American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan : From Perry to Obama 9780739189139, 9780739189122

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American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan

American Political and Cultural Perspectives on Japan From Perry to Obama John H. Miller

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A wholly owned subsidiary of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2014 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, John H., 1941American political and cultural perspectives on Japan : from Perry to Obama / John H. Miller. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-8912-2 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-8913-9 (electronic) 1. United States—Foreign relations—Japan. 2. Japan—Foreign relations—United States. I. Title. E183.8.J3M547 2014 327.73052—dc23 2014000376 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Mioko

Contents

Introduction

1

I: Acquaintances 1 Opening a Closed Country, 1853–1868 2 Admiring the New and Old Japan, 1868–1905 3 Confronting Imperial Japan, 1905–1920 4 Embracing Liberal Japan, 1921–1931 5 Colliding with Militarist Japan, 1931–1941 6 Fighting a Detested Foe, 1941–1945

9 11 25 37 49 63 77

II: Partners 7 Remaking Occupied Japan, 1945–1952 8 Allying with Pacifist Japan, 1952–1971 9 Coping with “Japan Incorporated,” 1971–1991 10 Reinventing the U.S.–Japan Alliance, 1991–2006 11 Assessing a Changing Japan, 2007–2013

91 93 107 121 135 147

Conclusion: Looking Ahead—and Back

159

Bibliography

165

Index

171

About the Author

175

vii

Introduction

The subject of this book is how Americans have thought about Japan and the Japanese during the past 160 years. I would like to think that the importance of this subject is self-evident. As former American ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield liked to say, the U.S.–Japan relationship is “the most important bilateral relationship is the world, bar none.” This may be less true now than in the 1980s when Mansfield used the phrase, but Japan remains today our principal Asian ally, a top trading partner, a critical source of capital and technology, and a key diplomatic partner in grappling with regional and global issues. Anything that helps us preserve and enhance our partnership with Japan is important—or ought to be. I subscribe to the view that history, properly understood, can aid selfknowledge. 1 More specifically, knowing something about how we have perceived—and misperceived—the Japanese in the past can help us avoid mistakes in the future. Americans have, for example, persistently tended to overestimate or underestimate them, with often unfortunate and sometimes disastrous consequences. 2 This tendency springs in large part from our beliefs, stereotypes, prejudices, and myths about the Japanese which collectively comprise our image of Japan. We may never be able to entirely free ourselves from such prejudices and myths, but at least we can be better aware of them. In the pages that follow, I attempt to reconstruct American images and ideas about Japan from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In doing so, I cast my net rather broadly. I of course consider the views of policymakers—presidents, secretaries of state, diplomats, members of Congress, military figures, and other officials. But I also take into account the opinions of journalists, scholars, businessmen, missionaries, and travelers, particularly those that received wide circulation. In addition, I include popular images 1

2

Introduction

generated by movies, novels, art, fashion, and television. I recognize that to talk about a single American image of Japan at any given point of time is an oversimplification, since there were often multiple and conflicting views in play. Still, certain themes and preoccupations predominate in different periods. I see American interaction with Japan as a series of encounters, the terms of which were set by major changes in the relationship. As a glance at my chapter headings indicates, Americans were sometimes the initiators of such changes, as in their “opening” of Japan in the 1850s and their “remaking” of Occupied Japan in the late 1940s. At other times, the Japanese were the principal instigators of change, as in the “rise of Imperial Japan” in the early 1900s, and the development of “Japan Inc.” in the 1960s and 1970s. In still other periods, important changes in the relationship were the result of joint action, as in the “collision” of 1941 and the ensuing1941–1945 Pacific War, and the formation of the U.S.–Japan Alliance in the early 1950s. Anyone seeking a “balanced” history of U.S.–Japan relations may be disappointed by this book. I give short shrift to Japanese views of America, except where some understanding of them seems essential. This is not because I consider Japanese views and attitudes unimportant, but because treating them in the depth they deserve would require a much longer book. I also feel that Japanese might be better equipped to address them. Still, it is impossible to ignore the Japanese side of the story. I have therefore tried to provide the reader with an idea of what was “really” happening in Japan as opposed to what Americans thought was happening at different points in time. Needless to say, Japanese history is contested terrain. My interpretations are therefore just that—interpretations, not to be confused with an attempt to depict “reality.” I also acknowledge a certain “tunnel vision” insofar as I concentrate on the bilateral interaction of Japan and America and pay relatively little attention to the broader regional and global setting. For example, I treat the Pacific War as if it was an exclusively Japanese–American conflict, which it obviously was not. Some readers may also wonder why I have not devoted more attention to the American domestic context, such as changing attitudes toward racial and cultural differences. Both the international and domestic angles are undeniably important. Again, however, my chief reason for not covering them in the detail they warrant is space: I have tried to keep this book as short, focused, and readable as possible. This book is aimed primarily at general readers, though I hope specialists in U.S.–Japan relations and American–East Asian relations will find it useful. I have tapped some primary sources, but rely heavily on the observations and insights of previous writers. I am particularly indebted to William L. Neumann’s America Encounters Japan: From Perry to MacArthur (1963), Foster Rhea Dulles’s Yankees and Samurai: America’s Role in the Emer-

Introduction

3

gence of Modern Japan (1965), Akira Iriye’s Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American–East Asian Relations (1967), Charles E. Neu’s The Troubled Encounter: The United States and Japan (1975), James C. Thomson, Jr., Peter W. Stanley, and John Curtis Perry’s Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia (1981), John Hunter Boyle’s Modern Japan: The American Nexus (1993), Walter LaFeber’s The Clash: U.S.–Japan Relations Throughout History (1997), and Michael R. Auslin’s Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.–Japan Relations (2011). I have also benefited from the writings of John W. Dower, Ian Littlewood, Sheila K. Johnson, and Michael J. Green. Auslin’s book is the closest to mine in scope and coverage. His focus, however, is on cultural exchange organizations and their activities. I do not deal with these organizations, in part because he has already ably done so. My approach differs from that of previous writers who see the history of U.S.–Japan relations in terms either of increasing mutual understanding or of repeated “clashes” born of deep-seated cultural and economic differences or American racism. Both perspectives are eminently reasonable, but I see the relationship unfolding in a series of discrete episodes best understood on their own terms. As in a stage drama consisting of acts and scenes, 3 the “actors” remain the same but the story line changes as the play unfolds. Unquestionably, though, the U.S.–Japan relationship has been much closer since the Pacific War than before. The leitmotif of the post-1945 chapters of this book—corresponding to the second act of the drama—is “partnership.” 4 The preceding ninety years are more difficult to characterize. Late nineteenth-century Americans exoticized and romanticized the far-off Japanese. In the early 1900s, immigration and geopolitics brought the two nations closer together, but American racism, often taking the form of “Yellow Peril” fantasies, bedeviled efforts to build stable and constructive bilateral relations. All in all, the U.S.–Japan relationship prior to 1945 was distant, superficial, and volatile—more that of casual acquaintances than partners. Hence the book’s division into part I, “Acquaintances,” and part II, “Partners.” My “drama” opens with the arrival in Japan in 1853 of Commodore Matthew Perry and his squadron of smoke-belching “black ships”—so named from the color of their hulls—which were tasked by the U.S. government with inducing the Japanese to abandon their longstanding policy of national seclusion. The colorful details of this first encounter have been recounted many times. My interest, though, is what Americans knew—or thought they knew—about this isolated and enigmatic people, and how they reacted to them. As described in chapter 1, they assumed they were entering a despotic feudal monarchy frozen in time since the Middle Ages. They further assumed that they were doing this benighted people a favor by introducing them to the blessings of American progress and civilization. Some Japanese “knights”

4

Introduction

and “barons” proved hostile, but many others seemed receptive, as did Japanese commoners whom Americans found extraordinarily polite, orderly, and friendly, albeit disconcertingly “lewd.” Chapter 2, which covers the period from the 1870s through the turn of the century, details how Americans cast themselves in the role of mentors to the rapidly modernizing and Westernizing “New Japan.” From an American perspective, earlier hints that the Japanese were an unusually progressive and enterprising Asian people—“Yankees of the East” as they were dubbed— now seemed amply confirmed. What most fascinated Americans, though, were the fast-disappearing art and culture of the “Old Japan.” Well-heeled Gilded Age travelers found Japan a Disneyesque theme park replete with charming characters and quaint exhibits. They did not take these characters very seriously, viewing them variously as comical, ultra-polite eccentrics, “guileless children,” and a race of artists and poets (the latter stereotype being fueled by a craze for Japanese arts and crafts in the 1880s and 1890s). Most intriguing of all were Japanese women who, as idealized in the Madame Butterfly myth, were imagined to be paragons of alluring sensuality, dainty femininity, and selfless devotion, pining for a Western, preferably American, lover. Between 1905 and 1920, the American image of Japan darkened as the formerly deferential pupil of the West suddenly morphed into Imperial Japan—a powerful and aggressive state bent on expanding in Asia and the Pacific. Chapter 3 describes how U.S.–Japan relations deteriorated in the aftermath of Japan’s unexpected victory over Russia in the 1904–1905 Russo–Japanese War as California racists turned on hapless Japanese immigrants in their midst, and Washington and Tokyo began quarreling over which should guide China’s renovation. There were periodic war scares and talk of a “Yellow Peril”—the supposed threat to the West posed by hordes of hostile Orientals mobilized and led by the Japanese. In American eyes, Japan’s modernization had gone grievously astray, resulting in the fusion of its ancient warrior tradition with “Prussian” militarism and authoritarianism. As an ominous post-World War I Japanese–American naval race got underway in 1919, a prominent senator declared Japan a “coming menace to the world” and many Americans seemed to agree. In the early 1920s, confrontation abruptly gave way to cooperation as the United States and Japan entered what was optimistically described at the time as “an era of good feeling.” The Japanese redeemed themselves in American eyes by embracing liberal democracy, naval arms limitation, and a “good neighbor” policy toward China. As I describe in chapter 4, American observers applauded these developments, which suggested that Japan’s modernization was back on track. They also commented approvingly on the infatuation of urban Japanese with jazz, baseball, and Hollywood movies. Some were particularly taken by the “Modern Girl,” the Japanese counterpart

Introduction

5

of the American “flapper.” Japan, it seemed, was once again eager to reinvent itself along American lines. There were, however, discordant notes in this new relationship. On the American side, strong currents of anti-Japanese racism persisted, culminating in the exclusion of Japanese immigrants in 1924. Few Americans recognized—or cared about—the depth of Japanese indignation against this gratuitous national insult or the danger it posed to the precarious ascendancy of Western-oriented Japanese liberals. Chapter 5 deals with the renewed deterioration of U.S.–Japanese relations during the 1930s as Japanese militarists wrested control of the government from pro-Western party politicians and embarked on a new program of aggressive imperial expansion at China’s expense. In contrast to the 1910s, Americans contented themselves with expressing mild disapproval of these developments coupled with a marked disinclination to get involved. Preoccupied with the Great Depression and determined to avoid entanglement in distant foreign conflicts, they did not see themselves as having a dog in the fight between Japan and China. Besides, many expected the Japanese to come to their senses and return to the American fold. All of this changed in 1940–1941 when Japan allied itself with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, transforming itself in American eyes from a regional rogue state into part of a global fascist menace. The unprepared and overconfident Roosevelt administration gambled that it could force the Japanese to back down in China and Southeast Asia by imposing a crippling oil embargo. Assuming that Japan would not dare attack the United States, which dwarfed it in industrial and potential military might, Roosevelt lost his bet at Pearl Harbor. The 1941–1945 Pacific War was, to borrow the phrase of historian John W. Dower, a “war without mercy” in which quarter was rarely given or sought by either side. As I discuss in chapter 6, the cruelty and fanaticism displayed by the Japanese military—especially its mistreatment of prisoners and civilians—appalled and infuriated Americans. Whatever they may have thought about Japanese before the war, most now demonized them as “beasts of the jungle” or worse, and had few qualms about imprisoning en masse innocent Japanese Americans as “security risks.” The “extreme” behavior of Japanese fighting men—which was widely assumed to apply to Japanese civilians as well—baffled Americans. Going beyond crude racist stereotypes, social scientists attributed it variously to collective mental illness or cultural conditioning. Recalling the relatively liberal and Westernized Japan of the 1920s and early 1930s, however, some recognized such behavior for what it was—the product of recent indoctrination that had shallow roots and could therefore be reversed. It was fortunate for both countries that the latter view prevailed over cries for vengeance. In chapter 7, I turn to the 1945–1952 American Occupation of Japan which, as noted above, I see as inaugurating a new era of Japanese–American partnership and intimacy. Under the benevolent gaze of General Douglas

6

Introduction

MacArthur, enthusiastic American “Occupationaires” sought to remake Japan in the image of New Deal America and implant pacifist and democratic ideals. Luckily for MacArthur, his goals largely coincided with those of most Japanese, with the result that the Occupation enjoyed quick and surprising success. This success had much to do with rapid dissipation of Americans’ wartime animosity toward Japanese. So, too, did the fact that the Occupation brought several million ordinary Americans, mostly young servicemen, into friendly interaction with the Japanese people. However superficial much of this interaction undoubtedly was, it produced some 20,000 marriages and unprecedented levels of mutual understanding, respect, and even admiration. Another, less positive legacy of the Occupation was the tendency of Americans to look down on Japanese as “wards” and “apprentices.” Given the exigencies of the Cold War, particularly the loss of China to Mao’s communists in 1949, it was perhaps inevitable that America should enlist Japan as a military ally. As discussed in chapter 8, the U.S.–Japan Alliance, which involved the exchange of bases for a U.S. security guarantee, was not entirely satisfactory to either side. Failing to fully appreciate the conversion of postwar Japanese to pacifism and their resentment of the intrusive presence of foreign troops, Americans were perplexed and irritated by Japan’s reluctance to rearm, and alarmed by the scale of popular opposition to the Alliance. During the 1950s, the survival of both the Alliance and Japanese democracy seemed in doubt. By the 1960s, however, Japan’s growing political stability and unforeseen “economic miracle”—the two being, of course, interrelated—gave rise to more relaxed attitudes. Americans celebrated their protégé’s economic success and avid pursuit of American-defined modernity as symbolized above all by an affluent, middle-class lifestyle. At the same time, Americans indulged their perennial fascination with the arts, crafts, and spirituality of the “Old Japan.” As explained in chapter 9, this happy state of affairs gave way in the 1970s and 1980s before escalating tensions and recriminations that seriously tested the postwar partnership. The root of the problem, as Americans saw it, was Japan’s “unfair trading practices” which threatened their manufacturing industries, jobs, and prosperity. Behind such practices many observers discerned a monolithic “Japan Inc.”—an “unholy alliance” of labor, business, and government bent on world economic domination. One American response was to “learn from Japan,” which involved elevating the Japanese to the unaccustomed position of teachers and exemplars. Another was to “get tough with Japan” even if this meant risking a trade war and a possible breakdown of the Alliance. There was a modest resurgence of anti-Japanese racism in the 1980s, though it failed to gain much traction. Most Americans were ambivalent about Japan, simultaneously admiring and fearing its economic prowess. As I try to show, this ambivalence was much in evidence in the way Japanese were depicted in American popular culture of the period.

Introduction

7

The notion that Japan posed a threat to America evaporated in the 1990s as Japan Inc. faltered and Japan entered a “lost decade” of economic stagnation. As suggested in chapter 10, the 1980s image of a fearsome juggernaut was replaced by that of a sclerotic invalid in need of American guidance. Paradoxically, this “invalid” produced a “cool” pop culture that captivated younger Americans. But Japan’s star was fading even as a resurgent China’s was rising. Beijing’s growing military power and uncertain intentions helped to breathe new life into the U.S.–Japan Alliance which, deprived of its antiSoviet rationale, entered a rough patch in the early 1990s. Under American prodding, the Japanese gradually moved away from their Cold War pacifist isolationism and agreed to assume expanded, albeit carefully circumscribed military responsibilities. Thus encouraged, the George W. Bush administration aspired to turn Japan into “The Britain of the Far East” and—with the help of an unusually able and forceful Japanese prime minister—made some progress in this endeavor. Chapter 11 surveys recent American speculation about Japan’s near-term future. Here optimism battles with pessimism. Trends in the early 2000s— notably a modest uptick in economic growth and the ascendancy of proAmerican nationalists—made a “Japan Rising” scenario seem plausible until the 2008–2009 global recession derailed the Japanese economy, making a “Japan Sinking” forecast more persuasive. The 2009 dethroning of Japan’s perennial conservative ruling party gave rise to a “hope and change” narrative, but this soon faded as the country’s new and inexperienced leaders plunged the management of the Alliance into confusion and failed to come up with a credible economic revitalization plan. Some observers saw Japan’s March 11, 2011, triple disaster as providing the impetus for a national “rebirth,” while others concluded that it would merely hasten Japan’s inevitable decline under the weight of its rapidly increasing number of elderly people and outmoded political economy. There is, in short, no consensus on where Japan might be headed. In my conclusion, I indulge in a bit of futurology of my own. Specifically, I use demographic projections to help construct a hypothetical picture of Japan thirty or forty years from now, and then offer some predictions about which of the American images and ideas discussed in this book might remain relevant. Among my predictions: racist denigration of the Japanese that has periodically roiled the relationship in the past will disappear, as will certain venerable stereotypes such as the Madame Butterfly myth which has dogged Japanese women since the early 1900s. On the other hand, I speculate that Americans will continue to view the Japanese as a highly cultured and artistic people, and perhaps also an oddly punctilious one—a “people of forms and ceremonies” as Commodore Perry memorably put it back in the 1850s. Depending on how Japan copes with needs of its elderly who will comprise nearly 40 percent of its sharply diminished population in 2050, it could again

8

Introduction

serve as a socioeconomic model for America, this time of how a society can age gracefully. NOTES 1. Margaret MacMillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: Modern Library, 2010), 146. 2. Kenneth B. Pyle, “Reading the New Era in Asia: The Use of History and Culture in the Making of Foreign Policy,” Asia Policy no. 3 (January 2007): 4–7. 3. Carol Gluck, “Japan and America: A Tale of Two Civilizations,” in Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching, ed. Ainslie T. Embree and Carol Gluck (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 799–800. 4. John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987).

I

Acquaintances

Chapter One

Opening a Closed Country, 1853–1868

Propelled by manifest destiny and the lure of the China market, Americans took the lead in forcing open isolationist Japan in the 1850s. Believing this “doubled-bolted” land, as Herman Melville famously called it, to be a stagnant and repressive “Oriental despotism,” most assumed that they were doing the Japanese a favor by exposing them to the liberating effects of international trade and America’s superior “Christian civilization.” The first American visitors found a friendly, curious people who were amazingly orderly and deferential to authority, though sadly lacking in what Americans of the day considered proper sexual morality. But Japan’s feudal ruling elite, the samurai, was less welcoming. During the 1860s, Americans and other Westerners came under attack by anti-foreign samurai extremists and watched nervously as Japan drifted into a civil war fought ostensibly over whether the country should be opened. Americans came through these experiences with a mixed image of the Japanese, seeing them simultaneously as “lewd” and punctilious, “progressive” and reactionary, and hospitable and xenophobic. MANIFEST DESTINY In July 1853, four heavily armed American warships, two of them steampowered, anchored at the mouth of Tokyo (then called Edo) Bay. Their commander, Commodore Matthew Perry, carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore to his “great and good friend” the emperor of Japan requesting the opening of trade relations, humane treatment of shipwrecked American sailors, and the provision of coal to China-bound American steamships. Perry had no illusions that delivering this letter, much less eliciting a positive 11

12

Chapter 1

response, would be easy. The Japanese had previously rebuffed similar requests and occasionally fired on Western vessels that intruded into their waters. The Americans were accordingly prepared for a fight: the decks were cleared for action, the big guns loaded and manned, and landing parties ready for combat ashore if need be. The 1853–1854 Perry expedition to Japan was one of the most ambitious and unusual operations undertaken by the nineteenth-century U.S. Navy— ambitious because it involved the deployment of nearly a quarter of its ships far from their East Coast bases, and unusual because it was an blatant exercise in “gunboat diplomacy” which Americans normally eschewed in their dealings with East Asians. They viewed the region as a promising field for commercial expansion and Christian proselytization, but they were rarely willing to undertake military action to defend or advance their interests there. Their navy was relatively weak and lacked overseas bases. Moreover, they regarded the use of force to coerce recalcitrant Asians as a specialty of rapacious and unprincipled European imperialists. Americans deplored such bullying and thought of themselves as acting on a higher moral plane of what President Thomas Jefferson called “peace, commerce and honest friendship.” 1 The late 1840s and early 1850s were, however, exceptional times, an era of exuberant nationalism and expansionism, which was captured by the slogan “manifest destiny”—the divinely sanctioned right of Americans to extend their democratic institutions and way of life across the North American continent and beyond. 2 While the immediate objective of most expansionists was the acquisition of Texas, California, and Oregon, some saw Pacific Coast ports like San Francisco as portals for a new transpacific trade route to China. The times seemed right for opening such a route. This was the heyday of fast American clipper ships which were wresting the China carrying trade from the British. And China beckoned as a market for the manufactured goods that American factories were beginning to turn out. In addition, Britain’s forcible opening of China on Western terms in the 1839–1842 Opium War appeared to herald a dramatic increase of American commercial opportunities there. Under the terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking and a subsequent agreement, the British secured the right to reside and trade in designated “treaty ports” where their nationals enjoyed extraterritoriality (immunity from Chinese law) plus low, fixed import duties. A mostfavored-nation clause ensured that they would acquire any privileges that China granted to other countries. The Americans were quick to demand similar rights and got them in the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia. These so-called “unequal treaties”—the Chinese received no reciprocal privileges—became the foundation of the Western presence in China for the next century, and the model for dealing with Japan and other East Asian countries.

Opening a Closed Country, 1853–1868

13

The problems confronting American proponents of a Pacific route to China—chiefly New York and New England businessmen—were largely logistical. By 1850, California had been admitted to the Union and its economy was booming under the stimulus of the Gold Rush. But transportation to and from the East Coast and Midwest was a limiting factor, even though there was talk of building a transcontinental railway and one was already being constructed across the Isthmus of Panama. Oceangoing steamships, which were beginning to displace clippers and other sailing ships, posed another challenge. Their crude engines consumed large amounts of coal, necessitating frequent refueling stops. To support steamships traveling between San Francisco and Shanghai, the most important of the new Chinese treaty ports, it would therefore be necessary to establish a string of Pacific coaling stations. This is where Japan entered the picture. It lay astride the proposed San Francisco–Shanghai steamship route and was rumored to contain extensive coal deposits, which Daniel Webster, Fillmore’s secretary of state, exuberantly proclaimed to be “a gift of Providence” intended for “the benefit of the human family.” 3 Webster and Fillmore had another reason to focus on Japan. American whalers began frequenting Japanese waters in the 1820s and their activities peaked in the 1840s, leading to shipwrecks and lurid stories of Japanese mistreatment of castaways. Such stories, amplified by newspapers, generated congressional demands for government action to force the Japanese to accord decent treatment to shipwrecked Americans. The president thus had a compelling humanitarian justification for an initiative aimed at securing access to Japanese coal. But what sort of initiative? Desultory European and American attempts over the past half century to draw the Japanese into negotiations had all failed, some ignominiously. In 1846, for example, Commodore James Biddle sailed two U.S. warships into Edo Bay only to be turned away empty-handed after suffering the indignity of being knocked down by a Japanese guard. There thus seemed to be no alternative to a massive show of force. But the trick would be to persuade the Japanese to cooperate without provoking a war which the United States was unprepared to fight and which Fillmore dreaded. To pull off what was essentially a bluff, the president needed a man who combined firmness with tact and who knew something about dealing with recalcitrant “natives.” Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry seemed to fit the bill, and Fillmore selected him in 1851 to lead a large naval expedition to Japan. A Mexican War hero and member of an illustrious naval family (his brother Oliver Hazard Perry won fame in the War of 1812), Perry was in the twilight of a distinguished career and one of the U.S. Navy’s most senior officers. “Old Bruin,” as his men nicknamed him, was a crusty, aloof disciplinarian who deplored the navy’s abolition of flogging. No one doubted his

14

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1. Commodore Matthew C. Perry, USN. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

competence, however, and he had some experience in employing naval force to overawe obtuse potentates in Africa and the Mediterranean. Perry assumed that the Japanese—a “deceitful” and “semi-barbarous people” 4—could be similarly coerced. He was, in any case, determined to succeed where Biddle had failed in this, his last command.

Opening a Closed Country, 1853–1868

15

A PECULIAR ORIENTAL DESPOTISM For mid-nineteenth-century Americans, Japan was a land shrouded in mystery and menace, known chiefly for its hermit-like aversion to contact with the outside world. Since the 1630s, the Japanese had sealed themselves off from the West, expelling most Europeans, proscribing Christianity, and banning overseas travel. Only a handful of Americans had set foot in the country, mostly shipwrecked sailors and a few merchant mariners sailing under the Dutch flag—Hollanders being the only Europeans permitted to reside and trade in Japan. Although confined as virtual prisoners in the southwestern port of Nagasaki, Dutch merchants and their German and Swedish employees were the main sources of information about Japan. The accounts of Engelbert Kaempfer from the 1690s, Carl Peter Thunberg from the 1770s, and Philipp Franz von Siebold from the 1820s were the best known and most influential. Few of these scholarly accounts were accessible to Americans, but a number of popular books in the 1840s and 1850s drew on them to present readable summaries of what was known about Japan at the time. A representative work is the English writer Mary Busk’s Manners and Customs of the Japanese in the Nineteenth Century, which was published anonymously in London and New York in 1841. Japan, Busk informed her readers, was a “feudal empire” presided over by an emperor (mikado) under whom autonomous regional lords (daimyo) governed their domains with the assistance of their military retainers (samurai). Ranked below the feudal elite were commoners, subdivided into merchants, artisans, and peasants. According to Busk, Japanese peasants, like medieval European serfs and villeins, were “so heavily burthened by contributions that indigence keeps them in a state of complete degradation.” 5 Japan, in other words, was a kind of time capsule where one was transported back to conditions supposedly resembling those of thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Europe. Busk classified the Japanese polity as an “Oriental despotism” in which individual freedom was absent and, indeed, inconceivable. This characterization would not have surprised her readers, since the conventional wisdom of the day had it that all Oriental states were despotisms of the most capricious and repressive sort. Busk averred, however, that the Japanese variant was “peculiar” in that there was no “arbitrary despot.” The mikado was the “nominally supreme sovereign,” but he was secluded in the ancient capital of Kyoto and little more than a prisoner of his military deputy, the shogun— also called “tycoon” by Westerners—who, from his headquarters in Edo, also functioned as Japan’s feudal overlord. Yet the shogun was not a personal despot either, being closely supervised and controlled by his councilors. (Busk was one of the few Western writers to correctly identify the mikado as Japan’s supreme ruler. Such was the confusion about its political system that

16

Chapter 1

some regarded the mikado and shogun as “co-emperors,” while others described the shogun as emperor and the mikado as a “kind of pope.”) If there was no despot, in what sense was feudal Japan a despotism? Busk’s answer: “law and established custom, unvarying, known to all, and pressing upon all alike are the real despots” so that “scarcely an action of life is exempt from their rigid, inflexible control.” 6 It might be objected that people everywhere and at all times more or less automatically obey law and custom. What made the Japanese case unique, however, were the intensity and scope of social controls. Busk cited the public posting of government regulations, the harsh punishments meted out to those who violated them, and a system of collective responsibility which made neighbors and family members accountable for each other’s behavior. But the main control mechanism was a ubiquitous network of spies and secret police such that “each half of the nation is made a spy upon the other half.” 7 In modern terms, Japan was a totalitarian police state, prefiguring George Orwell’s nightmarish 1984. Perry, who consulted the writings of Busk and other “Japan experts” of the time, offered a virtually identical assessment of conditions in Japan in the official report of his expedition. (He subscribed, however, to the erroneous notion that there were two emperors, one “spiritual” and the other “secular.”) In Perry’s view, the Japanese were incapable of change and progress because “all must proceed exactly as it has been done for centuries.” But he discerned some grounds for optimism. Most European observers agreed, he wrote, that the Japanese possessed “very ingenious and lively minds” and were “far superior” to other Asian peoples. If the government could be induced to relax its seclusion policy, one could thus hope that Japan would in due course join the “family of civilized nations.” 8 Since World War II, historians have drastically revised the Busk–Perry picture of mid-nineteenth-century Japan as a static, repressive despotism. Looking back from the vantage point of Japan’s rapid modernization after 1868, they have searched for “seeds of modernity” and found them in widespread male literacy, a high level of urbanization, a vibrant commercial economy, complex and “impersonal” bureaucratic government, and a budding “national consciousness,” at least among the samurai elite. They have also questioned the notion that Japan was a police state, pointing out that in practice the “state was relatively passive in its exercise of coercive authority.” 9 As a result, they have labeled Tokugawa Japan—so named from the family that supplied the shoguns from 1603 to 1868—“early modern Japan,” overturning the once widely accepted division between “feudal” and “modern” Japan marked by Perry’s opening of the country in 1853–1854. Historians have also called attention to a “domestic crisis” 10 in late Tokugawa Japan that escaped the notice of writers like Busk and their Dutch and German informants. By the 1840s, recurrent famines, peasant “riots,” samurai impoverishment, and daimyo insolvency had created a widespread sense

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of desperation and demoralization among the feudal elite, which was heightened by the failure of repeated reform attempts. Adding to the mood of crisis was awareness of the European imperialist advance against China in the Opium War, and recognition of Japan’s inferiority in military technology which made it powerless to resist should it become the next target. As the de facto national hegemon, the shogun was blamed for this situation and his authority was eroding. In contrast to contemporary China, order and discipline did not break down, but a potential for revolutionary change was present. ENTER THE AMERICANS The arrival of Perry’s squadron in 1853, while not unanticipated by the Japanese, impaled the shogun on the horns of a dangerous political dilemma. Perry quickly made it clear that he would not take no for an answer. Armed resistance, however, was not a realistic option. Japan’s small guard boats and antiquated firearms were no match for the Americans’ big guns and steamships. A clash invited certain defeat and a probable naval blockade of Edo which depended on coastal shipping for its food supplies. On the other hand, acceding to the American demand for the opening of the country might be seen by restive daimyo and samurai as a confession that the shogun was no longer capable of discharging his responsibility to defend the country from “barbarians”—his title, after all, literally meant “barbarian-quelling generalissimo.” The shogun attempted to extricate himself from this dilemma by accepting Fillmore’s letter from Perry and circulating it among the daimyo in hopes of forging a national consensus in favor of accepting at least a partial opening of the country. This was an unprecedented and, as it turned out, politically counterproductive step. No consensus was forthcoming—some daimyo urged refusal, others acceptance, but most merely counseled delay. Moreover, the fact that the shogun sought the advice of the daimyo suggested weakness and indecision, since his predecessors would never have permitted their involvement in such a momentous foreign policy decision. Worse still, the issue of opening the country now became politicized, as an influential faction of daimyo and their samurai supporters, encouraged by the heretofore passive mikado in Kyoto, insisted that he drive off the Americans by force. Perry, oblivious to the uproar his delivery of Fillmore’s letter had provoked, sailed away vowing to return the following year to receive the Japanese reply. When he reappeared in early 1854, the stage seemed set for an armed clash. Fortunately for both sides, the shogun offered to negotiate. After several weeks of occasionally tense talks, the commodore, laboring under the misconception that he was dealing with the “emperor of Japan,”

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agreed to terms he believed satisfied minimal U.S. requirements. Two minor ports, Shimoda and Hakodate, would be opened to supply American ships and repatriate shipwrecked sailors. Trade, which Perry considered of secondary importance, was not addressed. A Treaty of Peace and Amity (also known as the Treaty of Kanagawa) was signed in March 1854 with much pomp and ceremony. As might be expected, this opening of the country, limited though it was, went over very poorly with “rejectionist” daimyo and the mikado. To Perry’s chagrin, enthusiasm at home for his achievement was muted. Many Americans were disappointed by the absence of provisions for trade and diplomatic relations; one newspaper went so far as to call his expedition an “expensive failure.” 11 Despite waning public and congressional interest, however, the succeeding Franklin Pierce administration did not give up on Japan. The Treaty of Kanagawa stipulated that an American consul could be stationed in Shimoda, and Pierce hoped that this representative might be able to induce the Japanese to permit greater access. He accordingly appointed New York businessman-turned-diplomat Townsend Harris to this post and sent him to Shimoda in 1856 aboard a U.S. warship with instructions to try to negotiate a commercial treaty. Accompanied by his interpreter, Harris languished in this isolated port for some fourteen months, ignored by both the Japanese and American governments. Without the backing of American warships, his only negotiating leverage was his argument that the British—temporarily distracted by wars with China and Russia—would soon impose a commercial treaty by force, and that Japan could get better terms by preemptively concluding one with the United States. The shogun was persuaded by this logic and signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with Harris in July 1858. This agreement, which was modeled on the unequal treaties with China, provided for trade in designated treaty ports, fixed import duties, extraterritoriality, a most-favored-nation clause, and the right to station diplomats in Edo. The European powers quickly demanded and got similar treaties, and the first treaty ports opened for business in 1859, effectively ending Japan’s isolation from the West. FIRST IMPRESSIONS These events briefly revived American interest in Japan which peaked in 1860 when a seventy-seven-member delegation of Japanese officials traveled to Washington, D.C., to exchange instruments of ratification of the Harris treaty. As guests of the U.S. government, the emissaries were transported on warships and accorded elaborate courtesies, including a White House banquet hosted by President James Buchanan. The group—attired in samurai garb complete with double swords—also visited San Francisco, Baltimore,

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New York, and Philadelphia where they were feted by local notables and drew huge crowds of curious and boisterous onlookers. Watching them parade through New York City amid one such throng, Walt Whitman was moved to write: “Courteous, the swart-cheek’d two-sworded envoys, Leaning back in their open barouches, bare-headed, impassive, Ride to-day through Manhattan.” 12 For most Americans, the Japanese visitors were little more than entertaining exotics—a “combination of Red Indians and medieval knights,” as one journalist described them. 13 Many were, however, favorably impressed by their dignified bearing and the unflappable good humor with which they bore taunts and jostling by unruly crowds. Viewed in the context of Japan’s acceptance of the Perry and Harris treaties, the dispatch of this diplomatic mission—the first to a Western country—suggested to some commentators that the Japanese were well on their way to embracing American civilization. One influential magazine, for example, enthused that the Japanese displayed “an aptitude for acquiring the civilization of the West to which no other Oriental race can lay claim.” 14 There was also a certain amount of chest-thumping by those proud of the fact that America had stolen a march on Britain by succeeding in prying open Japan without having to fire a shot. But Japan no longer stirred the American imagination. Enthusiasm for manifest destiny and a transpacific steamship route to China had subsided. (The opening of the transcontinental railway connecting San Francisco with the East and Midwest and the beginning of steamship service to China via Japan would not come until the late 1860s.) The northwest Pacific whaling industry was entering a period of steep decline as petroleum replaced whale oil. It was apparent, moreover, that the Perry expedition had been a one-off event, made possible only because the British made available their network of coaling stations and ship-repair facilities. The United States lacked both the ships and imperial infrastructure to project power independently in East Asia or compete commercially with the British. And their approaching domestic conflagration turned Americans’ attention inward. A “SMOLDERING VOLCANO” The few Americans who followed developments in Japan after the outbreak of American Civil War in 1861 were surprised and dismayed by the wave of anti-foreign violence which began to sweep the country from about this time. One daimyo ordered the bombardment of Western ships and another condoned the murder by his retainers of a British merchant. Bands of swordwielding samurai extremists attacked the British and American legations in Edo and assassinated a number of Westerners, including Townsend Harris’s secretary. Western diplomats and merchants took to arming themselves and

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sleeping with loaded pistols. The shogun, who was responsible for implementing the treaties and protecting foreigners, seemed incapable of doing either. Indeed, his officials became targets of anti-foreign zealots who held them responsible for selling out to the hated Westerners. Francis Hall, an American merchant in the newly opened treaty port of Yokohama, compared the situation to living “over a smoldering volcano.” 15 The violence and disorder comported with neither the supposed eagerness of Japanese to adopt Western ways nor with the “police state” model of Tokugawa society. Why had the hitherto smooth opening of Japan gone so seriously awry? Japanese commoners were not the problem. Westerners found them friendly, law-abiding, and amazingly deferential to authority. (Confined to Edo and the treaty ports, they were largely unaware of occasional peasant riots in the interior.) The samurai were a different matter. Anti-Western sentiment had begun to build among them at the time of Perry’s visit—though the commodore was only dimly aware of it—and sharply escalated after the opening of the treaty ports and the establishment of Western diplomats in Edo. Western observers were puzzled by samurai anti-foreignism, attributing it variously to simple xenophobia, the insulting behavior of arrogant Westerners, or instigation by dissident daimyo eager to embarrass the shogun. They did not realize that it reflected the “stirrings of proto-nationalism,” which had its roots in a late-eighteenth-century nativist reaction against Chinese cultural and political models. 16 The samurai swordsmen who struck down Westerners under the slogan “Revere the Emperor, Expel the Barbarian” saw themselves as “men of high purpose,” willing to sacrifice their lives to defend their “divine land” and emperor against the polluting presence of Westerners. They regarded the shogun as a traitor who had forfeited his right to rule by opening the country to them. By themselves, these “men of high purpose” and their terrorist methods had limited political impact. They were relatively few in number and most were tracked down and executed. (Those that survived embraced westernization as a “necessary evil” to build up Japan’s power to resist Western encroachments.) But their cause and slogans were taken up by the daimyo of the powerful southwestern domains of Satsuma and Choshu, who nurtured a longstanding resentment of Tokugawa supremacy. Punitive naval bombardments by European warships in 1863–1864 convinced them that forcibly “expelling the barbarians” was a practical impossibility. They therefore shifted their objective to overthrowing the shogun and seizing power in the name of the emperor. In 1866–1867, Japan experienced a brief civil war as Tokugawa forces clashed with those of the Satsuma–Choshu coalition. Although the Tokugawa army was larger, it lacked the will to fight and was routed. Following up on their victory, Satsuma–Choshu troops occupied Kyoto and in January 1868 proclaimed the “restoration” of the shogun’s

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authority to the emperor. The shogun himself surrendered in Edo a few months later without a fight, but his diehard supporters in northern Japan continued the struggle into 1869. Most Americans, preoccupied by their own much larger and bloodier civil war and its aftermath, paid scant attention to these events. For those who noticed and cared, the anti-Western violence required a firm response. The American minister to Japan reported grimly in 1863 that “our foothold here can be maintained only by a firm attitude and with one hand on the sword.” 17 William Seward, secretary of state in the Lincoln and Johnson administrations, favored naval demonstrations and punitive strikes. In practice, this meant relying on British naval power, since the United States had few warships available for use in Japan. Seward, like other American observers, identified the emperor with anti-foreignism and the shogun with cooperation with the West. The British, who were better informed about Japanese politics, recognized that by the mid-1860s both sides were committed to westernization and upholding the treaties, and that the conflict between them was essentially a power struggle. “BULLIES AND DAMSELS” By the late 1860s, Americans had formed a new set of impressions about the Japanese. Not surprisingly, the murder and mayhem perpetrated by selfstyled “men of high purpose” gave the samurai bad press. A British diplomat described them as “swaggering, blustering bullies; many cowardly enough to strike an enemy in the back, or cut down an unarmed and inoffensive man, but also supplying numbers ever ready to fling their own lives away in accomplishing a revenge, or carrying out the behests of their Chief.” 18 In reality, this description fit only a small minority of samurai, mainly antiforeign activists. Most late Tokugawa samurai were basically clerks and bureaucratic functionaries in daimyo governments, who were little concerned with national politics or the Western intrusion. On the other hand, Japanese women, particularly the “rosy lipped blackeyed and attentive damsels” American and European men encountered in teahouses, 19 were much admired, and their appeal would only grow as contact between Japan and the West deepened. At the same time, many Westerners were scandalized by the casual attitude of the Japanese toward sex and nudity. The prevalence of prostitution and pornography drew particular opprobrium. George Preble, a young naval officer in Perry’s squadron, recorded that a group of Japanese “beckoned us on shore, and by the most unmistakable signs invited our intercourse with their women. One female went so far as to raise her drapery and expose her person to us.” Preble also

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cited the presentation to Perry of “a box of obscene paintings of naked men and women” as “another proof of the lewdness of this exclusive people.” 20 Americans were also offended—though fascinated—by the Japanese custom of mixed public bathing, which many interpreted as evidence of the “licentiousness and degradation” of the Japanese. There was, however, disagreement on this point. Townsend Harris acknowledged that “I cannot account for so indelicate a proceeding on the part of a people so generally correct.” But he noted that his Japanese informants had assured him that “it is not considered as dangerous to the chastity of their females; on the contrary, they urge that this very exposure lessens the desire that owes much of its power to mystery and difficulty.” 21 Mark Twain took his prudish and culturebound countrymen to task for imagining sexual overtones to the custom, commenting that “each race determines for itself what its indecencies are,” and that “nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.” 22 The era produced the first American Japanophiles, of whom Townsend Harris was perhaps the most prominent. During the six years he spent in Japan (1856–1862), first as consul and later as the equivalent of ambassador, Harris developed a deep admiration for the Japanese people, particularly commoners, whose courtesy, generosity, frugality, and amiability captivated him. Japan was, he wrote, “more like the golden age of simplicity and honesty than I have ever seen in any other country,” and he confessed doubts about “whether the opening of Japan to foreign influence will promote the general happiness of this people.” 23 NOTES 1. Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1992), 14. 2. Daniel M. Smith, The American Diplomatic Experience (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 114–15. 3. Quoted in Peter Booth Wiley, Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990), 100. 4. William L. Neumann, America Encounters Japan: From Perry to MacArthur (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 31. 5. Anonymous, Manners and Customs of the Japanese in the Nineteenth Century from the Accounts of Dutch Residents in Japan and from the German Work of Dr. Philipp Franz von Seibold (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841), 222. 6. Manners and Customs, 198–99. 7. Manners and Customs, 215–16. 8. Matthew C. Perry, Narrative of the Expedition to the China Seas and Japan, 1852–1854 (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000), 17–18. 9. Henry D. Smith, II, “Five Myths About Early Modern Japan,” in Asia in Western and World History: A Guide for Teaching, eds. Ainslie T. Embree and Carol Gluck (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe: 1997), 517. 10. John Whitney Hall, Japan from Prehistory to Modern Times (New York: Dell, 1970), 233–42. 11. Wiley, Yankees in the Land of the Gods, 466.

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12. Quoted in Foster Rhea Dulles, Yankees and Samurai: America’s Role in the Emergence of Modern Japan, 1791–1900 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 123. 13. Dulles, Yankees and Samurai, 109. 14. Cited in Iriye, Across the Pacific, 23. 15. Fred G. Notehelfer, ed., Japan Through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, 1859–1866 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001), 17. 16. Peter Duus, Modern Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 39, 65. 17. Quoted in Charles E. Neu, The Troubled Encounter: The United States and Japan (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1975), 15. 18. Rutherford Alcock, Capital of the Tycoon: A Narrative of Three Years’ Residence in Japan (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), 127. 19. Ian Littlewood, The Idea of Japan: Western Images, Western Myths (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 111. 20. George Preble, The Opening of Japan: A Diary of Discovery in the Far East (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 123, 126. 21. Quoted in Oliver Statler, Shimoda Story (New York: Random House, 1962), 153. 22. Quoted in John Ashmead, The Idea of Japan, 1853-1895: Japan as Described by American and Other Travelers from the West (New York: Garland Publications, 1987), 414. 23. Quoted in Alfred Tamarin, Japan and the United States: Early Encounters, 1791–1860 (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 198.

Chapter Two

Admiring the New and Old Japan, 1868–1905

From the 1870s through the 1890s, Americans encountered two Japans—a “New Japan” intent on transforming itself into a modern Western-style nation-state, and an “Old Japan” of quaint customs, odd behavior, exquisite artistry, and charming women. Gilded Age Americans applauded the New Japan, imagining the Japanese as enterprising and progressive “Yankees of the East,” and imagined themselves to be their mentors and exemplars. But it was the Old Japan that most intrigued them. Travelers and writers rhapsodized over a “paradise of artists and poets,” a “utopia of guileless children,” and an idyllic Arcadia whose denizens communed with nature and the spirit world much like the ancient Greeks. Not all Americans were enamored of the Japanese—some found their behavior puzzling, absurd, or even devious. But most were beguiled by Japanese women whom they idealized as paragons of demure femininity, grace, and selfless devotion. THE “NEW JAPAN” In January 1868, the sixteen-year-old emperor of Japan, known by his reign name Meiji (“Enlightened Rule”), proclaimed the restoration of direct imperial rule after a hiatus of some one thousand years. As reverential but uncomprehending commoners looked on, he was carried by palanquin from Kyoto to Edo—renamed Tokyo or “eastern capital”—where he took up residence in the castle of the deposed shogun. During his forty-four-year reign (1868–1912), Japan transformed itself from an isolated feudal backwater into East Asia’s leading industrial and military power, the region’s first constitutional monarchy, and a member of the “imperialist club.” 25

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No one foresaw this in 1868. American newspapers of the time—laboring under the misconception that the “mikado” and his supporters represented reaction and anti-foreignism—deplored the victory of the imperial forces in Japan’s civil war and urged the U.S. government to back the shogun. It soon became apparent, however, that the new imperial government in Tokyo had a more “progressive” agenda than had been supposed. It assured the Europeans and Americans that it would honor the unequal treaties concluded by the shogun, and the emperor issued a “Charter Oath” in which he pledged that “deliberative assemblies shall be widely established,” “evil customs of the past shall be broken off,” and “knowledge shall be sought throughout the world.” 1 This was a fairly accurate statement of the program of crash westernization and sweeping institutional reform which the emperor’s advisors— mostly young samurai officials from Satsuma and Choshu—envisioned. The political position of the new government was initially quite precarious. To be sure, it possessed in the person of the emperor the transcendent symbol of Japanese national unity and identity. This mattered to the feudal elite, who comprised 6 percent of Japan’s population of about 30 million, but not to the mass of commoners for whom the emperor was a shadowy abstraction, not a focus of loyalty. Moreover, the Meiji government lacked administrative control over most of the country which continued to be governed by autonomous daimyo whose allegiance to the new regime was tenuous. (The majority had stood aside during the civil war, hedging their bets on its outcome.) It also lacked adequate tax revenues which in an overwhelmingly agrarian country had to come mainly from land taxes. Perhaps most serious, it had no army, being entirely dependent on the forces of Satsuma and Choshu and a few other pro-imperial feudal domains. Under these circumstances, the top priority of the Meiji leaders was building an effective central government. But what sort of a government? One option was to preserve the existing feudal system and superimpose on it a new central authority based in Tokyo—in effect, continuing the “centralized feudalism” of Tokugawa times, with the mikado replacing the shogun as national hegemon. Not a few Western observers suspected that the “imperial restoration” of 1868—subsequently called the Meiji Restoration—represented merely a rearrangement of feudal “deck chairs” in which a coalition of daimyo led by Satsuma and Choshu would rule in the name of a powerless emperor, much as had the Tokugawa. This was not, however, what the emperor’s advisors had in mind. During the tumultuous 1860s, they had come to the realization that in the brave new world into which Commodore Perry and Townsend Harris had dragged them—a world dominated by predatory Western powers possessing irresistible military might—Japan could survive only by reinventing itself as a strong Western-style nation-state as quickly as possible. Although they had no blueprint for building such a state, the example of the advanced Western

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countries, especially Britain, America, France, and Germany, suggested what had to be done. The first step was dismantling Japan’s outmoded feudal polity. In 1871, the daimyo were ordered to hand over their domains to the emperor who promptly converted them into centrally administered prefectures. The daimyo were given generous pensions and sent into genteel retirement. Having thus removed the principal obstacle to the creation of a centralized state, they then imposed a uniform national land tax in 1873, giving the government a stable and much needed source of revenue. Also in 1873, a conscription law was enacted requiring all males to serve in a new national army. This followed the establishment in 1872 of a system of compulsory primary schooling for both boys and girls. Compulsory conscription and schooling were seen as essential to transform hitherto politically inert commoners into loyal and patriotic subjects on whom everything else depended. As the new conscript army took shape, the question of what to do with the samurai came to the fore. Their skill in swordsmanship was no longer needed and the abolition of the feudal domains deprived them of employment. Some adapted to the new order by becoming police and army officers or civilian government officials, but most languished in idleness, subsisting on their hereditary stipends now paid by the central government. After heated debate, the Meiji leaders decided in the mid-1870s that the samurai class was an expensive anachronism that had to go, and proceeded to strip it of its stipends and privileges, including the right to carry swords. Not surprisingly, there was a rash of samurai rebellions, the largest of which, in the former Satsuma domain in 1877, posed a serious threat to the government until its Westerntrained conscript army, composed mainly of commoners, bloodily suppressed it. To American and other foreign observers, the most striking development in early Meiji Japan was the westernization craze that swept the country under the slogan “Civilization and Enlightenment.” The emperor himself set the tone, divesting himself of his ancient court robes in favor of a Westernstyle military uniform, and his civilian officials followed suit by donning frock coats, leather shoes, and top hats. More remarkably, ordinary Japanese of all walks of life avidly adopted Western clothing, hairstyles, accessories— umbrellas and pocket watches being particular favorites—and even cuisine. This enthusiasm for Western ways was not entirely spontaneous, nor did it necessarily reflect an acknowledgment of the West’s cultural superiority. As part of its drive to win equality with the West, the Meiji government was determined to rid itself of the humiliating unequal treaties, and the only way to do this was to convince skeptical Westerners that Japanese were a “civilized” people. Hence, it bombarded the populace with admonitions to abandon “shameful” customs such as mixed public bathing and behave in a manner likely to gain Western approval. 2

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As the Meiji leaders saw it, a proper nation-state required not just a patriotic and “enlightened” citizenry, but a constitution and representative institutions as well. After all, the advanced Western states had such institutions, so they must be a source of their power. The choice on offer was between British parliamentarianism and the more authoritarian German model. (American-style democracy was never in the running.) After much debate, they opted for the German system which became the basis for a constitution “granted” to the Japanese people by the emperor in 1889. This document concentrated power in the hands of the monarch, but a personal autocracy was not contemplated. The emperor was to act only on the “advice” of his senior civilian and military officials. Imperial prerogatives were also limited by the rule of law and an independent judiciary, and by the power of the purse vested in the popularly elected lower house of the national parliament or Diet. Though hardly “democratic,” most observers at the time thought these arrangements appropriate to Japan’s needs. Another feature of Western nation-states that Meiji leaders were bent on acquiring was an industrial base. With capital, technology, and entrepreneurs in short supply, the government was forced to set up factories and other modern enterprises in the 1870s. These proved to be an unsustainable financial burden, however, so they were sold off at bargain-basement prices to private interests in the 1880s. By the 1890s, an industrial “takeoff” was underway, propelled by mechanized silk-reeling and cotton-spinning. These industries—whose workforce consisted chiefly of young peasant women— provided the bulk of Japan’s exports through the 1920s. Steel, shipbuilding, and other heavy industries developed more slowly but were acquiring growing importance by the end of the Meiji period. One enduring legacy of Meiji industrialization was a close and collaborative relationship between the government and a handful of giant, family-run conglomerates known as zaibatsu (literally, “financial cliques”) that dominated the modern sector of the economy. The Meiji government’s top foreign policy priority was revising the unequal treaties which it regarded as a humiliating symbol of Japan’s inferiority vis-à-vis the West. This goal was achieved in stages between 1894 and 1911. Caution born of a sense of military weakness and vulnerability was another hallmark of Meiji diplomacy, but this did not prevent Tokyo from sparring with Ch’ing China for dominance over Korea which the Japanese considered a vital national security interest. It was not until the mid-1890s that the Meiji leadership felt strong enough to risk a military showdown with China over Korea. In the 1894–1895 Sino–Japanese War, Japan easily defeated the Chinese, establishing itself as East Asia’s strongest power and—with its acquisition of Taiwan in the peace settlement—a colonial one as well. In the eyes of surprised Westerners, “plucky” and “progressive” Japan had not yet arrived as a Great Power but it seemed well on its way to becoming one.

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THE “YANKEES OF THE EAST” Gilded Age Americans applauded Meiji Japan’s rapid westernization which seemed to confirm their earlier impression that the Japanese, alone among Asians, were innately predisposed to embrace Western civilization. Commenting on “The New Era in Japan” soon after the Meiji Restoration, a New York newspaper opined that “from the vigorous character of the people we have a right to expect that she will be the first among the East Asiatic Countries to rise to a level with the more civilized nations.” A best-selling 1877 travelogue enthused that Japan had “unmoored” itself from Asia and moved across the Pacific to stand “alongside the New World, to have the same course of life and progress.” 3 As suggested by the latter piece, Americans saw an affinity between themselves and the Japanese that transcended racial differences. As one writer put it, the Japanese were the “Yankees of the East.” 4 This notion meshed with another American conceit—that the Japanese were intent on remaking themselves in the American image and regarded the United States as a special friend and protector. According to a Congressional document of the early 1870s, for example, “The fact seems now to be generally acknowledged that the Japanese people not only desire to follow, as far as possible, in all educational and political affairs, the example of the Americans, but that they look upon them as their best friends, among the nations of the globe.” 5 Evidence that the Japanese viewed America in this light seemed to be provided by the 1872 visit of the Iwakura Mission—a group of senior Meiji officials which spent seven months touring the United States and studying its institutions as part of an effort to discover and appropriate the secrets of Western wealth and power. The Iwakura Mission then proceeded to Europe where it found models more relevant to Japan’s needs. In reality, Meiji westernization was driven less by admiration of America or any other Western country than by fear of Western power. As suggested above, the Japanese viewed the late-nineteenth-century world of European imperialism as one in which “the strong devour the weak,” and they were determined not to be among the victims. Acutely aware of Japan’s vulnerability and backwardness, they saw massive cultural borrowing from the West as the only way to close the gap in wealth and power—that is, to make Japan a strong nation able to hold its own. The Western models they deemed most suitable for Japan’s needs in the critical fields of law, government, and military affairs were British, French, and German. The only area in which America had much to offer was education, particularly primary schooling. The idea of a “special relationship” between Japan and the United States did, however, have some substance. The sons and daughters of the Meiji elite favored American colleges, and several hundred American experts were employed by the Meiji government as engineers, teachers, and advisors. (Most

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foreign experts were, however, British, French, and German.) Some played important roles in Japan’s development and helped create goodwill toward Americans. One such figure was William Clark, the founder of Sapporo Agricultural College in Hokkaido, whose parting injunction to his students, “Boys, be ambitious,” became a legend in modern Japan. Another was David Murray, a Rutgers College professor who oversaw the creation of an American-style system of primary schools, complete with “McGuffey Readers.” The Ulysses Grant administration boosted America’s standing in Japanese eyes by offering to give up its unequal treaty privileges. (The offer was, however, conditional on the other treaty powers doing the same, and none was as yet willing.) This gesture was prompted in part by glowing reports from American diplomats, missionaries, and journalists about Japan’s remarkable progress and future importance as “the key to the Orient.” 6 Grant took a personal interest in Japan’s development, sending his commissioner of agriculture, Horace Capron, to head an American team charged with introducing American crops and farming techniques in Hokkaido. After he left office, Grant was feted by the emperor and enthusiastically welcomed by huge crowds during a 1879 visit to Japan. He took the occasion to advise his Japanese hosts to beware of Europeans and rely on Americans. The leading American interpreter of the “New Japan” was William Elliot Griffis whose book The Mikado’s Empire, originally published in 1876, became the standard work on the subject, going through twelve editions by 1913. Griffis came to Japan as a young Rutgers graduate in 1870, and taught science first at a samurai school in a remote provincial city and later at the forerunner of Tokyo University. Expecting to enter a “storybook realm of Oriental despotism,” he found a cultured and morally upright people for whom he conceived a lifelong admiration and respect. 7 He presented the Japanese as awakened by Perry from a centuries-long feudal torpor and as eager and respectful students of the West. A devout Protestant, he never wavered in his conviction that they would have to embrace Protestant Christianity to become fully civilized. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Griffis did not exoticize or romanticize the Japanese—indeed, he deplored this tendency—insisting that they “are simply human, no better, no worse, than mankind outside.” 8 “A UTOPIA OF ARTISTS AND POETS” In The Mikado’s Empire, Griffis advanced the novel proposition that Americans might have something to learn from the Japanese, whom he described as “the wise men of the west.” 9 In fact, the Western discovery and appropriation of Japanese art was already underway, led by French artists

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and connoisseurs, who had become fascinated by Japanese woodblock prints in the 1860s. “Japonisme,” as this vogue for Japanese art was called, reached its apogee in the 1880s and 1890s, and had major effects on Western aesthetic values and sensibilities. Indeed, “there is scarcely an artistic movement in the second half of the nineteenth century—Symbolist, Impressionist, PostImpressionist, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and, above all, the Aesthetic Movement itself—which did not owe something to Japanese influence.” 10 For Americans, the key figures in the discovery of Japan’s artistic heritage were a remarkable group of New England Japanophiles, including zoologist-turned-ethnographer Edward Morse, art connoisseur and collector Ernest Fenollosa, the painter John La Farge (a New York transplant), and Sturgis Bigelow, another admirer and collector of Japanese art. What these men had in common—apart from disdain for the materialism and gritty industrial realities of Gilded Age America—were an intense interest in the culture of the “Old Japan” and a concern both to preserve it and make it available to American audiences. They were attracted to Japan by its spirituality, grace, and refinement—qualities they felt lacking in their homeland and fast disappearing in Japan itself. Several of them, Bigelow and Fenollosa, even converted to Buddhism. Morse’s Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1885) introduced Americans to Japanese domestic architecture and the aesthetic values and principles it embodied. His book influenced architects like Frank Lloyd Wright and became a “pattern book for American builders” in the 1890s. La Farge was a pioneer in incorporating Japanese themes, techniques, and materials into American art. Fenollosa amassed an impressive collection of Japanese paintings, which he donated to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Morse and Bigelow, who were avid collectors of Japanese pottery, prints, swords, lacquerware, and other objets d’art, also made large donations to this museum, making it “the greatest and most comprehensive repository of Japanese art outside Japan.” 11 Perhaps more important than this circle of wealthy New England esthetes in popularizing Japanese arts and crafts were the great international expositions of the era—the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the 1885 New Orleans Exhibition, and the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago— which were attended by millions of ordinary Americans. The Meiji government went to considerable expense to showcase Japan’s traditional culture, including temples, teahouses, miniature gardens, tapestries, lacquerware, and ceramics. (Japan’s principal exports at the time were silk, tea, and craft goods, and America was a major market.) These exhibits fueled a middleclass craze for Japanese bric-a-brac, and helped establish a popular stereotype of Japan as a “land of artists and poets,” which William Griffis criticized on the grounds that it misrepresented what these eager Westernizers were actually about. 12

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“A PARADISE OF GUILELESS CHILDREN” Another American stereotype of the Japan which earned Griffis’s disapproval was the notion that it was a “paradise of guileless children.” The principal authors of this stereotype were well-heeled “globe-trotters” who began including Japan in their itineraries in the 1870s. Disembarking from their luxuriously appointed steamships, these visitors often felt themselves to be “Gullivers strolling through a Lilliputian Japanese fairyland” where everything— people, houses, trees—was charmingly miniaturized. 13 The travel literature from the period abounds in references to the Japanese as a “race of children,” an impression reinforced by their diminutive stature compared to Westerners and their “childlike” indifference to public nudity. The historian Henry Adams, who toured Japan in 1886 with his friend John La Farge, observed, for example, that “this is a child’s country. Men, women and children are taken out of the fairy books. . . . Life is a dream, and in Japan one dreams of the nursery.” 14 Could such a “race of children” realistically aspire to become the equals of “adult” Westerners? Percival Lowell—the Boston Brahmin and polymath who famously discovered “canals” on Mars—thought not and explained why in his influential 1888 book The Soul of the Far East. Looking at the Japanese through the “scientific” lens of Social Darwinism, Lowell wrote that they presented an “interesting case of partially arrested development.” They certainly were not primitives or savages—even “tea-house girls are models of refinement, and common coolies, when not at work, play chess as a pastime.” Rather, the problem was that “they are still in that childish state of development before self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet simplicity of nature.” 15 For all their charm, courtesy, and artistic talent, Lowell explained, the Japanese lacked “personality,” or a sense of an autonomous self. They therefore could only imitate, not create, and were incapable of grasping the principles of modern science, or competing with individualistic, “imaginative” Westerners. They were, in short, precocious children, but children nonetheless, and would remain so. Lowell’s analysis of Japanese “national character,” one of the first to employ social science concepts, was, in a sense, an update of the Oriental Despotism theory of earlier writers. They had argued that the tyranny of law and custom stunted the capacity for change and innovation, and turned Japanese into “automatons.” For Lowell, the mechanisms of Japanese “retardation” were biology and evolution. Lowell might have modified his views about Japanese imitativeness and lack of individuality had he been better informed about the society he was trying to describe. He was, for example, oblivious of the core Meiji value of individual ambition and success—“making something of oneself”—which was reflected in the enormous popularity of Samuel Smiles’s tract Self-

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Help. 16 What Lowell and other observers took to be blind mimicry of the West, moreover, was in fact a purposeful and selective process of borrowing and adaptation in which indigenous and Western values, practices, and institutions were creatively combined. The Meiji monarchy, simultaneously a “traditional” and “modern” construct, is a prime example. “AN ORIENTAL PUZZLE” Yet another stereotype of Japan that gained currency during the 1870s and 1880s was that it was a “queer, contradictory, upside down sort of country,” as a British writer put it. 17 Books on Japan such Lowell’s often began with a list of ways in which the Japanese not only behaved differently from Westerners but in a diametrically opposite fashion. They spoke backwards, read backwards, and wrote backwards, Lowell noted. Moreover, they laughed when sad, smiled when angry, and were impassive when agitated. The list of such “contrarieties” also included other paradoxes. Thus, they were said to be simultaneously effeminate and manly, polite and insolent, and lewd and prudish. What was one to make of such puzzling behavior? For some it was droll and amusing. Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado (1885)—which was a hit in America as well as Britain—depicted the Japanese as comic aliens from an Alice-in-Wonderland world. “Our attitude’s queer and quaint—You’re wrong if you think it ain’t,” sang its faux Japanese characters. (The target of such satire was the British court and aristocracy, though this was probably not obvious to American audiences.) Not everyone, however, was amused. Henry Adams, for example, found the “meaningless laughter” he everywhere encountered in Japan disconcerting and irksome. Former secretary of state Seward, who toured Japan in 1870, wondered if the extraordinary politeness of the Japanese masked a “measure of cunning and even possible cruelty.” 18 Many visitors were untroubled by the “antipodal” behavior of the Japanese; indeed, it was an integral part of the picturesque “theme park” they supposed Japan to be. They were less apt to focus on the peculiarity than the charm of the Japanese as exemplified by cute children, smiling kimono-clad women, and the elaborate courtesy displayed by virtually everyone. Seward’s adopted daughter, who accompanied him on his visit to Japan, expressed a typical reaction when she commented in amazement that “we saw not one act of rudeness, and heard not one word of ill-temper.” 19

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A VANISHING ARCADIA No one catered to Americans’ inclination to see Japan as a charming fantasy land more successfully than British-born Lafcadio Hearn who established himself as America’s most popular writer on Japan in the 1890s. Hearn aimed to capture the “race-spirit” of the Japanese, which he believed was embodied in their traditional customs and beliefs. He was not an academic ethnologist; rather, he was a literary man with a self-described taste for “the Odd, the Queer, the Strange, the Exotic, the Monstrous.” 20 A onetime crime reporter in Cincinnati, he arrived in Japan in 1890 seeking inspiration for his art and found it. He remained there until his death in 1904, marrying a Japanese woman, adopting a Japanese name, and even taking Japanese citizenship. The titles of Hearn’s books suggest what intrigued him and his readers about Japan: Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life (1896), Japanese Fairy Tales (1898), In Ghostly Japan (1899), and Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1903). These books were collections of essays and stories, based partly on his personal observations but mainly on Japanese folktales and legends. Hearn pictured the Old Japan as an idyllic Arcadia in which people lived harmoniously with one another and communed with nature and the gods. The closest Western analogy was ancient Greece—or rather what was imagined to be ancient Greece. “How marvelously,” he wrote, “does this world resemble antique Greece—not merely in its legends and the more joyous phases of its faith, but in all its graces of art and its senses of beauty.” 21 It pained him that this world was fast giving way before the advance of the soulless, materialistic civilization of the West. For many, no aspect of Hearn’s vanishing Arcadia was more attractive than its women. Demure, refined, loyal, and obedient, they were, he opined, “the most wonderful aesthetic products of Japan,” adding that “perhaps no such type of woman will appear in the world for a hundred thousand years.” 22 Not everyone was so enthralled, however. The dyspeptic Henry Adams, for example, commented that “the women all laugh, but they are obviously wooden dolls, badly made, and can only cackle, clatter in patterns over asphalt pavements in railway stations, and hop and slide in heel-less straw sandals across floors. I have not yet seen a woman with any mechanism better than that of a five-dollar wax doll.” 23 Adams’s dismissive view was, however, in the minority. Americans’ fascination with Japanese women was reflected in the vogue of popular “novels of desertion” in the 1890s and early 1900s. 24 These novels turned on temporary “marriages” between Japanese women and European and American naval officers, who invariably abandoned them when they left Japan—the taboo against interracial marriage at the time precluded any other outcome. The prototype of the genre was the French writer Pierre Loti’s

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Figure 2.1. Madame Butterfly played by American opera star Geraldine Farrar, 1908. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

autobiographical Madame Chrysanthemum (1887). Loti made no secret of his contempt for such women, dismissing them as disposable and contemptible playthings. But later novels and stage adaptations endowed the griefstricken women with dignity and nobility. In Giacomo Puccini’s famous 1904 opera Madame Butterfly, for example, the geisha (courtesan) protagonist becomes a tragic heroine who commits suicide after being spurned by her American lover. The Madame Butterfly myth would prove remarkably

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long-lived, as indeed would other late-nineteenth-century American stereotypes of the Japanese. NOTES 1. Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 358. 2. George B. Sansom, The Western World and Japan: A Study in the Interaction of European and Asiatic Cultures (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 385. 3. Iriye, Across the Pacific, 25–26. 4. William Eleroy Curtis, The Yankees of the East: Sketches of Modern Japan (New York: Duffield and Co., 1906). 5. Cited in Iriye, Across the Pacific, 31. 6. Neu, The Troubled Encounter, 21. 7. Robert Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 87. 8. William E. Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1903), 570. 9. Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire, 7. 10. Littlewood, The Idea of Japan, 81. 11. Christopher Benfey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics and the Opening of Japan (New York: Random House, 2003), 70, 76, 136. 12. Griffis, The Mikado’s Empire, 7. 13. Joseph M. Henning, Outposts of Civilization: Race, Religion and the Formative Years of American–Japanese Relations (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 54. 14. Quoted in Ashmead, The Idea of Japan 1853–1895, 518. 15. Percival Lowell, The Soul of the Far East (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), 7–8. 16. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan, 461–62. 17. Littlewood, The Idea of Japan, 10. 18. Cited in Dulles, Yankees and Samurai, 234, 240. 19. Dulles, Yankees and Samurai, 234. 20. Rosenstone, Mirror in the Shine, 80. 21. Quoted in Carl Dawson, Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1992), 16. 22. Quoted in John Hunter Boyle, Modern Japan: The American Nexus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), 110. 23. Quoted in Benfey, The Great Wave, 150. 24. Earl Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 48.

Chapter Three

Confronting Imperial Japan, 1905–1920

Accustomed to thinking of Japan as a land of gentle aesthetes and respectful pupils of the West, Americans were shocked by its unexpected 1905 victory over Russia in fierce land and naval battles. Viewing the Japanese through the prism of the then-popular notion of the “Yellow Peril,” many concluded that they were a superficially Westernized warrior people who posed a mortal threat to the West in general and America in particular. Californians saw the “threat from Japan” chiefly in terms of an influx of Japanese immigrants, whom they regarded as the advance guard of a Japanese “invasion.” Other Americans were alarmed by Japan’s aggressive expansion in China, Siberia, and the Pacific during World War I. By the early 1920s, Japan and the United States were locked in a seemingly intractable confrontation over immigration and foreign policy issues, which were made all the more dangerous by a spiraling naval race between them. A war scare—the third to roil U.S.–Japan relations since 1906—seemed to have more substance than its predecessors. THE RISE OF IMPERIAL JAPAN It was perhaps inevitable that Meiji Japan would seek to use its newfound military and industrial power to build a European-style colonial empire. As noted in the previous chapter, its leaders saw the late-nineteenth-century world in dog-eat-dog terms and considered the European imperialists to be the top dogs. Unless Japan joined the “winners,” it risked becoming one of the “losers.” Avoiding the latter fate was, after all, what Meiji modernization was all about. Moreover, the leading European nation-states against which the Japanese measured themselves—France, Britain, and Germany—all had 37

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overseas empires and were enlarging them at the expense of “lesser breeds” in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The Europeans regarded the acquisition of colonies and dependencies as a demonstration of their national virility and prowess, and their Japanese understudies did not wish to be perceived as laggards in this regard. The Japanese were also aware of the potential value of colonies as markets and sources of raw materials, but the embryonic state of their industrial economy made this a minor consideration. The Meiji leaders had other, more specific reasons for joining the scramble for empire. The French, British, and Dutch were carving up Southeast Asia, and the Russians were swallowing Central Asia. It seemed only a matter of time before they turned their attention to Northeast Asia where the decrepit and backward-looking Confucian monarchies of China and Korea offered an inviting power vacuum. True, the Chinese had embarked on a program of military “self-strengthening,” but their defeat by France in 1885 revealed its inadequacy. Korea was even weaker and more reactionary, and Japanese efforts to support Korean Westernizers proved unavailing. Korea’s geographic proximity—it was only ninety miles away across the Tsushima Strait—made it an object of particular concern to Japanese strategists, who feared that Japan’s security would be imperiled if one or another of the imperialist powers gained control of it. The most likely candidate was Russia, which began building the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1891 with the obvious intention of using it to project power in the region. Asserting Japanese primacy in Korea—or at least denying it to a potential hostile power—thus became one of Meiji Japan’s top foreign policy objectives. Ch’ing China initially posed the chief obstacle, invoking its traditional suzerain rights over its erstwhile Korean tributary in an effort to convert it into a Chinese satellite. Rather than risk a war with China it was unprepared to fight, Tokyo reluctantly acquiesced in 1885 to a modus vivendi which gave the Chinese the upper hand, and bided its time. By the mid-1890s, the Japanese judged that the military balance had swung far enough in their favor to risk a showdown with China over Korea. To the surprise of European observers, who held an inflated estimate of Chinese military capabilities, the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–1895 resulted in a quick and lopsided Japanese victory. At relatively little cost in blood and treasure, Japan’s efficient Western-style army and navy handily defeated the Chinese on land and at sea, forcing them to retreat from Korea and fall back toward Peking, which the Japanese probably could have captured if they had chosen to do so. The Japanese translated their success on the battlefield into important gains at the peace table, compelling the chastened Chinese to abandon Korea, pay a large war indemnity, grant them unequal treaty privileges, and cede Taiwan and the strategic Liaotung Peninsula in southern Manchuria. In grasping for Liaotung, however, they overreached. In the so-called Triple Intervention of 1895, Russia—which coveted the peninsula and its naval

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base of Port Arthur (Lushun)—lined up German and French backing for a nonnegotiable demand that Japan return it to China. Japan’s humiliation was complete in 1898 when the Russians induced China to give them a lease on Liaotung and Port Arthur. Nevertheless, the Japanese retained Taiwan which became the nucleus of their new colonial empire. They also used the Chinese indemnity to build a modern iron and steel complex. Perhaps more importantly, they began to be seen as significant players in imperialist power politics. In the aftermath of the Sino–Japanese War, Russia replaced China as Japan’s chief rival in Korea, and both proceeded to fish for advantage in the troubled waters of Korean domestic politics. The Russians meanwhile advanced into Manchuria, first acquiring Liaotung and then linking it to the Trans-Siberian system via the South Manchuria Railway. These moves alarmed the Japanese who saw them as threatening their position in Korea. A collision might have been averted if the Russians had been willing to trade Korea for Manchuria, but the tsar’s government—viewing the upstart Japanese with contempt—refused to accept such a deal. Resigned to having to fight another war over Korea, this time against a major European power, the Japanese undertook a naval and military buildup and guarded their diplomatic flank by concluding a military alliance with Britain in 1902. (The British were also alarmed by Russian expansion and viewed Japan as a useful counterweight.) The 1904–1905 Russo–Japanese War was a high-stakes gamble for the Japanese. Outnumbered and outgunned, they were given little chance against the Russians. But the latter were hampered by logistical problems, inept leadership, and domestic unrest. The Japanese bottled up Russia’s Far Eastern Fleet in Port Arthur and, in the naval Battle of Tsushima, annihilated its Baltic Fleet which had sailed around the world in a vain effort to reinforce it. The ground war, which was fought mainly in Manchuria, proved to be an inconclusive attritional struggle which prefigured World War I. The Japanese captured Port Arthur and southern Manchuria but sustained heavy casualties, losing more than 100,000 of the million men they mobilized. 1 Although the Russians also suffered heavy losses and were repeatedly pushed back, they were not decisively defeated. Indeed, had the war dragged on much longer, they might have prevailed over the exhausted Japanese. In any case, both sides sought a negotiated settlement. In the Portsmouth Peace Treaty, which was mediated by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, Russia transferred to Japan southern Sakhalin, the Liaotung leasehold, and the South Manchurian Railway, and conceded it a free hand in Korea. (The Japanese promptly imposed a protectorate over that unfortunate country and—faced with Korean recalcitrance—went on to annex it in 1910.) The Japanese public, having been led to believe by the government and press that their armies had won an unbroken string of great

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victories, expected much more, and angry mobs briefly plunged Tokyo into chaos when the terms of the treaty became known. Still, Japan was widely recognized as the winner and the first East Asian country to defeat a European power. The shock waves of this unprecedented and unexpected event, which shattered the myth of “white” invincibility, went around the world, inspiring both anxiety and hope. The Russo–Japanese War altered the geopolitics of East Asia and the West’s view of Japan. The latter was now seen as a full-fledged member of the “imperialist club,” with a substantial colonial empire embracing Taiwan, Korea, South Sakhalin, and southern Manchuria. It was also recognized as East Asia’s leading military and naval power, a position enhanced by Britain’s decision to withdraw many of its warships from the region to meet the growing German naval challenge in Europe. Moreover, Japanese soldiers and sailors were universally acknowledged to have proved themselves a match for Europeans in all aspects of modern warfare. “Imperial Japan” was, in short, a force to be reckoned with. THE “YELLOW PERIL” Most Americans applauded Japan’s victories over China and Russia, viewing it as the standard-bearer of Western civilization against the forces of tyranny and reaction. Widely considered the underdog in both conflicts, the Japanese “David” had, in American eyes, triumphed over Oriental and Slavic “Goliaths.” Yet within a year or so of the end of Russo–Japanese War, the United States was gripped by a war scare inspired by a putative “threat from Japan.” This uproar was in part manufactured by the rabidly anti-Japanese Hearst press, which took the lead in disseminating fantastic and patently false rumors about the alleged activities of Japanese “spies” and a supposed influx of Japanese “fifth columnists”—demobilized soldiers disguised as immigrants—into Hawaii and California. Although the hysteria soon subsided, a residue of fear and suspicion persisted. During the next fifteen years, there would be recurrent war scares and diplomatic rows between Tokyo and Washington. Clearly, a sea change had occurred in American attitudes toward the Japanese. There had been earlier friction with Japan, notably over the U.S. annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines in 1898. (American strategists and naval officers believed, not entirely without reason, that the Japanese harbored designs on both.) But such friction hardly explains the war scare of 1906–1907. A more likely source was the myth of the “Yellow Peril”—the idea that hordes of bloodthirsty Orientals were bent on driving Westerners out of East Asia and overrunning their homelands. Although Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm is often credited with popularizing this fanciful notion, its

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diffusion probably owed more to fin de siècle anxieties about Western “decadence” and the ominous “awakening” of semi-civilized and warlike Orientals. 2 Yellow Peril fears initially focused on the Chinese whose anti-Western outrages, especially during the 1899–1900 Boxer Uprising, gave them some credibility. In the run-up to the Russo–Japanese War, however, Russian propagandists tried to refocus such fears on the Japanese. Why did Americans identify the Japanese with the Yellow Peril? After all, they had been accustomed to viewing them as eager and respectful pupils of the West for more than thirty years. One might speculate that the astonishing spectacle of “Orientals” trouncing Europeans in the Russo–Japanese War was behind this attitudinal shift. Take, for example, President Roosevelt. Something of a Japanophile before the war—he was an avid practitioner of judo and counted prominent Japanese among his friends—he was taken aback and deeply troubled by Japanese victories, confiding to associates that “most certainly the Japanese soldiers and sailors have shown themselves to be terrible foes. There can be none more dangerous.” 3 In Roosevelt’s view, the Japanese were not only dangerous but hostile to whites. In another revealing aside, for example, he commented that he had “no doubt” that the Japanese disliked “all white men” and believed “their own yellow civilization to be better.” 4 During the war itself, there was little sign of a popular backlash against Japan. On the contrary, press coverage emphasized the “gallantry” of Japanese troops. Americans’ understanding of the battlefield prowess of the Japanese was shaped by Inazo Nitobe’s influential book Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1899), which went through ten editions by 1905. Nitobe, an American-educated Quaker who devoted his life to promoting Japanese–American friendship, argued that modern Japanese had inherited the martial ethos and values of the samurai Bushido code or “Way of the Warrior.” As expounded by Nitobe, Bushido was “synonymous with all the virtues—politeness, benevolence, loyalty, honour—that (he) wished to claim for Japanese society at its best.” 5 Japanese soldiers were, in other words, contemporary incarnations of idealized medieval “knights.” Japan’s warrior ethos was, however, subject to less benign interpretations. One Western observer of Japanese troops in action in Manchuria, for example, wrote of their “uncanny wild bravery, incomprehensible to the European mind, which sets the value of the individual at nought.” 6 Another mused in a similar vein that Japan won the war because “her ranks are packed with men who would rip themselves up rather than suffer defeat, and to whom life is not a matter worth a moment’s consideration.” 7 These observers were appalled by suicidal Japanese “human wave” assaults against Russian machine guns and artillery during the siege of Port Arthur. One might question, however, whether the “uncanny bravery” of the Japanese differed from that manifested by Americans in Civil War battles or the British at the Somme in 1916.

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Like “normal” soldiers, moreover, Japanese sometimes broke under fire, surrendered in hopeless situations, treated prisoners humanely, and even at times fraternized with their foes. 8 Be that as it may, the notion that the Japanese exhibited a “peculiar” ferocity and indifference to death caught on after the war and became a major theme of “threat from Japan” literature such as Homer Lea’s popular The Valor of Ignorance (1909). For writers like Lea, the Japanese were not fully westernized; rather, they had merely grafted Western technology onto their “primitive” warrior tradition. This made them a truly frightening adversary— a high-tech version of Genghis Khan’s rampaging Mongol hordes. In Lea’s view, war with Japan was inevitable and Americans were certain to lose unless they restored their own martial spirit, which had eroded due to the influx of foreign-born immigrants. THE JAPANESE “INVASION” To most Americans, the threat from Japan was an abstraction, but to Californians, it was a clear and present danger. Between 1901 and 1908, some 127,000 Japanese immigrated to the United States, mostly to California and other West Coast states. The vast majority were young male laborers who quickly became the target of intense hostility, especially in California. This was only to be expected. Having persecuted Chinese immigrants for decades, Californians were not inclined to welcome another influx of culturally alien “little brown men,” who they felt menaced their womenfolk and took jobs from local working men. In the eyes of many, moreover, the newcomers were the advance guard of a feared Japanese “invasion.” 9 Japanese immigrants initially settled in cities like San Francisco where they congregated in enclaves known as “Japantowns,” the counterparts of “Chinatowns.” Most whites viewed these enclaves as pools of cheap labor and dens of prostitution, gambling, and crime. A 1905 resolution of the California legislature, for example, described their inhabitants as “immoral, intemperate, and quarrelsome men, bound to labor for a pittance, and to subsist on a supply with which a white man can hardly sustain life.” 10 Although such stereotypes were grossly distorted and not universally held— some thought Japanese “sober and industrious”—they had a kernel of truth. Observers from Japan found Japantowns depressing places where one was apt to encounter “vagabonds” who whiled away their time in drinking establishments and brothels. 11 One type of Japanese immigrant who caught the fancy of Americans was the so-called “schoolboy”—young men who came to America in hopes of learning English and attending school, but who ended up as working as domestics and menials. The archetype was “Mr. Togo,” a thirty-five-year-old

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“boy” who spoke broken English and worked as a “maid” for an American family. The creation of the writer Wallace Irwin, Mr. Togo was depicted as “a buck-toothed, ever-smiling, ultra-polite but crafty ‘Jap,’” who dispensed humorous observations on current events. 12 Irwin’s popular Mr. Togo: Maid of All Work (1913) inspired a 1917 Hollywood comedy, Hashimura Togo, suggesting that comical caricatures of Japanese from the Gilbert and Sullivan era had not lost their appeal. To Californians, however, there was nothing amusing about Japanese immigrants, particularly when they established themselves as successful truck farmers and began to bring in wives from Japan. Golden State Japanophobes discerned a dual threat in these developments—a Japanese population explosion which would “Japanize” the state, and a Japanese takeover of California’s agriculture. Irwin, a convinced Yellow Perilist, helped raise the alarm with his 1921 novel Seed of the Sun. Set in California’s Central Valley, it portrayed Japanese as aggressive land grabbers, directed by the suave and sinister “Baron Tazumi,” a former Japanese army officer who was charged with implementing Tokyo’s plans for world domination. 13 Between 1905 and 1924, California politicians—wholly indifferent to the damage they were doing to U.S.–Japan relations—agitated for the exclusion

Figure 3.1. Anti-Japanese demonstrator in Los Angeles, early 1920s. Source: Corbis Images

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of Japanese immigrants, and heaped indignities and disabilities on Japanese residents in their state. Next to imposing a total ban on Japanese immigrants and depriving U.S.-born Japanese of citizenship rights, their main goal was to deny Japanese the right to own or lease land. In 1913 and 1920, the state legislature passed laws to this end, sparking diplomatic rows and war scares with Japan. But the initial instigator of trouble was the San Francisco Board of Education, which in October 1906 issued an order segregating Japanese schoolchildren in the city’s schools, a move that triggered the war scare and diplomatic crisis of 1906–1907. “ROOSEVELTIAN REALISM” Many East Coast opinion leaders deplored the blatant racism of California exclusionists, which they felt gratuitously insulted Japan and inflamed bilateral tensions. As one New York newspaper put it, “if somebody has to fight Japan, why not let California bear the whole burden of the war?” 14 But few disputed the exclusionists’ claim that Japanese were too alien to be assimilated in the American “melting pot.” Roosevelt, for example, privately sympathized with exclusionists, characterizing Japanese immigrants as an “entirely distinct alien mass” who posed a “serious problem” for “our laboring classes.” 15 The president, however, publicly distanced himself from the fearmongering of exclusionists and Yellow Perilists, and fretted over the “folly” of insulting this “jealous, sensitive, and warlike” nation by excluding their citizens and treating them as an “immoral, degraded, and worthless race.” There was, he thought, a real danger that Japan “if irritated could at once take both the Philippines and Hawaii from us.” 16 Roosevelt hoped to defuse tensions with Japan through a combination of firmness and conciliation. His top priority was resolving the immigration dispute. The U.S.–Japan “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1907 appeared to do this, at least temporarily. Under its terms, the Japanese government agreed to “voluntarily” restrict the immigration of laborers to the continental United States. There was, however, a loophole: the wives and other family members of those already in the United States would be permitted to join them. This set the stage for the entry of steady stream of so-called “picture brides”— women in arranged marriages—which infuriated Californians and contributed to a jump in the number of the state’s adult Japanese residents from 33,000 in 1910 to 48,000 in 1920. 17 A second element of Roosevelt’s strategy was to restrain Japan’s “military party” by a show of force. Here he was playing a weak hand. Although the U.S. Navy was larger than its Japanese counterpart, it was concentrated in the Atlantic, leaving the Philippines and Hawaii vulnerable. War Plan Orange—the 1906 U.S. blueprint for fighting a hypothetical war against

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Japan—assumed that the Philippines were indefensible and would quickly fall to the Japanese, prompting Roosevelt’s famous characterization of the islands as America’s “Heel of Achilles.” If he was unable to remedy U.S. weakness in the Western Pacific, he nonetheless hoped to demonstrate American power and determination by sending sixteen battleships (“The Great White Fleet”) on an around-the-world goodwill cruise in 1907–1909, which pointedly included a stop in Japan. Perhaps Roosevelt’s chief contribution to stabilizing U.S.–Japan relations was his encouragement of Japan’s continental expansion in hopes of diverting it from the Philippines and Hawaii. To this end, he readily acquiesced in Japan’s takeover of Korea and—in the Root–Takahira Agreement of 1908— its sphere of interest in southern Manchuria. He saw no contradiction between the latter move and the preceding McKinley administration’s 1899–1900 “Open Door” principles, which enjoined respect for Chinese territorial integrity and equality of commercial opportunity. For Roosevelt, these principles implied no U.S. obligation to defend China. Nor did he consider the relatively minor American economic stake in Manchuria worth challenging Japan’s special position there as long as a fig leaf of Chinese sovereignty and equal opportunity was preserved. SPARRING OVER CHINA Roosevelt’s successors, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, reversed his policy of accommodating Japan at China’s expense, and instead committed the United States to act as China’s protector against Japanese imperialist encroachments. What explains this turnabout? Economic considerations seem to have played little role. U.S. exports to China averaged only about 1 percent of total American exports between 1909 and 1919; Japan was far more important as a destination for U.S. exports and investments during this period. Rather, the operative motives were moral and ideological—the perceived “awakening” of China to republican and democratic ideals, and the conviction that America had a self-appointed “mission” to mentor and support its transformation. Taft and his secretary of state, Philander Knox, sought to aid China by providing American loans and investments—an approach they called “dollar diplomacy.” Their most ambitious undertaking was the Knox Neutralization Scheme of 1909 under which a U.S.-led banking consortium would loan the Chinese government money to buy out Russian and Japanese railways in Manchuria. This transparent attempt to break up Japan’s railway monopoly, the economic basis of its sphere of interest, foundered on combined Russian, Japanese, and British resistance. But the episode put Tokyo on notice that U.S. toleration of its continental ambitions had ended, and that conflict over

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China would join the simmering immigration dispute as a divisive bilateral issue. Wilson was even more determined to help China and restrain Japan, so it is hardly surprising that U.S.–Japan tensions escalated during World War I as Japan seized the opportunity offered by the weakening of European power in East Asia to achieve a dominant position in China. Entering the war on the side of its British ally, Japan quickly seized Germany’s leasehold in Shantung Province as well as its holdings in Micronesia. Then, in early 1915, Tokyo presented China’s feeble republican government with the so-called Twenty-One Demands, which were intended to solidify Japan’s position in Manchuria and Shantung, and impose what amounted to a protectorate over the rest of China. Persuaded by British protests to withdraw the most extreme demands, the Japanese contented themselves with fishing for political and economic concessions in the troubled waters of Chinese warlord politics. The Twenty-One Demands outraged Wilson, who refused to recognize any Sino–Japanese arrangement that violated the Open Door—a stance that prefigured the U.S. nonrecognition doctrine of the 1930s—and revived Taft’s encouragement of American loans to China in hopes of weakening Japan’s economic dominance. But these initiatives merely irritated the Japanese. After the United States entered the war in 1917, Wilson found it necessary to paper over his differences with his new Japanese “ally.” In the Lansing-Ishii Agreement, the United States acknowledged Japan’s “special interests” in China in return for a pledge to respect the Open Door. Tokyo interpreted this as American recognition of its “paramount interests” in China, prompting Chinese nationalists to denounce the agreement as a “sellout.” 18 Wilson’s efforts to restrain Japanese expansion suffered another setback in 1918 when the Japanese exploited their participation in Allied intervention in Siberia to set up anti-Bolshevik puppet states with a view to detaching this resource-rich region from Russia and incorporating it into their empire. The 1919 Paris Peace Conference brought an even worse defeat for Wilson. He went to Paris determined to pressure Japan into returning Shantung to China, only to be forced to back down by its threat to walk out of the conference and boycott his proposed League of Nations. The Shantung debacle “became the most unpopular and vulnerable aspect of the peace settlement in the United States, one that was eagerly seized on by opponents of the Versailles Treaty to whip up popular opposition to the President’s postwar plans.” 19 THE “PRUSSIA OF THE FAR EAST” As the Wilson era ended in 1920–1921, U.S.–Japan relations reached their nadir. As in 1906 and 1913, anti-Japanese moves by Californians provoked outrage in Japan and a war scare. This time, however, the situation was more

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dangerous. Washington and Tokyo were at loggerheads over Shantung, Siberia, and the Anglo–Japanese Alliance—which Americans saw as giving cover to Japanese aggression. Moreover, the two nations were now locked in a naval race. In 1916, the United States embarked on a massive naval building program, and three years later shifted much of its growing fleet to the Pacific. In 1920, Japan responded in kind by undertaking a naval buildup of its own. Heightened tensions with Japan gave rise to a new wave of Yellow Peril books such as Frederick McCormick’s The Menace of Japan (1917) and Sidney Osborne’s The New Japanese Peril (1921). These writers argued that Japan’s growing military and naval power and ongoing absorption of China and Siberia made it even more dangerous, increasing the likelihood of a Pacific war and a Japanese invasion of Hawaii and the West Coast. Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon by releasing in 1917 the Hearst-financed film Patria, which depicted Japanese troops, aided by Mexicans and Japanese-American fifth columnists, overrunning California in an orgy of rape, murder, and looting. 20 The Japan-as-Yellow Peril image was meanwhile updated. Rather than being seen merely as semi-Westernized warriors, they were now pictured as “Prussianized” ones. As a State Department official put it in 1919, “the spirit of Japan is that of Prussia, whom the Japanese leaders openly admire and whose government they chose for a model.” 21 Valentine McClatchy, a prominent California exclusionist, helped to popularize this notion in his influential 1920 tract The Germany of Asia. McClatchy professed to admire the Japanese as a people. The problem, he claimed, was their adoption of “militaristic” German models and methods, which had led them to embark on a “relentless and implacable” campaign of imperial expansion at China’s and America’s expense. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, was more blunt: Japan, he declared in 1919, was the “Prussia of the Far East” and the “coming danger of the world.” 22 Was Japan in fact a clone of Imperial Germany? True, the Meiji leaders admired it as “the vanguard of modernity and had forged a state on the foundation of empire, arms, and authoritarian rule in imitation of Kaiser Wilhelm.” 23 It is also true that there was strong pro-German sentiment in Japan during the war. But Japan was no Germany. It lacked, for example, a junker aristocracy or a colorful autocrat like Wilhelm. (Japan’s wartime emperor, the son of Meiji, was mentally ill and had to be shrouded from public view.) Japan’s political system, moreover, proved more hospitable to the development of popularly elected political parties. Indeed, by 1918 proWestern party politicians were displacing German-oriented militarists as the effective rulers of the country. Some American observers recognized this political shift and hailed it as marking the dawn of a new era of Western-style liberalism and democracy. The educator and philosopher John Dewey, for example, reported in 1919

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that “liberalism is in the air” and predicted that “Japan will move steadily toward democracy.” 24 Dewey’s optimism was shared by American businessmen, particularly those with interests in Japan. In their view, “it is clear that Japan is to move steadily on in the way of a trained and established democracy.” Japan-based missionaries, and the U.S. church groups that supported them, also welcomed what they saw as Japan’s turn toward democracy and liberalism. The ideals of the Japanese, enthused one missionary, were “approaching more and more the ideals of America.” 25 NOTES 1. Kenneth B. Pyle, The Making of Modern Japan (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1996), 141. 2. Akira Iriye, “Imperialism in East Asia” in Modern East Asia: Essays in Interpretation, ed. James B. Crowley (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), 131–32. 3. Quoted in Benfey, The Great Wave, 258. 4. Quoted in Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 28. 5. Littlewood, The Idea of Japan, 185. 6. Quoted in Endymion Wilkinson, Japan Versus the West: Images and Reality (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 126. 7. Littlewood, The Idea of Japan, 37. 8. Geoffrey Jukes, The Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1905 (Oxford, UK: Osprey Publishing, 2002), 43, 68, 89. 9. Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 1, 25, 70. 10. Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 27. 11. Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 107–8. 12. Neumann, America Encounters Japan, 127. 13. Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 92. 14. Cited in Neumann, America Encounters Japan, 125–26. 15. Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 35. 16. Benfey, The Great Wave, 258. 17. Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 44, 82. 18. Neumann, America Encounters Japan, 149. 19. Neu, The Troubled Encounter, 99. 20. Boyle, Modern Japan: The American Nexus, 150. 21. Iriye, Across the Pacific, 140. 22. Quoted in Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.–Japanese Relations throughout History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 126. 23. Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Reinvention: Japan in the Great War, 1914–1919 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3. 24. Quoted in James L. McClain, Japan: A Modern History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 328. 25. Cited in Sadao Asada, Culture Shock and Japanese-American Relations: Historical Essays (Colombia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 41, 45.

Chapter Four

Embracing Liberal Japan, 1921–1931

In the early 1920s, the storm clouds hanging over U.S.–Japan relations since 1905 suddenly lifted, bringing an unanticipated “era of good feeling.” At the 1921–1922 Washington Naval Conference, Japan agreed to withdraw from Siberia, pull back in China, participate in naval arms limitation, terminate the Anglo–Japanese Alliance, and uphold a new, U.S.-designed cooperative order in East Asia. Despite ill will in Japan generated by the 1924 Japanese Exclusion Act, Americans were encouraged by Japan’s adherence to the Washington settlement and its embrace of Western democracy and liberalism. American visitors were impressed by the glittering Westernized facade of “Jazz Age Japan,” and rediscovered the exotic attractions of the “Old Japan.” Few had more than an inkling of the explosive tensions that were building up in Japanese society or the precarious political ascendancy of the pro-Western party politicians who dominated Japan’s government during the decade. THE WASHINGTON SETTLEMENT As described in the previous chapter, an ominous naval race, the simmering immigration dispute, and diplomatic wrangling over China, Siberia, and a host of lesser issues made the prognosis for U.S.–Japan relations decidedly bleak at the beginning of the 1920s. Yet, in only a few months of high-level negotiations in late 1921 and early 1922, most of these issues were resolved to the mutual satisfaction of Tokyo and Washington. At a stroke, Japan and America moved from confrontation to détente, and from hostility to friend-

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ship—or so it seemed to most people at the time. What explains this turnaround? The decisive factor seems to have been the common interest of Japanese and American leaders in ending their financially ruinous naval race. In the United States, the ascendant Republican Party, having led the fight against Wilson’s Versailles Treaty and League of Nations, was under the gun to make a positive contribution to peace and disarmament, particularly given mounting public demands for a cutback in naval expenditures. In late 1920, Senator William Borah introduced a resolution calling for a 50 percent reduction in the naval building programs of the United States, Japan, and Britain. This hugely popular initiative pushed the incoming administration of Warren Harding to try to reach a settlement with Japan. Fortunately for Harding, the Japanese were receptive. Their navy had concluded that its building program was beyond the country’s financial capabilities. As the navy minister ruefully acknowledged, “even if we should try to compete with the United States, it is a foregone conclusion that we are simply not up to it.” 1 Japan, in other words, could not keep up and faced being eclipsed by America’s growing naval power in the Pacific. There was thus no alternative to seeking naval arms limitation agreement. But what price would the Americans demand, and how far should Japan go to meet it? The nation’s civilian and military leaders were divided. Hardliners were unwilling to offer much. But the pragmatic, business-oriented party politicians who dominated the cabinet were prepared to make extensive concessions in pursuit of a comprehensive settlement with the United States. This was exactly what Harding and his secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, had in mind. They recognized that ending the naval race required resolving the impasse over Shantung, Manchuria, Siberia, and the Anglo–Japanese Alliance. It would also, in their view, require the participation of the China, Britain, France, and others with a significant stake in East Asia—though not the Soviet Union which they regarded as a pariah state. So Harding convened the multilateral Washington Naval Conference in November 1921 with the ambitious goal of settling the “problems of the Pacific.” The Japanese attended reluctantly, fearing that the Americans might publicly pillory them for their imperialist policies. They need not have worried, as Hughes treated them with great tact and respect. He was aware of their desire for a naval arms limitation agreement and knew something of their internal divisions. (Among other sources of information, he had access to decrypted intercepts of Japanese diplomatic cable traffic to and from the United States.) He recognized that the success or failure of the conference would hinge on whether he could win the trust of Japanese moderates and provide them with a package deal they could sell in Tokyo in the face of likely opposition from hardline nationalists.

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Hughes opened the conference with a “bombshell” proposal for a ten-year moratorium on the construction of new battleships and a 10:10:6 capital ship ratio among the United States, Britain, and Japan. This was a political masterstroke insofar as it evoked enthusiastic public support at home and abroad, putting the Japanese in the position of spoilers if they refused. They had come to Washington determined to hold out for a 10:10:7 ratio, but backed down in return for British and American commitments not to fortify their possessions east of Singapore and west of Hawaii. The resulting Five-Power Treaty, which included France and Italy, ended the U.S.–Japan naval race. Although many Japanese were angered by their “inferior” ratio, those in the know understood that the Five-Power Treaty gave them naval supremacy in the Western Pacific, immunizing them from the threat of Western military intervention. Hughes demanded and got several quid pro quos from the Japanese. One was the abrogation of the Anglo–Japanese Alliance, which Americans had long considered a license for Japanese aggression. Britain and Japan reluctantly agreed to replace it with a toothless Four-Power Pact under which the United States, Britain, France, and Japan agreed to “consult” as necessary. As Senator Lodge succinctly put it, Hughes “substituted a four-power agreement to talk for a two-power agreement to fight.” 2 Perhaps more significantly, the secretary secured a Japanese promise of good behavior in China. This promise was implicit in the terms of the Nine-Power Treaty which obliged the signatories—all the powers with significant treaty rights in China—to respect Open Door principles by refraining from further encroachments on Chinese sovereignty and supporting the evolution of a stable and effective republican government. The Nine-Power Treaty greatly disappointed the Chinese, since it left intact the existing structure of foreign privileges—the treaty ports, leased territories, railway and mining concessions, extraterritoriality, and fixed, low tariffs—including Japan’s semi-colony in southern Manchuria. It was at best a statement of good intentions, but how these intentions would be implemented in practice was left purposely vague. With their “special interests” in southern Manchuria thus protected, the Japanese decided they could afford to be generous on Shantung. With Hughes’s quiet encouragement, they agreed to hand back the former German leasehold to China. As a further demonstration of their willingness to abide by the new “rules of the game” in East Asia, they wound up their intervention in Siberia in 1922, a decision made easy by the fact that this expensive imperialist venture had utterly failed, brought discredit on the army, and was intensely unpopular in Japan. Secretary Hughes grandly declared that the Washington settlement inaugurated “an era of good feeling in the Far East” 3 and most Americans at the time agreed. This assessment was overly sanguine: neither China nor the Soviet Union was satisfied with the new order, and each in its own way tried

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to undermine it. As far as U.S.–Japan relations were concerned, however, it had considerable truth. Consistent with the “spirit of Washington,” the Japanese displayed restraint in dealing with the tumultuous situation in China created by outpourings of popular resentment against foreign domination, and the efforts of Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalists to wrest power from warlords, reunify the country, and reassert central control over the country. The Japanese also honored the limitation on capital ships agreed to at Washington and, at the 1930 London Naval Conference, accepted similar limits on smaller warships. Looking back on the 1920s, Henry Stimson, secretary of state in the Hoover administration, opined that Japan had “given an exceptional record of good citizenship in the life of the international world.” 4 JAPANESE EXCLUSION A conspicuous omission from the Washington settlement was any attempt to deal with the immigration issue, and this had serious consequences. Hughes may have hoped that the “California problem” would recede with the overall improvement in U.S.–Japan relations. If so, he was mistaken. California exclusionists were unimpressed by Japan’s “record of good citizenship.” What mattered to them was blocking the 4,000 or so Japanese immigrants, mostly “picture brides,” who continued to enter the United States annually under the terms of the 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement and this, they realized, would require action by Congress. (Congress had banned Chinese immigration in 1882, and Californians wanted similar legislation to exclude the Japanese.) The movement to totally end Japanese immigration was aided by the wave of nativism and anti-foreignism that swept the United States in the early 1920s. In 1920–1921, over 800,000 immigrants flooded into the country, mostly from southern and Eastern Europe, provoking widespread fear that America’s “Anglo-Saxon civilization” was being swamped by culturally alien “parasites” and “Bolsheviks.” 5 “Scientific racists” like Lothrop Stoddard framed the issue in terms of genetics. In his widely read 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color, he claimed that racially superior American “Nordics” were threatened by an influx of inferior “Alpines” and “Mediterraneans” and, behind them, even more menacing hordes of degenerate Orientals. 6 Congress responded by temporarily restricting immigration, but it was clear that a permanent solution would have to be found. In 1923–1924, the outline of one took shape. National quotas would be awarded on the basis of the percentages held by various nationalities in the U.S. population at an earlier time. (1890 was eventually chosen as the base year.) This scheme was designed to favor “Nordics” over eastern and southern Europeans. Had it been applied to Japanese, about one hundred would have been admitted

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annually. But the initial Senate version of the bill did not include Japan on the grounds that immigration from that country was already restricted by the Gentlemen’s Agreement. Undeterred, California exclusionists lobbied for the addition of a clause banning “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” code words for Japanese who, as nonwhites, were barred from naturalization. They at first made little headway in the face of indifference to this issue in the Senate. They prevailed only when the powerful chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge, publicly misrepresented a plea from Japan’s ambassador as a “veiled threat” against the United States. Lodge’s gambit— one of the last and most discreditable actions of his long career—ensured the addition of the Japanese exclusion clause and congressional passage of the 1924 Immigration Act by a lopsided, veto-proof majority. 7 This gratuitous national insult, commonly known as the Japanese Exclusion Act, had a predictably negative impact on U.S.–Japan relations. Amid anti-American boycotts and demonstrations in Japan, Hughes lamented that Congress had “undone the work of the Washington Conference and implanted the seeds of an antagonism sure to bear fruit in the future.” 8 His gloomy assessment was overdrawn but prescient: the Washington settlement did not immediately unravel, but the seeds of future trouble were indeed planted. Until 1924, Japanese considered anti-Japanese prejudice in America to be mainly a California phenomenon. The Exclusion Act, however, convinced many that it reflected the sentiments of the American people as a whole. This view was exaggerated: Congress acted less out of anti-Japanese animus than complacency and insensitivity to Japanese reactions. But the damage was done and it proved considerable, handing Japanese critics of the Washington settlement and cooperation with the West a line of argument that pro-Western liberals found hard to counter. In the wake of the Exclusion Act, the fate of the approximately 90,000 Japanese residents of California faded as a bilateral issue. By dint of hard work and frugal living, they became relatively prosperous truck farmers and small businessmen. Faced with pervasive hostility and suspicion, however, they withdrew into self-contained ethnic enclaves, of which “Little Tokyo” in Los Angeles was the largest. Unlike their parents, second-generation, American-born “nisei” were U.S. citizens and became “Americanized.” As a group, nisei were highly motivated and excelled academically, hoping to advance into the professions and win acceptance in American society. But most found their way blocked by prejudice and discrimination. 9 “TAISHO DEMOCRACY” Many Americans downplayed the 1924 immigration brouhaha as a temporary spat in a deepening friendship. In 1928, for example, a senior U.S.

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diplomat commented that “all of the evidence seems to point to the friendliest of feelings between us and the Japanese which should continue more or less indefinitely.” 10 Some based their optimism on expanding economic ties—the United States took 40 percent of Japan’s exports and accounted for a like percentage of its foreign loans during the 1920s. Others hailed a growing convergence of values, institutions, and aspirations between Japan and America. “A new Japan,” wrote one observer in 1925, “feels itself a part of the worldwide movement to end war, to remedy economic injustice, to establish for the good of the common man the institutions of democracy.” 11 By the mid-1920s, Japan presented a fair approximation of a British-style parliamentary democracy. The prime ministership alternated between the heads of two rival political parties whose Diet representatives were chosen in relatively free and fair elections on the basis of universal manhood suffrage (adopted in 1925). There was a lively and largely uncensored press dominated by mass-circulation dailies. In the cities, and to some extent the countryside as well, the 1920s saw the rise of a small but militant labor movement. Except for communists and radical Marxists, leftwing activists were tolerated, and in the late 1920s so-called “proletarian parties” began to compete in national elections. The era of party rule between 1918 and 1932 is commonly known as “Taisho Democracy” after the reign name of the Meiji emperor’s son and successor. (The ailing Taisho emperor was replaced in 1922 by his son, Hirohito, who acted as regent until he ascended the throne in 1926 in his own right as the Showa emperor.) Not a few American observers concluded that liberal democracy had triumphed in Japan or was about to do so. The popular writer Sherwood Eddy offers a typical example. In The Challenge of the East (1931), he enthused that “liberal Japan is today breaking through the hard and crusted repression of feudal militarism and a new nation is coming to birth.” 12 Historians view Taisho Democracy more skeptically. True, party politicians proved successful in using the constitutional powers vested in the lower house of the Diet to elbow aside the handpicked successors of the Meiji “oligarchs” and put themselves at the helm of the Japanese state after World War I. But their dominance was precarious and far from complete. For one thing, they had to share leadership with other power centers—the House of Peers, the Privy Council, the army and navy, and the higher bureaucracy. For another, they had difficulty legitimizing parliamentary democracy in the eyes of the Japanese people. The idea of popular sovereignty was taboo, and anyone who advocated it risked being accused of lese majesty. Moreover, politicians’ reliance on logrolling and pork barrel tactics disgusted many Japanese, and the press routinely berated them and their big business allies for venality and corruption. The problem, however, went deeper than simple malfeasance, real or perceived. Fundamentally, the competitive dynamics of

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party politics did not sit well with a population conditioned to prize traditional “collectivist values” of unity and harmony. 13 American observers were not entirely unaware of some of the tensions roiling Taisho Democracy. As early as 1915, Thorstein Veblen predicted increasing conflict between the “Spirit of Old Japan” and the values and ideals of the modern, industrial society it was fast becoming. Four years later John Dewey sensed “subtle nervous tension in the atmosphere as of a country on the verge of change but not knowing where the change will take it.” The problem, Dewey thought, was that Japan was importing new Western ideas while “trying at the same time to preserve its own peculiar moral and political heritage.” He warned prophetically that “no nation can enduringly live a double life” and that Japan may “crash under the strain.” 14 The tensions noted by Veblen and Dewey were especially pronounced in the clash of values and outlook between city dwellers and rural villagers. Despite rapid industrialization and urbanization, Japan remained a largely agrarian, peasant-based society, and the 1920s were hard times for peasants. Population pressure, lagging productivity, and competition from cheap imported food depressed the incomes and living standards of many, particularly landless tenants at the bottom of the rural hierarchy. At the same time, traditional village solidarity broke down as landlords decamped for the towns and cities, and landlord–tenant relations became more impersonal and profitdriven. Not surprisingly, there was an upsurge in tenant strikes and disputes, some violent. While much of this protest was driven by “rising expectations,” it also reflected an inchoate sense among tradition-oriented villagers that westernization was tearing apart their communities and leaving them adrift in a hostile world. OBSERVING JAZZ AGE JAPAN In Japan’s cities, on the other hand, westernization was all the rage; indeed, the 1920s resemble the earlier era of “Civilization and Enlightenment” in the 1870s. American visitors to Japan in the late 1920s—over 8,500 came in 1929, the peak year for the decade—found Tokyo and other large cities quite similar in many ways to those at home. (The rebuilding of Tokyo after the 1923 earthquake enhanced the impression of modernity.) Downtown business districts, such as Tokyo’s Marunouchi, were filled with modern office buildings and thronged with a new middle class of white-collar “salary men” and “office ladies” who were virtually indistinguishable from their American counterparts. By the end of the decade Tokyo had a subway and network of commuter rail lines linking the city center with new “bedroom suburbs” catering to salary men and their families. Not without reason, an observer

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reported that the Japanese were a “bustling up-to-date folk getting more Western every day.” 15 The impression that Japan was “getting more Western every day” was reinforced by the kind of amusements to be found in the urban entertainment districts. Here one encountered art deco theaters showing the latest Hollywood films; dance halls featuring taxi-dancers; beer joints with flirtatious waitresses; and Ziegfeld Follies-style shows in which chorus girls danced the Charleston. The quintessential symbol of Japan’s Americanization was the so-called “modern girl” whom one was apt to see promenading in Tokyo’s fashionable Ginza district with her “Modern Boy” escort. Like the American flapper after whom she modeled herself, the Modern Girl with her bobbed hair, high heels, and jaunty manner was the emancipated woman par excellence. Although the Modern Girl would no doubt have astonished and repelled Lafcadio Hearn and other aficionados of the Old Japan, she fascinated American observers like Miriam Beard, the daughter of the famous historian, who lived in Tokyo in the late 1920s and wrote an interesting book based on her experiences. For Beard, the Modern Girl represented a “new woman who will be both domestic and amusing, both dignified and free, both wife and challenger.” This new woman, moreover, was part of an emerging “new society—with different ideals of love, marriage, morals, conduct, amusement and conversation,” which is coming because “the very spirit of the times compels.” 16 Observers were struck by other signs of Japan’s embrace of American ways such as the growing popularity of baseball, which attracted huge crowds and became a national sport during the 1920s. Hollywood-trained filmmakers turned out comedies and melodramas that mimicked American productions. American popular songs were in vogue and inspired Japanese knockoffs such as “Tokyo March,” the hit tune of 1929. And American loan words flooded into the Japanese language. Back in the United States, magazine articles with titles like “Japan Goes In for our Popular Songs” and “Rapid Americanization of Japan” acquainted American readers with some of these developments. 17 Not everyone was as sanguine as Miriam Beard about the prospects for Japan’s cultural westernization. Some thought that the “shackles of tradition” and “habits of subservience” would abort this trend. In his book China, Japan and Korea (1921), for example, J. O. P. Bland predicted that the Japanese family system, with its “inherited impulses of obedience and loyalty,” would stifle individual freedom. The writer Stephen King-Hall argued that the government’s manipulation of “the national cult of Shinto” would keep the people in a “sheep-like” state of obedience. Even John Dewey, for all his early enthusiasm about the advance of liberalism, worried that their

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Figure 4.1. A “modern girl” depicted by Japanese artist Kiyoshi Kobayakawa, 1930. Source: Honolulu Museum of Art, Gift of Philip H. Roach, Jr., 2001 (26926).

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attachment to nationalism and imperialism would lead the Japanese people to rally behind the “military party” if their empire was threatened. 18 REDISCOVERING THE “OLD JAPAN” Like their Gilded Age forebears, most American tourists in the 1920s were less interested in Japan’s westernization than the exotic sights of the Old Japan—geisha, cherry blossoms, miniature gardens, stunning landscapes, and ancient temples and shrines. The Old Japan was largely a construct of steamship line brochures, guidebooks, and travelogues, which bore scant resemblance to the modern industrial society Japan was becoming. But it exerted a profound influence on the American imagination, and helped revive stereotypes which had fallen into abeyance in the early 1900s. Consider, for example, a remarkable 1931 magazine piece by a young American naval officer recounting a ten-day visit to Japan. He found there, he wrote, “the old Japan of our childhood fancies, the country of toy houses and fairy gardens, of flowers and flower-like children, of black-eyed women as bright and dainty as nodding nasturtiums.” It was also a land where “grave and courteous scholars go hand in hand with little girls among the cherry blossoms,” and where “one seems to hear the violins crying out above the hushed harbors of Japan the longing of Madame Butterfly, who forever waits a foreign ship and a foreign lover. Japan at evening—it is a land of dreams.” 19 Here is the same fantasy world that beguiled late-nineteenthcentury Americans, complete with all the familiar props and characters— “toy houses,” cherry blossoms, “fairy gardens,” cherubic children, and alluring maidens. Fittingly, this “land of dreams” is presided over by the ghost of Madame Butterfly, pining for her faithless American lover. There is obviously nothing “real” about this world, but that is the point: one visits a theme park to escape reality, and Japan is clearly again being imagined as one. Other Gilded Age stereotypes made a comeback in the travel literature of the 1920s. For example, the notion of Japan as an “Oriental puzzle”—a land whose people behave in a contrarian manner incomprehensible to Westerners—reappeared. An adage had it that Japanese expressed themselves in just three ways: “One, a smile; Two, a silence; and Three, a mystery.” 20 The idea of Japan as a “land of children” also came back into vogue. Like their predecessors in the 1870s and 1880s, American tourists in the 1920s often thought of themselves as “Gullivers” in a land of childlike, ultra-polite “Lilliputians.” Such stereotypes did not go unchallenged. Missionaries, who knew the Japanese better than most Americans, attempted to “humanize” them. Echoing the judgment of William Griffis in the 1870s, for example, former missionary Sidney Gulick—the most prominent “advocate of understanding” in

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the 1910s and 1920s—tirelessly insisted that they were “fundamentally like us and wish to be regarded and treated so.” 21 Significantly, however, “no realistic novel comparable to Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931) was written about the Japanese, to bring them to life for readers in America.” 22 For many Americans, Japanese remained quirky, “inscrutable” exotics. AMERICAN COMPLACENCY The idea of a Japanese-led Yellow Peril did not, of course, disappear in the United States in the 1920s. American naval officers in particular continued to warn of an imminent “threat from Japan,” and Hector Bywater’s widely read The Great Pacific War: A History of the Japanese–American Campaigns of 1931–1933 (1925) conjured up a plausible vision of a Japanese–American war in the Pacific. (Bywater presciently projected an American victory and the remaking of Japan into a true democracy.) But the influence of such voices declined after the Washington Conference brought détente and Japan embraced democracy and liberalism. Despite the 1924 immigration crisis, the Coolidge and Hoover administrations assumed that Japan would remain committed to democracy at home and internationalism abroad. There seemed no reason to believe otherwise, and optimistic reports from the U.S. embassy in Tokyo suggested that Japan was “an absolutely devoted and perpetual friend of America.” 23 With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that such optimism was unwarranted. Japan in the 1920s was a deeply divided and troubled country. There was a yawning chasm between those who rejected Western-defined modernity and those who embraced it. Among the latter were the political parties, big business, and the urban middle class. The former included the peasantry, the urban poor, and the military. “Anti-modernists” deplored what they saw as a breakdown of traditional values due to the spread of “selfish” individualism and the aping of foreign ways. They blamed Western-oriented elites for this situation and called for the “restoration” of national solidarity and harmony. The party-dominated government of the 1920s and early 1930s might have survived if it had been more successful in stimulating economic growth and alleviating the plight of the disadvantaged. But its record in these areas was unimpressive. Moreover, the parties had the misfortune to be in charge during the worldwide Great Depression of 1929–1931, which had disastrous effects on Japan’s trade-dependent economy. They took the blame as millions of factory workers thrown out of work and peasants were pressed to the edge of starvation. Cries for the restoration of traditional values intensified, along with demands for an end to Japan’s identification with the West, which many saw as the root cause of its woes.

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The Japanese military was the obvious candidate to lead a challenge to the parties and their pro-Western policies. Its ranks were filled with men who believed that these policies were leading Japan to ruin and imperiling its security. They were also champions of traditional values and foes of cultural westernization. Seeing themselves as selfless patriots and dedicated servants of the emperor, moreover, they thought they were more qualified to lead the nation than “corrupt” party politicians. In addition, many in the military felt that party leaders were usurping their constitutionally guaranteed prerogative of advising the emperor—the commander-in-chief—on national security matters. Japanese navy and army officers each had specific grievances. The former were outraged by the civilian government’s acceptance of what they considered an unacceptably low cruiser ratio at the London Naval Conference. Army men were appalled by the “weak-kneed” and vacillating response of party cabinets to the threat posed by Chiang Kai-shek to Japan’s semi-colony in southern Manchuria. Chiang had set up a new national government in Nanking in 1928 and seemed bent on extending its control over Manchuria. The Japanese army garrison in the Liaotung leasehold, known as the Kwantung Army (Kwantung being the Japanese pronunciation of Liaotung), was especially alarmed by this prospect. Viewing the regional Chinese warlord as a weak reed, its leaders were drawn to the idea of seizing control over Manchuria to forestall Chiang—with or without Tokyo’s approval. In 1930–1931, the military seethed with plots for the seizure of Manchuria and a coup d’état in Japan. The coup plotters, mostly junior officers, planned to assassinate top civilian leaders, thereby provoking a state of emergency that would enable the army to take power. U.S. diplomats were largely oblivious to these plots and the dangers they posed. The American minister in China opined that “there is plenty of powder lying around but I think it is hardly dry enough yet to explode.” His counterpart in Japan agreed and spent most of his time in the summer of 1931 traveling around the country since “there wasn’t such an awful lot to do” except prepare for the visit of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. 24 NOTES 1. Sadao Asada, From Mahan to Pearl Harbor: The Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 57. 2. Quoted in LaFeber, The Clash, 141. 3. Neu, The Troubled Encounter, 117. 4. Henry L. Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis: Recollections and Observations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1936), 36. 5. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–32 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 205–6.

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6. Richard O’Conner, Pacific Destiny: An Informal History of the U.S. in the Far East (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 433. 7. Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice, 102–3. 8. Quoted in Neumann, America Encounters Japan, 176. 9. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 217–19. 10. Quoted in Iriye, Across the Pacific, 166. 11. Quoted in Robert S. Schwantes, Japanese and Americans: A Century of Cultural Relations (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955), 101. 12. Quoted in Jon Thares Davidann, Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.–Japan Relations, 1919–1941 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 19. 13. Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan: The Story of a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 169. 14. Asada, Culture Shock, 48–49. 15. Asada, Culture Shock, 35. 16. Miriam Beard, Realism in Romantic Japan (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 220, 230. 17. Davidann, Cultural Diplomacy, 113. 18. Quoted in Davidann, Cultural Diplomacy, 21–22, 74, 114–15. 19. Quoted in Schwantes, Japanese and Americans, 12. 20. Asada, Culture Shock, 44. 21. Sandra Taylor, Advocate of Understanding: Sidney Gulick and the Search for Peace with Japan (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1984), 81–82. 22. Asada, Culture Shock, 44. 23. Quoted in Neu, The Troubled Encounter, 128. 24. Iriye, Across the Pacific, 166–67.

Chapter Five

Colliding with Militarist Japan, 1931–1941

American optimism about Japan’s embrace of democracy and internationalism faded in the 1930s as it resumed its aggression against China, repudiated the Washington settlement, and reorganized itself as a military-dominated, quasi-totalitarian state. Preoccupied by the Great Depression and bent on insulating themselves from external conflicts, Americans initially had no interest in a confrontation with Japan over China, and hoped that pro-Western moderates would somehow regain power. The two nations embarked on a collision course only in 1940–1941 when the Japanese allied themselves with Nazi Germany and began to move into Southeast Asia, imperiling beleaguered Britain’s colonial lifeline and convincing Washington that they were part of a global fascist menace. Even then, a U.S.–Japan military showdown might have been delayed or possibly even averted if each had possessed a more accurate understanding of the other, and been willing to show greater flexibility. THE MANCHURIAN CRISIS On the night of September 18, 1931, a mysterious explosion occurred on a section of track of the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway near Mukden (Shenyang). The Kwantung Army announced that Chinese saboteurs were responsible and produced a few Chinese corpses as evidence. In reality, Japanese troops had set off the explosion to justify a carefully planned military operation aimed at occupying all of Manchuria. Kwantung army units quickly fanned out from the railway zone to seize Mukden and other cities against light resistance from troops of the Chinese warlord re63

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gime nominally in charge of the region. The long-gestating army plot to preempt the advance of Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists was underway. The civilian leadership in Tokyo—blindsided by these developments but correctly suspecting an army conspiracy—ordered a halt to offensive operations pending a negotiated settlement. The army high command (which was privy to the plot and sympathetic to it) reluctantly went along but did nothing to rein in the Kwantung army which swept on, manufacturing Chinese “provocations” and claiming “military necessity” as it went. The prime minister, faced with assassination threats by military extremists and popular rejoicing over the Kwantung Army’s action, elected not to try to force the issue and resigned in frustration in December. His successor, another party leader, had no better luck. The perils of standing up to the military were underscored by the assassination in early 1932 of a top zaibatsu executive and a former finance minister. In March, the prime minister acquiesced in the formal establishment of the supposedly independent state of “Manchukuo” headed by Henry Pu Yi, the last Manchu emperor of China. This, however, did not make him less objectionable to right-wing zealots. In May, a group of navy fanatics gunned him down in his residence. He was the last party man to serve as prime minister until after the Second World War Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Nanking—preoccupied with “banditsuppression” operations against the Chinese Communists—offered only diplomatic protests against Japan’s seizure of Manchuria. Among ordinary Chinese, however, outrage led to boycotts of Japanese goods and attacks on Japanese citizens. In January 1932, anti-Japanese riots in Shanghai escalated into an undeclared war as local Chinese military units joined the rioters and Japan committed some 50,000 troops backed by aircraft and warships. As American and European expatriates watched from the safety of their International Settlement, the Japanese pounded the Chinese parts of the city with air strikes and naval bombardments, killing thousands of civilians before the fighting died down. The League of Nations conducted an inquiry into the “Manchurian Incident,” as the Japanese called their takeover of Manchuria. The Lytton Commission Report, released in the autumn of 1932, found some merit in Tokyo’s claim that it had acted in self-defense, but not enough to alter the conclusion that its seizure of Manchuria was an act of aggression against China. In early 1933, the League censured Japan and urged it to return to the status quo ante. Japan responded by walking out of that body, its delegate claiming that his country had been “crucified.” In retrospect, the Manchurian crisis marked the end of party rule in Japan and the beginning of the end of the Washington settlement. In the years that followed, political power would slowly gravitate into the hands of military men and their civilian allies, who were intent on building a quasi-totalitarian

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“national defense state” at home and expanding Japan’s empire in East Asia to include China and, ultimately, Southeast Asia. This, however, was not apparent to contemporaries, including Americans. THE STIMSON DOCTRINE The Manchurian crisis came as an unpleasant surprise to the Hoover administration, which had its hands full grappling with the catastrophic domestic effects of the Great Depression and trying to revive international economic cooperation. Secretary of State Stimson initially accepted at face value assurances by Japan’s foreign minister, a personal friend, that the government would bring the Kwantung army to heel and negotiate a settlement of the “incident” with China. Within a couple of months, however, he became convinced that pro-Western moderates had lost control and that Japan was “in the hands of virtually mad dogs” who were “running amok.” 1 America would have to respond, but how? Stimson had little sympathy for China and was not much concerned about the balance of power in East Asia. What mattered to him was the preservation of the post-World War I “peace system”—the League of Nations, the Washington Treaties, and the 1928 Kellogg–Briand Peace Pact “outlawing” war—which Japan’s military aggression in Manchuria had flouted. 2 In hopes of deterring Japanese expansionists, he proposed imposing economic sanctions, shifting the bulk of the U.S. fleet to the Pacific, and undertaking an American naval buildup. But Hoover balked at such measures. A committed pacifist, he had no interest, as he put it, in “sticking pins in tigers.” 3 Besides, the U.S. navy, weakened by budget cuts, was in no shape to challenge the Japanese. Other means would have to be found to restrain them. In the event, Stimson came up with a variant of Wilson’s 1915 nonrecognition policy—a declaration that the United States would refuse to recognize any action in China that violated Open Door principles and the pacifist ideals of the Kellogg–Briand Pact. Such a declaration, coupled with vigorous moral condemnation of Japan’s wrongdoing, would, the secretary hoped, have a sobering effect on the Japanese and induce them to mend their ways. In fact, however, reports from the U.S. embassy in Tokyo suggested that Stimson’s initiative merely inflamed anti-American sentiment and alienated formerly pro-American liberals. The Japanese resented American interference and lack of understanding of the situation that had compelled them to preserve their Manchurian “lifeline.” Whatever the Japanese reaction, the “Stimson Doctrine”—as this initiative came to be known—was welcomed by the American Congress, press, and public. Expressing moral disapproval of Japan’s behavior seemed an appropriate response and it was as far as anyone was prepared to go. In

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contrast to the 1910s, Japanese bullying of China aroused relatively little concern. As one newspaper put it, “the American people don’t give a hoot in a rain barrel who controls North China.” 4 Preoccupied with the depression, Americans had turned inward. Moreover, their earlier sympathy for China had faded, as had their fear of the “threat from Japan.” Even the Hearst press toned down its anti-Japanese fulminations, editorializing in 1934 that the Sino–Japanese conflict “is not our business. It interests us. We sympathize. But it is not our concern.” 5 American disengagement from East Asia reflected “a tidal wave” of isolationist and pacifist sentiment that swept over the United States in the mid1930s. Inspired largely by disillusionment with Wilson’s “war to end all wars” and a determination to never again become involved in such a futile conflict, this sentiment manifested itself, among other ways, in the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937, which banned arms exports and private loans to belligerents, and prohibited travel on belligerent ships. Designed to keep America out of foreign wars, these Acts were based on “the highly debatable assumptions that no basic moral issues were involved in these (wars) and that no fundamental American interests were at stake.” 6 WHITHER JAPAN? A precarious Sino–Japanese truce between 1933 and 1936 fueled uncertainty about Japan’s intentions and direction. Would Tokyo be content with the seizure of Manchuria, or was it merely a prelude to renewed aggression? Was the ascendancy of militarists temporary, or did it signal the permanent eclipse of pro-Western moderates? Did the jingoism manifested by the Japanese public during the Manchurian crisis reflect a momentary enthusiasm, or a long-term shift toward chauvinism and ultranationalism? Was the anti-Western feeling displayed in the crisis a transitory mood, or an expression of a more fundamental alienation from the West and its ways? The Franklin Roosevelt administration adhered to the Stimson Doctrine— minus Stimson’s condemnatory rhetoric—and hoped for the best. But in 1934, Tokyo announced an “Asian Monroe Doctrine,” a veiled warning to the United States and others not to support China in its quarrel with Japan. In 1934–1935, naval arms limitation talks broke down over Japan’s insistence on parity with the United States and Britain, and in 1936 the Washington and London agreements lapsed, setting the stage for a naval race. Also in 1936, Japan signed an Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, in which they agreed to cooperate to combat Soviet-inspired communist subversion. The Washington settlement was now effectively dead and Japan openly aligned with the “revisionist” powers of Europe. 7

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Despite these disquieting developments, cultural and economic ties between the United States and Japan remained robust in the early and mid1930s. American exports to Japan—mainly machinery, lumber, and cotton— recovered to pre-Depression levels by 1937. The number of American tourists visiting Japan remained near the 1929 level of 8,500. American celebrities like Charlie Chaplin continued to be feted, and the popularity of American movies, songs, jazz, and baseball was undiminished. A high point of “cultural diplomacy” was the 1934 tour of an American All-Star baseball team led by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, which drew huge crowds and intensive Japanese press coverage. And Japanese “salary men,” “office ladies,” and stylish “modern girls” were as numerous as ever in the big cities. If Americans and their culture still retained considerable appeal in Japan, how did the Japanese fare in American opinion and imagination? Japan still had friends and defenders. Some valued it as an important export market, while others saw it as a stabilizing force in East Asia and a bulwark against Soviet expansion. The growing influence of militarists and ultranationalists was worrisome, but there was no consensus on what this trend portended. Some argued that the Japanese were reverting to type as a fundamentally “militaristic” people. However, no less an authority than Henry Stimson disagreed. Writing in 1936, he rejected the idea of a “voluntary reversion on the part of (Japan’s) entire people to militarism and the methods of past ages.” In his view, the ascendancy of “imperialistic military leaders” was a temporary aberration brought about by the economic dislocations of the Great Depression. “Sooner or later,” he predicted, the “moderate elements” would “again come to power.” 8 Given the ferocity of the Japanese assault on Shanghai in early 1932— press accounts described Japanese troops bayoneting defenseless Chinese women—one might expect that American popular stereotypes of the Japanese would be exceedingly negative. In the mid-1930s, however, the most popular Japanese figure in film and fiction was “Mr. Moto,” John Marquand’s imaginary Japanese secret agent. As depicted by Marquand, Mr. Moto was “efficient and patriotic, but essentially moderate.” 9 The popularity of such a figure, the antithesis of the scheming villains in Yellow Peril literature, reflected American open-mindedness toward the Japanese as well as a measure of respect and admiration for them. This, however, would soon change. THE SINO–JAPANESE WAR Residual American goodwill toward Japan evaporated after the outbreak of the Sino–Japanese War in July 1937. This conflict grew out of an accidental clash between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge outside

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Peking, which escalated into a full-scale but undeclared war as both sides poured in reinforcements. Japan’s leaders were intent on incorporating China into a Japan-Manchukuo economic bloc, and here was an opportunity to achieve this goal. The army high command, puffed up by its easy conquest of Manchuria in 1931–1932, assured the cabinet that it would quickly defeat Chiang Kai-shek and force him to accept Japanese terms. This proved to be a disastrous miscalculation. The course of the war at first seemed to justify the army’s optimism, albeit at a higher human cost than anticipated. Japanese troops easily overran northern China, and an expeditionary force besieged Shanghai. Here, however, Chinese resistance stiffened as Chiang committed his best Germantrained divisions. In fierce fighting outside of the city, the Japanese prevailed and drove Chiang’s battered formations back toward his capital of Nanking which fell in December after another bloody battle. Victorious Japanese troops now committed one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century— the “Rape of Nanking.” As incredulous Americans and Europeans watched from their “safety zone” in Nanking’s International Settlement, the Japanese troops slaughtered several hundred thousand defenseless men, women, and children—the precise number remains in dispute—in an orgy of rape, looting, and murder that lasted for weeks. Reports of Japanese atrocities appeared almost immediately in the American press, but the scale of the massacre was unclear at the time. Western eyewitnesses could see only a fraction of what went on in the city and depended on Chinese informants for descriptions of events around Nanking where much of the killing took place. Still, it was apparent that something terrible had occurred. The Rape of Nanking is usually explained either as an atypical breakdown of Japanese discipline or a deliberate act of terrorism ordered by Japanese army commanders to break the Chinese will to resist. However, scant evidence has come to light to support the latter view, and the former interpretation overlooks the systematic nature of the atrocities—officers often organized and directed them. It seems more likely that the indiscriminate slaughter of prisoners and civilians was simply part of the normal modus operandi of the Japanese army. A military noted for its “exemplary” treatment of prisoners in the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–1905 (and in the seizure of German-held Shantung in 1914) had become by the late 1930s a take-noprisoners killing machine in which “officers at all levels condoned or connived at murder, rape, arson, and looting.” 10 The army high command and the government in Tokyo—probably including the emperor—were aware of the rampage in Nanking, but no one tried to stop it. What produced this Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation of Japan’s military? A “sea change in attitudes toward civilians and prisoners” occurred in the 1920s and 1930s. 11 Doctrines of total war made civilians legitimate targets,

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Figure 5.1. The Japanese army in action in China, 1938. Source: Corbis Images.

and indoctrination in concepts of Japanese ethnic and racial superiority made it permissible to kill or mistreat enemy prisoners, especially if these were “inferiors” like the Chinese. (Conversely, surrendering to such a foe came to be seen as an irredeemable disgrace.) The Rape of Nanking was thus not an isolated event; rather, it was part of an established pattern of behavior that

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was repeated again and again, albeit on a smaller scale, in the war in China. Although Americans did not realize it, they along with the British and Dutch would be accorded much the same treatment four years later. Contrary to Japanese expectations, Chiang did not come to terms after the fall of Nanking; instead, he and what was left of his army retreated to the remote western city of Chungking where he vowed to continue the fight. In 1938, Japan’s armies completed their conquest of the lower Yangtze valley, seized the southern port city of Canton (Guangzhou), and blockaded the coast. They now controlled the most productive and economically advanced parts of China, but they lacked the manpower to occupy the entire country or assault Chiang in his new capital. It now dawned on the Tokyo leadership that it had blundered into a quagmire. Victory was unattainable but withdrawal unthinkable—too many lives and too much treasure had been expended. Soldiering on seemed the only option. As the war in China ground on in 1938 and 1939, American newspapers and movie newsreels graphically presented the suffering of Chinese civilians under relentless Japanese bombardment and ground offensives. Long-dormant American sympathy for China revived, along with the image of the Japanese as brutal and dangerous militarists. The Japanese generally refrained from attacking Europeans and Americans in China, but there were exceptions, such as the “accidental” bombing and strafing of the U.S. navy gunboat Panay near Nanking in December 1937. One might have expected a sharp U.S. reaction, but such was the strength of isolationist-pacifist sentiment at that time that Congress responded to this provocation by nearly passing the “Ludlow Amendment,” which would have amended the Constitution to require a national referendum for a declaration of war. Still, a formidable “China Lobby,” supported by the Time-Life publications of Henry Luce, mounted a national campaign to aid China and curb munitions exports to Japan. Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull, were sympathetic to the China Lobby and eager to find some way to restrain what Hull called the “wild, runaway, half-insane men” in Tokyo. 12 But imposing more than token economic sanctions on Japan seemed too risky: it would provoke the ire of domestic isolationists and “might lead to a crisis at a time when the European situation was ominous.” 13 In 1940, however, they changed their minds. In the wake of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg victories in the spring, Japan advanced into Southeast Asia, imperiling embattled Britain’s colonial lifeline. In September, moreover, Japan signed a military alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy—the Tripartite Pact—transforming itself in American eyes from a regional rogue state into part of a global fascist conspiracy to “conquer the world.” 14

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JAPANESE “FASCISM” But was Japan in fact a “fascist” state? Historians disagree on this point and, indeed, on exactly how to characterize Japan’s political system of the late 1930s and early 1940s. To be sure, there were a number of intriguing similarities between Nazi Germany and Japan, including a common celebration of the “volk” (or “Yamato race” in the case of Japan), a glorification of war, rejection of Western individualism and democracy, fervent anti-communism, and a “revisionist” foreign policy. In addition, some Japanese leaders admired and emulated Hitler’s “New Order” rhetoric and his efforts to impose totalitarian controls on the German people. There were, however, major differences between Japan and Germany. There was, for example, no Japanese equivalent of the Fuhrer or his Nazi Party. In Japan, the only “charismatic” leader was the emperor, but his role was to ratify decisions by his advisors, not to lead. Moreover, the revolutionary right in Japan never attempted to organize a mass party, and relied on the military to institute the changes it deemed necessary. It is true that an “Imperial Rule Assistance Association,” loosely modeled on the Nazi Party, was set up in 1940. But this organization was less a political party than a bureaucratic adjunct of the Home Ministry, whose basic function was to enforce conformity and stifle dissent. 15 If Japan was not a fascist state, was it a military dictatorship? The Japanese army aimed to create a “national defense state”—with itself at the helm—that would harness the nation’s spiritual and material resources for eventual “total war” against the Soviet Union and the Anglo–American powers. The exigencies of the war with China enabled it to make considerable progress toward this goal, but not enough to justify describing Japan as a dictatorship. The navy continued to be an autonomous rival of the army and together with the other surviving power centers of the 1920s—the Court, civil bureaucracy, big business, and the Diet—prevented it from exercising the unimpeded control it sought. In other words, Japan’s system of plural elites remained intact, with the army functioning as a primus inter pares. However its political system is defined, at the societal level Japan became increasingly regimented, indoctrinated, and militarized in the late 1930s. Aided by the national emergency that accompanied the war in China, the government had some success inculcating in Japanese youth an ethic of selfsacrificing devotion to emperor and nation, heightening popular pride in Japan’s martial traditions, and selling the notion that Japan was a uniquely harmonious and cohesive “family state”—or, as official propagandists put it, “under the emperor a body of people of one blood and one mind.” 16 Concurrently, the government stage-managed a “cultural revolt against the West,” whose individualism and hedonism were deemed corrosive of Japanese values and solidarity. In 1940, jazz was banned and dance halls

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closed down. American movies and popular songs were replaced by Japanese military marches and films with patriotic themes. Western fads and fashions, such as women’s “perms” and colorful frocks, were frowned upon, and those who indulged in them were often publicly admonished to mend their ways. Baseball continued to be permitted, but its American terminology was “Japanized.” One might ask why the Japanese people went along with all of this, or at least why there was not stronger resistance. After all, just a few years earlier they had idolized Babe Ruth and Charlie Chaplin, and intellectuals and journalists had occasionally poked fun at the pretensions of militarists. Part of the answer lies in the intensification of government surveillance and repression. The few brave enough to speak out against the military and its policies— mostly communist true believers—were subject to the attentions of the Home Ministry’s “thought police” whose methods were not dissimilar to those of the Gestapo. Perhaps more effective in stifling overt dissent were the ubiquitous busybodies in neighborhood associations and workplace groups, who were all too willing to inform on grumblers and slackers. But conformity did not necessarily mean belief, as a few Western observers recognized. For example, an American diplomat stationed in Tokyo in 1940–1941 recalled that “in spite of government-inspired propaganda, the virulent press, and zealous anti-foreign insults by the police . . . goodwill for the United States was never completely eradicated.” 17 FACING DOWN JAPAN In retrospect, it seems clear that Japan set itself on a collision course with the United States in 1940 by allying with Nazi Germany and advancing into Southeast Asia. But this was not so clear at the time. Many Japanese regarded the German alliance as a diplomatic masterstroke, which would deter the United States from interfering while they imposed their will on the all but defenseless French, Dutch, and British colonies in Southeast Asia. From Tokyo’s perspective, control of these colonies would have the double benefit of severing Chiang Kai-shek’s principal supply routes and securing access to oil and other vital strategic materials—rubber, tin, bauxite—which it conspicuously lacked. Unfortunately for the Japanese, the Tripartite Pact had the opposite effect from that intended: instead of intimidating Roosevelt, it provoked him into embargoing iron and steel scrap exports to Japan, a serious blow to its war economy. Although he had earlier embargoed aviation gasoline as a warning to Tokyo, Japan’s simultaneous embrace of Hitler and occupation of northern Indochina (with the acquiescence of the Vichy French colonial regime) convinced him that stronger measures were needed. His advisors offered con-

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flicting advice. Some urged caution, but others advocated imposing a total economic embargo on Japan, among them Henry Stimson (now secretary of war) who—having given up hope for a political comeback by Japanese moderates—argued that the Japanese were “notorious bluffers” who had always backed down when confronted by determined U.S. opposition. 18 (He apparently had in mind their retreat from imperialism at the 1921–1922 Washington Naval Conference.) Foremost among those recommending caution were the leaders of the U.S. army and navy. Although the navy had long regarded Japan as its chief hypothetical enemy, it concluded in 1940 that Nazi Germany posed a more serious threat and that the bulk of the fleet should be concentrated in the Atlantic to meet it. A crash naval construction program was underway, but not enough ships were as yet available in the Pacific to deter the Japanese. In the navy’s view, FDR should therefore play for time until the Pacific fleet could be built up. The army, never enthusiastic about the hopeless task of defending the Philippines, generally supported the navy’s Europe-first strategy and the need to avoid provoking the Japanese prematurely. The scrap embargo led Japan’s leaders to temporarily suspend their “southern advance” and engage the United States in talks aimed at a settlement. But these talks, which got underway in Washington in March 1941, merely underscored the widening gap between the two countries. Hull insisted that the sine qua non of any settlement was Japan’s withdrawal from China, which the United States now considered an ally in the global antifascist struggle. Such a withdrawal was, of course, out of the question for the Japanese. They therefore decided to resume their southern advance. They first covered their northern flank by concluding a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. Then, in July, they occupied southern Indochina, a move that positioned them for a possible invasion of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. In thus raising the ante, the Japanese hoped to impress Roosevelt with their determination and induce him to adopt a more conciliatory stance. In this, however, they were disappointed. The president saw the occupation of southern Indochina as the last straw and elected to play his “trump card”—an oil embargo. The U.S. navy objected, but administration hardliners were pleased. They, along with a majority of Americans, anticipated that Japan, faced with the prospect of slow economic strangulation, would surely back down. Behind this optimism lay an image of Japan as a “manageable, second-rate power, far less of a menace to American security than Nazi Germany.” It seemed inconceivable that such a country—possessing an economy only about a tenth the size of America’s—would dare attack the United States. Virtually everyone, including Roosevelt, assumed that if and when Japan struck, the blow would fall on British and Dutch holdings in Southeast Asia, not American territory. 19

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American complacency was based partly on racist stereotypes such as the notion that the congenital “myopia” of Japanese prevented them from shooting straight. 20 “Expert” observers of the Sino–Japanese War claimed that Japanese forces were poorly trained, ineptly led, and equipped with inferior weapons. After all, they had not been able to overcome Chinese resistance in four years of fighting. The U.S. army vastly overrated the deterrent effect of the B-17 heavy bombers which it hastily deployed in the Philippines, and General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of U.S.–Filipino forces there, assured Washington that he could repel a Japanese invasion. In addition, books like Freda Utley’s best-selling Japan’s Feet of Clay (1937) helped popularize the idea that Japan’s relatively small industrial economy would speedily collapse under the strain of a war with a major power like the United States. Although the U.S. navy was better informed about Japanese capabilities and respected them, the prevalence of such misconceptions and myths lulled Americans into a sense of invulnerability. The Roosevelt administration “saw no need to ‘baby’ Japan, to fear Japan, or to pay blackmail to Japan.” 21 Roosevelt briefly toyed with Tokyo’s proposal for a Pacific summit with the Japanese prime minister, but dropped it on the advice of the State Department which believed there was not enough “give” in Japan’s position on China to outweigh the political risk of engaging in what critics could portray as an “East Asian Munich.” 22 The danger of appearing to appease Japan weighed heavily on Roosevelt and Hull during the fall of 1941. It led them to reject Tokyo’s last-minute offer of a “modus vivendi” and refrain from presenting a serious counteroffer. Meanwhile, the countdown to war in the Pacific proceeded. In launching their surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Japanese labored under myths and misconceptions of their own. Foremost among these was the illusion that the shock of this blow would so demoralize the Americans as to make them amenable to a negotiated settlement on Japan’s terms. This proved not to be the case and they had no realistic backup plan for a prolonged war of attrition in which they were bound to be at an increasingly serious disadvantage. Instead, they counted on German victories over Russia and Britain to force the United States to concentrate on Hitler, and clung to the hope that superior “Japanese spirit” might compensate for their industrial weakness. 23 NOTES 1. LaFeber, The Clash, 170. 2. Warren I. Cohen, America’s Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations (New York: Columbia University press, 2010), 119. 3. Cited in Neu, Charles E., The Troubled Encounter, 138.

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4. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93. 5. Iriye, Across the Pacific, 185. 6. Smith, The American Diplomatic Experience, 355, 358. 7. Aikira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education, 1987), 35. 8. Stimson, The Far Eastern Crisis, 237–39. 9. John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), 159. 10. Edward J. Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 259. 11. Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army, 259–60. 12. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 403. 13. Cohen, America’s Response to China, 134. 14. Iriye, Across the Pacific, 206. 15. Duus, Modern Japan, 229. 16. William G. Beasley, The Rise of Modern Japan: Political, Economic, and Social Change since 1850 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 187. 17. John K. Emmerson, The Japanese Thread: A Life in the U.S. Foreign Service (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), 119. 18. Neu, The Troubled Encounter, 170. 19. Neu, The Troubled Encounter, 193, 195. 20. Dower, War Without Mercy, 102–3, 109. 21. Emmerson, The Japanese Thread, 117. 22. Neu, The Troubled Encounter, 185. 23. Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War, 171.

Chapter Six

Fighting a Detested Foe, 1941–1945

The distinguished American historian Allan Nevins wrote of America’s 1941–1945 war against Japan that “probably in all our history no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese.” 1 Popular wartime stereotypes of the Japanese as robots, lunatics, sub-humans, and criminals—which were applied indiscriminately to all Japanese, including Japanese Americans—were shaped in part by longstanding “Yellow Peril” phobias. But the fanaticism and wanton cruelty displayed by Japanese soldiers on Asian and Pacific battlefields invited such stereotypes and perplexed thoughtful Americans. “National character” studies attempted to explain their behavior in terms of abnormal psychology or cultural conditioning. A few recognized, however, that it was mainly the product of recent indoctrination, not culture or mental illness, and that its roots in Japanese society were relatively shallow. The Japanese were, in other words, capable of redemption. Fortunately for both countries, this view prevailed over cries for vengeance or extermination of the Japanese. AMERICA’S WAR AGAINST JAPAN The Pearl Harbor disaster inaugurated a brief season of defeats for Americans. Wake Island and Guam quickly fell, and the Japanese landed in the Philippines against weak opposition. (Other Japanese forces swept into British Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and British Burma.) MacArthur ordered a retreat to Bataan and Corregidor where fierce fighting culminated in the surrender of Filipino–American forces in May 1942, the worst-ever defeat suffered by American armed forces. In the same month, however, U.S. 77

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carriers—which had fortuitously escaped destruction at Pearl Harbor— turned back a Japanese thrust toward southeastern New Guinea in the Battle of the Coral Sea, and in June they inflicted a major defeat on the Japanese Combined Fleet in the Battle of Midway, sinking four of its first-line carriers. These victories forced the Japanese on the defensive and set the stage for a U.S. counteroffensive. This counteroffensive began in August 1942 with a marine landing on Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands and a joint American–Australian attack on Japanese forces in northeastern New Guinea. Months of attritional naval and ground combat—the latter under appalling jungle conditions—resulted in the Japanese being expelled from both the Solomons and northeastern New Guinea by late 1943. The next stage of the counteroffensive now commenced with the launching of a two-pronged attack on Japan’s outer defense perimeter. Army troops under the command of General MacArthur advanced along New Guinea’s northern coast toward the Philippines, while marines spearheaded amphibious assaults on fortified Japanese islands in the central Pacific, beginning with the November 1943 storming of the tiny atoll of Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands. Despite fierce resistance, both thrusts made good progress as Americans employed their growing naval and air dominance to bypass and neutralize Japanese strongholds such as Truk in the Caroline Islands. In mid-1944, the Central Pacific offensive, commanded by Admiral Chester Nimitz, broke through to Japan’s inner defense line in the Mariana Islands and commenced a massive assault on Saipan, the largest and most heavily defended island in the group. The increasingly desperate Japanese, realizing that the loss of the Marianas would put their home islands within the range of American bombers, threw everything they had into the struggle for Saipan. Their remaining carriers sallied forth, hoping to catch the American invasion fleet by surprise. But Nimitz was waiting for them. In the Battle of the Philippine Sea, American carriers inflicted a crushing defeat on their Japanese counterparts, eliminating Japanese naval aviation in a contest so lopsided that American pilots derisively called it the “Marianas turkey shoot.” Saipan fell in July after its 32,000 defenders fought to the last man or committed suicide, replicating a pattern established at Tarawa. Saipan marked the beginning of the end for the Japanese. True, their armies in China and Southeast Asia were still intact and even able to mount major offensives in 1944 against Chiang Kai-shek’s forces and the British in northeastern India. But Marianas-based American B-29 heavy bombers now brought Japan’s cities and factories under air attack. Meanwhile, American ships, aircraft, and submarines proceeded to decimate Japan’s merchant marine—literally, as it turned out, since only about a tenth of it was left afloat by mid-1945. This was perhaps the most decisive development of the war. Japan’s industrial economy was wholly dependent on imported fuel and raw

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materials from Manchuria, China, and Southeast Asia. As the Americans cut its maritime supply lines, it gradually ceased to function and production began to decline. Japan, in other words, was being strangled. Japanese in the know—but not ordinary Japanese who were told they were winning—recognized that the war was lost and that the only hope of salvaging something lay in a negotiated settlement. But negotiations were not on offer from the United States which had announced in 1943 that the war could only end with Japan’s unconditional surrender. This was unacceptable to Emperor Hirohito and his advisors who resolved to fight on. In late 1944, the military came up with a strategy to snatch an honorable peace from the jaws of defeat. This involved raising the human cost of the war for the Americans through a series of sacrificial “last battles” in and around the Japanese homeland. The navy was gone, having been all but wiped out in an unsuccessful attempt to disrupt the American invasion of the Philippines in October 1944. But the army was ready and willing to fight to the death. Also, “kamikazes” (explosives-laden suicide planes), first employed in the Philippines, provided a potent new weapon. In early 1945, American forces closed in on the Japanese home islands, intent on mounting an invasion unless Japan surrendered. A necessary preliminary was the seizure of forward bases on the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. The Japanese were waiting and well prepared. The marine assault on Iwo Jima in February proved exceptionally costly, since the defenders were entrenched in tunnels and caves, and had to be rooted out and killed in bitter hand-to-hand fighting. This pattern was repeated on an even larger scale in the April–June Battle for Okinawa where the Japanese were also ensconced in bombproof caves. In brutal combat reminiscent of World War I trench warfare, marine and army units eventually wiped them out, but not before mass kamikaze attacks inflicted heavy damage on the U.S. fleet standing offshore. The final death toll was staggering: 70,000 Japanese troops, 80,000 Okinawans (mostly civilians), 7,000 American soldiers and marines, and 5,000 American sailors. 2 Americans were appalled by their losses at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which exceeded those of the entire war in the Pacific up to that point. Moreover, Okinawa seemed to offer a preview of the carnage that would likely accompany an invasion of the Japanese mainland. (Projections of American casualties ran as high as one million.) By mid-1945, Tokyo was sending out peace feelers, but not offering terms Washington could seriously consider. The Soviet Union, consistent with agreements reached at the Yalta Conference in February, was preparing to strike into Manchuria and Korea. There was no assurance, however, that this blow would break the Japanese will to resist. American firebombing of Japanese cities, beginning with the incineration of downtown Tokyo in March, produced massive civilian casualties and economic disruption, but little sign of an imminent collapse. Under these

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circumstances, American planning for an invasion of Japan, timed for November, went ahead. Harry Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt on the latter’s death in April, had three options for trying to force Japan’s surrender without a costly invasion. One was a protracted blockade and bombardment, but this course was deemed too slow and uncertain. Another was modifying the unconditional surrender formula to permit a negotiated peace. Although this was favored by some in his administration, the president rejected it on the grounds that the American people would not stand for it. The third option was employing the atomic bomb which had been secretly developed at great expense for possible use against Nazi Germany. Truman approved the dropping of this fearsome weapon on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August, hoping it would shock Japan’s leaders into giving up. The atomic bombings, combined with the Soviet Union’s simultaneous attack on Manchuria, provoked a deadlock among the emperor’s advisors between military diehards and surrender advocates. In a rare personal intervention, the emperor broke this deadlock on August 10 by ordering acceptance of U.S. unconditional surrender terms with the proviso that “the prerogatives of the Emperor as a Sovereign ruler” be maintained. Although Truman did not explicitly rule this out, he replied that the emperor would be subject to the authority of the supreme commander of an Allied occupation force. On this ambiguous note, Japan formally surrendered on August 15, much to the surprise of practically everyone. THE ORDEAL OF JAPANESE AMERICANS Among the early—and more improbable—victims of the war were the 120,000 people of Japanese descent who lived in California and other West Coast states. Two-thirds were American-born U.S. citizens, and the rest longterm resident aliens ineligible for citizenship because of their race. Although the FBI concluded that these people posed no particular security threat, its view was ignored in the anti-Japanese hysteria and panic that swept over the West Coast in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Rumors abounded of an imminent Japanese invasion—at one point, Los Angeles was reported to be under air attack—and the activities of Japanese spies and saboteurs. Investigation by the FBI and other government agencies found all of these rumors to be unfounded, but this did not check a growing public demand that Japanese residents and citizens be rounded up and incarcerated. One California newspaper described them as “rattlesnakes in the parlor.” 3 No less a figure than army General John DeWitt, head of the newly created Western Defense Command, threw his weight behind this demand and recommended to Roosevelt a general roundup of Japanese Americans.

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His rationale for this extraordinary action was “military necessity,” based on the assumption that all persons of Japanese descent were “security risks,” whether citizens or not, because they might be loyal to Japan and hence inclined toward acts of sabotage. As DeWitt famously put it, “A Jap is a Jap.” In February 1942, Roosevelt signed an executive order calling for the relocation of West Coast Japanese Americans to internment camps in the interior. A few prominent members of his administration privately deplored this unprecedented move, notably Interior Secretary Harold Ickes who called it “stupid and cruel.” 4 But others endorsed it, including Secretary of War Stimson who accepted at face value the dossier of alleged treasonable acts committed by Japanese Americans that DeWitt submitted. War Department officials suppressed FBI reports debunking these spurious allegations. 5 Many of the detainees were forced to sell their farms, homes, and businesses at fire-sale prices, losing at a stroke the fruit of a life’s work. With only such possessions as they could carry, men, women, and children were herded into assembly centers and transported by rail to hastily constructed camps in remote desert locations such as Manzanar in southeastern California. Surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, they were housed in uninsulated cabins which were unbearably hot in summer and freezing cold in winter. The establishment of schools, clinics, libraries, churches, and newspapers eventually gave these communities a semblance of normalcy, but boredom and isolation, plus the prison-like conditions, made them anything but “normal.” Particularly demeaning aspects of life in the camps were the use of “stool pigeons” to ferret out traitors, and interrogations designed to ascertain the loyalties of the detainees. Those willing to sign “loyalty oaths” were furloughed or even released. Among the latter, some were permitted to enlist, and the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team compiled a distinguished war record in Europe. But others refused to sign such oaths, whether from divided loyalties (as in the case of some older, Japan-born detainees) or outrage that their patriotism should be thus questioned. These “hard cases,” numbering about 18,000 people, were put in a special camp in Tule Lake, California. The camps were gradually emptied in 1944–1945 as those deemed “loyal” were resettled around the country. Yet 44,000 were still incarcerated at the end of the war, some “so impaired by their captivity and by the loss of their assets” that they never recovered. 6 The legality of their confinement was upheld by the Supreme Court which brushed aside challenges in 1943–1944, ruling that “military necessity” justified Roosevelt’s action. Forty years later, in 1983, a presidential commission concluded that this justification was spurious and that the real reasons for the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans were “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” 7

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IMAGINING THE ENEMY The harsh treatment meted out to Japanese Americans was simply one facet of the hatred felt by most Americans toward Japanese, which increased as the war progressed and Japanese atrocities became widely known. By 1944–1945, a significant number of Americans—13 percent according to one poll—favored wiping them out as a people. Even if most were unwilling to go that far, “exterminationist” rhetoric was common, especially in U.S. army and navy circles. Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, for example, famously exhorted his men to “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs.” 8 Hollywood movies—a good barometer of popular sentiment—suggest what it was about Japanese behavior that so angered and repelled Americans. Films like Bataan (1943), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), Gung-Ho (1943), and Objective Burma (1945) depicted Japanese soldiers as “beasts of the jungle.” 9 They were masters of camouflage and deception, lurking in treetops, popping out of “spider holes,” and feigning surrender to induce unwary American troops to drop their guard. They were also sadists who gleefully machine-gunned women and children, and tortured and mutilated American prisoners. Their fanaticism was another much-emphasized theme: they immolated themselves in senseless “banzai charges” and routinely committed suicide when cornered. All of these films portrayed the Japanese as a faceless horde of bloodthirsty savages. There was little hint that any might be “real people” deserving a modicum of sympathy or respect. Asked what he thought about killing Japanese, a tough marine sergeant in Guadalcanal Diary replied: “Well, it’s kill or be killed—besides they ain’t people.” 10 Dehumanizing an enemy is, of course, standard procedure in wartime. But unlike war movies dealing with the Germans, which sometimes contrasted “good Germans” with “bad Nazis,” almost all celluloid Japanese were maniacal sub-humans—“monkeymen” was the favored image—beyond the pale of civilization and utterly devoid of redeeming qualities. Only one Hollywood film, Behind the Rising Sun (1943), portrayed the Japanese in a more nuanced light. Set during the run-up to Pearl Harbor, it has three Japanese protagonists: an idealistic young woman who dreams of a liberal, democratic Japan; a member of the old Western-oriented elite who collaborates with the militarists; and his Cornell-educated and superficially Americanized son. The latter is drafted into the army and is soon transformed into a sadistic killer and ultranationalist. The father—belatedly recognizing the disastrous course the country is following under the militarists—commits ritual suicide in atonement, hoping that the “people of Japan can redeem themselves before the civilized world.” The young woman vows to continue her struggle for a democratic future. 11

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Figure 6.1. A wartime U.S. government poster. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The U.S. government preferred to depict the Japanese—soldiers and civilians alike—as an undifferentiated mass of “emperor-worshipping” fanatics

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who were completely under the spell of their militarist leaders. This was, for example, the image presented in Hollywood director Frank Capra’s popular Why We Fight documentaries, particularly his Know Your Enemy—Japan (1945). In a metaphor that could have been borrowed from Mary Busk a century earlier, Capra described Japanese as “photographic prints off the same negative”—the equivalent of robots—who were trained from infancy to blindly obey their superiors and accept unquestioningly whatever they were told to believe. FACING THE ENEMY Imagining the Japanese enemy from afar was one thing; facing them in combat on Pacific battlefields—or falling into their hands as a POW—was quite another. To American soldiers, airmen, and sailors, the Japanese were radically different from their German adversaries. The latter were tough, disciplined, brave, and resourceful. So, too, were the Japanese, but they played by different rules. One could expect the Germans to surrender in extremis, but not the Japanese. American POWs could anticipate relatively decent treatment from the Germans, but not from the Japanese. Marine rifleman E. B. Sledge, who survived the ferocious battles for Peleliu and Okinawa, recalled that “a passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all marines I knew.” The reason, as one of his comrades put it, was “because they’re the meanest sonsabitches that ever lived.” 12 That “meanness” was on vivid display in the marines’ first encounter with Japanese troops on Guadalcanal in August 1942. Feigning death, injury, or surrender in hopes of killing unwary Americans was part of their standard operating procedure, as was the torture and mutilation of American prisoners. Hollywood movies, it turned out, did not exaggerate Japanese behavior. Nor did one have to be a racist to hate the Japanese. The loathing of marines for their enemy—which Sledge believed was fully reciprocated by the Japanese—“resulted in savage, ferocious fighting with no holds barred.” Marines took few prisoners, shooting most Japanese out of hand and sometimes desecrating their corpses to obtain grisly “souvenirs.” Sledge deplored such behavior, but he understood it: “it wasn’t simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps. Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman’s war.” 13 For American sailors, the most stressful and terrifying aspect of the war at sea was the Japanese kamikaze offensive which reached a climax off Okinawa in April–May 1945. “Few missiles or weapons have ever spread such

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flaming terror, such torturing burns, such searing death,” writes one naval historian. 14 The Japanese public esteemed kamikaze pilots as exemplars of noble self-sacrifice. (The same was true of the suicidal “banzai charges” and last stands of Japanese infantrymen.) But the psychology behind their attacks mystified and repelled Americans. Attempts to find American parallels to such behavior—such as the Alamo—overlook the fact that “Western societies cherish a distinction between spontaneous individual adoption of a course of action which makes death probable, and institutionalization of a tactic which makes it inevitable.” 15 No aspect of Japanese behavior appalled and infuriated Americans more than the wanton cruelty they displayed toward American POWs, the details of which became widely known in 1944. Some 20,000 servicemen fell into Japanese hands, most when the Philippines fell in 1942. Those who survived the Bataan Death March had to endure years of abuse, starvation, and slave labor in the Philippines and Japan. Sixty percent or 12,000 perished in captivity. Although there were isolated instances of good treatment and even kindness, “the casual sadism of the Japanese towards their prisoners was so widespread, indeed, almost universal, that it must be considered institutional.” 16 JAPANESE “NATIONAL CHARACTER” What explained the bizarre and murderous behavior of the Japanese military? Was it shared by the general population? Would the Japanese commit national suicide rather than surrender? Was there any way to induce them to give up? Going beyond popular “monkeymen” stereotypes to try to answer such questions became increasingly urgent as American forces closed in on Japan in 1945 and a high-casualty invasion loomed. Evidence from the front was not encouraging to those who hoped for Japan’s voluntary capitulation. In countless Pacific battles—Tarawa, Kwajalein, Attu, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa—Japanese garrisons fought to the last man or committed suicide rather than surrender. On Saipan, moreover, they were joined in death by Japanese civilians who leaped from high cliffs or blew themselves up with grenades as horrified American troops looked on. Similar civilian self-immolations occurred on Okinawa on an even larger scale, though here many were coerced by Japanese soldiers. Such behavior—along with the brutality and contempt displayed by Japanese toward their American, British, and Dutch captives—did not surprise Americans who subscribed to the myth of the Yellow Peril. Since the Russo–Japanese War, Yellow Perilists had been warning that the Japanese were high-tech savages burning with hatred of whites. It was only to be expected that they would behave in this manner once they had cast off their civilized

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veneer and embarked on a “race war” to drive whites from Asia. There were, however, several difficulties with this interpretation. For one thing, the Japanese were allies of the Germans who were indisputably “whites.” For another, just a few years earlier the Japanese had been eager consumers of American popular culture and admirers of Western institutions. The “Japanese enigma” only deepened when one considered the “odd” behavior of the relatively small number of Japanese prisoners who fell into American hands. Many proved surprisingly docile and cooperative, even volunteering to help try to coax their compatriots into giving up—hardly what one would expect of diehard fanatics. But such behavior did not portend the imminence of mass surrenders. However they were captured—usually in an unconscious or badly wounded state—they had violated the death-beforedishonor code of the Japanese military, disgracing themselves in their own eyes and those of their fellow Japanese. They were “outcasts” no longer bound by the rules and obligations of Japanese society. Few wanted their names reported to their families or expected to return to Japan. 17 There were, however, several aspects of their behavior that held some promise for peacefully ending the war. One was the speed with which their hostility toward Americans was replaced by goodwill once they discovered that they were not the “devils” that Japanese propaganda made them out to be. Another was their deep reverence for the emperor and willingness to lay down their arms if he ordered them to do so. 18 The emperor, in other words, held the key to peace, a fact recognized by some in the U.S. government who were able to prevent the bombing of the emperor’s palace in Tokyo and the old imperial capital of Kyoto. They failed, however, to persuade Truman to revise the U.S. unconditional surrender policy to explicitly guarantee the emperor’s position, a move that might have shortened the war. But recognition of the reverence felt by Japanese soldiers for their emperor left unexplained other perplexing and troubling aspects of their behavior, such as their penchant for sadistic cruelty. Here American social scientists stepped forward with interpretations based on abnormal psychology and criminal deviance. After all, the only Americans who indulged in such behavior were sociopaths and the mentally ill. Viewed from the perspective of abnormal psychology, Japanese men were seen as “neurotics” who were tormented by inner rage built up by traumatic child rearing practices and the pressures of conforming to a demanding social code. Anthropologist Weston LaBarre, who specialized in applying psychoanalytic theory to the study of ethnic groups, argued that “the Japanese are probably the most compulsive people in the world ethnological museum.” According to him, their “obsessive-compulsive personality structure” manifested itself in a variety of odd behaviors, such as “secretiveness” (hiding emotions), “fanaticism,” “touchiness,” “neatness and ritualistic cleanliness,” “hypochondria,” and “ceremoniousness.” More alarming was

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their proneness to “sadomasochistic” frenzies in which the beast within burst forth. 19 Although LaBarre did not do so, he might have cited as an example the murderous “saturnalia” in which Japanese troops indulged during their last-ditch defense of Manila against MacArthur’s advancing forces in February–March 1945. Many historians have dismissed such theorizing as the product of racist bias and cultural ethnocentrism, but few have offered any credible alternative explanation of orgies of unrestrained and pointless violence like the “Rape of Manila.” From what was said in the previous chapter about the evolution of the Japanese military, one might speculate that this organization had become a deviant subculture in which normally unthinkable behavior—bayonetting babies, gang rapes, random murder—was condoned or even encouraged. This is not to suggest that Japanese soldiers suffered from some collective mental disorder. Rather, “they were ‘ordinary men’ in extraordinary circumstances who became capable of the worst.” 20 Cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict offered a more sympathetic and ultimately more influential portrait of Japanese national character in her acclaimed 1946 book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Although she incorporated psychological theorizing in her study, Benedict urged that Japanese be understood on their own terms, not simply as deviants or neurotics. Their behavior, she argued, was basically shaped by their culture. Japanese were conditioned to identify with hierarchical social groups—the family, village, army, and above all the nation over which the emperor presided as a benevolent and quasi-divine father figure. Individuals saw themselves as owing limitless obligations to such groups, which evoked extraordinary loyalty and self-sacrifice. In Benedict’s view, the most powerful sanction in Japanese society was the shame one brought on oneself and one’s family by failing to fulfill the duties assigned by the group. Hence, their contempt for American soldiers who had “disgraced” themselves by surrendering, and the tendency of Japanese POWs to view themselves as outcasts. Because their ethics were “situational,” however, abrupt changes in behavior were possible—yesterday’s enemy might become today’s friend if the group decreed the necessity of such an about-face. This, Benedict suggested, was essentially what happened in August 1945 when the emperor announced Japan’s surrender, and called on his subjects to “endure the unendurable”—foreign military occupation—with their customary fortitude and discipline. 21 WARTIME JAPAN Among the criticisms leveled at Benedict’s work were the charges that she uncritically bought into the official myth that all Japanese thought alike; and

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that she erred in positing a timeless and unchanging Japanese “cultural essence.” 22 This last point seems especially telling. Benedict and other national character theorists ignored the extraordinary circumstances created by Japan’s “total war” against America. Had they not done so, they might have been more wary of grounding their analyses on trauma-inducing childrearing practices or supposedly immutable group loyalties and norms. Historians have cast a skeptical eye on the proposition that the Japanese people—as opposed to the military—were eager for a fight to the finish against the Americans. It seems inherently implausible that the pluralistic, Western-oriented society of the mid-1930s could have been transformed in just a few years into a monolith ready to die for the emperor on command. On the other hand, there was little overt resistance to the war or the government’s demands, including its mid-1945 order for the formation of a “people’s volunteer corps” composed of old men, women, and schoolchildren who—armed only with bamboo spears—were expected to sacrifice their lives repelling American invaders. One can only speculate whether the Japanese people would have immolated themselves en masse in this fashion, though the battles for Saipan and Okinawa suggest that vast numbers would have perished in one way or another. It is highly unlikely that many welcomed this prospect. The popular mood during the last months of the war was one of stoic resignation, not enthusiasm for an apocalyptic “last battle.” 23 Although discipline never broke, war weariness and criticism of the government and military—mostly expressed in anonymous graffiti—were sufficiently widespread to alarm the thought police. According to one historian, “the majority of Japanese were sick of regimentation, indoctrination, and militarism.” 24 American intelligence analysts were aware of some of this discontent, but U.S. war planning was based on worst-case assumptions. Nevertheless, senior officials like Secretary of War Stimson, recalling the “liberal twenties,” refused to believe that Japanese moderates and liberals were completely extinct. In a July 1945 memo to Truman, Stimson argued that “Japan is not a nation composed wholly of mad fanatics of an entirely different mentality from ours. On the contrary, she has within the past century shown herself to possess extremely intelligent people, capable in an extremely short time of adopting not only the complicated technique of Occidental civilization but to a substantial extent their culture and political and social ideas.” 25 Japan, in other words, was not beyond redemption. Fortunately for Japan—and America—Stimson’s view prevailed over cries for vengeance. NOTES 1. Cited in Dower, War Without Mercy, 33.

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2. Ronald H. Spector, The Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 540. 3. Boyle, Modern Japan: The American Nexus, 242. 4. Christopher Thorne, The Issue of War: States, Societies and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 273. 5. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear, 758. 6. Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 86. 7. Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial, 97. 8. Dower, War Without Mercy, 53–55. 9. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: Patriotism, Movies and the Second World War from ‘Ninotchka’ to ‘Mrs. Miniver’ (London: Tauris Parke, 2000), 257 ff. 10. Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 260. 11. Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 271–74. 12. E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 33–34. 13. Sledge, With the Old Breed, xxiii, 34. 14. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Two Ocean War: A Short History of the United States Navy in the Second World War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 554. 15. Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 172. 16. Hastings, Retribution, 368. 17. Emmerson, The Japanese Thread, 169–70. 18. Emmerson, The Japanese Thread, 368. 19. Weston LaBarre, “Some Observations on the Character Structure in the Orient,” in Japanese Character and Culture: A Book of Selected Readings, ed. Bernard S. Silberman (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962), 334–49. 20. Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army, 260. 21. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1970), 304–5. 22. Sonia Ryang, “Chrysanthemum’s Strange Life: Ruth Benedict in Postwar Japan,” Asian Anthropology, 1 (Feb. 2002), 91, 95. 23. Thomas R.H. Havens, Valley of Darkness: The Japanese People and World War Two (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986), ch. 10. 24. John W. Dower, Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: The New Press, 1993), 280. 25. Quoted in Frank Ninkovich, “History and Memory in Postwar U.S.–Japanese Relations,” in The Unpredictability of the Past: Memories of the Asia-Pacific War in U.S.–East Asian Relations, ed. Marc Gallicchio (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 98.

II

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Chapter Seven

Remaking Occupied Japan, 1945–1952

In their 1945–1952 occupation of Japan, Americans set out to democratize and demilitarize their erstwhile foe and largely succeeded. Much of the credit must go to the visionary leadership of General Douglas MacArthur, the Occupation supremo, and his dedicated “Occupationaires” who sought to remake Japan in the image of New Deal America. But MacArthur could hardly have succeeded to the extent he did had not most Japanese wanted to go in the direction he pointed them. Beyond its effects on Japan, the Occupation transformed American attitudes toward the Japanese. Most Americans quickly discarded their wartime stereotype of them as bestial sub-humans, and came to see them as penitent “delinquents” eager to turn themselves into model democrats and pacifists under “schoolmaster” MacArthur’s stern but benevolent gaze. The new image of Japan as an American-run “reform school” would have a long life, extending well beyond the formal end of the Occupation in 1952. PRE-SURRENDER PLANNING The Occupation would have been a protracted and harshly punitive affair if it had reflected the attitudes of most Americans toward Japan at the end of the war. According to a September 1945 poll, 54 percent approved of the use of atomic bombs against Japanese cities; indeed, 24 percent felt “we should have quickly used many more (such bombs) before Japan had a chance to surrender.” An earlier Gallup poll found that fully 70 percent favored imprisoning or executing Hirohito as a war criminal. A leading newspaper editori-

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alized that “the strictest control of the Japanese people, even for one hundred years, would not be enough.” 1 The U.S. government officials responsible for planning the Occupation were, to their credit, less interested in punishing Japan than reforming it, though they disagreed on how this should be done. “Japan experts” in the State Department, mostly diplomats with experience in prewar Japan such as former ambassador Joseph Grew, favored a short and relatively mild occupation, which would be limited to punishing war criminals, purging militarists, and restoring pro-Western liberals to power. They also favored retaining the emperor, albeit shorn of his absolute powers and supposed divinity, as a means of ensuring public order and support for a revival of parliamentary democracy. Their goal was the establishment of a new and improved version of Japan’s “Taisho democracy” of the 1920s. An opposing group of officials felt that simply restoring the status quo ante was not enough and that more drastic reforms were necessary. As Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson put it, “the present economic and social system in Japan which makes for a will to war will be changed so that the will to war will not continue.” 2 In the view of Acheson and others in this group, Hirohito would have to go, since he was irredeemably tainted by his collaboration with the militarists. So, too, would big business conglomerates (zaibatsu) for the same reason. In order to eradicate the deeper sources of Japanese militarism and ultranationalism, moreover, reform would have to extend to education, law, landholding, labor relations, the press, and other fields. In short, Japan would have to be remade from top to bottom. The views of the latter group prevailed. The “United States Initial PostSurrender Policy for Japan,” made public in early September 1945, called for the demobilization of Japan’s military; the establishment of a democratic government; the promotion of individual liberties, a free press, and human rights; the reform and decentralization of the police; the abrogation of discriminatory laws; and the release of political prisoners. It also prescribed the encouragement of a free labor movement and a “wide distribution of income and of the ownership of the means of production,” and the “dissolution of the large industrial and banking combinations (that had) exercised control of a great part of Japan’s trade and industry.” 3 No mention was made of Hirohito’s fate—Washington policymakers had not made up their mind on how to deal with this politically sensitive issue. Nor was there any reference to rebuilding Japan’s shattered economy. The implication was that the Japanese would have to fend for themselves, though how they were to do so absent access to markets and raw materials was unclear. An unstated assumption of the document was that Japan was “finished” as a great power, and was to be rendered incapable of ever again threatening its neighbors. For the foreseeable future, it would remain an economically prostrate and demilitarized American ward. East Asia was to

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be managed by the victorious Allies—the United States, Soviet Union, British Commonwealth, and Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China—whom Roosevelt famously called the “Four Policemen” of postwar Asia. The other “policemen” were not, however, invited to participate in the occupation of Japan except in a ceremonial capacity. (As a sop, several Allied advisory bodies were set up, but they were powerless.) In contrast to Germany, this was to be an exclusively American show and there would be no Allied occupation zones—much to the chagrin of Stalin who thought the Soviets deserved at least the northern island of Hokkaido. Also unlike Germany, the American occupiers proposed to rule indirectly through the existing Japanese government rather than directly through a military government. These decisions proved of great importance: they spared Japan the Cold War fate of divided Germany, and made the Japanese de facto partners in the Occupation and hence able to influence it. MACARTHUR’S “EXPERIMENT” President Truman’s choice of General MacArthur to preside over Japan’s reform as head of the Occupation (or “Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers,” as this position was formally designated) was, at first glance, an odd one. A professional soldier with pronounced right-wing leanings, MacArthur had been an outspoken critic of Roosevelt’s New Deal who had outraged liberals as army chief of staff by ordering troops to break up the 1932 “Bonus March.” (Roosevelt once called him the “second most dangerous man in America,” the first being Louisiana demagogue Huey Long.) One might expect, therefore, that MacArthur would have ignored Washington’s democratization agenda for Japan, and contented himself with restoring the conservative political and business elites of the 1920s, as was recommended by Grew and his fellow Japan experts. As it happened, however, MacArthur had his own ideas about reforming Japan, which were even more radical and idealistic than those of the Washington bureaucracy. To the surprise and dismay of many of his right-wing admirers at home, he surrounded himself in Tokyo with New Dealers; released imprisoned communists; encouraged leftist-dominated labor unions; expropriated Japanese landlords; mounted a “trust-busting” campaign against big business; championed the “liberation” of Japanese women; and rewrote Japan’s constitution to ban the establisment of a military. How can such “progressive” initiatives be squared with his well-deserved reputation as an arch-conservative? For some historians, the explanation of this paradox is quite simple: MacArthur was a “political opportunist” who merely pretended to be a progressive reformer in order to burnish his credentials as a “statesman” in

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preparation for a run for the presidency on the Republican Party ticket in 1948. 4 That MacArthur had presidential ambitions is not in doubt, but evidence for the claim that these ambitions were the primary motivation of his actions in Japan is at best circumstantial and relies heavily on the opinions of his numerous critics and detractors. It seems more probable that the messianic streak in this talented but immensely egocentric, if not megalomaniacal, man simply came to the fore in Japan. Another line of argument favored by those intent on cutting MacArthur down to size and debunking the “heroic narrative” promoted by his admirers is that he was just following orders from Washington. True, the broad outlines of occupation reforms were laid down in the Initial Post-Surrender Policy and later directives. However, MacArthur was armed with considerable discretionary authority, and no one who knew him doubted that he would exercise it to the fullest, least of all Truman. The president privately derided him as “Mr. Prima Donna” who was “worse than the Cabots and Lodges. . . . They at least talked with one another before they told God what to do. Mac tells God right off.” 5 Truman was glad to send him to Tokyo, and did not much care what he did there. Neither Truman nor anyone else in Washington was inclined to try to “supervise” this one-of-a-kind “American Caesar,” with his towering prestige and legions of fervent American admirers. In his Reminiscences, MacArthur described the Occupation as a “laboratory” for an “experiment” in liberating a people from militarism, feudalism, and theocracy, and bringing them “abreast of modern progressive thought and action.” 6 In other words, he imagined himself directing a project of world-historical significance—lifting a people from barbarism to civilization virtually overnight. He seemed wholly oblivious of the great strides the Japanese had taken since 1868 in advancing toward Western-defined modernity. Such recognition would have diminished the scale of his achievement. In any case, he knew little about the Japanese and evinced scant interest in educating himself about them. From the time of his arrival in 1945 until he was sacked by Truman in 1951, he secluded himself in Olympian detachment, rarely deigning to associate with Japanese except the emperor and a few other dignitaries. He did, however, have some ideas about the Japanese, which spilled out during his testimony before Congress after his return to the United States in 1951. There he famously described them as being “like a boy of twelve as compared with our development of forty-five years.” “In spite of their antiquity measured in time,” he explained, they were in a “very tuitionary condition” and hence “unusually susceptible to following new models, new ideas.” 7 These remarks are Exhibit A for those who think that MacArthur’s outlook—and, by extension, the Occupation itself—was suffused with racist

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condescension and contempt for the Japanese. But this judgment seems unduly harsh. MacArthur has been aptly characterized as “an anachronism, a nineteenth-century man with a twentieth-century career.” 8 Born in 1880, he probably picked up his notion of the “immaturity” of the Japanese and other East Asian peoples from ideas popularized by Percival Lowell at the turn of the century. In any event, there is little doubt that his approach to reforming Japan was heavily colored by his experiences in the American Philippines. His father briefly served as its military governor, and MacArthur himself spent much of his military career there, acquiring a fondness for its people, befriending prominent Filipinos, and even aspiring (in 1929) to become the colony’s governor general. He was an unabashed admirer of America’s “civilizing mission” in the Philippines, and explicitly cited it as the “guide” for his conduct of the Occupation. 9 MacArthur and his “Occupationaires” are vulnerable to the charge of being high-handed, paternalistic, and ethnocentric. Few of them knew much about Japan or had second thoughts about the wisdom or feasibility of transplanting American institutions, ideals, and values there. (For MacArthur, Americanizing the Japanese included trying to Christianize them—an endeavor that fizzled.) But if American naiveté and hubris were conspicuously on display in the Occupation, so, too, were their idealism, generosity, and sincerity. And for Japanese, “sincerity” is a particularly important virtue that redeems many faults. “REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE” Initially, there was no guarantee that the Occupation would operate as smoothly and peacefully as it in fact did. American soldiers—mindful of the fanaticism displayed by their erstwhile Japanese foes on the battlefield— feared the worst. Japanese were equally uncertain and fearful, having been fed on a diet of horror stories about the behavior of American “devils.” To his credit, MacArthur grasped the opportunity to allay Japanese apprehensions and win their trust. In an extraordinary demonstration of personal bravery, he arrived in Japan in late August at an insecure air base near Tokyo and drove into Yokohama unarmed and with only a few aides on roads lined with 30,000 Japanese troops assigned to act as his protectors. Master showman that he was, he arranged for his dramatic entry to be well covered by both the Japanese and American media. MacArthur undertook a variety of gestures designed to impress Japanese with American goodwill and benevolence, such as permitting the Japanese military to disarm and demobilize itself, distributing emergency food aid from U.S. army stocks, and making the slapping of Japanese by Occupation

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troops a punishable offense. None of these gestures was more important—or more controversial—than his decision not to arraign Hirohito as a war criminal and retain him on the throne as a symbol of the new democratic order he sought to create. MacArthur did not, of course, present this as a goodwill gesture. Rather, he argued that the emperor had been an unwilling “figurehead” of the militarists, whose prosecution would alienate and anger the Japanese people, requiring an “indefinite occupation” and a “million American troops” to maintain order. Whatever the merits of this argument, absolving the emperor of responsibility for the war implicitly absolved his subjects as well—a problem that would return to haunt the Japanese in the future. The punitive aspects of the Occupation were similar to those visited on Germany. The counterpart of the Nuremberg Trials was the International Military Tribunal of the Far East in which twenty-eight military and civilian leaders were charged with responsibility for atrocities or the novel crime of plotting aggression. All were found guilty and either executed or sentenced to prison terms. Some 5,000 military men were prosecuted in Japan and elsewhere in Asia for specific war crimes, and about 900 executed. A “purge” removed 220,000 senior figures in education, politics, the media, and business on the grounds that they had cooperated too closely with militarists. In addition, the Imperial army and navy were abolished, along with the Home Ministry and its notorious thought police. The same fate befell the Privy Council, House of Peers, and the peerage itself, a Meiji-era creation modeled on European practice. Having thus dismantled the ancien régime—with the significant exception of the powerful economic bureaucracy which was largely unscathed— MacArthur set about reconstructing Japan’s state and society on more democratic and egalitarian lines. Perhaps his most important innovation was the so-called “MacArthur Constitution” of 1947, which demoted the emperor to a “symbol of the State and unity of the people” and declared the people sovereign. It also included an American-style Bill of Rights and a host of “progressive” provisions such as those guaranteeing gender equality and collective bargaining rights. Article 9—apparently inserted at MacArthur’s personal behest—committed the Japanese people to “forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” To this end, it prohibited the maintenance of “land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential.” Most Japanese enthusiastically welcomed the new constitution and its democratic and pacifist ideals. There was also broad support for MacArthur’s program of economic democratization, especially land reform and the encouragement of labor unions. Land reform transformed landless tenant farmers into prosperous small landholders, ending long-simmering rural discontent. The labor movement—which underwent explosive growth in

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1945–1947 with the Occupation’s blessing—emerged as a formidable champion of workers’ rights and counterweight to the power of big business. Contrary to MacArthur’s expectations, however, it quickly became politicized as much of it fell under the leadership of communists and other leftists with radical political and economic agendas. MacArthur’s “trust busters” had less success in breaking up business conglomerates and promoting economic “deconcentration.” The Japanese public was largely indifferent to these goals, and conservative resistance was strong. Likewise, Occupation efforts to remake Japan’s educational and local government systems along American lines produced mixed results. Although educational opportunities expanded and there was a shift to inculcating democratic and pacifist values, American-style parent-teacher associations (PTAs) and locally elected school boards created confusion. Moreover, many newly empowered local governments proved too small and cash-strapped to deliver adequate public services. As one might expect, the most enduring legacies of the American “revolution from above”—democracy, pacifism, individual rights, legal equality for women, land reform, and a vibrant labor movement—were those for which the prewar and wartime experiences of the Japanese people had prepared them, and for which there was strong public support. American initiatives which lacked such support, such as MacArthur’s Christianization project, trust busting, a decentralized police force, PTAs, and the introduction of the Roman alphabet, died aborning or soon withered away. Considered from this perspective, the Occupation’s chief significance lay in speeding up changes already underway and giving specific form to them. It was, in the words of one historian, a “catalyst, not creator.” 10 “FRATERNIZATION” Above and beyond the changes the Occupation wrought on Japan was the transformation it effected in American attitudes toward Japan. Between 1945 and 1952, some two million Americans, mostly young servicemen, sojourned there, many bringing back favorable impressions. Nothing remotely comparable to this level of friendly people-to-people interaction had previously occurred, and the results were immediate and dramatic. The first American arrivals were combat veterans who brought with them the negative wartime stereotypes of the Japanese described in the previous chapter. Expecting to encounter sullen and resentful fanatics, many were dumbfounded to be greeted by laughing children, friendly adults, and respectful officials. Contemporary accounts and later reminiscences of GIs are replete with “epiphanies” in which they discarded their stereotypes and came to look upon the Japanese as decent and even likable people. 11 Descriptions

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of friendly encounters between GIs and ordinary Japanese became a staple of early Occupation reporting, helping to soften American attitudes toward Japan. So, too, did John Hersey’s moving account of the suffering of atomic bomb victims in his best-selling Hiroshima (1946). Most Americans soon came to agree with MacArthur that it was less important to punish the Japanese than reform them, and there was ample evidence to suggest that the Japanese were eager for American tutelage. Hirohito himself set the tone. Publicly renouncing his divinity, he traded in his wartime military uniform for a suit and took to awkwardly circulating among his people to inquire about their well-being. He did not seem to mind being upstaged by “MacArthur Shogun,” as Japanese dubbed the supreme commander, or resent his diminished status as the powerless symbol of the new, democratic Japan. On the contrary, he employed a pious Quaker lady, Elizabeth Gray Vining, to tutor the crown prince in English and democratic values. Vining’s memoir, Windows for the Crown Prince (1952), became another occupation-era best seller in the United States, and helped implant the notion that the Japanese had again become eager and respectful pupils of America. It was natural for Americans to imagine occupied Japan as “the world’s largest reformatory school” in which “Schoolmaster Uncle Sam” was curing erstwhile Japanese delinquents of their errant ways and molding them into model democrats. 12 MacArthur expected GIs to support this undertaking by serving as mentors and exemplars of the American way. Thus, the 1946 War Department training film Our Job in Japan instructed them that “we’re here to make it clear to the Japanese that the time has come to make sense— modern, civilized sense.” The best way to do this, the film suggested, was for GIs to be themselves, because “by being ourselves we can prove that what we like to call the American way, or democracy, or just plain old Golden Rule common sense, is a pretty good way to live.” 13 Some GIs took their assigned role seriously, but for many, “drinking, whoring, and souvenir hunting were among the most popular activities,” and the reason for their presence in Japan was obscure. The language barrier and non-fraternization rules during the initial stage of the Occupation confined them to tawdry “strips” around their bases, which were filled with bars, brothels, and bathhouses. There GIs often formed liaisons with Japanese bar girls, or “baby-sans” as they were called. Most of these liaisons were temporary in the Madame Butterfly mold, but some—along with friendships with more respectable women—blossomed into romantic attachments and even marriage. Although Occupation authorities looked askance at such marriages, some 20,000 took place by 1955—“probably the largest number of legally sanctioned interracial marriages in such a brief space of time in American history.” 14

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The Japan of 1945–1947—with its bombed-out cities and ragged, hungry inhabitants—was hardly an ideal setting in which to savor the attractions of the Old Japan. But much survived intact, particularly in rural areas and in undamaged cities such as Kyoto. Like Gilded Age tourists, Occupation personnel were a privileged elite who were able to tour Japan in comfort and

Figure 7.1. Jitterbugging in Tokyo during the Occupation. Source: Getty Images

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style. They snapped up Japanese curios and artwork, rhapsodized over the natural beauty of the countryside, and enthused over the “quaintness” of ancient temples and thatched-roofed farmhouses. The late-nineteenth-century idea of Japan as an exotic “toy land” was beginning to make another comeback. 15 CRITIQUES OF THE OCCUPATION At the outset of the Occupation in 1945, most Americans felt MacArthur was “not tough enough” with Japan. By 1949, however, his approval rating exceeded 80 percent. Even more striking was the reversal of attitudes toward the Japanese. In August 1945, it would have been difficult to find any American who held a favorable opinion of them. But by 1949, 34 percent of those polled held “friendly feelings” toward Japanese, and this proportion rose to 51 percent in 1951, with only 25 percent expressing “unfriendly feelings.” 16 For most Americans, the Occupation was a “success story,” one of the few they could point to in postwar East Asia, and a consolation of sorts for the disastrous “loss of China.” MacArthur got most of the credit—the Occupation was, after all, his show. Some, however, expressed doubts and misgivings: Had the Japanese “really” embraced democracy? Had MacArthur gone far enough in dismantling the old order? Or had he gone too far? Consider, for example, Time-Life journalist Noel Busch’s assessment of the Occupation in Fallen Sun (1948). Like most people who wrote in a serious vein about Japan in the late 1940s, he subscribed to the view that Japanese were culturally conditioned to follow, lemming-like, in whatever direction their god-emperor led them. “As soon as the surrender was announced,” Busch wrote, “it became just as important to the Japanese to obey the Emperor’s command to co-operate with the Americans as it had previously been to kill as many of them as possible.” But this was not the whole story. “Trained for centuries to admire victory in war above all else, and convinced . . . that the Americans were better at war than they were themselves, the Japanese saw a way to save further face by imitating their conqueror with the object, eventually, of becoming exactly like him.” 17 Did not the zeal of the Japanese to become “exactly like Americans” guarantee the Occupation’s success? Busch was skeptical. In an unacknowledged nod to Percival Lowell’s theory of their stunted individuality, he suggested that their “childish aptitude for the perfect copy” fostered the “dangerous illusion” that they were learning to do things for themselves, whereas in actuality the opposite was the case. They thus might “picture democracy as a procedure wherein the nation first voted and then asked a higher authority if they had voted the right way.” The “net of all of this,” he predicted, “could

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be that the Japanese will finally emerge from their novel experience (the Occupation) with a smattering of democratic manners but no great change in their own basic conditioning attitude toward life.” 18 Other critics were more explicit in charging that MacArthur’s democratization program had opened a Pandora’s Box of problems. Former ambassador Grew, for example, considered the Japanese people to be “somewhat like sheep.” Any attempt to impose full-fledged democracy would, he felt, only lead to chaos and “leave (the) field wide open for would be dictators.” As noted above, Grew favored an occupation that restored pre-1932 liberals to power and interfered as little as possible with Japan’s economic, political, and social systems. He was consequently incensed by MacArthur’s purge of Japanese elites and his “zaibatsu-busting” efforts. Such policies would, he warned, impede Japan’s economic recovery and drive it “straight into the Russian orbit.” 19 Grew’s views were embraced by an anti-communist and pro-business “Japan Lobby,” which mounted a partially successful campaign in 1947–1948 to roll back the general’s reforms. Critics on the left dismissed the contention that the Japanese people were unfit for democratic self-government as a red herring put forward by those intent on perpetuating Japan’s prewar oligarchy, and they took MacArthur to task for not going far enough to break its power. In Prospects for Democracy in Japan (1949), for example, the scholar-activist T. A. Bisson argued that the Occupation had failed to attain its announced aims of democratizing Japan’s politics and economy “primarily because those aims could not be achieved through the instrumentality of Japan’s old guard.” In Bisson’s view, this “old guard” had sabotaged genuine reform, and MacArthur had allowed them to do it. 20 THE “REVERSE COURSE” With the intensification of the Cold War in 1948 and the imminent fall of China to Mao’s communists, Washington policymakers belatedly “discovered” postwar Japan’s geopolitical importance and began to view it as a potential Cold War ally. What concerned them most were the precarious state of the Japanese economy and the threat of communist subversion. Inflation was rampant, unemployment high, shortages of food and consumer goods acute, foreign trade virtually nonexistent, and industrial production far below prewar levels. Equally alarming was surging labor unrest which was spearheaded by communist-dominated public-sector unions. From Washington’s perspective, MacArthur seemed strangely complacent about the dangers inherent in this situation. The State Department’s George Kennan, later celebrated as the “father of containment,” caustically observed in his memoirs that if MacArthur’s reform policies “had been de-

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vised for the specific purpose of of rendering Japanese society vulnerable to Communist political pressures and paving the way for a Communist takeover, they could hardly have been other than what they were.” 21 In 1948, Washington lowered the boom on MacArthur, ending his reign as an autonomous “proconsul.” In October, he was ordered to implement NSC 13, also known as the “Report by the National Security Council on Recommendations with Respect to United States Policy toward Japan.” This directive de-emphasized reform in favor of economic recovery which was now identified as the “primary objective” of U.S. policy. Economic recovery was to be pursued through a combination of U.S. aid and encouragement of Japanese business. The Japanese government was to play its part by curbing inflation, reducing “work-stoppages,” and putting its fiscal house in order. The “purge,” “trust busting,” and other democratization measures were to be relaxed, and the Japanese police strengthened. 22 In line with Washington’s new priorities, MacArthur quietly suspended trust-busting, approved the reinstatement of earlier “purgees,” prohibited strikes by public-sector workers, strengthened the police, and gave his blessing to a “Red Purge” in which thousands of communists were weeded out of the labor movement. He also threw his weight behind an austerity plan recommended by Detroit banker Joseph Dodge in 1949. The “Dodge Line,” as this plan is called, broke the back of inflation by slashing government spending, tightening credit, and stabilizing the yen–dollar exchange rate. Did this so-called “reverse course”—a phrase coined by Japanese critics—amount to a Cold War-driven “betrayal” of the initially progressive objectives of the Occupation? Or was it simply a “shifting of gears” to bring Occupation policies more into line with changing domestic and international realities? 23 Historians continue to debate this question; their answers depend on what they believe should have been the proper goals of the United States in shaping postwar Japan. Whatever one’s convictions in this regard, the fact remains that the key reforms of the Occupation’s early phase—land reform, democratization, and the adoption of pacifism as Japan’s new national credo—were never reversed. NOTES 1. Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 657. 2. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 77. 3. Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 24–25. 4. Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945–1952 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989), 6. 5. Quoted in LaFeber, The Clash, 260. 6. Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 282–83.

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7. Dower, Embracing Defeat, 550. 8. John Curtis Perry, Beneath the Eagle’s Wings: Americans in Occupied Japan (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980), 78. 9. MacArthur, Reminiscences, 20. 10. Edwin O. Reischauer, “The Allied Occupation: Catalyst, Not Creator,” in Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modern Japanese History, eds. Harry Wray and Hillary Conroy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 335–42. 11. Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 14–15. 12. Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 25. 13. Cited in Dower, Embracing Defeat, 216–17. 14. Perry, Beneath the Eagle’s Wings, 184–185, 187, 189. 15. Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally, 20–24. 16. Frank Ninkovich, “History and Memory in Postwar U.S.–Japanese Relations,” 92–93. 17. Noel F. Busch, Fallen Sun: A Report on Japan (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1948), 32, 34. 18. Busch, Fallen Sun, 247–49, 253. 19. Schonberger, Aftermath of War, 27, 38–39. 20. Schonberger, Aftermath of War, 105. 21. D. Clayton James, The Years of MacArthur: Triumph and Disaster, 1945–1964 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 227–28. 22. James, The Years of MacArthur, 229–31. 23. Carol Gluck, “Entangling Illusions—Japanese and American Views of the Occupation,” in New Frontiers in American–East Asian Relations, ed. Warren I. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 206.

Chapter Eight

Allying with Pacifist Japan, 1952–1971

By the end of the 1940s, the United States had become intent on turning Japan into a Cold War ally. Having converted en masse to pacifism in 1945–1946, the Japanese resisted rearmament and entanglement in the Cold War, but they recognized that some kind of security tie was the price of ending the Occupation and regaining their independence. The 1952 U.S.–Japan Mutual Security Treaty was a compromise—America received bases and Japan got a security guarantee. From Washington’s perspective, Japan turned out to be a “reluctant ally,” but it prospered mightily under America’s wing, experiencing an unexpected “economic miracle” during the 1960s. Americans celebrated their protégé’s economic success, and indulged their perennial fascination with its traditional culture and appealing womenfolk. Viewing Japan through the prism of then-popular “modernization theory,” they assumed that it was becoming more and more “like America,” a notion of which they would soon be disabused. ENDING THE OCCUPATION American planners initially paid little attention to the questions of how long the Occupation should last or what should be the shape of America’s future relationship with Japan. But MacArthur, characteristically, had his own ideas on these matters and was not shy about voicing them. To Washington’s consternation, he announced at a press conference in early 1947 that the goals of the Occupation had been achieved and that the time had come to restore sovereignty to Japan. He did not foresee a need for a U.S.–Japan alliance or Japanese rearmament. Post-Occupation Japan was to be a demil107

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itarized and neutral state—“the Switzerland of the Pacific” as he put it, overlooking the fact that Switzerland had a well-trained and well-equipped citizen army. The Japanese were, in other words, to be allowed to realize the pacifist ideals set forth in their “no war” constitution. 1 MacArthur’s initiative was a nonstarter in Washington. It seemed folly to cast adrift an unarmed, economically floundering, and politically unstable Japan, especially in light of the presumed predatory intentions of the Soviet Union. (This erstwhile postwar “policeman” had proved uncooperative and was now seen as posing a global threat to U.S. interests.). The State Department’s George Kennan, who played a lead role in the early stages of postOccupation planning in 1947–1948, believed that a stable Japan, backed by a U.S. security guarantee, might induce Moscow to respect its independence. He was unconvinced of the necessity for Japanese rearmament or U.S. bases in Japan, which he proposed to use as “bargaining chips” to try to strike a deal with Stalin. But the Defense Department balked, insisting that Japan should be pressed to rearm and that the United States should retain bases in Okinawa and the mainland as a “forward operating platform.” 2 To Kennan’s dismay, Secretary of State Dean Acheson shifted toward the Pentagon’s position in 1949, conceding that some U.S. forces could remain in post-Occupation Japan and that limited Japanese rearmament would be acceptable. Anything more would unnecessarily provoke the Soviets. This, however, failed to satisfy Defense Secretary Louis Johnson. He preferred to continue the Occupation indefinitely, but if it had to end, the Japanese should be induced to undertake large-scale rearmament and provide the U.S. military with an extensive network of bases. The State-Defense deadlock was not broken until 1950 when Truman ordered them to resolve their differences. Johnson thereupon dropped his opposition to an early end to the Occupation, and Acheson accepted the Pentagon’s position on base rights and Japanese rearmament. It remained, however, to sell these terms to the Japanese. The Japanese government led by ex-diplomat Shigeru Yoshida played little part in the U.S. interagency wrangling of 1948–1950 and its views did not much matter to the principals. Yoshida, an Anglophile and old-fashioned “liberal,” was appalled by MacArthur’s democratization and demilitarization program, but he agreed with the general on the desirability of an early restoration of Japanese sovereignty. While not averse to a U.S. security guarantee, he preferred a minimal American military presence in Japan and was deadset against large-scale Japanese rearmament. Like other Japanese conservatives, Yoshida disapproved of the 1947 constitution’s no-war clause. He recognized, however, that it enjoyed broad popular support and could not be set aside without a bitter political fight with the newly empowered Japanese Left, which interpreted it as requiring Japan’s “unarmed neutrality” in the Cold War.

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In hopes of securing bipartisan support for a deal with Japan, the Truman administration appointed Republican Party foreign policy heavyweight John Foster Dulles to lead the negotiations with Yoshida. Dulles found the latter receptive to a U.S. proposal for a generous multilateral peace treaty. (Japan indirectly assumed responsibility for the war and renounced its post-1894 territorial acquisitions, but war reparations would be addressed later in bilateral talks.) However, reaching agreement on the terms of a bilateral security pact proved more difficult. Yoshida was willing to trade basing rights for a U.S. security guarantee, but he balked at Dulles’s demand for the immediate establishment of a 300,000-man army. The Japanese people, he argued, would not stand for such a flagrant violation of the “peace constitution” which the Americans themselves had imposed only three years earlier. The best Yoshida could offer was a vague promise of gradual and limited rearmament, which Dulles reluctantly accepted. At the September 1951 San Francisco conference, Yoshida signed a peace treaty with forty-eight nations—not including the USSR and PRC—and a security treaty with the United States. There was, however, a last-minute hitch. A group of U.S. senators threatened to block ratification of the treaties if Japan normalized relations with Communist China as Yoshida clearly intended to do. Dulles therefore extracted a public pledge from him not to deal with the PRC and instead recognize Chiang Kai-shek’s rump Nationalist regime on Taiwan. This was a bitter pill for Yoshida to swallow. He had counted on trade with China to sustain Japan’s economic recovery and felt little animus toward Mao and his communists. Moreover, the episode embarrassingly highlighted Japan’s subservient position vis-à-vis the United States. THE RELUCTANT ALLY The U.S.–Japan Mutual Security Treaty, which came into force in 1952 with the end of the Occupation, was a less than fully satisfactory arrangement for both sides. The United States retained its bases in mainland Japan plus administrative control of Okinawa. However, the Japanese showed no eagerness to rebuild their military, though a start had been made in 1950 with the formation (at MacArthur’s order) of a 75,000-men “National Police Reserve.” In 1954, Yoshida converted this into a “Self-Defense Force (SDF),” arguing—against vociferous objections from the Left—that the constitution did not prohibit self-defense. But the SDF was only slowly built up, and was configured for purely defensive operations against a hypothetical attack on the Japanese homeland. Yoshida rejected Dulles’s request for Japanese participation in NATO-style collective security arrangements. His legal experts maintained that such participation was incompatible with Article 9, though this did not stop Japan from joining the United Nations in 1956. In American

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eyes, Japan was a thus a “reluctant ally,” strangely complacent in the face of the Sino–Soviet menace. From the Japanese perspective, the Security Treaty relieved them of the necessity to provide for their own defense, thus enabling them to concentrate their energies and resources on economic recovery. But the price was high. For one thing, the U.S. security guarantee was implicit, not explicit. For another, Tokyo had no voice in where or for what purpose Japan-based American forces would be employed. Nor did it have any say in the kind of armaments, including nuclear weapons, the Americans might bring into the country. Furthermore, the United States retained the right to use its forces to quell internal disturbances in Japan if need be. There was no pretense of equality here—Japan was reduced to a position of “subordinate independence.” 3 Indeed, in the view of many Japanese and even some Americans, the treaty represented the continuation of the Occupation by another name. Not surprisingly, Japanese of all ideological persuasions found this situation galling and not a little reminiscent of the late-nineteenth-century unequal treaty regime, with its foreign enclaves and privileges protected by Western gunboats. 4 The parallel was heightened by the large and highly visible American military presence in Japan—some 250,000 troops plus dependents in 1952 who enjoyed “extraterritorial” rights under a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). The inevitable crime, accidents, and land disputes created much local discontent around the bases, which the Japanese Left, particularly the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) and its labor and student allies, fanned with noisy “Yankee Go Home” demonstrations. But “anti-Americanism” did not run very deep in 1950s Japan. The Occupation had left a reservoir of goodwill toward Americans and most Japanese, particularly farmers, were well satisfied with the reforms it had carried out. Besides, the nation was focused on economic recovery. The Eisenhower administration was troubled by what it took to be an upsurge of anti-American and neutralist sentiment in Japan. Dulles, who served as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State from 1953 to 1959, was especially unhappy with the slowness of Japanese rearmament and prodded Yoshida and his successors to pick up the pace. (Under such prodding, the SDF grew by the late 1950s into a modern 210,000-man military with air, naval, and ground components equipped with American weapons.) Dulles also fretted over Japan’s opening of “unofficial” trade relations with the PRC, its attendance at the 1955 Bandung Conference of nonaligned states, and its abortive attempt to negotiate a peace treaty with the USSR in 1956—all of which he saw as signs of “incipient neutralism.” 5 Even though Japan may have been a less than ideal Cold War ally from Washington’s point of view, it was the “sheet anchor” of the U.S. containment strategy in East Asia. 6 It provided an indispensable “forward operating platform” for the projection of U.S. power in the region, and its reviving

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industrial economy functioned as the “workshop” of noncommunist Asia. The Eisenhower administration consequently did what it could to support and strengthen its new ally. It backed Tokyo’s efforts to rejoin the international community by, for example, lobbying for its admission to the United Nations and sponsoring its membership in the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. It also opened the American market to Japanese exports, facilitated Japanese access to American technology, and even provided credit through the U.S. ExportImport Bank to help the Japanese pay for their food and raw material imports. THE SECURITY TREATY CRISIS In the late 1950s, Eisenhower tried to assist Japan’s ruling conservatives— who had combined in 1955 to form the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)—by reducing the U.S. military “footprint” in Japan and renegotiating the Security Treaty to eliminate its most inequitable features. One might expect that these moves, particularly treaty revision, would have elicited a favorable reaction in Japan and helped quiet anti-alliance agitation. In fact, however, the ratification of the revised treaty in 1960 became the occasion for the largest mass demonstrations in Japanese history, forcing the cancellation of a planned visit by Eisenhower which would have been the first ever by a sitting American president. What went wrong? In essence, Washington bet on the wrong political horse by negotiating treaty revision with Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi. Although a staunch proponent of the alliance, he had served in Japan’s wartime cabinet and been arrested in 1945 as a suspected war criminal. (He was not, however, indicted.) This personal baggage plus his well-advertised reactionary views made him anathema to the Left which saw him as the leader of a conservative push to recreate the pre-1945 state. His heavy-handed tactics to secure Diet approval of the revised security treaty—he had police physically eject socialist and other opposition representatives before the vote was taken—seemed to confirm these suspicions. The tens of thousands of ordinary Japanese who took to the streets of Tokyo in protest were animated less by anti-American or even anti-alliance sentiments than by anger over Kishi’s “undemocratic” action. 7 (It is also noteworthy that the protests were confined to Tokyo—most of the rest of the country simply watched.) The demonstrations quickly subsided when Kishi resigned, and the LDP was returned to power by a larger-than-usual margin in elections held only a few months later. Nevertheless, the “security treaty crisis,” as this episode is called, had a sobering effect on the LDP. Kishi and other nationalist “hawks” were pushed aside by “doves” intent on doing

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whatever it took to restore domestic tranquility. The latter deemed this to require shelving divisive security issues and instead emphasizing economic growth and “income doubling.” They also proceeded to co-opt the Left’s pacifist and neutralist agenda by, for example, banning arms exports, limiting defense expenditures, and pledging not to produce, possess, or allow the introduction of nuclear weapons into Japan. 8 In the United States, the security treaty crisis was widely viewed as an indicator of growing anti-Americanism and the fragility of Japan’s new democracy. The Kennedy administration consequently took the unusual step of appointing America’s leading Japanologist, Harvard professor Edwin Reischauer, as ambassador and tasking him with shoring up the alliance. Reischauer came to the attention of Kennedy’s advisors through an influential Foreign Affairs article in which he argued that there was substantial public support in Japan for both the alliance and conservative rule. The problem, he wrote, was the “alienation” of Japanese intellectuals and students, and the “frightening” gap between their thinking and that of Americans. The Eisenhower administration, he charged, had failed to reach out to these discontented elements, listen to their grievances, and explain American purposes and ideals. 9 As U.S. ambassador between 1961 and 1966, Reischauer labored to repair what he called “the broken dialogue” with the Japanese Left, construct an “equal partnership” between Japan and America, and broaden it to encompass economic, cultural, and other nonmilitary areas of cooperation. 10 He was, however, only partly successful. Few Japanese leftists were interested in dialogue with representatives of American capitalism and imperialism, even if—like Reischauer—they spoke Japanese and had a Japanese wife. Americans, on their part, found it difficult to abandon their “occupation mentality” in which Japanese figured as “wards” and “pupils.” This was especially true of the U.S. military in Okinawa, which governed the island as an American semi-colony, and resisted interference from both Reischauer and the Japanese government (which had “residual sovereignty”). Another problem was a lack of sustained high-level support in Washington. The president himself initially evinced little interest in Japan, though his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, befriended Reischauer and visited Japan in 1962 where he engaged in a spirited public debate with Japanese students. Robert Kennedy played a major role in persuading John F. Kennedy to plan a trip to Japan in January 1964, which was aborted by his assassination. Perhaps a bigger obstacle to the partnership envisioned by Reischauer was growing tension between Washington and Tokyo over China and Vietnam. Differences over China were not new, but they intensified during the 1960s as the Johnson administration pressed Japan to play an active role in blocking Chinese expansion in Southeast Asia. LDP leaders considered U.S.

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fears of the PRC overblown and parried Washington’s requests for politicalmilitary support in Vietnam. The emergence of a strong anti-Vietnam War movement in Japan after 1965 further strained relations, as did Japanese demands for the return of Okinawa, which was a major staging area for U.S. military operations in Vietnam. Reischauer eventually tired of serving as an apologist for the Vietnam War, of which he privately disapproved, and returned to academia. But the damage to his reputation in antiwar circles proved irreparable. JAPAN’S “ECONOMIC MIRACLE” Whatever Americans thought about Japan’s reliability as an ally—a plurality but not a majority believed it to be “dependable”—they marveled at its spectacular economic growth. Between the mid-1950s and early 1970s, it maintained a 10 percent annual growth rate, an unprecedented achievement for an industrialized country. Japan’s GDP eclipsed Britain’s and West Germany’s, making it the world’s third largest economy after the United States and Soviet Union. High-quality, reasonably priced Japanese products—TVs, cameras, watches, appliances, and autos—flooded into European and American markets where they were eagerly snapped up by consumers. Americans who attended the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, Japan’s national “coming out party,” were impressed by its growing prosperity and modernity, symbolized by elevated expressways, “bullet trains,” and crowded highend department stores. No one had predicted this when Japan regained its independence in 1952. John Foster Dulles commented wryly at the time that “suicide was not an illogical step for anyone concerned about Japan’s economic future.” 11 The problem, as he saw it, was that the “Japanese don’t make the things we want.” 12 He might have rephrased this as “they can’t make the things we want.” During and after the Occupation, the “made in Japan” label was synonymous with cheap, ill-made sundries—“dollar blouses,” toys, cocktail napkins, and the like. American observers in the 1950s concluded that, while the Japanese might be able to sell such items to their Asian neighbors, there was a limited market for them in the United States, and it was unlikely that they could produce quality, high-value-added goods Americans would buy. What this pessimistic prognosis overlooked is the fact that the Japanese were quite capable of making world-class industrial products; indeed, they had done so on a large scale during the war when their factories and shipyards turned out everything from super-battleships to advanced fighter aircraft. Like postwar Germany—which experienced its own “economic miracle”—Japan inherited a wealth of technical and engineering skill, entrepreneurial energy, and managerial talent, which it redirected from military to

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civilian production. The continuity between Japan’s wartime and postwar economies is especially striking in industries like shipbuilding and optics, whose revival helped propel its industrial “take-off” in the late 1950s. Such continuity is also evident in Japan’s political economy, notably the outsized role—from an American perspective—of its powerful economic bureaucracy led by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Ministry of Finance (MOF). 13 American observers in the 1960s were well aware that the “mercantilist” methods employed by MITI and MOF to promote Japan’s industrial growth—such as erecting barriers to foreign investment and manufactured imports—were unacceptable in America’s “free market” economy. But few were much concerned. Japan was considered to be the equivalent of a “newly industrialized country” (NIC), which was entitled to play by different rules than advanced countries until it “graduated” to developed country status. 14 Besides, encouraging Japan’s economic growth had been an integral part of America’s Cold War strategy since the late 1940s, and there seemed to be no compelling reason to abandon this policy. By 1970, however, some Americans were having second thoughts. True, their trillion-dollar economy was five times larger than Japan’s, and there was a wide gap in living standards between the two countries. But there were some disconcerting straws in the wind. In 1965, the bilateral trade balance shifted in favor of Japan which thereafter ran a growing surplus. Moreover, the Japanese were moving up the industrial food chain from toys and textiles to consumer electronics, steel, and autos, where they were mounting a serious challenge to American manufacturers. What would happen if Japan’s extraordinary growth continued? In his widely read 1970 book The Emerging Japanese Superstate, futurologist Herman Kahn offered an alarming answer: the twenty-first century would belong to Japan. “AN OVERWHELMING DOUBLE IMAGE” Most Americans were little troubled by the prospect of Japanese economic competition. Polls from 1970–1971 indicate that only a quarter expected Japan to “surpass the United States in average family income within the next thirty years and become an economic superpower.” A much higher proportion—between 66 and 85 percent—perceived Japan as a “really democratic” and “peace-loving” nation that “stands on common ground with the United States” and whose friendship the United States needed to “maintain peace and stability in the Pacific.” 15 Such attitudes clearly had their roots in the presumed success of the Occupation in democratizing Japan and turning it into a loyal friend. The Occupation-era rediscovery of Japan’s intriguing traditional culture and ap-

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pealing womenfolk also contributed to Americans’ positive image of Japan. No one played a greater role in popularizing these aspects of Japan than James Michener, whose best-selling novel Sayonara (1954) was perhaps the single most influential book about Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. Essentially a retelling of the venerable Madame Butterfly story set during the 1950–1953 Korean War, Michener’s novel combined “paeans to Japanese womanhood” with “the first postwar travel guide to Japan.” 16 The 1957 Hollywood version, starring Marlon Brando, replaced the familiar tragic ending with a happy one, reportedly at Brando’s insistence. Attracted by the romantic picture of Japan painted by books and movies like Sayonara, American tourists began visiting in increasing numbers— 18,000 in 1953, 100,000 in 1960, and 300,000 in 1970. They encountered what one popular magazine described as a country “remote from our understanding” and “topsy-turvy to the eye and mind,” which “presents us with an overwhelming double image, one face turned to its classical past, the other preoccupied with the present and with Western ways of thinking, behaving, working.” 17 Tourists observed the paradoxes of this “topsy-turvy” and Janusfaced land from the air-conditioned comfort of ultramodern hotels and bullet trains. After sampling the exoticism and spirituality of the Old Japan as embodied in Kyoto’s Gion geisha quarter and Zen temples, they stocked up on expensive cameras, watches, and designer jewelry at posh department stores. Everyone they encountered was, of course, amazingly efficient and polite. Zen Buddhism—widely seen as the spiritual essence of the Old Japan— enjoyed a vogue among Americans during the late 1950s and 1960s. Its emphasis on the pursuit of inner tranquility and enlightenment through meditation was particularly appealing to those alienated from what they regarded as the soulless materialism of American culture. (This was the case, for example, with the “Beat Generation” of the 1950s and their “Hippie” successors in the 1960s.) The attraction of Zen-inspired Japanese pastimes like flower arranging and the tea ceremony derived less from such alienation than from their association with a chic, cosmopolitan lifestyle. The popularity of judo and other martial arts, which also had Zen underpinnings, stemmed in part from the belief that their practitioners acquired special, even superhuman powers. The Japanese martial arts craze set the stage for the reemergence of the samurai as a figure of fascination and awe in the American imagination. Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s art films The Seven Samurai (1954) and Yojimbo (1961) led the way. In contrast to the merciless sadists of Yellow Peril mythology, his samurai anti-heroes were men of honor who effortlessly—and with zen-like impassivity—dispatched villains with a flick of their swords. Kurosawa’s chivalrous samurai loners became the prototype of the

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Figure 8.1. Sayonara, the movie, 1957. Source: Corbis Images.

wandering, Old West gunfighters in Hollywood’s The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti westerns” starring Clint Eastwood. Cold War priorities inevitably shaped popular images of the Japanese. Mr. Moto, John Marquand’s courtly Japanese secret agent of the 1930s, made a postwar curtain call in Stopover Tokyo (1957) in which he joined forces with American CIA agents to thwart “commie” subversives bent on

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disrupting the U.S.–Japan alliance. Hollywood war movies such as Frank Sinatra’s None But the Brave (1965) and Hell in the Pacific (1968), starring Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, “humanized” the formerly faceless fanatics of the Pacific War. In both films, marooned American and Japanese soldiers are forced to cooperate to survive, gaining in the process a degree of mutual respect and understanding. THE “SUCCESSFUL MODERNIZER” The 1950s and 1960s saw a significant increase in books catering to Americans’ growing interest in Japan. Among those aimed at general readers, only Oliver Statler’s Japanese Inn (1961)—a semi-fictional account of some of the major events and personages of Japanese history—achieved best-seller status. 18 Descriptions of contemporary Japan like journalist Richard Halloran’s Japan: Images and Realities (1969) attracted a smaller, though still substantial audience. But the most noteworthy feature of this corpus of Japan-related writings was the appearance of a host of academic studies of Japanese history, politics, economics, society, and literature written by a new kind of professional Japanologist represented by such scholars as Donald Keene (literature), Robert Ward (politics), John Hall (history), and William Lockwood (economics), among others. Most of these men—there were at first relatively few women—were products of the U.S. military’s crash efforts during the war to train language and area specialists on Japan. As young university professors during the 1950s and 1960s, they were beneficiaries of Cold War-inspired government and foundation funding for the development of interdisciplinary teaching and research programs on Japan. Such programs were a favored object of support because Japan’s postwar transformation into a prosperous capitalist democracy was a Cold War “success story,” which, it was believed, held lessons applicable to noncommunist developing countries. By the end of the 1960s, the field of Japanese studies was well established, with some 500 graduate students and faculty in 135 colleges and universities. 19 The doyen of the new Japan experts was Edwin Reischauer, Japan-born Harvard historian and U.S. ambassador to Japan. At Harvard in the late 1940s and 1950s, he trained and mentored many of them, and authored Japan: Past and Present, a lucid and perceptive survey of Japanese history aimed at general readers. Originally published in 1946, it was revised and updated three times before being reissued in 1970 as Japan: The Story of a Nation. Although this book never achieved best-seller status, it strongly influenced American perceptions of Japan during the period, and ranks with Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and James Michener’s Sayonara as one of the most important books on Japan written since World

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War II. Reischauer’s views on Japanese history were transmitted to a generation of American undergraduates and graduate students in East Asia: The Great Tradition (1960) and East Asia: The Modern Transformation (1965), standard college texts which he co-authored with his Harvard colleagues John King Fairbank and Albert M. Craig. Reischauer and his colleagues in the 1960s viewed Japan as a “successful modernizer.” By this they meant that the Japanese—alone among non-western peoples at the time—had embraced “modernity,” defined in terms of urbanization, industrialization, science, secularization, bureaucratization, mass literacy, social mobility, and so forth. The appeal of this approach was threefold. First, in contrast Marxist and other theories, it appeared to offer a “value-free” way of understanding Japanese history. Second, it put the Japanese experience in a broader framework, facilitating cross-cultural comparisons. Third, embedded in it, though rarely explicitly emphasized, was the comforting notion that the Japanese were “becoming like us.” Proponents of “modernization theory” described it as an “effort to develop a broad, hypothetical concept with which to comprehend the great changes which were transforming societies the world over regardless of differences in social or political systems.” 20 New Leftists, however, denounced modernization as another name for “Americanization” and accused its proponents of using it to justify “U.S. imperialism.” Modernization theory was, they claimed, a “carefully constructed” ideology designed to “play down to a null point American aggression and exploitation and play up as a dominant motif American benevolence in assisting Asians to traverse the treacherous evolutionary course to the modern world.” 21 Reischauer was an inviting target for New Leftists. The most famous American historian of Japan of the day and a leading advocate of modernization theory, he was also closely associated with the U.S. government as ambassador to Japan. “For a prominent American official to praise Japan’s successful modernization was easily interpreted as a political statement premised on the assumption that Japan was deemed successful for having remained within the ‘free world’ and was therefore a convenient model for developing nations.” 22 New Leftists went after Reischauer with a vengeance, accusing him of acting as a U.S. government “front man” and presenting a sanitized, “feel good” narrative of modern Japanese history, which glossed over elite repression and manipulation and the repeated thwarting of the democratic aspirations of the Japanese people. 23 As far as most Americans were concerned, the modernization controversy was a tempest in a teapot, and few paid it much heed. (Academics soon tired of modernization theory and embraced new and more esoteric fads such as “structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, and rational choice theory.” 24) If this contretemps had any lasting significance, it

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was to implant in some minds doubts that Japan was becoming “like America.” Such doubts would presently increase exponentially. NOTES 1. Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan, 96–97, 99. 2. Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan, 132–33. 3. John W. Dower, “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems: External Policy and Internal Conflict” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 12. 4. Andrew Gordon, A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 242. 5. Michael Schaller, “The United States, Japan, and China at Fifty,” in Partnership: The United States and Japan, 1951–2001, eds., Akira Iriye and Robert A. Wampler (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2001), 45. 6. John Welfield, An Empire in Eclipse: Japan in the Postwar American Alliance System (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 112. 7. Duus, Modern Japan, 288. 8. Dower, “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems,” 24–27. 9. George R. Packard, Edwin O. Reischauer and the American Discovery of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 137. 10. Packard, Edwin O. Reischauer, 257 ff. 11. Quoted in Pyle, The Making of Modern Japan, 244. 12. Quoted in Boyle, Modern Japan: The American Nexus, 353. 13. Dower, Japan in War and Peace, 14. 14. Richard Katz, Japan, the System that Soured: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese Economic Miracle (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 292. 15. Nathan Glazer, “From Ruth Benedict to Herman Kahn,” in Mutual Images: Essays in American–Japanese Relations, ed. Akira Iriye (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 142–43. 16. Sheila K. Johnson, The Japanese Through American Eyes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 82. 17. Quoted in Johnson, The Japanese Through American Eyes, 101–2. 18. Johnson, The Japanese Through American Eyes, 107. 19. Michael R. Auslin, Pacific Cosmopolitans: A Cultural History of U.S.–Japan Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 211. 20. John W. Hall, “The Problem: When Did Modern Japanese History Begin?” in Japan Examined: Perspectives on Modern Japanese History, eds. Harry Wray and Hilary Conroy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 11. 21. Edward Friedman and Mark Selden, eds., America’s Asia: Dissenting Essays on Asian–American Relations (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), ix. 22. Hall, “The Problem,” 12. 23. John W. Dower, ed., Origins of the Modern Japanese State: Selected Writings of E.H. Norman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 58–59. 24. Helen Hardacre, ed., The Postwar Development of Japanese Studies in the United States (Leiden: Brill, 1998), x–xi.

Chapter Nine

Coping with “Japan Incorporated,” 1971–1991

In the early 1970s, America and Japan entered a “new era of chronic tension” 1 that continued well into the 1990s. A flood of Japanese exports decimated American manufacturing industries, prompting calls for protection and retaliation and inspiring much debate over the nature of the “Japanese challenge.” Free traders squared off against those who argued that Japan represented a new and menacing form of state-guided capitalism, a monolithic “Japan, Inc.,” with which America could not compete. Some advocated “learning from Japan,” while others warned of the “danger from Japan”— positions that were not mutually exclusive. American attitudes toward Japan soured and there was a revival of negative stereotypes associated with earlier Yellow Peril thinking. But for all its sound and fury, the anti-Japanese backlash never gained much traction. The goodwill built up since 1945 could not easily be set aside. Americans may have feared Japan’s economic power, but they admired and respected Japanese. The American–Japanese partnership, though strained, held. THE “NIXON SHOCKS” America’s longstanding forbearance toward its Japanese ally declined during the 1969–1974 presidency of Richard Nixon. Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger—both dedicated practitioners of realpolitik diplomacy—regarded pacifism and the economics-first approach of the Japanese with ill-concealed disdain. Kissinger, for example, confided to associates that the Japanese struck him as “little Sony salesmen” and “small and petty bookkeepers.” 2 Pushing such a nation to assume greater 121

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political–military responsibilities, as called for by Nixon’s Guam Doctrine, seemed a Sisyphean task. True, in their first summit meeting in 1969, Nixon elicited from Japanese Prime Minister Eisaku Sato a mention of the importance to Japanese security of Taiwan and Korea. But Tokyo spent “the next decade burying any possibility that Japan would become directly involved in the actual U.S. defense commitment to Taiwan and Korea.” 3 Then there was the so-called “textile wrangle.” 4 Nixon knew that Sato was eager for domestic political reasons to recover Japanese administrative control over Okinawa. The president was amenable, but he wanted as a quid pro quo limits on Japanese textile exports to the United States, which were hurting American producers in the South and imperiling his “southern strategy.” Nixon thought he had secured from Sato a pledge to rein in these exports, but they kept coming and Japanese trade negotiators dug in their heels. The Japanese prime minister seemed to have “reneged” on the deal. Moreover, Sato’s government showed little willingness to help curb Japan’s ballooning trade surplus with the United States—which rose from 1.2 to 3 billion dollars in 1970–1971—by, for example, revaluing its currency to make Japanese exports more expensive. American business leaders and Congress clamored to “get tough with Japan.” Nixon, who had put Japan on his “enemies list,” was glad to oblige. In August 1971, he blindsided the Japanese by announcing—on VJ Day no less—that the United States was unilaterally imposing a 10 percent surcharge on imports and going off the gold standard, thus allowing the dollar to “float” downward against other currencies, including the Japanese yen. (This “dollar shock” forced the yen up, temporarily reducing Japanese exports to the United States.) Such was the contempt in which Nixon held the Japanese that he did not bother to consult or even inform them in advance of these initiatives—or of his planned visit to the PRC which he had publicly revealed a few weeks earlier. Sato, nonplussed and humiliated, resigned shortly afterward. The “Nixon shocks,” as the Japanese called these snubs, marked a sea change in U.S.–Japan relations. The alliance emerged largely unscathed, though its value diminished somewhat as Nixon and Kissinger pursued détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with China, and Cold War tensions in East Asia temporarily subsided. However, there was no longer talk of an “equal partnership” with Japan, and Americans’ earlier celebration of its “economic miracle” and “growing modernity” abruptly faded. “In the eyes of Congress and the American public, Japan became identified as economic enemy number one.” 5 Although this shift in American attitudes did not occur immediately, there were already signs in 1971 of a new and hostile mood toward Japan. For example, a member of Nixon’s cabinet, thought to be Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, created a stir by reportedly declaring that “the Japanese are

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still fighting the war, only now instead of a shooting war, it is an economic war. Their immediate intention is to try to dominate the Pacific and then perhaps the world.” Along with the perception of Japan as a potential threat to the United States came the view that it was not as Westernized as had been earlier supposed. As Time magazine put it, “If Japan does not follow the gentlemanly rules (on trade), it is not because of simple greed but because it does not adhere to Western principles on much of anything.” 6 DEBATING JAPAN’S ECONOMIC SYSTEM The sources of Japan’s export prowess became a subject of consuming interest in the United States during the 1970s, and inspired a lively debate among academics, pundits, and officials. At the risk of oversimplification, one can identify two broad schools of thought: the “Japan, Inc.” school and the “free market” school. The phrase “Japan, Inc.” (short for “Japan Incorporated”) was coined by business consultant James Abegglen in 1970 and quickly caught on as shorthand to describe a system completely unlike that of any other advanced capitalist country. 7 According to Abegglen, Japan was analogous to a “giant conglomerate” in which the government, led by MITI and MOF, served as the “corporate headquarters” and big business functioned as “corporate divisions” charged with implementing its decisions and plans. The goal of Japan Inc. was to maximize national wealth and spread it fairly among the members of the “corporate family.” This goal was pursued through avowedly “mercantilist” policies, which involved piling up ever larger trade and current account surpluses with the rest of the world. (Nixon’s Commerce Department endorsed this interpretation in its 1972 pamphlet Japan: The GovernmentBusiness Relationship: A Guide for American Businessmen.) Japan Inc. was underpinned by a variety of unusual institutions and values. One notable example was the Japanese system of labor relations, especially lifetime employment and seniority-based wages, which was credited with generating high levels of worker productivity and loyalty. Relations among the moving parts of Japan Inc.—labor, business, the bureaucracy, and the ruling LDP—were lubricated by “traditional” Japanese values of consensus, harmony, and cooperation in the pursuit of group goals. Above all, Japan Inc. was united by a national consensus on the need to catch up with and surpass the advanced capitalist countries of the West, particularly Japan’s erstwhile American mentor. There was little place in Japan Inc. for foreign companies and imports (except oil and raw materials) and they were systematically excluded. Foreign businessmen and their alien ways would disrupt the delicate “web” of interpersonal relationships on which the Japanese system depended.

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Foreign manufactured goods also had to be kept out, even if they were of better quality and cheaper than those made in Japan. Such goods might threaten the livelihood of Japanese workers, and this could not be tolerated in a society where everyone was entitled to a “fair share.” Besides, a protected domestic market enabled Japanese manufacturers to earn the profits they needed to undersell foreign competitors abroad. Japanese consumers might not benefit, but the nation as a whole did—or was believed to. Mainstream or “free market” economists rejected the Japan Inc. model as a crude caricature put forward to justify protectionist and punitive measures against Japan. They particularly objected to the notion that the Japanese government had masterminded the country’s postwar growth. As Hugh Patrick, a leading free marketer, put it: “I am of the school which interprets Japanese economic performance as due primarily to the actions and efforts of private individuals and enterprises responding to the opportunities provided in quite free markets for commodities and labor. While the government has been supportive and indeed has done much to create the environment for growth, its role has been often been exaggerated.” 8 Considered from the standpoint of mainstream economists, Japan and the United States were both fundamentally free-market economies. True, the Japanese engaged in protectionism and government intervention to a degree that was shocking by American standards. However, these practices were merely anachronistic vestiges of their industrial “takeoff “in the 1950s and 1960s, which would be discarded as the Japanese economy matured and became more like that of other advanced countries. In the meantime, bilateral trade disputes should be resolved through “orthodox policy solutions” such as “adjustments in exchange rates, elimination of market distortions caused by interest groups, or better coordination of macroeconomic policies.” 9 There was no need to panic or overreact. The problem, however, was that the Japanese did not discard protectionism, at least not as rapidly as mainstream economists expected. Rather, they found new and ingenious ways to practice it—erecting, for example, regulatory and other non-tariff barriers—and employed it not to nurture up-andcoming “infant industries” but to shelter inefficient and uncompetitive sectors of their economy such as retailing and food processing. By the 1980s, Japan thus presented the anomalous spectacle of a developed country using the methods of a developing one. It was, in other words, hardly “like us.” THE JAPANESE CHALLENGE It is unlikely that Japan’s economic system would have attracted much attention outside academic and official circles if it had not been widely believed to exert a large and mostly negative effect on the livelihood of American work-

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ers. The 1970s and early 1980s were tough times for the United States and other industrialized countries. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 brought persistent “stagflation”—high inflation, low growth, and high unemployment. America’s economic woes were magnified by the technological obsolescence and complacency of many old-line manufacturing industries, which became vulnerable to imports from more efficient foreign producers. They responded by demanding protection, or by shifting to cheaper offshore production, which turned large parts of the Midwest into a “rust belt.” Japan also suffered from the 1973 oil shock, falling into a recession in 1974. But it soon recovered through a combination of stringent energy conservation measures and an “export offensive” aimed at European and American markets. Japan’s bilateral trade surplus with United States, negligible in 1975, soared to 10 billion dollars in 1981 and then to an incredible 50 billion in 1985. Surging Japanese exports all but wiped out the American consumer electronics industry and pushed steel and auto producers to the wall. (Japanese car exports to the United States rose from 400,000 in 1970 to nearly 2 million in 1980.) The latter cried foul, charging that Japanese exporters employed “unfair” trading practices such as “dumping” (selling below cost), relying on government subsidies and tax breaks, and keeping their home market closed to imports. Such complaints were not groundless, but they overlooked the fact that many American firms would have been hard-pressed to compete even if the “playing field” had been “level”—a point emphasized by Japanese. They claimed, somewhat disingenuously, that their market was open to foreign manufactured goods and that Americans simply did not “try hard enough” to sell there. They were on firmer ground in attributing their success in the American market primarily to the fact that they offered innovative, highquality products at reasonable prices. Autos were a case in point. Reliable, fuel-efficient, and moderately priced Japanese-made compact cars proved hugely popular with American consumers, while Detroit lost ground by continuing to turn out defect-prone gas guzzlers. Inevitably, the Japanese export offensive became politicized in the United States. Autos, steel, and other adversely affected industries employed millions of workers who blamed Japanese imports for job losses and wage cuts, and demanded relief. The Carter and Reagan administrations consequently came under strong union and congressional pressure to roll back the tide of Japanese products and pry open the Japanese market. U.S. trade negotiators extracted a series of “voluntary export restraint agreements” (VERs) in color TVs (1977), steel (1978), and autos (1981), and pushed the Japanese to lower tariff and non-tariff barriers to the entry of American beef, citrus, and cigarettes. But Japan’s export juggernaut rolled on and its market remained largely closed to U.S. products.

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LEARNING FROM JAPAN American alarm over the “challenge from Japan” was mixed with admiration and respect for the Japanese accomplishments. To many Americans, Japan seemed to be on the cutting edge of a high-tech future. One example was Sony’s introduction in 1979 of its Walkman personal cassette-tape player which “revolutionized entertainment technology.” 10 With an estimated 70 percent of the world’s robots in the mid-1980s, moreover, Japan led the “robot revolution,” as any observer of highly automated Japanese auto plants could readily attest. In addition, Japanese firms were moving up the technological ladder to “knowledge-intensive” industries such as semiconductors. By 1983, Japanese producers held 70 percent of the world market for microchips, which had been an American preserve only a decade earlier. 11 Even if the Japanese were “unfair traders,” they were obviously doing something right and it behooved Americans to find out what. The canonical text of the “learn-from-Japan” movement was Harvard Japanologist Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One (1979) which ascribed Japan’s economic success to fruitful government–business collaboration, harmonious labor relations, high-quality education, socioeconomic equality, and a virtually crime-free society. The subtitle of the book, “Lessons for America,” suggests the author’s purpose—mining Japanese institutions and practices for useful pointers on how America might reform itself and overcome what President Jimmy Carter famously called its national “malaise.” America’s “star pupil” in Asia only a decade earlier was now held up as its “teacher.” The learn-from-Japan movement spawned a flood of business books like William Ouchi’s Theory Z (1981), which touted Japanese organizational and management practices and urged American firms to adopt them. Americans were particularly intrigued by Japanese quality control methods, including worker participation in shop-floor “quality circles” intended to elicit suggestions for improved production processes. Ironically, quality circles were originally an American idea credited to management guru W. Edward Deming who visited Japan during the Occupation to advise Japanese manufacturers. Like Meiji-era American educators, Deming became a household name in Japan, while remaining almost unknown at home. The American quest for the “secrets” of Japanese business success extended to the long-gone samurai on the dubious assumption that Japanese businessmen thought and acted like them. (Some Meiji-era entrepreneurs were ex-samurai, but the Japanese “salary men” of the 1980s were quintessential organization men far removed from the samurai of Tokugawa times.) American business school students pored over The Book of Five Rings— famed swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s 1645 classic on sword fighting—to gain insights into Japanese business methods. However implausible, the no-

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tion that Japanese businessmen were “samurai in suits” became firmly established. 12 No proposal by learn-from-Japan enthusiasts was more controversial than political scientist Chalmers Johnson’s recommendation that the United States adopt Japanese-style “industrial policy” and set up a “pilot agency” similar to MITI. Johnson put forward these suggestions in his influential 1982 book MITI and the Japanese Miracle, which was both a scholarly study of the history of MITI’s role in promoting Japanese economic growth and a frontal attack on free-market orthodoxy. Japan, he argued, was the archetypal “developmental state” in which economic bureaucrats plan and guide economic development aimed at maximizing national wealth free of political interference. As such, it represented a new and superior form of capitalism. America would have to adapt to it or be overwhelmed. Although Johnson insisted otherwise, his developmental state theory was in fact a variant of the Japan Inc. model. Earlier versions of this model had posited an interdependent “ruling triad” of economic bureaucrats, big business, and LDP politicians in which none clearly predominated. Johnson, however, asserted that bureaucrats were firmly in charge. Business deferred to their “guidance” because they controlled the credit, subsidies, and tax breaks on which it depended. The LDP lacked the technocratic expertise to challenge bureaucrats’ management of the economy and was, in any case, content to accept the trappings of power in return for side payments to farmers and other “clients” who sustained its Diet majority. In Johnson’s famous phrase, “bureaucrats rule and politicians reign.” 13 “THE DANGER FROM JAPAN” Free traders rejected Johnson’s call for an American industrial policy—the notion that bureaucrats should “pick winners and losers” was anathema to them—and many of his fellow academics were skeptical of his claim that Japan was run by all-powerful economic bureaucrats. However, his developmental state paradigm caught on among journalists and trade officials for whom it provided a convincing answer to the question of why Japan failed to conform to the behavior expected of a “mature” industrial economy. Johnson initially did not play up the idea that Japan posed a danger to the United States, but his followers and admirers did. By the late 1980s, this idea dominated American discourse about Japan. Respected journalist Theodore White sounded the alarm. In an influential article titled “The Danger from Japan” in the July 28, 1985, New York Times Sunday Magazine, he suggested that the Japanese were using economic weapons to avenge their military defeat in 1945. They aimed, he claimed, at nothing less than the “dismantling of American industry” in “one of history’s

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most brilliant commercial offensives.” White complained that Washington’s response was beset by confusion and the lack of a coherent strategy—some officials pursued the “Holy Grail” of free trade, others engaged in “tormented, ad hoc” bargaining to pry open Japan’s markets, and still others sought to shield American industries from Japanese exports. Unless more forceful measures were taken to stop the Japanese, Americans’ growing frustration and anger might “explode” in a crisis that could wreck the U.S.–Japan alliance. White’s piece inaugurated a wave of “Japan threat” writings reminiscent of those of the early 1900s. In Trading Places (1988), former trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz explained how “America allowed Japan to take the lead” in one industry after another. In The Enigma of Japanese Power (1989), Dutch journalist Karel van Wolfren debunked the “myth” that Japan’s elected political leaders were in charge or could restrain Japan’s “Headless Horseman” ride toward world economic domination. In a May 1989 Atlantic Monthly article, James Fallows called for the “containment of Japan.” In Agents of Influence (1991), Pat Choate presented an exposé of “how Japan manipulates America’s political and economic system.” And in The Coming War with Japan (1991), George Friedman and Meredith LeBard suggested that escalating trade disputes could lead to a U.S.–Japan war.

Figure 9.1. American autoworkers smashing a Japanese-made car, early 1980s. Source: AP Photos

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The media dubbed these writers “revisionists” because, like Chalmers Johnson and other proponents of the Japan Inc. model, they took issue with the conventional wisdom that Japan was a capitalist democracy “just like us,” or was becoming one. Most revisionists rejected the idea that the bilateral trade imbalance could be addressed by macroeconomic tinkering, exchange rate adjustments, voluntary export restraint agreements, or efforts to persuade the Japanese to open their markets. If the United States refused to fight fire with fire by adopting an industrial policy of its own, they insisted that the only realistic option was “managed trade” based on negotiated market shares. 14 The Reagan administration shied away from managed trade, employing instead an eclectic mix of policy tools to try to reduce the enormous U.S. trade deficit with Japan. In addition to restraining Japanese exports through VERs and antidumping penalties, it embarked on “Market-Oriented, SectorSelective” (MOSS) negotiations with Tokyo aimed at removing non-tariff barriers to a broad range of American goods and services. Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, a dedicated free trader, characterized these negotiations as “a painful, tooth-pulling effort” 15 and had no illusions about their efficacy. Some progress was made, but not enough to have any appreciable effect on the trade deficit. The same was true of the ambitious marketopening effort dubbed the “Strategic Impediments Initiative” (SII) which was launched by the George H. W. Bush administration in 1989. Both the MOSS and SII talks were largely window dressing designed to forestall stronger action by Congress. In the view of Reagan administration officials, a large part of the problem with Japan was an overvalued dollar and undervalued yen. Hoping to correct this imbalance, Reagan’s Treasury Secretary James Baker prevailed upon his Japanese counterpart to sign on to the 1985 Plaza Accord—so named for the hotel in New York City where the deal was struck—under which Japan agreed to raise the yen’s value and undertake a domestic stimulus program to boost imports. Contrary to Baker’s expectations, however, the U.S. trade deficit with Japan soared from 50 billion dollars in the mid-1980s to a peak of 87 billion in 1987. (It thereafter declined somewhat, but not enough to satisfy most Americans.) The higher yen enabled Japanese manufacturers to cut their dollar-denominated fuel and raw material costs, leading to a surge of exports. The Plaza Accord backfired in still another way. Japanese firms and individuals—flush with cheap credit and a suddenly more valuable currency—went on a buying spree in the United States, snapping up iconic properties like Columbia Pictures, Rockefeller Center, and the Pebble Beach Golf Course. For those disposed to believe it, here was evidence that the Japanese were intent not just on eviscerating America’s industrial economy but “colonizing” the country as well. Less noticed by Americans, the Japanese govern-

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ment’s domestic stimulus program created an “asset bubble” fueled by easy credit and speculative investment. Most observers at the time hailed this as a sign of the continued dynamism of Japan’s “miracle economy,” little realizing that the boom represented its last hurrah. If there was a bright spot in U.S.–Japan relations during the Reagan years, it was enhanced security cooperation. During the 1960s and 1970s, Japan refused to allow its SDF to enter into joint planning with the U.S. military for fear of being “entrapped” in Washington’s Cold War strategy. But the onset of the “Second Cold War” and ominous build-up of Soviet Far Eastern forces in the late 1970s led Tokyo to reconsider its position. In the early 1980s, it okayed joint military planning and ordered the SDF to defend Japan’s sealanes out to 1,000 nautical miles, making Japan for the first time “an active player in the U.S. global strategy of containment against the Soviet Union.” 16 In addition, Reagan found a kindred soul in Japan’s hawkish Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone (1982–1987), who pushed for closer military cooperation. There were, however, problems. Nakasone was swimming against the tide of Japan’s pacifist–isolationist orthodoxy and made little progress. The SDF lacked the equipment and training to operate jointly with American forces. Moreover, defense cooperation was not immune to a spillover of tensions from the contentious trade relationship, as was underscored by the bitter controversy that erupted in the late 1980s over the co-development of the FSX advanced fighter jet. American critics charged that this project amounted to a “giveaway of America’s most critical technologies to Japan, which would spin-off these technologies to build up (its) civilian aircraft industry and mount another assault on one of America’s remaining high grounds of international competitiveness.” 17 MIXED IMAGES OF JAPAN What did ordinary Americans think about Japan? Polls from the mid-1980s indicate that a large majority—85 to 90 percent—saw it as posing a serious economic threat to America and were pessimistic about continued U.S. preeminence in the face of Japanese competition. At the same time, however, similar percentages held positive impressions of the Japanese, and a majority (54 percent) admired Japan as a country. 18 Americans, in other words, simultaneously admired and feared Japan. Such “schizophrenic” attitudes were reflected in representations of Japan and the Japanese in American popular culture. Consider, for example, the British writer James Clavell’s best-selling historical novel Shogun (1975), which was made into a popular TV mini-series in 1980. Set in feudal Japan of 1600, it served up dollops of violence, ro-

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mance, and intrigue, combined with fascinating details about Japanese customs and behavior. Overall, Clavell painted a positive portrait of the Japanese, leading some to interpret his novel as a “popular-culture version” of Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One. 19 Having endured three years in a Japanese POW camp during the war, however, Clavell was sensitive to what he took to be the Japanese penchant for sadistic cruelty. His samurai are men of honor, but they are also cold-blooded killers. Given rising trade tensions and the prevalence of the “samurai in suits” stereotype, it is only to be expected that Clavell’s menacing samurai should have made their way into novels and films set against the background of current U.S.–Japan relations. Novelist Eric Van Lustbader successfully mined this vein with his popular Ninja (1980), The Miko (1984), and White Ninja (1990), in which his American protagonists battle sword-wielding Japanese employed by sinister Japanese corporations. Ridley Scott’s film Black Rain (1989) explored the same terrain, featuring the horrific beheading of an American policeman by a motorbike-riding “samurai” in the incongruous setting of Osaka’s “ultramodern cityscape.” 20 The chivalrous loners of the 1960s had been replaced by murderous fanatics akin to those Americans had encountered on Guadalcanal, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima. Likewise, the venerable image of Japan as a timeless land of cherry blossoms, geisha, and quaint thatched-roofed farmhouses was overlaid by a new image of Japan as a dehumanized, high-tech dystopia. Filmmaker Ridley Scott led the way with his 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner which presented “a disturbing and compelling vision of a future high-tech Los Angeles, where (the) culture, cuisine, and local patois all clearly owed much to Japanese inspiration, and whose architectural design strongly evoked the Ginza at night.” 21 Japan was also the setting for “cyberpunk” science fiction novels like William Gibson’s Necromancer (1984) which depicted a “future world transformed—and in many ways both connected and alienated by high technology.” 22 Such a dystopia seemed appropriate for a people enamored of robots, high-tech gadgetry, and video games. The “Japan threat” novel par excellence was Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (1992), which was made into a Hollywood movie starring Sean Connery. Ostensibly a murder mystery set in Los Angeles a few years hence, Rising Sun is actually about the “invasion” and “occupation” of America by unscrupulous Japanese corporations. Crichton, who was deeply influenced by revisionists and even listed their writings at the end of his novel, imagined “an America largely owned and run by the Japanese” whom he depicted as a “sneaky enemy—bribery, fraud, blackmail and improper influence are (their) standard methods of doing business.” As his American characters lament, they “treat us as an underdeveloped country” and “they’re turning this country into another Japan.” 23 Crichton’s characters and story echoed those in Wallace Irwin’s Seed of the Sun published seventy years earlier.

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Some have concluded that there was a revival of anti-Japanese racism during the 1980s. True, there was some nasty rhetoric and a hapless Chinese American was beaten to death in 1981 by angry autoworkers who mistook him for Japanese. But such incidents were few and far between. There was no backlash against Japanese Americans. Unlike their prewar predecessors, they were well respected and integrated into the mainstream of American society. Moreover, the 1980s was a decade of apology and restitution for past injustices. In 1988, Congress passed and President Reagan signed legislation that formally apologized for their wartime incarceration and provided 1.2 billion dollars in compensation to the survivors. For all the negative images of the Japanese in films like Rising Sun, there were also some positive ones. 24 For example, the popular Karate Kid movies of 1984 and 1989 starred an appealing, bonsai-tending Japanese American (Pat Morita) who helps his young white American pupil to grasp the spiritual basis of Japan’s martial arts. (The latter ends up falling in love with and marrying a Japanese woman.) Gung Ho (1985) offered a comedic take on the mutual incomprehension of workaholic Japanese and easygoing Americans at a “transplanted” Japanese auto factory in Pennsylvania. At the end of the film, the two sides realize that each has something to learn from the other— which may stand as an epitaph for America’s encounter with Japan during this difficult period. NOTES 1. Gordon, A Modern History of Japan, 292. 2. Quoted in Kenneth B. Pyle, Japan Rising: The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 14. 3. Michael J. Green, “The Search for an Active Security Partnership: Lessons from the 1980s,” in Partnership, Iriye and Wampler, 138. 4. I. M. Destler, Haruhiro Fukui, and Hideo Sato, The Textile Wrangle: Conflict in Japanese-American Relations, 1969–1971 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). 5. Michael A. Barnhart, “From Hershey Bars to Motor Cars: America’s Economic Policy Toward Japan, 1945–76,” in Partnership, Iriye and Wampler, 217. 6. Quoted in LaFeber, The Clash, 353, 359. 7. Katz, The System that Soured, 296. 8. Quoted in Katz, The System that Soured, 80. 9. Donald C. Hellmann, “The Imperatives for Reciprocity and Symmetry in U.S.–Japanese Economic and Defense Relations” in Sharing World Leadership? A New Era for America and Japan, eds. John H. Makin and Donald C. Hellmann (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1989), 254. 10. Auslin, Pacific Cosmopolitans, 242. 11. Wilkinson, Japan Versus the West, 195. 12. Littlewood, The Idea of Japan, 197. 13. Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925–1975 (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1987), 316. 14. Katz, The System that Soured, 310. 15. Quoted in LaFeber, The Clash, 379. 16. Green, “The Search for an Active Security Partnership,” 138, 142–43.

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17. Robert A. Wampler, “Reversals of Fortune? Shifting Images of Japan as Number One,” in Partnership, Iriye and Wampler, 255. 18. Wampler, “Reversals of Fortune?” 253. 19. Henry D. Smith, II, ed., Learning From Shogun: Japanese History and Western Fantasy (Santa Barbara: University of California Santa Barbara Program in Asian Studies, 1980), 19. 20. Littlewood, The Idea of Japan, 186. 21. Wampler, “Reversals of Fortune?” 254. 22. Wampler, “Reversals of Fortune?” 254. 23. Littlewood, The Idea of Japan, 200–1. 24. Johnson, The Japanese Through American Eyes, 141–42, 159–60.

Chapter Ten

Reinventing the U.S.–Japan Alliance, 1991–2006

The end of the Cold War brought several “near-death experiences” for the U.S.–Japan alliance which lacked any convincing rationale with the removal of the Soviet threat. In the mid-1990s, however, it got a new lease on life as its purpose was redefined and Japan agreed to assume a modest backup role in support of U.S. forces engaged in “regional military contingencies.” Japan meanwhile experienced a “lost decade” of economic stagnation as Japan Inc. The earlier American image of Japan as a threatening juggernaut was replaced by one of a “sclerotic invalid” in need of heavy doses of American free-market capitalism. At the same time, younger Americans became infatuated with Japan’s pop culture and celebrated its “gross national cool.” Despite this unpromising setting, the George W. Bush administration discerned an opportunity to move the alliance to the next level by transforming Japan into “the Britain of the Far East,” and made some progress toward this goal in the early 2000s. THE ALLIANCE ADRIFT The 1990–1991 Persian Gulf crisis exposed a wide gap between American and Japanese thinking about how their alliance should operate in the postCold War world. The LDP government of Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu initially attempted to deal with the crisis in accordance with Cold War precedents: Japan would provide diplomatic support to the United States, but that was all. If the crisis escalated into a war, the Americans and their other allies would have to do the fighting. There was no way the SDF could get involved. It was strictly for homeland defense, and Japan’s “no war” constitution for135

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bade its overseas dispatch in collective security ventures, even ones sanctioned by the UN. Japan would, in other words, remain in its customary “bystander” position on the sidelines. The Japanese were amazed and disconcerted to discover that this response no longer washed with the Americans. The George H. W. Bush administration made it clear from the outset that the United States wanted not only a large financial contribution but “boots on the ground” Japanese participation in the multilateral coalition it was assembling to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait. 1 The Japanese, after all, obtained 70 percent of their oil from the Gulf, so it was only natural to expect them to “step up to the plate” to help defend it against Iraqi aggression. When Kaifu dithered, American anger and impatience grew. The U.S. House of Representatives voted to begin withdrawing 5,000 troops a year from Japan unless Tokyo agreed to pay the full cost of keeping them there. This threat galvanized Kaifu into ponying up 4 billion dollars (later increased to 13 billion) to help finance coalition operations. He also tried—unsuccessfully—to pass legislation in Japan’s Diet that would have enabled the SDF to provide noncombat logistical support. It is fortunate for the U.S.–Japan alliance that the 1991 Gulf War resulted in a quick and relatively painless victory for U.S.-led coalition forces. American disgust with Japan’s feckless response was palpable—one prominent senator pronounced it “contemptible tokenism” and another suggested that Tokyo’s policy was guided by “greed and avarice.” 2 It requires no great imagination to suppose that this disgust would have erupted into fury, likely wrecking the alliance, had Operation Desert Storm proved to be the highcasualty conflict many anticipated. 3 As it was, Japan got little credit for its large financial contribution. President Bush snubbed the Japanese by excluding them from the victory celebrations, and the Kuwaitis did not even mention Japan in their public letter of thanks to the countries that had liberated them. Japan was widely derided for practicing “checkbook diplomacy.” Given the alliance’s “near-death experience” in 1991, one might suppose that Washington and Tokyo would have attached high priority to redefining it to fit the altered American expectations and new international realities of the post-Cold War environment. In fact, however, they did not immediately do so, with the result that it “drifted” in the early 1990s, devoid of any obvious rationale and lacking strong public support in either country. The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 dissolved the “geopolitical glue” which had held the alliance together for forty years. Absent the Soviet threat, Americans had less need of a “forward operating platform” in East Asia, and were less willing to tolerate what many regarded as Japan’s “free riding” and “adversarial” trade practices. The Japanese, on their part, had less reason to put up with the large and intrusive American military presence in their midst, and more incentive to explore alternative security arrangements. The alliance consequently languished on the back burner in both Tokyo and Washington

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as the Clinton administration prioritized winning the “trade war” with Japan and Tokyo focused on nurturing nascent multilateral security institutions such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). 4 REDEFINING THE ALLIANCE The neglect of the U.S.–Japan alliance ended in the mid-1990s as America discovered new uses for it. This discovery was much aided by the deteriorating security environment in Northeast Asia. First, inter-Korean détente collapsed and was followed by the 1993–1994 Korean Nuclear Crisis, in which North Korean leader Kim Il-sung indulged in high-stakes brinksmanship with the United States. Then came the 1995–1996 Taiwan Missile Crisis in which China resorted to blatant saber rattling in an attempt to intimidate the independence-minded Taiwanese, prompting Clinton to dispatch two carrier battle groups to the area. Northeast Asia had again become a “rough neighborhood” even though the Soviets were gone. Under these circumstances, Americans began to see their alliance with Japan as an invaluable instrument for containing the North Koreans, underpinning U.S. engagement with a rising and unpredictable China, and reinforcing “the credibility of the American forward military commitment to the region.” 5 But Japan would have to play a larger and more active role. The Gulf Crisis had underscored Americans’ unwillingness to tolerate an ally that sat on its hands while they fought and died defending its interests. They would have been even more outraged had the SDF stood aside in a second Korean war—on Japan’s doorstep—which very nearly broke out in 1994. The Clinton administration entrusted Assistant Secretary of Defense Joseph Nye with the task of coaxing the Japanese into assuming larger military responsibilities within the alliance. This was no easy task. LDP hawks were willing enough, but the Japanese people as a whole were reluctant to venture outside the pacifist-isolationist “greenhouse” in which they had comfortably ensconced themselves for half a century. They had no stomach for the roughand-tumble of international power politics or becoming a “normal” country in military terms. As one veteran LDP leader bluntly described the national mind set: “No one has the guts to rescue a woman being harassed by a drunkard on a commuter train. How can a people like this hope to become a normal nation?” 6 Americans might have been more sympathetic and tolerant of Japanese sensitivities had they reflected on the fact that they themselves had embraced a similar pacifist-isolationist outlook during the 1930s which they had been shaken out of only by the shock of Pearl Harbor. From Washington’s perspective, however, the problem was to help the Japanese to overcome their addiction to “free riding” on defense. Fortunately, there were some encourag-

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ing signs that they might be coming around to a more “responsible” and “realistic” position. By 1995, the Japanese public had become alarmed by Chinese and North Korean behavior and skeptical of security multilateralism as represented by ARF which had proved little more than a “talk shop.” Unless they were prepared to go it alone, which few were, the only alternative was to strengthen the American alliance. Nye was consequently able to sell Japan’s political leadership on a plan to update and revamp the security partnership. The “Nye Initiative,” as this plan was dubbed, involved a high-level reaffirmation of the alliance’s continued relevance and importance in East Asia, plus a pledge by Tokyo to provide rear-area logistical support to American forces engaged in military contingencies “near Japan.” (Exactly which contingencies might be covered was purposely left vague, so as not to inflame Chinese suspicions that joint military action to defend Taiwan was contemplated.) Another element of the plan was a U.S. undertaking to reduce its military footprint in Okinawa, which was prompted by a national outcry in Japan over the September 1995 rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl by three U.S. servicemen. This entailed relocating American military facilities such as the controversial Futenma Marine Air Station which was inconveniently situated in the midst of a city. The Nye Initiative formed the basis for the Japan-U.S. Joint Declaration on Security which President Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto signed with much fanfare at their April 1996 summit meeting. The U.S. media reaction was positive, even “jubilant.” The Joint Declaration seemed to mark a new beginning for the alliance comparable to the 1960 revision of the security treaty. Some commentators opined that “Japan as a nation was on the verge of significant geostrategic change and about to assume a more proportionate share of responsibility for national, regional, and alliance security.” 7 The Clinton–Hashimoto Declaration led in 1997 to the revision of the U.S.–Japan Guidelines for Defense Cooperation to authorize Japan’s SDF for the first time to provide logistical, intelligence, and other kinds of noncombat support to U.S. forces engaged in regional military contingencies. Following protracted debate, the Japanese Diet passed implementing legislation in 1999. At the same time, Japan further boosted security cooperation with the United States by agreeing to undertake joint research on ballistic missile defense. It did so after North Korea lobbed a long-range ballistic missile over northern Japan in 1998, heightening Japanese fears of North Korean belligerence. Another factor pushing Japan into America’s embrace was the deterioration in Sino-Japanese relations in the late 1990s as Chinese leaders took to publicly hectoring the Japanese over their lack of “sincere” remorse for wartime atrocities such as the 1937 Rape of Nanking and the alleged revival of

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their “militaristic” tendencies. Beijing also denounced the revamped U.S.–Japan alliance as a thinly-disguised move to “contain” China. “JAPAN PASSING” One might expect that the Clinton administration would have devoted considerable attention and effort to nurturing its revamped security partnership with Japan, but this was not the case. In fact, the late 1990s turned out to be another period of “drift” in U.S.–Japanese relations. Clinton himself set the tone by abruptly shifting from alliance-building with Japan to forging a “strategic partnership” with China. Many Japanese concluded—not entirely without reason—that they had been relegated to a secondary position in Clinton’s scale of priorities, an impression reinforced by the president’s failure to stop in Tokyo on his way to a June 1998 summit meeting in Beijing with Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. “Japan Passing,” as the Japanese media dubbed this slight, stemmed from a variety of sources. One was Japan’s confused politics and seeming inability to produce bold, forceful leaders. (Hashimoto may been such a leader, but he was succeeded by lackluster, hyper-cautious figures more in keeping with the LDP’s tradition of selecting don’t-rock-the-boat nonentities as party leader and prime minister.) Second, as described below, was Japan’s stumbling economy and fading influence in Asia. Third, was skepticism both within and outside the Clinton administration about Japan’s reliability as a military ally. American observers disagreed on whether Japan had turned the corner toward becoming a “normal” military power. Some concluded that it had not. True, the Japanese had committed themselves to supporting U.S. forces engaged in combat, which seemed at first glance a striking departure from their Cold War-era passivity. But Japanese officials were evasive about the circumstances that might trigger such support, and denied that it implied any abandonment of Japan’s long-standing taboo against using military force for purposes other than self-defense. Thus, Japan’s foreign minister stated in 1997 that “the new ‘Guidelines’ will not change the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty nor its related rights and obligations nor the fundamental framework of the United States–Japan alliance relationship.” 8 Japan experts such as Peter J. Katzenstein and Thomas U. Berger suggested that nothing fundamental had changed—Japan remained a nation of pacifists whose aversion to military force was as strong as ever. In Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan (1996), Katzenstein pointed to the restrictive rules of engagement imposed on Japanese SDF personnel assigned to UN peacekeeping missions. They were kept out of dangerous situations and prohibited from using their weapons except

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in self-defense, even if this meant standing aside and watching passively as peacekeepers from other nations were attacked around them. Considered from this perspective, the revised Guidelines were essentially a Japanese “ploy” to placate Americans and assure continued U.S. protection by offering the appearance, but not the reality, of a more robust Japanese military posture. Japan could thus continue to pursue its Cold War priorities of pacifism and mercantilism in the changed post-Cold War environment without the threat of American “abandonment.” In this view, it would be unwise and perhaps illusory for the United States to count on Japan’s support in any military conflict that threatened Japanese economic and trade interests, or which entailed the slightest risk of Japanese casualties. Another group of experts maintained that Japan’s “strategic culture” was “gradually shifting toward greater realism.” 9 The Japanese had not wholly abandoned pacifism and mercantilism, they conceded, but they were “reluctantly” doing so, and this trend presented the United States with an opportunity to transform the U.S.–Japan alliance into a stronger and more “symmetrical” security partnership. (The most cogent presentation of this view is Michael Green’s 2001 book Japan’s Reluctant Realism: Foreign Policy Challenges in an Era of Uncertain Power.) Proponents of the “reluctant realism” thesis offered no explanation of the curiously un-martial behavior of Japanese peacekeepers, except to suggest that it was a fast-eroding vestige of Japan’s “culture of antimilitarism.” Here was a revival, probably unconscious, of the old American idea that the Japanese were becoming “like us.” Clinton administration officials showed little interest in the “reluctant realism” thesis or, after 1995–1996, the U.S.–Japan security relationship. For them, Japan was first and foremost an economic problem. Clinton came into office determined to correct the bilateral trade deficit and presided over an aggressive campaign in 1993–1994 to crack open the Japanese market by pressuring Tokyo to accept “managed trade,” an approach favored by revisionists but anathema to both free traders and the Japanese. In acrimonious trade negotiations, Clinton’s team extracted some concessions, but not enough to reduce the trade imbalance. The 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis again brought divisive economic issues to the fore in U.S.–Japan relations. Clintonites sharply criticized Japan for failing to help its beleaguered Asian neighbors by stimulating its economy, opening its markets, and appreciating the yen. They also slapped down Tokyo’s proposal for an “Asian Monetary Fund” on the grounds that it would undercut the influence of the IMF. In addition, many held Japan at least indirectly responsible for the crisis by serving as the model and inspiration of Asian “crony capitalism.” Most galling of all to the Japanese, Clinton and Jiang Zemin joined during their June 1998 summit in chiding them for their inability to put their own economic house in order.

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JAPAN’S “LOST DECADE” In 1998, Japan was mired in a full-blown recession after six years of close to zero growth. Moreover, its financial system teetered on the brink of collapse, arousing fears that it might bring down the global economy with it. The immediate cause of Japan’s economic woes was the bursting of the late 1980s asset bubble in 1990, which buried the country in a mountain of bad debts, excess capacity, and redundant workers. The government exacerbated the situation by covering up the extent of the loan defaults—estimated to be as high as 1 trillion dollars—and propping up so-called “zombie companies,” which cut prices to stay afloat, contributing to a deflationary spiral. 10 Japan entered what the media called a “lost decade.” The seriousness of Japan’s economic problems was not at first widely appreciated. Revisionists, for example, insisted that they were merely hiccups. In Blindside: Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by the Year 2000 (1995), Eammon Fingleton even claimed that the Japanese were deliberately exaggerating their problems to lull Americans into a false sense of security. Despite the crash of the Japanese stock and real estate markets in 1990, growth continued at nearly 4 percent in 1991, buoyed by high capital investment. Even when the economy tanked in 1992, many predicted a quick recovery. Japan had, after all, surmounted earlier economic challenges such as the 1970s oil shocks. In hopes of speeding a recovery, the government slashed interest rates, devalued the yen, and undertook a massive public works program. Growth slowly rebounded to 5 percent in 1996. Then illtimed tax increases and government austerity measures plunged the economy into recession in 1998. By the late 1990s, most American observers had come to the conclusion that Japan’s difficulties stemmed from “systemic” weaknesses rather than simply bad policy decisions or a downturn in the business cycle. 11 The chief culprit was deemed to be the institutions and practices of Japan Inc.—protectionism, cartels, bureaucratic guidance, lifetime employment, and pay by seniority. These had worked well enough in the 1960s to promote “winners” and dynamic growth, but they had been redirected in the 1970s to protecting “losers.” A few efficient export-oriented industries now struggled to subsidize a host of uncompetitive domestic ones, and innovation and risk-taking languished. Unless Japan broke out of the Japan Inc. straitjacket, it would be condemned to perpetual economic stagnation. The American image of Japan underwent a startling change: the fearsome juggernaut of the 1980s became the pathetic “cripple” of the 1990s—a switch reflected in analysts’ use of disease metaphors like “arthritis,” “sclerosis,” and “anorexia” to describe the problems afflicting Japan’s economy. Edward J. Lincoln’s Arthritic Japan (2001) offers a typical example. Earlier calls to “learn from Japan” and warnings of the “danger from Japan” now seemed

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anachronistic or even ludicrous, and their proponents retreated from the public spotlight. Americans reverted to their traditional view that Japan ought to “learn from America,” and many Japanese agreed. Deregulation, liberalization, and restructuring became the watchwords of Japanese reformers. Despite much talk about dismantling Japan Inc. and replacing it with a free market system, however, reform efforts were “quite weak and mild.” 12 As Japan wavered with Hamlet-like indecision over whether to become a “normal” free market economy and military power, American interest shifted to China, which was on track to replace it as East Asia’s economic giant. By the end of the 1990s, Japan had become a “forgotten player,” as Japan expert Michael Green put it in a summer 2000 article in The National Interest. Even as Japan faded from the radar screens of policymakers, pundits, and business executives, however, it loomed large for other Americans, particularly children, adolescents, and twenty-somethings. What attracted them to Japan were not its traditional arts and crafts, Zen Buddhism, martial arts, or quaint customs, but its pop culture. JAPAN’S “GROSS NATIONAL COOL” Japan’s pop culture “invasion” of America in the 1990s was led by anime (animated features) and manga (comic books). Not far behind were Japanese TV game and reality shows like Iron Chef and Takeshi’s Castle, character products (Hello Kitty and Pokémon), karaoke, and sushi. Japanese pop music, fashions, and art had less impact in the United States than Asia, but were still influential. For many young Americans, Japan was the epitome of postmodern cool and a cultural superpower. Its gross national product may no longer have evoked admiration and awe but its “gross national cool” did, as Douglas McGray argued in a May–June 2002 Foreign Policy article. The vogue for Japanese pop culture did not, of course, spring up overnight out of nowhere. Japanese monster movies like Godzilla had attracted American audiences since the 1950s, and Astro Boy and other Japanese cartoon characters became fixtures in American TV programs for children beginning in the 1960s. Moreover, Japan was the leader of the video game revolution of the late 1970s and 1980s, introducing such megahits as PacMan and Mario Bros. Fed on a “regular diet of big-eyed cartoon characters, giant monsters on movie screens, bright colors, stylized violence, and plenty of robots, cyborgs, and androids, generations of Americans developed a taste for Japanese pop.” 13 What was it about Japanese pop culture, particularly anime and manga that attracted young Americans? One analyst identifies four themes that seemed to have special appeal: “an apocalyptic imagination, fascination with the monstrous, a soft spot for the cute, and mecha (robot and cyborg) fanta-

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sies.” In addition, many anime and manga works expressed a bleak, “nihilistic” worldview that evidently struck a chord with those alienated from, or at least dissatisfied with conventional society. There were few happy endings and heroes often wound up dead. Anime classics like Akira (1988)—in which biker gangs battle a shadowy authoritarian state in a futuristic Tokyo rebuilt from the ashes of World War III—presented a world that was “profoundly, perhaps even irreparably, corrupt and dysfunctional.” 14 While aficionados of Japanese pop culture celebrated its “eccentricities, spastic zaniness, and libertarian fearlessness,” 15 others found it bizarre and off-putting. Sophia Coppola’s 2003 sleeper hit Lost in Translation offered moviegoers the opportunity to judge for themselves. The comical encounters of her American protagonists—played by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson—with Tokyo’s zany nightlife and odd denizens disconcerted some who were offended by Coppola’s portrayal of Tokyo as a “miasmic kaleidoscope of nocturnal partying, bizarre customs, and perpetual adolescence.” 16 But these were precisely the features of Japan’s pop culture scene that enthralled Americans. Traditional Japanese subjects, particularly samurai and geisha, continued to attract movie audiences. The Last Samurai (2003), starring Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe, presented Hollywood’s take on the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion. The film depicted samurai as heroic exemplars of knightly virtues, a

Figure 10.1.

Anime expo in Los Angeles, 2013. Source: AP Photos

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characterization that would have pleased Inazo Nitobe but stood in sharp contrast to their 1980s image. Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) explored the gritty realities of the world of these courtesans in the 1930s and 1940s. Interestingly, the film’s geisha protagonist falls in love not with an American—they appear only briefly and not very memorably during the Occupation years— but with a wealthy Japanese businessman, as was usually the case in fact. The appeal of the Madame Butterfly myth had begun to wane. The war was also not forgotten. Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) offered a nuanced and not unsympathetic portrait of Japanese soldiers caught up in the terrible 1945 battle. However, the 2010 HBO TV miniseries The Pacific graphically recreated the horror of combat with a faceless and brutal enemy as experienced by men like E. B. Sledge. Ted Leonsis’s semidocumentary Nanking (2007)—based on Iris Chang’s best-selling 1999 account of the Rape of Nanking—kept alive memories of Japan’s wartime atrocities. Although the war did not become a major issue in U.S.–Japan relations, American eyebrows were raised by some LDP leaders’ fulsome tributes to Japan’s war dead and equivocal stance toward Japanese war crimes and human rights abuses, notably the forcible recruitment of Asian “comfort women” (military prostitutes). American indignation over the latter issue inspired a 2007 congressional resolution calling on the Japanese government to apologize to and compensate the surviving victims. TOWARD A “MATURE PARTNERSHIP” The accession of maverick LDP politician Junichiro Koizumi as Japan’s prime minister in 2001 marked the return of the “forgotten player” to the forefront of Washington’s attention. With his “Beethoven-style hairdo and love of opera, Elvis, and heavy metal,” 17 Koizumi personified the funkiness and zaniness of postmodern Japan. More important, he was the answer to the hopes of American Japan watchers for a bold pro-American leader who would help push the U.S.–Japan alliance to the next level. Koizumi fit the bill admirably, plus he was charismatic and media-savvy—rare qualities in a Japanese politician. An added bonus was his stated intention to dismantle Japan Inc. through sweeping deregulation and privatization, even if this meant tangling with the LDP’s Old Guard. Koizumi lost no time in demonstrating his interest in strengthening the alliance. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, he secured Diet approval for the dispatch of an SDF naval task force to support the United States in Operation Enduring Freedom. True, this was hardly the boots-on-the-ground presence in the combat zone provided by Britain and other U.S. allies. The SDF flotilla, composed mostly of oilers, parked well out of harm’s way in the

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Indian Ocean and its only task was to refuel coalition warships. But Koizumi took this initiative voluntarily and without American arm-twisting. Moreover, it broke Japan’s Cold War taboo against employing the SDF in overseas collective security ventures. Koizumi’s action pleased the George W. Bush administration, and Bush and Koizumi hit it off, establishing cordial personal ties reminiscent of the famous “Ron–Yasu” relationship of the 1980s. The two leaders set about upgrading the alliance into what the American side called a “mature partnership.” In practice, this meant transforming Japan into “the Britain of the Far East”—a partner that would stand shoulder to shoulder with America, regionally and globally, militarily as well as diplomatically. (American hopes and expectations were set forth in a 2000 National Defense University study entitled The United States and Japan: Advancing toward a Mature Partnership, better known as the Armitage Report.) Koizumi did not disappoint his new American friend. In 2003, he joined Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) under which the SDF assisted the United States in interdicting ships suspected of carrying weapons of mass destruction. In 2004, he followed up the SDF’s Indian Ocean deployment by sending 600 SDF soldiers to assist with Iraqi reconstruction. (Although they were carefully insulated from danger, this boots-on-the-ground presence in a war zone would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier.) Also in 2004, Japan and the United States agreed to co-develop a ballistic missile defense system, a step that pointed toward the closer integration of their militaries and defense industries. Agreement was also reached on the reduction and realignment of U.S. forces in Japan, including resolution of the nettlesome Futenma issue which had been delayed by Okinawan opposition. Then, in 2006, Koizumi signed on to a “global alliance” with the United States, which was underpinned by shared values and ideals, not just common security concerns in East Asia. 18 By the time Koizumi stepped down in 2006, he and Bush had built “the tightest security cooperation of the Washington–Tokyo alliance’s fivedecade history.” 19 Koizumi had also assembled a group of like-minded LDP leaders who were expected to follow in his footsteps. The “reluctant realism” hypothesis thus appeared to have been borne out—the Japanese, led by proAmerican “realists,” had “crossed the Rubicon” toward political-military normalcy and bade farewell to pacifism and isolationism. 20 Or had they? Koizumi’s SDF deployments were groundbreaking and attracted much attention. Examined closely, however, they were revealed to be carefully hedged, one-off events that had as much symbolism as substance to them. 21 In particular, they showed the continued unwillingness of the Japanese to put their people in harm’s way. Then there was the question of whether Japan’s pro-U.S. tilt would continue. Some Japan watchers felt that Koizumi had pulled Japan too tightly

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into America’s embrace, and that there was bound to be some kind of backlash. One, for example, predicted that Japan “will seek maximum autonomy for its own purposes” and “will not wish to be hostage to America’s global strategy or to its relations with China and Korea.” In his opinion, moreover, Japan’s “readiness to tighten cooperation (with the United States) is not the result of shared values, but rather of of the realist appraisal of the value of the alliance.” 22 NOTES 1. Michael H. Armacost, Friends or Rivals? The Insider’s Account of U.S.–Japan Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 102. 2. LaFeber, The Clash, 388. 3. Thomas U. Berger, Redefining Japan & the U.S.–Japan Alliance (New York: The Japan Society, 2004), 48. 4. Green, “The Search for an Active Security Partnership” in Partnership, Iriye and Wampler, 146. 5. Green, “The Search for an Active Security Partnership,” 147. 6. Quoted in Kenneth B. Pyle, The Japanese Question: Power and Purpose in a New Era (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1996), 173. 7. Quoted in Michael Blaker et al., Case Studies in Japanese Negotiating Behavior (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2002), 133. 8. Quoted in Richard J. Samuels and Christopher P. Twomey, “The Eagle Eyes the Pacific: American Foreign Policy Options in East Asia after the Cold War,” in The U.S.–Japan Alliance: Past, Present, and Future, Michael J. Green and Patrick M. Cronin, eds. (New York: The Council on Foreign Relations, 1999), 12. 9. Michael J. Green, “State of the Field Report: Research on Japanese Security Policy,” Access Asia Review (September 1998), 14–15. 10. Jeff Kingston, Contemporary Japan: History, Politics, and Social Change since the 1980s (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 25. 11. Katz, The System that Soured, Ch. 2. 12. Edward J. Lincoln, Arthritic Japan: The Slow Pace of Economic Reform (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2001), 200. 13. William J. Tsutsui, Japanese Popular Culture and Globalization (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 2010), 40. 14. Tsutsui, Japanese Popular Culture, 18–21, 38. 15. Roland Kelts, Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the U.S. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 6. 16. Auslin, Pacific Cosmopolitans, 268. 17. Kenneth B. Pyle, “Japan’s Historic Change of Course,” Current History (September 2006), 277. 18. Michael J. Green, “U.S.–Japanese Relations after Koizumi: Convergence or Cooling?” The Washington Quarterly (Autumn 2006), 106–8. 19. Green, “U.S.–Japanese Relations after Koizumi,” 101. 20. John H. Miller, “Japan Crosses the Rubicon?” Asia-Pacific Security Studies 1:1 (2002), 1–4. 21. Christopher W. Hughes, Japan’s Re-emergence as a ‘Normal’ Military Power (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005), 132. 22. Pyle, “Japan’s Historic Change of Course,” 282.

Chapter Eleven

Assessing a Changing Japan, 2007–2013

The late 2000s and early 2010s were trying times for Americans interested in how their chief Asian ally was changing and where it might be headed. Trends during the Koizumi era suggested a “Japan Rising”—an economically revitalized and self-confident Japan ready to resume its place on the world geopolitical stage. But the severe recession of 2008–2009 made equally plausible a “Japan Sinking” scenario, in which Japan appeared likely to “sink” under the weight of its rapidly increasing elderly population and its “lost generation” of economically disenfranchised young people. The dethroning of the LDP by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 2009 brought another “hope and change” narrative. But this, too, proved short-lived as the DPJ failed to deliver on economic renovation and threw a monkey wrench into U.S.–Japan security cooperation. Pessimism gave way to renewed optimism as some Americans saw in Japan’s March 11, 2011, disaster the seeds of a national “rebirth” and “renaissance.” Two years later, however, it was hard to sustain such optimism. “JAPAN RISING” In 2007, noted Japan historian and commentator Kenneth Pyle published Japan Rising to much critical acclaim. Subtitled The Resurgence of Japanese Power and Purpose, the book advanced the provocative thesis that Japan was on the threshold of a momentous “sea change in its international orientation” comparable to those of 1868, 1921, 1931, and 1945. “After more than half a century of national pacifism and isolationism,” Pyle argued, “the nation is

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preparing to become a major player in the strategic struggles of the twentyfirst century.” 1 Japan, in other words, was back. In Pyle’s view, Japan’s previous changes of course had been responses to alterations in its international environment, and the current one was no exception. The end of the Cold War eliminated the bipolar international system in which the Japanese had found it advantageous to pursue pacifism and mercantilism under the protective wing of the United States. Now, with the advent of the multipolar post-Cold War order, they were set to reemerge, butterfly-like, from their pacifist-mercantilist cocoon and resume their place on the international stage as a “normal” nation. According to Pyle, the agent of Japan’s metamorphosis was the “heisei generation”—younger Japanese who came to maturity during the reign of the current Emperor Akihito. (The latter ascended the throne in 1989, taking the reign name Heisei or “universal peace.”) In contrast to their elders, members of this new generation do not “feel guilt or remorse for Japan’s imperial past; nor are they defensive about Japan’s traditional political values.” They are also “more inclined to respect individuality, freedom, autonomy, and civicmindedness.” Most important, they are “impatient with the slow pace of change in economic restructuring, in developing a more assertive foreign policy, and in rethinking the constitution.” 2 Koizumi was the first Japanese leader to give expression to the aspirations of the heisei generation. His policy initiatives—promoting deregulation and privatization, strengthening the U.S.–Japan alliance, and adopting a more assertive posture vis-à-vis China—were in line with its priorities. So, too, was his loosening of Japan’s self-imposed constraints on its military, such as those banning the SDF’s overseas dispatch, participation in “collective selfdefense,” and the acquisition of power-projection capabilities. Koizumi’s moves toward military “normalcy” had broad support among the heisei generation. They were, moreover, “not peripheral adjustments; rather, they pointed to a comprehensive revision of the Japanese system.” 3 Japan was to again stand tall in the international arena. The heisei generation’s putative great power ambitions would count for little if Japan’s economy continued to stagnate. But Pyle suggested that Koizumi’s economic reforms had enabled Japan to “turn the corner” and resume “healthy growth.” This had happened not by jettisoning the Japan Inc. model as prescribed by many Western economists, but through its incremental adaptation to the forces of globalization and technological change. As a result, the “long-range economic picture (had) brightened” and “confidence was returning.” 4 What did Japan’s resurgence mean for the U.S.–Japan alliance? Here Pyle offered a mixed assessment. Japan was likely to be a closer and “more engaged ally” in areas such as ballistic missile defense. But it was illusory to expect it to become the “Britain of the Far East.” The Japanese had their own

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interests and priorities which did not necessarily mesh with those of the United States. One should therefore expect disagreement and divergence between Washington and Tokyo. (One likely point of divergence was Japan’s interest in promoting Asian regional integration—it was, after all, an Asian country.) Pyle also predicted that “the growing influence of public opinion on Japan’s foreign policy” would make U.S. bases in Japan a “source of considerable friction.” 5 Bush administration officials were unhappy with Pyle’s disparagement of their project of turning Japan into the Britain of the Far East, though they welcomed the rest of his analysis, which dovetailed with the “reluctant realism” thesis. However, not all Japan specialists agreed with Pyle that Japan had in fact embarked on a “revolutionary change of course.” Some noted, for example, that he glossed over continuities with the pacifism and mercantilism of the Cold War era. Moreover, as Pyle himself acknowledged, no leader from the heisei generation had yet articulated clear new national goals. It was therefore difficult to judge exactly where Japan might be headed or even whether it was actually moving in a new direction. Others were skeptical of Pyle’s claim of Tokyo’s newfound foreign policy activism. “For all the talk about a more proactive and assertive Japan with (what Pyle calls) a resurgence of power and purpose,” one opined, “Japan appears to remain essentially a reactive or adaptive state.” 6 “JAPAN SINKING” Neither Pyle nor anyone else foresaw the global recession of 2008–2009 or its devastating impact on Japan’s economy. In late 2008 and early 2009, its exports fell by a startling 50 percent and its GDP contracted by over 15 percent. Japan fell into its worst recession since 1945, one more severe than that of any other advanced industrial country. Mass unemployment was averted—Japan’s unemployment rate peaked in 2009 at 5.7 percent—but only because the government pumped money into firms to enable them to keep redundant workers on the payroll. Still, talk of “Japan rising” abruptly ended. The question instead became whether a “sinking Japan” could “survive” much less thrive. 7 What explains the severity of the slump? Between 2002 and 2007, Japan experienced a modest recovery relative to the worst years of the “lost decade.” Growth averaged about 2 percent a year, anemic by the standards of Japan Inc., but still respectable. It was, however, less solidly based than many observers assumed. It was driven chiefly by external demand for Japanese cars and consumer electronics, and capital investment by the exportoriented firms that made them. Domestic consumption—household income and consumer spending—grew more slowly, depressed by Japan’s rapidly

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aging population and Japanese firms’ growing reliance on poorly paid temporary and part-time workers, whom they turned to in an effort to trim labor costs without sacking regular employees. The economy was thus vulnerable to an export slowdown, and domestic demand was too weak to compensate. Japan probably did not face another lost decade of stagnation and recession. Economists pointed out that the country’s economic fundamentals were much improved compared to the 1990s. Koizumi had cleaned up the postbubble financial mess and reduced the overhang of bad debt. Moreover, deregulation and corporate restructuring had made the economy “more market-based than in the past.” 8 The dual economy of the 1980s and 1990s—a few efficient export industries propping up many uncompetitive and protected domestic ones—remained largely intact. But the shift to temps and part-timers reflected the breakdown of Japan Inc. Japanese companies increasingly recognized that, to be competitive, they could no longer afford to offer lifetime employment and seniority-based wages. Protectionism against manufactured imports was on the wane, and foreign firms were setting up shop in Japan in unprecedented numbers. The country was at last opening up. While one could be optimistic that Japan’s “leaner, meaner” economy would rebound from the 2008–2009 recession fairly quickly, this rebound would have to come from a revival of exports. There was little prospect of an expansion of domestic consumption. In addition to the increasing number of temps, there was a growing army of retirees living on fixed incomes, some in straitened circumstances. The proportion of the population sixty-five or older—22 percent—was among the highest in the industrialized world and was rapidly rising. Moreover, Japan’s birth rate had plummeted since the 1970s, with the result that there were fewer young people entering the work force and setting up families. (Japan’s population of 128 million had begun to shrink in 2008.) The long-term effects of this “demographic drag”—fewer young people and more older ones—could only be guessed at, but they did not bode well for growth. Japan faced a slow-growth future, perhaps on the order of 1 to 1.5 percent per year at best. 9 JAPAN’S “LOST GENERATION” Even if the 2008–2009 recession was unlikely to cause Japan to sink, it cast an unflattering light on the social pathologies and vulnerabilities spawned by deregulation and corporate restructuring. Topping the list of such problems was the rise of what the media dubbed a “lost generation” of young people trapped in low-paying, temporary jobs. These workers constituted 34 percent of the labor force in 2009, up from 20 percent in 1990. Lacking job security, they were laid off in droves during the recession. Many were ineligible for unemployment benefits, and found themselves on the street and penniless. A

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“tent city” of the homeless sprang up in downtown Tokyo, shocking the public and forcing the government to provide emergency assistance. American observers, accustomed since the 1960s to seeing prosperous, black-suited “salary men” marching to and from work, were taken aback. The lost generation was a major source of rising rates of divorce, suicide, domestic violence, child abuse, crime, and poverty. Such indices of social breakdown were hardly serious by international standards, but they were alarming to the Japanese who put great store on order, decorum, and “fair shares.” At the bottom of the “irregular” employment hierarchy were socalled NEETs—those without education, employment, or training—who eked out a hand-to-mouth existence by performing odd jobs when and where they could find them. Some dropped out entirely and became “shut-ins” or recluses in their parents’ homes, watching TV, playing video games, or reading manga, often for years on end. Here was an intriguing new area of research for American academics and popular writers, particularly those with a sociological bent. Michael Zielenziger suggested in Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created its Own Lost Generation (2006) that the plight of “shut-ins” was emblematic of the fate of free spirits in a conformist, inward-looking, and change-averse society. In Race for the Exits: The Unraveling of Japan’s System of Social Protection (2006), Leonard Schoppa described how more and more Japanese were falling through the meshes of Japan’s fraying social safety net and becoming victims of the vagaries of market forces. According to Mary Brinton’s Lost in Transition: Youth, Work, and Instability in Postindustrial Japan (2011), Japan’s educational escalator had broken down, leaving millions of young people stranded in dead-end, menial jobs—or no jobs at all. Most Americans, preoccupied with their own economic woes in 2008–2009, ignored the travails of a country with an unemployment rate half that of their own. But those who did pay attention noticed a new, more somber mood. The exuberant self-confidence of the 1980s was, of course, long gone. But so, too, was the funky zaniness of the 1990s pop culture efflorescence. The Japanese movie Tokyo Sonata (2008) brought home to American audiences the quiet desperation of “downsized” salary men. (The protagonist of this film, whose job is outsourced to China, is reduced to cleaning lavatories to make ends meet while pretending to his family and friends that he still holds a respectable, white-collar job.) American newspapers and magazines occasionally carried stories about the distress of semiemployed Japanese young people. A piece in The Atlantic, for example, profiled a thirty-something NEET in his “pool-table-size apartment” where “squatting over a pile of newspapers, shirtless under a trash-bag smock, he doesn’t look tired so much as defeated, like a dog that has given up on being adopted.” 10

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There was a cautionary tale here for America. Were American firms to follow in Japan’s footsteps by shifting to part-time and temporary workers— as seemed to be happening in the “jobless recovery” of 2009–2012—there was a danger that they would produce an American lost generation, with all this implied in terms of wasted lives, lower productivity, depressed consumption, and slower growth. Already by 2012, 30 percent of American workers aged twenty to twenty-four were “nonregular,” up from 23 percent in 2008. “Japan’s experience highlights the risk that this generation (of Americans) may end up so utterly lost, it will set off a cycle of economic decline—one that quashes the chances of generations to come.” 11 “HOPE AND CHANGE,” JAPANESE STYLE In August 2009, the unthinkable happened—angry Japanese voters turned the LDP out of power and replaced it with the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ). Nothing like this had happened in living memory. Except for a brief hiatus in 1993–1994, the LDP had ruled Japan since its formation in 1955, presiding over both Japan Inc.’s glory years and its decline after 1990. The immediate cause of the LDP’s defeat was its fumbling response to the recession. Beyond this, however, voters were disenchanted with the lackluster leaders who had succeeded Koizumi, the revival of the party’s old guard and their old-fashioned pork-barrel politics, and administrative missteps, notably the “loss” of the records of millions of pensioners for which the LDP took the blame. The election outcome was widely interpreted as more a repudiation of the LDP than an endorsement of the DPJ. But the DPJ laid out an ambitious leftof-center program of national renovation that appealed to many voters and echoed in some ways candidate Barack Obama’s “hope and change” theme of 2008. (Obama’s victory may also have helped inspired them to “throw the bums out.”) At the top of the DPJ’s reform agenda was reining in Japan’s powerful bureaucrats and placing them under closer political direction and supervision. Another goal was decentralizing government and making it more transparent and accountable. Also high among DPJ priorities was shifting the basis of economic growth from exports to domestic consumption and rolling back Koizumi’s free-market reforms. DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama, the scion of an old political family, inveighed against these reforms, which he claimed had turned Japan into a nation of haves and have-nots, eroding its social cohesion—or, as he put it, its “fraternity.” The solution, he argued, was redistributing wealth from corporations to households by, among other things, increasing pensions, subsidizing worker retraining, abolishing highway tolls and the gasoline surtax, lowering taxes on small businesses, raising the minimum wage, curbing non-

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regular employment, introducing child allowances, reducing school fees, promoting a “green economy,” and establishing a moratorium on the debts of small and medium enterprises. Many American observers initially welcomed the DPJs accession to power as heralding the advent of competitive two-party politics, increased citizen participation in government, and a long overdue shift to consumption-based growth. But critics pointed to the scattershot and contradictory nature of the party’s economic initiatives. Overall, these initiatives promised to stimulate domestic consumption by putting more money in people’s pockets. But the DPJ’s pledges to limit temporary jobs, establish a debt moratorium for small businesses, and raise greenhouse gas emission standards alarmed business leaders who thought them likely to inhibit growth. Even more worrisome was the absence of a “serious plan for restoring long-term economic growth to Japan.” 12 Some DPJ figures talked vaguely about adopting “the Scandinavian model,” 13 but there was little sign that the party actually intended to do so. The essence of the “Scandinavian” or “Nordic” model is “flexicurity”—a combination of labor market flexibility and worker security. In such a system, it is easy to close plants and lay off workers, but they receive generous unemployment benefits and retraining assistance plus guaranteed pensions and health care. “Jobs come and go. Companies come and go. But workers find new jobs, the economy gets more efficient and real wages keep rising.” 14 The DPJ did propose to curb nonregular employment and put more resources into job retraining. But allowing companies to come and go did not figure in Hatoyama’s restoration of “fraternity.” This was a bridge too far in a society still largely wedded to the security afforded by Japan Inc. Questions also arose how the DPJ proposed to pay for its expensive tax cuts and subsidies. Hatoyama ruled out an increase in the national consumption tax, claiming that pruning unnecessary items from the budget would generate sufficient funds to cover the new outlays. But this approach failed to produce enough money, leaving the unpalatable options of either reneging on the DPJ’s campaign promises or increasing the issuance of government bonds. Few favored the latter course. The Japanese government was already heavily dependent on deficit financing and had amassed a public debt approaching 200 percent of GDP, the highest rate in the world. Although most of this debt was held domestically, there were limits to how far it could rise without triggering a damaging international credit downgrade. After only a few months in power, the DPJ lost credibility as a change agent in the eyes of most U.S. Japan watchers. The party’s assault on the bureaucracy produced confusion and an “amateurish, flying-by-the-seat-ofyour-pants” style of governance. DPJ leaders, some plagued by corruption scandals, were openly quarreling over policy issues, such as whether to increase taxes or borrowing. Having rejected Koizumi’s deregulation and pri-

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vatization policies, moreover, they seemed clueless about how to restore Japan’s economic vitality. As one American critic commented, their approach “emphasizes the role that government can play in creating jobs by pouring money into healthcare and other social services and gives scant attention to what the government should do to create incentives for business to generate employment.” 15 ALLIANCE ANGST The nine-month tenure of DPJ Prime Minister Hatoyama represented “the greatest period of political turmoil and confusion in the U.S.–Japan alliance since the mutual security treaty was signed in 1960.” 16 Few in Washington anticipated this turn of events. Public support for the alliance was strong in both Japan and the United States. Polls in early 2009 indicated that upwards of 75 percent of Japanese approved of it, and a like percentage of Americans considered Japan to be a reliable ally. Nevertheless, there were rumblings of dissatisfaction in both countries with the enhanced security partnership established by Bush and Koizumi. On the American side, some critics argued that the stronger alliance promoted regional instability by feeding Beijing’s fears of Japan’s “remilitarization” and U.S.–Japan “containment” of China. A variant of this argument was the charge that U.S. support emboldened Japanese nationalists to adopt inflammatory positions on war-related issues. Exhibit A was Koizumi’s repeated visits to Yasukuni Shrine to pay homage to Japan’s war dead, including convicted war criminals, which infuriated Chinese and Koreans. Koizumi’s LDP successors discontinued these visits, but one, Shinzo Abe, aroused the ire of the U.S. Congress in 2007 by publicly denying that Japan had forcibly recruited Asian “comfort women” during the war. Other critics argued that the U.S. effort to convert Japan into a more active security partner had largely failed. As one retired general bluntly put it: “The Japanese constitution and their political legacy from WWII make them literally worthless as a deployed ground combat military force.” 17 The problem, according to proponents of this view, was that the Japanese lacked the political will to assume the risks and burdens expected of a “normal” ally. They instead remained “abnormal” in their aversion to putting their soldiers in harm’s way, raising defense spending above 1 percent of GDP, and forthrightly accepting collective security responsibilities. The upgraded alliance was consequently a “rhetorical facade,” vulnerable to collapse in a serious military contingency. 18 The Japanese, in other words, were not ready for prime time, whatever their supposed shift to greater “realism.” As it happened, the anticipated crisis of confidence in the alliance was precipitated not by a military contingency but by Hatoyama. In opposition,

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he and other DPJ leaders had criticized Koizumi’s excessive deference to the United States and called for a more “equal alliance.” In policy terms, this meant ending the SDF’s refueling operation in the Indian Ocean, renegotiating the 2006 Futenma relocation agreement, revising the Status of Forces Agreement governing the legal status of U.S. forces in Japan, reviewing Japan’s Host Nation Support for those forces, and establishing a commission to investigate secret U.S.–Japan understandings related to nuclear weapons during the Cold War. They also talked about moving away from the United States and building closer ties with Japan’s Asian neighbors in an “East Asian Community.” U.S. officials were aware of these campaign pledges, but they assumed that the DPJ would discard or modify them once it was faced with the responsibility of governing. Hatoyama did not, however, conform to this scenario. For whatever reason—probably pre-election commitments to his left-wing coalition partners—he resolved to stand firm on some of his pledges, including insistence that the Futenma agreement be renegotiated. This was not a popular position to take outside of Okinawa. The 2009 election did not turn on defense and foreign policy issues, and the Japanese people had not demanded that their leaders “stand up to the Americans,” though this was how it was read by some American Japan experts. In any case, Futenma quickly became a major bone of contention between the Obama administration and Hatoyama’s DPJ government. The U.S. defense establishment was outraged by Japan’s reneging on its 1996 commitment to relocate the Futenma Marine Air Station to another, less populated part of Okinawa. This commitment was the linchpin of the Pentagon’s plans to realign U.S. forces in Japan and the Western Pacific. Now Hatoyama insisted that this facility be removed entirely from Okinawa, which U.S. planners considered impractical. Here seemed conclusive evidence that Japan was a “feckless ally” and “strategic disappointment.” 19 Hatoyama blinked. Confronted with plummeting public approval ratings, he dropped his opposition to the original relocation plan and resigned in June 2010. But the Futenma issue simmered on, unresolved. Although Hatoyama’s DPJ successors pledged to move ahead, local opposition, court challenges, and environmental concerns blocked progress. Alliance managers in Tokyo and Washington labored to put bilateral security cooperation back on track, but restoring the alliance’s credibility in the eyes of the American foreign policy and defense establishment was an uphill struggle. “3/11” The appalling triple disaster that struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011—a massive earthquake, tsunami, and partial meltdown of a nuclear

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reactor—inspired a remarkable moment in American–Japanese relations that had no real precedent, except perhaps the devastating 1923 Tokyo–Yokohama earthquake. As in 1923, there was a spontaneous outpouring of American sympathy and support, but this time on a much larger scale. President Obama set the tone, declaring the alliance “unshakable” and pledging to “stand with the people of Japan.” In the weeks and months that followed, Americans contributed more than 630 million dollars to aid the victims, “the highest ever for relief to a developed country.” 20 The March 11 disaster—quickly dubbed “3/11”—gave a major boost to Japanese and American evaluations of the alliance, the SDF, and U.S. forces in Japan. Intensive media coverage of American and Japanese soldiers working side by side in rescue and relief operations, the first joint operation in the history of the alliance, made the security partnership real for many people in a way that it had not been before, and underscored its positive value for Japan. (The anti-base clamor quieted even in Okinawa, its national epicenter.) With U.S. forces deliberately playing a support role, the SDF was the hero of the hour. Its performance drew praise from both Japanese and Americans, and refuted naysayers who had doubted that it was capable of acting jointly with U.S. forces in emergencies. In the aftermath of 3/11, many American observers offered surprisingly bullish forecasts of Japan’s future—surprising, that is, in light of the doomand-gloom scenarios common before the disaster. Japan would not only recover, they predicted, but the calamity would serve as a catalyst for a national “rebirth” or “new beginning.” 21 The main source of such optimism was the remarkable fortitude, discipline, and solidarity displayed by the Japanese people, particularly young people. As one American commentator noted: “The self-mobilization of Japanese youth through social media in response to the disaster belied a growing narrative about a lost generation of young Japanese who supposedly cared only about themselves.” 22 Even the most optimistic prognosticators admitted, however, that Japan faced daunting challenges. First of all, the devastated northeast would have to be rebuilt. As one of the world’s richest countries, Japan undoubtedly could afford to do this, perhaps creating a “reconstruction boom” that would help jump-start growth. But some analysts warned that relief and reconstruction costs would “almost certainly exert a malign influence over Japan’s national finances.” 23 Even before 3/11, rating agencies had downgraded Japan’s international credit rating in a no-confidence vote on the government’s ability to get its public debt under control. With spending set to skyrocket in the wake of the disaster, the possibility of a fiscal meltdown could not be entirely excluded. Then there was the question of whether Japan could achieve stable, longterm economic growth. Most American observers agreed that the key was promoting greater competition, openness, and innovation—in other words,

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clearing away the remnants of Japan Inc. Checklists of what had to be done varied, but generally included lowering trade barriers, harnessing the talents of Japanese women, encouraging innovative startup firms, and staying the course on nuclear power despite the terrifying reactor meltdown of 3/11. Japan would also have to find a way to “defuse” its ticking “demographic time bomb” 24 which promised to flood the country with old people and drastically reduce the working-age population. The most obvious way to do this would be to open the door to foreign immigrants, but there was nothing in Japanese experience to suggest that this would attract much support. Managers of the U.S.–Japan alliance discerned a silver lining in 3/11 insofar as enhanced public support in Japan for the alliance created an opportunity for resolving the Futenma impasse and reviving the Bush–Koizumi “global alliance.” It was widely acknowledged, however, that progress on this front—as on others—would require bold and skillful Japanese political leadership. Here the outlook was mixed. Not much could be expected of senior DPJ and LDP figures, who were mired in political infighting and bereft of new ideas. But younger and more innovative politicians who came to the fore during the 3/11 crisis offered some promise. Moreover, the Japanese people seemed eager for a fresh start of some sort. As one veteran Japan watcher opined, the Japanese wanted a “New Deal” and were waiting for the equivalent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 25 The DPJ failed to deliver. Disillusioned Japanese voters ousted it in December 2012, and restored the LDP to power under Shinzo Abe, the failed prime minister of 2006–2007. From an American perspective, the main challenge facing him was the familiar one of getting Japan on a growth track while somehow reducing its huge public debt. The litmus test of his success or failure was also familiar—“subjecting the economy’s most coddled sectors to international competition” despite the LDP’s reliance on “farmers and other special interests most threatened by free trade,” as the Washington Post editorialized on February 21, 2013. Optimism did not run high that Abe would rise to the occasion. Two years after 3/11, Japanese—and Americans—were still waiting for a Japanese New Deal and FDR. NOTES 1. Pyle, Japan Rising, 2. 2. Pyle, Japan Rising, 358, 360. 3. Pyle, Japan Rising, 374. 4. Pyle, Japan Rising, 368–69. 5. Pyle, Japan Rising, 368–69. 6. Mike M. Mochizuki, “Change in Japan’s Grand Strategy: Why and How Much?” Asia Policy, No. 4 (July 2007), 194. 7. Michael Auslin, “Can Japan Thrive—or Survive?” Asian Outlook, No. 2 (April 2009), 1. 8. Edward J. Lincoln, “Is Japan Lost Again?” Current History (September 2009), 271–72. 9. Lincoln, “Is Japan Lost Again?” 273.

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10. Ethan Devine, “What Americans Should Understand About Japan’s 1990s Economic Bust,” The Atlantic (May 2013), www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2013/05/. 11. Devine, “What Americans Should Understand.” 12. Michael J. Green, “Japan’s Confused Revolution,” The Washington Quarterly (January 2010), 15. 13. Yoichi Funabashi, “Tokyo’s Trials,” Foreign Affairs, 88:6 (November/December 2009), accessed on ProQuest. 14. Richard Katz, “Reforming Japan, Nordic Style” in Reimagining Japan: The Quest for a Future that Works, McKinsey and Co., ed. (San Francisco: VIZ Media, 2011), 145. 15. Gerald L. Curtis, “‘Creative Destruction’ in Japanese Politics” in Reimagining Japan, McKinsey and Co., 130–31. 16. Michael J. Green, “The Democratic Party of Japan and the Future of the U.S.–Japan Alliance,” Journal of Japanese Studies 37:1 (2011), 91. 17. Quoted in Robert Madsen and Richard J. Samuels, “Japan, LLP,” The National Interest (May/June 2010), 6. 18. Michael Finnegan, “Managing Unmet Expectations in the U.S.–Japan Alliance,” National Bureau of Asian Research Special Report (November 2009), 3–4. 19. Madsen and Samuels, “Japan LLP,” 8. 20. Richard J. Samuels, 3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 19. 21. Hugh Patrick, “After the Tohoku Earthquake, Japan’s New Beginning,” East Asia Forum, April 19, 2011, www.eastasiaforum.org. 22. Michael J. Green, “Tokyo’s Turning Point,” Foreign Affairs, April 9, 2011 Snapshot, www.foreignaffairs.com. 23. Robert Madsen and Richard J. Samuels, “Japan’s Black Swan: How the Earthquake Changed Everything,” Foreign Policy, March 16, 2011, 3. 24. Kingston, Contemporary Japan, Ch. 3. 25. Patrick Cronin, “Japan’s New Deal Opportunity,” The Diplomat, April 11, 2011, 1.

Conclusion Looking Ahead—and Back

Using the past to predict the future is like trying to drive looking at the rearview mirror—one is apt to end up in a ditch. 1 Historians are thus well advised to leave the future to futurologists. Still, it is tempting to suppose that the patterns one discerns in the past might help limn the shape of things to come. There are, of course, pitfalls. History never repeats itself even if, as Mark Twain famously quipped, it may sometimes rhyme. It is also notoriously easy to misapply the “lessons of history,” usually by assuming a false equivalence between situations or events. How many times have the “lessons of Munich” been misapplied? Another trap is straight-lining current trends into the future. This approach sometimes works, and I use it below to try to predict Japan’s demographic future. As often as not, however, it leads to erroneous forecasts. Either the assumptions are wrong or unforeseen contingencies intervene. Two striking examples are the underestimation of Japan’s economic prospects in the 1950s and their overestimation in the 1980s. But there are many other examples of American ideas about Japan that turned out to be wrong or exaggerated—the “paradise of guileless children” of the 1880s, the “Prussia of the Far East” of the 1910s, the “beasts of the jungle” of the 1940s, and the “sclerotic invalid” of the 1990s. Americans have gotten Japan wrong so often that one is compelled to exercise special caution and humility in offering predictions about where it might be headed. Fortunately, however, we are not without some relatively hard evidence on this score, courtesy of demographers. They tell us that in thirty or forty years Japanese will be many fewer and much older than at present. Japan’s population, currently about 127 million, will fall to 89 mil159

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lion in 2055. The proportion of the elderly (age sixty-five or older), now 23 percent, will exceed 40 percent in 2050. The workforce will shrink from 66 million to 50 million and, as it does, so, too, will economic output. Japan will remain a wealthy country in terms of per capita GDP, but its economy, currently ranked third in the world after the United States and China, will likely fall to eighth place or perhaps even eleventh in 2050. 2 The driver of Japan’s demographic transformation is its falling fertility rate—fewer and fewer women are marrying and having children. In consequence, the number of nuclear families and young people will fall. Japanese society will be “filled with aged isolates, divorcees, and adults whose family lines end with them.” 3 Having no children to support them, a rising proportion of the elderly will have to live in institutional settings, and the cost of treating age-related health problems such as Alzheimer’s disease will soar. Fewer young people and more old ones likely mean less entrepreneurism, innovation, and risk-taking. In other words, “demographic change threatens to suck the vitality out of Japanese society.” 4 There may be some silver linings in these clouds. For example, Japan in 2050 will be a “less crowded and ‘greener’ land” than at present. 5 The depopulation of rural areas, which is advancing at a faster rate than in the cities, could return much of the countryside to the bucolic state celebrated by American visitors in the 1880s. Less crowding and more living space, coupled with improvements in energy efficiency and green technologies, might enhance the quality of life for the Japanese. Indeed, it may be that the Japan of the future will be an international pacesetter in eldercare and geriatric medicine, and the builder of “the world’s most advanced, smart, and energyefficient cities and infrastructure.” 6 It is, of course, possible that this demographic forecast will turn out to be wrong. The Japanese might, for example, start marrying and having children again in large numbers. They might also decide to welcome masses of foreign workers to bolster the thinning ranks of their labor force. But the odds against either of these things happening seem fairly high. “For better or worse depopulation and pervasive graying will be Japan’s lot,” 7 along with a slow, albeit relative economic decline. What does all of this have to do with how Americans have viewed Japan in the past and might in the future? I suggest that some images will persist, while others will die out in the coming era of Japan’s graying and “genteel decline.” For example, the perception of Japan as a threat that has periodically dominated the American consciousness—notably between 1905 and 1920, 1941 and 1945, and 1985 and 1995—will disappear along with the menacing stereotypes associated with it. It is simply inconceivable that Americans will see the shrinking, graying, and risk-averse Japan of the next few decades as posing any sort of threat. The specter of the “Yellow Peril” is dead and will

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not revive. Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun of two decades ago was the last we will see of it. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that racial thinking about Japan is too deeply embedded in the American psyche to ever completely disappear. 8 Ethnocentric stereotypes of the Japanese may therefore persist. For example, the tendency to view them as quirky Alice-in-Wonderland characters has a long history—think of The Mikado, Mr. Togo: Maid of All Work, and Lost in Translation—that probably has not run its course. Another hardy perennial that will likely continue in some form is the predisposition to see them as “pupils” or “understudies.” This was present from the beginning of America’s interaction with Japan in the 1850s and has persisted up to the present. Americans would be well advised to discard such stereotypes, which are a prime source of confusion and misunderstanding in dealing with the Japanese. Take, for example, the idea of turning Japan into a strong and active military ally, a will-o’-the-wisp that has beguiled Americans from John Foster Dulles to George W. Bush, and which has its origins in the understudy stereotype. It has become increasingly obvious that for whatever reason— residual pacifism and isolationism, fiscal constraints, a desire for autonomy—Japan is unwilling to become the “Britain of the Far East.” To insist otherwise is a recipe for disappointment and frustration, which threatens to erode support for the alliance. As a number of commentators have suggested, more modest and realistic American expectations of what Japan can do would help stabilize this vital security partnership. 9 This will become even more important going forward as an aging, cash-strapped, and inward-looking Japan becomes less able to contribute to the alliance. Another closely related notion of which Americans ought to disabuse themselves—but may not—is that Japanese should be like Americans and that they aspire to become so. The example par excellence is the 1945–1952 American Occupation of Japan in which Americans tried to remake Japan in the image of New Deal America. But similar notions were conspicuous at other times as well. Late nineteenth-century Americans hailed the Japanese as the “Yankees of the East” and aimed to transplant their “Christian civilization” in Japan. In the 1920s, they welcomed Japan’s embrace of jazz, flappers, baseball, and liberal democracy, which pointed toward a growing convergence between American and Japan. In the 1960s, they celebrated “modernization” which seemed to be making Japan more like America. In the 1990s, they prescribed American-style free-market capitalism to cure Japan of its post-bubble hangover and restore growth. The problem with such thinking is that it obscures the fact that the Japanese do not and never have wanted to be “Americanized.” They are intensely proud and protective of their own culture and way of doing things. This may seem obvious, but it is something that Americans historically have been slow to appreciate and accept, giving rise to repeated misconceptions about the

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Japanese. In the 1870s, for example, Americans imagined that Japan was reinventing itself along American lines, whereas the reality was quite different. In the 1970s, many supposed that the Japanese were operating a freemarket economy despite growing evidence to the contrary. Further disconnects may lie ahead. Americans now assume that the Japanese have belatedly discovered the virtues of an American-style free-market capitalism and are moving toward it. But such a system is unlikely to have much appeal to the swelling ranks of Japan’s vulnerable elderly and temps. It is therefore probable that Japan will eventually come up with something different. One can only guess how the Japanese will remake their society in the coming decades, but there are a few clues. During their time of economic troubles since the early 1990s, they have shown a strong aversion to high unemployment and extreme social inequality. The odds are good, therefore, that they will do whatever it takes to keep their society stable, cohesive, and equitable. They are seized with the problems posed by “isolates,” dropouts, and NEETs, and will address them. Money is not a major obstacle; Japan is one of the world’s richest countries, and it will become richer still in per capita terms as its population declines. Despite current handwringing over the Japan’s “breakdown” and “malaise,” American visitors to Japan encounter a society that works in some ways better than their own. It is therefore reasonable to expect that the Japanese will find a way to “age gracefully,” providing a comfortable retirement for the elderly while creating new economic opportunities for young people. As noted above, such a scenario is not fanciful, given Japan’s engineering skills and highly educated work force. Moreover, the Japanese have compiled a “reasonably good track record” 10 in managing the social problems created by their rapidly aging population. Another reason for optimism is their strong communitarian ethic and capacity for teamwork, which was much on display during the 3/11 crisis. Perhaps most importantly, change and adaptation have been Japanese specialties for the past 160 years, and there is no compelling reason to believe that they have lost this flair. Japan could thus again become a model for America, which faces similar, though less serious demographic and economic challenges. But even if it does not, it is a safe bet that Americans’ perennial fascination with the art and culture of the “Old Japan”—flower arranging, the tea ceremony, ceramics, Zen Buddhism, martial arts, and the like—will continue. The venerable image of the Japanese as a highly cultured people with extraordinary aesthetic sensibilities will survive. So, too, may the more recent image of the Japanese as pacesetters in “techno and pop culture innovation.” But this will depend on whether Japan’s youth-oriented pop culture retains its vibrancy and creativity in an era when there are far fewer young people to sustain it. Other traditional stereotypes of the Japanese are almost certain to disappear, along with the sword-wielding killers of the 1980s. The dainty, demure,

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and self-sacrificing women celebrated by American writers from Lafcadio Hearn to James Michener are a case in point. Any connection they may have had to reality was severed by the “liberation” of Japanese women beginning in the 1980s. More and more of them have elected to postpone marriage or forgo it altogether in favor of an independent lifestyle. The Madame Butterfly of old has morphed into what a Japanese psychology professor describes as “women who are aggressive, desire gratification of their own, know their own minds, and can express themselves clearly.” 11 The “Modern Girl” of the 1920s has returned with a vengeance. Commodore Perry characterized the Japanese as “a people of forms and ceremonies.” From his time to ours, no American idea about the Japanese has been more tenaciously held. As we have seen, it has generated a wide variety or reactions and stereotypes. Some judged the Japanese to be paragons of good manners and civility. Others considered them “inscrutable,” comical, or deceitful. Still others concluded that they were the polar opposites of Americans. They were thus considered “abnormal,” contradictory, childlike, and lacking in individuality. Whether charming or alarming, the Japanese have always seemed a breed apart. I would like to think that the “alienness” of the Japanese will gradually dissipate in the years ahead, and that Americans will come to view them as real people rather than caricatures. This may already be occurring. The “Asianization of America” is redefining what it means to be an American and reducing the cultural distance between Americans and Asians, including Japanese. 12 The incorporation of bits and pieces of Japanese culture into the mainstream of American life, from anime to sushi, will no doubt facilitate this trend. Over time, it will thus become increasingly difficult to exoticize the Japanese. They may be less interesting, but they will be more “normal.” It is difficult to be optimistic, however, that Americans will shed their tendency to see the Japanese as an odd and puzzling people. The language barrier, geographical distance, and deeply ingrained Japanese cultural exclusivity will inhibit this. American images of the Japanese in 2050 may turn out to be surprisingly familiar in some ways. NOTES 1. MacMillan, Dangerous Games, 141. 2. Brad Glosserman, “Fade to Gray,” in Reimagining Japan, McKinsey and Co., 88–90. 3. Nicholas Eberstadt, "Demography and Japan’s Future,” in Reimagining Japan, McKinsey and Co., 83–84. 4. Glosserman, “Fade to Gray,” 89. 5. Eberstadt, “Demography and Japan’s Future,” 86. 6. Nathan Gardeis, “The Silver Lining of Japan’s Earthquake,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 14, 2011.

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7. Eberstadt, “Demography and Japan’s Future,” 87. 8. Dower, Japan in War and Peace, 319–20. 9. Madsen and Samuels, “Japan LLP,” 10. 10. Kingston, Contemporary Japan, 62. 11. Quoted in Karen Ma, The Modern Madame Butterfly: Fantasy and Reality in Japanese Cross-Cultural Relationships (Tokyo and Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1996), 34. 12. Warren I. Cohen, The Asian American Century (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 2002), 127.

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Index

Abe, Shinzo, 154, 157 Acheson, Dean, 94, 108 Adams, Henry, 32, 33, 34 Akihito, Emperor, 148 anime. See Japan, pop culture Arthritic Japan, 141 Baker, James, 129 Bataan Death March. See Pacific War, Japanese atrocities Beard, Miriam, 55 Behind the Rising Sun, 82. See also Pacific War, Hollywood war films Benedict, Ruth, 87. See also Pacific War, Japanese national character studies Bisson, T. A., 103 Black Rain, 131 Blade Runner, 131 “Britain of the Far East,” 7, 135, 145, 148, 161. See also U.S.–Japan Alliance, post-Cold War strengthening of Buchanan, James, 18 Busch, Noel, 102 Bush, George H. W., 129, 136, 154, 157 Bush, George W., 7, 135, 145, 161 Bushido: The Soul of Japan, 41 Busk, Mary, 15–16 Bywater, Hector, 59 Capra, Frank, 84

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 87–88, 117 Clavell, James, 130–131 Clinton, Bill, 137, 138, 139, 140 “comfort women,” 144, 154 developmental state, 127. See also Japan, Japan Inc.; Johnson, Chalmers Dewey, John, 47–48, 55, 56 DeWitt, John, 80–81. See also Japanese Americans, internment during World War II Dower, John W., 5 Dulles, John Foster, 109, 110, 113 Eddy, Sherwood, 54 Eisenhower, Dwight, 110, 111 Fallen Sun, 102. See also Occupation of Japan, critiques of Fenollosa, Ernest, 31 Fillmore, Millard, 11, 13; Fillmore’s Letter to Commodore Perry, 17 Futenma Marine Air Station, 138, 145, 155, 157. See also U.S.–Japan Alliance, U.S. bases Gentlemen’s Agreement, 44, 52, 53. See also Japanese Americans, immigrants; Roosevelt, Theodore Grant, Ulysses, 30 171

172

Index

Green, Michael, 3, 140, 142 Grew, Joseph, 94, 103 Griffis, William Elliot, 30, 31, 32, 58 Guadalcanal Diary, 82 Gulf Crisis (1990–1991), 135–136. See also U.S.–Japan Alliance, post-Cold War fragility of Gulick, Sydney, 50 Hall, Francis, 20 Halsey, William “Bull,” 82 Harding, Warren, 50 Harris, Townsend, 18, 22 Harris Treaty, 18 Hashimoto, Ryutaro, 138, 139 Hatoyama, Yukio, 152, 153, 154, 154–155 Hearn, Lafcadio, 34, 56, 163 Hearst press, 40, 66 Hell in the Pacific, 117 Hersey, John, 100 Hirohito, Emperor, 54, 71, 79, 80, 86, 87, 93–94, 94, 98, 100 Hoover, Herbert, 65 Hull, Cordell, 70, 73, 74 international expositions, 31. See also Japan, traditional arts and crafts Japan: Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), 147, 152–153, 157; demographic future of, 7, 150, 156, 159–160; “economic miracle,” 6, 107, 113–114, 122; fascism in, 71; geisha, 35, 58, 115, 131, 143–144; heisei generation, 148; Imperial army, 41, 41–42, 60, 67, 68, 71, 79, 86, 87; imperialism, 4, 5, 37, 37–39, 46, 50, 51, 63, 63–64, 65, 68; “Japan Inc.,” 2, 6, 7, 121, 123–124, 125, 127, 129, 135, 141, 142, 144, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 157; Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 111, 127, 128, 139, 152, 157; “lost decade,” 7, 135, 141, 149–150; “lost generation,” 147, 150–152, 156; March 11, 2011 triple disaster, 7, 147, 155–156; Meiji Emperor, 25–26, 27, 28, 54; Meiji Restoration, 20, 25, 26, 29; Meiji modernization, 26–28, 29, 32–33; as “Oriental despotism,” 11, 15–16;

pacifism, 5, 7, 98, 104, 107, 108, 109, 137, 139, 147–148; pop culture, 7, 135, 142–143, 162; samurai, 15, 16, 17, 19–20, 21, 27, 41, 115, 126, 143; SelfDefense Force (SDF), 109, 110, 130, 135, 139, 145, 156; “Taisho democracy,” 47, 54–55, 94; Tokugawa Japan, 16–17; traditional arts and crafts, 4, 6, 101, 107, 115, 162; women, 4, 21, 25, 34, 56, 58, 72, 100, 107, 115, 162; Zen Buddhism, 115 Japan as Number One, 126 “Japan Passing,” 139 Japan’s Reluctant Realism, 140 Japan Rising, 147–148 Japan: The Story of a Nation, 117 Japanese Americans: discrimination against, 4, 37, 42, 43, 53; exclusion movement in California, 43, 52–53; internment during World War II, 5, 80–81; Japanese immigrants, 42, 44, 52; Japantowns, 42, 53; “picture brides,” 44, 52; restitution and apology to, 132. See also Yellow Peril; Gentlemen’s Agreement Japanese Exclusion Act (1924), 4, 49, 52–53 “Japonisme,” 31 Johnson, Chalmers, 127, 129 Johnson, Louis, 108 Johnson, Lyndon, 112 Kahn, Herman, 114 Kaifu, Toshiki, 135, 136 Kanagawa, Treaty of, 18 Karate Kid, 132 Kennan, George, 103, 108 Kennedy, John F., 112 Kennedy, Robert, 112 Kishi, Nobusuke, 111 Kissinger, Henry, 121, 122 Koizumi, Junichiro, 144–145 Kurosawa, Akira, 115 LaBarre, Weston, 86–87 La Farge, John, 31, 32 Lea, Homer, 42 Letters from Iwo Jima, 144 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 47, 51, 53

Index

173

Lost in Translation, 143, 161 Lowell, Percival, 32–33, 33, 97, 102 Lustbader, Eric Van, 131

103–104 Open Door policy, 45, 46, 51, 65 Ouchi, William, 126

MacArthur, Douglas, 5, 74, 77–78, 93, 95–97, 97, 100, 102, 103–104, 107. See also Pacific War; Occupation of Japan Madame Butterfly, 4, 7, 34, 58, 115, 144, 162 The Magnificent Seven, 116 manga. See Japan, pop culture Manchurian Crisis (1931–1932), 63–65, 66. See also Japan, imperialism manifest destiny, 11, 12–13, 19 Mansfield, Mike, 1 Marquand, John, 67, 116 McClatchy, Valentine, 47 McGray, Douglas, 142 Melville, Herman, 11 Memoirs of a Geisha, 144 Michener, James, 115, 117, 163 The Mikado, 33, 161 The Mikado’s Empire, 30 Mr. Moto, 67, 116 Mr. Togo: Maid of All Work, 42–43, 161 MITI and the Japanese Miracle, 127 “modern girl,” 4, 56, 67, 162. See also Japan, women modernization theory, 107, 118, 161 Morse, Edward, 31

Pacific War, 2, 3, 5, 47, 77, 117; American counteroffensive, 78; atomic bombing of Japan, 80, 93; banzai charges, 82, 85; Hollywood war movies and, 82; Japanese atrocities during, 77, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87; Japanese national character studies, 77, 85, 86–87, 87; Japanese POWs, 86, 87; Japanese surrender, 80, 87; kamikazes, 79, 84; last battles of, 79; Pearl Harbor attack, 5, 74, 77, 80 Perry, Matthew, 3, 7, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17–18, 22, 27, 30, 163 Pierce, Franklin, 18 Plaza Accord, 129 Preble, George, 21 “The Prussia of the Far East,” 46–48 Pyle, Kenneth, 147–149

Nakasone, Yasuhiro, 130 Nanking Massacre. See Rape of Nanking Nanking, 144 NEETs. See Japan, “lost generation” Nevins, Allan, 77 Nitobe, Inazo, 41, 143 Nixon, Richard, 121–122 “Nixon Shocks,” 121–123 Nye Initiative, 138 Obama, Barack, 152, 155, 156 Occupation of Japan, 2, 5, 93, 110, 114, 161; Allied role in, 95; critiques of, 102–103; ending, 107–109; fraternization during, 5, 99, 100, 101; “MacArthur Constitution,” 98, 109, 136; planning for, 94; reforms under, 98–99; “reverse course” during,

Rape of Nanking, 68, 68–70, 138, 144. See also Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945); Japan, Imperial army Reagan, Ronald, 129, 130 Reischauer, Edwin, 112–113, 117–118 revisionists, 71, 129, 131, 140, 141 Rising Sun, 131, 132, 161 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 5, 66, 73, 74, 81, 95 Roosevelt, Theodore, 39, 41, 44–45 Russo–Japanese War (1904–1905), 4, 37, 39–40, 40, 41 “samurai in suits,” 127, 131 Sato, Eisaku, 122 Sayonara, 115, 117. See also Japan, women; Madame Butterfly Seed of the Sun, 43, 131 Seward, William, 21, 33 Shogun, 130 Shultz, George, 129 Sino–Japanese War (1894–1895), 28, 38 Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945), 67–68, 70 Sledge, E. B., 84 The Soul of the Far East, 32 Stimson, Henry, 52, 65–66, 67, 73, 81, 88

174

Index

Stimson Doctrine, 65, 66 Stoddard, Lothrop, 52 “Switzerland of the Pacific,” 108 Taft, William Howard, 45 Tokyo Sonata, 151 Tripartite Pact, 5, 63, 70, 72 Truman, Harry, 80, 95, 96, 108 Twain, Mark, 22, 159 Twenty-One Demands, 46 unequal treaties, 12, 18, 27, 110 U.S.–Japan Alliance, 2, 6, 7, 107, 110, 122, 130, 135, 148, 154, 161; as a “global alliance,” 145, 157; Mutual Security Treaty and, 107, 109, 110; post-Cold War fragility of, 7, 135, 136, 136–137; post-Cold War strengthening of, 7, 138, 144–145, 154; Security Treaty crisis (1960), 111–112; U.S. bases and, 110,

138, 149, 156 U.S.–Japan trade conflict, 121, 122, 124–125, 129 Utley, Freda, 74 The Valor of Ignorance, 42 Veblen, Thorstein, 55 Vining, Elizabeth Gray, 100 Vogel, Ezra, 126, 131 Washington Naval Conference (1921–1922), 49, 50–51, 64, 66 Webster, Daniel, 13 White, Theodore, 127–128 Whitman, Walt, 19 Wilson, Woodrow, 45, 46 Yellow Peril, 3, 4, 6, 37, 40–41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 59, 67, 77, 85, 115, 121, 160 Yoshida, Shigeru, 108–109, 109, 110

About the Author

John H. Miller is a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, who served in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Canada. Following his retirement from the Foreign Service, he taught at the Asia–Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu, and was Asia Chair at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Virginia. He holds a PhD in Japanese history from Princeton University, and is the author of Modern East Asia: An Introductory History (2007).

175