Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Most people's impression of modern Japan is illuminated by the glow of Tokyo's inner-city technology district: the glamorous neon signs of Akihabara, or the outrageous fashion and impossible cool of Harajuku.
If it can be argued that the rise of technology has liberated information and communication from the hands of propagandists and the controllers of thought, why is it that in the world's capital for technological development there is a gag around the mouths of its citizenry when it comes to discussing the past?
World War II is a subject that cannot fail to arise when teaching adult students the English language. Japan is country that is still riven by the occupation after the war: a conflict between its traditional national identity and the forces of cultural imperialism.
Ever since high-school modern history class there have been a number of things I wanted answers to concerning the Japanese role in World War II: why the cruelty, why the brutality, why the suicides? Another was what life must have been like for such a proud country under the heel of an occupying force. And I wanted to know why two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan when it was clear the war had been won.
More recently, as an Australian with a Japanese wife, I wanted to know why my wife and her friends (all in their late 20s) plead complete ignorance, end of story, when questioned about their interpretation of the conflict; why students of mine in their mid 30s are painfully embarrassed by the subject when it arises in the classroom, and why those 50 years and over are so aggressive, resentful and defensive when discussing any topic touching the World War II.
The issue of the nature of Japan's war responsibility, and the nature of its contrition, is still an open wound in this country, 50 years on. I came here expecting a younger generation of high-school graduates ready and willing to discuss the war with the benefit of generational distance, just as most young people today will readily and shamefully express America and Australia's guilty part in the prosecution and senseless, indiscriminate protraction of the Vietnam War.
Instead I find people either ignorant, unwilling or belligerent when it comes to even the most innocuous discussion of the war. Most Japanese want it buried. The foundations of modern Japan are built on those bones, and the bones of their own that cannot be mourned, and it will not stay buried. The issue has not yet been resolved, and that still influences the political system today.
I wanted to know: why do Japan's neighbours hate it so much, after so long? Why does Japan not have a national day of remembrance for its war dead, and for reflection on the futility of war, like in western countries? Why is the subject of the war still taboo? Why do right-wing vans tool through suburban streets blaring reactionary propaganda, even today?
Wanting answers, I turned to Herbert Bix's book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. Showered with praise by the world's most powerful book critics, and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, I figured it might be a good place to start.
Today I finished the 700th page on the subway, and came away with a few of my questions answered. I was impressed by the restraint Bix displayed, and with the weight of his research. I don't have a uni degree, and am not a historian, so I can't unreservedly comment on whether this book is biased or not. But it seemed even-handed. There were 50 pages of bibliographical references. From what I could see, Bix drew his evidence from a wide variety of sources, and I found his arguments cool and logical.
However, he did not stray from his thesis: that emporer Hirohito, the Showa period emperor, the wartime emperor, bore the ultimate responsibility for the Great East Asian War that preceded WWII, and for the decision to attack the US. He was not, as both American and Japanese history has maintained, a constitutional monarch; a figurehead forced to rubber-stamp the decisions of the right-wing militarists in government.
Bix shows that it was in America's best interests, during the occupation, to portray the emperor as a pacifist who was fooled by his fascist court into declaring a 'defensive war' and was the one, galled by the death and destruction, to finally surrender and bring peace to his suffering nation. It was MacArthur's intention to strip all power from the throne, force Hirohito to relinquish his God Status -- seperate church and state -- and return power to the constitution and the people. Hirohito and the old guard (including those that fell on their swords during the Tokyo trials), Bix claims, wanted this also to protect the continuity of the divine Japanese imperial system.
He makes an extremely thorough and convincing argument, starting from the Meiji period in the late 1800s (the Meiji Emperor ended the feudal system in Japan, heralded a period of modernisation and defeated the Russians to claim Manchuko, a source of the problems that led up to the war in the Pacific during World War II) and ending at Hirohito's death in 1989.
Bix's thesis is important because it refutes entirely the Japanese state's version of history, casts a scathing indictment on the American politicization of history for its own gain, and provides a concrete reason for Japan's inability to reconcile with its past.
The book was illuminating to me in so many ways. For the first time it showed me, from an Asian country's perspective, the international effects of British and American territorial and economic colonialism in south Asia during the last half of the 19th century, and the first half of the 20th century. I can see more clearly how threatened many countries must have felt during that time of rampant greed and racism. Japan, I came to see, was a supremely racist country -- but no more racist than Britain, a country Anglo-Saxons are conditioned to believe was blameless in the WWII conflict.
British imperialism during the latter part of the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries was the greedy root that toppled the world into a desperate racial conflict. National Socialism in Germany, fetid seed that it was, could never have found root unless the British Empire tilled the soil first. The Alliance in WWII could never be justified along ideological lines, just as the Axis powers had wildly differing interests. And in all readings of history, it is important to recognise that no two sides in a conflict are ever entirely in the right. Unfortunately, life is not as simple as a newspaper headline.
The most significant point that was driven home to me by this history book is the power of those in government to completely and utterly manipulate the population to believe what it wants it to believe. To pretend that government control of the press died with the war is the most fundamental and dangerous mistake we can make today. Bix's book is a savage indictment of an 'independent' media.
Today's government propaganda is infinitely more subtle and sophisticated. That a militaristic right-wing government in Japan could galvanise a strongly pacifist nation (following WWI) into a fire-breathing hate machine against a phantom enemy in 1936 is absolutely, dead-seriously, possible today. Not just possible -- it's already happened.
For those of you who have any interest in discovering how peace can turn into war, I suggest you read Herbert Bix's book. For those with any interest in the backround of Japanese politics today, again, read this book.
And for anyone who is surprised by how a right-wing government has managed to involve the world's 'democratic' nations in a war with no clear ending in Iraq, and left a candle burning under the fuse of the Muslim world's rage, read Bix's book.
It's long and it's difficult, but knowledge and understanding are never bought cheaply.
-- The Beige Baron
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