Bending Adversity: Japan and the Art of Survival (12 page)

That looked more and more inevitable as Japan’s campaign to be treated equally went nowhere. The number of naval vessels Japan could own in relation to Britain and America was frozen by international agreement. In 1933, after the League of Nations had condemned the seizure of Manchuria, Japan walked out in disgust. It had effectively given up on its long-held ambition to be accepted as a member of the western colonial club. Shorn of its moorings, Japan’s military flew out of control. By 1937, it had moved from Manchuria deeper into China proper, and in 1940 into northern Indochina. When Japan pushed further into Indochina, Washington responded with a full-blown international oil embargo. Boxed in, Japan’s leaders mounted what they portrayed as a ‘defensive’ attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The following February the Japanese seized Malaya and Singapore and, within weeks, the Dutch East Indies, modern Indonesia, fell into its hands. Not long after, it grabbed a large part of the Philippines and much of Burma.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was greeted with euphoria at home, where many saw it as revenge for Commodore Perry’s assault on Japan all those years before. It was celebrated by one poet, Kotaro Takamura (1883–1956), who saw in the bold act against the Anglo-Saxons revenge for years of humiliation and an affirmation of Japanese superiority.

Nippon, the land of the gods

Ruled over by a living god
⁵³

Yet now America had been provoked into entering the war, it was only a matter of time before the military tide turned. Just six months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy lost the decisive battle of Midway, which severely depleted its fleet and left its new empire in the Pacific exposed. The Americans pursued an island-hopping strategy, moving ever closer towards Japan. When, in July 1944, they captured Saipan, within bombing range of Japan, the great air raids on the Japanese cities began. Unfortunately, Japan’s military leaders were unable to face the inevitable. The navy was perhaps prepared to accept a negotiated surrender, but not the unconditional capitulation the Allies were demanding. Terrible battles ensued, not least the one for Okinawa, so catastrophically violent it was known as the ‘Typhoon of Steel’. The battle, in which kamikaze pilots mounted some 1,500 attacks on American ships and Okinawan civilians committed mass suicide, often instigated by Japanese troops, was one of the most ferocious of the Second World War. Then came the two nuclear bombs on 6 August and 9 August of 1945, followed by the unconditional surrender that Japan’s deluded leaders had so long resisted.

Japan lay in ruins. For the next seven years it would be a supplicant of America and the occupying force of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Japan had left Asia. But the price of doing so was to become subordinate to another power – the United States.

Decades Found and Lost

The Magic Teapot

Two months before Japan surrendered to the Allies, Shijuro Ogata, the seventeen-year-old son of a famous newspaper editor, secured a ticket for the Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra. The concert was Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. It was to be held in the Hibiya Public Hall, a brick construction erected as part of the capital’s modernization effort after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. On the evening of the concert, Ogata remembers taking a tram from Shibuya to Shimbashi, a distance of some three miles. The journey covered what are now some of the city’s most expensive neighbourhoods, a choc-a-bloc jumble of neon, skyscrapers, office buildings, parks, homes, department stores, boutiques, bowling alleys, arcades, cinemas, theatres, clubs, museums and thousands of cafés, restaurants and bars. Back then the scene was desolate. From early 1945, the US had sent dozens of low-flying B-29s to drop incendiary bombs on the Japanese capital, much of which was constructed of wood. On the night of 9–10 March, some 300 bombers had roared over the city, dropping bombs that destroyed sixteen square miles of buildings and unleashed raging fires. That night alone, an estimated 100,000 civilians died and a million homes went up in flames. It is considered the most destructive bombing raid in all human history, more deadly, even, than the atomic bombs. The Ogatas’ house in the then up-and-coming Shinjuku district survived the March raid only to succumb to another in late May. ‘Tokyo was completely devastated,’ Ogata recalls of his journey through the charred wasteland to the concert in Hibiya Hall. ‘Everything was flat, just flat.’
¹

Now in his eighties and retired from the Bank of Japan, where he spent most of his professional life, Ogata has a kindly face and
a ready wit. It was he who had introduced me to the proverb about ‘bending adversity’ and who had professed his faith that Japan could recover again, both from the devastation of the tsunami and from its current economic and political malaise. In ordinary people’s dignified response to adversity, he had seen something of the post-1945 spirit that had enabled the Japanese to confront adversity and build something positive from the wreckage of war. Ogata loves a political discussion and to venture opinions that many would consider a little risqué, especially those on the right of Japan’s political spectrum. Much of his time is spent in the Japan Press Club and the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan where he attends lectures and press conferences and talks about issues of the day. He has his stock of little sayings, rarely delivered without a twinkle in his eye. ‘Japan is a country of good soldiers but poor commanders’ is one of his favourites. It is a lesson perhaps learned from Japan’s wartime experience, but one that he finds applicable to modern Japan too, particularly in its current phase of drift. For him, the aphorism captures the diligence and decency of common people – exhibited again in the aftermath of the tsunami – but the disappointment he feels in the nation’s leaders. Although he was a senior figure at the Bank of Japan, he likes to introduce himself with a self-deprecatory, ‘I am Sadako’s husband,’ acknowledging the greater renown of his wife, former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and one of Japan’s most famous citizens.
²

Ogata’s grandfather and great-grandfather on his father’s side, both born well before the Meiji Restoration, had been students of Dutch learning. His father, Taketora, was editor-in-chief of the liberal
Asahi
newspaper and a proponent of greater democracy in the late 1920s. Despite this liberal upbringing, Ogata remembers celebrating the fall of Nanking as a primary school student. As the rape and slaughter of civilians unfolded, archive photographs show innocent-faced ranks of Japanese schoolchildren like Ogata waving Rising Sun flags outside the Imperial Palace. Four years later, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor had shocked the teenage Ogata, but he confessed that news of the distant hostilities brought a certain thrill. ‘The initial victories excited most of us, including those who had been opposed to the war,’ he writes in his memoirs.
³

Because of his father’s connections to the newspaper business Ogata was better informed about what was going on than most Japanese, for whom censored news media spewing imperial propaganda was the only source of information. He guessed before most that Japan would lose the war. By 9 August, less than two months after he had attended the Beethoven concert, he learned from navy officers that Hiroshima had been destroyed by a fearful new weapon and that the Soviet Union had torn up its non-aggression pact with Japan. Though Ogata did not yet know that a second nuclear bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, he realized the end of the war was close. The entry in his diary, six days before Japan’s unconditional surrender on 15 August, reads, ‘The arrival of a very tragic day of history seems imminent.’ It is hard to imagine now the psychological devastation. Japan’s dreams – if that’s what its fantasies of Asian domination can be called – were over. The emperor, previously distant, divine and unerring, came on the radio to announce the surrender. Villagers and city dwellers alike gathered around crackly radios, their heads bowed in disbelief. No one had heard the emperor’s voice before, let alone speaking such unimaginable words. Shintaro Ishihara, who grew up to become Tokyo governor, was twelve years old. ‘I thought his voice was high and sounded very feminine,’ he told me. ‘Like the shriek of a cat.’
⁴

Japan lay in ruins, its ideology as well as its buildings reduced to rubble. Aerial photographs of Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the days following surrender look strangely like those of the towns along the northeast coast after the 2011 tsunami. The street grid is visible, but most of the buildings have vanished. Only the odd industrial chimney or brick building sticks up from the rubble. Japan’s defeat was absolute. Four-fifths of its ships, a third of its industrial machinery, and nearly a quarter of its rolling stock, cars and trucks had been destroyed.
⁵
Documentary footage from just after the surrender shows ragged children in wooden clogs picking through the debris.

My own father-in-law, Gene Aaroe, a member of the US coastguard in 1945, remembers landing at the northern port of Aomori shortly after the surrender. He had half expected to fight. After all, he had witnessed the planes of kamikaze pilots explode in flames as they attempted to sink the ships around him in the Battle of Okinawa. Like
other Americans, he had heard stories of a fanatical race of emperor-worshippers who would never surrender and were prepared to fight to the last man, woman and child.
⁶
Instead, he found a submissive and devastated nation. People in Aomori lined the streets with their pots, pans, kimonos and other possessions at their feet, items for sale to the conquering Americans. He bought a
harakiri
ritual suicide knife, which he still keeps in a cupboard in Seattle. Doubtless the few dollars he paid for it were exchanged for desperately needed food.

Two weeks after the emperor’s message, General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan, landed at Atsugi aerodrome near Tokyo. Dressed in khaki army fatigues, he struck an imposing figure. His apparent nonchalance at becoming Japan’s potentate was emphasized by the enormous corncob pipe stuck jauntily between his teeth. A subsequent picture taken with the emperor shows a relaxed American towering over a slight and nervous Japanese man. Not long after, the emperor himself endured the unendurable: he told his people that stories of his divinity were misplaced.

•   •   •

For the first time in its history Japan was to be occupied by a foreign power. The Americans stayed less than seven years. It was to be one of the most extraordinary encounters of the twentieth century, a ‘sensual embrace’ of victor and vanquished in John Dower’s memorable phrase. Though MacArthur was a conservative, many of the officials around him were Roosevelt New Dealers, idealists who wanted to fashion a peaceful and democratic society from the broken shards of Japan’s failed modernization. Acting through the existing bureaucracy, they began to implement a series of far-reaching policies, including land and labour reform, the breakup of oligopolies, equal rights for women, an amnesty for leftwing political prisoners and the drafting of a new pacifist constitution. They also set about purging the government and armed forces of those associated with militarism, though MacArthur took the controversial decision to shield the emperor from prosecution and preserve him as a figure of national unity.

Among many thousands who came under initial suspicion was Ogata’s father, Taketora. Despite his liberal background, he had overseen the
Asahi
’s shift towards a more pro-government line and in
1944 was drafted into the cabinet to head the information bureau. After the war, he was briefly designated a war criminal and placed under house arrest. In March 1946 he was summoned by the prosecutors to give evidence to the Tokyo War Tribunal about the pre-war political situation. At the trial, seven men, including former prime minister Hideki Tojo, were sentenced to death. Sixteen more were given life sentences. Outside this show trial, Asia’s equivalent of Nuremberg, hundreds of lower-ranking officers were executed for atrocities. Ogata’s father was purged from public activities but subsequently cleared of war crimes. Still, Ogata remembers a shrine festival when a drunken man repeatedly pounded on the wooden wall of their house, calling out, ‘Taketora Ogata, you are a war criminal.’ It was, Ogata recalls, a miserable evening.

At the time, millions of Japanese were engaged in an urgent attempt to understand how their society could have gone so badly wrong. In the years immediately following the war, support for the socialist and communist parties surged, so much so that the American occupiers were frightened into clamping down on the forces they had let loose. In the so-called ‘reverse course’, which took hold in around 1948 as the contours of the Cold War began to freeze into shape, there was a crackdown on organized labour and on leftwing political leaders. As early as 1947, MacArthur had personally intervened to head off a threatened national strike. Eleanor Hadley, who had been given the job of breaking up the powerful
zaibatsu
business conglomerates, noted the hypocrisy. ‘They had been told to organize, that there was a right to strike,’ she said. ‘Then at the moment of their power they were cut off.’
⁷
By 1949, the idea of a Red Purge against ‘troublemakers’ in the labour unions, media and private sector had become so prevalent that the phrase had migrated into Japanese where it was rendered
reddo pa-ji.

Such was the intellectual turmoil, everything came under discussion. Ogata remembers a conference at his high-school campus to discuss the pros and cons of dropping Chinese characters and, instead, Romanizing written Japanese. One theory claimed that Japan had been held back because it took so long for children to master thousands of complex characters, leaving insufficient time to study modern
science. Even in its defeat and humiliation, the impulse to escape its Asian inheritance and join the ranks of ‘civilized’ western nations had not been extinguished.

The means of achieving this had clearly changed. Japan was occupied and, from November 1946, had a constitution that renounced its right to wage war or to maintain a standing army, navy or air force. The colonial route to international status was blocked. That left the economic path. Ogata says that, even then, amid the ruins of war, he did not despair. ‘We were quite optimistic really,’ he recalls cheerfully, speaking more than sixty-five years after his tram ride through a flattened Tokyo. ‘Because, you see, there was no way to go down. The only way to survive meant going up.’

•   •   •

The world now takes Japan’s economic rise for granted. Its startling achievements from 1950 to 1973, when the economy was torpedoing along at an average growth rate of 10 per cent a year, loom much less large today than its more recent economic failures. The past two ‘lost decades’ – though they have not been quite as lost as some believe – have convinced many detractors that the nation’s supposed economic strengths were a chimera and that the true, hidebound Japan now stands before us. The country that some in the 1980s predicted would surpass the US as the world’s most powerful economy has instead fallen flat on its face. As a result, the once supposedly essential components of Japan’s economic rise – its particular corporate culture and its managed industrial policy – are sometimes derided as the very reasons for its twenty years in the wilderness. ‘The state of Japan is a scandal, an outrage, a reproach,’ wrote Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize winner in economics, in a series of papers about Japan’s post-bubble disease. Subsequently, when economic crisis and paralysis hit the US and Europe, Krugman changed his tune, citing Japan instead as a model of how to weather an economic storm.
⁸
Even after twenty years of malaise, Japan still stands as the world’s most successful example of a catch-up economy. No other non-western nation, save city-states such as Singapore and Qatar, has achieved the standard of living the Japanese now take for granted.
⁹

It is all too easy to forget just how unpromising Japan’s economic prospects looked in 1945. We forget too that Japan, understandably
vilified in Asia for its wartime aggression, nevertheless became an inspiration for much of the region in the latter half of the twentieth century. Japan may not have been loved, but it had proved what should always have been obvious: non-whites were every bit as capable of achieving economic and technological success as Caucasians. That simple truth was not self-evident even in 1958 when Kenneth Galbraith began his book
The Affluent Society
by defining wealthy nations as those ‘in the comparatively small corner of the world populated by Europeans’.
¹⁰
Japan’s implicit message proved an inspiration for technocrats and political leaders alike in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia and Hong Kong, all of whom emulated its export-led development model. The image of flying geese, first dreamed up in the Japan of the 1930s, took hold, this time with an economic, rather than military, meaning. Japan was the lead goose and the nations of Southeast Asia its followers. Japan had proved to arrogant westerners and to self-doubting Asians alike that colour was no bar to development.