on Dower's Embracing Defeat

Democracy Best Served – On a Couple Chapters of Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower

Reading what Dower has to say about military tribunals in Embracing Defeat helps to underscore similar traps in thinking made by makers of U.S. policy elsewhere while at the same time revealing leaps in logic made by MacArthur’s staff that helped, perhaps, the United States to gain the outcomes it wanted in Japan. Nowhere is there an attempt to create a high modernist, Le Corbusier-like vision of Japan, rather the goal is instead to create a stable U.S. partner that will support U.S. policy in the Pacific.

The idea of what might be able to happen in Japan is no less radical however than what neo-conservatives imagined for Iraq: a complete transformation of government and, to a certain extent, a transformation of how the people there are expected to think about concepts like freedom and government. After all, what we claim to have wanted Iraq to become, a stable democracy and friend to U.S. interests in a strategic region of the world is similar to what we seem to have worked for in Japan.

In the tribunal for Japanese war crimes, the United States determined ahead of time what it was that was going to be given as information and judgment, both to the participants and to the observers. Tojo was given an idea of himself to convey in the court in order to spare his own vision of the emperor’s position in the new Japan as well as to satisfy his idea of duty. Thus the United States co-opted Tojo’s pain and sense of loss at the conclusion of the war and used it as a way of to define what Japan had been and what it was going to be there at the tribunals. When he did stray from the path, Dower reports on page 325, it was the American-led prosecuting team that made sure Tojo connected his statements back to the American thread of what the war was. In the end, the Americans completely controlled what was going to be said. On the same day the New York Times reported Hirohito “denied” his divinity (1 January 1946), it also reported that “History Teaching in Japan [is] Brought Under Allied Ban,” and that “the suspension of teaching of Japanese history, geography and morals by Japanese schools was ordered…by Allied Headquarters.” The past written in terms approved by the Americans would not only dictate to the former military of Japan what he was to say, it would dictate to every Japanese school child what history was in the attempt to make a Japan a place where “democracy [was] best served” (327). Tribunals were another place, a key place, where democracy would have to best served. Everywhere there are U.S. generals in Dower’s study, there lurks underneath their words, and sometimes directly in their words, a sense that the eventual enemy is much more important than the past enemy, and the eventual enemy is communism.

Any deviation from the U.S. program put all our interests in danger. Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, a close assistant to General MacArthur wrote privately in a letter to a Japanese official in the imperial court that the “’frequent mention of the [Emperor’s] [potential] abdication in the American press [is alarming].’ Such an act, he declared, ‘would be a victory for all Communists and especially the Russians who hold it is naïve to claim that Japan can be democratized so long as the Emperor remains on the throne’” (p. 328). Much like in today’s climate, policy-makers agonized over every report and every incident, seeing in them the seeds of defeat for their programs and their aims and the potential ascendancy of a great and terrible authoritarian monster. The word “communism”, like the word “terrorism” tended to put a damper on debate and to fix the policy makers were tunnel vision.

In the Japanese trials, the desires of the United States to fix a certain policy for Japan melded with the accuseds’s desires to fix a certain idea of the Emperor’s character so that their vision of part of Japan’s future might remain intact, the Americans were able to use this to suit their purposes in creating an idea for Japan that supported their program for Japan. In Iraq the tribunals have been just as manipulated but not nearly as passive as the United States would have liked to see. Sure every time another member of the Bush White House is found to be officially incompetent, corrupt or both, we quickly hear about a confession or another finding of the tribunals nominatively under Iraqi government control, an idea of punishment is meted out but it has no coherence, no seeming authority because it has been so patchwork and because the voices of those in the courts is so discordant and antithetical to the U.S. message. There is no compatibility in visions for the Iraqi future or in ideas about what certain leaders are to marry with a mutually compatible statement. The resulting noise is discordant and reveals rifts at all levels of Iraqi planning.

The ultimate end of U.S. policy in Japan appears, from an outsider and definitely no expert on Japanese post-War history (I’m speaking of myself here), to have been successful. It is perhaps useful here though to mention a connection I saw drawn between Yukio Mishima and Arab suicide bombers in the February, 2004 issue of The Believer. Mishima had been celebrated by the Japan Romantic School writers during World War II, and this was a school that ardently supported the idea of the Emperor as divinity and swore allegiance to that divinity and the nationalism it inspired in them; after the war Mishima turned his back on them and appeared to have completely modernized; his novels seem to fit into the more open sexuality of the Kasutori culture, though it also transcended it. However at the end of his life, he turned his back on the previous quarter century of his life, and in front of a collection of troops and a captured general, committed suicide for his Emperor. One wonders, even at its most successful, just how successful outside cultures can be in re-shaping the interior lives of other cultures? It is in that interior re-shaping, ultimately, that the United States has most interested in sculpting in its foreign adventures. In Iraq that has meant blood and heartache. In Japan, it led to some moral confusion, and was ultimately adapted by the Japanese to their own advantages and uses.