by Ian Buruma
Exquisite Oriental irony? A ritual form of self-abasement? Or simply an attempt to flatter Americans in their age of “decline”? Whatever the intention, there is a strong whiff of the past in this advertisement. It conjures up visions of crisp uniforms, patent-leather shoes, deep bows, lipstick smiles, and filthy urchins shouting “Chewingu gummu pureesu.”
Ah yes, those were the days, when GI Joe was Number One, the biggest, the richest, the strongest. America, shipshape, efficient, set the tune to which lesser nations danced. MacArthur was the shogun; aviator shades, corncob pipe and squashed cap were his regalia. And Japan lay at his feet, ready to learn and eager to please. But the Americans were not just the biggest and the best, they were also the most generous. Instead of exacting the punishment that was the victor’s due, Uncle Sam would remake Japan more or less in his own image. Out with samurai, feudalism, militarism, chauvinism, racialism—welcome Glenn Miller, baseball, chocolate, boogie-woogie, demokurashee!
Politically, Shogun MacArthur famously said, the Japanese were twelve-year-olds. But SCAP (Supreme Commander, Allied Powers) was there to set this straight. The Japanese would have to learn everything from scratch. The process would be supported by the so-called Three Ss: Screen, Sex and Sports. The revival of baseball was to be encouraged (hardly necessary, in fact), because it was healthy, American and democratic. A certain amount of physical affection, within bounds, was healthy too—among your own kind, of course. The Japanese should at least learn to kiss their girls in public, just like us. And the movie screen was best of all, to show the way to the yellow brick road, strewn with healthy, democratic American values.
It is easy, in retrospect, to be facetious about America’s finest hour, just as it is easy to forget that the Americans really were the most generous of conquerors, and in many cases the most well-meaning of teachers. The question is whether, in retrospect, SCAP and his loyal retainers got it right. Did they teach the right lessons, in the right way? Was MacArthur’s Occupation indeed the glowing success story of American tutelage that people of that generation still like to say it was, or are some of the problems with Japan today actually the result of that remarkable time?
Joseph Goebbels was not the only one to have discovered the efficacy of movies as a tool of propaganda. The Japanese, too, had been superb film propagandists during the war. Their best wartime films were, on the whole, better propaganda and better art than similar fare in America, Britain or Germany, because they were more realistic and less strident. Not much effort was spent on demonizing the enemy (partly because of the lack of Caucasian extras). Instead, the emphasis was on brave soldiers toughing it out overseas, and on loyal, patriotic families on the home front sacrificing personal gain for the greater national good. The very real sacrifices and deprivations people had to suffer in Japan were not hidden or ignored: quite the contrary, they were celebrated as examples of heroism, of what made the Japanese Volk great.
In her fascinating book on Occupation movie policies, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo, Hirano Kyoko mentions the regulations issued during the war by the Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs. There was a rule against “films describing individual happiness,” as well as—naturally—“films dealing with sexual frivolity.” That some of the most active wartime propagandists were former communists is not really so surprising: the spirit of collectivism and the suppression of individual desires (“greedy materialism”) were not uncongenial to them.
The right (perhaps even the duty) of the individual to be happy was, however, precisely what the Americans wanted Japanese films to propagate after the war. Hence the sensation of the first Japanese screen kiss, an episode which Hirano describes well. The kiss was proposed by an American censor to the Shochiku film company. An actress named Ikuno Michiko was trained by her (American) boyfriend to do it properly. When the scene was shot, she allegedly covered her lips with a piece of gauze to avoid direct contact with her costar, Osaka Shiro. The film, Twenty-Year-Old Youth, was released on May 23, 1946.
The audiences loved it. Students cheered and shouted “Banzai!” when the famous kiss arrived. An eyewitness, quoted by Hirano, described audiences as “gulping, sighing, and yelling.” The first screen kiss clearly had a liberating effect, just as the censor (the sweet irony of it!) had intended. And, as is the way in the film business, the first success was followed by a spate of kiss movies. Conservatives were, of course, upset about this affront to traditional morals. And some left-wing critics were just as severe. The Free Film Workers Group said that filmmakers were engaging in irresponsible sensationalism instead of making films with a “truly democratic spirit.”
The Japanese leftists and most of the American censors agreed about one basic thing, however: to foster a democratic spirit, “feudalism” had to be rooted out. This led to some of the oddest policies of the Occupation. Since much of the Japanese artistic tradition could be crudely classified as “feudal,” much of it had to go. Kabuki theater, for instance, often appears to celebrate feats of samurai valor and sacrifice—loyal retainers committing suicide or wreaking revenge for the sake of their lords, that kind of thing. Whether Kabuki plays really were celebrations of samurai values is open to question—arguably the commercial classes, which formed the main Kabuki audience, took pleasure in watching the human tragedy brought on by such values—but this was too complicated for most censors, so many classics of the Kabuki theater were banned.
The cinematic version of Kabuki was the swordfight movie, long a mainstay of Japanese entertainment. Like American westerns, which they sometimes emulated, these films featured violent heroes. But their ethos was by no means straightforward. The Japanese had discovered the antihero centuries before Hollywood did. The tragic black-hat, who was inevitably defeated by the same superior forces that kept the common people down, was a subversive figure—antifeudal, if anything. Still, swordfight movies, being very “feudal,” had to go. Reels and reels of precious film were burned and dumped into a river south of Tokyo.
Even Mount Fuji was “feudal.” The famous cone always was the most revered object of Japanese nature worship. And, since the worship of Japanese nature easily slides into worship of the Japanese nation, Mount Fuji was seen as a symbol of imperialist chauvinism, so Mount Fuji had to go too—at least on film. It could not even be shown in a movie about farmers cultivating land on the slopes of the volcano.
I doubt whether the democratic spirit was promoted by these antifeudal actions. But it probably was not damaged either. More serious was the underlying hypocrisy of the American enterprise. Hypocrisy is of course part of any propaganda in political correctness, but occupation PC was hypocritical in a fundamental way. The official American guidelines for a PC cinema in postwar Japan included the following: “Approval of free discussion of political issues” and “Dramatizing figures in Japanese history who stood for freedom and representative government.”
These were both fine things. But free discussion, like sexual expression, had its limits. Crimes committed by American soldiers in Japan could not be shown, or even reported. The Japanese papers had to use curious circumlocutions, such as “The criminals were unusually tall and hairy men.” War damage inflicted by American bombing raids was not to be mentioned. Hirano gives the example of a famous film by Ozu, Late Spring, in which one of the characters compares the serene beauty of Kyoto to the ruined city of Tokyo. The original line “[Tokyo] is full of burned sites” had to be changed to “It’s so dusty all over.”
Criticism of American Occupation policies was strictly forbidden. A movie entitled Between War and Peace, by two leftist directors, Kamei Fumio and Yamamoto Satsuo, showed workers carrying banners that said “Freedom of Speech” and “Let Us Who Work Eat.” The scene was banned by the censors for being “suggestive or criticizing SCAP censorship and encouraging labor strikes.” The censors of the free world, in short, had to censor references to their own censorship.
Not only was SCAP above critical scrutiny, but a negative picture of the United States
was also deemed undesirable. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the Frank Capra picture, released in Japan in 1941, could no longer be shown in 1946, because its depiction of graft and corruption might give a false impression of American democracy. And portrayals of the extremes of poverty and wealth in America were censored. As Hirano tells us, a montage in The Great Gatsby (1949) of young people joyriding, drinking and running speakeasies had to be cut for distribution in Japan.
The race factor, then as now a central issue of political correctness, tied SCAP’s censors into intricate knots. During much of the Occupation, fraternizing with the former enemy was forbidden to the American occupiers. Inevitably, however, a great deal of fraternizing went on. But the problems involved in affairs between American soldiers and Japanese women could not be shown on screen. On the other hand, Hirano mentions a film entitled Sorrowful Beauty, which raised objections against an interracial marriage. This had to be revised, the censors decided, “on the ground of racism.”
Perhaps most serious of all was the matter of the Japanese emperor. Representative government was all very well, but the Emperor, in whose name war had been declared in 1941, had to be protected “from ridicule, vituperation or virulent criticism.” This was the official guideline. SCAP, in the best tradition of Japanese shoguns, thought he could rule Japan most effectively with the Emperor as a symbolic figure who was unassailable from below and easy to manipulate from above. So protection was essential. Not only could the Emperor not be called as a witness, let alone be tried as a defendant at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, but his innocence during the war could not even be questioned. Hirano discusses at length the case of The Japanese Tragedy (1946). It is an unusual case, since it concerns a film passed by the censors at first, only to be banned later. The Japanese Tragedy, directed by Kamei Fumio, was a montage of newsreels, films, photographs and newspaper cuttings suggesting that Emperor Hirohito was formally responsible for going to war. The point Kamei and other critics of the imperial system sought to make was that, to be democrats, the Japanese had to be weaned from Emperor worship. This could not succeed without a critical analysis of the imperial role during the war.
After having passed the censors, the movie was screened privately for the then prime minister, Yoshida Shigeru, in the presence of Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, head of the Military Intelligence Section. Yoshida was a conservative patriot with Churchillian pretensions. Willoughby, to put it mildly, had little sympathy for the “pinko” New Deal Democrats employed by SCAP. Yoshida complained that the film was too critical. Willoughby agreed. The film was banned. And when Hirano saw The Japanese Tragedy in 1984, with Kamei, she was told that “it was around the time that the film was banned that the Japanese people stopped actively discussing the responsibility of Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal.” In effect, the greatest test of postwar Japanese democracy had been flunked, not because the Japanese were political twelve-year-olds, but because Shogun MacArthur took away their right to free speech.
By 1952 China had been lost, the Korean War had been almost lost, and SCAP’s reign in Japan had been terminated. The so-called Reverse Course, a key phrase in the lexicon of left-of-center Japanese historians, had already taken place. Halfway along the yellow brick road to democracy, Japan had been turned around by Japanese bureaucrats and American conservatives, and remodeled as an anticommunist bastion against Red China. SCAP had helped to slap down the same labor unions it had encouraged earlier. Former war criminals emerged from prison to join the government once again. The left-wing parties were pushed into the margins, where they remain today. And Japanese industry was urged to let rip. Japan would be a pacific exporting nation, while the U.S. took care of war and peace.
But if the course of Japanese politics had been reversed, an equally dramatic reversal took place in Japanese movies. As soon as SCAP left town, the forbidden fruit was swiftly displayed. Films about Hiroshima made it clear just who should feel guilty about the war. Movies about American military bases reveled in American crimes. Scenes of big GIs, usually black, raping innocent Japanese girls became a stock image in Japanese films about the Occupation. And the taste for sensational imagery of the U.S., showing the former enemy in the worst possible light, has persisted to this day.
None of this means that the Japanese are implacably anti-American: it just proves that propaganda can produce the opposite effect from the one intended. People cannot be fooled all the time, and the price of American hypocrisy was a lingering resentment among many Japanese intellectuals, on the left and the right, and a propensity toward self-pity among the general public. Which is not to say that American culture had no positive impact. Glenn Miller, screen kisses and easy manners did much to loosen up Japanese social life. But, apart from the unique case of the first kiss, these were not part of SCAP propaganda. People danced to “In The Mood” because they wanted to, not because it was a lesson imposed on them.
One might well wonder what problems with Japan today have to do with cultural propaganda of almost fifty years ago. They are linked, however, in a confused and confusing manner. One legacy of Occupation propaganda is a myth which has lost none of its tenacity: the myth that economic policies or political arrangements are mainly a reflection of cultural values, of mentalités. There was, and still is, a strong belief, for example, that democracy is a Western value fostered by Christianity, and so on. To become a democrat you must be “Westernized,” and preferably play baseball and kiss your girl. There is, on the other hand, the belief that the Japanese Economic Miracle can be explained primarily by ancient Japanese traditions, instead of policies decided upon by American Cold War strategists and Japanese officialdom. And there are those who think that the authoritarian nature of Japan’s so-called democracy is mainly caused, let us say, by Confucianism, rather than by the monopoly on power skillfully achieved by pork-barrel politicians and bureaucrats who have managed to rig the electoral system.
Culture, some maintain, is why we have to worry today about the mighty Japanese—not because there is something flawed in Japan’s political relations with the outside world, but because they are Japanese, heirs to the samurai tradition, lacking in universal values and so on. The myth fostered by the Occupation was that if only Japanese values could be changed, which in time they would, then all would be right between Japan and the world. In the meantime, until that happy day when the Japanese could be truly trusted, they would be kept under the protective American thumb.
The confusion was made worse by a number of well-meaning American experts, collectively known as the Chrysanthemum Club, who saw it as their duty to protect the delicate Japan–U.S. relationship by deflecting criticism of Japan. Like professional Pollyannas, they would tell us over and over that, despite appearances to the contrary, the Japanese, given some patience, would one day be just like us. In a 1965 book written with John K. Fairbank and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: The Modern Transformation, the late Edwin O. Reischauer, the doyen of Chrysanthemums, wrote that Japan had “passed from the ‘investment boom’ of the early 1950s to the ‘leisure boom’ of 1960 and the ‘vacation boom’ of 1963.”
Reischauer was wrong. But the Pollyannas were perhaps right in a way that none of the SCAP’s men anticipated. The filmmaker Oshima Nagisa was a teenager during the Occupation. In a book published in 1975, he remembers how hungry the Japanese were for any entertainment, anything from the outside world, where people had money, ate plenty of food, and lived in big houses instead of among the ruins. They wanted to see America, if only in flickering images on a torn and dirty screen. But did these films teach the Japanese democracy? Oshima thinks not. Instead, he believes, Japan learned the values of “progress” and “development.” Japan wanted to be just as rich as America—no, even richer. “And if we think about the extraordinary speed of postwar progress and development in Japan, perhaps we should say that the route upon which we travelled was that Union Pacific railway line which we saw in those Westerns several decades ago.”
Ever since Jap
an was exposed to the expansive power of Europe and America, Japanese thinkers have been exercised by the cultural problem. Nationalists in the eighteenth century, such as Aizawa Seishisai, thought Christianity explained the strength of the Western world. (Max Weber, incidentally, thought so too. He argued that Protestantism produced successful capitalists, and Confucianism kept them back.) Japan, so Aizawa believed, needed a unifying religious force of its own, something purely Japanese. This turned out to be an official version of Shintoism, with the emperor as the apex of the cult. And so the Japanese were furnished with an unchanging “soul,” even as they acquired the techniques of modern life from the West.
The desire to separate the purely native from Western importations is still strong. Prominent political writers, such as Eto Jun, maintain, for example, that the American Occupation robbed Japan of its purity, its true identity, by censoring traditional culture and stifling the imperial cult. He has the ear of quite a few Western journalists and Japanophiles who worry about national identity, too, especially in non-Western countries supposedly “swamped” by Americana. Western romantics have sought to escape for centuries from the messy reality of their own world to a purer universe across the horizon: in Shangri-la, Cathay or the Land of the Rising Sun.
But while the fin de siècle Japanophile Lafcadio Hearn could still dream of the pristine Orient betwixt the cherry trees (and even he lamented the continuing hemorrhage of purity), the modern visitor to Japan, or anywhere in Asia, can hardly overlook the lively cultural mess. What makes Leo Rubinfien’s photographs, published in A Map of the East, so superb is his refusal to overlook it. Instead, he finds poetry in the hybrid vulgarity of contemporary Asia. The temptation for a Western artist in Japan is to look for juxtapositions: East–West, foreign–native, Buddhas and Coca-Cola. Rubinfien, although he too, according to his own introduction, is given to lamenting what has been lost, avoids this easy choice. His photographs of Japanese picking their way through the urban landscape show everything at once: kimonos, business suits, paper lanterns, jazz coffee shops, skyscrapers, Shinto shrines. It is all here: the architecture, the clothes, the clutter of life, presented without cheap irony. Some of it might have originated in China, or Paris, or New York, yet all of it is unmistakably Japanese. Categories like East and West, let alone pure and impure, cease to exist, or at least to matter.