In a 2007 speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, President Bush sought to ridicule, as he had done throughout his time in office, all those “specialists” who supposedly belittled Iraq’s prospects for democracy. In doing so, he invoked the historical analogy that had been bandied about by the neoconservatives prior to the invasion, but had quickly fallen into desuetude thanks to the all-consuming insurgency: that of post-World War II Japan. Citing the observations of “one historian” who was referring to, in Bush’s words, “people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the blessings of a free society”, Bush quoted as follows: “Had these erstwhile experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution [in Japan] would have died of ridicule at an early stage”.
These words are from historian John Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. According to a 2003 interview with Dower in the NYT magazine, Dower’s book was “required reading in the Bush White House.” The only problem was that Dower himself was far from eager to have his work appropriated by the Bush administration, as evidenced by an essay he wrote on the eve of the invasion of Iraq for the Boston Review, entitled “A Warning from History: Don’t Expect Democracy in Iraq”. In the essay Dower plainly states, “the occupation of Japan offers no model whatsoever for any projected occupation of Iraq”. Apparently Dower, in his incarnation as citizen rather than historian, was consigned to the same fate as all those telling the president what he did not want to hear. After Bush’s 2007 speech to the VFW, Dower called the President’s reading of history “really perverse”. “The war supporters keep on doing this”, Dower said in an interview with MSNBC. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it [the analogy with postwar Japan] and it’s always more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world”.
Dower has been far from alone in rebuking American policymakers for their misreading of history. Since the inception of the War on Terror, American historians of Japan have been amongst the most trenchant critics of American policy in the Middle East. Along with Dower, one might cite the commentary of Chalmers Johnson and Herbert P. Bix in this respect. Bix, who won the Pulitzer Prize the year after Dower for his Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, compared Japanese behavior in Manchuria to American war crimes in Fallujah in a 2005 essay for Zmag. Though not a historian of Japan, the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a 2003 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, accused the Bush administration of “adopting a policy of ‘anticipatory self-defense’ that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor.” This was a remarkable statement coming from a court historian such as Schlesinger. Fortunately, the expansion of executive power during the Bush-Cheney years apparently extended to the right to determine which historical analogies shall be deemed germane, and which ones shall be discarded.
I was reminded of Bix’s observations about Fallujah, and the relevance of Japanese history for the American moment in Iraq in general, when I came across veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn’s article from July 2010 in the London Independent entitled “Toxic Legacy of US Assault on Fallujah ‘Worse Than Hiroshima’”. Cockburn’s article summarizes the findings of a British medical study called “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth-Sex Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009”, first published in the July 2010 International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Based on the work of a team of eleven researchers in Fallujah in 2010, the study found a four-fold increase in all cancers from 2005 through 2009, and, in children under fourteen, a twelve-fold increase in all cancers. For Leukemia, the study found a thirty eight-fold increase in the general population, and for breast cancer, ten-fold. In the report, the authors note similarities between the influx of certain types of cancers experienced in Fallujah and those witnessed after Hiroshima—though with rates affecting the population of Fallujah even more dramatically. The British study also noted a change in the same period in the ratio of male to female births, likewise observed in the affected Japanese after Hiroshima. Though the authors make no specific allegations, evidence clearly suggests the use of uranium during the infamous “struggle for Fallujah” in 2004, corroborating reports of American war crimes that emerged after that “battle”. The Army has already admitted to the use of white phosphorous in Fallujah, illegal under international law.
Coming as it did—two weeks before the forty-fifth anniversary of the dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima—one might have expected Cockburn’s article, and the medical study it was based on, to be of some interest. Yet to this day, not a single mention of this story can be been found in the American press. An article printed on the British Daily Mail website in March 2010 called “The Curse of Fallujah” similarly shows gruesome photographic evidence of what Cockburn’s article later describes. It is apparently of no real concern that the upshot of our campaign in Iraq is a baby being born with three heads.
This might be seen as another example of “the cunning of history”—that predictions of Iraq ending up like postwar Japan did, in one sense, turn out to be remarkably prescient. Now the same historian President Bush loved to use to reproach those “erstwhile experts” has written a book, grappling in full with the comparison between imperial and postwar Japan and the US during the War on Terror. John Dower’s Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq
can be seen as an in depth rejoinder to the Bush administrations superficial and cynical exploitation of his previous book, Embracing Defeat. The result is a work demonstrating that imperial America has much in common with then imperial Japan, while the American occupations of Iraq and postwar Japan are essentially night and day.
The usefulness of historical comparison depends, I think, on the skill of the historian, who must allow all historical events to retain their distinct qualities. Indeed, I would imagine that Dower would agree that the main purpose of comparative history is to elucidate differences. This is not to say that the similarities between imperial Japan and present-day America aren’t compelling—they certainly are, and Dower has much insight into what he calls the “ wars of choice and strategic imbecilities” that characterized both the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Iraq. Especially important is the section “The Emperor System and the Imperial Presidency”, where Dower reviews the drive to war in both countries and finds that “the Japanese and U.S. cases hardly amount to sharply contrasting examples of authoritarian rule versus democratic checks and balances”. An examination of ideology blurs the differences further, as both Japanese and U.S. elites exhibited a remarkable ability to rationalize acts of blatant aggression as self-defense, as well as missions delivering “civilization” to the respective regions of Asia and the Middle East. Dower could have devoted more discussion to the function of the media in each case; with regard to the U.S., he merely writes that the “mainstream media” acted as “a mouthpiece for executive policies presented in the name of national security.” This may be accurate, but the staggering conformity of the American media, on full display in the run-up to war in Iraq, warrants further analysis. In reality, the media has far more agency in democratic societies than the term “mouthpiece” might suggest; in the case of the U.S., one might argue that the media has actively contributed to the inertia of war by crucially misinforming the public. In any event, one must wonder how different our system is from authoritarian Japan in this respect when opinion-makers, while not under the constraints of formal censorship, nevertheless behave (to borrow the words of Harold Rosenberg) like a “herd of independent minds”.
Despite the many revealing analogies drawn between Pearl Harbor and Iraq, as well as 9/11 and Hiroshima, the crux of Dower’s book is the comparison between the occupations of Iraq and post-surrender Japan. Dower locates the many factors that allowed the occupation of Japan a chance for relative success, all absent in the case of Iraq. Chief among these is what Dower calls “ moral legitimacy”: the fact that the emperor endorsed the occupation, instructing the Japanese to “turn to civilian occupations as good and loyal subjects” and to “exert your full energies to in the task of postwar reconstruction”. The actual response of the Japanese did not neatly conform to Hirohito’s wishes; not all were ready to defer to those who had turned their cities into smoldering ash. But many Japanese, while ashamed of the surrender and the subsequent presence of occupying forces, were nonetheless eager to transcend the war experience; many also felt pride in the democratization of their country, regardless of whether it was occurring under foreign auspices. Indeed, whatever the conflicted attitudes towards the occupation, one might say that the Japanese at large were engaged by the transformation of their society. This is revealed by Sodei Rinjiro’s fascinating book Dear General MacArthur, a collection of letters from ordinary Japanese to Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan, during the occupation. Some of the letters are laudatory; others express concern about the behavior of American troops, specifically with regard to Japanese women. Some Japanese even reprimanded MacArthur for shielding Hirohito from war crimes prosecution—thereby perpetuating the myth of Hirohito as a puppet of the “militarists” and absolving him from bringing disgrace upon Japan—as well as retaining the institution of the emperor as a “symbol of the state” under Japan’s new constitution. Dower might have simply contrasted these nuanced and varied responses to MacArthur and American forces in Japan with the largely symbolic, and rather less subtle, response of the Iraqi people to latter-day American officials: the shoe thrown at the face of President Bush.
One should not get the impression, however, that in contrast to Iraq the occupation of Japan was in no way problematic. According to Dower, corruption was prevalent from the outset, as was looting. Interestingly, with regards to one criticism leveled at the Bush administration’s handling of Iraq—the argument that American planners were ignorant of Iraqi culture and society—Dower tells us that “the same criticism can be directed at most of the Americans later praised for promoting the reformist agenda in defeated Japan.” Of these Americans, “few spoke Japanese or knew anything about Japan beforehand”; and one finds that contempt amongst neoconservatives for State Department “Arabists” had a historical precedent in the dismissal of what one American colonel in Tokyo called “old Japan hands.” Dower also shows that some of the “seemingly draconian policies that proved disastrous in Iraq”, in particular “the elimination of the military establishment”, were also a feature of the occupation of Japan. And one cannot argue that the occupation of Japan was firmly grounded in respect for international law, as there was no legal precedent for the sweeping political changes brought about by American forces. Article 43 of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare, for example, stipulates that the occupant shall “respect, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country”. The Americans well understood that the drafting of a new constitution was in obvious violation of the Hague Convention; they therefore initially presented their draft as a revision, rather than a replacement, of the Meiji Constitution. In the end, however, MacArthur was given “unrestricted authority” over the drafting process; and one must acknowledge that what resulted is one of the most remarkably progressive constitutions in the world—a constitution that explicitly repudiates any form of discrimination, affirms the equality of the sexes, and—most importantly—renounces both war as well as “the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.”
Yet the drafting of Japan’s constitution, widely regarded as the greatest achievement of the occupation, soon turned out to be a pyrrhic victory for the Americans, especially in terms of Japan’s forced embrace of anti-militarism. Indeed, not too long after the ink was dried on the new constitution the U.S, now seeing Japan as a potential ally in the region, began to rethink Japan’s conversion to pacifism. The fight to preserve Article 9—the clause of Japan’s constitution renouncing war—became the purview of Japanese liberals, who to this day struggle against both American designs to see Japan become a “normal” (i.e. aggressive) state, as well as Japanese nationalists who view the constitution itself as an alien imposition. The Bush administration, for example, while singing the praises of America’s work in post-surrender Japan, was obviously more than happy to see Japan’s constitution undermined by sending troops to Iraq. When one considers the alacrity with which they set out to shred their own constitution, however, it is hardly surprising that the Bush administration would have encouraged others to do the same.
All this points to the tragic irony of our involvement with postwar Japan: that just as Japan was transforming, with our patronage, from authoritarianism to a constitutional monarchy, the U.S. itself was beginning to transform into a system not entirely unlike that of Japan before the war. The term “monarchy” is obviously not a precise characterization of our political system in general; the founders of the U.S. (save for Hamilton) were contemptuous of such a notion; and today one finds large swaths of the population who in no way respect the president, much less regard him the way the many Japanese viewed Hirohito—as sacred and inviolable. And we of course have elections, however far removed the process may be from the citizenry. And yet, as Garry Wills shows in his recent Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State, the label “monarch” is not an inaccurate characterization of the president when one specifically considers the powers that today reside in the executive branch. As Wills tells it, the aggrandizement of executive power that reached its apex under Bush can be traced not to the Reagan administration, when the cult of the “unitary executive” was first fashioned by legal “conservatives” hovering around the Federalist Society, but as far back to World War II and the origins of the Manhattan Project. According to Wills, the deceitfulness and obsessive secrecy that accompanied our development of nuclear weapons—so secret, in fact, that Truman literally had no clue of the Manhattan Project until he became president—was not merely an extraconstitutional wartime aberration, like Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, from which we would quickly recover. In reality, the secret bureaucracy precipitated by the Manhattan Project not only spawned the national security state created by Truman, but crucially provided a model for how to shroud its covert behavior from the citizenry. The evasion of the national security state from critical oversight continues today, though one can hardly expect otherwise from a legislative branch that is itself fully corrupted. Sordid tales about the CIA—which has always functioned, in Chalmers Johnson words, as the “presidents private army”—became more acceptable to air after the twin failures of 9/11 and Iraq (Tim Wiener’s Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA, for example, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008). But there has been no such reckoning with the mammoth national security state as a whole, almost all of which is unconstitutional and continues to bankrupt Americans. Nor is there acknowledgement of the blow that “bomb power” has dealt to our republic. As reporters such as Jane Mayer in The New Yorker and David Cole in the New York Review of Books have exposed, the legal “minds” singularly obsessed throughout their career with rationalizing a vision of the “unitary executive” were unsurprisingly the same ones—like David Addington and John Yoo—who proceeded, in the Bush administration, to justify torture, extraordinary rendition, abrogation of the Geneva Conventions, eavesdrop on Americans, and so on. Obama, as we know, has far from repudiated this legacy. Yet it is worth recalling that these criminal measures derive in large part from the president’s long-standing monopolistic control of nuclear weapons and codes. As Dick Cheney told Fox News in 2008, in the event that a president were to decide to “launch the kind of devastating attack the world has never seen”, then he “doesn’t have to check with anybody, he doesn’t have to call the Congress, he doesn’t have to check with the courts”. According to Wills, such a rationale actually encompasses a host of less catastrophic, though no less extreme, powers assumed by our “commander in chief”.
Apart from the destruction visited upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is thus worth considering how drive for the atomic bomb—which Truman called, after it was used on civilians, the “greatest thing in history”—has disfigured our democracy and invited further recourse to state terrorism, as well as inspired non-state actors in their targeting of civilians. Of course, many American intellectuals, such as Lewis Mumford and Reinhold Niebuhr, condemned our use of the bomb at the time; and the historical debate surrounding whether or not Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “worth it” continues to rage on today. Wills’ work adds a complex layer to our understanding of this question. Nevertheless, when one considers that today no comparable objections are raised about American conduct in war, and that crimes against civilians are still completely subordinated to the all-important issue of strategy or “success”— the “struggle for Fallujah” is a most obvious example here—we can safely say that the acrimonious debates about Hiroshima and Nagasaki have mostly reinforced our worst intellectual tendencies.
Finally, though Dower sees his book as a corrective to the “historical amnesia” of the Bush administration, and indeed America at large, the plain truth is that such a shift in consciousness is impossible in the absence of legal and moral accountability. In the Nuremberg and Tokyo trails, leaders were punished for the first time in history for perpetrating aggressive war, what Robert H. Jackson, chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, called “the supreme international crime”. And during the occupation, Japanese civilians were forced to reflect upon the ravages of unchecked militarism. American forces in Japan banned, in authoritarian fashion, any expressed glorification of Japanese supremacy, whether literal or artistic. The consequences of such an orchestrated repudiation of the past were staggering. Another recent book on Japan, Donald Keene’s So Lovely a Country Will Never Perish: Wartime Diaries of Japanese Writers, shows how quickly some of the more nationalistic and jingoistic elements within Japanese society—in this case, writers and intellectuals—came to revise their opinions of their country after defeat in World War II. Keene, arguably the foremost scholar of Japan in America today, was personally acquainted with some of the diarists, and he weaves his own commentary in and out of their writing. The beauty of Keene’s book lies not only in the diaries but also in his charitable and sympathetic insights into the men he knew. Keene is taken aback that men he understood to be essentially cosmopolitan—Japanese writers who shared his passion for French literature, for example—could have simultaneously expressed the most base and nationalistic sentiments during the war, declaring their desire for vengeance and the wish to see the “Anglo-Saxons” destroyed.
Whatever discomfort some of these diaries evidently caused Keene—a kind of pain radiates subtly at certain places in his book—one should not be too surprised at the sentiments expressed. American historians will look back on our recent cult of “liberal hawks” as basically the equivalent of these Japanese writers, whether it be Thomas Friedman, who advised that we “take out a very big stick” on Iraq, or Christopher Hitchens, who gleefully anticipated a “clash of civilizations” and bragged that we had bombed Afghanistan “out of the stone age”. A fair amount of worldly intelligence is no protection against the seductions of war and jingoism. Nor are these “liberal hawks” the more dignified for predictably shifting blame for the wars they provided ideological cover for—the same phenomenon occurred in Japan, where a narrow clique of militarists apparently bore all responsibility; here it is Rumsfeld, or the CIA, or whatever. In any event, the same journalists, like Jeffrey Goldberg, who led us into Iraq with spurious reporting about WMD and linkages between Saddam and al-Qaeda now churn out further propaganda rationalizing an attack against Iran, showing no compunction for indulging in such fraudulent alarmism in the past. Goldberg, of course, now claims that he is analyzing the likelihood of war rather than advocating for it. On Iraq, he admits to being wrong about WMD “like everyone else”; yet he will certainly not apologize for having “taken a stance against a genocidal fascist” like Saddam. Goldberg does, however, “regret the atrocious manner in which the Bush administration prosecuted the war, and its aftermath”.
The popular Japanese novelist Takami Jun, who kept a diary throughout the war years and after, noted a similar shameful lack of self-scrutiny amongst the pundit class, who presumed to modestly describe “realities” that they in fact critically enabled. Referring to Ozaki Shiro, director of the Bunpo (the Japanese Literature Patriotic Association), Takami had this to say after the war:
He himself feels not the slightest responsibility for the present situation, but blames other people—the military or whoever—for having done wrong…he speaks of the “present realities”, but does he suppose he bears no responsibility for creating them…was he not a convinced practitioner of keeping the masses culturally ignorant? Now he comes out with the charge that the military were mistaken, but at the time, was it not he who, protected by the military, used the borrowed authority of the tiger to perform the tricks of the fox?
In another diary entry, Takami writes, “When I think of it, the newspapers also bear responsibility for the defeat. One can’t blame only the controls. Writers and intellectuals are also responsible.” After a conversation with Takami, the reporter Sawahiraki Susumu responded, “I wonder if there is any feeling at the newspapers today that they owe the public an apology.” The writer Yamada Futaro—who Keene tells us “intensely desired a Japanese victory and refused to consider that the war might end with anything other than a Japanese victory”—came to believe after the war that “the past ten years have been an unprecedented period of shame in the history of the Japanese press”.
As Keene’s and other recent books demonstrate, Japanese history is rich with what historians sometimes call “a usable past”—though not in the way our elected officials like to imagine.
