Silken Slippers and Hobnail Boots Surviving the Decline and Fall

by R.E. Hannay

  Part of the war effort involved adequately housing internees. As much as relocation camps are maligned and now are called “concentration camps'" by liberals, their operations and accommodations were nothing like the concentration camps of Europe or the terrible Japanese prison camps. The relocation camp at the Santa Anita racetrack is widely criticized, but immediately after the internees left in 1942 it was used to house American GIs. More important, most Japanese were not prisoners but were free to leave the camps and move away from the West Coast military zone, which thousands did. Those who stayed in the camps were able to go to school or work outside the West Coast exclusion zones if they chose to, and 4,300 left them to attend college.

  In part because of the fair treatment they received, many loyal Japanese joined our armed forces and served with distinction. Most served in Europe because they would have been in danger from friendly fire if in combat zones in the Pacific. Patriotism also emerged from the often-forgotten Japanese American Citizens League. They understood and embraced the wartime need to put national security first.

  The common understanding is that the evacuees received nothing until President Reagan signed the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, from which a total of $1.65 billion was given to ethnic Japanese internees. In fact, in 1948 legislation authorized payments to evacuees on the basis of individual damages and granted a total of 26,568 settlements. Between 1951 and 1978, Congress passed eight more compensation laws granting a variety of benefits. The 1988 act was unique only because, contrary to previous compensations granted, it gave money based solely on Japanese ethnicity. Evacuees who had refused to take a loyalty oath, renounced U.S. citizenship, resisted the draft, terrorized other camp residents, or returned to Japan were all handed the same amount of U.S. taxpayers’ money as were the loyal evacuees. The losses were more personal property than real estate. Many of the Japanese were farmers, but most were tenant farmers because of some laws prohibiting aliens from owning land. Although repeated compensations have been given to Japanese internees, no compensation was given to Axis internees. As with our graduated income-tax assessments, the section of our Constitution ensuring equal treatment for everyone is frequently violated by our revisionist courts.

  As we reflect on our history, the Bush and Obama administration’s policies of refusing to permit “racial profiling” as part of their War on Terror would have made no sense in World War II and they make no sense now. Police, security personnel and others routinely identify patterns in determining who and what need to be investigated.

  In retrospect, it is always easy to consider what might have been done differently. In this case, instead of the way it was done, with very limited resources available to determine which aliens were more likely to pose a threat, more time should have been given to them to settle their affairs, then finding creative ways to remove them from designated military zones and find productive work for them elsewhere, encouraging eligible men to volunteer for military service outside the Pacific war zone and permitting their families to return home. As the war progressed and public fears of an impending attack and war-plant sabotage eased, we could have started a program of releasing U.S. citizens and other internees whose background did not suggest a danger, instead of waiting until almost the end of the war.

  JAPAN, LAND OF THE WHITEWASHED ASSASSINS

  Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has just repeated their 1941 attack on the United States, this time verbally. For decades Japan has tried to rewrite history, concealing and denying their barbaric, bloody treatment of China for fourteen years and the U.S. and its allies for four years.

  On April 23, 2013 Abe told the Japanese Diet, “The definition of what constitutes an invasion has yet to be established in academia or in the international community.” During the same week, the prime minister’s cabinet and 168 Japanese lawmakers paid homage at the Yasukuni Shrine of Japanese war heroes, including those convicted of war crimes against China. Its history museum justifies their invasions and annexations of Manchuria and Korea by citing mistreatment of those lands during the imperial era in China.

  Jennifer Lind, a consultant for RAND and the Defense Department, explains the situation in her book, Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics. “More than 60 years after the end of World War II, chilly relations in East Asia stand in stark contrast to the thaw in Western Europe. Germans have spent decades confronting and atoning for the crimes of the Nazi era, but in 2005, Japan’s Education Ministry approved textbooks widely perceived as whitewashing Japan’s past atrocities. Violent protests erupted in China.”

  In the past, when Japanese leaders have tried to make apologies in a Diet resolution, prominent conservatives have not only denied approval, but also glorified Japan’s past violence. In 1988, cabinet member Seisuke Okuno defended Japanese imperialism and said Caucasians had been the real aggressors in Asia. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, prominent members of his Diet and senior academicians forced school textbooks to be censored to delete all references to Japanese war guilt and atrocities, to instill national pride. This is part of a continuing and increasing trend, with new disputes between Japan and China over islands, offshore petroleum rights and international sea lanes increasing animosity between Japan and China.

  The Japanese denials and deception at the highest levels concerning who started the 1941 war are insulting and are outright lies. The week before their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese diplomatic envoys to Washington discussing disagreements while their large attack fleet was steaming to Hawaii to destroy our Pacific fleet, with other forces en route to attack our Clark Field in the Philippines on December 7th. The Tokyo museum and other Japanese sources say Roosevelt started the war.

  Japan had invaded resource-rich, strategically important Manchuria in 1931 and Jehol province in 1933. In 1937 they escalated their war to conquer all of China, taking Peking and its provinces in the north and Shanghai in the south, then moving up the Yangtze River to capture the national capital, Nanking. Infuriated by the strength of the Chinese resistance, Japan adopted a policy of deliberate savagery, expecting to break the Chinese will to resist. The Japanese troops were encouraged by their officers to invent terrible ways to torture and slaughter the Chinese. In December, 1937, after taking Nanking, they immediately slaughtered thousands of Chinese troops who had surrendered and then rounded up about 20,000 young Chinese men, transported them in trucks outside the city walls and murdered them. At least 20,000 Chinese women were raped during the first four weeks of the Nanking occupation and many were mutilated and killed after being raped.

  Iris Chang’s 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking, contains many photographs smuggled out of Nanking – troops using live Chinese for bayonet practice, bands of drunken Japanese soldiers roaming the city, murdering, raping, looting and burning. Extensive lethal and fatal medical experiments were conducted on live Chinese. Historians have estimated that several million Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were murdered between 1937 and 1945. The Yasukuni history museum's only description of their invasion of Nanking is a copy of a document hand written by a Japanese officer commanding his troops not to attack civilians, and a statement that the reason for the Nanking attacks was that some Chinese civilians shot at the invaders.

  The other, equally unbelievable war activities by Japan, which considered its people superior to all others, involved their treatment of Allied prisoners of war. The brutality and deaths on the Bataan Death March have been publicized, but the Japanese treatment of military prisoners was worse.

  Gavan Daws’ 1994 book, Prisoners of the Japanese, was the result of ten years of documentary research and interviews of surviving prisoners. In the first months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines and elsewhere, the Japanese Army took over 140,000 Allied prisoners. Daws said 27 percent of them died at the hands of their captors, compared to about 3 percent of Americans and their allies in German prison camps. They were denied medical treatment, beaten, tortured, systematically starved and m
urdered. Typical rations totaled about 600 calories of junk food per day, while doing hard slave labor from dawn to dusk. Those who survived were slated to be worked to death. According to Daws, if the war had lasted another twelve months, there would hardly have been a surviving prisoner of the Japanese.

  Another chapter in the Japanese book of horrors involves ships they used to transport prisoners. In 2001 Gregory F. Michno published a book titled Death On The Hellships, giving the facts. He said it was far worse than the Bataan Death March, with more than 126,000 prisoners transported and more than 21,000 dying aboard the ships. Survivors described it as the worst part of their captivity. The details and photos from these and other sources are hard to believe, coming from a “superior” First World country. Their denying and whitewashing the facts to promote “national pride” is unconscionable.

  World War II isn’t just a history book to Americans who were there. Our country put their normal activities on hold for four years and worked overtime to defeat the Japanese and German aggressors who intended to take over the world, in the largest and most devastating war in the history of the world. Aside from the enormous financial costs, estimates of the total military and civilian deaths vary from 50 to 70 million persons. Countless others survived with broken bodies and minds. It’s one thing for a nation to go on a years-long program of torturing and slaughtering other people, and quite another 68 years later to say it never happened or to take pride in their warriors who did the foul deeds. For many years, when given a choice, some Americans have avoided buying Japanese products in retaliation.

  The Japanese now are ensuring national atrophy by preventing immigration. Their low birth rate guarantees a shrinking working population to support an increasing number of retired persons. At the same time, their new solution to two decades of economic doldrums is to print large amounts of fiat money, incurring unsustainable debt with Depression-era fiscal policies and devaluing their currencies in a mercantilist move. It all amounts to financial and demographic self-destruction. Some wish them god speed in their seppuku.

  PART V: MISCELLANEOUS ISSUES