Year Zero

by Ian Buruma

  One way of reading Japanese behavior is to see it as an example of Oriental flattery, insincere, self-serving, and fitting a long tradition of appeasing powerful rulers. There may have been an element of this, but it is far from the whole story. I am convinced that much of the gratitude was genuine. Compared to most German (non-Jewish) civilians, whose living conditions, fattened by the loot from conquered countries, were not so bad until the last stages of the war, Japanese had suffered more. Not only did most of their cities go up in flames, as was true in Germany too, but the Japanese had been living on hunger rations for several years. And the bullying by Japanese military authorities and security police forces was probably even more intrusive than in Germany. Unlike many Germans in 1945, who still thought fondly of the Führer, few Japanese had anything good to say about their military regime, which had brought them nothing but misery.

  So when the Americans—so wealthy, and crisply turned out, so tall, and in the main so free and easy—settled in, they really were regarded as liberators, and many Japanese were ready to be taught how they might become more free and easy themselves. It wasn’t the first time in Japanese history that people decided to learn from a great outside power. China had been the model for many centuries, and Europe and the U.S. had been the examples to emulate since the latter half of the nineteenth century. Militant Japanese nationalism in the twentieth century was in some ways a reaction to an extraordinary run of Westernization, meaning economic liberalism, mass media, Hollywood movies, political parties, Marxism, individualism, baseball, jazz, and so forth. After the disaster of World War II, most Japanese were more than happy to return to modernity, which they associated with the Western world, and, after 1945, with America in particular.

  Whether this could really be called reeducation is a moot point. But the new masters, and many of their pupils, clearly thought in those terms. Quite how to “remake” Japan was the question. Japan hands found the whole idea absurd, and the officials most eager to take Japan’s reeducation in hand knew very little about the country and its history. To them, there could be no equivalent of denazification, of stripping off a recent layer of toxic ideology from a mature civilization, since Japan was not deemed to have such a thing. Japanese culture itself was thought by reformers to be rotten to the core.

  Nevertheless, the need for a total makeover was no more apparent to the old Japanese elites in the imperial court and the bureaucracy than it was to the Japan hands. They would have been perfectly content to stay with small reforms, undertaken slowly. But for Colonel Charles Kades and other New Dealers around SCAP, these reforms wouldn’t go nearly far enough. In his words: “[The Japanese leaders] wanted to take a tree that was diseased and prune the branches . . . We felt it was necessary to, in order to get rid of the disease, take the root and branches off.”40

  To purge Japan of its “feudal” culture, it was not enough to tear down Japanese rising sun flags (known as “meatballs” to the GIs), or ban the musical or visual celebrations of Japanese military prowess, or even abolish the Japanese armed forces, or indeed write a new constitution banning Japan’s sovereign right to wage war.

  All these things were thought to be necessary, to be sure; preparations were already made in 1945 to write the pacifist constitution. (Quite who thought of this novelty first is unclear; some say it was Shidehara Kijiro, the Japanese prime minister in 1945, a longtime pacifist, who suggested it to MacArthur.) “Feudal” family laws were abolished and women’s rights guaranteed. This was upsetting to members of Japan’s governing elites, even men who were relatively liberal, such as the ex-foreign minister Shigemitsu Mamoru (“Shiggy” in the U.S. press), who wrote in his diary: “The occupation army is thinking along lines that are radically different from any mere compliance with the Potsdam Declaration . . . They propose a remodeling of Japan from top to bottom.”41

  He was right; that is what the reformers set out to do. All Japanese customs and habits, thought to be “feudal,” had to be rooted out. American soldiers or civilians who spotted Japanese women breastfeeding in public tried to stop this practice at once. Wooden swords in traditional theater productions were confiscated. Kabuki plays featuring samurai heroes were banned. Earl Ernst, who later became a distinguished scholar of the Kabuki theater, walked into the Imperial Theater in Tokyo one night to halt a performance of Terakoya, a scene in a famous eighteenth-century play about a former samurai lord who is ordered to sacrifice his son. Out of loyalty to his lord, a former retainer kills his own son instead. This type of theatrical “barbarism” could not be tolerated. Instead, to edify the Japanese public, the theater company was required to stage a performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado. Rather than being edified, however, the Japanese public was apparently rather nonplussed.

  Nothing that could be remotely associated with “feudalism” was allowed. Even the depiction of Mount Fuji, a sacred spot in the ancient nature religion that is Shinto, was banned, in movies, artworks, and on the tiled walls of public bathhouses, where the Fuji was a popular adornment. Since the nineteenth century Shinto had indeed been transformed into a kind of state cult to promote emperor worship and the notion of the Japanese as a unique race, blessed with divine bloodlines, destined to rule the lesser breeds in Asia. Prohibiting the use of Shinto as a state religion was actually not a bad idea. The SCAP directive of 15 December stated:

  The purpose of this directive is to separate religion from the state, to prevent misuse of religion for political ends, and to put all religions, faiths, and creeds upon exactly the same legal basis, entitled to exactly the same opportunities and protection.42

  Ordering Emperor Hirohito to announce on the radio that he was a human being like everyone else did not seem like such a bad idea, either. What the emperor actually said was that his ties with the Japanese people were not “predicated on the false conception that the emperor is divine.” This satisfied the Americans. Most Japanese were hardly surprised by the statement, since they never doubted his humanity. But they saw him as a ruler descended from the Sun Goddess, something he never repudiated. In any case, few Japanese seem to have cared much one way or another. Only ultranationalists were upset, and have remained so ever since, arguing that Shinto should not be treated as any other religion, but as the essence of Japanese culture.

  Some of the cultural reeducation was merely irritating, and usually not long-lived, such as the banning of Kabuki plays or swordfight movies. Some of it was so eccentric as to be amusing, like the American soldier in charge of a rural district who thought that teaching the Japanese square dancing would enhance their democratic spirit. But in some things the Americans could go too far, even for the relatively pliant Japanese. For example, the possibility of abolishing Chinese characters and romanizing the Japanese writing system was extensively studied, and then recommended by a U.S. education mission. Nothing came of it. The education system, on the other hand, unlike in Germany, was radically revised. Single-sex elite schools made way for a system of coeducational comprehensive schools, with three years of elementary school, three years of lower secondary, and three years of upper secondary school.

  The town of Omi, in the middle of the country, not too far from Kyoto, could serve as the Japanese equivalent of Aachen. In the fall of 1945, a U.S. Army patrol decided to check on a primary school there. The sight of the American soldiers terrified the pupils so much that they started screaming. When asked whether they “liked Americans,” there was a vigorous shaking of heads. Schoolrooms were still decorated with wartime posters showing Japanese soldiers striking heroic poses. One of the teachers was a former army officer. A bloodstained sailor’s cap was found in a desk drawer. All this would not do at all, so the school principal was ordered to fire the ex-army officer and make sure all references to the war were removed.

  Six months later, some of the same Americans returned to the scene in a jeep. This time, the children appeared to be less afraid. One of the officers began to whistle “Swanee R
iver,” and to the American party’s intense satisfaction, the children sang the song with him in Japanese, followed by renderings of “Auld Lang Syne” and the “Maine Stein Song.” The party was equally pleased to note that the textbooks had been properly doctored; all “feudal” passages, referring to the war, to Japan’s warrior past, to the emperor, and so on, had been blacked out with India ink. The principal, full of goodwill, spoke in English. He promised that all the wartime posters would be put on a bonfire and several more teachers, three of whom had served in the army, dismissed.43

  However relieved many Japanese may have been by the relatively benign behavior of the American victors, and however grateful for the democratic reforms forced on their political elites, there were also more complicated feelings about American-style reeducation. A fascinating letter to the Asahi newspaper from a junior high school student perfectly expressed a common reaction among young Japanese to the volte-face by their elders; one day they were taught to worship the emperor and support the holy war in Asia, and the next, by the very same teachers, to denounce Japanese feudalism and support demokurashii.

  The student begins his letter by observing that many adults are worried how hard it will be to change young minds raised with militarism. In fact, he says, recent experience has made teenagers much more politically conscious. All they had ever known was that Japan was permanently at war. Peace was like “emerging from the dark into dazzling sunlight.” Everything they had been taught before was shown to be utterly wrong: “How could they ever trust their leaders, or indeed any adults again?” In fact, it was the adults, still often confused and ambivalent about the recent past, who should give cause for worry, for they clearly had more difficulty in freeing themselves from the spirit of militarism.44

  His was the voice of one of the most politically active generations in Japan’s modern history. Most were on the left, and all were filled with distrust of the old Japanese establishment and felt deeply betrayed when the Cold War prompted the same Americans who had come to Japan as teachers of freedom, pacifism, and democracy to embrace that old establishment, many of whose members had the blood of the last war on their hands. Japanese much like the young letter writer to the Asahi would pour into the streets of Tokyo in 1960 when Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, the Albert Speer of wartime Japan, ratified a security treaty with the U.S. that would turn Japan into a perpetual base for U.S. military operations in Asia. They protested against Japan’s indirect—and highly lucrative—involvement in the Vietnam War, which seemed to echo earlier wars in Asia. The Japanese left, enraged by Japan’s role in U.S. “imperialism,” and the right, just as enraged by having to abide by an “American” pacifist constitution, had one thing in common. To either side, the U.S. occupation seemed never to have ended.

  To some people postwar demokurashii had come a little too easily, as a kind of gift from the foreign conquerors. A well-known cartoon by Kato Etsuro showed an ecstatic Japanese crowd, some still in military caps, raising their hands to the skies, from which parachuted canisters drop like manna from heaven bearing the words “democratic revolution.”45 To receive something one ought to have fought for oneself was a little humiliating.

  Some of the humiliation was intended, but it was not directly aimed at the common Japanese people. The most emblematic photograph of the Occupation, published in September 1945, was taken on the occasion of Emperor Hirohito’s official visit (more an audience, really) to General MacArthur at SCAP’s official residence. The emperor, forty-four years old, a mere stripling compared to the Supreme Commander, who was sixty-five, stands stiffly to attention in full morning dress. Next to him stands MacArthur, his superior authority made visible not just by his great height, but a studied casualness: the open-necked khaki shirt, hands comfortably lodged behind his hips.

  The photo was printed in all the major newspapers, and the Japanese government, shocked by an image reeking of lèse-majesté, promptly forbade further publication. The following day, MacArthur revoked the ban and ordered new measures to guarantee press freedom. This did not mean that the Americans didn’t censor the news as actively as they did in Germany. They did. Mention of Hiroshima was prohibited, for example, as were negative reports about the United States, or any criticism of SCAP’s administration. (In 1946, a Japanese film titled The Japanese Tragedy was even banned for being too critical of the emperor’s wartime role, since MacArthur, after all, had absolved him from all blame.)

  Still, democracy was not just an empty word. Some of the revolutionary change dropped in those parachuted canisters was real enough. But there was still that lingering sense of shame, poignantly articulated by Takami Jun, one of the most thoughtful and honest Japanese writers of his time. He wrote in his diary on September 30:

  When I think back to the fact that freedom, which naturally should have been given by the people’s own government, could not be given, and instead has been bestowed for the first time by the military forces of a foreign country . . . I cannot escape feelings of shame. I am ashamed as someone who loves Japan, ashamed for Japan’s sake.46

  The feeling is understandable, but such utterances are a bit misleading. One of the conceits of the Occupation, still often heard, is that the Americans built modern Japanese institutions from scratch, that “Westernization” began in 1945, and that the Japanese, thanks to benevolent U.S. guidance, jumped from “feudalism” to democracy in a year or two after their wartime defeat. In fact, democratic institutions, flawed and fragile as they may have been, were already in place by the 1920s. In Japan, as in the Western zones of Germany, after the war Western Allies created the conditions for those institutions to be restored on a firmer basis. This was not always automatic. Japanese politicians and bureaucrats often had to be forced to carry out democratic reforms which most people welcomed. What neither the Americans nor the Japanese could have anticipated, however, was that the one thing the Americans did concoct entirely by themselves would become both the cornerstone, and the burden, of the postwar Japanese identity.

  Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, although it was written only in 1946, and thus outside the scope of this book, is still worth quoting, since it, more than anything else, expresses the idealism of 1945:

  (1) Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) To accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

  In 1953, on a visit to Japan as Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon shocked the Japanese by declaring that Article 9 had been a mistake. There was no reason why the Japanese shouldn’t revise it. The United States wouldn’t object. Indeed, the United States wanted Japan to be a strong ally against communism. But most Japanese disagreed. They refused to change their constitution because they were proud of it. Pacifism had given a nation which had slaughtered millions of people in several terrible wars a new sense of moral purpose, even superiority. Japan would lead the world into a new era of peace. In Japanese eyes, it was the Americans, in Korea, Vietnam, and later in Iraq or Afghanistan, who ought to be condemned for refusing to relinquish the habit of war.

  This, more or less, was the tone of public discourse in Japan for at least fifty years after the war. But pacifism came with a price. Idealism and reality soon diverged, and the Japanese, contrary to the words of their constitution, did rebuild their armed forces, disguised at first as police forces, and later as the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF). Not only was this hypocritical, but it failed to address another problem, resented almost equally by Japanese on both the right and the left. Japan was still dependent on the U.S. for its security; pacifism was professed under the nuclear umbrella of its former conquerors. There never was the equivalent in East Asia of NATO, or a European Union, allowi
ng Japan to build trust and find a new place among its neighbors.

  Article 9, still clung to by most people, but fiercely resented by the nationalistic right, has also muddled Japanese attitudes towards their own history. So long as liberals and leftists defend the pacifist clause as an essential penance for wartime guilt, the right maintains that Japan was no more guilty than any other country at war. If the Rape of Nanking or the Manila Massacre are reasons to deprive the nation of a sovereign right, then there is every reason to minimize the importance of those “incidents.” This hopelessly polarized political dispute, masquerading as a historical debate, has poisoned Japan’s relations with the rest of Asia for decades. Apart from the one-sided dependence on the United States, this too has been part of the legacy of 1945, a year of many catastrophes that ended with such high hopes.

  CHAPTER 9

  ONE WORLD

  Brian Urquhart, the young British army intelligence officer mentioned earlier in this book, the man who had been told to go on sick leave after he alerted his superior officers to the colossal risks of dropping Allied forces near the Dutch town of Arnhem in September 1944, could easily have ended up as a cynic. Operation Market-Garden, costing thousands of young lives, went ahead anyway. “Monty” wanted to outshine his American rival, General George Patton, no matter what. A little more than six months later, already disillusioned by the arrogant stupidity of his own side, Urquhart was among the first Allied soldiers to enter Bergen-Belsen. First, the idiocy, then the horror. When the war was finally over, he could not summon up much joy.

  And yet, somehow, he avoided the trap of cynicism. He recalled in his memoir: “I did not meditate that things would never be the same. I hadn’t had too much experience of the old order and did not feel I would miss it. I did think that the greatest task at hand would be to help prevent such disasters from ever happening again.”1