Student Movement in China. San Francisco, CA: The American Committee for Fair Play in China, 1926. Greene, Jerome D. “Reviewed Work: Japan’s Policies and Purposes: Selections from Recent Addresses and Writings, by Hirosi Saito”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 9, no. 2. Jun., 1936.

Saving China, losing China  53 Harper Sibley Papers, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, Y.USA.26. University of Michigan. https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/7/resources/862. Haynes, John Earl, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev. Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Herzstein, Robert E. Henry R. Luce, Time, and the American Crusade in Asia. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Higashinakano, Shudo. Nankin Jiken: Kokumintō gokuhi bunsho kara yomitoku. Tokyo: Soshisha, 2006. Hirai, Kinza Riugé M. “The Japanese Life and Customs as Contrasted with those of the Western World (With the Treaty Question)”. Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York, vol. 26, no. 1. 1894. Hodous, Lewis. “The Anti-Christian Movement in China”. The Journal of Religion, vol. 10, no. 4. 1930. Holmes, John W. “The I.P.R. in Retrospect: Review Article”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 47, no. 4. Winter, 1974–1975. Hooper, Paul F. “The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 61, no. 1. Spring, 1988. Hornbeck, Stanley K. “The Situation in China”. News Bulletin (Institute of Pacific Relations). January, 1927. Hoyt, Edwin C. “The United States Reaction to the Korean Attack: A Study of the Principles of the United Nations Charter as a Factor in American Policy-Making”. The American Journal of International Law, vol. 55, no. 1. Jan., 1961. Hübner, Stefan. “Uniting the East via Western Amateur Sports Values: Asian Integration, the Olympic Ideal and the Far Eastern Championship Games,” in Marc Frey and Nicola Spakowski, eds., Asianisms: Regionalist Interactions and Asian Integration. Singapore: NUS Press, 2016. Huebner, Jon W. “Chinese Anti-Americanism, 1946–48”. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 17. Jan., 1987. Ikeda, Haruka. Ichiji shiryō ga akasu Nankin jiken no shinjitsu. Tokyo: Tendensha, 2020. Ion, A. Hamish. “Review of Jon Thares Davidann, A World of Crisis and Progress: The American YMCA in Japan 1890–1930 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1998)”. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 59, no. 2. May, 2000. Israel, Jerry. “‘For God, for China and for Yale’: The Open Door in Action”. The American Historical Review, vol. 75, no. 3. Feb., 1970. JACAR (The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, the National Archives of Japan). Ref. B02030591100, Zai Nyū Yōku sōryōjikan Shōwa jūninen jūichigatsu nijūshichinichi kara Shōwa jūsannen kugatsu jūyokka Shina gawa senden kankei daiikkan. Gaimushō Gaikō Shiryōkan. Johnson, Chalmers. An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge Spy Ring (expanded ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. ———. “Reviewed Work: The John Doe Associates: Backdoor Diplomacy for Peace, 1941, by R.C. Butow”. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 2. Feb., 1976. Johnstone, Andrew. “Spinning War and Peace: Foreign Relations and Public Relations on the Eve of World War II”. Journal of American Studies, vol. 53, no. 1. Feb., 2019. Kimoto, Mosaburō. YMCA shi nōto, Satō Naoko, Kaihō mae Chūgoku ni okeru kyōikuken kaishū undō to misshonkei daigaku, Nippon no kyōikushigaku dai nijūgoshū. Tokyo: Nihon YMCA Dōmei, 1983. Kitamura, Minoru. The Politics of Nanjing: An Impartial Investigation. New York, NY: University Press of America, 2007.

54  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan Klehr, Harvey, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov. The Secret World of American Communism (Annals of Communism Series). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Klehr, Harvey and Ronald Radosh. The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. LaFeber, Walter. “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina: 1942–45.” The American Historical Review, vol. 80, no. 5. Dec., 1975. Lee, Joseph Tse-Hei. “Christianity and State-Building in Republican Chaozhou, South China,” in Friederike Assandri and Dora Martins, eds., From Early Tang Court Debates to China’s Peaceful Rise. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. Li, Lincoln. Student Nationalism in China, 1924–1929. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Liu, Kwang-Ching. “Early Christian Colleges in China.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 20, no. 1. Nov., 1960. Ma, Xiaohua. Maboroshi no shin chitsujo to Ajia Taiheiyō: Dainiji sekai taisenki no Bei Chū dōmei no atsureki. Tokyo: Sairyūsha, 2000. MacMurray, John Van Antwerp, ed. Arthur Waldron, How the Peace was Lost: The 1935 Memorandum: Developments Affecting American Policy in the Far East, Prepared for the State Department by Ambassador John Van Antwerp MacMurray. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute Press, 1992. Marshall, Jonathan. “Cooking the Books: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the China Lobby and Cold War Propaganda, 1950–1962”. The Asia-Pacific Journal, vol. 11, issue 37, no. 1. Sept. 14, 2013. Melby, John F. “The Origins of the Cold War in China”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 41, no. 1. Spring, 1968. ———. “Reviewed Works: Marshall in China, by John Robinson Beal; Dixie Mission: The United States Army Observer Group in Yenan, 1944, by David D. Barrett”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 44, no. 2. Summer, 1971. Mott, John R. “War Y.M.C.A.” The Journal of Education, vol. 88, no. 3. Jul. 18, 1918. Nakajima, Mineo. “The Sino- Soviet Confrontation: Its Roots in the International Background of the Korean War”. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 1. Jan., 1978. Nakayasu, Yosaku. Saikin Shina Kyōsantōshi. Tokyo: Tōadōbunkai, 1944. Nankin, Jiken Genchi Chōsa Kenkyūkai, ed. Nankin jiken genchi chōsa hōkokusho (vol. 1, American References). Tokyo: Nankin Jiken Chōsa Kenkyūkai, 1985. “‘Nankin jiken’ sekai ni hirometa Gōjin kisha, Kokumintō senden kikan de katsuyaku, Taihoku no shiryō de hanmei”. Sankei Shimbun. April 16, 2015. Newman, Robert P. Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Ninkovich, Frank. “The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change”. The Journal of American History, vol. 70, no. 4. Mar., 1984. Park, T.J. Review of Kristopher C. Erskine, “American Public Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics: The Genesis of the China Lobby in the United States, and how Missionaries Shifted American Foreign Policy between 1938 and 1941”. Journal of American-East Asian Relations, vol. 25, no. 1 (2018). H-Diplo, ­ Article Review no. 846. April 4, 2019. Price, Maurice T. “Can China Establish a Political Democracy? A Critique of Current Analyses of Chinese Political Capabilities”. The Far Eastern Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 3. May, 1942.

Saving China, losing China  55 Quigley, Carroll. Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. San Pedro, CA: GSG & Associates, 2004. Raucher, Alan. “The First Foreign Affairs Think Tanks”. American Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 4. Autumn, 1978. Romerstein, Herbert and Eric Breindel. The Venona Secrets: The Definitive Exposé of Soviet Espionage in America. Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2000. Schaller, Michael. “American Air Strategy in China, 1939–1941: The Origins of Clandestine Air Warfare”. American Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1. Spring, 1976. Sheng, Michael M. “America’s Lost Chance in China? A Reappraisal of Chinese Communist Policy toward the United States before 1945”. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 29. Jan., 1993. Sheridan, James E. “Reviewed Work(s): The Man Who Lost China, by Brian Crozier and Eric Chou”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 51, no. 1. Spring, 1978. Shiozuki, Kentarō. “21 seiki no boranteia no tōmen suru kadai: heiwa to kōseina chikyū shakai no tame ni”. Boranteiagaku Kenkyū, vol. 2. October, 2001. Stanley Kuhl Hornbeck Papers. Hoover Institution Archives, Collection Number 67008. Register archived at http://pdf.oac.cdlib.org/pdf/hoover/reg_340.pdf. Stimson, Henry L. What One Person Can Do toward Ending America’s Arming of Japan. New York, NY: American Committee for Non-participation in Japanese Aggression, 1940. Sugawara, Yoshino. “Toward the Opposite Side of ‘Vulgarity’: The Birth of Cinema as a ‘Healthful Entertainment’ and the Shanghai YMCA,” in Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, ed. Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China: Kaleidoscopic Histories. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018. Teiwes, Frederick C. “Mao and his Lieutenants”. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, nos. 19/20. Jan.–Jul., 1988. Theoharis, Athan. “Roosevelt and Truman on Yalta: The Origins of the Cold War”. Political Science Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 2. Jun., 1972. Tozer, Warren W. “Reviewed Work: The Chinese Connection: Roger S. Greene, Thomas W. Lamont, George E. Sokolsky and American-East Asian Relations, by Warren I. Cohen”. The Journal of American History, vol. 66, no. 1. Jun., 1979. Tsou, Tang. “The American Political Tradition and the American Image of Chinese Communism”. Political Science Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 4. Dec., 1962. Vandenberg, Jr., Arthur H. and Joe Alex Morris, eds. The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi. “Review: The Nanking Massacre: Now You See It, …” Monumenta Nipponica, vol. 56, no. 4. Winter, 2001. Waldron, Arthur. “John Van Antwerp MacMurray: A Wilsonian Realist Follows the China Star, 1914–1935”. The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 69, no. 3. Spring, 2008. Wasserstrom, Jeffrey. “Cosmopolitan Connections and Transnational Networks,” in Nara Dillon and Jean C. Oi, eds. At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and State-Building in Republican Shanghai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Wei, Shuge. “Beyond the Front Line: China’s Rivalry with Japan in the English-Language Press over the Jinan Incident, 1928”. Modern Asian Studies, vol. 48, no. 1. 2014. ———. “News as a Weapon: Hollington Tong and the Formation of the Guomindang Centralized Foreign Propaganda System, 1937–1938”. Twentieth-Century ­ China, vol. 39, no. 2. Apr., 2014.

56  Ezaki Michio and Jason Morgan Weston, Timothy B. “China, Professional Journalism, and Liberal Internationalism in the Era of the First World War”. Pacific Affairs, vol. 83, no. 2. Jun., 2010. White, Theodore H. “Chiang Kai-shek: The Leader of Fighting China Plays a Commanding role in the Allied War Effort and the Destiny of All Asia”. LIFE. Mar. 2, 1942. Xu, Xiaohong. “Belonging before Believing: Group Ethos and Bloc Recruitment in the Making of Chinese Communism”. American Sociological Review, vol. 78, no. 5. Oct., 2013. Yamamoto, Tatsuro and Sumiko Yamamoto. “II. The Anti-Christian Movement in China, 1922–1927”. The Far Eastern Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 2. Feb., 1953. Yamaoka, Michio. Taiheiyō Mondai Chōsakai kenkyū. Tokyo: Ryukei Shosha, 1997. ———. Taiheiyō Mondai Chōsakai, 1925–1961 to sono jidai. Tokyo: Shunpusha, 2010. Yamazaki, Masahiro. Rekishisen to shisōsen: rekishi mondai no yomitokikata. Tokyo: Shueisha Shinsho, 2019. Yang, Benjamin. “Complexity and Reasonability: Reassessment of the Li Lisan Adventure”. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 21. Jan., 1989. Yang, Daqing. “Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing”. The American Historical Review, vol. 104, no. 3. Jun., 1999. Yu, Maochun. “Reviewed Work: Honorable Survivor: Mao’s China, McCarthy’s America, and the Persecution of John S. Service, by Lynne Joiner”. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 69, no. 3. Aug., 2010. Yui, Daizaburō. Mikan no senryō kaikaku: Amerika chishikijin to suterareta Nihon minshuka kōsō. Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1989.

3

Piecing together the “broken dialogue” Ambassador Douglas MacArthur and the controversy over Professor Edwin O. Reischauer’s Foreign Affairs article1 Robert D. Eldridge

Introduction Perhaps the most famous essay on postwar U.S.-Japan relations is the one which appeared in the October 1960 issue of Foreign Affairs. Entitled “The Broken Dialogue with Japan,” it was penned by a 50-year-old Harvard University professor, Edwin O. Reischauer. Born and raised in Japan, the author was disturbed by the state of America’s Asia policy, especially toward Japan, which had witnessed massive riots in the first half of 1960 over the revision of the Japan-U.S. security treaty and its “forced passage” through the Japanese parliament by the conservative government of Kishi Nobusuke (1957–1960). Visiting Japan shortly after Kishi announced he was stepping down in the face of massive opposition to the treaty revision, Reischauer decided to put his thoughts on paper. The result was the 6,000-word Foreign Affairs article highly critical of the handling of bilateral relations by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. “The Broken Dialogue” was immediately translated into Japanese and published in the leftist monthly, Sekai (The World).2 It launched a heated debate, brought fame to Reischauer, and led to his being nominated ambassador to Japan in March the following year, over someone the Foreign Service preferred, by the newly inaugurated administration of President John F. Kennedy.3 Understandably, however, the criticisms Reischauer made in the article had caused intense discomfort and outrage in the U.S. ambassador to Japan at the time, Douglas A. MacArthur II, a veteran diplomat, son-in-law of former Vice President Alben W. Barkley, and nephew of his namesake, General Douglas MacArthur, who served as the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan during the occupation that had ended a mere 8 years before. Ambassador MacArthur and Professor Reischauer, and their respective supporters, would spend much of the fall and early winter battling it out in meetings, correspondence, and other fora before an eventual compromise and truce were reached. The embassy’s indignation is somewhat known, and Reischauer refers to the episode in his memoirs, My Life between Japan and America (which is elaborated on by Reischauer’s biographer4), but the details of the controversy

58  Robert D. Eldridge have remained unknown.5 This chapter explores the storm over the article, extensively using primary sources from a variety of archives, memoirs, and interviews to develop a modern understanding of what happened and why. The heated exchanges at the time were on one level about personalities, and on the other, about interpretations or analysis of contemporary events and views of Japan. The interactions were, in reality, an intense wrangling over the production of an information regime against the backdrop of the Cold War. The MacArthur-Reischauer row went to the heart of America’s diplomacy and Japan’s subordinate position in it, and raised questions about the extent to which the opinions of leftist political parties and intellectuals should be heard.6 The information regime in post-Occupation Cold War Japan, in other words— so often portrayed as dominated by the United States—was contested at the most fundamental levels. The inherent tension between professional diplomats, who help formulate policy, and academics of the ivory tower, who think they know what policy should be, highlights the challenges and efficacy of public diplomacy, or populist approaches, versus quiet, direct diplomacy with the core of the host nation’s leaders. Formulating an information regime out of a “broken dialogue” was a monumental task, and in revisiting the MacArthur-Reischauer tensions, we are reminded of the contentious, often fractured nature of the U.S.-Japan relations in the Cold War.

Reischauer and the background to “the broken dialogue” As the son of Presbyterian educational missionaries, Edwin Oldfather Reischauer attended the American School in Japan before traveling to the United States aboard the Taiyō Maru in 1927 to attend Oberlin College. After graduating in 1931, he attended graduate school at Harvard studying under Serge Elisséeff, a Russian-French Japanologist who had been the first Western graduate of the University of Tokyo. Reischauer’s doctoral dissertation, for which he received his Ph.D. in 1939, was based on further training and research in Paris, Japan, Korea, and China from 1935 to 1938 and was a study and translation of the Japanese monk Ennin’s diary written in classical Chinese during his travels during the Tang Dynasty. By prior arrangement, Reischauer assumed a teaching position at Harvard upon his return in the late summer of 1938, and would remain in Cambridge for the next 40 years with the exception of sabbaticals, trips abroad, service in Washington, D.C., before, during, and after World War II (1941–1946), and his five years as the U.S. ambassador to Japan (1961–1966). As part of his collateral duties at Harvard, Reischauer was in charge of the Harvard Yenching Institute since 1956. The Institute was established in 1928 and for many years had been headed by Reischauer’s academic advisor, Elisséeff, long considered the leading expert on Japan in the Western world. As the new Yenching director, Reischauer needed to travel in East Asia region and was given fall semesters off from Harvard to do so. The summer of 1960 was a particularly propitious time for Reischauer to be on leave and in Japan. The country was in the thralls of the crisis over the

Piecing together the “broken dialogue”  59 deliberations on the revised security treaty, and neighboring South Korea had just experienced the April Revolution that led to the resignation of longtime president Syngman Rhee following fraud during the March 1960 elections. Moreover, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s trip to Japan, expected to take place on June 23 when the revised security treaty would go into effect, had been cancelled at the last minute at the request of Prime Minister Kishi out of fear for the president’s safety. Reischauer and his wife, the former Matsukata Haru— whom he had met after his first wife, Adrienne, died in 1955 and whom he married five months later in early 1956—left for Japan in late June.7 Immediately prior to their departure, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the longserving editor of Foreign Affairs, approached Reischauer about writing an article on the turmoil in Japan.8 Having submitted an article for the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations journal before, Reischauer was familiar with the expected word length—“4,000–4,500 words, but if necessary up to 5,000”—and agreed to Armstrong’s request in the second half of July with a promise to submit the manuscript by August 10.9 True to his word, Reischauer sent it on August 4 from his wife’s family home in Minami-chō, Aoyama, Minato Ward (one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Tokyo), noting in the letter mailed with the manuscript, I have had a fascinating month in Japan, immersing myself in the situation. Japanese intellectuals, newspapers, and magazines have come at me from all directions, keeping me terribly busy but giving me a wonderful fill-in on the situation. The only trouble is that I am so full of it all that I could more easily write a book than an article.10 In light of this, Reischauer admitted that he had had trouble staying within the word limit. “Even after leaving out all the details and fascinating side issues,” he confided, I find my article is about 1,000 words over the top limit of 5000 that you assigned me. I beg your indulgence. I am terrified lest any cutting at your end falsify the picture or the balance I have tried to create.11 Armstrong, the consummate professional who “took for granted the fact that there existed a world outside the United States,” was glad to receive it. Knowing that many professors tend to miss deadlines and worried whether Reischauer would submit the article in time, Armstrong had sent him a Western Union telegram on August 5 with a prepaid reply of $3.70.12 Reischauer responded immediately, telling Armstrong that the manuscript had been sent on the 4th. Upon its receipt, Armstrong’s staff wrote to express their thanks for the “excellent manuscript” and let Reischauer know that they sent it to the printer in full having “treated it with the greatest circumspection.”13 The letter went on to note that they were “delighted that we called upon you at such an opportune moment. Your article will contribute importantly to a better understanding of the situation in Japan, and we will publish it with a great deal of pleasure.”14

60  Robert D. Eldridge For Reischauer, writing the article “would prove to be the most significant activity” during his summer, although he had other scholarly projects going on as well.15 In the fall, he visited Korea in October, followed by trips to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, and India before returning to the United States. A coup in South Vietnam interrupted the Reischauers’ plans to visit there and Cambodia, ironic, or perhaps fitting, in light of Reischauer’s later strong opposition to the Vietnam War. Indeed, even before he assumed his later anti-Vietnam War position, Reischauer had increasingly been concerned about the U.S. policy toward the region. Six years before he penned “The Broken Dialogue,” in fact, he wrote Wanted: an Asia Policy.16 Critical of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ moralistic foreign policy, Reischauer wrote the nearly 300-page book in the summer of 1954: since I felt that we did not have an overall policy consistent with basic American ideals and interests. The book has a strong cold war flavor, taking for granted the basic confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States, but my chief point was that we were going about this confrontation in the wrong way, at least in Asia.17 The contest between Reischauer and MacArthur over the post-Occupation information regime in Japan, then, was in fact part of a much longer preoccupation with how the United States was, or was not, managing information and strategy in Cold War Asia overall. Reischauer had been speaking out for some time but did not find the opportunities important enough and thus published the book, which was his first major policy statement on foreign affairs. Reischauer’s biographer, former student, and special assistant at the embassy from 1963 to 1965, George R. Packard, described it as a “passionate critique. . .[of] ‘American blundering in East Asia’.”18 Comprising three parts (“The Problem,” “The Situation,” and “Principles of Strategy”), the book devoted a chapter to “The Problems of Communication.”19 Reviewing it in Pacific Historical Review, diplomatic historian Charles Vevier described Reischauer as “a sensitive observer of American policy in Asia” who is “convinced that Americans have been poorly prepared for effective thought and action on Asian matters.”20 Despite this and other favorable reviews, the book “dropped into the pool of public opinion without raising a ripple,” Reischauer wrote 30 years later: The nation, under Dulles’ unwise leadership, was headed determinedly in the opposite direction. Of course, I have had the satisfaction of seeing us slowly change course since then, until three decades later American policy in Asia is much closer to what I advocated back in 1955. But this is small comfort in the face of the national tragedies and appalling waste mistaken policies have caused in the meantime. . . We still need to put less faith in military defense and more in economic aid and the support of self-determination and democracy.21

Piecing together the “broken dialogue”  61 In contrast to the above writings, “The Broken Dialogue” would garner immediate and abundant attention, especially that of Ambassador MacArthur, who had recently appeared on the cover of Time magazine as the “the principal architect of present-day U.S. policy toward Japan,” and his colleagues in the Department of State.22

In his own words: Reischauer’s “broken dialogue” Before examining reactions to and criticism of his commentary, it is important to introduce Reischauer’s own perspective on what his “brief article” was about. What was Reischauer’s stake in contesting the prevailing information regime? In his 1986 memoirs, Reischauer relates over the course of two pages: Just before we left for Japan, the distinguished quarterly magazine Foreign Affairs asked me to write an article about the disturbances, and I promised to do so after I had had a chance to study the situation for myself. I therefore spent most of July interviewing people of all types and then wrote a brief article entitled “The Broken Dialogue,” though in actuality the dialogue I was referring to had never existed. I devoted the bulk of the argument to the different perceptions of the situation by the Japanese conservatives, the various opposition parties, and the American government. The leftists had wildly inaccurate concepts of American foreign policy and the world situation and feared that the right was striving with American connivance to return Japan to prewar militarism and limited democracy. The right saw the left as being made of unrealistic and sometimes traitorous fools. The Americans saw the Japanese ruling groups as timid but faithful allies whose support could simply be taken for granted, and they ignored the views of the left as not being worthy of notice. My chief conclusion was that the whole Security Treaty incident had revealed “a weakness of communication between the United States and opposition elements in Japan.” I saw a gap in understanding that was “a truly frightening phenomenon,” and pointed out that this gap required Americans to establish a dialogue with all sections of Japanese society. The article appeared in the October issue of Foreign Affairs and drew considerable attention. 23 Although “The Broken Dialogue” was Reischauer’s most famous set of policy recommendations, it was actually not his first article written for that journal. A decade before, Armstrong had reached out to the still relatively young Harvard professor to write something in light of the outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula and its effect on Japan, and in particular the peace and security treaties. Having published The United States and Japan that same year (1950), a book which was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times book section, Reischauer was quickly building a reputation in the foreign policy community as a young and highly capable academic, and as such his works had also been introduced in Foreign Affairs. But while Reischauer did submit an essay

62  Robert D. Eldridge in 1950 in response to Armstrong’s request, he missed the deadline and the piece does not seem to have been published.24 There is little reason to suspect, in any event, that Reischauer thought that his highly critical appraisal of the U.S. foreign policy in Japan would win him wide acclaim in Washington. His biographer does not think that the article was “an application for the job of ambassador to Tokyo,” as Reischauer was “too shrewd an observer of Washington politics to imagine that such an outcome would be possible.” And yet, Reischauer did understand that he would have a greater voice in the U.S. policy toward the region as a result of the article, particularly if Kennedy won.25 In the event, not only would he have a greater voice, but he would be nominated ambassador as well. The article, which was the second one in the line-up, occupied 16 pages of that month’s edition, and was one of four dealing with Asia and two with Japan. After spending most of the essay analyzing the political, social, and intellectual situations in Japan, Reischauer discusses what would become the operative, or from the State Department’s and especially embassy’s perspective, the problematic section (highlighted below): All this reveals a weakness of communication between the Western democracies and opposition elements in Japan. Though the latter include the most fervent supporters of peace and democracy, their thinking is so far removed from that of their counterparts in the West that sometimes no real dialogue is possible. On top of the ever-present language barrier stands an even higher barrier of unspoken assumptions that make true understanding difficult. We can, of course, say that the fault lies with the Japanese intellectuals for being so unrealistic, but the fault also lies with us for failing to understand what is in their minds. The shocking misestimate of the situation in May and June on the part of the American Government and Embassy in Tokyo reveals how small is our contact with the Japanese opposition. It is natural that our Embassy should have more contact with English-speaking businessmen and with conservative political leaders, who not only stand in the positions of responsibility but also share more of our point of view on world problems. But we should know enough about Japan to realize that a great gulf in thinking lies between these people and the intellectuals and others of the opposition. The latter are right in their charge that the close contacts they once had with Americans during the Occupation no longer exist. 26 How was the United States, which was enmeshed in an information-heavy Cold War with the Soviet Union, to advance its interests and promote its information regime in Japan— arguably the single most important Cold War ally in Asia— without incorporating the voices of the Japanese opposition? How, in other words, was an information regime to be constructed by willful ignorance, and not by creative engagement with various strands of one’s crucial ally’s own information landscape?

Piecing together the “broken dialogue”  63

Initial reactions The article came out in late September and immediately created a storm. Assistant Secretary of State J. Graham Parsons at once wrote to Reischauer, “taking advantage of our long friendship to make a few comments on it.”27 His ­three-page ­ letter, dated September 29 and sent out on the 30th, was calm and professional, emphasizing points of agreement, but also identifying problems he had with the article: I disagree with you, however, that [intellectuals in Japan] lack sufficient communication with our representatives in Japan. I would like to show you someday a most voluminous dispatch we recently received from our Embassy which is testament to the vast range of contacts our people have with Japanese intellectuals. However, such official contacts can only be of secondary value. The whole basis of our part-way United States policy toward intellectuals and students abroad has been to encourage communication with their counterparts in the United States. Men, like yourself, are bound to have a greater influence on the university circles than any official American. I, therefore, wonder whether your article has not done a disservice to Japan’s intellectuals by appearing to justify their recent behavior and by implication encouraging a continuation of their present unrealism. It seems to me that the future of Japan’s democracy is indeed in danger and it would be a great tragedy if Japan’s intellectual leaders, in the name of democracy, encourage a continuation of violence and disrespect for parliamentary institutions which could lead to a violent [illegible, but likely, “showdown”] with Japan’s government and a possible reversion to extremist rule.28 It would not be for another five weeks before the letter, which Reischauer described as a “protest,” reached the professor.29 Parsons, unaware perhaps that the Reischauer was in Japan at the time, had sent the letter to Harvard University. It was while Reischauer was in Taipei, in the second week of November, when he responded. In the interim, he had extensive interactions with the embassy in Tokyo over the article’s contents. Before we look at Reischauer’s response to Parsons on November 8, it is necessary to look at the exchanges he had with Ambassador MacArthur. It is unclear how the embassy learned of the article in Foreign Affairs—from ­ the State Department, newspapers, a store-bought copy, or a subscription— but it was read as quickly as might be expected. The embassy contacted Reischauer at his wife’s family home in Aoyama and arranged a meeting for October 28 with the ambassador so that MacArthur could educate the professor. There appears to be no official record of their discussion, which is quite surprising in one sense because of the need of the embassy to document its displeasure and to record its actions and any admissions of fault by Reischauer. But at the same time, it may have been improper for the meeting to have taken place as the U.S. ambassador was putting pressure on an American academic to change his views or correct his

64  Robert D. Eldridge interpretation of events, and subsequently, as we shall see, to alter a translation of the article that was scheduled to appear. Because there is no record of the meeting, we will have to determine its contents based on context derived from subsequent correspondence and interactions, such as one between Reischauer and the embassy’s public affairs officer, John L. Stegmaier, a 1937 graduate of Harvard who served as the conduit between Reischauer and MacArthur.30 During their “good talk” on October 28, MacArthur showed Reischauer the record of the embassy’s reporting from September 1959 through June 1960 as well as the embassy’s contacts with the Socialists (whose party had split once again, with the Democratic Socialist Party being formed in January 1960).31 Reischauer acknowledged to Ambassador MacArthur that the sentence, “The shocking misestimate of the situation in May and June on the part of the American Government and Embassy in Tokyo reveals how small is our contact with Japanese opposition,” in the article was “not accurate and that you were sorry you had used it.”32 Reischauer informed the ambassador that the article was being translated into Japanese for publication in Japan. The following day, perhaps upon further reflection and/or the result of a meeting with his immediate staff, MacArthur had Stegmaier call Reischauer to request that the sentence in question be deleted.33 Reischauer did so that same day, explaining to Naruse Masaji, an editor with Sekai, that after meeting with the ambassador and seeing the correspondence “before and after May 19.  .  .I [now] realize that the phrase ‘shocking misestimate’ as used in my Foreign Affairs article, was not really accurate” and suggested that they delete the sentence.34 According to Reischauer, the editor, however, believed that “deletion of this sentence would probably cause more trouble than its inclusion” because “many people have read the original English article.”35 As such, the two worked on “ton[ing] down the statement until it sounds very mild in Japanese.”36 Reischauer then provided an explanation to Stegmaier, who had done graduate study in Japanese at Yale, of the changes made: The (shocking, odorubeki deleted) misjudgment (hantei for handan, which makes a considerable difference in Japanese) of the situation in May and June on the part of the American government and embassy in Tokyo shows (shimesu in place of bakuro, reveals, a big difference in Japanese) how small is our effective (koka aru added) contact with the Japanese opposition.37 He noted that he thought it was “certainly a fairer statement (particularly as it reads in Japanese) than the original one,” but “still feel that there was some misjudgment in not sooner finding some acceptable way to postpone the President’s visit.”38 Reischauer, battling a fever, did not have time to wait for a response, as he departed two days later for Taipei for his duties at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, nor would he be back in Tokyo again to be able to discuss the issue in person with MacArthur again or with his staff.39 Everything would need to be done by letter, which is ripe for misunderstanding and misinterpretation and

Piecing together the “broken dialogue”  65 became heated, as the ambassador sent several letters to Reischauer, the editor of Foreign Affairs, Armstrong, and the influential international lawyer and diplomat, Arthur Dean “whom [MacArthur] felt would wish to know the facts.”40

Argument by correspondence: changing the wording of the Japanese translation Stegmaier, who would later work under Reischauer as the Consul General in Osaka-Kobe and was described by one colleague as “a man with a real feel for the Japanese mood,”41 shared Reischauer’s October 29 letter with the ambassador who followed up with a response of his own dated November 4. As mentioned earlier, Reischauer was no longer at the well-to-do Tokyo address of his in-laws, and it appears he had not informed the ambassador of his forwarding address. In the meantime, after a couple of weeks in Taipei, Reischauer continued with his travels, eventually reaching India in early December. It was while he was there that MacArthur’s letter of November 4 (and a second one of November 14) finally reached him. Reischauer answered on December 2, and included correspondence he had with an editor at Sekai over the issue of the sentence deletion as well as an exchange he had with Parsons, whose original letter, introduced earlier, had been sent to Reischauer’s Cambridge address. Before we look at his response to MacArthur, it is necessary, chronologically, to first look at Reischauer’s response to Parsons’ September 30 letter (dated November 8). Reischauer apologized that his article “disturbed you so much, especially since I believe the area of our disagreement (and my criticism of the American Government) is much narrower than you seem to assume,” and then explained that he felt that he did “not deserve [Parson’s] criticism that my article may have ‘done a disservice to Japan’s intellectuals’.”42 Indeed, Reischauer asserted, it and another piece specifically written for Sekai were designed to do just the opposite, and reactions from Japanese have convined (sic) me that, far from having the effect you suggest, they have indeed been useful in encouraging a more realistic attitude on the part of Japanese intellectuals and a healthier approach to democracy. The usual American frontal attack on the attitude of Japanese intellectuals tends to strengthen rather than weaken them in their fallacies. I believe that my approach has been far more effective, and I have been delighted— as well as amazed—that a hitherto entirely leftist journal like Sekai wants to print my articles. The criticisms of Japanese attitudes in these articles are about as heavy a dose as Japanese intellectuals are able to absorb at this stage.43 Reischauer continued: Whether my criticism of the specific incident was justified or not, I do feel that we face a big continuing problem in our relations, not only with the opposition, but with the Japanese people as a whole. In fact this problem

66  Robert D. Eldridge exists in many other Asian countries as well, and perhaps in other parts of the world also. We have not been as successful in our intellectual contacts and in creating a true and favorable image of the United States as we have in other aspects of diplomacy. I personally feel that the whole problem needs rethinking at this stage and that a much bigger effort— and one much freer of usual embassy control and supervision— is called for.44 Reischauer voiced his concern about the lack of dialogue with the opposition, including intelligentsia. “I am aware,” he writes, that a number of fine Foreign Service Officers have extensive and close relations with Japanese Socialists and intellectuals. I do, however, feel that their relations are not always as well used as they might be. Certainly the reaction of the Japanese would indicate that they are not very successful. I found a great deal of feeling among Japanese that embassy officials only preached at them rather than talking with them.45 In the spirit of dialogue, Reischauer offered to meet with Parsons in January or February to discuss the “whole problem” as well as some worrisome trends in Korea, but it does not appear that Parsons took him up on the offer. In the meantime, Ambassador MacArthur sent Reischauer the first of two letters that month, the first one on November 4.46 In it, MacArthur explained that Stegmaier had shown him Reischauer’s letter of October 29 and that he “[has] no personal feeling of rancor towards” the professor and that he “enjoyed very much our conversation.”47 However, he continued, I and some of my associates in the Government who deal with Japanese affairs feel strongly that this sentence is not only unjust, as you recognize, but also serves to undermine the position of the United States in Japan. [Here,] elements that are unfriendly to the United States are using the sentence to support their contention that their policies are sound and correct, as the U.S. Government would recognize if the American Embassy and the State Department were not so uninformed and ignorant of the true picture in Japan. Other non-communist elements, which unwittingly permitted themselves to be used by the pro-communist organizations which spearheaded the upheaval last May and June when force and violence were substituted for the rule of law and democracy, are also using the sentence as a means of divesting themselves of any responsibility for the disgraceful events of May and June and placing this responsibility on an alleged misunderstanding of their activities [by the U.S.].48 Because of this, and Reischauer’s lack of “any real effort to ascertain facts,” MacArthur believed “a question of integrity was involved” and that it “was not unreasonable to request that you at least delete the sentence from the Japanese

Piecing together the “broken dialogue”  67 reprint” so that “it would not cause farther damage and injustice.”49 The ambassador added that although “I did not ask you publicly to reaffirm your statement to me that the sentence was inaccurate and that you regretted it,” Reischauer apparently did not feel he could delete the sentence as “many people had read the original English article” and the deletion “would probably cause more trouble than its inclusion.”50 This MacArthur challenged, when he wrote: It seems to me the very fact that many people in Japan have read the article is an even greater reason for rectifying an injustice by deleting the sentence. Furthermore, it seems to me that if your Japanese publisher felt the deletion would cause trouble, fairness would suggest that a note could be appended to the translation that as a result of a careful investigation you had made of the Embassy reporting you considered that this sentence was not accurate.51 Finally, on the question of toning down the translation, MacArthur wrote that he “[had] gone over the revised translation with some distinguished Japanese intellectuals whom I admire and respect, and they have told me that the original sense of the sentence is all too clear.”52 Armstrong, who had received copies of this letter to Reischauer and Reischauer’s letter to Stegmaier, as well as one from MacArthur dated November 6, wrote to MacArthur. He was apologetic that “this incident arose between you and a man whom we invited to write” for the journal, explaining that its policy was “not altering an author’s views but only correcting what we can readily identify as errors of fact. I am sorry that this resulted in our not questioning Dr. Reischauer’s statements of opinion in this case.”53 Going further, Armstrong agreed that it was hard to understand why the offending sentence, which Dr. Reischauer seems to have admitted was incorrect, was not omitted by him from an authorized translation printed in Sekai. Even if some Japanese noticed the omission, no embarrassment could have been caused to anyone but him.54 It was in early December that Reischauer wrote from New Delhi, likely because it would have taken a while for his correspondence to catch up with him. In a four-page response to MacArthur, Reischauer, after explaining once again the purpose of the article, argued that with the exception of the one sentence you have objected to so strenuously, what I wrote, I believe, stands up even now as a sound presentation of the subject. The sentence in question was merely an aside, meant to illustrate the difficulty of mutual understanding.55 He then expressed his belief that MacArthur’s comment, “without any real effort to ascertain facts,” seemed to Reischauer to be “unfair” as he doubted that

68  Robert D. Eldridge a request to see “your confidential reports to Washington in order to phrase this sentence more accurately” would have been granted.56 Reischauer went on to tell MacArthur that his use of the phrase “a question of integrity” was “uncalled for” in light of the efforts he had made to address the concerns the sentence caused by communicating with the editors of Sekai, despite his fear that any changes to the Japanese version of the text would invite unwanted attention—“it might also make some Japanese conclude that an American ambassador has the right and power to force a private American scholar to change his public statements. Such an interpretation could be very injurious to American interests.”57 Nevertheless, Reischauer agreed to contact the journal again and ask them to add a footnote, a copy of which he enclosed to MacArthur and to Armstrong.58 Reischauer also challenged the ambassador’s assertion that several individuals, such as Eda Saburō of the Socialist Party, had used the article to shift blame to the U.S. government. “I found,” Reischauer noted, “this idea [that ‘Washington had received distorted reports from both the Embassy and the Japanese Conservative Government’] already strongly established in Japanese minds when I came to Japan in early July, and the opposition groups have held to it consistently ever since. I can’t imagine that my statement contributed substantially to this feeling.”59 Rather, the professor argued, I do feel that my Foreign Affairs article as well as my article written directly for Sekai and the many talks I gave in Japan, by taking an understanding but critical view of the threat to democracy in the May and June disturbances, did contribute to some of the sober second thoughts Japanese have been having on the subject and thus, far from having done damages to the interests of the United States, as you suggest, I feel that my articles have definitely served American interests— which, as I see them, are based first and foremost on the success of democracy in Japan.60 Reischauer signed off on a positive note—“I regret that our contacts so far have been largely over this little disagreement, and I hope that they will continue in a less controversial vein in the future.”61 MacArthur, in his four-page response of December 9, picked up on this theme of “not pursu[ing] this subject further” and thanked Reischauer for writing to Naruse, the Sekai editor.62 MacArthur emphasized that the embassy “fully agreed with many of the cogent points” Reischauer made in the article, and that the embassy “did not challenge at all your right to disagree or be critical,” noting that it was an “honest difference of view between us.”63 MacArthur then went on to explain once again the embassy’s concerns about the demonstrators’ “violence and illegal action” and that the embassy felt

Piecing together the “broken dialogue”  69 the situation in the Japanese intellectual and university community is in our judgment and perhaps more serious than in any other of the major of the major sectors of Japanese national life, and we feel there is more that we can and should do.64 Along these lines, MacArthur added at the end of the letter that on my part, I would warmly welcome seeing a great deal more of you whenever you have the time available in order to profit from your great knowledge about so many aspects and facets of the Japanese picture which you have studied with such care.65 Parallel to this, MacArthur also wrote to Armstrong “noting that he felt it was a sincere gesture on [Reischauer’s] part which I appreciate. . . so that you will know the outcome of this matter, which I think we can consider closed.”66 With these two letters, the three-month saga came to an end, but the subject of it— the article in Foreign Affairs—would launch a new period in Reischauer’s life.

Conclusion While observers of the bilateral relationship then and later could have only imagined the embassy’s unhappiness with Reischauer’s remarks, it was only with his memoirs that we became more aware of the degree of that anger, even though it was only shared in a paragraph, and his biography provided even less. Those on the other side of the issue, particularly MacArthur, did not leave memoirs, and his two oral histories avoid any reference to it. Readers may conclude that this lack of discussion is because the ambassador was not overly concerned with the “Broken Dialogue” affair, when in fact, as declassified documents and related correspondence show, it greatly bothered him and his Foreign Service colleagues. Thanks to the release of these documents, we are now able to examine this issue, not only as a test of personalities and positions, but also as a case of how governments— in this case, the United States— should interact with the governments, political parties, and people of another country in the formation and maintenance of an information regime. Indeed, the Reischauer-MacArthur standoff highlights the highly contingent nature of an information regime even as seemingly stolid and bedrock as that of the United States in postwar Japan. Democracy in East Asia was a goal shared by Reischauer and MacArthur alike, but exactly what that was to look like was subject to intense disagreement and debate. To varying degrees, both MacArthur and Reischauer were frustrated with the lack of realism among Japanese academics and the hostility of some toward the United States and/or its policies. Initially, MacArthur may have included Reischauer in that group, but he seems to have come to respect him more. Indeed, in much of the correspondence, it seemed like the real issue was not democracy, but pride: the self-importance of a diplomat without an interest in academic opinions, and the conceit of an academic without diplomatic experience (at this

70  Robert D. Eldridge point). It was a dialogue in which both sides talked past each other. In the final analysis, while Reischauer may have been incorrect about some aspects of the article, it is possible that he was on target with the general tone. In other words, the ambassador may have forced his views and bullied his way. One political officer at the embassy felt that MacArthur was a “little dictator” who practiced “intellectual dishonesty” in his reporting and statements.67 It is likely, therefore, that people with different viewpoints, opinions, and ideologies were browbeaten rather than heard out. In other words, it was a monologue versus a dialogue, ripe for miscommunication— exactly, ironically, as Reischauer had diagnosed about the behavior of the U.S. Embassy toward Japan as a whole. Reischauer, after becoming ambassador himself the following year, dramatically expanded the dialogue he had characterized as “broken,” traveling to all parts of the country (unlike MacArthur, who tended to stay in Tokyo) and meeting with people of all walks of life and conversing in Japanese with them. After he stepped down as ambassador in 1966, he could write that “Perhaps the greatest change in the tone of Japanese-American relations has been the growing feeling that the Japanese can and do speak fully and frankly to Americans and that their voices are heard.”68

Notes 1 The author would like to express his gratitude to the Northeast Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies for the travel grant he received in 2000–2001 which allowed him to do early research on Reischauer. 2 Edwin O. Reischauer, “The Broken Dialogue with Japan,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 39, No. 1 (October 1960), 11–26. 3 For more on this, see Robert D. Eldridge, “The Scholar and the Diplomat: Edwin O. Reischauer, J. Graham Parsons, and the Rivalry over the Ambassadorship to Japan during the Cold War” (under review). 4 George R. Packard, Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 5 Edwin O. Reischauer, My Life between Japan and America (hereafter, MLBJAA) (New York: John Weatherhill, Inc., 1986). One Japan-based scholar has fortunately done an important interpretative study of the article and its impact. See Roger H. Brown, “Cold War Ambassador: Edwin O. Reischauer and the ‘Broken Dialogue’ with Japan,” Saitama University Review, Vol. 41, No. 1 (October 2005), 103–132. 6 Public intellectual, playwright, and university president Yamazaki Masakazu was highly critical of his contemporary intellectuals when he wrote, the immediate postwar years saw the revival of Marxism and the rise of left-wing populism to replace the rightwing nationalism of the prewar years. The ‘impassioned men’ of the interi class did not change their disposition with the end of the war. They simply replaced one ideology with another as they came to exercise leadership in the progressive political parties, trade unions, farmers’ cooperatives, students’ associations, and the press. Postwar left-wing ideology was espoused by the interi in coalition with the grass roots. It thus took over the role of a now defunct right-wing populism. Many young wartime militarists went through a conversion, becoming fervent revolutionaries. The thread of anti-American sentiment, held in abeyance for five or so years following the end of the war, was eagerly picked up by left-wing activists. American individualism was branded as

Piecing together the “broken dialogue”  71 the enemy of collective solidarity; popular culture was the sign of capitalist degeneration; American Occupation policies manifested the imperialist oppression of a defeated nation. Ignorant of Stalinist depotism, of the Sino-Soviet confrontation, of the realities of the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese had little ideological immunity to Marxist rhetoric. Marxism, for a time, spread across campuses like wildfire, particularly in fields like history, politics, economics, and philosophy. See Masakazu Yamazaki, “The Intellectual Community of the Showa Era,” in Carol Gluck and Stephen R. Graubard, eds., The Japan of Hirohito (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 260. 7 Matsukata had been a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post and a member of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club Board. In fact, Reischauer was introduced to Matsukata in the dining room of the club by the writer, James Michener. According to the Club’s official history, “There was romance in the Club, to. . . No one then had any idea that the professor would in a few years become the U.S. ambassador to Japan.” See The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, ed., The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan: Reporting a Half Century of Upheavals: From 1945 to the Present (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1998), 103. For more on the courtship, see Reischauer, MLBJAA, 140–143, and Haru Matsukata Reischauer, Samurai and Silk: A Japanese and American Heritage (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1986), 14–17. 8 For more on Armstrong, see Priscilla Roberts, “‘The Council has been your Creation’: Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Paradigm of the American Foreign Policy Establishment?” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 35, No. 1 (April 2001), 65–94. 9 “Note by HFA on Edwin O. Reischauer (hereafter EOR), June 17, 1960,” Folder: Correspondence, Reischauer, Edwin O. 1950, 1951, 1960, 1961, Box 52, Hamilton Fish Armstrong Papers (hereafter, HFA Papers), 1893–1973, Seeley G. Mudd Library, Princeton University. 24 The reason for the non-publication is unclear. There is a note from assistant editor Byron Dexter raising concerns about the China question apparently addressed in the draft, but I was unable to locate any other related correspondence or comments by Reischauer in his personal papers. Reischauer does discuss a China-related article “written some time after the Communist triumph but at a date and for a journal I have not been able to identify” in his memoirs (128).

72  Robert D. Eldridge

Piecing together the “broken dialogue”  73

74  Robert D. Eldridge Eldridge, Robert D. under review. “The Scholar and the Diplomat: Edwin O. Reischauer, J. Graham Parsons, and the Rivalry over the Ambassadorship to Japan during the Cold War.” Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, ed. 1998. The Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan: Reporting a Half Century of Upheavals: From 1945 to the Present. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle. “Foreign Relations: The No. 1 Objective.” 1960. Time. 75: 26 (June 27), 18–19. Packard, George R. 2010. Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan. New York: Columbia University Press. Reischauer, Edwin O. 1955. Wanted: An Asian Policy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Reischauer, Edwin O. 1960. “The Broken Dialogue with Japan.” Foreign Affairs. 39: 1 (October), 11–26 Reischauer, Edwin O. 1967. “Our Dialogue with Japan.” Foreign Affairs. 45: 2 (January), 215–228 Reischauer, Edwin O. 1986. My Life between Japan and America. New York: John Weatherhill, Inc. Reischauer, Haru Matsukata. 1986. Samurai and Silk: A Japanese and American Heritage. Tokyo: Tuttle. Roberts, Priscilla. 2001. “‘The Council has Been Your Creation’: Hamilton Fish Armstrong, Paradigm of the American Foreign Policy Establishment?” Journal of American Studies. 35: 1 (April), 65–94 Vevier, Charles. 1955. “Review of Wanted: An Asian Policy. By Edwin O. Reischauer (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. xii + 276 pp. $3.75).” Pacific Historical Review. 24: 4 (November), 424. “William H. Gleysteen, Jr. oral history interview, Frontline Diplomacy: The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection, Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, Arlington, Virginia, June 10, 1997.” Yamazaki, Masakazu. 1992. “The Intellectual Community of the Showa Era.” In The Japan of Hirohito, eds. Carol Gluck and Stephen R. Graubard. New York: W.W. Norton, 245–264.

Part two

Knowledge networks and scholarship

4

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization) Pak Kyǒng-sik ­ and Zainichi identity as inspired by North Korea Chizuko T. Allen

Introduction On February 10, 2018, the History Museum of J-Koreans (Zainichi kanjin rekishi shiryōkan) held a symposium to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the passing of Pak Kyŏng-sik (1922–1998), a zainichi (ethnic Korean resident in Japan) scholar, in Mindan Korea Central Hall in Minato-ku, Tokyo, where the headquarters of the South Korea-aligned Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan) is located. One hundred and twenty people gathered to express their appreciation of Pak’s contributions to the study of zainichi history and modern Korea-Japan relations. Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University Mizuno Naoki praised Pak for authoring over 1,200 Korea-related entries in Kindai Nihon shakai undō jinbutsu daijiten (Encyclopedia of social activists in modern Japan), a five-volume work published in 1997. Prof. Kim Kwan-yŏl from Kwangwoon University in Seoul, South Korea, noted that Pak’s many publications had stimulated zainichi studies in South Korea and that his 1973 monograph Nihon teikoku shugi no Chōsen shihai (Japanese imperial rule over Korea) in particular, through its 1986 Korean translation, was required reading for students studying colonial Korea. The symposium also referred to Pak’s launch of the Association for the Research of Zainichi Activism History (Zainichi Chōsenjin undōshi kenkyūkai) in 1976 and attempt to build a library dedicated to zainichi history before his untimely death in a traffic accident (“Zainichi. . .” 2018). Indeed, Pak was a prolific scholar, whose work included the compilation of zainichi-related historical sources in numerous volumes, still being used by scholars around the world.1 Yet, Pak’s most impactful publication was his small monograph published in 1965, Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kiroku (A record of forced mobilization of Koreans, Kiroku hereafter), the first monograph that featured the term kyōsei renkō, which roughly means “forced displacement/mobilization” in Japanese. After being read by a limited audience in the 1960s and 1970s, Kiroku drew increasing attention in the 1980s, when zainichi Korean activism, including the refusal to be fingerprinted by the Japanese government, became widely known through the Japanese media. Today, Pak’s Kiroku is known for its role in popularizing the term kyōsei renkō (kangje yŏnhaeng in Korean), commonly used to refer to wartime Japan’s forcible mobilization of Korean and Chinese workers, not only

78  Chizuko T. Allen in Japan, but also on the Korean Peninsula.2 Despite the significance of Pak’s work, however, only a handful of scholars in Japan have appraised Pak’s work on the subject, and little discussion in Korean or English has appeared. In this paper, I view Pak’s book Kiroku as having formed the nucleus of a Cold War information regime in Japan, a counter-narrative embedded within the postwar Japan-ROK-US alliance. I focus in particular on Pak’s discussion of kyōsei renkō, the alleged forced mobilization and labor of Koreans in wartime Japan. What motivated Pak to write on this topic, and what were his primary assertions? Who or what influenced him? How accurate were his depictions of Koreans’ migration to and work in Japan? Who are his critics, and what are their arguments? This paper seeks to address these questions by referring to Kiroku as well as Pak’s later publications. Although virtually gone from historiographical memory today, Pak’s creation of a nascent information regime during the height of the East Asian Cold War would later prove to have devastating consequences for the Cold War alliance system as the Cold War itself drew to a close. As a young Korean man living in postwar Japan, Pak chose to affiliate himself with North Korea-aligned organizations and embraced North Korea’s historical paradigm of struggles between imperialism and its victims, as rooted in Marxism-Leninism. He set out to shed light on Japan’s kyōsei renkō, forcible mobilization of Korean laborers to war-related Japanese industries, in order to confirm imperial Japan’s exploitation and victimization of Koreans. His pioneering 1965 book Kiroku fell short of standards of academic objectivity and rigor, due to his selective information as well as his disregard of voluntary Korean migration and the complexities of wartime recruitment. Nevertheless, Pak’s narratives and use of the term kyōsei renkō continue to serve as powerful political tools to reproach Japanese colonial rule over Korea and deny the legitimacy of that rule. Kyōsei renkō has become a trope of post-Cold War Koreas-Japan discourse, but its roots lie firmly in the Cold War, with a North Korea-inspired book that set up so powerful an information regime within the dominant information regime cultivated by the governments of the United States, Japan, and South Korea that today Pak’s counter-narrative is fundamentally destabilizing the Cold War alliance system.

Pak’s early life Pak Kyŏng-sik was born under Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) in December 1922 as the first son of Pak Yŏn-jin and Hong Sa, a couple living in a farming village in North Kyŏngsang province in southeastern Korea. Pak Yŏn-jin had never received a modern education, but had learned to read and write Korean and Chinese characters in a traditional village school, or sŏdang. After taking seasonal jobs in Japan, Pak Yŏn-jin decided to settle as a tenant farmer in Ōita prefecture in Kyushu, the southern main island of Japan, together with his family, in the spring of 1929. Thus, Pak Kyŏng-sik and his parents, along with his two sisters and younger brother, began a humble life on a small farm nestled among the mountains of northeastern Ōita. While Pak’s father worked on the farm, his

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization)  79 mother did domestic work for Japanese families and collected recycle items for modest fees. The family was poor. Pak remembered eating rice porridge mixed with chestnuts and radish and wearing hand-me-down clothes from Japanese families as a young boy. Pak began attending a local primary school as a first grader immediately after his arrival in Ōita. His parents gave priority to his education over that of his elder sister. His early school days were challenging, however, as he spoke not even one word of Japanese on his first day of school, and experienced discrimination. Japanese children called him a Chōsenjin (“Korean”), and he often fought back. He nevertheless continued his education and graduated from a local secondary school in 1940, a fine academic achievement at the time. In the following year, he moved to Tokyo to enroll in a teaching certificate program at Nihon University with a focus on geography and history. While still enrolled in classes, he began teaching as a substitute teacher at a public primary school in Tokyo and continued teaching until the spring of 1945. In August 1945, when the Pacific War ended, Pak was lying in bed with pleurisy and lung infiltration, common lung-related ailments at the time. The news of the collapse of the Japanese empire and subsequent liberation of Korea stunned him and made him rethink his life. He recollected in 1984: I had lived as a Japanese subject in the pre-liberation era and even used a Japanese name for myself for five years. Korea’s liberation from Japan on August 15, 1945, however, made me wake up to my ethnic identity and start a new life as Pak Kyŏng-sik, a Korean man. Because I received Japanese education from elementary school through college, I had lived with no subjective spirit as a Korean. I also had no knowledge on how Korea had developed in the past, how it had fallen to be a Japanese colony, or how Koreans fought for the liberation of the country. I had only read history books written from Japanese viewpoints centered on the imperial house, with limited references to Korea as a backward nation constantly invaded by surrounding countries. . .thinking that the Korean people were inferior, I had often lamented on my birth as a Korean and developed an inferiority complex.3 Until August 1945, Pak had acted as a Japanese subject, using a Japanese name and even teaching primary school classes based on the curricula determined by the Japanese government. He felt he was “half Japanese,” however, because his allegiance to Japan was never wholehearted, and he was relieved to know that the war was over and Korea was freed. With a new determination to reclaim his Korean identity, Pak began to study Korean history on his own as soon as he recovered from his lung illnesses. His parents and siblings promptly left Japan for their hometown in southern Korea, occupied by the U.S. military government, which developed into the Republic of Korea (ROK), or South Korea, in 1948. Little did Pak know that he would not see his family until his first visit to South Korea in 1984, due to his association with North Korea-aligned organizations in postwar Japan (Pak 1992, 610, 622).

80  Chizuko T. Allen The dislocation of the Pak family was part of a much bigger population reshuffling after the end of World War II (WWII). There were over two million Koreans living in Japan in August 1945. After the return of nearly 1.5 million Koreans to southern Korea within a few years, about 600,000 people of Korean ancestry remained in Japan to become the core of the zainichi community. These 600,000 would soon be joined by South Korean refugees from the violence that followed the April 1948 Cheju Island Uprising as well as the Korean War (1950–1953) (Morris-Suzuki 2009, 56). The zainichi Koreans formed numerous political organizations as they were stimulated by political reforms initiated by the Allied Occupation of Japan, and by the release of many Korean prisoners who had been incarcerated for anti-Japanese and revolutionary activities. The Zai-Nihon Chōsenjin renmei (League of Koreans in Japan) was established as ­ an umbrella organization for numerous leftist zainichi groups in October 1945, and the Chōsen kenkoku sokushin seinen dōmei (Youth Alliance to Promote the Founding of Korea) was formed by the rightist zainichi in the following month (Yi, Yŏng-ch’ae 2010, 35–36). The Korean activists, many freshly out of prison, gave speeches in front of the welcoming Korean community in Tokyo. According to Pak, he went to listen to many such speeches and was deeply moved by the enthusiasm of the speakers and the audience, although his limited Korean language skills hardly allowed him to comprehend the messages. After a brief experience with the conservative Youth Alliance for several months, he made a decision to associate himself with the leftist League of Koreans in Japan by the summer of 1946. He lived with the members of the League of Koreans, worked part-time jobs, and enrolled in Tōyō University with a major in history, eventually earning a BA in March 1949. As no Korean history courses were offered at the college, Pak took courses on Chinese history and studied Korean history mostly on his own. Following graduation, he was employed by some of the newly formed Korean middle schools in Tokyo, where he worked hard to improve his Korean so he could teach social studies in the Korean language (Pak 1992, 610–612). Although the great majority of the zainichi had come from southern Korea, Pak recalls that as many as 80 percent of them in the early postwar era chose to affiliate themselves with the leftist League of Koreans in Japan in support of the northern half of Korea under the Soviet occupation. The northern, occupied half of the Korean Peninsula developed into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea, in 1948 (Pak 1992, 14). A smaller number of zainichi joined the Zai-Nihon Chōsen kyoryū mindan (later Zai-Nihon Daikanminkoku kyoryū mindan, Korean Residents Union in Japan), which replaced the Youth Alliance and other organizations aligned with southern Korea under the U.S. military government and the ROK, or South Korea, from 1948. The Allied Occupation of Japan, however, banned the League of Koreans in 1949 because of its radicalism and violence. In 1951, former members of the League of Koreans formed the Zainichi Chōsen tōitsu minshu sensen (United Democratic Front of Koreans in Japan), which essentially assisted the activities of the Japanese Communist Party in pursuit of a Japanese socialist revolution,

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization)  81 an overarching goal for all socialists and communists in Japan at the time (Yi, Yŏng-ch’ae 2010, 36–37). After the Korean War ended, North Korea began paying close attention to Koreans living in Japan. North Korea had welcomed repatriates from China and the Soviet Union to draw manpower and skills before the Korean War, and it now set its sights on Koreans in Japan, then the second largest overseas Korean community after that in China. This North Korean interest happened to coincide with the desires of some zainichi leaders in the United Democratic Front, such as Han Tǒk-su (1907–2001), who sought to work directly with North Korea. Kim Il Sung of North Korea reportedly contacted the Soviets in Moscow and secured Stalin’s approval for the zainichi group’s change in affiliation, an important organizational shift in the alignment of the international communist movement (Yi, Yǒng-ch’ae 2010, 37–40). In January 1955, the Japanese Communist Party formally gave up its control over the United Democratic Front, and, in the following month, the North Korean government demanded that the Japanese government improve its treatment of the zainichi, referring to them as DPRK citizens. As the San Francisco Peace Treaty had taken away Japanese citizenship from the zainichi and made them “stateless” from 1952, the North Korean government’s recognizing them as its overseas citizens, despite the lack of legal effect, struck a chord with many of them. In May 1955, Han Tǒk-su established Zai-Nihon Chōsenjin sōrengōkai (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), or Sōren (Chongryon in Korean) for short, with the clear objective of pursuing activism within Japan as DPRK citizens. The old United Democratic Front was disbanded (Pak 1992, 613; Yi, Yǒng-ch’ae 2010, 37–40). Pak was happy to hear that the new organization Chongryon had severed ties with Japanese politics, as he had previously felt uncomfortable with assisting Japanese communists in elections. But Chongryon’s sharp criticism of the United Democratic Front’s activities in the past created new problems. Former United Democratic Front members were required to “self-criticize,” as often practiced in organizations upholding MarxismLeninism. In the late 1950s, Pak, while continuing to teach at Korean middle and high schools, worked for a Korean research institute not associated with Chongryon, and this also added to Chongryon’s suspicions about him (Pak 1992, 614–615). These complex splinterings and overlappings of groups and identities in Cold War Japan would prove fertile ground for the development of an information regime set against the dominant information regime of the Japanese state and its alliance partners in East Asia.

Kyōsei Renkō as a key concept Pak found a turning point in 1960, when he was hired as a professor of history and geography at Korea University in Tokyo, a four-year institution of higher education established by Chongryon in 1958 for young zainichi men and women. Although the Japanese School Education Act classified Korea University as a miscellaneous vocational school, instead of a university, Korea

82  Chizuko T. Allen University represented the highest academic credentials for North Korea-aligned zainichi and provided Pak with financial stability and an academic environment that allowed him to teach and conduct research. In 1962, he served as a primary translator to translate into Japanese and publish Chōsen tsūshi (History of Korea), a survey of Korean history originally published in 1958 in Korean as Chosŏn t’ongsa by the Institute of History under North Korea’s Academy of Sciences in Pyongyang. Going over all the details of Korean history written by North Korean scholars, he thoroughly absorbed North Korea’s strugglecentered Marxist-Leninist historical viewpoints. This would form the bedrock of his kyōsei renkō counter-information regime. Pak wrote in 1965: As I relish my happiness as a citizen of DPRK, I thought of my fellow countrymen’s life in South Korea. Children who are in rags and unable to go to school roam on the street, and some of them shine shoes. Hearing about a child who waited for hours to receive a bowl of porridge in a soup kitchen in South Korea reminded me of my younger sister who wrote to me about her hardship as a single mother after her divorce ten years ago. We must never be controlled by imperialism again. I would like to help drive out the U.S. military from South Korea so I can reunite and live in peace with my parents and siblings who are in South Korea. (Pak 1965, 140) Pak upheld North Korea on a pedestal, believing that it was a successful socialist state that took good care of its citizens’ needs. In his view, South Korea, by contrast, was a failing state with deprived women and children under the yoke of the U.S. imperialism. Content to have the status of DPRK’s overseas citizen, he wondered what contributions he could make as a teacher and activist loyal to the DPRK. He also wished to shed light on the history of zainichi, which often had been the topic of discussions in meetings and classes at Korean schools (Pak 1992, 616). In May 1960, Pak was struck by an article published in the Japanese leftleaning monthly magazine Sekai, “Senjika ni okeru Chūgokujin kyōsei renkō no kiroku” (“A record of forced mobilization of Chinese in wartime Japan”). It was one of the earliest articles that called attention to imperial Japan’s abuse of Chinese laborers at Japanese coal mines and construction sites during the Pacific War. Pak attended study sessions held by those studying the subject and explored the topic of Japan’s wartime mobilization of non-Japanese workers. Convinced that imperial Japan’s mobilization of Koreans should be studied by a Korean scholar like himself, he began collecting documents and making research trips. His research results began to appear beginning in 1962. In that year, he wrote an essay titled “Taiheiyō sensōchū ni okeru Chōsenjin rōdōsha no kyōsei renkō nitsuite” (“Forced mobilization of Korean laborers in the Pacific War”) and had it printed as a brochure by his university department. In 1963, he and his university colleague Yi Chin-hŭi (1929–2012), a zainichi scholar with expertise in ancient history of Korea and Japan, together created a booklet regarding the

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization)  83 killing of Koreans in the aftermath of the Great Kantō Earthquake of 1923 in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the event (ibid.). Pak inherited from the 1960 article on Chinese laborers not only the topic of Japan’s wartime mobilization of non-Japanese laborers, but also its unusual terminology, kyōsei renkō, a combination of two common Japanese words, kyōsei (forced, forcible, compulsory) and renkō (taking or hauling away a person or persons). The word renkō has a rather narrow usage, as it is almost always used for taking criminals, or crime suspects, to the police or a police station, with a hint of disapproval of the criminal(s) or suspect(s) being transported. The group that studied wartime Chinese laborers used this word renkō, with all of its negative connotations, to depict their inescapable transfer to Japan, and added the word kyōsei to further emphasize the forcible nature of that act. The term kyōsei renkō should ordinarily refer to the extremely forceful hauling away of criminals so unruly that they could not otherwise be transported using the usual methods. Nearly 40,000 Chinese who were shipped to Japanese coal mines and construction companies by 1944, based on the Japanese cabinet decisions, were northern Chinese peasants affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party and became POWs through Japanese captures in the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) (Nishinarita 2010). Assuming that they were POWs and defenseless, the use of the term kyōsei renkō to refer to their transport was not inappropriate, although the phrasing was very awkward. In September 1960, four months after the article on Chinese laborers appeared, the magazine Sekai published another article that used the term kyōsei renkō. This article, by Fujishima Udai (1924–1997), a Japanese poet and journalist who specialized in Japan-Korea issues, was titled “Chōsen to Nihonjin: Kyokutō no kinchō to Nichi-Bei teikokushugi” (“Korea and Japanese: political tension in the Far East and Japanese and American imperialism”), and had a section titled “Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kiroku” (“A record of forced mobilization of Koreans”). Fujishima’s use of the term kyōsei renkō most likely came from the earlier Sekai article, and he may not have thought deeply about the difference between Chinese and Korean workers in wartime Japan. Korean workers in wartime Japan were not POWs or criminals, but simply Japanese subjects from the Korean Peninsula. Even if Chinese POWs and Korean laborers worked at the same sites and did similar work, their legal status in the wartime Japanese empire could not have been more different. As Koreans from Korea had all the rights of Japanese citizens living in the peninsula, Korean laborers would not have tolerated being dragooned any more than their Japanese counterparts would. Fujishima’s narrative of wartime Korean workers was brief and seemingly insignificant, but his reference to their mobilization as kyōsei renkō set a precedent for Pak’s work. Pak’s article “Taiheiyō sensōji ni okeru Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō” (“Forced mobilization of Korean laborers during the Pacific War”) appeared in February 1965 in Rekishi Kenkyū (Historical studies), an academic journal published by Osaka Gakugei University. Three months later, his monograph Kiroku (A record of forced mobilization of Koreans) was published. Pak clearly made strategic use of the term kyōsei renkō, which ordinarily meant the aggressive manhandling of

84  Chizuko T. Allen criminals or POWs being forcibly transported from one location to another. By using the term to refer to the mobilization of innocent and defenseless Koreans, Pak let it highlight the aggressiveness and violence of the haulers, and of the Japanese empire by extension, evoking emotions of disapproval and reproach. The term kyōsei renkō, now with the shifted meaning of condemnation of the assailant, dotted Pak’s narratives throughout his book. The Chongryon leadership did not understand the significance of Kiroku, nor did it appreciate Pak’s effort to write a history for the benefit of the zainichi and Koreans as a whole. Much to his surprise, the Chongryon propaganda department criticized Pak for publishing without sufficient prior consultation. Chongryon, according to Pak, had many guidelines for members to abide by, and its restrictions on publications made it practically impossible for members to publish in the period from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Pak’s relationship with Chongryon did not improve in the remainder of the 1960s, and his poor health made him decide to resign from Korea University in 1970. Although his name remained on the Chongryon list of membership, he withdrew from all Chongryon activities in 1971. He devoted the rest of his life to the historical study of zainichi and modern relations between Korea and Japan (Pak 1992, 617–620).

Zainichi Korean identity as victims of imperialist aggressions Pak’s monograph Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kiroku comprises four chapters: (1) Korean migration to Japan from 1910 to 1938; (2) kyōsei renkō from 1939 to 1945; (3) the stories of seven Korean men based on Pak’s interviews; (4) Pak’s visits to former work sites of Korean laborers such as coal mines, metal mines, and construction sites. The book also contains appendices and reference lists. Besides these components are his Foreword and Introduction as well as his Conclusion and Afterword, critically important to understanding his framework. His Afterword notes that Kiroku has inconsistent writing styles and overlapping contents because its parts are from his prior articles and speeches: the Introduction came from his May 1964 speech and Chapters II–IV came from his articles published in three different journals in 1964 and 1965. It appears that he added the Foreword, Chapter I, and the Conclusion to his existing works just before the book’s publication. The three-page Foreword sets the political tone for the entire book with Pak’s strong expression of antagonism toward Japan and the United States. He attacks “imperialism” twelve times in those three pages, and he specifies “imperialism” as “Japanese imperialism” and “American imperialism” over half of those dozen times. The term “Japanese monopoly capitalism” is also mentioned more than once to refer to Japanese economic dominance. He says: We Koreans suffered from all sorts of oppression and exploitation by Japanese imperialism in the past, and thus our hatred of imperialism has reached the marrow of our bones. (Pak 1965, 2–3)

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization)  85 Pak reveals the primary purpose of the book at the end of the Foreword: I would like to shed light on the true identity of the imperialist aggressors by showing the zainichi’s hardship and the wartime kyōsei renkō of Koreans in particular. I hope this book helps protect the democratic rights of the zainichi and foster true friendship and coalition between the Korean and the Japanese peoples through removing any theoretical remains left by imperialist aggressors. (Pak 1965, 3–4) Pak’s goal is to establish the zainichi identity in the context of Japanese imperialism, particularly in the suffering of the Korean people under imperialism. He thus approaches the topic of their wartime labor mobilization as the prime example of that suffering, attempting to repudiate the existing Japanese narratives in the process. In his Conclusion, Pak mentions his success in creating this counter-information ­ regime: As discussed, the zainichi are the Koreans who were either driven out of Korea by the Japanese imperialists’ takeover, or forcefully brought (kyōsei renkō) to Japan by the imperialists’ need in the Pacific War, as well as their descendants. (Pak 1965, 326) This book has shown how Japanese imperialism proceeded to colonize Korea in the past, and what despairing state of slavery the Korean people, particularly the zainichi Korean, consequently fell in. (Pak 1965, 331) He concludes that imperialism reduced the Korean people to slaves, and that this was particularly so for the zainichi, the Koreans who were driven to Japan as a result of Japanese takeover and war preparations. The zainichi are placed at the pinnacle of the Korean people’s suffering as they were the foremost example of victims resulting from Japanese imperialism. Pak does not refrain from expressing his political views in Kiroku regarding the current relationships between Japan and the two Koreas as well as U.S. involvement in the region. According to him, the problem of imperialist aggressions did not end with Japan’s defeat in WWII. Many Japanese, particularly capitalists, retained their ambitions to control Korea, with no remorse about their past crimes. To Pak, the corrupt state of the Japanese government is obvious because, instead of recognizing the North Korean government, it forged diplomatic ties with South Korea under the regime of President Park Chung Hee (1917–1979), supported by American imperialism. After subjugating Japan in the wake of WWII, the United States took over the legacy of Japanese colonial imperialism in the region of East Asia and incorporated the Japanese aggressors

86  Chizuko T. Allen in the process. American imperialism has been pushing the Japan-South Korea bilateral talks to proceed and negotiate a normalization treaty since 1952, Pak asserts. He says that the bilateral talks, finalizing the treaty at the time of Kiroku’s publication, represent nothing other than Japan’s renewed attempt at the economic invasion of Korea, just as the 1905 Protectorate Treaty, which Japanese imperialists had forced on Korea, facilitated Japan’s economic takeover before (Pak 1965, 44–45).

Narrative of wartime Japan’s forcible mobilization of Korean workers The highlights of Kiroku’s chapters are as follows. In Chapter I, Pak contends that the migration of Korean workers to Japan between 1910, the year of Japan’s annexation of Korea, and 1938, the year before Japan’s war mobilization programs began, resulted from Japan’s takeover of Korean land. The Korean population in Japan continued to grow, from 2,500 in 1911 to 30,000 in 1920, 300,000 in 1930, and 800,000 in 1938. Morita Yoshio (1910–1992), who worked for the Government-General of Korea until 1945 and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in postwar Japan, published a seminal article in 1955 that explained Korean migrations to Japan between 1910 and 1945. According to him, Korea’s rapid population increase after the Japanese annexation led to surplus population particularly in southern farming villages, giving rise to increasing wage workers in Korea. In the meantime, Japan experienced labor shortage resulting from the growth of industries and thus provided job opportunities for the Koreans. In short, Morita concludes, it was push and pull factors that made Korean workers leave their villages for work in Japan (Morita 1955). Pak objects to Morita’s theory and criticizes him for “ignoring the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, or imperialists and colonial subjects.” In Pak’s view, Korea, a poor but peaceful agrarian society, was absorbed into Japan’s capitalist economy through the latter’s political takeover. The land survey conducted by the Government-General of Korea in 1910–1918, and the inflow of Japanese farmers, stripped Korean farmers of land and reduced them to tenants and soon wage workers, or the “proletariat,” due to their inability to pay high tenant fees. These displaced Korean farmers were ultimately compelled to leave their ancestral homeland and roam in distant lands in Japan and Manchuria for their survival. On Pak’s analysis, then, Koreans did not voluntarily migrate to Japan, but were simply forced out of Korea (Pak 1965, 21–22). During the economic boom of the WWI (1914–1918) era, Japanese capitalism, in need of cheap labor from Korea, used Japanese labor brokers, Pak argues, who lured Korean workers with lies. Koreans from rural farming villages were placed in menial jobs in Japan with low wages and poor working conditions, such as in the construction and manufacturing industries. These jobs, Pak says, were avoided by Japanese workers. In the post-WWI economic depression of the 1920s, many Koreans in Japan lost their jobs and became destitute (Pak 1965, 21, 33). As targets of ethnic discrimination, Korean workers received lower

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization)  87 wages and even lost a good part of their wages to middlemen. They endured the lowest standard of living, in terms of meals, housing, and other living conditions, in Japan (Pak 1965, 36–37). When they courageously protested the low wages and poor working conditions, Pak claims, they were tortured, killed, or simply left to die (Pak 1965, 40–41). Pak’s Chapter II deals with the migration of Korean workers to Japan as a result of the Japanese government’s wartime mobilization programs. It is known that the government programs of Korean workers’ mobilization emerged in three stages. In April 1938, following the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Konoe Fumimaro cabinet of Japan had the Imperial Diet pass the National General Mobilization Law to facilitate the wartime mobilization of workers. A year later, the National Conscription Order was instituted, and many Japanese workers were mobilized to work in target industries directly under the supervision of the state. The National Conscription Order, however, did not apply to the Korean Peninsula due largely to the opposition of the GovernmentGeneral of Korea. Officials in the Government-General offices knew that any surplus labor available in southern villages must be sent to northern Korea, where heavy industries and mining had developed and were in full swing to support the war on the continent. Some officials were also aware of poor working conditions at Japanese mines and thus were hesitant to send Koreans there (Tonomura 2012, 44). Furthermore, farmers in southern Korea were unprepared to work as industrial workers (Palmer 2013, 140). For all these reasons, the Government-General of Korea, instead of conscription, instituted a program of company-directed recruitment for Japanese coal and metal mine companies to recruit Korean workers with government oversight beginning in September 1939. The Government-General increased its involvement from February 1942 by launching a program of government-mediated recruitment, which assigned mobilization quotas to Korean provinces. Thus, Korean workers applied to jobs at Japanese coal mines, construction companies, and factories through the administrative offices of counties and villages from September 1939 through August 1944. Only at a very late stage of the war, in September 1944, did labor conscription take effect in Korea, with Korean men conscripted for work in Japan and Sakhalin for seven months until March 1945. After this date, labor conscription across the Korea Strait became impossible due to U.S. naval blockades and aerial minelaying (Morita 1955, 18). According to Pak, however, both the company-directed recruitment and the government-mediated recruitment programs did not promote voluntary applications, but worked as disguised forms of kyōsei renkō (Pak 1965, 48–49). The Government-General of Korea, with numeric goals each year, assigned quotas to lower administrative offices, and these units, in turn, worked closely with the local police, neighborhood associations, and private labor brokers to secure Korean workers. Local officials, Pak alleged, often resorted to forcibly hauling Korean men from the streets, paddy fields, and individual homes. Although the actual number of Korean workers shipped to Japan totaled 720,000 from 1939 to 1945, the Government-General’s recruitment goals were larger: 97,000 in

88  Chizuko T. Allen 1940, 100,000 in 1941, 130,000 in 1942, 200,000 in 1943, and 400,000 in 1944 for a total of 927,000. Nearly half of the Koreans taken to Japan worked in coal mines and related companies, Pak asserts (Pak 1965, 49–63). In Pak’s narrative, testimonials by the Japanese who were involved in mobilizing Koreans confess that they acted as if they had been slave hunters, forcefully capturing targeted healthy Korean males (Pak 1965, 71). Chapter IV describes Pak’s 1964 research trips that explored the Japanese mines and construction sites where Korean laborers had worked from the late 1930s to 1945. He narrates stories of abused and tortured Korean laborers, told by local elders, and also describes his encounter with unclaimed urns full of deceased Korean workers’ ashes, kept at temples near the coal mines. During these trips, he interviewed former Korean laborers and later recorded seven of their stories in Chapter III. The stories related in Chapter III feature recruitment fraud, poor working conditions, low wages, workplace violence, and escape before the end of the twoyear contract. The first story, for instance, is told by Kim Sŏn-yŏng, a 40-yearold Korean man living in Bibai city, northeast of Sapporo in Hokkaido, Japan’s northern main island. According to Kim, when in Seoul in 1942, he agreed to work for a Japanese construction company for 5 yen a day, or 2,000 yen for two years. When he arrived in Bibai, Hokkaido, together with 91 other Koreans, he realized that he had been recruited to be a coal miner. His protest was quickly silenced by policemen nearby. The coal mine employed thousands of Koreans, who were divided into several teams, and Kim was placed on a team of 500 Koreans. They worked in underground shafts from sunrise to sunset, and were locked in dormitories at night and on no-work days a few times a month. Although his wage turned out to be 3 yen a day rather than 5 yen, he received only 1 or 2 yen each month after expenses for his shoes, food, cigarettes, and bedding were subtracted from his pay. In 1944, a big explosion in the shafts killed about 100 workers, including 80 Koreans. When Kim’s subsequent escape attempt failed, he was jailed and tortured for ten days. In the fall of 1944, he managed to run away eastward to Obihiro, Hokkaido and there met other Koreans, who helped him find forestry work in south-central Hokkaido. Kim visited Bibai soon after Korea’s liberation in August 1945, but his former coworkers were nowhere to be found. According to Pak, Kim learned that over 400 of the 500 Koreans on his team had either died or run away before the war ended (Pak 1965, 108–110). How did Pak’s narratives of Japanese imperialism as perpetual aggressor and exploiter emerge? What outside influence and inspiration did he receive in the formulation of this information regime? Pak answers this question by including in his Appendices a 30-page-long statement released on March 20, 1964 by Pyongyang’s North Korean Bar Association, a government unit responsible for communicating DPRK’s legal stance to the international community. The statement discusses the entire 35 years of Japanese administration over Korea as a series of brutal tortures and massacres of the innocent Korean people, creatively depicting the Japanese suppression of the March First Independence Movement of 1919 as including the chopping off of Korean nationalists’ heads and then

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization)  89 displaying them on the streets, nailing innocent Koreans to crosses set up on the streets till they died, dragging naked women under arrest, and killing people by tearing their bodies into pieces (Pak 1965, 269). The Japanese continued to oppress Koreans brutally in the 1920s and 1930s, according to the statement, by slaughtering thousands of laborers, farmers, and students who rose up and demanded their rights (Pak 1965, 271). The Japanese exploitation of the Korean economy was so severe, the DPRK government complained, that North Korea and its people paid indescribable sacrifices for post-WWII economic reconstruction. The economic loss caused by the Japanese empire allegedly amounted to several hundred billion yen (Pak 1965, 281). The 1964 document by the North Korean Bar Association uses the term kyōsei renkō in a way identical to Pak’s usage of term: Another crime of Japanese imperialism against the Korean people in the colonial era was its kyōsei renkō of numerous Korean workers, followed by its oppression, exploitation, and massacre of the workers. [. . .] The Korean people who lost their means for living became a perpetual source of cheap labor serving Japan’s monopoly capitalism. Japanese imperialism expanded during WWI and searched desperately for cheap labor. It viciously drove Koreans to Japan through lies, placation, and threats. Especially during its continental expansion and the Pacific War, Japanese imperialism forcibly conscripted a large number of Koreans to resolve its lack of manpower. In order to haul Korean workers to Japan, the imperialists barged in farmers’ homes at night and loaded abducted young men from fields on trucks in daytime. (Pak 1965, 284–285) The statement expresses that the Japanese, because of their ethnicity-based discrimination, made Korean workers work like beasts for 12–15 hours a day, placing them in jobs with the worst working conditions, such as coal mines, civil work projects, and the construction of military installations (Pak 1965, 284– 285). The statement also accuses American imperialism of reviving Japan for use in a larger scheme after WWII and promoting the Japan-South Korea talks as a tool for both American and Japanese imperialist ambitions over the peninsula. The 1965 Japan-South Korea treaty, according to the North Korean statement, would serve the imperialists just as the 1905 Japan-Korea Protectorate Treaty had (Pak 1965, 289–290). In sum, the statement by the North Korean Bar Association closely parallels Pak’s assertions and even coincides in the use of the term kyōsei renkō. Did the North Korean Bar Association copy the term kyōsei renkō from Pak’s pamphlet printed at Korea University in Tokyo? North Korea’s use of the term has not been found from documents before this 1964 statement, but similar expressions, according to Chung Daekyun, Emeritus Professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University, appeared in North Korea’s official newspaper the Rodong Sinmun as early as in 1959 (Chung 2004, 115). It is possible that Pak and North Korean writers

90  Chizuko T. Allen influenced each other in creating narratives of Japanese oppression of Koreans in general and forced mobilization of Korean laborers in particular. The information regime emerging in Japan and across the Korea Strait in the late 1950s and into the 1960s and afterward had discernible nodes of production, but it also arose organically as part of a concerted effort to subvert the information regime of Cold War East Asian alliance politics.

Pak’s flaws and his critics There is no doubt that Pak began his research not with an open mind, but with the assumption of Japan’s forcible mobilization, kyōsei renkō, and other abuse of Koreans and gathered information to support this assumption. Naturally, he selected information that fit his hypothesis and ignored information that did not. Additionally, Pak does not define or explain kyōsei renkō, imperialism, or monopoly capitalism, extremely important terms that sustain his narratives. Kim Yŏng-dal (1948–2000), a younger zainichi scholar and participant in the Association for the Research of Zainichi Activism History that Pak established, points out that Pak continued using kyōsei renkō as an intuitive term for its emotional appeal to the public, without defining the term for academic usage. Kim is also critical of the Japanese academic circles that accepted this intuitive term as if it meant specific historical occurrences (Kim 2003, 119–120). These two problems, the selective suppression of information and the intuitive and fluid use of terms, created many problems in Pak’s study, as pointed out by Kim and other scholars who followed. Pak’s tendency to exaggerate given facts is also a major cause for concern. This tendency has been criticized by Kim Yŏng-dal and Chung Daekyun. Perhaps the most important exaggeration that affects Pak’s thesis concerns the composition of the zainichi. According to Kim, contrary to Pak’s assertion, most of the Korean labor conscripts and recruits who had arrived in Japan on the wartime mobilization programs returned home to Korea as soon as the Pacific War ended, and only a small number of them remained in Japan. By contrast, many of those who had come to work in Japan on their own and settled in Japan before and during the war had remained in postwar Japan and became the zainichi. These zainichi were joined by South Korean refugees who fled the chaos of their country to Japan before and during the Korean War (Kim 2003, 21). Kim also disapproves Pak’s uncritical borrowing of figures found in secondary sources. While Pak’s Kiroku simply adopted unreliable figures for Korean migration, his 1973 monograph on the general topic of Japanese colonial rule, supposedly more academic in nature, used the wrong figures derived from a Korean scholar’s work. This resulted in noting the number of Korean workers who arrived in Japan in 1945 to be 330,000, a large inflation considering that there was no transportation between Korea and Japan after March 1945 (Kim 2003, 124–132; Pak 1973, 33). Likewise, Chung Daekyun points out Pak’s inappropriate inserting of unrelated photos in the first pages of his Kiroku. Several of these old black-and-white photos

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization)  91 show gruesome images of bloody bodies and heads apparently from the 1920s and 1930s, with little relevance to Korean migration to Japan. Chung wonders if Pak’s purpose was to simply impress Japanese cruelty on the readers (Chung 2004, 145–146). There are others outside of Japan who have expressed serious doubts about Pak’s work. For example, Yi U-yŏn, a researcher at the Naksungdae Institute of Economic Research in Seoul, challenges Pak’s information regime-generating narrative that Japanese authorities discriminated against Korean workers by intentionally placing them in coal mines and other jobs of poor working conditions and paying them lower wages. Taking a close look at the data on Korean coal mine workers in Japan included in the volumes of source materials that Pak compiled and published in the 1970s, Yi finds that there was no ethnicity-based discrimination in working conditions between the late 1930s and 1945. Korean workers, who were generally young and strong, simply filled the vacancies created when young Japanese miners were drafted into the military in wartime Japan. Because the Korean miners lacked experience, they often worked alongside Japanese miners who had much experience (Yi U-yŏn 2015, 15–16). Yi also finds Pak’s assertion about lower wages for Korean miners to be inaccurate. According to Yi’s finding, coal miners’ wages were determined not by ethnicity, but by productivity, which, in turn, depended on experience and skills. What Pak ignored in his narrative is that, in part because Korean laborers filled vacancies when veteran Japanese miners left for the war, 60 percent of the Japanese miners included in the statistics had over two years of experience, while only ten percent of Korean miners had two years of experience. This naturally resulted in higher wages for Japanese and lower wages for Korean miners (Yi U-yŏn 2017, 71; 2018, 36–39). A 2012 book titled Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō (Forced mobilization of Koreans), authored by Tonomura Masaru, professor at Tokyo University, introduces divergent information and discussions on the subject despite its title being nearly identical to that of Pak Kyǒng-sik’s ­ Kiroku. Tonomura, for instance, refers to a Japanese coal mine company recruiter’s account that he was enthusiastically welcomed in southern Korean villages in 1939 because of the region’s drought in that year. About two hundred Koreans applied for ten job openings in each village that he visited (Tonomura 2012, 61). According to Tonomura, the delay in labor conscription in Korea may be viewed as a discrimination because the government gave benefits to the families of conscripted workers. He also thinks that the government-mediated recruitment in Korea was often just as forceful as the labor conscription in Japan proper (Tonomura 2012, 149). Tonomura confesses that he began his research with the expectation of reconfirming Pak’s assertion of Japanese coercion, appalling working conditions, and governmental responsibility, but soon found out that the sources did not always support these assertions. Tonomura remarks that academic work, unlike propaganda, must not be based on the cherry-picking of facts (Tonomura 2017, 53). Kimura Kan, professor at Kobe University, emphasizes the complexity of recruitment processes and the issue of perception gaps. According to him, Korean

92  Chizuko T. Allen workers understood the government-mediated recruitment to be strictly mandatory, contrary to the government guidelines and records. Korean villagers may not have distinguished general recruitment from the government-mediated recruitment because of the power of middlemen and recruiters (Kimura 2005, 339–341). Brandon Palmer, professor at Coastal Carolina University, notes that local officials and policemen at the village level often pressured young men into agreeing to apply for work. The local officials were not the only ones to be blamed as Japanese companies used both their own recruiters and Korean recruiting agents, who were paid commissions for gathering Korean workers. Bribery of local officials and threatening of recruits were probably commonplace (Palmer 2013, 141–142). It is possible that coercive recruitment took place not because of government policies, but due to the personal greed of recruitment agents and lower-level officials. Nishioka Tsutomu, professor at the Institute of Moralogy and Reitaku University, Japan, shows through statistical data the importance of Korean workers’ voluntary migration that preceded and exceeded wartime mobilization. As already shown by Pak, the number of Koreans living in Japan reached 800,000 by 1938, before wartime mobilization began. The Japanese government in fact restricted Korean migration, especially during the Japanese recession in the 1920s. According to Nishioka, between 1925 and 1937, 164,000 Korean workers and their families were stopped at Pusan Harbor from traveling to Japan due to the lack of required documents, such as job certificates. Between 1933 and 1938, over a million Koreans submitted applications at their local government offices to go to Japan, but only about 40 percent were approved. Korean workers’ voluntary migration continued even after the wartime mobilization began in 1939. Between 1939 and 1941, 140,000 Korean workers arrived in Japan through the mobilization programs, while 440,000 additional Koreans moved to Japan voluntarily. Between 1942 and 1945, almost all of the 520,000 Koreans who arrived in Japan did so as part of mobilization programs, but 220,000 ran away from their designated jobs to work elsewhere in Japan. Surveys at the time reveal that a large portion of mobilized Koreans, from the beginning, intended to run away and seek other employment with better wages and conditions. Consequently, out of two million Koreans living in Japan in August 1945, only about 323,000 Koreans were employed at locations designated for mobilized workers, and 113,000 Koreans were soldiers and civilian military personnel stationed in Japan. The remaining 1.6 million Koreans in Japan were workers employed outside of the mobilization programs and their families. This demonstrates the failure of the mobilization programs, as well as Korean workers’ attempt to make the most of whatever opportunities were available and to seek a better life in Japan (Nishioka 2018). Although not directly challenging Pak’s work, many scholars, after studying primary sources, reject the black-and-white paradigm of Japanese exploitation vs. Korean victimhood and/or resistance. For instance, historian of East Asia and international educator Edwin H. Gragert’s study clarified that the Japanese land

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization)  93 survey of 1910–1918 brought about little change to landownership in Korea, invalidating Pak’s and the prevalent Korean argument that Government-General officials stole land from uninformed Korean farmers. Gragert and many other scholars today demonstrate that Korean farmers and landowners lost their land and became tenants as they defaulted on loans in the economic depressions of the 1920s and 1930s (Gragert 1994). Capitalism introduced by Japan transformed Korean society, but it did not impoverish all Koreans, a conclusion which runs contrary to Pak’s assertations. Some Koreans became prosperous businessmen in colonial Korea, as shown by Carter J. Eckert, professor at Harvard University (Eckert 1991). Pak’s information regime was constructed through an at best vigorous streamlining of the historical data. Compounding the confusion surrounding the kyōsei renkō narrative is the well-known fact in Japan that many zainichi men and women became successful in the arts, business, and sports beginning in prewar Japan and continuing through the Cold War. Kang Chol-hwan, a North Korean defector and author in South Korea, relates that his paternal grandfather and grandmother separately migrated from Korea’s Cheju Island to Japan in the early 1930s. While his grandmother worked in a textile factory, his grandfather worked in a jewelry shop and soon became a successful jeweler. They married in Kyoto and enjoyed a wealthy lifestyle until 1960, when they moved to North Korea. Thus did the information regime created in part by Pak and other disaffected Korean residents of Cold War Japan have immediate consequences. In fact, over 90,000 ­ Chongryon-affiliated zainichi, along with several thousand Japanese spouses, moved to North Korea beginning in 1959, in response to Chongryon’s urge for the zainichi to “return home” to North Korea. What awaited them in North Korea, however, was not the “socialist paradise” touted by Chongryon, but poverty, discrimination, and even life in prison camps in many cases, including that of Kang’s family (Kang 2001, 12–24). Chung Daekyun suspects that the zainichi who had settled in North Korea made their suffering known to their relatives in Japan by 1965. Chung criticizes Pak’s hypocrisy in continuing to sing the praises of North Korea—that is, in continuing to foster a counterfactual Cold War information regime— even after it had become clear that the zainichi who moved to North Korea were in dire straits (Chung 2004, 161).

Concluding remarks Pak Kyǒng-sik migrated to Japan with his parents as a young child from rural southern Korea in the late 1920s and received an imperial Japanese education. Following the Japanese empire’s defeat in the Pacific War in 1945 and Korea’s subsequent liberation, which resulted in the creation of the two opposing Koreas, Pak, now a grown man, sought to reclaim his Korean identity as a zainichi, an ethnic Korean resident in postwar Japan. Through his study and teaching at Korean schools and Korea University associated with the North Koreaaligned Chongryon, Pak came to see history through the lens of North Korea’s

94  Chizuko T. Allen nationalist historical paradigm of struggles between imperialism and the Korean people, rooted in Marxism-Leninism. The influence of this meta-information regime, North Korean-style MarxismLeninism, led Pak to spin off a Cold War information regime tailored to postwar Japan. Placing the zainichi in a scheme of dichotomy between Japanese imperialism and exploited Koreans, the assailant and the victim, was a challenge, however, because many of the zainichi were Koreans who had willingly left Korea in search of economic opportunities in capitalist-imperialist Japan, just like Pak’s parents, and their descendants, including Pak himself. When judged from the black-and-white viewpoint of North Korean nationalism, the position of the zainichi was ambivalent at best, and Pak was considered “half Japanese” as he had received a prewar Japanese education, used a Japanese name, and even taught Japanese children in wartime Japan. To help establish his own Korean identity, Pak set out to uplift the zainichi by placing them on the forefront of the Korean people who had suffered from imperialism. Repeatedly mentioning kyōsei renkō, the term originally referring to the transport of Chinese POW laborers to Japan, Pak depicted all prewar and wartime Korean workers in Japan as victims of forced mobilization and exploitation by Japanese imperialism and concluded that the zainichi today were the descendants of these victims. In his attempt to depict all Koreans in Japan as victims of imperialism, Pak selectively used information at the expense of accuracy and objectivity. Ironically, factual information proved an obstacle to the creation of a Cold War East Asian information regime. Despite its many academic shortcomings, Pak’s Kiroku became an inspiration to a group of Japanese intellectuals beginning in the 1980s (Chung 2004, 120). Hayashi Eidai (1933–2017), a Japanese non-fiction writer, for instance, embraced Pak’s use of the term kyōsei renkō, and began publishing non-fiction books on the theme of prewar Japan’s exploitation of Koreans. Yoshida Seiji (1913–2000), another Japanese writer, began writing fictional tales in novel form in the late 1970s about his having rounded up Cheju Island women to be used in Japan’s wartime military brothels. Yoshida even professed his alleged crime of kyōsei renkō in front of Koreans in the 1980s. Pak’s information regime, itself an offshoot of Cold War North Korean propaganda, had taken on a life of its own. The power of Pak’s narratives became even more prevalent in the 1990s, as many writers and scholars in Japan and South Korea subscribed to the assumption of kyōsei renkō when dealing with the topic of “comfort women,” or women who had worked in Japan’s overseas military brothels in the Pacific War. The term Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō appeared in the standard Japanese dictionary Kōjien beginning in 1991. South Korean scholars embraced Pak’s concept of kyōsei renkō, although the Korean version of the term, kangje yŏnhaeng, is not as popular, as Korean-speaking scholars prefer other variants such as kangje tongwŏn (kyōsei dōin in Japanese) for forced mobilization.4 Pak’s information regime, built on the North Korean paradigm of imperialist abuse, has become an integral part of South Korea’s nationalist narratives against Japanese colonial rule.

Kyōsei Renkō (forced mobilization)  95

Notes 1 Ken C. Kawashima refers to Pak’s collection of primary documents relating to Koreans in interwar Japan, published in 1975–1976, as being indispensable for his research (Kawashima 2009, 23). 2 A Korean translation of Pak’s book Kiroku was published in South Korea in 2008, 43 years after the publication in Japanese. The unusually long wait was probably due to the book’s praise for North Korea. Despite the absence of Pak’s Kiroku in Korean translation, the term kangje yŏnhaeng was well circulated in South Korea before 2008. See the title of Chŏng Hye-jŏng’s ­ publication on Korean wartime workers (Chŏng 2006). 3 The quote is from Pak’s 1984 speech about his life as a zainichi, recorded in his publication commemorating his 70th birthday (Pak 1992, 609). Information on his early life is found in his multiple speeches from the 1980s, compiled in the same book. 4 See the title of Chŏng’s 2013 book.

Bibliography Chŏng, Hye-jŏng. ­ 2006. Chosŏnin kangje yŏnhaeng kangje nodong. Seoul: Sŏnin. ———. 2013. Chinyong kongch’ul kangje yŏnhaeng kangje tongwŏn. Seoul: Sŏnin. Chung, Daekyun (Tei, Daikin). 2004. Zainichi kyōsei renkō no shinwa. Tokyo: Bungeishunjū. Eckert, Carter J. 1991. Offspring of Empire: The Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876–1945. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Gragert, Edwin H. 1994. Landownership under Colonial Rule: Korea’s Japanese Experience, 1900–1935. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Kang, Chol-hwan. 2001. The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. New York: Basic Books. Kawashima, Ken C. 2009. The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kim, Yǒng-dal. ­ 2003. Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kenkyū (Kim Yǒng-dal ­ chosakushū 2). Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Kimura, Kan. 2005. “Sōryokusen taiseiki no Chōsen hantō ni kansuru ichi kōsatsu.” In Nikkan rekishi kyōdō kenkyū hōkokusho, ed. Nikkan rekishi kyōdō kenkyū iinkai, 3: 321–342. Nikkan bunka kōryū kikin (The Japan Korea Cultural Foundation) www. jkcf.or.jp/projects/2005/18003/? (www.jkcf.or.jp/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/ ­ 2019/11/07-0j_j.pdf) Accessed 20 October 2019. Morita, Yoshio. 1955. “Zainichi chōsenjin shogū no suii to genjō,” Hōmu kenkyū hōkokusho 43: 3. Reprinted in Morita, Yoshio, Sūji ga kataru zainichi Kankoku Chōsenjin no rekishi. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 1996. Morris- Suzuki, Tessa. 2009. “Freedom and Homecoming: Narratives of Migration in the Repatriation of Zainichi Koreans to North Korea.” In Diaspora without Homeland: Being Koreans in Japan, eds. Sonia Ryang and John Lie, 39–61. Berkeley: University of California Press. Nishinarita, Yutaka. 2010. “Chūgokujin kyōsei renkō seisaku no seiritsukatei.” Hitotsubashi daigaku nenpō Keizaigaku kenkyū 42: 43–104. Nishioka, Tsutomu. 2018. “The Reality of the Mobilization of Koreans During World War II: An Analysis Based on Statistics and Written Records.” Japan Review 2:2 (Fall): 53–60. Pak, Kyŏng-sik. ­ 1965. Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō no kiroku. Tokyo: Miraisha.

96  Chizuko T. Allen ———. 1973. Nihon teikokushugi no Chōsen shihai II. Tokyo: Aoki Shoten. ———. 1992. Zainichi Chōsenjin, kyōsei renkō, minzoku mondai: Koki o kinen shite. Tokyo: Sanichi Shobō. Palmer, Brandon. 2013. Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan’s War, 1937–1945. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Tonomura, Masaru. 2012. Chōsenjin kyōsei renkō. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. ———. 2017. “Ianfu o meguru rekishi kenkyū o fukameru tameni.” In Taiwa no tameni: Teikoku no ianfu to iu toi o hiraku, eds. Asano Toyomi, Ogura Kizō, and Nishi Masahiko, 49–58. Tokyo: Kurein. ­ Yi, U-yŏn. 2015. Chŏnsigi Ilbon ŭroŭi nomudongwŏn kwa t’an’gwang ŭi nodong hwan’gyŏng. Working Paper December 2015. Naksungdae Institute of Economic Research. www.naksung.re.kr/work/work1?seq=4950. Accessed 10 October 2019. ———. 2017. “Senjiki Nihon e rōmudōin sareta Chōsenjin kōfu (sekitan kinzoku) no chingin to minzokukan no kakusa.” Enerugī kenkyū: sekitan o chūshin toshite 32: 63–87. ——— (Lee, Woo-Youn). 2018. “Korean Coal and Metal Mineworkers Mobilized in Wartime Japan: The Question of Wages and Ethnicity-based Disparities.” Japan Review 1:3 (Spring): 26–59. Yi, Yŏng-ch’ae. 2010. “Sengo Nicchō kankei no shokikeiseikatei no bunseki.” Ritsumeikan hōgaku 333/334 (5/6th, 2010): 33–58. “Zainichi dōhōshi kenkyū no daiichininsha Boku Keishoku (Pak Kyŏng-sik) shi no gyōseki o kenshō.” Mindan Shinbun 19 February 2018. Mindan. www.mindan.org/ old/front/newsDetail4edf.html?category=0&newsid=24273 Accessed 20 October 2019.

5

The effect of Chinese communism on an Australian in British Malaya, 1950–1971 Escaping ideology by nearly “going native” Anders Corr1

Introduction Chinese communism is an information regime, defined in this case as an organizing belief system or episteme, that had a profound influence on the history of British Malaya.2 This influence was applied intermediately through military means, as well as directly through ideology. Chinese communism, directed from China, inspired an insurgency that would come into a direct ideological conflict with British imperialism and colonialism, as well as the military power of the British army. The British labeled this insurgency “The Emergency,” and dated it 1948–1960. Coming shortly after two world wars weakened Britain, the efforts of the United States, the Soviet Union, and China to replace the old European empires with their own visions of global order hastened the retreat of the British Empire from Malaya and elsewhere. This clash of information regimes and negotiation of conflicting epistemes on the ground are well illustrated by the experiences of Tom Nunan, an Australian tin miner working for Austral Malay Tin Limited (AMT) in Malaya from 1950 to 1971. Toward the end of Nunan’s stay, the company was taken over by Chinese and Malay business leaders who continued purchasing land for mining. Nunan’s experience illustrates how political power transferred largely to Malays, who, after British imperialism, a Japanese invasion, and Chinese communist insurgency, reclaimed their country as their own, thus adding an additional complicating factor to the informational clash of Chinese communism and British colonialism. British colonialism is typically represented by American, Soviet, and Chinese information regimes as racist and orientalist, both in terms of the government officials and businessmen who were the faces of colonial power, as well as in the legal and social structures that reified racism institutionally. While many elements of colonialism in various locales and times were undeniably racist and orientalist, examining the first-person accounts of some colonials suggests that the information regime of “British colonialism” was non-monolithic and

98  Anders Corr non-continuous, that some of the structures being instituted were attempts at racial diversity and political inclusion with the aim of eventual independence, that Europeans were not the only colonizers, and that racism afflicted not only Europeans, but the colonized and other colonial ethnicities as well. As seen from the vantage of Nunan, the Emergency was based on an ideology of Chinese racism or resistance against Europeans, rather than communism. Nunan thus problematizes the Chinese communist attempt to portray the British as uniquely racist and an enemy to other ethnicities in addition to the Chinese communists, namely Indians, Malays, and non-Communist Chinese who did not always see the British in Malaya as monolithically and negatively racist. In this clash of information regimes, we can come to see with more clarity the reality of events and actors in their various informational, ideological, racial, and nationalistic milieux. Nunan was a colonial who began his career as a young and admiring orientalist who enjoyed the advantages of his race qua an information regime of European superiority. Over time, however, Nunan came to realize the shaky social foundations of his relatively junior status within the British Empire or Commonwealth, given his subaltern Australian identity. He proceeded toward “going native,” that is, identifying closely with Malay hunters, fishermen, and boatsmen, to the point of bringing his young family into a precarious existence in the bush. Toward the end of his stay in what had then become an independent Malaysia, Nunan broke further with Western “civilization,” orientalism, and anti-Chinese sentiment. He noted, for example, the Western sterility of modern Singapore, and showed a dislike of a Malayanization that he saw as discriminatory against Chinese. Nunan also describes how Malaya’s 1957 independence (Merdeka) and Malayanization forced Europeans out of social, governance, and employment opportunities, while not explicitly criticizing it on that basis. Nunan’s starting viewpoint on Malaya was affected by his British upbringing in Australia and reading of imperial-era literature. While Nunan was personally intrigued by British-Polish novelist Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, even to the point of seeking river adventures himself in Malaya, he ultimately shows that there is much more to the British Empire in Malaya than the received information regime of “white superiority.” Nunan gradually unraveled and discarded this information regime through othering himself as an Australian relative to the British, establishing close inter-racial friendships with Malays, Indians, Chinese, and Eurasians, subalterning himself to experienced Malay hunters, boatsmen, and fishermen, and finally bringing his young family, including an infant and baby, into a near “gone native” experience through an extended family stay in the bush on a tin prospecting trip. He thereby undid a received information regime of Chinese communism as liberating the colonized in Asia, for himself at least, and as a representative of a likely larger class of individual in the former British colonies. He at the same time discarded the norms of British colonialism, which required an aloof self-segregation from all but the elites of non-European races.

Effect of Chinese communism  99 Nunan’s thoughts on colonialism and race are salted throughout his unpublished 2012 memoir, which brings greater depth to our understanding of colonial Malaya and complicates the picture of racism that frequently accompanies accounts of the British Empire on the Malay peninsula. This is the first time, to this author’s knowledge, that the memoir is being analyzed for a historical monograph. It was delivered from Nunan’s family and is wistfully titled My Charmed Life: Against Various Backgrounds, Some Strange, Most Now Gone (Nunan 2012). Unless otherwise indicated, parenthetical notations are page numbers to this memoir.

Family background The memoir starts with a short family history that introduces Nunan’s Australian family as good British subjects, cloistered in terms of his father’s lack of access to twentieth-century communication technologies. When my father was born in 1891 there were no motor cars or aeroplanes, no wireless sets or telephones. Through at least most of his life he would have seen himself as a citizen of a country that was part of an all-powerful British empire. (5) Nunan’s view of Asia was conditioned as a young boy by the selection, by his mother, of passages from letters sent from a family friend who worked on a tin mine in Malaya, the profession that Nunan himself would choose. These letters were likely from the mid- or late 1930s, given Nunan’s birth in 1928 (16). Mum read out some extraordinary excerpts, such as how at one time the friend had met a tiger right at the back of their house. Even the stamps stirred the imagination, with a picture of a man’s head bearing a strange, high turban. For me the name of the country then conjured up exotic expectations, of a world still as described by Conrad. (16) Nunan mentions “Conrad” three times in his memoir. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is about a Congo River boat excursion under arrow fire by native tribes in Africa. Combined with notions of “white superiority,” the omnipotence of the British Empire, and an exoticized Malaya conveyed in letters from his family friend around the 1930s, Conrad was an information regime in his own right that would partially survive, and partially erode for Nunan through contact with the reality of waning British influence on the fringes of British power in rural, riverine, and jungle areas of Malaya from 1950 to 1971.

The Emergency The Emergency was an insurgency waged by mostly Chinese communist “terrorists” against British authorities and Europeans in Malaya from

100  Anders Corr approximately 1948 to 1960. Nunan, as a tin prospector in jungle areas of the country, was exposed to the Emergency for almost its entirety. His account, both historical (53) and personal, accords well with other Malayan histories of the post-war period (Purcell 1967; Ryan 1976). Nunan had three brushes with “communist terrorists” (CTs), as the insurgents were known. The first interaction illustrated that Chinese communists during the Emergency did not exempt other Chinese from theft. While returning from the East side of the country to the West in a homemade 1947 Ford armor-plated vehicle through dense jungle with a military convoy for protection, Nunan came across several Chinese individuals who had had their goods stolen by CTs. A[f]ter we had driven about half way to Gambang we met a lorry coming the other way and were flagged down. The two very excited Chinese occupants of the lorry told us how they had just been stopped by a large number of uniformed CTs, who had robbed them of everything portable in the truck, including a number of bags of mail. They had been asked to dare the Kuantan police to come out and get them. (92). The British military convoy pressed on despite the warning, and came across a burning pile of mail about 10 or 15 minutes later (92). Nunan would have only two more brushes with CTs, both in 1952. While prospecting on a Malayan rubber estate for tin, his team was unknowingly used as bait by the British army to ambush uniformed CTs. This resulted in automatic gunfire so near that a shower of rubber-tree leaves fell around him (109). In another case, he was hunting jungle fowl with a Malay father and son near his company’s Sungkai mine. They followed a faint track and just when planning to return to the mine at dusk, surprised a pair of two uniformed CTs with guns slung over their shoulders. Nobody wanted a fight, so both parties sought to hide from each other, and ultimately slunk away in separate directions (110). But the Emergency got close enough to Nunan so that one of his friends, a Northern Irish sergeant named “Mac” McGill, got killed in a communist ambush. According to Nunan: Most people on estates and mines were probably never in serious danger but they felt they were on the front line, compared with the “office wallahs” in Kuala Lumpur (KL) and this formed a bond between them. When they went into KL they congregated in particular places, such as the Coliseum Cafe in Batu Road, and swapped stories about CTs, their SCs [Special Constables], what the OCPD [Officer Commanding Police District] had said, etc., etc. Some of them really did hang their weapons on the hatstand in the entrance foyer. This period was about the low point in the emergency and many people thought that they may not be in the country much longer. The Emergency dominated their lives.

Effect of Chinese communism  101 I went back to Taiping and one day a few weeks later. . . Harry Brown came into my office to tell me that Mac had been killed at Ulu Yam in an ambush. He really had been in the front line. (89) Nunan identified Chinese in Malaya as the predominant population that fueled the insurgency against British rule. “An organisation of Chinese communists was trying to overthrow the government,” he wrote, matter-of-factly. “Although not powerful enough to attack the government directly, they murdered Europeans wherever possible, necessarily those on outlying estates and mines” (9). While there was token participation by other races in the insurgency, and many Chinese and Malays were killed along with Europeans, Nunan gets the gist of the insurgency correct in his short summary. The communists attacked outlying estates and mines, and ambushed travelers on the roads. “Some protection to their housing areas was provided by surrounding them with high wire fences and watchtowers manned by Malays known as Special Constables,” Nunan writes (53). The British greatly expanded the army and police, including through the hiring of thousands of Malays and deployment of Australian troops and those of other Commonwealth countries (53–54). Nunan disputes depicting “The Emergency” (his quotes) as a war of decolonization. “It was certainly not a national uprising nor a popular war for independence,” he writes. “The Malays, as well as most other citizens, strongly opposed the idea of a Chinese communist takeover” (54). Nunan describes the insurgency as Chinese communist “rebellion,” “terrorism,” and “banditry,” as did his British contemporaries generally. There was no security trouble at all in predominantly Malay areas, such as the east coast or the far north-west of the country. It was a struggle by a communist organisation, initially with the aim of establishing a communist regime, similar to those emerging in China and the former Indo-china. It was first directed entirely against the Government and Europeans generally, although many Chinese civilians accused of collaboration with the British were murdered. After the first five years, by which time it was apparent that overthrow of the government was not even a remote possibility, it became for the rebels a struggle for survival, punctuated by isolated murders, raids or ambushes. (54) The CTs in Malaya lived part-time as civilians, donning uniforms after dark, according to Nunan. Leaders were forced to live in the jungle, and “preyed on Chinese farmers occupying small holdings on the jungle fringe, which they had squatted on during the food shortages of the Japanese occupation,” he writes in his memoir. “The CTs took sustenance from these people, by force if necessary”3 (54). To keep the insurgents from accessing food and intelligence in rural Chinese communities, the authorities adopted the Briggs Plan that resettled rural

102  Anders Corr Chinese into enclosed villages (Sendut 1962). Nunan describes the Briggs Plan as the resettlement of squatters and other Chinese living in remote areas into “new villages” (his quotes) surrounded by barbed wire and manned by police. “New Villages” was a phrase used by the government at the time to describe what some would less charitably describe as night-time “concentration camps.” Nunan writes, “Residents could go forth to work on their farms during the day but were required to be back inside the barbed wire and gates before the evening curfew.” CTs had to raid the settlements for food, but were then subject to ambush by the government (54). Nunan credits the resettlement plan, completed in 1954 (Sendut 1962), with victory over the rebels, whose insurgency was winding down by 1955. “From the completion of the resettlement. . . the worst was over and the CTs were never going to win,” writes Nunan. “Black” areas (his quotes) of low security were successively focused upon until the last was declared “white” in 1958. Fighting moved to road ambushes and finally deep into the jungle as the terrorists lost ground (54). Nunan was on leave in Australia when Malaya got independence in 1957, but returned that same year with a new wife. While MCP supporters generally credit the insurgency with pressuring Britain to grant independence to Malaysia, Nunan describes the historic transformation of Malaya into Malaysia as mild, and having nothing to do with the ongoing Emergency (154).

Tin mining, rubber plantations, and a racial division of labor Malaya had a diverse population in the 1950s, according to Nunan, that included Malays, Chinese, Indians, Europeans, Eurasians, Arabs, and aborigines (50–51). Labor tended to divide along ethnic lines, with Europeans in government and business leadership positions, and employed as small businessmen other than doctors. Tamil Indians worked on the plantations, Muslims and Sikhs from India were businessmen, professionals, and government officials, and Sikhs (called Bengalis) worked as watchmen and police (51). Many stayed for a limited time to cover a particular labor contract. “Europeans, too, were transient, being there on work permits and being obliged to leave if they ceased doing what their permit allowed them to do,” according to Nunan (51). Nunan notes the shift in his own view of Asia, based on not only his time in Malaya, but his work in Thailand and Burma. He was part of the expatriate community in these countries, most coming as young adults and only returning “home” (Nunan’s quotes) at the retirement age of 55, and for “long leave” of six months every three years. They worked in senior positions in government, army, mines, plantations, and commercial houses. “They all employed servants, did no menial work whatever themselves and rarely mixed socially with people of any of the other races,” he writes. “Europeans (even non-British ones like me) were rulers.”

Effect of Chinese communism  103 “All of these races lived in comparative harmony but in quite separate communities,” wrote Nunan. “Chinese spoke to one another in their own regional dialects, such as Cantonese, Hokkien or Hakka. Very few could speak Mandarin Chinese and it was nowhere used in ordinary conversation” (51). “Apart from a tiny number in the police or university, no Europeans spoke any of the Chinese dialects, and apart from rubber planters who were required to learn some Tamil, Europeans normally knew no Indian language.” Only middle-class Asians typically knew some English, so communication between the races was normally in “bazaar Malay” which was simplified to the extent that it was “not conducive to conveying finer inflections of meaning” (9). Nunan worked in Malaya for a company that engaged in tin mining. AMT had a split board of directors, with offices in Sydney, Australia, and Taiping, the former capital of the northern Malayan state of Perak. Until at least the early 1890s, Taiping had unofficially been the center of Britain’s administration of the Malay states.4 The company was floated in 1912 on the Sydney Stock Exchange and took part among many other small companies in the tin mining rush caused by the increased use of tin plating for food containers. The Federated Malay States had extensive alluvial deposits of tin, and a Chinese tin mining industry that extended back to the early nineteenth century, so was a prime target for new companies (6, 44). By the 1950s, AMT was led by the Taiping office in Malaya, with three mines in the country. It also had three mines in Thailand, Burma, and New Zealand, respectively (58). According to Nunan: Minutes of the meetings would have been exchanged [between Sydney and Taiping offices], followed by mutual commenting and there would have been a certain amount of reporting to Sydney from Malaya (with more comments) but all the decisions were by this time being made by the Taiping board, to be simply ratified by the Sydney board. (46, 58) Taiping in 1950 had a population of about 50,000, approximately 1 percent of which was European, and 90 percent Chinese. During the Emergency, “Taiping was a big army base, virtually a garrison town, and British army officers easily outnumbered the other Europeans,” writes Nunan (68). It had imposing colonial-era European buildings with large parks, ponds, and lawns for strolling and parading in the evenings. A large Union Jack flew over the parade grounds (a padang) in the center of town. “Here people of all races sometimes gathered to watch military parades with names like ‘Beating Retreat’ or ‘Trooping the Colour,’ staged by various British army regiments,” he writes. It was a long-established, well regimented town with a self-contained, socially stratified expatriate community headed by a British District Officer, a British Chief of Police (the Officer Commanding Police District, or OCPD) and Colonels in charge of whichever British regiments were in the area. (6)

104  Anders Corr

Multi-ethnic ­ relationships Racism did put a pinch on European bachelors due to a general lack of European women in Taiping. “Apart from half a dozen nurses at the army hospital (who were apparently not eligible or could not afford to belong to the club) there were no unmarried white women,” writes Nunan. “Thus, particularly for bachelors, one element of normal social life was completely missing” (6). Non-marital liaison was frowned upon and quickly became grist for rumors. “Keeping of Asian mistresses was considered taboo, not only socially but also by employers, and doing so secretly, except perhaps on an outlying estate with only a single European, was not likely to be possible” (6). Nunan escaped this predicament by finding a girlfriend who was “Eurasian” but could pass for white. Between 1951 and 1953, he got at least one big financial bonus as a result of the increase in tin prices from the Korean War. He used the money for a new convertible Sunbeam Talbot, leading to the girlfriend, who was a bit older than him, and trips with her Eurasian friends to a Port Dickson beach resort (111). “As in other beach resorts in those days, the Europeans had the place to themselves, as Chinese girls shunned exposure to the sun, for fear of darkening their skin” (112). One way in which separation between Europeans and Asians was encouraged was through public tropes of Asian undesirability. There was, for example, a public trope among Europeans that Chinese women were flat chested. Chinese working men and women wore shirts, trousers and clogs. For town wear, the womens’ outfit of long-sleeved shirt and trousers was in patterned cotton and was known as a “samfoo”. They apparently did not wear bras and were deemed by Europeans to be flat-chested. (Those who knew better seldom acknowledged the fact). In later years, when they adopted Western dress, they suddenly acquired bosoms as prominent as those of Westerners. (52) Nunan wrote of other cross-racial relationships in the backcountry, where “the keeping of mistresses, provided reasonably discreet, might be overlooked by management and, especially in Thailand with no end of attractive ones on offer, fairly common. The liaisons sometimes led to lifetime partnerships” (7).

Racism and hierarchy: white privilege and orientalism While Nunan’s actions were generally non-racist in Malaya, and his later writing reveals little personal focus on race, he did show a sense of Southeast Asia being “primitive.” He “enjoyed” the privileges of his race and class, and he had an awe of Asia that shaded from culture shock to that which has been characterized as orientalist (Said 1978). He writes of stepping off the “Super Constellation, a four engine propeller driven plane, at the very forefront of aircraft technology,” into Djakarta, his first experience of Asia.

Effect of Chinese communism  105 As we emerged into the open air, we were met by a blast of hot air, strongly dosed with what I was to find was the smell of Asia, a mixture of the perfumes of rotten fruit and something like gunpowder smoke. I found it exotic and not unpleasant. Part of the smell Nunan ascribes to “public hygiene [that] did not enjoy quite the priority it enjoys today.” He writes, “There were hordes of people, strangely dressed and doing strange things,” for example, half-naked senior men pedaling rickshaws, wearing conical straw hats, and carrying live fowl, pigs, and whole families (13–14). But with the help of servants, whites were able to escape into comparative luxury. Nunan describes his surprise at being treated like royalty by Chinese and Malay servants. “I was met in the terminal by a Chinese man holding aloft a board with my name on it and was most impressed at being located in a foreign place in such a jumble of humanity.” He was “not allowed” to carry his own baggage, and was “ushered into the back seat of a car to be driven to Raffles Hotel,” the best in Singapore. Crossing a river in Singapore, Nunan notes the remarkable, almost ominous contrast with Australia. “The water was almost black and strewn with floating garbage,” he writes. “On either bank were moored a variety of dark, unpainted wooden vessels, usually with a half cylindrical thatched roof over the stern, on which people obviously cooked, ate and slept.” Without saying so explicitly, Nunan describes his first impression of an Asia that is at once superstitious and inefficient. “Smaller craft, each with an eye painted on either side of the bow, were being propelled by oars,” he writes. “Instead of sitting facing astern as we do in Western row-boats, the oarsman stood, facing ahead, with long, crossed oars” (14). Nunan’s memoir sighs in pleasant surprise when he reaches the Raffles Hotel, where it “appeared that I had a servant assigned to me alone.” It was in “an area of fine old European buildings, lawns, trees, gardens, modern hotels and shops,” he writes. “In Raffles Hotel I was housed in a spacious suite of several rooms, of a standard I had never enjoyed in Australia.” Overhead fans blew a cool breeze, and “Afternoon tea was served on my own balcony, on a white damask tablecloth with an elegant tea-set and shiny silver cutlery” (14). Nunan was simultaneously awed by the British culture into which he was being ushered from his relatively lower-class status in Australia, and the “dark mysteries” of Asia. He explicitly acknowledges that he had entered into a world of white superiority, but that such “superiority” was temporary and based on wealth in addition to biology. There was also the fact that we lived in an environment in which white people enjoyed a superior status. That respect was shown to Europeans was partly due to the fact that they were then the ruling race, were employers rather than employees of Asians, and customers rather than merchants. That the respect was expected by them was due to what was then a world-wide,

106  Anders Corr almost universally held belief among white people that we really were superior. I have seen this belief gradually become less certainly (or at least less openly) held. (6–7) Nunan had his own gardener, a Malay driver named Mat, and “an Indian cook called Sammy, whose wife did the cleaning and washing (the ‘dhobi’),” he writes. “All this was to be mine” (58). In Burma in 1955, Nunan socialized with a Eurasian acting as an agent for AMT. I was invited out to dinner by the company’s agent, a stout Eurasian gentleman of exaggeratedly English speech and manners. He lived in a large, sprawling, old bungalow and we sat on a verandah sipping Mandalay rum, while he talked about ‘the natives’. The scene was straight out of Conrad. For dinner we were served roast peacock. (132) Nunan’s memories of the pungent Asia of 1950 compare positively in his mind to the “sterility” of modern Westernized Asia as exemplified by Singapore. Criticism of the contemporary West as “sterile” creeps into his description of the way from the airport in Singapore to his first hotel stay. “Singapore then was vastly different from the rich, Western, almost sterile metropolis of today,” he writes. “Much of it looked, smelt and sounded of an Asia that had changed little in a hundred years” (13).

Privilege and tin operations in the context of the Emergency The Executive Directors of AMT in Taiping were all European, as were the accountants and design engineer. Under them were about 20 local staff. “The uniform for the office for those of my rank was white shorts and short sleeve white shirt, with knee-length white stockings and black shoes,” Nunan writes. “For the field I was to wear the same in khaki, but with. . . special, hand made canvas and leather boots” (58). Nunan was given an identity card and gun licenses for a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver and a .45 Reising sub-machine gun. These were for personal protection, given the Emergency, but he ultimately only used them for hunting. Nunan was driven around the country on his tin prospecting trips in the armor-plated 1947 Ford, including armor plate over the windows, with narrow slits through which to see (59). Malay police set up roadblocks on either side of each village, but typically waved through any Europeans (60). Drilling to obtain mineral samples was done by a “team of eight boring coolies, usually Chinese from Hainan Island, a race known as ‘Hylam,’ comprised a gang.” The boring supervisor was Malay (60). Once the tin was extracted, it was washed in pans by females, allowing the heavy tin ore (cassiterite) if any to be retained. “Finally, any tin ore present was separated from the other heavy minerals by a very skilled operator (in this case an elderly Chinese lady named Yong Thai) called a tin dresser” (61).

Effect of Chinese communism  107 Another of Nunan’s jobs by 1953 was to negotiate with Malay landowners near AMT’s Puchong mine for mining options and land sales. “The landholders lived elsewhere (because of the Emergency) and it was necessary to track them down and try to persuade them to accept the deal we were offering,” wrote Nunan. A number of them were Chettiars, an Indian race largely given to money lending, and they were not disposed to accept anything without drawn-out bargaining. However I had no discretion in the matter and we all knew that what was being offered was well above market price so I just had to hold out. (112) One advantage given to Europeans by AMT was significant extra leave. “All Europeans were given 6 months leave every 3 years, it being considered that in those pre-airconditioning days the climate was too wearing for any longer a stint at one time,” writes Nunan (58). Another advantage exclusive to Europeans during the Emergency was a de facto immunity to the curfew. At the mine compound in Ulu Yam, Sergeant Mac McGill oversaw several platoons of Malay Special Constables (SCs). “The area outside the compound was under dusk to dawn curfew, but this did not seem to apply too strictly to Europeans and, of course, not at all to Mac,” writes Nunan (88). Another advantage was the right to hunt, which was denied to all races but Europeans and Malays. According to Nunan: Because of the Emergency, Chinese and Indian hunters were denied firearms, so all sorts of game flourished. Rubber estates were over-run with wild pigs, and we had frequent pig shoots. Asian wild pigs are good to eat and wild boar meat was highly prized. For a share of the bag, we had no trouble getting large gangs of Tamil beaters to drive pigs out of patches of blukar. Fortunately, we never shot any of the beaters, but I doubt if they realised how lucky they were. (112)

Political and economic hierarchies Overlaid on the racial basis for hierarchy in Malaya, as already noted, was a deeper foundation of economic difference. Nunan theorizes the source of racism as at least partially economic, that is, Europeans as employers and customers, rather than employees and merchants. That would change for Nunan in later life, when he was employed by a wealthy Chinese Malayan (168), had to seek immigration papers from purposefully slow officials in Thailand (95), and courted Laotian officials through purchasing meals, bottles of scotch, and ultimately a $10,000 ride in a decrepit Soviet-era helicopter to a sapphire mine that did not pan out (212). Power and money flowed both ways in late and post-colonial Asia. The social status in Taiping that Nunan describes is relatively continuous across the races, from British government officials at the head through British

108  Anders Corr and then non-British European businessmen, to army soldiers of other rank, then to the non-European workers on the mines and in government, and finally, presumably, to those non-European villagers who did not work for Europeans. However, those in the latter category might have seen themselves as entirely free and therefore above the European-dominated hierarchy. In contrast to Nunan’s middle-management attire of white shorts and shortsleeve shirt, the upper management of AMT’s Taiping headquarters wore longsleeved white shirts, long cream trousers, and bow tie. As Nunan wrote: A mine would normally have a European staff of about 6 men, with in some cases their wives, plus 50 to 100 Asian employees, including office staff, other junior staff, dredge operators and labourers (called ‘coolies’ by other Asians but not by us). “All lived in what was called a ‘compound,’ a high-fenced area containing mine buildings and accommodation.” Europeans lived in relatively large “bungalows,” separated from the rest by lawns and gardens. “The rest lived in progressively more modest accommodation, according to rank” (7). The British incorporated locals into Malayan governance structures, albeit as subalterns. “Government junior office staff (‘kranies’) and field workers were Asian, as were army and police constables and sergeants, but those of higher rank were British”5 (9). The isolation of working on mines meant that socializing was often done with coworkers, and hierarchical relations extended from the workplace to after hours. The hierarchy even extended to house inventories supplied by the company. Nunan was amused that “only those above a stipulated rank received fish knives, and those below some other level were assumed to have no need of liqueur glasses” (7). Despite Nunan’s mid-ranking managerial position, he took full advantage of his superior status relative to his own servants. Life was very comfortable. One quickly got used to belonging to an upper class complete with servants and I soon slipped into bad Malayan ways. I might not always get up from my chair to get myself a drink. Sammy was always lurking in a room adjoining the lounge room. I simply called him, told him what I wanted and he soon reappeared with a tray. (69)

The Club Club life was important to the upper classes among expatriate Britons, and Taiping was no exception. “Taiping had what was called ‘The New Club,’ said to have been formed early in the century by some not eligible to join another more exclusive club, which had since then ceased to exist,” wrote Nunan. “The New Club had then gradually assumed the exclusivity of its predecessor” (67). There was racial and class stratification apparent at the New Club. “Like all such clubs, it was a club for gentlemen,” according to Nunan. The word

Effect of Chinese communism  109 “gentleman” excluded “other ranks” in the army, but did include most other British in Malaya. “All Colonial Servants, army officers and planters, as well as the senior staff of British commercial firms came from a background of leading public schools and their wives were generally from the same class.” Nunan explains that, “The club was a place where they could relax with their own and only their own.” Gentlemen, according to Nunan, “did not enjoy letting their hair down in front of subordinates, even European subordinates, so in 1950 there were no army officers under the rank of captain and few planters other than managers in the New Club.” Prospective members had to be nominated, seconded, and pass scrutiny of the entire committee. “To be accepted, being European was of course obligatory—Chinese and Indians had their own clubs”6 (67). Even the status of Australian was a social handicap with the British in Malaya. “Accent had always been a badge of their [English middle] class and the hint of any provincial accent (except for some reason, Scottish) meant automatic expulsion,” according to Nunan. The Australian accent “is a little too close to cockney, and cockney would certainly not be heard in the Taiping New Club” (67). The English gentleman, Nunan explained, had a “mental picture of the typical Australian” as “someone with a ‘beer-gut’ spilling over his belt perhaps turning up at the club in football shorts and thongs” (68). Nunan recounts racial stratification between patrons and servants at the club. At his first tennis competition, all spectators wore “neat tennis gear and clapped or applauded at appropriate times in a polite fashion,” he noted. “Servants (always called ‘boys’ even though mostly of mature age) wearing long white trousers, white blazers and Malay ‘songkoks’ on their heads,” held aloft drink trays (59). By the time Nunan left Taiping for Penang in 1970, he noted that Europeans had become completely absent from “government, army, banks, schools, trading houses, plantations, mines or anything else.” He resigned as “the last European committee member of the New Club, which . . . was exclusively European when I joined it 20 years earlier” (8).

Nearly “going native” While living in Malaya was relatively cheap for Nunan, he found that “long before payday at the end of each month, I was broke.” He also found Taiping a bit boring, and realized that he would earn “brownie points” with his superiors by spending more time in the field. So, between 1950 and 1960, he spent more time “outstation” with boring crews prospecting for tin upriver and in the jungles (69). Nunan frequently stayed in kampong houses on wooden stilts with thatched roofs of the nipah palm. There was little furniture other than sleeping and eating mats on the floor. “I could never sit cross-legged comfortably and needed to support myself with one arm,” writes Nunan. He ate with the Malays according to their dietary norms of a higher proportion of rice than meat, vegetables, or fruit, and showed some as much subservience in his table manners as practicable. “Malays pick up their food, even rice, in their fingers, but in those days I was allowed [emphasis mine] a spoon,” he writes (75).

110  Anders Corr His backcountry stays could last as long as one or two months (8–10), and their duration increased over time (69). Nunan got so comfortable in these environs that he frequently went crocodile and tiger hunting, adopted a black panther and small crocodiles as pets, and brought his family (including wife and two young children) to live with him (8, 10). As the fishing, crocodile and tiger hunting was with non-European locals who had far more experience than him, Nunan took the role of subordinate to Malays that complicated notions of monolithic European superiority in late colonial Malaya (8). A window into Nunan’s transformation from orientalist outsider, to nearly going native can be found in the comparison of his aloof observation of a net fisherman at his first dinner in Singapore, to his later awkward attempts to learn the art of net casting himself. He writes of the dinner with some Europeans: As we ate, I became aware of movement in the water alongside our jetty only a few metres away, at about the edge of the lit-up area. This turned out to be a man, struggling through water above his waist, and every now and then throwing a large cast net ahead of him. It was not the sort of thing you might have seen at a restaurant in Australia. (14) Nunan had Sundays off when on long prospecting trips. Alone without his European friends and family, he would take his Malay workers on excursions by boat and car. “Rather than go off alone, I invited my staff to accompany me,” he writes. Nunan ate Indian Muslim food with them, and went to see Indian and Indonesian movies. In the evenings, they would visit coffee shops run by Chinese and Indians. “The superior status of the European was normally reinforced by keeping aloof from all but the most distinguished Asians,” writes Nunan. “A European sitting in a coffee shop with a few Malays might have occasioned some stares in 1950.” Nunan was, therefore, an unwitting race traitor, but one who, as he became aware of this fact in later life, looked back approvingly on his actions. He adds almost conspiratorially, “Fortunately we saw few other Europeans on our travels and certainly none in coffee shops” (76). Nunan and his Malay friends stayed in the cheap hotels of Baling, Sungei Patani, and other towns. “In most of these, the bedrooms were separated by partitions that reached neither floor nor ceiling, so that any noise anywhere on the whole floor could be heard in every room,” he writes. “Chinese frequently played mahjong until very late,” he notes. “Tiles were slammed down with shouts of triumph, so sleeping was difficult for me, although the other hotel guests snored through it all” (76). The four Malays with whom he traveled to small towns spoke English. “They were of course delighted and I was glad of their company and, from our talks together, I learnt a little about the world from their point of view” (76). The skill of the fish net casters humbled Nunan. On his trips to the Southern side of the estuary, he would head to a beach with his staff on a sampan. “Here we swam and fished and I was taught how to throw the ‘jala’ or castnet,” he

Effect of Chinese communism  111 writes. “Jaafar, one of the clerks, had been a fisherman in his early life and could throw a jala, 10 metres in diameter. I had difficulty with one of 3 metres” (76). Some of his transformation comes through his fascination with animals, and his reliance on locals for education in how to interact with them. There is a photo of a barefoot Nunan riding an elephant in Thailand with a local at his side, for example, dryly titled “A Driving lesson” (100). At a strip show in Thailand, Nunan found a baby black panther in a box for the amusement of passerby, who would pull rotan tied to its neck to make it snarl. Nunan asked to adopt the animal, and so started his adventure of owning a black panther as a pet. He named it “Satan.” As it got older, there were two instances that alarmed Nunan, one in which Satan saw a child as prey, and another in which the panther cornered Nunan’s cook and the cook’s wife in the kitchen. Nunan then arranged to give it away (101–103). When with the boring gangs, Nunan would occasionally come across crocodiles, at which point his workers would yell “tembak, tembak!” “Tembak” means “shoot.” “I sometimes obliged with a burst from the Reising” machine gun, he writes. This is, of course, the picture of the white man’s “oriental” experience, urged on to hunt dangerous big game by admiring “coolies” who lacked the weaponry to do so. But Nunan soon found the Reising to be an impractical weapon against crocodiles. It was “a short range weapon, and at 50 meters or more, any bullets that might have hit a crocodile would have just bounced off” (75). Nunan later took a relatively lowly amidships position in crocodile hunting expeditions led by Malays and Thais, who sold the prized skins for handbags and luggage. On one expedition, the elderly hunter at the bow of the boat pierced a crocodile with a spear tied to a rope. The crocodile was big enough that when it sought to escape, it dragged the small boat “at near planing speed” for several kilometers (107–108). Nunan’s wife Pat, after they married in 1957 in Australia, accompanied him to independent Malaysia. She was an adventurer herself, and rather than staying in the urbanized areas, she brought their two young children in 1959 into the jungle with her husband while he prospected for tin. They took their daughter Anne, just ten months at the time, up a river and against the rapids in a sampan, then returned for Jane, an only slightly older baby, who they had left with friends. The boat with the child nearly capsized, but was saved by one of the Malay boring gang members, who jumped overboard to swing its bow into the current (161). When they arrived at the prospecting site in the jungle, “The men were astonished to see a European woman carrying a fair headed baby climb out of the boat.” Monsoon rains hit, and nappies had to be dried on a Primus gas stove. When the boring gang had to move further upriver, a new house was built for the Nunans (separate from other worker quarters). It was a one-room shack with a small verandah built of “jungle poles, bamboo, rotan and palm fronds,” raised 1.5 meters off the ground (162, 164).

112  Anders Corr The shack was right next to the river, which provided the entire family with drinking water, showers, and a place to sit and cool themselves and the occasional beer, carried in after day-long trips into town.7 “Piping was of bamboo, with the divisions between nodes chopped out,” writes Nunan. “The house was shaded by giant trees and we were very comfortable” (162). The family took evening walks in the jungle, acquiring some Malay culture in the process. Pat adopted the Malay way of carrying a small child - on her hip supported by a sarong around her neck. We ambled along slowly and Jane either walked or was piggy-backed by me. Along the river bank there were big bamboo clumps and fairly open ground between them so walking was easy. I carried a shotgun and one aim of the exercise was to get something for the pot. (162) On these family hunting excursions, Nunan was able to “bag” three or four jungle fowl that looked like bantam hens, one green pigeon (punai), and a small deer called a kijang (162). Lacking refrigeration, most of the family’s meat was tinned food, so “rare supplements of fresh game were most welcome.” The jungle was full of wild animals, including monkeys, bats, and “a shrew” that visited them every night. We heard wild elephants tearing down the bamboo and one morning we found that they had visited the drill site during the previous night. Equipment had been moved about and there were big footprints in the mud. On a path to the drill site the men sometimes found fresh tiger tracks. (163) When leaving the site due to lack of tin, the boring gang and family returned down the river, now lower with the end of the monsoon, on a fleet of rafts made of bamboo poles lashed together with rotan. Nunan and a Malay handled the punting poles in the bow and stern, with the family, two Malay women, and a basket of hens in the middle. “We were sometimes watched by troops of monkeys, flocks of hornbills and many gaudy kingfishers.” The older of the two children sat cooling in a depression in the raft through which river water flowed. Pat had the gun at her side (163–167). “Back in Taiping, Pat once again faced criticism and admiration in about equal measure from the ladies,” according to Nunan. “I could not imagine any one of them even considering doing what she had done” (163).

The Chinese Nunan’s view of Chinese Malayans was matter-of-fact, descriptive, and sometimes admiring. Other than when he discussed the insurgents, he did not have even an undertone of criticism much less racism. Nunan notes that the Chinese “were not one homogenous race, having come from different areas in Southern China, speaking different languages” (50). Here, Nunan uses the term “race” as contemporary social science might use the word “ethnicity” or even “culture.”

Effect of Chinese communism  113 Chinese mining in Malaya predated and then continued under British rule (Gullick 1953; Irwin 1955). “Although originally introduced to South-east Asia from California and Australia, during my time in Malaya gravel pumping was almost exclusively a Chinese practice,” Nunan writes. “With it they won about half of the country’s tin production” (56). Near the end of his career in Malaysia, Nunan started working for, and befriended, a wealthy Chinese Malaysian investor in the mining industry named Yeap Hock Hoe. Hock Hoe purchased a large stake in AMT on the stock exchange. Yeap Hock Hoe was the son of Yeap Chor Ee, who had accumulated a vast fortune in rubber and banking. Hock Hoe had inherited and still operated the Ban Hin Lee Bank, as well as a number of other companies. He was not a very active businessman but had become interested in mining. He was to figure prominently in the remainder of my Malayan mining career. (168) Hock Hoe was the son of a Penang millionaire, and his wife was the daughter of a “Java sugar king” (Straits Times, November 28, 1933, 12). He was a director of the Ban Hin Lee Bank Limited, a family firm founded in 1918 by his father, and registered in 1935. Hock Hoe took charge of the Penang office in 1951. Between 1950 and 1952, the bank’s assets almost doubled, from $16.5 million to $31.6 million (Tan Ee-Leong 1969, 273–274). Hock Hoe also owned a small newspaper in Penang called the Straits Echo. During the Emergency, Hock Hoe sought to acquire “new mining properties for himself and sought the assistance of AMT in evaluating potential areas offered to him,” according to Nunan. He brought Hock Hoe, along with “a few hangers-on,” on prospecting trips in search of tin (168). On their voyages to remote places for a few days at a time, Nunan took a liking to his new Chinese employer. “He was a modest, genuine person and I developed a high regard for him,” writes Nunan. “I was invited to several Penang banquets, and we took him (with his team) for a weekend trip to Pangkor Island on Swannee.” Swannee was a small sail boat that Nunan owned for pleasure, typically fishing. “Fortunately, one of his men immediately paid any bills that appeared, as we were as usual rather short of the ready” (168). In 1959, Hock Hoe invited the Nunan family to spend Christmas at his “enormous house, occupied only by Hock Hoe, his wife and his mother, with an army of servants.” There were sentries at the gate of the house, and others patrolling to deter crime. “Like all rich Malayan Chinese, Hock Hoe was fearful of kidnapping.” It took about five minutes to walk from the west to the east wing of the mansion (168). Called the “Homestead,” it was located on what was variously known as Northam Road, Millionaires’ Row, and White Men’s Road (Ang More Lor), and has since been renamed Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah (The Star, September 14, 2014). Hock Hoe also owned a holiday house on Penang Hill, where Nunan stayed one night. They visited Penang’s best restaurants together, “where we were

114  Anders Corr always accompanied by a few of the hangers-on. One of them always paid for everything and Hock Hoe was never (directly) bothered by such mundane matters” (168). After some time prospecting back in Australia from about 1961 to 1966, Nunan got an offer that he and Pat could not refuse back at AMT in Malaya, giving Nunan the title of Assistant General Manager, and a seat on the Board (172–182). There had been big changes in Austral Malay Tin. Yeap Hock Hoe now controlled the company and had been appointed Chairman of Directors, while Albert Bartlett was Managing Director. There had been something of a coup in the company and, in effect, my side had won. Albert, with Hock Hoe’s approval, was firmly in control. The other executive directors had taken early retirement. My friend David Cheng was the new General Manager. (182) By the time Yeap Hock Hoe controlled AMT, it had five operating mines in Malaya. Those in Thailand and Burma were shut down, and one in Australia was sold after a couple of years (182).

Malayanization Chinese in Malaysia were targeted as Malays increased their political influence following independence. Nunan witnessed this, along with continued erosion of European influence, toward the end of his career in Malaysia. Malayanization was started by the British as early as the 1950s, though not under that name. “Urban Malays filled many junior Government positions and they dominated the police force, though not then at the highest levels,” according to Nunan. “Even in 1950, the country was set for eventual independence and the plan was to train Malays to be ready [to] take over the reins of government” (51). Independence and decolonization meant removing Europeans from their prior positions as leaders in government and business. The tin market collapsed in 1985, but even before then according to Nunan, “the jobs of most European mine staff in Malaysia had already been lost through ‘Malayanisation’ (compulsorily [sic] replacement by locals), and the ownership of the big mining companies had largely passed to local shareholders” (8). As late colonialism faded into independence in Malaya, Nunan watched as racial hierarchies were replaced by class hierarchies in which Europeans and nonEuropeans socialized with one another. “Our pedestal gradually collapsed and our automatically superior status gradually disappeared,” Nunan writes. “We came to mix socially more and more with Asians and to compete with them on an even footing in rugby, golf or tennis” (9). After independence in 1957, “Europeans began to be replaced in the top jobs and were no longer the ruling race. Some Asians even occupied positions which demanded respect from those who had previously been accustomed to

Effect of Chinese communism  115 giving them orders.” Malaysia and Thailand’s currencies appreciated so remarkably compared to Australia, during this time, that “expatriates or visitors are no longer necessarily a richer class” (9). According to Nunan: Members of Parliament and the Ministers of all the different departments were Asian but most of the old British bureaucrats remained in their positions and things went on much as before. There was a timetable set down for Malayanisation (replacement by Malays) of all government and commercial staff, but for most people, especially the more senior, their careers were to extend for many more years. (155) The races generally mixed socially and in a friendly manner, according to Nunan, but the lead was automatically Malay (182). The Taiping New Club reflected this change. The most senior local member of government, the District Officer, who was always a Malay was automatically elected the president of the club. Most of the committee and other members were also Asian - businessmen, professional men and government employees. We learnt a lot from one another and formed good friendships. Most expatriates now tended to see the country in a different light. (182) The remaining British military personnel in Taiping at that point were those officers training the Malaysian military. Most others had been withdrawn from the country as the Emergency wound down (182).

Anti-Chinese riot of 1969 In May 1969, anti-Chinese riots paralyzed Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. Nunan witnessed the riots first-hand, and relates in his memoir his belief that Malay leaders orchestrated them to justify the removal of growing Chinese political influence. This was a common interpretation of the riots as early as 1970 (Gungwu 1970). Nunan describes the cause of the riots as a reaction against Chinese political success: There had been a big fuss in the local papers about the recent electoral successes of a largely Chinese political party, whereas government had been held by a coalition virtually controlled by the Malay party, UMNO, ever since independence. Malays, particularly the more urbanized and better educated, had long resented the fact that Chinese controlled virtually all of the commerce, whereas Malays were in the majority and saw themselves as the original and rightful owners of the country (“bumiputras”). A number of papers and books apparently intended to whip up feelings had lately appeared written by radical Malays, prominent among them the later Prime Minister, Mohammed Mahatir.

116  Anders Corr There were marches and counter marches and on that afternoon a large gathering of angry Malays had been addressed by several high ranking Malay politicians, including the Chief Minister of Selangor State, Dato Harun. There is no doubt that, instead of trying to calm the situation, these speakers set out to inflame it. The actual fighting commenced when the Malay crowd at the meeting attacked and killed two passing Chinese motorcyclists. After that they went berserk (or, to use an old Malay word, amok) and attacks and retaliation spread quickly through the city. The Malays were reputedly egged on to kill by loudspeakers broadcasting from mosques. (189) Nunan, his wife, and driver Osman witnessed the violence. Driving from the airport back into Kuala Lumpur, the three of them encountered heavy traffic, beyond which were burning cars (189). The cars right in front of us all started to turn around and drive back in the wrong direction, with the occupants sounding their horns, waving and shouting to others to go back. Osman immediately followed suit, with great difficulty, and as we turned I saw two men dragging the prostrate body of a woman off into the shrubbery, on the roadside right beside us. Each man had hold of an arm and whether they were saving her or otherwise, I have no idea. (189) Osman was driving sporadically, given his fear. Nunan took over, and Osman hid by taking off his Malay headgear, called a songkok, and laying down behind the front seats. Nunan decided to drive to his company’s nearby mine in Puchong, but first he had to drive through a Chinese village called Kuchai. They hoped that, as Europeans, they would be seen as neutrals, and allowed through (190). Our way was barred by a group of about 20 excited Chinese vigilantes, armed with iron bars and parangs (machetes). I wound down the window and was greatly relieved to be waved to drive on. Had the vigilantes looked in the back and seen Osman, the outcome might have been different. (190) A 24-hour curfew was proclaimed the next day, and extended to “many other areas” (190): We heard on television that the rioting was serious and that troops had been called in, but we were not shown any footage of what was going on in the streets. The government immediately announced that the man who had been Prime Minister since independence, the moderate Tengku Abdul Rahman had resigned and been replaced by the more radical Tun Abdul Razak. Parliament had been suspended and all sorts of emergency measures were announced. The unusual speed with which these arrangements were made suggested even then that there was nothing spontaneous about the affair. From Puchong, we could see the glow of fires above Kuala Lumpur. (190)

Effect of Chinese communism  117 The curfew kept the trio in Puchong for a week, while they exchanged rumors, listened to overseas shortwave broadcasts, and watched as frequent columns of smoke wafted above the glow of fires from Kuala Lumpur. Very little official information was released (190). When the curfew ended, the three returned to their deserted Kuala Lumpur hotel to retrieve their belongings. On the way out of town, they saw the aftermath of the riots: There was little traffic and very few people on the streets but an atmosphere of fear was palpable. We saw burnt out cars and fire damaged buildings. . . . . . We went North along a near deserted Ipoh Road. I saw several walls of dwellings above Chinese shophouses that had been sprayed with machinegun fire. Inside one roundabout, about 20 Chinese youths sat cross legged with their hands held behind their heads, guarded by Malay soldiers. (190) After driving outside the capital, there was “virtually no trouble at any stage” (191). The death toll was unknown, according to Nunan. “The official figure was about 180 but most people believed it to be very much higher, perhaps 1,000 and nearly all of them Chinese.” Nunan saw the riots and what he considered unfair treatment of the Chinese as distasteful, diminishing his esteem for Malaysia (191). The fact that on the very first night of the riots, the Prime Ministe[r] Tengku Abdul Rahmin had resigned, to be replaced by his former deputy, Tun Razak seemed a suspiciously quick reaction. The Government usually dithered for a long time before taking action of any type. Again suspiciously quickly, new laws were enacted, almost overnight. The press was temporarily banned and affirmative action plans for Malays were introduced. Henceforth, all government contracts or licences for such things as taxis, mining, timber extraction, etc. would go only to bumiputras (“sons of the soil,” a term deemed to cover not only Malays and indigenous people but rather inexplicably, Indonesian immigrants), school and university entrance examinations would be conducted in the Malay language. All this was of course a great topic of conversation among Europeans, who were probably more or less impartial observers. The almost universal conclusion was that the whole operation had been planned before and stage managed. Armed Malay troops and police were let loose among unarmed Chinese men, women and children, ostensibly to restore order but more plausibly to teach them a lesson and prepare them for a redistribution of the country’s power and opportunities. Soon after the troubles, many Chinese doctors, dentists and other professionals who would have no trouble being accepted as immigrants in the UK or Australia left the country. They saw no future for their children under the new regime.

118  Anders Corr Over time, the affirmative action measures had less effect than planned. Bumiputras obtained the licences to mine, extract timber or whatever, but many finished as very junior partners in Chinese enterprises, getting a small proportion of the proceeds as holder of the lease. A few Malays however, especially under Dr. Mahatir’s later cronyism, became very rich and powerful. Chinese children, probably driven by the typical ambition of Chinese parents, soon became at least as competent in the Malay language as the Malay children. The press was subjected to strict rules that forbade the publication of anything that might be said to be likely to foment racial hatred, and this was taken to include all criticism of the government and especially its affirmative action policies. Thereafter, I liked Malaya a lot less. (191) Nunan resigned as the Vice President of the New Club of Taiping in January 1971, when AMT moved its headquarters from Taiping to Penang. He was the last of the European office bearers of that institution. In Penang, he took on the new role of “General Manager Development.” He was in charge of new mining and agricultural projects, including a palm oil mill in Johore (193). But in July 1971, AMT lost control of its operating companies and Nunan and the other executive directors lost their jobs (195; Straits Times, July 30, 1971, 17). He returned to Australia in October 1971 (198).

Conclusion Nunan’s life in Malaya from 1950 to 1971 was a voyage that put multiple information regimes, including those of the British colonists and Chinese communists, to the test of reality. As experienced by a young Australian tin prospector, colonial Malaya certainly entailed elements of white superiority. But it also included mixing of the “races” and the embrace, by Nunan at least, of humbly learning local knowledge of hunting, building, and boating from Malay teachers. Information regimes may be totalizing by nature, but they are always subject to negotiation, even rejection, on the ground. Local knowledge, in other words, can easily trump ideology. This local knowledge was found outside the colonial hierarchy. In ungoverned spaces on the edges of British control, on the other side of estuaries, upriver, and on jungle trails used by CTs, Nunan took low positions that accorded to his relatively lesser skills as hunter or boatsman. Perhaps as a result, there is a frank humility found in the writing of Nunan that belies the highly politicized monolithic information regimes of the period, including British depictions of colonists as the bringers of civilization, democracy, and development, and Chinese communist depictions of colonists as racist oppressors. We see, through Nunan’s writing, the complexity of hierarchy in colonial Malaya in which some “whites” were not superior relative to others, and where Australians and Army officers of lower rank were discriminated against at the New Club in Taiping. And, we see that financial means and political power eroded

Effect of Chinese communism  119 race as a determinant of placement in hierarchies. Nunan worked late in his career in what was then independent Malaysia for a wealthy Chinese. He grew to respect and care for his Chinese employer, and ultimately criticized Malayanization and its violent excesses against Chinese Malaysians in the anti-Chinese riots of 1969. Nunan matter-of-factly describes the Emergency variously as rebellion, banditry, and Chinese communist terrorism against Europeans. It was not, according to Nunan, an anti-colonial struggle. This view is buttressed by Nunan’s own history of colonialism in Malaya that stretches back to the early sixteenth century, and includes Arab, Chinese, Portuguese, Dutch, and finally British contestation and war over the peninsula. This historical account by Nunan was not detailed here for space reasons, but in his telling is found Nunan’s own information regime. The Chinese fight each other for territory, trade routes, and power, just as do Europeans. When they fight, they weaken themselves and create opportunities for other groups to invade (49–50). There are few if any villains or heroes in Nunan’s account, just the description of an interplay of power and wealth, and a persistent personal drive to get away from it all. Nunan was, in the end, most interested in the next trip into the bush or onto the sea, for fishing and hunting. Nunan did not have Chinese communist friends, and did not subscribe to any aspect of communist ideology. The effect of Chinese communism on Nunan, judging from his memoir, was ultimately tangential. The Chinese communist insurgency may have hastened Malaysia’s independence, Malayanization and ultimately the replacement of Europeans at the apex of Malaysia’s political and economic hierarchies. This is demonstrated in Nunan’s own life as late in his Malaysian career he ultimately reports to a Chinese employer for tin prospecting, and a Malay president at the social club for which he acted as the Vice President. Thus, Chinese communism, as an information regime, mobilizes Chinese Malaysians and mainlanders in ways that, by the defeat of the insurgency in the mid-1950s, and by the anti-Chinese race riots of 1969, had clearly done Chinese Malaysians more harm than good. In the process, Malays in Malaysia rose to the apex of political power, and Europeans, including Australians like Nunan, largely returned to their countries of origin. To the extent that the Chinese in Malaya helped themselves in Malaysia longterm, it was in spite of Chinese communism, not because of it. Individuals here, too, outmaneuvered a prevailing, and often violently imposed, information regime with global pretensions. Through their economic power, not their self-defeating communist ideology or military efforts, the Chinese established themselves on the Malay peninsula, then paved the way for their future in Malaysia. To be sure, Chinese communism in Malaya had some intended effects: it hastened the demise of white superiority and the disaggregation of the British Empire, including according to its own narrative. But while the ideology may have achieved some of the racial goals of communist China in Singapore in that those of Chinese ethnicity took over the governance there, it backfired against the Malay peninsular Chinese in that it replaced British governance in Malaya

120  Anders Corr with a more racial and violent Malay nationalism indiscriminately directed against Chinese Malaysians.

Notes 1 The author thanks Bernard Cadogan and Jason Morgan for suggestions that contributed to this chapter. He thanks Charles Parton and the family of Tom Nunan for making available the memoir upon which the chapter is based. 2 Following Gungwu (1970, 1), prior to 1957, “Malaya” refers to the Federation of Malaya and the Colony of Singapore. Between 1957 and 1963, “Malaya” refers to the Federation only. After 1963, “Malaya” refers to the States of Malaya in West Malaysia. 3 The communist “terrorists” were frequently criminal in their methods, including theft and extortion from poor Chinese villagers, and were often simply called “bandits” by contemporary British law enforcement. 4 Khoo Kay Kim, “Taiping (Larut): The Early History of a Mining Settlement,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 64, No. 1 (260) (1991), 30. 5 The word “kranie” is not necessarily derogatory, and can be translated as “clerk.” See Maimunah Mohd, Tahir (Ungku), Modern Malay Literary Culture: A Historical Perspective, Research Notes and Discussion Papers No. 62, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1987, 8. 6 Malays, Chinese, and Indians kept apart politically and religiously, perhaps with the encouragement of British officials. “The British authorities discouraged assimilation,” according to southeast Asian historian J. Norman Palmer. “A divided country is always easier to rule.” Yet, Palmer notes that, “Britons’ motives were not totally selfish. Many colonial officials looked upon themselves as guardians of the Malays against the more aggressive Indians and Chinese.” This view of British imperialism in Malaya extends to a 1913 law limiting Malay rights to sell their ancestral lands to speculators and plantations to “protect Malays against themselves” (Palmer’s quotes). The law also kept Malays in their traditional rural lifestyles (Palmer 1987, 62). 7 Captain Speedy, the nineteenth-century British Assistant Resident of Larut, based in Taiping, also arguably “went native” to some extent. He was derided by other British administrators for treating the Chinese “like gentlemen” and wearing traditional dress he had picked up in Abyssinia. His adventurous wife also enjoyed bathing in the rivers of Malaya (Gullick 1953, 69).

Bibliography Edward Said, 1978. Orientalism, New York: Pantheon Books. Graham Iwin, 1955. Nineteenth-Century Borneo: A Study in Diplomatic Rivalry, S-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff. Hamzah Sndut, 1962. “The Resettlement Villages in Malaya,” Geography, Vol. 47, No. 1 (January 1962), 41–46. J. Norman Palmer, 1987. “The British Legacy,” in The Wilson Quarterly, special issue on Malaysia, Vol. 11, No. 5, Winter. John M. Gullick, 1953. “Captain Speedy of Larut,” Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 26, No. 3 (163) (November 1953), 3–103. Joseph Conrad, 1899. Heart of Darkness, Blackwood’s Magazine. Khoo Kay Kim, 1991. “Taiping (Larut): The Early History of a Mining Settlement,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 64, No. 1 (260) (1991), 6–7.

Effect of Chinese communism  121 N.a., 1933. “Penang Wedding,” Straits Times, 28 November, 12. N.a., 1971. “Highlights,” Straits Times, 30 July, 17. N.J. Ryan, 1976. A History of Malaysia and Singapore, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Tan Ee-Leong, 1969. “The Chinese Banks Incorporated in Singapore & the Federation of Malaya,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 42, No. 1 (215) (July 1969), 256–281. Tom Nunan, 2012. My Charmed Life: Against Various Backgrounds, Some Strange, Most Now Gone, 2nd Edition, August 2012, Unpublished memoir, 227 p. Victor Purcell, 1967. The Chinese in Malaya, London: Oxford University Press. Wang Gungwu, 1970. “Chinese Politics in Malaya,” China Quarterly, September 1970, 1–30.

Part three

Ideologies, religion, and culture

6

Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan Kevin Doak

Introduction All too often, the Cold War in Japan is seen as a postwar imposition, by Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Douglas MacArthur, of American anticommunism on the Japanese people, particularly during the supposed “reverse course” at some point after 1947. This interpretation privileges state actors (the United States versus the Soviet Union, later joined by the People’s Republic of China) and overlooks the broader context of communism within a global information regime that peoples around the world participated in from at least the early twentieth century. It also tends to assume that Japanese themselves were not interested in resisting communism and had to be forced into the Cold War from American national interests. Of course, the reality was not so simple or one-sided. In this chapter, I will argue that, even in the early postwar period, people in Japan were actually resisting communism before the US Occupation did, and this resistance to communism in Japan had a history that went back before and through World War II. Most remarkable is the role played by Christians in Japan, particularly Catholics, given the rather low percentage of the Japanese population that was Christian. By relocating the Cold War in Japan from a postwar American imposition on the Japanese people to a long struggle by people in Japan themselves against global communism, we can gain a better appreciation of the agency of those individuals who resisted communism in Japan, pre- and postwar. We also gain a better understanding of how the global information regime of the universal Catholic Church provided both Christians and non-Christians in Japan with powerful resources for resisting communism before and during the Cold War.

Catholicism and communism as competing global information regimes before the Cold War To understand the Cold War within the framework of competing information regimes, particularly information regimes that were not structured on nationstates, one has to look back a bit to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Itō Takashi has even described the twentieth century as “the century

126  Kevin Doak of communism.”1 Yes, the establishment of the Soviet Union, the world’s first communist state, in 1917 meant that communism constituted “an extremely large element in changing the world.”2 But with the establishment in 1919 of the Comintern (“The Third International”) by the Russian Communist Party, the contestation between communism and non-communist value systems meant that various countries around the world increasingly were enlisted in the worldwide revolutionary movement. Japan was no exception. Indeed, Germaine Hoston has written that “beginning in 1919. . . the primary objective of Comintern policy became to foment revolution in the East.”3 Building on the socialist movement that had arisen in Japan in the late nineteenth century, Kondō Eizō linked up with Sakai Toshihiko, Yamakawa Hitoshi, and Arahata Kanson and an emissary from the Comintern named Zhang Dalai (Chō Dairai). The Japan Branch of the Comintern Preparatory Committee was organized in April 1921 with Sakai as the chairman and key members Yamakawa, Takatsu Seidō, and Hashiura Tokio, among others. By November 1922, when Japan’s first Communist Party was officially recognized at the Fourth Meeting of the Comintern in Petrograd-Moscow, Japan had about 60 communists who had come together from various groups. Communism was certainly by then a globally structured information regime bent on world revolution. Japan’s signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact on November 25, 1936 and the Tripartite Pact on September 27, 1940 are well-known historical facts. But generally, they are seen as no more than evidence of Japan’s joining the Fascist Axis in World War II. In reality, they were part of a broader foreign policy that sought to resist the Comintern’s goal of fomenting revolution in the East, particularly by removing (or executing) Japan’s emperor. This anti-communist agenda, especially the Tripartite Pact, is most associated with Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yōsuke, who was less interested in Hitler’s fascism (he helped settle Jewish refugees in Manchuria) than he was in resisting communism, especially in East Asia. He constantly pushed for Japan to attack the Soviet Union. It is not widely known that “Frank” Matsuoka, as he was also known, was a Protestant Christian and well on his way to converting to Catholicism, which he did before his death in 1946. To be fair, before his death, he admitted that his support for the Tripartite Pact was the biggest tactical error of his diplomatic career. This earlier history must be taken into account when we try to understand what the Cold War meant in postwar Japan. For Japan, the Cold War was not a new postwar development, something that rose up in contrast to the hot war of World War II. This standard historiographical imagination rests on several assumptions that make it difficult to understand the broader historical context of the Cold War as a continuation of an earlier struggle in Japan, one that may be framed as a contestation for global influence between a newly arisen world-wide communist information regime and a response, equally global, from traditionalists opposed to communist revolution. Nor will it suffice to accept the  state-based assumption that the Cold War was merely a proxy battle between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union (and much later, the People’s Republic of China).

Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan  127 This state-based assumption has led to an underappreciation of the leading role played by the Catholic Church, a global, non-state actor that opposed worldwide communism before and during the official “Cold War” period. To understand the Cold War as a struggle between rival information regimes, it is crucial to have at least a basic understanding of the Catholic Church’s early responses to the challenges of Marxism. These early responses to global communism can be limned from a few papal encyclicals which collectively may serve to represent the information regime of the universal Church in its contestation of Marxism. The Church’s response began in the late nineteenth century with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) and continued with Pope Pius XI’s encyclicals Casti connubii (1930) and Quadragesimo anno (1931). Together, these magisterial statements of the Catholic Church outlined an alternative response to the oppressive social and economic conditions of industrial capitalism that Karl Marx had emphasized, while proposing a distinctively Catholic, non-communist response to them. While Leo XIII did not use the word “communism” in Rerum novarum, he did refer explicitly to “socialism,” by which he meant what the Church and the rest of the world would later recognize as communism.4 And on “socialism,” he got right to the point. What defined revolutionary socialism (communism) was its denial of the right to the ownership of private property: It is clear that the main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property. (RN#15) Leo XIII stressed that the great mistake. . . is. . . the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. (RN#19) By the early twentieth century, it was increasingly evident that there was a worldwide struggle between communism and Catholicism. The persecution (including infiltration) of the Catholic Church in Russia escalated from the October Revolution of 1917 through the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922. But most spectacular and surprising to many Japanese was the persecution of Catholics in Mexico, a country many had presumed to be as Catholic in its very culture as their own was Shinto. On August 1, 1926, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper carried a prominent article, “Fight for Religion Finally Becomes Violent: All of

128  Kevin Doak Mexico in Crisis,” that specifically noted the oppression of the Mexican Catholic Church as President Plutarco Elías Calles rigorously enforced for the first time articles in the 1917 Mexican Constitution that were prejudicial to the Church. The article juxtaposed a picture of a determined President Calles and picture of the Mexico City Cathedral, with the caption “President Calles, determined to persecute the Catholic faithful.” And while the article mentioned that blood was already flowing, it only counted the wounded in the dozens.5 Before the Cristero War—into which this persecution would escalate—ended three years later, it would claim some 250,000 lives. On the same page was an article by Tokyo Imperial University law professor and recent Catholic convert Tanaka Kōtarō on “Law and Social Life” that pleaded for legislators in Japan to gain a correct understanding of the legitimate role of religion in social life. Implicit was the lesson from Mexico: failure to do so could lead to a bloody war in Japan, no more improbable than the war against Catholicism that was waging in Catholic Mexico. On November 18, 1926, Pius XI issued Iniquis afflictisque, an encyclical on the persecution of the Church in Mexico. While diplomatically avoiding inflammatory rhetoric, Pius XI did note that Mexican educators were required to participate in a parade sponsored by “a socialist organization” that was followed “by heaping all kinds of abuse on the Church [in order to obtain] popular approval of the acts of the President” (IA, #15). Tanaka followed up in his first book Law, Religion and Social Life (1927) on the war against Catholicism in Mexico that by then had grown horrifically bloody. There he placed the war in the broader context of the ideology of materialism that had shaped the governments of post-revolutionary France, the Soviet Union, and most recently Mexico. He agreed that it was essential to recognize the principle of separation of Church and State. But he added, “it must not be a principle of separation based on the materialist worldview such as is found in Soviet Russia, nor can it be based on the hostility toward religion as we find in Mexico or France.”6 Tanaka may have expressed himself in restrained academic style, but communists in Japan quickly identified him as their opponent, and one of them published a critique of Tanaka’s book from a communist standpoint.7 Thereafter, Tanaka would be a regular target of criticism from both communists and extreme right-wing nationalists. By 1931, Pius XI could no longer avoid the term “communism.” This was no doubt a result of what the Soviet Union was doing to the Catholic Church there. Edward Krause has summarized the horrors: By 1934, 3,300 Catholic churches and 2,000 chapels in Russia had been reduced to two. The best estimate is that at least a hundred million innocent people would be murdered by Communists in the name of ‘scientific socialism,’ including thirty-five million Christians.8 In Quadragesimo anno, Pius XI drew a distinction between a moderate form of socialism, which does accept some form of private property, and communism. Of course, he recognized that both communism and socialism in “all their forms,

Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan  129 even the most modified, [have] wander[ed] far from the precepts of the Gospel” (QA #128). But his main target was communism and its two principles: unrelenting class warfare and absolute extermination of private ownership.  .  . The horrible slaughter and destruction through which it has laid waste vast regions of eastern Europe and Asia are the evidence; how much an enemy and how openly hostile it is to Holy Church and to God Himself is, alas too well proved by facts and fully known to all. (QA #112) The following year, Tanaka outlined in the leading journal Kaizō what he called the problem of Japan’s “intellectual anarchy.” Tanaka saw Japan in the early 1930s as standing at the crossroads that led either to extreme right-wing nationalism or Marxism, and he blamed Japan’s predominant positivist philosophy that rejected any objective moral principles for the devil’s dilemma. Even Protestant Christianity in Japan had developed in an individualistic, subjectivist manner that left those Christians intellectually defenseless against the claims of communism. But internationally, Tanaka noted, “the religion that Marxists most ferociously attack is the Catholic Church.” 9 Tanaka explained this war between these two information regimes in the following terms: The clash between Marxism and Catholicism stems in the first place from its atheism, and on that point the clash is head-on. The reason is that, while Marxism is fundamentally an economic theory, the communist LaborFarmer Russia is attempting to eradicate religion. In the second place, Marxism in the form of communism, clashes with Catholicism. That clash is a side-battle. The Catholic Church is fundamentally interested in the spiritual life of Man and does not make particular claims about the institutions of Man’s secular life.10 Tanaka noted that in principle the Catholic Church has no interest in whether people adopt a system of private property or of communism. The problem is that the communist system contradicts human nature and will bring about its degradation and destruction. Specifically, communism will destroy the institution of the family that is based on the demands of human nature. . . The institution of private property is necessary for the maintenance of the institution of the family and is based on the natural law.11 Further evidence that Tanaka was part of this international information regime is his citation of both Rerum novarum (to show that the Catholic Church was not turning its back on the real sufferings of the laborers) and Quadragesimo anno (to demonstrate the Catholic social teaching on the right of workers to organize), which had been translated into Japanese in 1931.12

130  Kevin Doak One year later, in 1932, Tanaka developed his argument on the threats against the institution of the family in the same left-leaning journal Kaizō that had published his earlier article. He warned of the dangers of both “individualism and collectivism” in current ideas about marriage and family. “Collectivist” marriage referred not to communist countries, but to marriage laws under Nazi Germany. Both approaches to marriage were dangerous, however, and Tanaka strongly repudiated them both. He cited Pius XI’s encyclical Casti connubii to emphasize that marriage was correctly understood as a divine institution, not something that “can be changed and abrogated according to human caprice and the shifting circumstances of human affairs.”13 But he emphasized that “what must not be overlooked here is the point that the topic of marriage as a pathological phenomenon has extremely intimate ties intellectually with the spread of communism.”14 Soviet law had removed all traces of religion from marriage, in keeping with the anti-religious policy of the Soviet Union. The importance of redefining marriage for communism can be seen in the fact that the first law passed in the Soviet Union was the New Family Law. The great irony for Tanaka was that this law reflected the Enlightenment value of individualism, particularly the idea that marriage was merely “a private contract.” Everything else in the Soviet Union was determined on the basis of “socialistic, statist, collectivist” principles; only marriage was seen as “non-socialistic, non-statist, and individualistic.” The laws in the Soviet Union were in this matter no different from the trends in capitalist thinking on marriage, if not even more individualistic. The key difference, however, was the rejection of private property that was designed to bring about the collapse of the family as an institution.15 He concluded his article with the following, prophetic words: I repeat. The so-called “ideological problem” is not limited to economic or political matters. The moral or religious issue is even more important because it touches on the very foundation of human nature. And the problem of how we think about marriage is intimately connected with the moral life of the nation in general. And insofar as the family is the cell of the state and society, ensuring the health of the family will have a profound influence on the health of society. But the destruction of the former will necessarily induce the destruction of the latter (think of ancient Rome). We should pay more attention to this problem than we have in the past.16 Even into the early and mid-1930s, Marxist intellectuals remained engaged in contesting Tanaka’s Catholic views. Tosaka Jun was his main Marxist critic. Tosaka published a repudiation of Tanaka’s Catholic defense of marriage in the May 3, 1933 edition of the Tokyo Asahi newspaper, and Tanaka replied to him in the same newspaper in a series of articles from June 16 to June 19.17 The argument continued in prominent newspapers over the next several years, with Tosaka publishing a piece in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper in 1935 with the title “Asking Tokyo University Professor Tanaka Kōtarō about Catholicism and

Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan  131 Imperial Nationalism” in which he strongly implied that Japanese Catholics like Tanaka stood on the wrong side of the political divide of their day.18 Tanaka replied in the same newspaper the following day, emphasizing the universal values of Catholicism (its difference from “Japanism”) and its belief that freedom was not unlimited, but framed within the demands of the natural law (its difference from liberalism).19 Tanaka’s argument for Catholicism and against Marxism gained further support in March 1937 when Pius XI promulgated Divini redemptoris which explicitly condemned communism. In DR, Pius XI wrote, “Bolshevistic and atheistic communism undermines the very foundations of civilizations.  .  . and is absolutely contrary to natural law” (DR #3–4) and he harshly criticized the media silence regarding the communist atrocities in Russia, Mexico, and Spain. After 1937, when Japan entered into the Second Sino-Japanese War, and especially after 1938 when Tosaka and his Marxist comrades were arrested, communism was no longer openly debated in Japan. Rather, Tanaka’s critics on the right (e.g. Minoda Muneki) were his main adversaries for the duration of the war.

Pedro Arrupe, S.J. on the true face of communism In October 1945, the US Occupation released Japanese communists from prison and two of them, Tokuda Kyūichi and Shiga Yoshio, immediately established the Japan Communist Party. The following year, the Japan Communist Party became actively involved in the labor movement and political protests. In October and November 1946, Pedro Arrupe, S.J. responded with a series of lectures on the dangers of communism which he gave at schools in Kumamoto and various cities in western Honshu. Arrupe had been in Japan since 1938 and had gained a solid proficiency in the Japanese language by this time. It is not clear who sponsored this lecture series, but it seems that the schools where he spoke were public schools. From the book composed of his lectures that he published in Japanese (“The True Face of Communism”) in January 1948, we may surmise that the lecture series may have been sponsored by the Society of Jesus, as the book carries the imprimi potest (permission to publish) of Bruno Bitter, S.J., the ViceSuperior of the Jesuit Mission in Japan. But that must remain a matter of speculation. What is known is that Arrupe was asked to give these lectures because he had first-hand experience of communism, first in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War and the following year when, exiled in the United States, he visited Mexico during the anti-Catholic, socialist Cárdenas regime.20 It is worth noting that Arrupe was a Spaniard and many of his brother Jesuits in Japan (including Bitter) were Germans and, because of their nationalities, they had been able to remain in Japan throughout the war. In the context of the early postwar American Occupation of Japan, Spaniards and Germans who had stayed in Japan during the war, who had not been expatriated as enemy aliens, may have been viewed with some skepticism by the Occupation officials. At any rate, it does not seem that Arrupe’s lecture series or book was sponsored by the Occupation. And indeed, those leftist historians who accept the theory of a

132  Kevin Doak reverse course in 1947 or 1948 implicitly suggest that the early Occupation was promoting communism in Japan as an antidote to wartime “fascism” at the very time Arrupe was speaking out against communism. From the outset, it was clear that the fight against communism was both principled and personal for Arrupe. The 1949 edition of the book opens with nine shocking photographs of the work of communists during the Spanish Civil War: desecration of churches, bodies of their tortured victims, their destruction of the Alcázar of Toledo, and their exposure of the skeletons of dead priests and nuns. But it was the last photograph that succinctly captured Arrupe’s point. It was of the bodies of two laborers, shot in the head by the communists and tied together with a rosary. As both the Spanish Civil War and the Mexican Cristero War had demonstrated, this global struggle was really over the competing worldviews of communism and Catholicism. And that was the perspective Arrupe outlined in his lectures and book. But it was not merely personal. In his introduction, Arrupe confessed that in spite of all the talk of “construction” in postwar Japan, he felt that Japan was headed more in the direction of destruction. The reason was that the Japanese people seemed to have lost their belief in a transcendental principle: Before the defeat in the war, every Japanese person had what might be called a kind of Absolute. This was the axis of each man’s heart, the center of his life. However, with the defeat in the war, this concept of an Absolute rather foolishly collapsed. When this concept, so important that it had become the basis of all life, falls apart, man cannot help falling into a stupor. But when he eventually realizes he cannot remain aimless forever, he starts growing impatient and grabs whatever is nearby and makes that the new Absolute. But what do you suppose he finds most close to him? An egotism based on himself and himself alone. I do not think I can overemphasize that this is the greatest cause of the current vulgarization of social conditions. You can say this is just a reaction against the vicious totalitarianism of the wartime. But there is something else on the loose. What is it? Materialism. . . In a word, Marxism.21 Arrupe was no cheerleader for the American Occupation of Japan. Clearly, he felt that the US effort to construct a new democratic Japan was not responding to the spiritual impoverishment of the Japanese people. What they needed was not American know-how, but Catholic values that would provide them with a new transcendental, a new hope for life. The book was organized around two major chapters and two short appendices (a third appendix on “Getting Behind the Iron Curtain” was added to the 1949 edition). The first chapter, “The History of Communism,” opened with a brief summary of ancient Greek philosophers and early Christians whose thought bore some resemblance to aspects of communist ideology. But Arrupe emphasized that it was really with the industrial revolution and the consequent labor problem that the foundations were laid for what we recognize today as

Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan  133 communism. The ultimate goal of these modern communists was “to use whatever means necessary to eradicate the firm Catholic faith from the world of workers.”22 From there, Arrupe covered the intellectual contributions of the usual suspects: François-Noël Babeuf, Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, Louis Blanqui, Ferdinand Lassalle, and, of course, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. The second chapter, “The World View of Communism,” critically assessed what Arrupe called the three main arguments of communism: the claim to equality, to freedom, and the rejection of private property rights. In his critique of the Marxist argument against the right to private property, Arrupe referred to Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum, quoting in Japanese the following passage: It is no easy matter to define the relative rights and mutual duties of the rich and of the poor, of capital and of labor. And the danger lies in this, that crafty agitators are intent on making use of these differences of opinion to pervert men’s judgments and to stir up the people to revolt. . . In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class. . . so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.23 Arrupe felt that, after reading this section, many Japanese might conclude that the only means for redressing the economic injustice of the workers is Marxism and the obliteration (“dynamiting”) of capitalism.24 He argued against such a violent conclusion: “resistance and hatred certainly are not inevitable,” he counseled. And his reason? “The differences in social life arise in accordance with the order of the Natural Law. By correctly protecting that order, we can preserve the social order.”25 Before concluding that Marxism is the best—or only—remedy for these injustices, he urged everyone to carefully read the entire encyclical and to recognize what Marxist calls for resistance had done to actual people in the real world. The most moving part of Arrupe’s book is his treatment of the communist theory and practice of educating the young. After reviewing communist education theorists (Kanitz, Lévy-Bruhl) and emphasizing that the goal of communist education was “to plant a hatred for God” in the minds of children, 26 he related a personal experience he had with the practical effects of communist education. While in exile in the United States in 1937, he heard that the Communist Party had devised a plan to ensure that the future of Spain would be a communist one. In the midst of the Spanish Civil War, they pulled 3,000 Spanish children out of school and, without notifying their parents, sent the children to communist safe-havens like Russia and Mexico. Five hundred of the children were sent to the town of Morelia in Mexico. He read in an American magazine that Morelia was a paradise for these children.27 But just then a friend who had been in Morelia arrived with first-hand information about what really was happening there and

134  Kevin Doak invited Arrupe to accompany him to the children’s school in Morelia. Arrupe readily agreed. What he found there horrified him. The children were living in the streets, not attending school, and involved in gangs and committing all sorts of crimes. They had insufficient food, clothing, and medical care. When Arrupe asked his guide why the children were not in school, he was told that they were on strike because the principal had tried to discipline them for hitting their teacher with a rock. The local communists supported the school children’s strike as an example of proper communist resistance to authority. Only when local Catholic families took some of the children into their homes did those children begin to settle down and behave. But as soon as the officials found out, they took the children out of those homes and forbade the Catholic families from coming near the school. The children returned to their wild ways.28 Arrupe spoke with a 15-year-old girl who related how, on the journey to Mexico, she had to hide with her younger sisters in the hold of the boat (which they had been forced onto) for fear of rape by the captain and that the head of the women’s dormitory was a local bargirl and their nurse, a former prostitute. She pleaded with him, “how can I find happiness when I am surrounded by these people who are like beasts?” When Arrupe asked a local educator about it, he conceded that their educational experiment had failed and that the only hope for restoring these children’s happiness would be to have a couple of Catholic priests take over their education.29 But that was not likely to happen. The last aspect of the communist worldview that Arrupe discussed was “Communism and the Family (katei).” He noted that the fundamental spirit of the institution of marriage under the Bolsheviks was to use it to destroy the family since they saw the family as the basis of bourgeois society, the central power that held together the social order of the bourgeois state and economy. Instead of the family, labor unions would be the basic cell of Bolshevik society. The first step in creating this Bolshevik society was to remove legal protections for marital relations based on the system of “one man, one woman” and to make heterosexual monogamy seem like an idiosyncratic choice.30 He quoted a certain “Gurian” (Waldemar Gurian, 1902–1954?) to the effect that in the Soviet Union, marriage is nothing more than an individual union between a man and a woman and “since it is merely an individual, private matter, no matter how disordered that relationship might be, no matter how immoral that relationship might be, there is no legal sanction to be had.”31 For Arrupe, the greatest tragedy of this redefinition of marriage was its deleterious effect on the children. On the one hand, the communists encouraged children to rebel against their parents, and on the other hand, they encouraged mothers to reject any emotional attachment to their children. The communists “go as far as saying, ‘kill maternal love,’ and ‘a woman who loves her child is no different than a bitch’.”32 Arrupe quoted a resolution passed at the 3rd International Conference of Communist Women held in 1924: “The revolution cannot be achieved by our staying at home so we must immediately smash the home.”33 A leader in that effort was Russian Ambassador to Norway, Alexandra Kollontai, who said,

Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan  135 if we can raise an endowment of one hundred million rubles in a year, we would educate one million children. . . doing so would destroy the family, but what is a family anyway but the union of a man and woman that rejects communal life. Do we really need such a thing? I don’t think we do.34 Arrupe wrapped up his discussion on communism and the family by reviewing 1927 statistics from Leningrad that showed, with the introduction of this communist revolution in marriage and the family, a sharp increase in divorce, children who did not know their parents, venereal disease, adultery, and abortion. The effects of communism on the family were clear: “men increasingly became animalistic, prisoners of moral dissipation, and they abandoned their women and children with indifference.”35 Finally, Arrupe brought the issue back to Japan, offering a brief analysis on the strategy of communism with regard to Japan. In Japan, as elsewhere, he noted that the Communist Party lays low, not putting its true cards on the table until it has seized power. Rather, the Communist Party in Japan attracts the general population by promising things like “a wealthy Japan,” or “a populist government,” a strategy that was quite effective since many Japanese were still mired in a general sense of despondency after the war. In the meantime, the Communist Party was busy building cells everywhere and calling for strikes, especially the general strike. Arrupe argued that instead of “workers unite!,” the call in his day should be “brother workers, don’t become bait for the beasts!”36 Arrupe believed that the unity of the Japanese people was their strongest defense against the communists. Because of their patriotism (aikokushin), the Japanese were not easily susceptible to social divisions on the basis of class. Thus, the Communist Party tried to implant hatred instead of the brotherly love (dōhō ai) that was so strong among the Japanese. Arrupe drew on his own background, noting that Spaniards were no less patriotic than the Japanese, and yet they had to endure the bloody Civil War with the communists. But Japan had a resource that might preserve them from Spain’s fate: If Japan can be separated from its spirit of patriotism, Japan will simply and ruthlessly be destroyed. The Communist Party takes aim at this patriotism. And what is the focal point of this patriotism? Of course, it is His Majesty the Emperor. That is why the Communist Party is always saying this and that about His Majesty the Emperor. They try separating His Imperial Majesty into two: the emperor and the imperial system, or the political emperor and the religious emperor. But His Majesty the Emperor is The One (goichinin). If either aspect is left out, the Emperor of Japan ceases to exist.37 In addition, Arrupe identified two openings for the communists in Japan. One was the penchant for Hegelian dialectic among Japanese intellectuals. Arrupe worried that Japanese intellectuals could not see the danger in this philosophy, its tendency to focus on material things at the expense of a deeper metaphysics. Arrupe called for greater reflection on this intellectual poverty, lest the Japanese

136  Kevin Doak intellectuals follow the example of Russian intellectuals whose secular atheism led to nihilism and ultimately to the control of the Communist Party.38 The other opening for communism was the large number of poor as a result of the bombings of Japan’s cities and the returnee soldiers. These displaced people provided a social basis for the materialist emphases on food, clothing, and housing at the expense of moral values and a concern with what is the Truth. In the end, Arrupe appealed to the traditional historical spirit of the Japanese to save them from the dangers of communism. He noted the presence in this traditional Japanese spirit of an inherent tendency to recognize the evils of communism and a strong opposition to it. But he also worried that there might be an inclination among the Japanese not to mobilize their traditional spirit when they most needed it and thus to open the doors to nihilism through their inaction. He advised the Japanese to learn from the history of other countries, most notably his own Spain during the Civil War. The tremendous loss of life during that war might have been lessened, he warned, had the conservatives not taken so long to rise up against the communists. If the Japanese remain complacent to the dangers of communism, then by the time they wake up, “Japan might be destroyed for all time. Or at least, it might not be saved without spending a greater amount of compatriots’ lives and treasure than the atomic bombs took.”39 The Japanese should not be persuaded by communist ideology that only communism can make Japanese society better. The Japanese should fix their own social ills by themselves, aware of the lessons afforded by other countries, but never reach out to the communists for a resolution to their social problems. They must never forget that “Bolshevism is not so much an economic philosophy as it is a biased, fanatical worldview” that must be resisted through spiritual warfare.40

The broader postwar Japanese Catholic discourse on anti-communism ­ Arrupe’s Japanese lectures and book against communism are evidence of the global, Catholic information regime’s role in the Cold War. He was not alone. His Jesuit colleague Fr. Heinrich Dumoulin, professor at Sophia University, made an important contribution with an article on “Catholicism and the World of Marxism” in the September 1948 issue of the Japanese language journal Catholic Thought.41 It was offered on the occasion of the centenary of the Communist Manifesto. But Dumoulin made the point that 1948 was also the centenary of (the future bishop) Wilhelm von Ketteler’s speech to the National Parliament in Frankfurt on the Christian idea of human liberty. Dumoulin emphasized the Catholic Church as the bulwark against Communist imperialism, and he cited the Italian intellectual Giuseppe Antonio Borgese to the effect that the world was now divided and one had to choose either the Soviet Union or the Catholic Church, both of which were headed for collision.42 As if to prove his case, only three months after Dumoulin’s article appeared, Cardinal József Mindszenty was arrested by lackeys of the Soviet Union in its satellite country, the People’s Republic of Hungary. It seemed as if the nightmare of

Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan  137 the Calles regime had come back to haunt eastern Europe. Cardinal Mindszenty’s show trial in February 1949 and life sentence only drew the world’s attention to his plight and the plight of Catholics living under communism. Remarkably, the left-leaning journal Kaizō published a detailed exposé from the United Press of the whole Mindszenty affair, under the title “Who is the Enemy of Democracy? The Struggle Between Communism and the Roman Catholic Church.” It included a Japanese translation of a letter the cardinal had sent to those in his diocese on November 18, shortly before his arrest. And lest one conclude that this journal was suggesting that communism was the true friend of democracy (after all, it also published in the same issue a piece by the communist Tokuda Kyūichi), it wrote “the voice of Cardinal Mindszenty had been the one and only important voice upholding freedom in Hungary until autumn of 1948.”43 The case of Cardinal Mindszenty became a crystallizing moment in the Cold War that underscored the central struggle between communism and Catholicism, while alerting the entire world (even largely non-Christian countries like Japan) that the choice between freedom and oppression was a stark and very real one. In 1950, Tanaka Kōtarō published Communism and Its Worldview, a collection of articles and essays he had published in various journals and newspapers over the previous two years. It was sure to get attention, as Tanaka had just been appointed the new chief justice of Japan’s Supreme Court. Tanaka believed that many young Japanese were running to communism, not so much from the deplorable economics conditions in postwar Japan, but because they were quite naive about what communism really was. Japanese had been so deeply influenced by utilitarian and functionalist education for so long that they failed to see that dialectical materialist communism was more than a simple economic theory; it had claims to a worldview and that is why it attracts our scholars, artists and public intellectuals and of course our students who are like a blank slate when it comes to worldviews.44 Tanaka noted that modern Japanese education had been premised on a positivism and utilitarianism (the goal was fukoku kyōhei; “enrich the nation, strengthen the military”) that simply set aside moral questions about the nature and purpose of Man. In the first half of the twentieth century, this education led Japanese either to a Nazi-like nationalist exceptionalism or to Marxist communism. While communism had been suppressed during the war, now in the early postwar period, the roles were reversed: nationalists were suppressed and the communists were resurrected. But Tanaka argued that the communists’ path was made easier by the fact that communism had never really faced a rigorous critique of its worldview in Japan, a failure Tanaka attributed to the weak role of philosophy in modern Japanese education. Tanaka was astounded that the Japanese translation of Das Kapital was available in cheap one-yen books, and thus it had become “the Bible” for many postwar Japanese intellectuals and students. But he added dryly that, as with most Bibles, it was carried around more often than it was read.45 He concluded that “it is no exaggeration to say that,

138  Kevin Doak at present, Christianity (Catholicism in particular) is the only bulwark against Communism in the world.”46 Tanaka’s reasons were simple: Catholicism was grounded in a firm, identifiable worldview, one that was diametrically opposed to the atheism and materialism of communism. Tanaka published these articles and the book in Japanese. But he was very active in the global information regime of anti-communism, with many articles also written in English and published both inside and outside Japan. The best example from this period is his article on “Peace and Justice.” Originally published in Japanese in the journal Kokoro and republished later in English in the Nippon Times newspaper, it was then picked up by the American Catholic University Law Review and carried again in the American Bar Association ­Journal—all in the same year, 1952. The year of publication was not incidental. Tanaka opened the essay by reflecting that this year marked the end of the US Occupation and the rehabilitation of Japan as an independent member of the world community. But, as he pointed out, the world was not united, and the question facing a newly independent Japan was where would she stand in a world that was divided between those countries who act “in conformity with the spirit of the United Nations Charter” and those who follow “the Soviet Union and its satellite countries.”47 Tanaka’s argument was global in focus, but aimed particularly at those leftists in Japan who had criticized the San Francisco Peace Treaty for making Japan a partisan in the Cold War and who regularly intoned as their alternative the coded phrase, “over-all peace.” Tanaka rejected this argument as too idealistic, arguing that neutrality was impossible because the basic issue at stake was not political, but ethical. As he powerfully argued: Our choice lies between a dark world in which truth is distorted, man is enslaved, people are deprived of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience and the freedom of political association, secret trials are held and children spy on their parents and the other world in which human rights and freedoms are guaranteed not by the letter of the law only but are protected in actual practice. . . So long as we remain faithful apostles of the new Constitution, our choice is quite obvious. We must needs align ourselves with the group of nations adhering staunchly to the United Nations Charter which, in fundamentals, is identical with Japan’s new Constitution.48 In essence, Tanaka’s argument was merely an extension of the argument he made in “UNESCO Philosophy and Communism” which he first published in the Japanese magazine Yomiuri Hyōron in January 1950, reprinted in his 1952 Communism and Its Worldview and again as the final chapter in his Sequel to A Theory of World Law which was published in 1972, just two years before his death. In short, Tanaka found the principles of UNESCO to lie in a recognition of the natural law and thus to be incompatible with communism.49 One can only imagine what Tanaka would think today, had he lived long enough to witness members from several communist countries on the Executive Board of UNESCO.

Catholicism and the Cold War in Japan  139

Conclusion Certainly, much has changed since Tanaka, Arrupe, and others wrote on the antipathy between Catholicism and communism. One might conclude that Catholicism led the democratic nations in defeating communism and that Pope John Paul II played a heroic role in ending the Cold War peacefully. Many do so argue. But that view is far too Euro-centric in scope. The Cold War is not over in East Asia, and in more recent years Marxist cultural influences have pervaded most capitalist societies, even reaching the highest levels of the Catholic Church itself. For its part, the Catholic Church hierarchy in Japan has not only distanced itself from Tanaka’s principled fight against Marxism, but it has adopted the very effort toward neutrality in geo-political struggles with communist countries in East Asia that Tanaka had criticized as too idealistic. These changing political, cultural, social, and moral realities signify nothing so much as the end of one kind of ideological regime, one that for many years was coded as “the Cold War,” while marking the start of a new kind of ideological regime—one that seems to have accepted the social and cultural goals of communism, even if abandoning the economic challenges to global capitalism that Marxism had long raised. It is hard to discern at this point in time what the full nature of this new, emerging global information regime might be. But one thing is certain: it does not seem very hospitable to the kinds of Catholic values that Arrupe, Dumoulin, and Tanaka fought so hard to defend.

Notes 1 Itō Takashi, Nihon no kindai volume 16: Nihon no uchi to soto (Tokyo: Chūō Kōron Sha, 2001), 235. 2 Itō, Nihon no kindai volume 16, 237. 3 Germaine Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), xi. 4 One possible reason that the word “communism” is not used in this 1891 encyclical is that it was not until after Engels’s preface to the 1888 English translation of the Communist Manifesto that a distinction between “socialism” and “communism” was widely made. See Arrupe, Kyōsanshugi no jissō (Tokyo: Don Bosco Sha, 1949), 68. 5 “Shūkyō tōsō tsui ni bōdōka shi, mekishiko zendo no kiki,” Tokyo Asahi Shimbun (August 1, 1926), 2. 6 Tanaka Kōtarō, Hō to shūkyō to shakai seikatsu (Tokyo: Kaizō Sha, 1927), 173. 7 M.K., “Ronri yori itadaki gutai-teki seikatsu yōkyū,” Teikoku Daigaku Shimbun (April 25, 1927). 8 Edward Krause, “Marxism,” in Michael L. Coulter, Stephen M. Krason, Richard S. Myers, and Joseph A. Varacalli, eds., Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy, Volume 2 (Lanham, MD, Toronto, and Plymouth, UK: The Scarecrow Press, 2007), 673. 9 Tanaka, “Gendai no shisō-teki ­ anākī to sono gen’in kentō,” Kaizō (June 1932); reprinted in Kyōyō to bunka no kiso (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1937), 45. ­ ­ ­

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142  Kevin Doak ———. “Peace and Justice: Japan’s Place in the Family of Nations.” American Bar ­Association Journal, volume 38. August, 1952. ———. “Yunesuko tetsugaku to kyōsanshugi.” In Tanaka, Zoku sekai hō no riron, ge. Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1972, 707–728. Tokyo Asahi Shimbun. “Shūkyō tōsō tsui ni bōdōka shi, mekishiko zendo no kiki.” August 1, 1926. Tosaka, Jun. “Rikon to tetsugaku, ge: Tanaka Hakase no shoron o yomu.” Tokyo Asahi Shimbun. May 3, 1933. ———. “Katorikku to kōdōshugi: Tōdai kyōju Tanaka Kōtarō-shi ni tazuneru.” Yomiuri Shimbun. May 31, 1935.

7

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea as a diplomatic subject David A. Tizzard

Introduction This chapter explores the regional and global environment in which the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK; North Korea) came into being, and how the DPRK transformed from a communist regime, focused on hard power elements such as the military and economy, to one that projected an image of self-reliance and anti-imperialism, particularly toward the Third World and rising social movements during the 1970s. North Korea was very much a player in the Cold War in East Asia, but its method of diplomatic attack changed over time, necessitated by its desire for survival among the great powers surrounding it. Not only did the DPRK seek to protect itself from those who opposed it on the international stage, it also sought legitimacy in the eyes of its own citizens, especially as North Koreans endured increasingly harsh living conditions and totalitarian measures. This chapter traces and explains the evolution of North Korea from a military to a diplomatic subject, molded in the crucible of the Cold War, and suggests that this evolution has taken place across three distinct propaganda tracks.

Korea and the Cold War The Korean War (1950–1953) was the defining moment of the Cold War. Yet, it is worth noting that for both Koreas, their involvement in the broader global clash was not unavoidable. In 1949, the major World War II powers had left the Korean Peninsula: Japan had been defeated, the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) had left, the Soviet forces were largely withdrawn, and China was still embroiled in its own domestic struggles as Mao Zedong’s (1893–1976) Communist Party and Chiang Kai-shek’s (1887–1975) Nationalists vied for control of mainland China. Korea was, for one of the first times in recent memory, left to its own devices and in charge of its own destiny. For a brief moment after the end of World War II, it seemed as though the Korean Peninsula would be free and independent. That would be changed by Kim Il-sung’s decision to invade the South on June 25, 1950 and the subsequent arrival of China and the United Nations forces.

144  David A. Tizzard However, while the Korean War has been referred to as “The Forgotten War,” for other scholars, the conflict “shaped the course of the Cold War” and set the tone for the decades of standoff that would follow.1 More broadly, the Korean War was part of a larger East Asian Cold War theater. Elsewhere in East Asia, Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China (as the country was called after the Communists’ victory in October of 1949) was arming and funding Worker’s Party of Vietnam president and Vietnamese prime minister Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces in the north of Vietnam in their guerilla actions against French imperial forces in Indochina. This led to questions being raised about whether the “domino theory” was correct: would the fall of one country to communism lead to a succession of others coming under the same influence?2 These questions were first encountered on the Korean Peninsula in June of 1950, and the proxy war that developed in Korea came to define the rest of what would become known as the Cold War. Since the first, fateful division of the Korean Peninsula into Soviet- and Alliedcontrolled halves after the close of World War II, the two Koreas have found themselves locked in a permanent conflict, their identities and destinies defined by their mutual antagonism and intertwined with the broader systemic ideological and cultural tensions of the Cold War. The stark divide between North and South Korea (the Republic of Korea (ROK)) makes for a Manichean dynamic at work on the Korean Peninsula which does not brook moral ambiguity. The Korean Peninsula is arguably the most challenging diplomatic environment in the world today. Indeed, the ROK’s and DPRK’s alliances with greater powers have left them not only seemingly as parts of a much bigger game but also having to seek legitimacy in the eyes of the diplomatic community so as to bolster their own claims to the peninsula. As part of this alliance strategy, two months after the Korean War began, Seoul and Washington signed the “Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of Korea,” which obliges both nations to come to the other’s aid if attacked as well as allows American forces to be stationed in South Korea. This means that, for the North, the “imperial” American forces remain stationed on their doorstep.3 Thus, even though the Cold War has ended for most of the world, the Korean Peninsula remains divided and ideological antagonisms between the communist North and capitalist South still exist despite the efforts of a series of “progressive” South Korean presidents to engage Pyongyang. These have been best exemplified by Kim Dae-jung’s (1924–2009) Sunshine Policy, the continuation of such an approach by his successor Roh Moo-hyun (1946–2009) and, more recently, President Moon Jae-in, who has met frequently with his DPRK counterpart Chairman Kim Jong-un. For the DPRK, one of the biggest challenges has been to convince itself, its citizens, and the global community that it was, in fact, the victim despite it having been the clear aggressor and the cause of the suffering on, and ongoing division of, the Korean Peninsula. Rather than being the instigator of a conflict that cost nearly five million lives, the DPRK sought to reinvent itself as a defender of national interests amid imperialism and great power politics. Rather than being

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea  145 a satellite state of the Soviet Union and heavily dependent on Chinese forces both during and after the Korean War for its security, the North spun a narrative that depicted its leader Kim Il-sung (1912–1994) as a war hero who almost single-handedly repelled a series of invasions of the homeland while formulating the juche ideology of self-reliance. The DPRK’s diplomatic propaganda would require a series of tools and weapons far different from those found on the battlefield. A new information regime was required to carry out a peace offensive, one filled with carefully constructed ideological statements and historical interpretations so as to ensure the survival of the DPRK in the international arena and keep its citizens docile and incapable of challenging the authoritarian rule of Pyongyang. North Korea was still at war, but it had to change how it was at war.

“Tracks” of information The entire North Korean state can essentially be seen as an information regime. While the DPRK uses military means to secure its borders, it places just as much emphasis on propaganda as a form of domestic control. Much has been written on how severely Pyongyang restricts information on the outside world to its citizens,4 as well as on the various efforts and plans from external sources to get information in from the outside so as to encourage change from the bottom up and “beat the regime.”5 The propaganda employed differs according to the audience and the form of control required, and shows that “Juche acts as a cover for the true ideology, which has its reserved space in the propaganda unavailable to foreigners.”6 North Korean propaganda-diplomacy is thus in a permanent state of flux, forever transforming through a dialectical history and never static.7 For a foreign audience, such ideological propaganda is “the opaque core of North Korean national solipsism.”8 B.R. Myers has suggested that for North Korea, information as a form of control exists in three specific and clearly differentiated realms: the inner track, the outer track, and the export track.9 While these can be further subdivided, Myers holds that this trichotomy best explains Pyongyang’s dissemination of information in its pursuit of domestic dominance and international recognition. The tripartite distinction has also been utilized by David Zeglen in his analysis of the relationship between Chairman Kim Jong-un and his wife Ri Sol-ju, as well as the growing media attention surrounding them.10 Zeglen holds that while for external Western observers the photos and images indicate the “presence of a foreign culture as a portent of glasnost and perestroika,” in the eyes of the North Korean audience, these images only further reinforce the authority and power of the state.11 It is not only the track through which information is shared, but also the Saussurean significance bestowed upon it by the observers. Creating such a separated and controlled flow of information has been essential for the survival of the state in Pyongyang. It has allowed it to receive countless amounts of foreign aid from sources as varied as China and the European Union while also still declaring to its citizens that it remains an independent and free-thinking nation. The idea that different publications serve different

146  David A. Tizzard purposes for the North is given further credence by Virgine Grzelczyk, who affirms that “the KCNA [Korean Central News Agency, the mouthpiece of the Korean Workers’ Party in North Korea] is written with a foreign audience in mind and should be treated as such.”12

The inner track: gods and control Repression and propaganda are two of the most commonly used methods for maintaining control and conferring legitimacy in an authoritarian state. The former seeks to remove any spontaneity in citizens and create automatons who respond passively to the state’s directions but never collectively or in the belief that such actions could bring about positive change in the country.13 Conversely, propaganda seeks to control citizens’ hearts and minds. It instills a sense of pride in one’s home nation—often through the dissemination of false information—while discrediting domestic dissidents and accusing foreign actors of imperialism. It does not take long for such messages to descend into chauvinism and xenophobia, and this is exacerbated in an ethno-national state such as the DPRK. The inner track is propaganda directed solely at the citizens of the DPRK and is not to be seen by external observers. In inner-track propaganda, therefore, a great emphasis is placed on building the cult of personality around the Kim family as well as instilling a strong degree of patriotism among North Korean citizens against an often demonized external and imperial enemy. Government directives and policies are often first realized here, on the inner track, before perhaps later being tried in a different sphere possibly visible to external observers.14 The inner track is marked as distinct in that Kim Il-sung would publicly extol the virtues of the Soviet regime to an international audience “while promoting an inner track that preached race-based nationalism.”15 These two stances are obviously contradictory, and yet when seen in light of the multi-track information regime of North Korean Cold War diplomacy, they can be seen as complementary, both aiding the survival of the Kim regime. With the North Korean identity and ideology having their origins in Stalinism, the state created a cult of personality around its leader and founder. The Kim family is depicted as having qualities and importance far beyond those of normal human beings. For example, the founder of the state, Kim Il-sung, was declared the eternal leader and continues to shape the thoughts and lives of the North Korean people from beyond the grave. Kim Il-sung (born Kim Song-ju in 1912 on the same day that the Titanic sank) rose from being a lowly foot solider in the USSR’s drive to communize the planet, to the leader of a twentiethcentury state, before finally ascending to the position of a deity. The North Korean state’s “propaganda began to veer into the realms of madness by presenting Kim as the Christ-like savior of Korea.”16 The apotheosis of Kim Il-sung is the essence of North Korean inner-track diplomatic propaganda. This elevation of the North Korean monarchs into the realm of the transcendental was seen as essential for domestic control and conferring legitimacy

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea  147 onto the family that ruled the country.17 Former South Korean Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ra Jong-yil, describes the North Korean theocracy as having been brought about not so much by religious devotion, but rather by the nature of the family’s rule. Unlike in Japan, where the imperial family stretches back 126 generations, the Kim regime “lacked traditional legitimacy.”18 Therefore, any details or discussion of their private lives threatened the survival of the system. Moreover, were the family itself to secularize or associate freely with the general citizenry of the state, this might tarnish or weaken the image and perceived sanctity of what was known as the “Paektu bloodline.” This term was used to denote the line from Kim Il-sung who—the Northern legends say— successfully fought against the Japanese imperial invading army and thus secured the freedom and safety of his people. This combination of secrecy and necessity in the Kim family’s attempts to maintain their political rule over the population eventually gave way to mysticism, and thus the theocratic monarchy came to be. The rule of divine kings in Pyongyang has been used to justify any behavior or policy so long as these strengthen or prolong the Kims’ regime.

The outer track The outer track is designed for the state’s citizens but in the knowledge that it will also be viewed by curious foreign eyes, including scholars and academics studying North Korea. This awareness of possible foreign consumption of diplomatic propaganda is what differentiates the outer from the inner track. But “foreign consumption” does not necessarily mean consumption by people living overseas. Much of the outer track, or at least one subset of it, is aimed at South Koreans, and thus the language in which it is presented (Korean) is of importance. Myers sees Kim Jong-un’s 2018 New Year’s Day address as an example of such propaganda, for the address made ample reference of the nation’s “great racial mission” to satisfy those in Pyongyang while also alluding to the possibilities of reunification and reform to show “South Koreans that Kim Jong-un is no communist but rather someone under whose rule they could keep their assets.”19 Outer-track diplomatic propaganda is Janus-faced in its delivery, playing multiple audiences toward the same dynastic goal.20 There is some debate over what publications or channels best represent the outer track.21 Myers himself has since gone on to describe the outer track as “aimed at both North Koreans and South Koreans at the same time.”22 If the latter description is taken as accurate, then the outer track might be understood as distinct from the export track in that it predominantly, if not exclusively, uses the Korean language rather than English. Essentially, however, there are a series of export sub-tracks under two broad categories: “Korean-language exports” and “other-language exports.” During the authoritarian South Korean governments of the 1970s and 1980s, some South Koreans relied on North Korean radio broadcasts for their domestic information.23 Other information is exported with a specific audience in mind: Russian, Chinese, pacifists or antiimperialists in Western countries, and so on. Myers has argued that President

148  David A. Tizzard Trump’s engagement with Pyongyang is based on an understanding of the outer track as being an extension of diplomatic propaganda, and thus able to be disregarded, but that Trump and his advisors seemingly neglect the existence or presence of the inner track.24 Because of the emphasis on performance and suasion over overt control, the language of the outer track has to be sanitized and filtered. Here, too, however, the proper balance must be struck. Much of the nationalist and chauvinist discourse that is used for domestic control in North Korea will not find much purchase in other countries. However, for some South Koreans, such messages were precisely what they wanted to hear, particularly with their own government engaging in sterner authoritarian rule during the 1970s. South Korean President Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) clothed himself in de facto dictatorial power following the establishment of the Yushin Constitution in late 1972.25 South Koreans were increasingly being inspired by the minjung movement, seeing themselves as historically subjective and autonomous actors in the nation’s narrative. This led to their seeking works and writings that spoke of revolution and unity among workers, particularly those from the North. The Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) believed that the North was carrying out espionage in addition to broadcasting outer-track diplomatic propaganda in Korea, especially on ROK university campuses where North Koreans sought to spread seditious ideas and foster the seeds of a socialist revolution in the South.26 North Korea would have been aware that certain ideas would gain traction in the South: anti-Americanism, socialist revolutionary ideas, and those that decried the authoritarian nature of the South Korean government. It would be wrong to suggest that the entire population of South Korea was receptive to such materials, as anti-communism and the South’s own domestic propaganda were also very strong. Unlike with inner-track propaganda, where the North Korean leadership has a captive and indoctrinated audience, in dealing with South Korea, it was necessary to target different audiences and tailor the message to suit various expectations. Among certain sections of the South Korean population, such as found on university campuses, there was a sympathetic audience for the North’s Korean-language outer track. However, the idolatry and cult of personality that was being built around DPRK leader Kim Il-sung was kept primarily for its domestic citizens.

The export track There is not one, single export track that the North Korean state uses exclusively. Much in the same way that Nazi Germany produced tailored propaganda messages for pacifists in Britain and Hindu nationalists in India, so too does North Korea have a range of sub-tracks that reach Russian, Chinese, Christian, and anti-imperial ears with their own specific messages.27 North Korea has demonstrated its ability to reach a great many actors by paying careful attention to how it is likely to be received. This is evident in the cultural diplomacy the North displayed in exporting the Mass Games to the Third World in the

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea  149 1970s and 1980s.28 In its exported propaganda as part of an information regime geared toward control and legitimacy, Pyongyang used diplomatic channels, sports, and other countries’ social movements to further its own domestic and geopolitical aims. The export track is constructed solely for the international press and foreign governments. It is neither expected nor desired that it will be consumed by those inside North Korea. It is through this particular avenue that the North communicates with the global community, safe in the knowledge that any message it projects will not be seen by its citizens. It is able to tailor its message to the particular audience and issue at the time without disrupting the totalitarian rule it exerts over its own population. In this manner, the DPRK is able to project a continued image of infallibility free from criticism or charges of hypocrisy. In order to understand the North’s Cold War diplomatic messaging, it is necessary to understand that both North and South Korea claimed to rule its own and the other’s territory. During the Cold War on the Korean Peninsula, countries seeking diplomatic relations were essentially forced to choose between Pyongyang and Seoul as the single legitimate government of Korea. This particular standoff was marked by a hermetically sealed border and articulated as the Hallstein Doctrine, a principle named after Federal Republic of Germany State Secretary to the Foreign Minister Walter Hallstein (1901–1982). Cho Soon-sung wrote of this doctrine in the 1960s that the “South Korean regime would probably never accept the terms of a two Koreas policy and would rather stick to the Hallstein principle—i.e., that South Korea sever diplomatic relations with those who recognize the North Korean regime.”29 This was a reflection of both states’ claiming ownership and jurisdiction of the whole of Korean territory following the signing of an armistice rather than a peace treaty to halt open hostilities during the Korean War. Indeed, North Korea even claimed Seoul as its capital until as late as 1972. Ultimately, the policy of being able to recognize only one of the two Koreas ended when North Korea abandoned it in 1969 and then Seoul discarded it four years later in 1973. North Korean scholar Andrei Lankov argues that the “principle quietly ended in 1969, and since then it has become possible for a government to maintain diplomatic relations with the two Korean states simultaneously.”30 Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR) were the first countries to adopt a “two Koreas” approach and over the decades most other countries have done the same. The major exceptions are the United States, Canada, France, and Japan, which have all yet to diplomatically recognize the government in Pyongyang (the United States and North Korea remain technically at war). Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the creation of a unipolar liberal framework dominated financially and culturally by the capitalist United States, more recently nations in Northeast Asia have had to readjust to the world around them in order to ensure their continued survival. North Korea is no exception. Daniel Wertz suggests that North Korea goes through cycles of self-imposed isolation and then periods of extended outreach, including diplomatic talks with

150  David A. Tizzard members of the global community. Wertz has divided this cycle of Pyongyang’s interactions with the international community into six chronological groups, each varying in attitude and audience: 1 2 3 4 5 6

1948–1950s limited diplomatic relationships; late 1950s–1960s non-aligned diplomacy; 1970s extended diplomatic outreach; 1980s faltering outreach; 1990s growing isolation then new outreach; 2000s the European Union and Six-Party Talks.31

The third chronological period marked a new departure in the DPRK’s diplomatic relations. The North began seeking recognition and acceptance from states it would normally consider ideological enemies. It thus demonstrated that it was capable of slipping into a “parallel diplomatic universe that does not require the United States, Japan, and South Korea.”32 This outreach was of great importance because the two previous decades had been synonymous with division and military conflict: the 1950s marked by the Korean War and the 1960s primarily by the Vietnam War.

World Cup diplomatic propaganda: the export track in action Because of World War II and other military conflicts, such as the French war in Algeria and other colonial powers’ wars in their respective territories, Western Europe wanted little to do with the DPRK in the 1960s. This reluctance was exemplified in the diplomatic conundrum that arose following the North’s qualification for the 1966 FIFA World Cup in England. Britain had refused to recognize the DPRK on multiple occasions previously and had fought against it during the Korean War as part of the United Nations Command (UNC). The Korean War saw 80,000 UK service members deployed, 1,108 of whom died.33 Yet, the DPRK had qualified for the World Cup in unique circumstances, with many other competitors from the region having refused to compete in protest against the restrictive qualifying conditions. The DPRK beat the only other participating nation from the Asian region, Australia, to qualify. However, Britain had yet to recognize North Korea and this caused no small amount of diplomatic pressure.34 One of the primary concerns was that it would be necessary to display the DPRK’s national flag as part of the tournament, and also to play the North Korean anthem, the Aegukka, at games involving the country. Both of these acts would indirectly signify diplomatic recognition of North Korea, something that Britain was loath to do. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) initially debated denying the DPRK team visas so that they would not be able to enter the country. However, with Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s (1916–1995) left-wing Labour government recently elected in 1964, there was a determination to promote

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea  151 cooperation with states that rallied against imperialism and trumpeted a socialist outlook.35 Prime Minister Wilson didn’t necessarily want to champion the values of the DPRK, but he did seek a more pluralist approach to international relations and therefore accepted the North as different in political outlook and yet still a member of the community of nations. There was thus some interest among members of the British government to seek a compromise. Some of the solutions that the British Foreign Office arrived at were to minimize the use of symbolism, restrict access to royal dignitaries and ceremonies, and request that the Pyongyang team compete under the name “North Korea” rather than the official FIFA name of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.36 A newspaper report in the British Telegraph quotes a memo from the FCO which describes the situation in the following terms: We would prefer as few manifestations as possible of North Korean ‘nationality’ both because we must avoid any implication that we have recognised North Korea and because anything that the North Koreans are allowed to do in Britain will be used as a precedent in the future for the much more tricky case of the East Germans.37 North Korea was, for the British, an “imagined community” with domestic and regional consequences, and it was up to the United Kingdom to decide how it would imagine North Korea in light of the DPRK’s own narrative and projections. But the British government, unlike the North Korean regime, had very little control over how its citizens thought. Because of its relative success at the World Cup, North Korea was seen in a more positive light by spectators. In the British town of Middlesbrough, where the players and coaches were based, the North Korean team is still thought of fondly.38 North Korea did not win the World Cup that year, but they did achieve something arguably much more important— they found a way to propagandize foreigners without going through the usual diplomatic-propaganda channels. This helps explain why, in the following decade, the DPRK was so determined to spread its name and image as widely as possible. Doing so implied its legitimacy and acceptance, something the British Foreign Office were clearly reluctant to confer.

North Korean outer-track diplomatic propaganda in a global Cold War Following the World Cup in 1966, North Korea embarked on a mission to enhance its diplomatic presence. This would naturally require a change in its posture toward the international community and a rebranding from a military dictatorship to a state focused on peace, cosmopolitanism under a socialist banner, and national sovereignty. The 1970s, therefore, saw North Korea enact bilateral relations with a host of Western states as part of a peaceful diplomatic push toward Europe. During this irenic political outreach in the 1970s, North Korea

152  David A. Tizzard suggested that it would be willing to establish relations with capitalist countries providing that they were willing to be seen as requesting such a partnership and show the necessary deference that the DPRK’s ideology and internal propaganda required. As experience with Great Britain during the 1966 World Cup confirmed, the DPRK’s best chances of success in outer-track diplomatic propaganda were with countries where a leftist party was in power. Sweden was the next to fall for the North’s outer-track charm offensive. Having exported much industrial mining equipment, machinery, and even Volvo cars to socialist countries on the premise that those countries were unlikely to renege on their debts, the left-leaning government in Stockholm decided to establish diplomatic relations with the DPRK in 1973.39 Sweden’s decision to engage the DPRK diplomatically was not political, but economic. Stockholm sought to assist the DPRK in its industrial development and develop the relationship it had fostered since initiating its first official presence in the country in 1953 as part of Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC) with Switzerland, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. It was private Swedish businessmen who encouraged the country’s Foreign Ministry to establish an embassy in Pyongyang so as to “facilitate business transactions.”40 However it came about, it was another success for North Korean diplomatic propaganda and the development of a Cold War information regime portraying Pyongyang as the capital of a normal state with a legitimate government. Other countries quickly followed suit after Sweden’s offer of assistance, with 1973 being somewhat of a breakout year for North Korea diplomatically. That year, the DPRK initiated full diplomatic relations with the five countries comprising the Nordic region (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Iceland, and Sweden) as well as Argentina, Gambia, Mauritius, Malaysia, Iran, and Togo.41 Portugal and Singapore followed two years later in 1975. Although France does not have official relations with the North, Korean scholar Aidan Foster-Carter describes France as a “pioneer” in European engagement with Pyongyang, citing Charles de Gaulle’s decision to allow North Korean officials to open a trade bureau in Paris in 1968.42 North Korea’s outer-track strategy was paying off handsomely. With Labour parties in power around the Commonwealth, there were some initial positive responses to the DPRK’s diplomatic advances outside of Britain, as well. Australia normalized relations with the DPRK first, in 1974, with embassies being opened in Pyongyang and Canberra, respectively. To be recognized by Australia was a diplomatic triumph for Kim Il-sung and his search for international recognition. However, the Australia-DPRK diplomatic relations lasted less than a year. The outward-looking aspect to North Korean propaganda was undone by the internal information regime of absolute control over the population and the need to protect the prestige of the nation-state at all costs. In 1976, North Korean soldiers brutally murdered American and South Korean soldiers working to trim overhanging branches in the Joint Security Area of the DMZ. The details of this North Korean axe murder were conveyed to the North Korean side with a crucial mistranslation. The axe that the Americans and South Koreans had been using to cut branches was said to have been made

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea  153 in Australia (the axe was actually made in Austria). This seemingly irrelevant bit of information was enough to prompt North Korea to withdraw their embassy staff from Canberra.43 Australia was not the only Western government to weigh its diplomatic options with Pyongyang. Steven Lee writes that “The British Labour government of Harold Wilson was also seriously considering recognizing the DPRK.”44 Britain was well aware of the significance of its own position. It knew that such a decision could not be made lightly, for any move would have far-reaching consequences in terms of other nations’ positions vis-à-vis North Korea. Eric Neumayer’s 2008 ­ work on the factors that determine diplomatic representation highlighted how North Korea had “suffered from more or less widespread refusal to recognize their status as an independent, sovereign nation state.”45 Steven Lee quotes the British head of the Far Eastern Department, William Bently, as explicitly stating that “British recognition of the north would lead to a number of other countries following suit.”46 Despite some in Prime Minister Wilson’s Labour cabinet wanting to pursue such opportunities, delegates from UK allies, the United States and South Korea, ultimately persuaded Wilson’s government to refuse the offer, citing economic trade concerns with its partners as well as misgivings as to the nature of the North’s request. Ideological allegiance during the Cold War was still of paramount importance—there was only so far that North Korean outer-track diplomatic propaganda could go. North Korea also engaged a number of international organizations in an attempt to bolster its legitimacy and international standing, including joining the World Health Organization (in May of 1973) and initiating observer missions at the United Nations the same year, setting up offices in UN buildings in both New York and Geneva.47 Pyongyang also joined the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on October 18, 1974. In doing so, it gained a platform to rally against American imperialism and frequently proclaimed itself the “solely lawful state of Korea,” while it reached out to “socialist countries, then national independent countries of Asia and Africa and the entire peace-loving peoples of the world.”48 Even while the North railed against the Cold War West, however, it was vehemently refuting any suggestion that both Koreas join the United Nations as separate members. North Korea demanded that this should only take place with the two Koreas united in confederation. In a letter to the First Secretary of the Albanian Labor Party Enver Hoxha in 1973, Kim Il-sung proposed the novel solution of “once again the establishment of the South and the North under the name of a single state—The Confederative Republic of Goryeo.”49 The North denounced its Cold War rivals but also sought to compete with them on ideological and informational terms. If the United States had the Peace Corps, for example—founded by the American government in 1961 in an effort to foster better relations with the international community by aiding developing nations with education and public health—then the DPRK needed something similar. In the Cold War struggle, hearts and minds were military objectives. This marked a notable change in the North’s approach to power and how it

154  David A. Tizzard portrayed itself on the international stage. Power could be visible. It could be perceived by others. It could, essentially, be soft as well as hard. Such a change, seen particularly through the lens of the Cold War, is affirmed by scholars who assert that it is not “the objective significance,” but instead “the perception of what [a given] event signified.”50 From Pyongyang’s view, there was more to war than missiles and ideological fault lines. Of great importance was also the idea of how the international community perceived each state and how, in turn, each state presented itself. Thus began a concerted “peace offensive” by the DPRK. In a series of recently released exchanges with I.T. Novikov, the Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, Kim Il-sung asserted that this particular approach was feared by North Korea’s enemies more than any armed attack because it removed any justification the capitalist nations would have for increasing their military presence or bolstering their forces against a now seemingly non-existent enemy.51 The targets of this peace offensive were not simply the South Korean government, but also foreign journalists and commentators from Japan, the United States, and beyond.

North Korea and black nationalists: East Asian Cold War in big-city America One of the more surprising relations that the North fostered during this time was with the American political organization the Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1969. This particular alliance was formed on the basis of self-reliance, a cosmopolitan attitude toward revolution, and an antagonism directed at aspects of American domestic and foreign policy.52 This alliance also pointed to the DPRK’s “long term interest in cultivating high profile international visitors.”53 Despite the seemingly strange relationship, particularly because of the virulent ethno-nationalist nature of the North Korean regime which was presumably hostile to groups arguing for separatism or supremacy on the basis of other races, international diplomacy played a major role in its instigation. Algeria, an African country with no diplomatic relations with the United States, invited the Black Panthers to establish an embassy in their country and it was there that officials got in contact regarding an alliance. As with the World Cup in England in 1966, North Korea was willing to pursue any avenue in order to shore up its standing around the world. According to Kim Il-sung, one of the main goals of the peace offensive was to display to the world the supposed “advantages of socialism,” which included lack of unemployment, citizens all wearing decent clothes, free education, and absence of social prejudice.54 A series of articles was published in The Black Panther—the official organ of the BPP—written by the group’s leader, Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998), following his trip to Pyongyang in 1969. In these pieces, North Korea was described as a modern socialist utopia, free and independent from the racist and imperial behaviors of the United States.55 Such descriptions would have no doubt been a great boon for a Northeast Asian state in an existential Cold War struggle seeking legitimacy in the eyes of the world.56

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea  155 Alongside this peace offensive, however, was the promotion of the state and its leader as the figureheads of a global socialist revolution. This message was particularly aimed at developing countries in Africa, Latin America, and other parts of Asia. Because North Korea denied and kept secret much of the financial, political, and military support it received both during and after the Korean War from the Soviet Union and China, it was able to project a narrative of self-reliance (juche) and proclaim itself as a stalwart defender of national self-determination in the fight against the homogenizing spread of imperialism and capitalism. This was all despite the inherent contradictions in the North’s founding under the Soviet sponsorship and the continued aid it received from both the USSR and China. Diplomacy, for all its strengths, also requires that lies be accepted— provided, of course, that they are presented in the most official proclamations and platforms. This was what the North Korean leadership attempted to do, with the Cold War in East Asia acting as Gestalt for the DPRK’s three-track diplomatic propaganda, and this diplomatic propaganda, in turn, both restricting and liberating North Korea in its engagement with the world.

Conclusion The Cold War was an ideological battle between two antithetical positions: one that espoused the strength of the collective and one that championed individual freedom. It was also an evolved form of conflict. Traditional military approaches in which clear and distinct military formations set up against each other on a designated battlefield while following established rules had been abandoned. The success of the United States’ Manhattan Project as well as the development of nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union, China, and beyond meant that the risks involved in conflict had grown exponentially and now placed the entire human race at risk. Such changes necessitate a new form of warfare—one based on information, subterfuge, proxy action, and guerrilla tactics. The DPRK also had to evolve and adapt to this evolving environment. In doing so, the North used both diplomatic maneuvers and propaganda to portray itself as a sovereign nation focused on self-reliance and anti-imperialist actions as well as a worker’s paradise and socialist utopia. The targets of this carefully constructed, state-oriented, top-down narrative were its own citizens, South Korea (with whom it was engaged in a struggle for legitimacy), and the wider global community. Because of the variety of audience, Pyongyang constructed a threetrack system through which propaganda and information could be disseminated. Having done so, it was able to restrict information to certain parties and tailor specific messages to others. The three-track system allowed it to maintain a form of modern totalitarian control. While there is much reason to criticize the DPRK’s drive during the 1970s to force into existence a state focused on a constructed diplomatic peace offensive, it must be remembered that ultimately the state survived. Despite all the predictions of collapse, economic disaster, widespread famine, or political instability, as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, the DPRK shows little sign

156  David A. Tizzard of leaving the international community. Indeed, bolstered by recent diplomatic meetings with ROK President Moon Jae-in and US President Donald Trump, as well as the successful development of its nuclear program, North Korea is arguably more secure than ever. This may not be a welcome outcome for most of the rest of the world, but it is undeniably an outcome brought about by the successful implementation of the three-track information regime of diplomatic propaganda. North Korea continues to use soft power and information to its advantage. It presents a modern Pyongyang to the world, one filled with subway stations, smart phones, water parks, and department stores.57 It has also feminized its image and done away with the notion of its being little more than a gerontocracy by placing Kim Yo-jong and Ri Sol-ju in prominent and visible positions. None of these things are a coincidence. They are part of an elaborate performance by the North Korean regime, fomenting terror and ideological control at home while projecting peace, engagement, and strength abroad. Information regimes such as North Korea’s evolve according to technological developments and societal changes, requiring different tools and techniques in order to obtain, maintain, or increase that most vital of international currencies: power. And yet, these evolutions will be different according to the temporal and spatial circumstances as well as the cultural and ideological situations in which they arise. History and peoples do matter. State goals and the foundations from which they are sought differ greatly and thus so will the regimes that manifest as a result. This will determine just how information regimes continue to develop in the future as they have done in the past.

Notes 1 On the Korean War as forgotten war, see Andrew Salmon, “A Cartoonist at War: ‘Gobau’s’ Korea, 1950,” The Asia Pacific Journal, Vol. 7, Issue 28, No. 3 (2009). On the Korean War’s shaping the course of the Cold War, see Robert Jervis, “The Impact of the Korean War on the Cold War,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 24, No. 2 (1980), 563. 2 Wen-Qing Ngoei, “World War II, Race, and the Southeast Asian Origins of the Domino Theory,” The Wilson Center (April 4, 2017) www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ world-war-ii-race-and-the-southeast-asian-origins-the-domino-theory. 3 There are approximately 28,000 American troops currently based in South Korea, the majority of them at Camp Humphreys, the largest US Army garrison in Asia. See Kim Gamel, “USFK Dedicates New Headquarters at Camp Humphreys,” Stars and Stripes (June 28, 2018). www.stripes.com/news/pacific/ usfk-dedicates-new-headquarters-at-camp-humphreys-1.535321 ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ 4 See Daniel Byman and Jennifer Lind, “Pyongyang’s Survival Strategy: Tools of Authoritarian Control in North Korea,” International Security, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2010), 44–74 and Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009). 5 Andrei Lankov, “Changing North Korea: An Information Campaign Can Beat the Regime,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 95 (2009), 95–105. 6 Jan Blinka, “Myers, Brian R.: North Korea’s Juche Myth,” Czech Journal of Political Science, DOI: 10.5817/PC2017-1-74, Accessed March 09, 2020, www.politologic kycasopis.cz/userfiles/file/2017/1/Polcas_2017_1_pp_74-76.pdf.

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea  157 7 Aidan Foster-Carter, “North Korea: Development and Self-Reliance a Critical Appraisal,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 9, no. 1 (1977): 45–55, https://doi. org/10.1080/14672715.1977.10406399, 48. 8 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 404. 9 B. R. Myers, North Korea’s Juche Myth (Busan: Sthele Press, 2015), 9.

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21 Some have questioned whether publications such as the Rodong Sinmum and Kulloja are to be classified as inner or outer track considering their relative ease of access for those outside the DPRK. See Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, “Book Review: “North Korea’s Juche Myth””, 38 North, July 1, 2016, Accessed March 09, 2020, www.38north.org/2016/07/bksilberstein070116/. 22 See Isaac Chotiner, “Sympathy for North Korea: Why South Koreans might just be willing to align with Kim Jong-un,” Slate, January 03, 2018, Accessed March 09, 2020, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/the-problem-with-south­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ korea-yes-south-korea.html. ­ ­ ­ 23 Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 127 and 141–142. 24 B.R. Myers, “Confederation Again,” Sthele Press, July 26, 2018, Accessed March 09, 2020, http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2018/07/26/confederation-again­b-r-myers/. ­ 25 Byung Sun Kahng, “The Yushin Constitution and the Establishment of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in the Republic of Korea,” Korea Observer, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1992), 177–195.

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(603.1),” Executive Office of the Secretary-General, S-0196-0002-05, United Nations Archives and Records Management Section (UN ARMS), New York. Obtained for NKIDP by Charles Kraus. http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/ document/117360. “Letter from Kim Il Sung to Enver Hoxha,” July 07, 1973, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, AQPPSH, MPP Korese, D 1, V. 1973. Translated by Enkel Daljani, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114285. Kathryn Weathersby, “Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945– 1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives,” Cold War International History Project (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 1993), 6. “From the Journal of Y.D. Fadeev, ‘Record of Conversation between I.T. Novikov, Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, and Kim Il Sung, General Secretary of the KWP CC and Chairman of the DPRK Cabinet of Ministers, 28 June 1972’,” July 03, 1972, History and Public Policy Program Digital Archive, RGANI, f. 5, op. 64, d. 423, ll. 20–32. Contributed by Sergey Radchenko and translated by Gary Goldberg, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/134136, 6. Benjamin R. Young, “Juche in the United States: The Black Panther Party’s Relations with North Korea, 1969–1971,” The Asia Pacific Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 12, No. 2 (2015). Tania Branigan, “How Black Panthers turned to North Korea in fight against US imperialism,” The Guardian, June 19, 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ jun/19/black-panthers-north-korea-us-imperialism. “From the Journal of Y.D. Fadeev, ‘Record of Conversation between I.T. Novikov, Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, and Kim Il Sung, General Secretary of the KWP CC and Chairman of the DPRK Cabinet of Ministers, 28 June 1972’,” op. cit., 8. Benjamin R. Young, “Juche in the United States,” op. cit. Manifestations can still be seen today as it was recently revealed that US Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard was raised under the eyes of self-proclaimed guru Chris Butler who “thought North Korea a workers’ paradise.” Kerry Howley, “Tulsi Gabbard Had a Very Strange Childhood,” Intelligencer, June 11, 2019, https://nymag. ­ ­ com/intelligencer/2019/06/tulsi-gabbard-2020-presidential-campaign.html. See Shreyas Reddy, “Analysis: How Does North Korea Use Social Media?” BBC Monitoring (2019), Accessed January 28, https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/ c200xiwn.

Bibliography Andersson, Magnus, and Jinsun Bae. “Sweden’s Engagement with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” North Korean Review 11, no. 1 (2015). Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973. Baker, John Carl. “Culture, North Korea and Nuclear Impasse | Ploughshares Fund.” Ploughshares Fund. Accessed April 2, 2020. www.ploughshares.org/issues-analysis/ article/culture-north-korea-and-nuclear-impasse. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Becker, Jasper. Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Blinka, Jan. “Myers, Brian R.: North Korea’s Juche Myth.” Politologický Časopis Czech Journal of Political Science 24, no. 1 (2017): 74–76. https://doi.org/10.5817/ pc2017-1-74. Branigan, Tania. “How Black Panthers Turned to North Korea in Fight against US Imperialism.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, June 19, 2014. www.theguardian. com/world/2014/jun/19/black-panthers-north-korea-us-imperialism. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­

160  David A. Tizzard Byman, Daniel, and Jennifer Lind. “Pyongyang’s Survival Strategy: Tools of Authoritarian Control in North Korea.” International Security 35, no. 1 (2010). https://doi. org/10.1162/isec_a_00002. Cho, Soon-sung. “Japan’s Two Koreas Policy and the Problems of Korean Unification.” Asian Survey 7, no. 10 (1967). Choi, Chong-Ki. “The Korean Question in the United Nations.” Verfassung in Recht Und Übersee/Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America 8, no. 3 (1975). https://doi.org/10.5771/0506-7286-1975-3-395. Chotiner, Isaac. “Sympathy for North Korea: Why South Koreans Might Just be Willing to Align with Kim Jong-Un.” Slate, January 8, 2018. https://slate.com/news-and­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ politics/2018/01/the-problem-with-south-korea-yes-south-korea.html. “Culture, North Korea, and Nuclear Impasse: an Interview with David Zeglen on North Korea.” Ploughshares Fund, February 14, 2019. www.ploughshares.org/about-us/ staff/john-carl-baker. ­ ­ Cumings, Bruce. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Demick, Barbara. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2009. Farr, Malcolm. “Why Pyongyang Doesn’t Have an Embassy in Australia.” News.com. au, August 10, 2017. www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/why-pyongyang­doesnt-have-an-embassy-in-australia/news-story/06a6d97b8dddd361db09d0231 ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ 4451998. Foster, Aidan. “North Korea’s French Connection.” 38 North, January 23, 2014. www.38north.org/2014/01/afostercarter012314/. ———. “North Korea: Development and Self- Reliance a Critical Appraisal.” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 9, no. 1 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.1977 .10406399. Gamel, Kim. “USFK Dedicates New Headquarters at Camp Humphreys.” Stars and Stripes. Accessed April 2, 2020. www.stripes.com/news/pacific/usfk-dedicates-new­headquarters-at-camp-humphreys-1.535321. ­ ­ ­ Grzelczyk, Virginie. North Korea’s New Diplomacy: Challenging Political Isolation in the 21st Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Haggard, Stephen, and Jaesung Ryu. “Diplomatic Relations, North and South.” Peterson Institute for International Economics, March 6, 2012. www.piie.com/blogs/ north-korea-witness-transformation/diplomatic-relations-north-and-south. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Hajek, Danny. “How 1,000 Volvos Ended Up in North Korea—And Made a Diplomatic Difference.” NPR, December 4, 2017. www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/12/ 0 4/547390622/ how-1- 0 0 0 -volvos-ended-up-i t h-korea-a ­ ­ ­ n-nor ­ ­ ­ nd-made-a­ ­ diplomatic-difference. ­ Howley, Kerry. “Tulsi Gabbard Had a Very Strange Childhood.” Intelligencer, June 11, 2019. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/tulsi-gabbard-2020-presidential­ ­ campaign.html. Jervis, Robert. “The Impact of the Korean War on the Cold War.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 24, no. 4 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1177/002200278002400401. Kahng, Byung Suhn. “The Yushin Constitution and the Establishment of Bureaucratic Authoritarianism in the Republic of Korea.” Korea Observer 23, no. 2 (1992). Lankov, Andrei. The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015. ———. “Changing North Korea: An Information Campaign Can Beat the Regime.” Foreign Affairs, 2009.

The Cold War as Gestalt for North Korea  161 Lee, Namhee. The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. Lee, Steven. “The Korean Armistice and the End of Peace: The US-UN Coalition and the Dynamics of War-Making in Korea, 1953–76.” Journal of Korean Studies 18, no. 2 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1353/jks.2013.0018. Lerner, Mitchell. “‘Mostly Propaganda in Nature:’ Kim Il Sung, the Juche. . .,” 2010. www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/mostly-propaganda-nature-kim-il-sung-the­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ juche-ideology-and-the-second-korean-war. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Myers, B. R. “Confederation (Again)—B.R. Myers—Sthele Press.” Sthele Press, July 26, 2018. http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2018/07/26/confederation-again-b­ r-myers/. ———. “League-Confederation Goes Outer Track—B.R. Myers. . .” Sthele Press. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://sthelepress.com/index.php/2018/09/24/league-confederationgoes-outer-track-b-r-myers/. ———. North Korea’s Juche Myth. Busan: Sthele Press, 2015. Neumayer, Eric. “Distance, Power and Ideology: Diplomatic Representation in a World of Nation- States.” Area 40, no. 2 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14754762.2008.00804.x. Ngoei, Wen-Qing. “World War II, Race, and the Southeast Asian Origins of the Domino Theory.” Wilson Center. Accessed April 2, 2020. www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/ world-war-ii-race-and-the-southeast-asian-origins-the-domino-theory. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Polley, Martin. “The Diplomatic Background to the 1966 Football World Cup.” The Sports Historian 18, no. 2 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1080/17460269809445793. Ra, Jong-yil. Inside North Korea’s Theocracy: The Rise and Sudden Fall of Jang Song­ Thaek. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2019. Reddy, Shreyas. “BBC Monitoring—Essential Media Insight.” BBC News. BBC, 2019. https://monitoring.bbc.co.uk/product/c200xiwn. Salmon, Andrew. “A Cartoonist at War: ‘Gobau’s’ Korea, 1950.” The Asia Pacific Journal 7, no. 28 (2009). ———. Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War, 1950. London: Aurum Press, 2012. Silberstein, Benjamin Katzeff. “Book Review: ‘North Korea’s Juche Myth.’” 38 North, July 1, 2016. www.38north.org/2016/07/bksilberstein070116/. Suzuki, Shogo. “Japan’s Socialization into Janus-Faced European International Society.” European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 1 (2005). https://doi. org/10.1177/1354066105050139. Taylor, Louise. “How Little Stars from North Korea Were.  .  .—The Guardian.” The Guardian, June 8, 2010. www.theguardian.com/football/2010/jun/08/ north-korea-world-cup-middlesbrough. ­ ­ ­ ­ Tennett, Kevin, and Alex Gillett. Foundations Of Managing Sporting Events: Organising the 1966 FIFA World Cup. New York: Routledge, 2018. Weathersby, Kathryn. “Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945–50: New Evidence From the Russian Archives.” Wilson Center, 1993. www. wilsoncenter.org/publication/soviet-aims-korea-and-the-origins-the-korean-war-1945­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ 50-new-evidence-the-russian. ­ ­ ­ Wertz, Daniel. “DPRK Diplomatic Relations.” NCNK, June 28, 2017. www.ncnk.org/ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ resources/briefing-papers/all-briefing-papers/dprk-diplomatic-relations. Wilson Center Digital Archive. “From the Journal of Y.D. Fadeev, ‘Record of Conversation between I.T. Novikov, Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, and

162  David A. Tizzard Kim Il Sung, General Secretary of the KWP CC and Chairman of the DPRK Cabinet of Ministers, 28 June 1972’.” Wilson Center Digital Archive. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/134136. ———. “Letter, DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Concerning DPRK’s Rejection of Korean Question Resolution.” Wilson Center Digital Archive. Accessed April 2, 2020. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/117360. ———. “Letter from Kim Il Sung to Enver Hoxha.” Wilson Center Digital Archive, July 7, 1973. https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114285. “World Cup: ‘Political Headache’ of North Korea in 1966.” The Telegraph, June 14, ­ ­ ­ 2010. www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/world-cup/7825219/World-Cup-Politicalheadache-of-North-Korea-in-1966.html. Young, Benjamin R. “Cultural Diplomacy with North Korean Characteristics: Pyongyang’s Exportation of the Mass Games to the Third World, 1972–1996.” The International History Review, July 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1609545. ———. “Juche in the United States: The Black Panther Party’s Relations with North Korea, 1969–1971.” The Asia Pacific Journal 13, no. 12 (2015). ———. “North Korea’s Juche: Myth or Meaningful? | NK News.” NK News, March 7, 2016. www.nknews.org/2016/03/north-koreas-juche-myth-or-meaningful/. ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ Zeglen, David. First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship, and Cultural Politics. Edited by Shelley Cobb and Neil Ewen. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. ———. “It’s the Thought That Counts: North Korea’s Glocalization of the Celebrity Couple and the Mediated Politics of Reform.” In First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics, edited by Shelley Cobb and Neil Ewen. London: Bloomsbury, 2015, 188–210.

8

The Club of Rome in East Asia U.S.-led population-control ­ information regimes and waging the Cold War in the Far East1 Jason Morgan

Introduction: from empire of production to empire of consumption In his 2007 book Among Empires, Harvard historian Charles Maier posits a hermeneutic of rupture in the American empire during the Cold War. From World War II until the 1970s, Maier argues, the United States had pursued what he calls an “empire of production.”2 As Columbia University historian Stephen Wertheim summarizes Maier’s views: The empire of production was truly imperial, Maier writes, because European elites acquiesced in Washington’s military and socioeconomic leadership, propagating US economic structures and Fordist production methods to the Old World. The Marshall Plan emerges as a milestone. From Marshall Plan offices at home and visits to the United States, European labor learned the US consensus that wage hikes should not exceed productivity gains.3 The first three decades or so of the “American Century” were, for Maier, in many ways an extension of the American model of blended capitalism and Taylorist productivity enhancement. The massive industrial productivity of the American economic engine, fine-tuned by middle managers and wedded to progressivist geopolitical-ideological expansionism, was the motif for the first act of America’s leading role on the world’s stage.4 From the 1970s, however, Maier argues, the United States was fundamentally transformed, from an empire of production to an empire of consumption. In the 1970s, the United States’ imperial expenditures began to outstrip her industrial productivity. In order to f inance the debt that accumulated from her Cold War interventionism and multi-lateral, multi-level maintenance of the geopolitical information regime of “freedom and democracy,” the United States began to see its empire, not as the scope of its ability to export industrial product and productivity, but as a resource for

164  Jason Morgan f inancing its exploding budgetary shortfalls and perennial def icit spending. 5 As Wertheim puts it: Maier approaches [the question of America’s being an ‘empire of consumption’] by asking why foreigners bought US Treasury bills even though higher rates of return were available elsewhere and the dollar had depreciated. His answer lies in a tacit exchange between core and periphery. The United States sent manufacturing jobs and social capital abroad, where foreigners in turn bought Treasury bills to finance the United States’ mounting debt and prodigal consumption. [. . .] Maier contends that where US jobs were exported, elites “returned a portion of the goods produced under them as a payment for their new opportunities to become wealthy.”6 In other words, the 1970s, in Maier’s estimation, brought about a dramatic remapping of the American empire. Where once internationally minded Americans had seen the world as space for conquest (ideological, geographical, or otherwise), in the 1970s American internationalists began to see the world as a population to be managed in order to maintain American consumption habits at home. The American empire began farming out its debt worldwide in order to prop up the dialectic of deficit-spending imperial consumption on a global scale. Maier’s insights are profound, and have yet to be fully incorporated into our understanding of the Cold War. Indeed, Maier’s distinction between the American empire as one of production, and then of consumption, challenges the received narrative of the Cold War in Asia in particular. In this essay, I will use the example of a managerial-consumptionist information regime in East Asia during the Cold War to show that Maier was correct in his assessment of the American empire. In particular, the population-control schemes formulated at the upper echelons of the American government in the early 1970s and beyond— themselves part of an even larger information regime, the Club of Rome idea of impending population calamity and the need to dramatically reduce the number of people on the planet—are a confirmation of Maier’s thesis. More important, the Club of Rome ideology is also a key feature of the American-led consumption-and-control information regime in East Asia during the Cold War.

What is the “Club of Rome idea”? It was at the very peak of the “growth idea,” when income-doubling plans and seemingly infinite economic expansion and “modernization” appeared to be verifying the American model of production in the service of freedom and democracy worldwide, that some in the West began to cast shadows on the hopes of the modernizers.7 In 1968, a group of industrialists and intellectuals sought to revive the prewar idea of the command economy or socialist-consumerist economy, such as that advocated by King Camp Gillette, which would require reining in growth and checking population expansion. In combining near-term growth outlooks with long-term pessimism on economic and population growth, the

The Club of Rome in East Asia   165 Club of Rome advocated what it called the “problematique,” or a programmatic, ideological skepticism about the very idea of growth. As Club of Rome adherents explain their movement in their own words: The Club of Rome was founded by Auretio Peccei and Alexander King at the Academia de Lincei in Rome in 1968 when the economic growth mania was at its height. Soon after the publication of its first report ‘Limits to Growth’ in 1972, the world was hit by the oil crisis. [. . .] The crisis was a clear warning to the industrialized countries of the vulnerability of their economies; the security of supply of raw materials and energy was dependent on events in distant places, largely beyond their control.8 The Club of Rome’s information regime of global anti-growthism, their “world problematique,” is to be countered by what they call a “resolutique” of the managed decline of production. In both diagnosis and prescribed cure, the Club of Rome information regime was seemingly tailor-made for the U.S. government’s studied turn from a production to consumption empire. As the Foreword, by Club of Rome president Ricardo Díez-Hochleitner, to a 1991 mass-market Club of Rome report puts it: The year 1968 was that of the Great Divide. It marked the end as well as the zenith of the long post-war period of rapid economic growth in the industrialized countries. But it was also a year of social unrest, with student uprisings and other manifestations of alienation and counter-cultural protest in many countries. [. . .] A number of individuals close to decision-making points became concerned about the apparent inability of governments and international organizations to foresee, or even attempt to foresee, the consequences of substantial material growth; in-sufficient [sic] thought seemed to be given to the quality of the life that unprecedented general affluence should make possible.9 The Club of Rome information regime was in many ways a dégringolade of the system of debt imperialism upon which the American imperium had been predicated since at least the Marshall Plan (and similar programs for Asia) following World War II. Indeed, World War II—and World War I—had been paid for by deficit spending and currency manipulation, a separate information regime which grew out of the rearrangement of empires following Britain’s, and Europe’s, financial collapse and withdrawal from colonial politics in the wake of the massive outlays for armament and other wartime expenses.

National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM-200) The Club of Rome idea was different from other austerity programs, however, in that it focused, not on monetary supply or interest rates, but on people themselves. The problem, the Club of Rome group asserted, was not that there was

166  Jason Morgan too much money moving through the world economy, but that there were too many people consuming too many natural resources. In order to prevent various regions, and indeed the entire world, from descending into chaos or war over resources, the Club of Rome averred, populations and their consumption must be managed by a select group of experts. Many in the upper echelons of the U.S. government took notice of these warnings, and some agencies and high-placed officials, including President Richard M. Nixon’s Secretary of State and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, formulated plans of action based upon the Club of Rome’s pronouncements. The key document (among those so far declassified) explaining how the Club of Rome information regime shaped geopolitics in Asia during the Cold War is National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM-200), which the U.S. National Security Council promulgated on December 10, 1974.10 Because the head of the National Security Council at the time, and throughout the Richard M. Nixon administration, was Henry Kissinger, NSSM-200 is often also referred to as the Kissinger Report.11 The Kissinger Report is a remarkably frank assessment of high Cold War geopolitics in terms of the ability of the United States to maintain a level of consumption at home. The report unabashedly views the rest of the world, and in particular Africa and Asia, as both providers of key resources (oil, tin, copper, titanium, zinc, iron, gold, and so forth) and potential site— again, especially Africa and Asia—of political disruptions to the steady supply of those resources. The world is understood in a bifurcated, yet intertwined, way: there are material goods that the U.S. government wishes to continue to procure from outside its borders (and, especially, beyond the traditional sphere of EuroAmerican cultural resonance), but the people living on top of those mineral resources present a tremendous risk that the U.S. government understands it must manage in order to maintain its imperial sway. NSSM-200 is a remarkable document in that it shows the U.S. government quite clearly understanding the transition from empire of production to empire of consumption that Charles Maier would detail some three and a half decades after NSSM-200 was internally promulgated. As NSSM-200 put it: The United States has become increasingly dependent on mineral imports from developing countries in recent decades, and this trend is likely to continue. [.  .  .] The real problems of mineral supplies lie, not in basic physical sufficiency, but in the politico-economic issues of access, terms for exploration and exploitation, and division of the benefits among producers, consumers, and host country governments. In the extreme cases where population pressures lead to endemic famine, food riot, and breakdown of social order, those conditions are scarcely conducive to systematic exploration for mineral deposits or the long-term investments required for exploitation. [.  .  .] Whether through government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed Materials [sic] will be jeopardized.12

The Club of Rome in East Asia   167 Elsewhere in the report, which overall abounds in exhortations to the American government to manage world population in order to secure the resources necessary to allow for ongoing consumption in the United States, the authors note gravely “increasing population disturbances should be expected in the future” for India and Bangladesh. “The existence of India as a democratic buttress in Asia will be threatened.”13 If this were to fail, the report asks, “Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can’t/won’t control their population growth?”14 This was the financial aspect of the Maierian shift in information regime, from empire of production to empire of consumption. Growth, paradoxically, meant austerity, at least for those parts of the world on the peripheries of the American Cold War client-state set. The early 1970s, which saw both the oil shocks and Nixon’s dismantling of the Bretton Woods system by decoupling the U.S. dollar from the gold standard, were the unraveling of the deficit-spending system of imperium, but also, in many ways, the redoubling of it. The United States could no longer produce the war materiel needed to police the vast frontier of the Cold War empire, and Vietnam and the “body count” definition of military success had deeply soured the American, and world, publics on the American program of fighting the Cold War at “any price,” bearing “any burden,” as President John F. Kennedy had announced in 1961, at the beginning of the initially optimistic 1960s.15 The system would henceforth be disaggregated, with world production (of resources) to prop up American consumption at home. This was to be done by shifting from monetary to population control by central governments, and in particular the U.S. federal government. The Kissinger Report is concerned with resources, to be sure, but the main “problematique” of the document is the people who happen to occupy the places whence said resources are to be extracted. And not only that, but population as a global phenomenon, as a generalized consumption trend using up food and debalancing the world climate, is articulated in a preliminary but very forthright way in NSSM-200. It is not just that there are too many people in the “developing world” (or in “LDCs [Least Developed Countries],” as the Kissinger Report terminology goes), but that the global population as a whole is jeopardizing the American lifestyle by infringing on the consumption prerogatives of the American populace. Again, the Club of Rome was a pioneer in this population-resource-climate intersectional information regime: The problems of most of the developing countries are greatly exacerbated by the population explosion. World population, now just over 5 billion (from 1.8 billion in 1900) is expected to reach 6.2 billion in the year 2000 and over 8.5 billion in 2025, according to median UN projections.16 [. . .] Production of sufficient food to meet the needs of a rapidly increasing world population is obviously a matter of primary concern.17 [. . .] By the middle of the next century, inhabitants of the presently industrialized countries will constitute well under 20 per cent of the world population. Can we envisage a future world with a ghetto of rich nations, armed with sophisticated

168  Jason Morgan weapons to protect themselves against the hordes of hungry, uneducated, unemployed and very angry people outside? [. . .] It is therefore urgent to improve economic conditions in the poor countries, and at the same time to introduce effective means of population control. We would like to stress that reductions in economic disparity and aid to development of a wise and cooperative character, far from being humanitarian gestures, are of fundamental self-interest to the rich countries.18 This was succinctly summed up in the 1991 Club of Rome report subtitled “The Common Enemy of Humanity is Man”: All these dangers [pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like] are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.19 While the Club of Rome report from 1991 was explicit, even brusque, in its diagnosis of the problems threatening the continued hegemony over world resources by the rich (and almost exclusively Euro-American) “developed nations,” the Kissinger Report from seventeen years before reflected a world in which the upheavals of decolonization and post-colonial dislocation and rethinking were still immediate threats. The Vietnam War had not yet been fully lost by the United States, and the possibility of a renewed global conflict, probably springing from Asia and then quickly escalating to embroil the Soviet Union and the United States in a third World War (the rapid inversion of the Cold War), was imminent. The drafters of NSSM-200 knew that they had to tread lightly and conceal their true motives—including mandatory “sterilization of men and women”20 —under a tissue of euphemism and policy misdirection.21

Eugenics as a precursor to the Cold War anti-population information regime This program of interventionism into the biopolitics of Asia and other non-white regions of the world was new in its scope, but in its basic contours it had actually been under development for decades prior to the formation of the emerging information regime of an American empire of consumption replacing the earlier, more active empire of expansion and conquest underpinned by massive industrial production.22 If anything, the only real change from the past was that, as the American imperium abutted the Soviet, thus unwittingly forming a global information regime, known as the Cold War, of ideological standoff fringed at the borderlines with armed conflict (and shot through with attempts to undermine the ideological panoply of the other), there was necessarily a new, shared, third term of the Cold War dialectic, a globalized recognition of the “limits of growth” and, thereafter and necessarily, a recalculation of imperium from conquest to management of areas already to some degree under ideological capture.

The Club of Rome in East Asia   169 The world had been divided up; what remained was to secure ongoing provision of resources for the maintenance of the Cold War regime. The initial Cold War may have been an armed standoff, but by the 1960s, the population-control information regime had begun to compete with even military considerations in the United States’ view of its planetary rivalry with the Soviet Union and the place of other countries within the ad hoc American imperium. In January of 1965, for example, just four years after President Kennedy had declared that “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, said at his own inaugural address, “I will seek new ways to use our knowledge to help deal with the explosion in world population and the growing scarcity in world resources.”23 Thenceforth, population control became a theme of the Johnson Administration, and indeed of the entire federal apparatus. “Less than $5 invested in population control is worth $100 invested in economic growth,” Pres. Johnson declared in a speech for the Twentieth Anniversary Celebration of the United Nations on June 25, 1965.24 In August of that year, Johnson addressed UN Secretary-General U Thant at the Second World Population Conference in Belgrade, saying that “second only to peace [. . .] this transcendent problem [of overpopulation] is humanity’s greatest challenge.”25 Similar pronouncements flowed from the lips and pen of the president and his cabinet in a veritable torrent into the late 1960s and beyond. Subsequent presidents picked up the theme.26 But although the Cold War deeply colored these lamentations about overpopulation, this globalized imperium was not, counterintuitively perhaps, an outgrowth of the Cold War information regime. It predated it considerably. It was not the Iron Curtain or any kind of Red Scare, but the eugenicist information regime which had enjoyed widespread favor beginning roughly with World War I which contributed the main tenor of the Cold War preoccupation with maintaining conquered territory and then, from the 1970s, managing the American empire in order to ensure continued levels of consumption at home. The horrors of Auschwitz and the National Socialist regime made overt eugenics untenable as an information regime after the collapse of the Third Reich and the undeniable revelations of the eugenicist anti-population-based productionism (i.e. the Shoah) of World War II. But it should be recalled that North America, which was the source of NSSM-200 in 1974, was also the original home of the pseudoscience of eugenics.27 NSSM-200 was, proximately, a function of the Cold War. Historically, however, and substantially, it was a continuation of the older idea of improving the quality of life in the United States by ensuring that only the right kinds of people had children.

The Malthusian roots of progressivism Malthusian—or, to be more precise, neo-Malthusian—thinking has long been a staple of progressivism in the United States. If anything, one could argue that they are identical. But in order to understand this information regime and how it

170  Jason Morgan exerted profound, indeed formative, influence on Cold War geopolitics, we must first understand the biopolitical view of American history. As Kolson Schlosser explains in a 2009 essay on neo-Malthusianism and its implications for biopolitical governance in the United States after World War II, the United States’ unique contribution to biopolitics was in its embrace of eugenics in the service of the state. French philosopher Michel Foucault and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben have detailed how biopolitics works: in short, the state assumes control over the biological aspect of human life, 28 thus totalizing state control over the human subject by “merg[ing] the biological with the political.”29 Biopolitics is “the means by which the group of living beings understood as a population is measured in order to be governed,” and because the biopolitical state sees populations as managerial burdens to be governed, there necessarily arises a bifurcation of a given regime into an elite, or center, which regulates a periphery of teeming masses threatening the elites’ access to materials and other privileges of power.30 Thomas Malthus himself wrote in 1798, when the British Empire was nea rly at its peak. The introduction of India and African colonies sharpened the distinction between metropole and frontier. The same held inside of England, too. Malthus saw rapidly growing London as containing entirely too many people, leading him and others in his wake to lament that population would soon outstrip resources, if it hadn’t already. In that spirit, the Malthusian League of London was formed in 1877 to call for a reduction in population, especially because of “the consequences of overpopulation for the wealthy.”31 As a 1911 Malthusian League publication put it: .  .  .overcrowding, semi-starvation and squalor are the fruitful sources of disease which scruples not to travel beyond its birthplace and to infect the homes of the wealthy. Modern society may be fitly compared to a magnificent palace reared in a miasmatic swamp, which fills the air with its deathdealing exhalations.32 The realities of empire—of having to govern a mass of people who were not easily persuaded to stop procreating—began to weigh heavily upon the upper crusts of English society, certainly by 1911 when the aforementioned quotation was published by the Malthusian League, but much earlier, too, as British intellectuals gradually thought through the implications of the empire and of advances in sciences—many of them discoveries made in the course of imperial expansion, for example, the cure for scurvy and the pre-discovery of vitamins—which were beginning to lead to increases in human populations.33 In the United States, this neo-Malthusianism was tainted heavily by racialist and eugenicist pseudo-science, as well as by Darwinism of both the biological and social varieties. Early American neo-Malthusians worried about the “race suicide” they saw implicit in the influx of non-white, non-A nglo-Saxon, nonProtestant immigrants into America. “Race-suicide was in many ways the precursor to American eugenics,” Schlosser avers, and this is amply borne out by

The Club of Rome in East Asia   171 the documentary record.34 Birth control advocates such as Margaret Sanger couched their calls for dramatically culling non-white populations in the crudest of racially charged language, with Sanger famously advocating the reduction of the “Negro population” and other “defective stocks” as a way to remove so many “human weeds.”35

The global reach of progressivist anti-natalism Sanger was hardly alone in her understanding of the population problem, nor was she the readiest to globalize the problem of population beyond the borders of the United States. As Schlosser points out: Demographer Warren Thompson left open the possibility of population induced war in Danger Spots in World Population (1929), [in which he argues that] certain areas—specifically Central Europe, the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean areas—have populations in excess of their resources. These he labels ‘danger spots’, and, for Thompson, much of (then) modern warfare resulted from the diffusion of population from these areas to areas of resource ‘surplus’. As a leading figure in the field of demography, Thompson’s analysis contributed to a basic categorization of world population into areas of burgeoning masses ‘out there’ threatening peaceful populations ‘in here’. [. . .] Population debates were a key component to the construction of geopolitical imaginaries in this time period.36 After World War II, Fairfield Osborn and William Vogt, authors, respectively, of Our Plundered Planet and Road to Survival, helped reframe the populationvs.-resource-availability debate for the emerging Cold War, with Osborn even going so far as to blame “both World Wars, the Mexican Revolution and even the collapse of the Mayan Empire to imbalances between growing populations and natural resources.”37 Osborn continues: When will it be openly recognized that one of the principal causes of the aggressive attitudes of individual nations and of much of the present discord among groups is traceable to diminishing productive lands and to increasing population pressures? Every country, all the world, is met with the threat of an oncoming crisis.38 As the president of the American Eugenics Society and author for the American Birth Control League Guy Irving Burch wrote in his 1945 book Population Roads to Peace and War, victorious nations should “insist” on the “compulsory sterilization” of “all persons who are inadequate, either biologically or socially.” Otherwise, the peace gained by the Allied victory in World War II would be “as transitory as were the results of the Versailles Treaty.”39

172  Jason Morgan Sanger, too, was in her own way concerned about population and geopolitics, although perhaps in not so apocalyptic a register. For example, in Chapter 5, “The Cruelty of Charity,” of her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger reproduces a letter from a missionary in China in order to advance her argument, not so much that resources are at stake, but that charity itself is depriving people of material abundance: The people of the United States have recently been called upon to exercise their traditional generosity not merely to aid the European Relief Council in its efforts to keep alive three million, five hundred thousand starving children in Central Europe, but in addition to contribute to that enormous fund to save the thirty million Chinese who find themselves at the verge of starvation, owing to one of those recurrent famines which strike often at that densely populated and inert country, where procreative recklessness is encouraged as a matter of duty. [. . .] The most serious charge that can be brought against modern ‘benevolence’ is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large. Looked at impartially, this compensatory generosity is in its final effect probably more dangerous, more dysgenic, more blighting than the initial practice of profiteering and the social injustice which makes some too rich and others too poor.40 But the most salient vector for Sanger’s birth control ideology to reach Asia was not China, but Japan. Indeed, Japan had been the first global recipient of America’s fledgling eugenicist information regime. Since almost the beginning of the eugenics movement in the United States, biologists and proto-eugenicists in Japan had been paying careful attention to the emerging pseudo-science in America. Eugenics works were being translated into Japanese as early as 1914, and a monthly journal titled “Eugenics” was published beginning in 1924.41 When Japanese feminist and Margaret Sanger protégée Ishimoto Shizue (also spelled “Shidzue”) published her autobiography Facing Two Ways in 1939, “Fred Hogue, an active member of the American Eugenics Society [.  .  .] who wrote a column called ‘Social Eugenics’” lauded Ishimoto and her book in the Los Angeles Times.42 As social historian Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci explicates in Contraceptive Diplomacy: Hogue and other American eugenicists’ interest in spreading birth control in Japan represented an ongoing discussion about differential birth rates between races across the world. [. . .] Demographic Yellow Peril seemed to threaten the stability of white world hegemony. These eugenic fears propelled the anti-Japanese immigration campaigns in California, which emerged following the anti-Chinese movement around the turn of the century and

The Club of Rome in East Asia   173 intensified in the early 1920s. [. . .] As far as the eugenicists could see, the immigration policies could address only the domestic problems of race relations. They therefore believed that international cooperation or agreement was further needed to deal with the differential birth rates of nations across the globe for the sake of world peace.43 The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, a 1920 book by “Harvard-educated historian and eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard,” TakeuchiDemirci writes, “further helped popularize the idea of an impending Yellow Peril.”44 Within Japan, as well, “Japanese eugenicists debated how to interpret Western attempts to check the population increase of fertile nonwhite races based on eugenic reasons.”45 While some Japanese eugenicists thought such rhetoric an “insult,” some, such as biologist Tanaka Yoshimaro, “admitted that the Japanese in general were physically inferior to whites, but at the same time insisted that there were many Japanese qualities that made them unique and genetically superior.”46 “Most Japanese intellectuals,” Takeuchi-Demirci writes, “agreed that top-down measures were needed to reduce the birth rate of those who were mentally or physically handicapped or doomed to be a burden to the nation.”47 Some of the most respected intellectuals in the United States helped convince their Japanese counterparts of the wisdom of adopting eugenicist views and practices. For example, Julius Rosenwald Foundation president and Rockefeller Foundation Vice President Edwin R. Embree visited Japan in 1926, along with Princeton biology professor Edwin Conklin, under the auspices of the Human Biology Commission (1924–1927). The two agreed with their Japanese eugenicist counterparts that Japan had a population problem. “‘More conspicuous in Japan even than ancient art or modern industry are babies,’ Embree reflected in his journal. ‘They are everywhere.’”48

Eugenics as information regime for pre-, postwar, and Cold War East Asia It is a trope of Cold War writing that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 were the “first shots of the Cold War.”49 If the Cold War is understood as a military standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, then this argument is a compelling one.50 But if Maier’s insights into the American empire’s having shifted modes from conquest to consumption hold true, then another salvo of the Cold War in East Asia can be said to have come much more subtly, not in the form of atomic explosions, but those of a new kind of bomb: a population bomb.51 While the Soviet Union’s development of atomic weapons was deeply troubling to the United States and its Cold War allies, it is significant that the U.S. government drew up its own five-year plans, not on nuclear parity, but on managing population growth worldwide.52 Indeed, in 1973, former Secretary of Defense (1961–1968) and automobile executive

174  Jason Morgan Robert McNamara would declare that “the threat of unmanageable population pressures is very much like the threat of nuclear war.”53 These sentiments were hardly new. Immediately after the use of atomic bombs on Japan, the chief translator of this growing fear of population bombs into policy on the ground in East Asia was Brigadier General Crawford F. Sams (1902– 1994). Virtually unheard of today, Sams, the de facto surgeon general of Japan during the U.S. military’s occupation of that country, continued in the older vein of eugenicist thinking about populations. As Troy J. Sacquety writes in the official military history of Sams: In 1945, [Sams] transferred to Japan to serve as the Chief of the Public Health and Welfare Section, General Headquarters, Supreme Commander for the Allied Power (SCAP) in the military government of occupied Japan.54 [.  .  .] Sams engineered one of the most transformative medical revolutions ever undertaken in a country. [In both Japan and Korea, Sams improved nutrition and stopped or prevented outbreaks of diseases such as smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, and typhus.] This success had propaganda value because the ability to control epidemics was a ‘test of Communist versus democratic abilities . . . if we could control these diseases . . . and the Communists could not, it would be a direct and telling blow to the Communist propaganda . . . because we could show that literally the chances of dying under the Communist banner were far greater,’ recalled BG Sams.55 Sams, under the direction of MacArthur, urged on the Japanese government the passage of the Yūsei Hogohō, or Eugenic Protection Law.56 To be sure, the people of Japan were in dire straits as the American Occupation was getting underway. Just as Sacquety asserts, famine and disease were rampant. But Sams, working within the emerging Cold War information regime and on the front lines of the United States’ nascent global confrontation with the Soviet Union, was virtually forced by his circumstances to focus less on people and more on populations. Aggregation into “populations” to be managed by the central government in Washington is a defining feature of the American imperium during the Cold War, when even—especially—large groups of people under the American nuclear umbrella became weaponized against the Soviets. If populations were left to their own devices, hunger, sickness, or other evils could undermine the American sway over the free world. As population researcher and China expert Steven W. Mosher writes: Population control became a weapon in the Cold War. Perhaps the first ‘successful’ population control program was carried out in post-war Japan. [. . .] MacArthur published a report, drafted by the Natural Resource Section of his [SCAP] office, which argued that the ‘discrepancies’ between Japan’s burgeoning population and its limited resources could not be met in any ‘humane’ way except by a reduction of the birthrate. The Japanese Diet followed in 1948 by passing the Eugenic Protection Law.57

The Club of Rome in East Asia   175 After this law was passed, the former legal proscriptions on abortion in Japan were almost entirely evacuated. For a time in the 1950s, Japan had the highest measured abortion rate anywhere in the world.58 With the Japanese population completely in check by the early stages of the Cold War, the United States turned to face the burgeoning populations of other countries in Asia. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, neo-Malthusian ideology had taken hold of virtually the entire American government establishment.59 Robert McNamara, also famous for his concerns about the overpopulation of the world, brought a similar mentality, the rubric of the “body count,” to bear on the United States’ attempt to intervene in populations in the Far East. As Vietnam was turning into a quagmire and the U.S. government was failing to manage populations either abroad or at home—as the optimism of Kennedy and Johnson gave way to frustration, dismay, and despair—the United States was beginning to work much more aggressively through international institutions, such as the United Nations Fund for Population Activities, established in 1967 and funded by the United States and other member states the United States coerces into donating. As NSSM-200 makes clear, the U.S. Department of State and its Agency for International Development [USAID] ‘played an important role in establishing the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) to spearhead a multilateral effort in population as a complement to the bilateral actions of AID and other donor countries’.60 In other words, as the military “containment” of world communism was falling apart in Southeast Asia, the U.S. government was actively seeking other ways to wage the Cold War than with bombs and boots on the ground. It was largely due to expenditures in the Vietnam War that President Richard M. Nixon announced that the United States would be decoupling the dollar from the gold standard in 1971.61 It also fell to Nixon to manage the shift from a pre-Cold War information regime of eugenicist population control to the Cold War information regime of population control for American empire and the consumerist information regime detailed by Charles Maier, a regime that was grounded in managerial biopolitics on a global scale. As Kasun explains: Richard Nixon was the first president to send a message directly to Congress calling for even greater funding of [Pres. Johnson’s] population programs, and in 1970 he struck new ground by appointing the now-famous Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, under the chairmanship of John D. Rockefeller III, founder of the Population Council and a dedicated member of the antinatalist movement. The commission [. . .] threw its weight behind a host of population deterrents—free abortion-ondemand, sex education, easier voluntary sterilization, and public solicitation of teenagers to adopt contraceptives. In his letter transmitting the commission’s Report to Congress, Rockefeller ordained that since further population growth would not advance such essential national interests as ‘the vitality of business’, it had better stop.62

176  Jason Morgan President Nixon accepted the report reluctantly, but by then the information regime had been set on its present course. “Through [a subsequent] battery of legislation,” Kasun notes, “Congress provided for the world’s largest program of publicly financed birth control, both at home and abroad, and undertook 90 percent of the worldwide research on population and family planning.” While Ronald Reagan and some in his administration sought to curtail U.S. government intervention in biopolitics worldwide, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush would continue, and in some ways further strengthen, this information regime right to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, which he formed in 1973 “to analyze the problems facing North America, Western Europe, and Japan,” counted Carter, Bush, Carter’s Vice President Walter Mondale, Carter’s Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Carter’s Deputy Secretary of State (and Clinton’s Secretary of State) Warren Christopher, Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and other Washington elites as members. Its remit was to persuade the “economic officials of .  .  . the largest countries” to “think in terms of managing a single world economy, in addition to managing international economic relations among countries. [. . .] Population planning should be an integral part of social and economic development.”63

Conclusion The Cold War is often portrayed as a contest of production, an extension of the “arsenal of democracy,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the United States’ efforts to supply liberal democracies with arms and materiel in 1940, and of “freedom’s forge,” in the words of popular historian Arthur Herman.64 By out-producing its enemies and underwriting the productivity of its allies, the narrative goes, the United States was able to win the Cold War, which was ultimately a Taylorist contest between factory managers and weapons developers. From the “missile gap” scare to the Strategic Defense Initiative under President Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, including the Cold War in East Asia, is usually understood as a competition over which side could out-produce the other. But the population-control information regime poses a big challenge to this view. Central planning, whether in Five-Year Plans for wheat production or “Plan 2000” reports (as were issued under President Jimmy Carter) for securing sufficient harvests through top-down, Washington-enforced regimens of family planning, and not production, became the dominant Cold War information regime beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Charles Maier asserts, the American empire shifted from a production to consumption mode in the 1970s. In this paper, I have argued that this shift also entailed a shift from pro-natalist biopolitical schemes to anti-natalist population-control schemes, which were, in turn, part of Washington’s growing alarm over rising non-white populations around the world and the threat that these additional people supposedly posed to the United States’ ability to secure natural resources such as petroleum, zinc, and tin for consumption at home. As the United States shifted, per the Maierian

The Club of Rome in East Asia   177 explication, from an empire of production to one of consumption—that is, as the United States began prioritizing the domestic consumption economy over the need to produce enough goods to maintain the “arsenal of democracy” and “freedom’s forge” needed to prop up client states around the globe—the imperative for officials in Washington also shifted, from exporting American dominance to importing the materials needed to prop up the consumer economy at home. Central to this was population control. Begun as eugenics and patent racism in the prewar period, largely in the United States, and then exported to Germany, Japan, and elsewhere, the population-control information regime became intertwined with the American management of its Asian client states in the Cold War. The Club of Rome idea, the idea that there was a ticking “population bomb” set to explode into a world crisis of overpopulation and a subsequent Malthusian dystopia of “hordes” of hungry poor people swarming the rich nations of the world, became the dominant information regime of the American imperium. The Cold War, beginning in the 1970s, became, for the United States, not a question of winning hearts and minds, but of controlling the “body count,” the number of human beings on a planet managed largely by Washington, D.C. As the U.S. dollar grew more distant from gold and the United States became a realm of consumption and inflation rather than tight money and manufacturing, the population-control information regime came to dictate the conduct of the Cold War.

Notes 1 Prof. J. Mark Ramseyer provided extensive and enormously insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. All interpretations and faults remain mine alone, but Prof. Ramseyer saved me from many errors, and also helped greatly in improving the cohesion of the essay overall. I am grateful to him. I am also grateful to Dr. Ligaya Acosta for informing me of the existence of NSSM-200. 2 Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). See also Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. Ch. 1, “Society as factory,” 19–69. 3 Stephen Wertheim, “The Final Frontiers? Charles Maier’s Breakthrough Among Empires,” Harvard International Review, November 22, 2007 4 On American capitalism, see Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). On the role of middle managers in the bureaucratization of American economic and political life, see James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (New York: John Day Co., 1941) and Samuel T. Francis, Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America (Arlington, VA: Washington Summit, 2016). The phrase “American Century” was popularized by Henry Luce in a February 17, 1941 editorial in Life magazine titled “The American Century.” 5 On economics and American empire, see Robert M. Collins, “The Economic Crisis of 1968 and the Waning of the ‘American Century’,” The American Historical Review, vol. 101, no. 2 (Apr., 1996), 396–422. 6 Stephen Wertheim, “The Final Frontiers?” Harvard International Review, op. cit.

178  Jason Morgan 7 See Scott O’Bryan, The Growth Idea: Purpose and Prosperity in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan, 1966), and, on King Camp Gillette and socialist management of the world economy, Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (Nashville, TN and London: New English Review Press, 2019). 8 Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution—A Strategy for Surviving the World: A Report by the Council of the Club of Rome (Sydney, Australia: Simon & Schuster of Australia, 1991), 4. For an earlier example of advancing a planetary and ecological organizing principle, see, e.g., John McHale, The Future of the Future (New York: George Braziller, 1968). 9 Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution, op. cit., vii.

12 “National Security Study Memorandum NSSM 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests (THE KISSINGER REPORT),” December 10, 1974. Classified by Harry C. Blaney, III, declassified/released on July 3, 1989 under provisions of Executive Order 12356 by F. Graboske, National Security Council. Quotation from Chapter 3, “Minerals and Fuel,” 40.

not only [. . .] national and regional stability but also [. . .] the future world order. In a sense, if we and other richer elements of the world community do not meet the test of formulating a policy to help Bangladesh awake from its economic and demographic nightmare, we will not be prepared in future decades to deal with the consequences of similar problems in other countries which have far more political and economic consequences to U.S. interests. (“National Security Study Memorandum NSSM 200,” op. cit., 63, quoting [U.S.] Embassy Dacca’s report of June 19, 1974 (Dacca 3424)) ­

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“Kagakushi nyu ̄ mon: Yu ̄ sei hogoho ̄ no rekishizo ̄ no saikento ̄ ,” Kagakushi Kenkyu ̄ (June, 2002), 104–106, Shimokawa Masaharu, Bo ̄ kyaku no Hikiageshi: Izumi Sei’ichi to Futsukaichi Hoyo ̄ sho (Fukuoka: Genshobo ̄ , 2017), Toyoda Maho, “Amerika senryo ̄ ka no Nippon ni okeru seishoku no kanri: Yu ̄ sei hogoho ̄ no funin shujutsu/danshu,” Amerikashi Kenkyu ̄ , no. 36, 2013, 63–82, Lynn D. Wardle, “‘Crying Stones’: A Comparison of Abortion in Japan and the United States,” New York Law School Journal of International and Comparative Law, vol. 14, nos. 2 & 3, 1993, 183–259, and Yamamoto Kiyoko, “Kindai Nippon ni okeru yu ̄ sei seisaku to kazoku seido ni kansuru rekishi shakaigakuteki ko ̄ satsu,” Sonoda Gakuen Joshi Daigaku Ronbunshu ̄ , no. 37 (Dec., 2002), 99–110. On the nexus of religion and population in East Asia, see, e.g., Vegard Skirbekk, Setsuya Fukuda, Conrad Hackett, Marcin Stonawski, Thomas Spoorenberg and Raya Muttarak, “Is Buddhism the Low-Fertility Religion of Asia?” Demographic Research, Max Planck Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Wissenschaften, vol. 32 (Jan.–Jun., 2015), 1–28. Mosher, 51, also endnote 80, citing David Cushman Coyle, “Japan’s Population,” Population Bulletin vol. 15, no. 7, 1959, 119–136 See Lynn D. Wardle, “‘Crying Stones’,” op. cit. For a background to the abortion issue in Japan, see Fabian Drixler, Mabiki: Infanticide and Population Growth in Eastern Japan, 1660–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). See, e.g., James Robenalt, January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month that Changed America Forever (Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2015). Jacqueline Kasun, The War against Population, op. cit., 199, citing U.S. Government Document NSSM 200, “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests,” December 10, 1974, declassified on December 31, 1980, 121, UN Fund for Population Activities, 1983 Report, and Agency for International Development, “Rationale for AID Support of Population Programs,” January 1982, 24. It was perhaps to prevent another Vietnam in the People’s Republic of China that in 1979 UNFPA began assist[ing with] a virulent program of population control in Mainland China to train workers, collect data, and produce contraceptive and abortion equipment. By the end of 1984 UNFPA had poured $54 million into the Chinese program, not including the Chinese share of UNFPA’s regional projects in Asia. While vivid accounts were seeping out on the harsh realities of the new one-child-per-family program—compulsory abortion and infanticide—UNFPA’s 1981 Report glowed with high praise: ‘exceptionally high implementation rate’, ‘high commitment’, ‘remarkably efficient financial reporting’. The friendly approval was in general echoed by the population network: Patricia Harris, Health and Human Services Administration secretary for the Carter administration, signed a cooperative research agreement in family planning with representatives of the Chinese government; the Population Reference Bureau listed the Chinese program as an example of ‘well-designed family planning programs’; Lester Brown of Worldwatch found it a promising model in ‘Population Policies for a New Economic Era’; International Planned Parenthood wondered if it could serve as a ‘Third World Model’; and the Planned Parenthood Federation of Korea launched its own one-child-perfamily drive. Jacqueline Kasun, The War against Population, op. cit., 199–200, citing UN Fund for Population Activities, Reports for 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, and Summary of Allocations, 1984, Christopher S. Wren, “Chinese Region Showing Resistance to National Goals for Birth Control,” New York Times, May 16, 1982, 29, Michele Vink, “Abortion and Birth Control in Canton, China,” Wall Street Journal, November 30, 1981, Henry P. David, “China’s Population Policy: Glimpses and a ‘Minisurvey’,” Intercom, September/October 1982, 3–4, the U.S. Department of State’s official confirmation of reports of forced abortions in late pregnancy in Country Reports

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on Human Rights Practices for 1983, submitted to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, February 1984, 743, UNFPA, 1981 Report, 52, Intercom, July 1980, 4, Intercom, March/April 1983, 7, Lester Brown, Worldwatch Paper #53, International Planned Parenthood Federation, People, vol. 10, no. 1, 1983, 24, and International Planned Parenthood Federation, People, vol. 10, no. 2, 1983, 28. See, generally, “America’s Suicide Attempt,” in Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties, rev. edn (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1992), Chapter 18. Jacqueline Kasun, The War against Population, op. cit., 163–164, citing Population Reference Bureau, World Population Growth and Response: 1965–1975—A Decade of Global Action (Washington, DC: The Population Reference Bureau, April 1976), 185, Population and the American Future: The Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (New York: New American Library, 1972), 137, 171, 178, 189–190, John D. Rockefeller III, Letter to the President and Congress, transmitting the Final Report of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, dated March 27, 1972, Alan Guttmacher Institute, Informing Social Change (New York: The Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1980), 19, and Population Reference Bureau, World Population Growth and Response, op. cit., 187. Jacqueline Kasun, The War against Population, op. cit., 197, citing The Reform of International Institutions: A Report of the Trilateral Task Force on International Institutions to the Trilateral Commission (New York: The Trilateral Commission, 1976), 22, and Reducing Malnutrition in Developing Countries: Increasing Rice Production in South and Southeast Asia: Report of the Trilateral North-South Food Task Force to the Trilateral Commission (New York: Trilateral Commission, 1978), xi. Emphases in original. Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy” speech was broadcast via radio on December 29, 1940, nearly one year before the attack at Pearl Harbor brought the United States into direct military conflict with other belligerent nations. It is notable that even before Pearl Harbor Roosevelt was pitching productivity as the key to the preservation of freedom. For “freedom’s forge,” see Arthur Herman, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II (New York: Random House, 2012).

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abe, Shintarō 14 Abe, Shinzō 17–18 Academia de Lincei 165 Acheson, Dean 44–45 Acosta, Ligaya 177n1 Agamben, Giorgio 170, 179n28 Akashi, Yasushi 22 All-China Student Union 35 Amerasia 40–42 American Bar Association Journal 138 American Birth Control League 171 The American Committee for NonParticipation in Japanese Aggression 30–31, 34, 36–37 American Eugenics Society 171–172 American Friends of the Chinese People 40 American School in Japan 58 Anti-Comintern Pact 126 Armstrong, Hamilton Fish 59, 61–62, 65, 67–69 Arrupe, Pedro, S.J. 7, 131–136, 139 Arahata, Kanson 126 Asahi Shimbun (newspaper) 19, 130 Austral Malay Tin Limited (AMT) 97, 114 Barkley, Alben W. 57 biopolitics 8, 168, 170, 175–176 Bisson, Thomas Arthur 40–41 Bitter, Bruno, S.J. 131 Black Panther Party (BPP) 8, 154 Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio 136 Bretton Woods 167 Briggs Plan 101–102 Brzezinski, Zbigniew 176 Burch, Guy Irving 171 Burma 60, 102–103, 106, 114 Bush, George H. W. 176 Calles, Plutarco Elías 7, 128, 137 Cambodia 60

Capra, Frank 38, 49n43 Carter, Jimmy 176, 181n60 Casti connubii 127, 130 Chiang Kai-shek 21, 31, 34–37, 40, 42–45, 47–48, 50, 52, 143 China Today 40 Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang [Guomindang]) 21, 30–31, 33–36, 38–39, 41–42 Chō Dairai see Zhang Dalai Chongryon (Zai-Nihon Chōsenjin sōrengōkai (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan)) 81, 84, 93 Chōsen kenkoku sokushin seinen dōmei (Youth Alliance to Promote the Founding of Korea) 80 Christopher, Warren 176 Chung Daekyun 89–90, 93 Church Committee for China Relief (CCCR) 36 Cleaver, Eldridge 154 Club of Rome 8–9, 164–169, 177 Comintern 4, 30–32, 37, 39–41, 43, 126 Conklin, Edwin 173 Conrad, Joseph 98–99, 106 Council on Foreign Relations 59 Cristero War 7, 132 Dean, Arthur 65 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK; North Korea) 5–6, 8, 25, 77–80, 81–82, 89, 93, 143–156 Den, Hideo 13–14 Department of State, United States 44, 61–63, 66, 175 Deripaska, Oleg 18 Díez-Hochleitner, Ricardo 165 Divini redemptoris 131 Dixie Mission 44 domino theory 144

188 Index Domnitsky, Andrey Ivanovich 4, 14–17 Dulles, John Foster 60 Dumoulin, Heinrich, S.J. 136, 139

Hornbeck, Stanley 36, 41 Hull, Cordell 36 Human Biology Commission 173

Eckert, Carter J. 93 Eda, Saburō 68 Eisenhower, Dwight David 59 Elisséeff, Serge 58 Embree, Edwin R. 173 Emergency, The 6, 97–103, 106–107, 113, 115–116, 119 Emperor of Japan (tennō) 126, 135, 140n37 Engels, Friedrich 4, 133 Ennin 58 Eugenic Protection Law (Yūsei Hogohō) 174 European Relief Council 172

Iijima, Isao 18 Iniquis afflictisque 128 Inoki, Masamachi 23 Institute of Moralogy xv, 92 Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) 31, 37–40, 43, 49, 46 Ishimoto, Shizue 172

Fairbank, John King 43 family, Communist attacks on 129–130, 134–135 Field, Frederick Vanderbilt 40 FIFA World Cup 8, 150–151 Fitch, George 34–36, 41 Ford Foundation 9 Ford, Gerald Rudolph 176 Foreign Affairs 5, 57, 59, 61, 63–65, 68–69 Foucault, Michel 170 Fukuda, Takeo 14 Gayn, Mark 42 Gillette, King Camp 164, 178n7 gold standard 8, 175 Greene, Jerome Davis 38 Greene, Roger Sherman, II 37–38 GRU 17, 19, 21 Hallstein Doctrine 149 Hammarskjöld, Dag 22 Han Tǒk-su 81 Harvard University 5–6, 8, 57–58, 63–64, 93, 163, 173 Harvard Yenching Institute 58, 64 Hashimoto, Ryūtarō 17–18 Hashiura, Tokio 126 Hatoyama, Ichirō 4, 13–15, 23 Hatoyama, Yukio 18 History Museum of J-Koreans (Zainichi kanjin rekishi shiryōkan) 77 Ho Chi Minh 144 Hogue, Fred 172 Hokkaido 88 Hong Kong 60

Jaffe, Philip 39–42 Japan Communist Party 80–81, 126, 131, 135 John Paul II, Pope 139 Johnson, Lyndon Baines 169, 175 Juche 8, 145, 155 Julius Rosenwald Foundation 173 Kang Chol-hwan 93 Kasun, Jacqueline 175–176, 181n60 Kawaji, Toshiakira 15 KGB 17, 19–20, 22 KGB rezident 20, 22 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 57, 62, 167, 175 Ketteler, Wilhelm von 136 Khrushchev, Nikita 13, 23 Kim Dae-jung 144 Kim Il-sung 143, 145, 154 Kim Jong-un 144–145 Kim Yŏng-dal 90 Kimura, Kan 91–92 King, Alexander 165 Kishi, Nobusuke 57, 59 Kissinger, Henry 8, 43, 166 “Know Your Enemy: Japan” 38 Kollontai, Alexandra 134 Kondō, Eizō 126 Kōno, Ichirō 23 Konoe, Fumimaro 87 Korea, Government-General of 86–87, 93 Korean War 8, 45, 51n62, 80–81, 90, 104, 143–145, 149–150, 155 Korea University 81 Krasnoyarsk Agreement 17 Kubek, Anthony 41–42 kyōsei renkō (forced mobilization) 5, 77–78, 81–85, 87, 89–91, 93–94 Larson, Emmanuel 42 Leaf, Earl 34, 36 Lenin, Vladimir 4, 31, 43, 133 Leo XIII, Pope 7, 127, 133 ‘Limits to Growth’ 165

Index  189 MacArthur, Douglas A., Gen. 125, 174 MacArthur, Douglas A., II 5, 57–58, 60, 61, 63–70 Maier, Charles 8, 163–164, 167, 173, 175–176 Mainichi Shimbun (newspaper) 19 Malaya 6, 97–104, 107–110, 113–114, 118, 120n2 Malayanisation 98, 114–115, 119 Malthus, Thomas 170 Malthusianism 169–170, 175, 177, 179n28 Malthusian League of London 170 Mao Zedong 21, 31, 35, 37, 41, 43–44, 143–144 marriage 130, 134–135 Marshall, George C. 44 Marshall Plan 50n59, 163, 165 Marx, Karl 4, 127, 133 Marxism 7–8, 43, 70n6, 78, 81–82, 94, 129, 127, 130–133, 136–137, 139 Matsukata, Haru 59, 71n7 Matsuoka, Yōsuke “Frank” 126 McNamara, Robert 174–175 Merdeka 98 Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan) 77 Mindan Korea Central Hall 77 Mindszenty, Cardinal József 7, 136–137 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA) 14, 25, 39–40, 86 Mitchell, Kate 42 Molotov, Vyacheslav 21 Moon Jae-in 144, 156 Morelia, Mexico: Spanish children in 133–134, 140n27 Mori, Yoshirō 15 Morita, Yoshio 86–87 Mosher, Steven W. 174 Mosukuwa Kai (Moscow Society) 19 Mott, John Raleigh 36, 38 Naruse, Masaji 64, 68, 73n58 National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM–200, the “Kissinger Report”) 8–9, 165–169, 175, 180, 181n60 Natural Law 129, 131, 133 Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission (NNSC) 152 New York Times 37, 61 New Zealand 103 Nippon Times (newspaper) 138 Nishioka, Tsutomu xv, 92 Nixon, Richard Milhouse 8, 43, 166–167, 175–176

NKGB 20–21 NKVD 20 North Korean Bar Association 88–89 Nunan, Tom 97–120 Oberlin College 58 Office of Strategic Services (OSS) 42 orientalism 97–98, 104, 110 Osborn, Fairfield 171 Pacific Historical Review 60 Packard, George R. 60 Pak Kyǒng-sik 5, 10, 77–79, 91, 93, 95 Palmer, Brandon 92 Park Chung-hee 148 Parsons, J. Graham 63, 65–66 “peaceful co-existence” 13 Peccei, Auretio 165 Penang 109, 113, 118 Perak 103 Pius XI, Pope 127–128, 130–131 Price, Frank 33–34, 36 Price, Harry 33, 46n12 problematique 165, 167 Putin,Vladimir 18–19 Putyatin, Eufemii Vasilievich 15 Quadragesimo anno 127–129Ra Jong-yil 147 Razak, Tun Abdul 116–117 Reagan, Ronald Wilson 176 Reischauer, Adrienne 59 Reischauer, Edwin O. 5, 57–70 Reitaku University xv, 92 Republic of China (Taiwan) 4–5, 31, 43, 60 Republic of Korea (South Korea) 59, 77–79, 80, 82, 85, 89, 93–94, 144, 148–150, 153, 155 Rerum novarum 127, 129, 133 resolutique 165 Rhee, Syngman 59 Rockefeller Foundation 9, 38, 173 Rockefeller, John D. III 175, 182n62 Rodong Sinmun (newspaper) 89, 157n21 Roh Moo-hyun 144 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 37, 49n44, 176, 182n64 Roth, Andrew 42 Sakai, Toshihiko 126 Sakhalin 87 Sams, Crawford 174 San Francisco Peace Treaty 138 Sanger, Margaret 171–172

190 Index Satō, Masaru 18 Security Treaty, U.S.-Japan 5, 57, 59, 61 Sekai 57, 64–65, 67–68, 82–83 Service, John Stewart 42, 49n44 Shiga, Yoshio 7, 131 Sibley, Harper 36, 47n29 Singapore 98, 105–106, 110, 119, 152 Song Ziwen (T.V. Soong) 37 Soong Meiling 31, 35 South Vietnam 60 Soviet Union 1, 3, 13–17, 19–22, 23–25, 31, 37–39, 41, 43, 60, 62, 80–81, 97, 125–128, 130, 134, 136, 138, 145, 149, 155, 168–169, 173–174, 176 Spanish Civil War 70n6, 131–133 Stalin, Josef 4, 13, 21–22, 31, 43, 70n6, 81, 146 Stegmaier, John L. 64–67 Stewart, Maxwell 40 Stimson, Henry L. 37, 41 Stoddard, Lothrop 173 Sugihara, Arata 14 Sun Yatsen 31, 36 Suzuki, Muneo 18, 27n18 SVR 17, 21 Taiping 101, 103–104, 106–109, 112, 115, 118 Taiwan see Republic of China Takatsu, Seidō 126 Takeda, Tsunekazu 14 Takeuchi-Demirci, Aiko 172–173 Tanaka, Kōtarō 7, 128–131, 137–139 Tanaka Memorial 38, 49n43 Tanaka, Yoshimaro 173 Taylorist 163, 176 Tengku Abdul Rahman 116–117 Thailand 60, 102–104, 107, 111, 114–115 Third International see Comintern Thompson, Warren 171 Tianjin, Treaty of 34–35 Tikhvinsky, Sergei Leonidovich 4, 18–25 Timperley, Harold John 31, 34, 38 Tokuda, Kyūichi 7, 131, 137 Tokyo Shimbun (newspaper) 19 Tonomura, Masaru 91 Tosaka, Jun 7, 130–131 Tripartite Pact 126 Ugaki, Kazushige 39 United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) 175 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 175

The United States and Japan 61 United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) 143 U.S.-Japan security arrangement 18 U.S. Treasury bills 164 University of Tokyo 58 U Thant 169 Vance, Cyrus 176 Vandenberg, Arthur 43–44 Vevier, Charles 60 Vietnam War 2, 8, 144, 150, 167–168, 175 Vogt, William 171 Wakasugi, Kaname 39 Wang Zhengting (Chengting Thomas “C.T.” Wang) 36 Wanted: an Asia Policy 60 Wertheim, Stephen 163–164 White Privilege 104–107 World War II i, 1, 4–6, 8, 13–14, 17, 25, 41–44, 58, 80, 125–126, 143–144, 150, 163, 165, 169–171 Yale University 64 Yamakawa, Hitoshi 126 Yamashita, Yasuhiro 14 Yeap Hock Hoe 113–114 Yellow Peril 172–173 Yeltsin, Boris 17 Yi Chin-hŭi 82 Yi U-yŏn 91 Yoshida, Seiji 94 Yoshida, Shigeru 13–14 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) 4, 30, 34–38, 41, 46n18 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) 34 Yushin Constitution 148 zainichi 5, 77, 80–82, 84–85, 90, 93–94 Zai-Nihon Chōsenjin renmei (League of Koreans in Japan) 80 Zai-Nihon Chōsen kyoryū mindan (later Zai-Nihon Daikanminkoku kyoryū mindan, Korean Residents Union in Japan) 80 Zainichi Chōsen tōitsu minshu sensen (United Democratic Front of Koreans in Japan) 80 Zeng Xubai 34 Zhang, Dalai 126 Zhou Enlai 35