I don’t’ quite remember when I began to wonder how World War II would look like from the Japanese point of view. In Chinese history books and contemporary TV shows, Imperial Japan is often portrayed as an evil empire run by crazy generals and barbarous soldiers who were utterly incompetent on the battlefield but overtly obsessed with atrocities. Thanks to these concerted efforts, many Chinese believe that version of Japan had never died; it just lurks behind the scenes, ready to reemerge as soon as we let down our guard. Little wonder then, in Chinese social media, anti-Japanese sentiment is like a tinderbox ready to be ignited by any trivialities taken by Chinese internet users as an insult to their national pride. I remember the years when I feel the same way toward Japan as today’s “little pinks” (小粉红）. It is a strange feeling, an unhealthy blend of fear, anger, hatred, humiliation, and self-pity. At some point, I realize, like every story of this proportion, there must be another narrative and interpretation. The desire to read the story from the other side is what drew me to John Toland’s “The Rising Sun”. I was not disappointed.
In Toland’s telling, the expansion of Imperial Japan in East and Southeast Asia and her conflict with the West, culminated in the Pacific War, was rooted in the aspiration to free Asia from exploitation by the white man. The Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere was not only an imperial propaganda, but also an ideology many idealists in Japan genuinely subscribed to. However, as with almost any ideology, Toland noted, it “was taken over and exploited by realists”. Toland did not believe the Pacific war was inevitable. He documented vividly the hesitancy, strife and desperation of the Japanese government leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Indeed, even the most feverish militarists in Tokyo, including Hideki Tojo and Isoroku Yamamoto, were reluctant to go to war against the U.S., and certainly few thought they could win. Nevertheless, the war broke because “mutual misunderstanding, language difficulties”, as well as “Japanese opportunism and irrationality, and “American racial prejudice, distrust, ignorance, rigidity, and self-righteousness.” Toland was critical of the West, especially the British Empire, for its hypocrisy and racism, to which he no doubt assigns some blame for the outbreak of the Pacific War. “The West had two standards of freedom,” he writes, “one for itself and one for those east of Suez,… (being) convinced that Asians did not know what was best for themselves and world security”. He quoted Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, who wrote in diary,
“To the president (Roosevelt), China means four hundred million people who are going to count in the world of tomorrow, but Winston thinks only of the color of their skin.”
I am sure Churchill was not the only white man of his time who had a fetish for skin color and considered yellow peril a real threat.
Several things I learned from the book had made an indelible impression on me. The most noteworthy is perhaps Japanese soldiers’ unflinching loyalty to the emperor and indifference to sufferings and death. Brutality seems a way of life to a Japanese soldier. He understands to be captured by enemy is to disgrace not only himself but his comrades, family, and village. Therefore, his motto is “Always save the last round for yourself”, as demanded in his code of conduct. “Fight to the last man” is not just a show of resolution, but an order to be taken literally. If there is a difference between foot soldiers and generals in this regard, it is that generals usually prefer more honorable hara-kiri （切腹自杀）in the true spirit of bushido (武士道).
The last Kamikaze (神风) mission was in fact flown by the inventor of Kamikaze warfare, Admiral Matome Ugaki, who was the Chief-of-Staff for Yamamoto and the Commander-in-Chief of the 5th Air Fleet at the time of Japan’s surrender. General Kuribayashi – whose story was dramatized in a 2007 Hollywood movie entitled “the letters from Iwo Jima” – committed hara-kiri (according to one account) after leading a ferocious defense of Iwo Jima, which he knew was a suicide mission from the beginning. He was a man of letter and believed “America is the last country in the world Japan should fight”. On the tiny island of Carregidor in Philippines, Toland writes, “5,000 Japanese defenders fought for eleven days against an aggressive, overwhelming parachute and amphibious assault. All except 20 died.” They had no chance to make even a slight difference strategically, and it would not have mattered whether they had fought for eleven days or eleven hours. Indeed, eleven hours was how long 76,000 Philippine-American soldiers had fought before surrendering to a Japanese army of similar size three years earlier, on the same island. Even Japanese civilians frequently prioritize death over surrender. In the Battle of Saipan, “almost 22,000 Japanese civilians – two out of three – perished needlessly”. Many committed suicides, killing not just themselves but whole families, including children.
Why do Japanese seem to have such a high tolerance for mental and physical distress? How could they so readily give up their lives even when, to a bystander, their ultimate sacrifice appears to no purpose? These questions fascinated me. Toland did not address them head-on; but if you read between lines, he has offered two clues: faith and eschatology.
Like Jesus to Christians, the emperor is the Source of Faith to Japanese. The Imperial Way (kodo) defines Japanese morality based on the unconditional obligation to the emperor. Most Chinese would have a hard time to understand this relationship between Japanese people and the emperor. Through Chinese history, an emperor’s claim to the Mandate of Heaven was supposedly contingent on his being a just and able ruler. This well-meaning principle, of course, had produced endless bloody struggles for the throne, by ambitious men who thought, often prematurely, their turn to represent Heaven had arrived. In Japan, the emperor is worshiped as God, and his reign is eternal and irreplaceable. Without the emperor, all Japanese would be without country, without parents, homeless.
According to Toland, the Japanese eschatology is best expressed in the word sayonara – it is often translated as “good-bye” but its precise meaning is in fact “so be it” (就这样吧). To Japanese, life is ever shifting on an erratic path. Every moment could bring abrupt changes, even death. Thus, they say sayonara to everything every moment, which could be their last. Paradoxically, the acceptance of death at any moment gave the Japanese “the strength to face disaster stoically and a calm determination to let nothing discourage or disappoint”. They are always ready to take whatever life throws at them with a sayonara, so be it!
I imagine many Chinese readers would find Toland suspiciously lenient on the hideous war crimes perpetrated by Imperial Japan against other Asian countries, especially China. This is not surprising given the book’s perspective is decisively a Japanese one. Perhaps Toland’s wife, who was born and raised in Japan, further tilted the balance in Japan’s favor. In any case, I agree with Toland on one thing: there is no such thing as evil people, only evil ideology. Imperial Japanese is not the first people poisoned by a lethal combination of faith and extreme ideology. Nor would it be the last.