Theater of Cruelty (21 page)

Keene makes the important point that ultranationalism was not necessarily the result of provincialism or ignorance about the outside world. On the contrary, it was often precisely the people who had been most exposed to foreign experience who became the most rabid promoters of bellicose propaganda. In some cases this might be ascribed to disillusion: the idealistic worshiper of Western literature being offended in Europe or the US by social slights or mere indifference. The same phenomenon sometimes occurs in reverse, so to speak: the ardent Japanophile who blames Japan for not fulfilling unrealistic expectations.

Offense taken could explain the case, mentioned by Keene, of the poet and sculptor Takamura Kotaro (1883–1956). He adored the works of Rodin and studied in Paris, New York, and London, where he made friends with the potter Bernard Leach. He wrote disparaging poems about his fellow Japanese, which can only be described as racist: “Small-minded, self-satisfied / Monkey-like, foxlike, squirrel-like, gudgeon-like, minnow-like, potsherd-like, gargoyle-faced Japanese!” This was published in 1911. Here are some lines from another poem, written in 1914, inspired by Leach: “My friend of the Anglo-Saxon race I respect and love! / My friend of the race / That produced Shakespeare and Blake.…” And this: “I became an adult in Paris. / In Paris
too I first touched the opposite sex, / And in Paris first found a liberation of my soul.…”
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And yet, even then, the exultation was mixed with darker feelings. Takamura wrote in a letter (unsent) that “even amid the shouts of joy of Paris,” he suffered every day “an anguish that is bone-deep.” He couldn’t understand “the white race.” And the racial, as is so often the case, became sexual:

So Takamura’s reaction to Pearl Harbor does not come as a complete surprise:

The point here is not the particular quasi-religious mania that is being espoused in this poem. What is interesting—and not limited to Japan—is the deep longing among certain writers and intellectuals to
identify with a people, a cause, or a faith. This longing was especially acute in the early twentieth century among Japanese writers who came back to Japan from Western sojourns terrified of being marginalized, or even cast out, for being deracinated, for having lost the purity of their Japaneseness. They needed to rid themselves of the taint of cosmopolitanism. This lends an edge of hysteria to the writings of such figures as Takamura or Noguchi Yone (father of the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi), which might not have been quite so prevalent among more ordinary Japanese.

One should always be wary of comparisons that sweep too broadly across different cultures and times, but it might not be too far-fetched to detect a comparable psychology at work in highly educated American intellectuals who express a deep admiration for Sarah Palin. Posing as the voice of the “real” people (as Palin might put it) is comforting, and often a bid for power. Thinking for oneself can be a lonely business. In wartime Japan it was also very dangerous.

For Japanese, born in a relatively isolated country at a time when the cultural inferiority of Asians was widely assumed, even among many Asians themselves, the hunger for identification with the nation, or “race,” and for proof of their superiority was especially sharp. Such feelings are not unique or even hard to understand. What is more difficult to fathom is how intelligent, educated people could justify intellectually their sudden switches from worldly cosmopolitanism to chauvinistic mania, and then, just as suddenly, back to liberalism after Japan’s defeat in 1945.

Some writers never joined this roller-coaster ride, to be sure. Keene quotes extensively from the justly celebrated diaries of the great short-story writer Nagai Kafu (1879–1959). Kafu (Japanese commonly refer to him by his first name, as a sobriquet) despised the militarists in the 1930s and had nothing good to say about nationalist propaganda during the war: “This is a case of inept sentiments in
inept language.” Kafu, like Noguchi and Takamura, had lived abroad, in the US and France,
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and was an expert in French literature and a lover of French wines and Scotch whiskey, the supplies of which, to his great annoyance, ran out during the war. He lost his house and all its contents in a bombing raid. But he never blamed the foreign enemies for the destruction of his country. December 31, 1944: “It’s entirely the doing of the [Japanese] military. Their crimes must be recorded for all time to come.”

One reason Kafu retained his cool was his utter disinterest in being a joiner. Although he came from a well-off family, had early literary success, and taught French literature at a first-rate university, Kafu had already turned his back on the academic and literary worlds before the 1920s. He was happiest in the company of strippers, prostitutes, and geisha. His reputation as a distinguished eccentric settled, Kafu could afford an attitude of sardonic detachment.

There were a few others, quoted by Keene, who shared Kafu’s disdain for militarist posturing from the beginning. Watanabe Kazuo (1901–1975), a professor of French at Tokyo Imperial University, was one. He cursed “those who have swelled our people’s pride. This is the source of all our unhappiness.” Kiyosawa Kiyoshi, a journalist who had been partly educated and had worked in the US, was another.
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The most interesting diaries, however, are by writers who expressed doubts, while still going along with the prevailing mood. Their risky introspection exposes the tension between the natural skepticism of a thinking person and the desire to escape from isolation and join the crowd.

Takami Jun (1907–1965) was such a man. Like Kafu, Takami
found inspiration for his pre-war writings in the raffish milieu of Tokyo’s plebeian pleasure districts. If Kafu’s lyrical descriptions expressed a nostalgia for fading or already long-faded brothel areas, Takami’s stories celebrated the lives of common people in contemporary Tokyo. It is as though, in his imagination at least, he wished to be one of them. In 1933, he had been tortured by the police as a suspected Communist. During the war, Takami traveled to China and Southeast Asia as an army correspondent. Not a fanatical nationalist like Ito or Noguchi, he identified with the suffering and fortitude of ordinary people, though not so much, it must be said, of ordinary Chinese or Southeast Asians.

When the war ended, an event that Kafu celebrated by drinking into the night with friends, Takami wrote:

At the same time, Takami was happy that writers could express themselves more freely again. Despite his patriotism, he had always loathed the censorship and other restrictions of militarist authoritarianism. As soon as the war was over, he analyzed the reasons why he had failed to resist it. It is one of the clearest and most honest testimonies to the anguish of being a skeptic living under dictatorship that I have read:

And yet his very sense of relief, even joy, about freedom regained made him feel ashamed, as though he were betraying his long-suffering compatriots. “During the war,” he wrote,

The reality of defeat, especially among male Japanese, provoked all the old feelings of humiliation that blended the sexual with the racial: the sight of Japanese women, by no means all prostitutes, flinging themselves at tall, well-fed, smartly dressed American soldiers for a pack of Lucky Strikes or a pair of silk stockings; the swaggering GIs taking up all the seats on overcrowded trains; and so on. Kafu, as usual, took all this in his stride, and expressed his characteristic interest in the going rates for sex in the new pleasure districts catering to foreign troops. Observing some American officers trying to speak a little Japanese to a bar girl at a Tokyo hotel, he contrasted their courtesy to the thuggish behavior of Japanese officers in China.

Takami, too, wrote about the way local women took to the alien occupiers. Less detached (or indeed prurient) than Kafu, he was shocked at first when he saw a Japanese woman carrying on with her American lover at a railway station, publicly, loudly, without any embarrassment. A seemingly ordinary woman, she looked “proud to
behave shockingly with an American soldier even when surrounded by watching eyes. Such sights might, unexpectedly soon, cease to seem unusual.” But then Takami thinks again: “It would actually be a good thing if that happened very soon. Best of all would be a deluge of such sights. It would be good training for the Japanese!”

This, as Keene points out, was not a common reaction. As he says:

This was no doubt true, but most Japanese took to the freedoms installed by the unexpectedly benign Allied occupation with gusto: suffrage for women, the relatively free press (relative because criticism of the Allied occupiers, or even the US itself, was banned), democratic education, scenes of kissing in the movies, jazz music, independent labor unions, land reform, and much more. In fact, the speed with which the Japanese turned from emperor-worshiping chauvinism to Yankee-style
demokurashii
shocked some intellectuals and was another source of shame. Why did it take a horrendous military defeat and a foreign occupation to liberate the Japanese? Why couldn’t they have done it themselves? Was the very alacrity of change not a sign that freedom in Japan was just skin-deep?

Here is Takami:

Yamada Futaro, the same man who called for vengeance after the defeat, watched the transformation of his country with a degree of skepticism, precisely because he himself had allowed irrational passions to cloud his better judgment during the war:

One sees what he means. And Yamada was not entirely wrong. But this cannot be entirely right either. The “temperament” that embraces personal and political freedoms is not quite the same as the collective hysteria of a people at war, who would be cruelly punished for any sign of nonconformism. The comforts, such as they are, of conformity in a dictatorship don’t stem from quite the same source as the more testing challenges of freedom.

It is also a little too flattering to the American occupiers to view the transformation of postwar Japan as a kind of religious conversion. Many Japanese had been fighting for almost a century for more democratic institutions, freedom of expression, and social equality. For much of the 1920s, the Japanese government, though far from being perfectly democratic, was more liberal than any other government in Asia, almost all of which was ruled by colonial regimes. What embarrassed Takami, Yamada, and other writers was probably
not just that intellectuals had been unable, or unwilling, to stop their country from sliding into militarism (and indeed were quite willing to promote it) but the added humiliation that they played a less important part in the democratic restoration than they might have wished.

For it was not just “the military forces of a foreign country” that liberated the Japanese. Much of the credit for this must also go to Japanese politicians, activists, bureaucrats, schoolteachers, and labor union leaders. One of the lessons of the postwar changes in Japan, and West Germany, is that “democratization” cannot work without the active participation of able local elites and the consent of the majority of “unknown” people. Writers, artists, scholars, and journalists can make a difference. Watanabe Kazuo, the professor of French, was not wrong to castigate his fellow intellectuals in 1945 for their lack of moral backbone under militarism. He was right to say that “intellectuals should be strong and courageous in order to protect the freedom to think and the integrity of thought.”

But it is a common feature of intellectuals everywhere to overrate their own political importance. More depressing, however, is the fact that writers and scholars, regardless of their superior literary skill or knowledge, are no less prone to following fashions and promoting their rulers’ vain and destructive campaigns for national or military glory than other people. As Keene has demonstrated in his admirable book, this was certainly true of Japanese intellectuals in the dark years of the last century. But it is a lesson from which intellectuals in other countries, often operating under far less difficult circumstances, can derive equal profit.