From Wartime Enemy to Cold War Ally

Yes, Friday the 13th laziness on your bloggy menu today! Here's my survey of shifts in American representations of Japan between 1941 and 1973, delivered last Saturday at the JASF.

Last week, I focused on John Dower’s analysis of the use of animal imagery in American war propaganda to dehumanize Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War. This week, I want to interweave his emphasis with that of University of California at Riverside Asian American Studies scholar Traise Yamamoto, who in Masking Selves, Making Subjects demonstrates how Japanese people and culture were infantilized and feminized in American popular culture over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Combining Dower’s and Yamamoto’s focuses allows me to illustrate how sharply American images of Japan shifted over the course of the 1940s and 1950s and to suggest what’s at stake in that transformation.

Consider this series of cartoons from the beginning, middle, and end of the Pacific War. Throughout, Japanese soldiers are represented as monkeys and apes, but note how the imagery, style, connotations, associations, and allusions shift from treacherous to rampaging to cute. Now examine the gender politics of these wartime images of Japanese soldiers and female victims and how they contrast with these Occupation-era images of Japanese women and American military personnel. Taken together, these images provide an index of changing American representational strategies toward Japan. Indeed, they might even be said to construct for their American audiences a series of versions of Japan: from pesky and annoying enemy, to dangerous and powerful enemy, to savage and bestial enemy, to welcoming and inviting subjects in a demilitarized society. The kimonos the Japanese women wear are particularly significant; they not only allude to pre-modern Japan, but also evoke the “Madame Butterfly” image that many feminist scholars have shown to be so influential on Western perceptions of Japan. Indeed, whether the metaphor is of husband and wife, parent and child, or teacher and student, the underlying story these images tell is of the power relations between the U.S. and Japan during the years of the Pacific War and Occupation.

Such shifts were even more prevalent and overt in materials prepared for those Americans being sent to defeat, occupy, and reconstruct Japan in the mid-1940s. In the 1945 propaganda efforts of On to Tokyo and Know Your Enemy--Japan, Japanese barbarism and lack of individuality were emphasized, according to the established wartime script, yet just a few months after they were released, images of women and children flooded the screen in Our Job in Japan just as its narrative shifted from a critique of Imperial Japan to the prospects of a thoroughly reconstructed, demilitarized, and democratized society. We should pay equal attention to the continuities between this Occupation training film and practically concurrent war-time propaganda as to their disjunctures, for the tension between them signals the divisions among those planning the Occupation of Japan.

As John Dower documents in Embracing Defeat, conflicts between the “Japan crowd” and the “China crowd” among U.S. foreign policy elites intensified as the tide of battle turned in America’s favor in the Pacific War. Soon after August 11, 1945, when Dean Acheson replaced Joseph Grew as undersecretary of state, it quickly became clear that the China crowd--associated with a desire for a more radical reconstruction of Japan than the more conservative reformists among the Japan crowd were advocating for--had won this intellectual, political, and institutional debate. Thus, although the noted Japanologists of the 1940s worked together to craft a U.S. Office of War Information report in December 1944, they were almost completely excluded from General MacArthur’s administration during the Occupation.

In retrospect, however, the distance between both crowds seems rather small. Both urged General MacArthur to rule indirectly through the Emperor, his advisors, and the Japanese state bureaucracy, in order to capitalize on the loyalty of the citizenry to familiar and traditional authority figures. Both were blind to the colonialist structures and implications of the Occupation, particularly in Okinawa. Both saw Japan primarily through the lens of American histories and interests.

And those interests would shift dramatically by the late 1940s, with serious implications for Japan, Asia, and the world. The “reverse course” in the American Occupation of Japan has been covered by a host of distinguished historians; the shifts from purging militarists to purging Communists, from demilitarizing to remilitarizing Japan, and from political to economic reform are too large and complex to cover here. But a quick look at two non-fictional films that focus on the U.S.’s role in East Asia during World War II, the first from 1944 and the second from 1953, can serve to illustrate how dramatically the “home front” image of Japan changed from World War II to the Cold War. The Battle of China, one of the final films in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight war propaganda series, emphasizes the heroism of the Chinese resistance to Japanese imperialism and war atrocities at a time when U.S. war planners thought the road to defeating Imperial Japan ran through China and geopolitical strategists hoped that supporting Chinese nationalist forces against Chinese communists and Japanese imperialists would lead to post-war benefits for the U.S. By contrast, the celebrated Victory at Sea television documentary series, produced after the communists won and the U.S. “lost” China--after, that is, Japan had shifted from wartime enemy to Cold War ally--surveys the exact same history, but this time with an emphasis on the Anglo-American joint effort with their colonized subjects in India and Southeast Asia to free China from Japanese imperialism. This is a story tailored to the Third World in the mid-1950s, implying that American leadership can protect them from Soviet or Chinese domination; the earlier pro-China, anti-Japan narrative is almost completely submerged in this effort to make the East Asian and Southeast Asian theaters in World War II relevant to the needs of the Cold War U.S. in the final months of the Korean War.

Hollywood, too, followed suit during the 1950s, promoting the U.S.-Japanese alliance in films whose plots hinged on American military personnel’s relationships with Japanese women. In sharp contrast to U.S. W.W. II movies like The Purple Heart (1944), which make violent and brutal acts of male Japanese soldiers against U.S. POWs representative of Japan itself, the relationships between male American soldiers and female Japanese civilians in movies such as Japanese War Bride (1952), Teahouse of the August Moon (1956), and Sayonara (1957) allegorized the new relationships between their respective countries. As these movies were produced just as and after new American immigration laws were dramatically transforming policies established in the nativist 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, they represent and enact the continuing stereotyping as well as challenges to racial prejudice happening in the United States during the 1950s around citizenship rights for descendants of Asian immigrants and civil rights for African Americans. Some aspects of American power in Japan and attitudes toward Asians are romanticized and naturalized in these films, but others are questioned and criticized. The love plot and its vicissitudes in each of these 1950s films makes possible a reeducation of sorts of American movie-going audiences. Their domestication of U.S.-Japan relations brought the Cold War home, helping to normalize the drastic shifts in U.S. policy toward Japan over the previous two decades.

Thus, even as some U.S. officials began calling for the rapid remilitarization of Japan, even as Japan became a crucial workshop during the Korean War, even as the American reconstruction effort shifted from the Occupation to a kind of East Asian Marshall Plan, even, that is, as Japan became the hub of American diplomatic, military, and economic efforts to contain Soviet and Chinese communism, the representative images of Japan in American popular culture came to be modernized geisha figures. Even as Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, Nanking and Nagasaki, and the Tokyo Tribunals and Article 9 came to symbolize the poles and polarities of American representations of and responses to Japan, so, too, did the samurai and the geisha. In part due to the emphasis and efforts of state and civil society within Japan and in part due to American preoccupation with communist enemies in the Soviet Union, China, Korea, and Vietnam during the 1950s through early 1970s, however, the feminized, receptive image of Japan seemed to have eclipsed the aggressive, militarist image of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

That's More Like It! Back to Lazy Blogging, JASF Edition

Time to set the table! What follows is the opening of a talk I gave last Saturday at the Japan-America Society of Fukuoka. For this coming Saturday's talk, which is FINALLY done, check out Mostly Harmless. Given how busy I am in our final month or so in Japan (on this stay, that is!), I'm going to subject my "readers" to more of this talk over the next few days. Not the best of meals, but what can you do?

This talk, “The End of the American Century in Japan? 1941-1995,” picks up where last week’s “From Manifest Destiny to War in the Pacific, 1846-1945” left off. In that talk, I gave a very rough sketch of the changing images of Japan in American eyes, from an exotic and backward culture in the mid-nineteenth century to a modernizing, industrializing rising power at the turn into the twentieth century, to a militarist, imperialist enemy by the middle of that century. I emphasized that such shifts should be understood in the context of American experiences with and representations of other non-U.S. cultures and countries and argued that they are often more revealing of American mindsets than Japanese realities. By showing how certain images and styles of representation get cut and pasted from one group to another or get recycled from one time period to another, I tried to suggest how complex and difficult it can be to understand and analyze them.

Implicit in my talk were the following questions. What is the relation between image and reality? Between attitude and action? How, for instance, did Commodore Matthew Perry’s studies of European writings on Japanese culture and society as he was preparing to lead his first expedition to Japan, along with his experiences fighting Mexicans and Indians in the Mexican War of 1846-1848, influence his strategies and tactics as a negotiator with bakufu representatives? In what ways may Washington war planners, all the way up to President Harry Truman, have been influenced by American war propaganda emphasizing the brutal savagery of the Japanese military and the fanatical loyalty of the Japanese citizenry, particularly in the spring and summer of 1945?

These questions, of course, raise larger and even more difficult ones. To what extent can subjective human beings limited to partial perspectives understand each other objectively? Indeed, is such objectivity possible or desirable? This is not only a question of knowledge, understanding, and truth; it is also a question of how to understand the nature of reality. If we are tempted to argue that Americans often and perhaps even consistently mischaracterized Japan between 1846 and 1945, by what standard do we judge their characterizations to be mistaken? If even Japanese self-images of this time period do not escape the difficulties and complexities of aesthetic and political representation, where is such a standard to be found?

These issues in the relation between representation and reality, in turn, raise questions about how to characterize the first century of U.S.-Japanese relations. Was the Pacific War an inevitable conflict between two rising and expansionist powers with claims to and designs on the Pacific? Was it a blip in an otherwise amicable bilateral partnership? Was it a relatively arbitrary swing of a randomly seesawing relationship?

I’m going to return to these questions at the end of this talk. But first, by focusing on the shifts between 1941 and 1995 in American representations of Japan from wartime enemy to Cold War ally to economic rival, I’ll emphasize just how complex and difficult they are--and how much is at stake in them.

Somebody Tell Neil Gaiman

Thanks to the brilliant Bill Benzon, Gojira's telling Tie-Dye Hana Kuma onechan adventure stories over at Mostly Harmless. Reminds me of certain Sandman issues!

P.S.: Somebody (else?) tell me how to get real titles for my posts!

I have no idea why blogger isn't allowing me to enter titles to my posts here and at Mostly Harmless lately, but at least I don't have to decide between "What Does Flannery O'Connor Have to Do with Being a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer?" and "The Life You Change Might Be Your Own." In fact, I'm feeling confident enough about my last JASF lecture that in this quickie post I'll challenge my handful of readers to posit a connection between the above two title options and guess what I talked about last Thursday at the Kyushu Fulbright Alumni Association meeting. Hints in the tags. Well, one. Have fun. Back soon.

Born on the 4th of July...

...was one Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1804. Happy Birthday! I really wonder what you'd make of the state of the union.

[Update 7/9/07: and Ralph Luker didn't note it. For shame! But he did point us to this Joseph Nye piece earlier, so I take that back. By the way, I will return to CitizenSE blogging as soon as I finish my last talk. I have to deliver it Saturday and get it to the translator before then, so hopefully that will be sooner rather than later.]

Whoa! Japanese Defense Minister Resigns Over His A-Bomb Remarks

It turns out the exact same day I was giving my first talk on "Shifting American Images of Japan," Defense Minister and Nagasaki native Fumio Kyuma was in my tsuma's hometown sharing his own views on the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan--views close to the mainstream in the U.S., I would add, with the predictable result that Right Blogistan and the 101st Keyboarders are in Red Alert mode. Of course, in Japan, news of his views prompted a wave of highly critical editorials and other responses, leading him to first apologize for his remarks, then retract them, and later resign from his post.

In other news, President Bush shamelessly stands behind discredited Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and commuted Scooter Libby's sentence.

So far the most interesting analysis I've seen has been from Observing Japan. If you know of other interesting ones (even if you don't agree with them), please let me know. I'm sure I'll be getting questions about this during my talk this coming Saturday!

Let's Start July Off With a Bang: Militarization, Propaganda, and the War in the Pacific

OK, so here's the part of my JASF talk that my audience got most into. Too bad I ran out of time. Ah well, gave me material for the opening of the next talk.

Militarization, Propaganda, and the War in the Pacific
Having emphasized in the prior two sections of this talk the transnational, multiethnic influences on American representations of mid-nineteenth-century Japan and the ways in which American reexaminations of Meiji Japan were at the same time meditations on the state of the U.S. as it entered the twentieth century, respectively, I want to bring these threads together in this final section on the Pacific War in the 1930s and 1940s. Even though Pearl Harbor and the U.S. war effort quickly crystallized American public opinion vehemently against Japan and most anyone of Japanese descent living in the United States during the war, it’s worth remarking how late--into the late 1930s among many elites and even later in popular culture--the Hearn-London debate from the first decade of the century continued to be played out. Two representative figures here are Robert Heinlein and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Heinlein represents the London school of Japanology. Updating for his contemporaries the media-induced Japanese invasion panic of 1907, London’s own writings on Japan and China, and the 1928-1929 Philip Nowland science fiction novel Armageddon 2419 (which inspired such comic strips featuring Asian villains as Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Flash Gordon), Heinlein’s 1941 science fiction novel Sixth Column posits an Asian invasion of the United States. This popularized image of a “yellow peril” threatening the United States was not just a prejudice of the masses; in 1924, in a culmination of some 40 years of anti-Asian state and federal legislation, the U.S. passed the most restrictive immigration law in its history, completely excluding emigration from Asia (except for the quasi-colony of the Philippines) and drastically reducing emigration from southern and eastern Europe. With the demographic threat contained by the Johnson-Reed Act, the “yellow peril” shifted toward suspicion of the rising regional power in Asia, Japan.

Du Bois, by contrast, is closer to Hearn. As a host of recent studies--most notably by Vijay Prashad, Marc Gallichio, and Bill Mullen--has unearthed, many prominent African-American intellectuals during the 1920s and 1930s looked favorably upon both Taisho and Showa Japan. W.E.B. Du Bois, who during this period developed an innovative socialist critique of racism and colonialism, applauded the Taisho regime’s efforts to codify anti-racism and anti-colonialism in the League of Nations. Given his tendency to excuse the occupation of Korea, perhaps it should come as no surprise that even as the Showa regime leaned more and more toward militarism and expansionism--and even after the staging of the Manchurian Incident--Du Bois continued to hold out hope that the anti-colonial would outweigh the imperial in Japanese international politics. Only after 1937 did Du Bois pin his anti-colonial hopes on China and shift to a critique of Japanese depradations against Chinese civilians.

For different reasons, many U.S elites began to peg American national interests with China over the course of the 1930s, as well. Between the popularity of Pearl Buck’s 1931 novel The Good Earth, outrage at Japanese crimes against humanity with the bombing of Shanghai and the rape of Nanking, and the hope that Chinese nationalists would see the United States as a possible ally in their fight against European and Japanese imperialism, opinion leaders in the U.S. began to quietly agitate for war against Japan.

After years of such efforts, the U.S. public was primed for a nearly unanimous shift in representations of Japan by the U.S. government, media, and entertainment industries following the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. And indeed, between documentaries like Frank Capra’s series Why We Fight, Hollywood movies like The Purple Heart that focused on Japanese atrocities against American POWs, comic books like Captain America, editorials and editorial cartoons in major newspapers and magazines, and even animated shorts featuring Bugs Bunny and Popeye, whatever debates over and ambivalence in the pre-war American images of Japan were washed away by a wave of anti-Japanese war propaganda.

John Dower has traced a fascinating shift in this propaganda over the course of the war. At first, as the Japanese military was winning battle after battle, American propagandists labored to convince the American public to take the threat from Japan seriously and to give up their stereotypes of the Japanese as small, harmless, incompetent, and even ludicrous when it came to fighting with modern weapons of war. Next, as the bloodiness of the battles and difficulty of seeing a way to victory became apparent, propagandists shifted to producing and questioning images of Japanese as super-soldiers. The sneaky, back-stabbing monkey images used to symbolize Japanese soldiers during the first year of the war were transformed into images of gigantic, powerful, rampaging apes, for instance. Then, as the tide of battle turned in the U.S.’s favor, images of Japanese as vermin to be exterminated began to appear, followed by a return to the mocking, parodic images from the first weeks of the war.

Christina Jarvis has updated and expanded Dower’s work to focus on how the image of war-time allies, such as Chinese and Filipino peoples, became rehabilitated during the war. During the 1930s, for instance, Filipino farm laborers in the American west were often bitterly discriminated against and attacked, as documented in Carlos Bulosan’s autobiography, America Is in the Heart. But once their compatriots were seen as the victims of Japanese imperialism in need of rescue by the U.S. military, attitudes toward diasporic Filipinos in the U.S. shifted, as well. The case of China is even more dramatic, as these scenes from The Battle of China, one of the last films in the Why We Fight series, demonstrate.

The work of Dower, Jarvis, and other historians of American war propaganda raise controversial questions that scholars of the aerial bombing campaigns and of the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki have also considered. What role did this propaganda play in the decision to bomb civilian populations and dozens of major Japanese cities? Dower analyzes how American propagandists manipulated Japanese war propaganda, turning positives from the Showa regime’s perspective into negatives for the American public’s consumption; this suggests a degree of self-consciousness about the construction and orchestration of images of and from Japan. But did American war planners come to believe their own propaganda that the Japanese people were fanatically devoted to the Emperor, who was a tool of military elites, and needed to be shocked and awed out of their self-destructive reverence? Or after pushing for years for total and unconditional surrender of the Japanese government and sowing the seeds of racialized hatred of the Japanese people, were they constrained by the public opinion they helped cultivate? Over the past several decades, historians have debated the strategic, military, technical, scientific aspects of the American air campaign and the timing of the use of atomic weaponry, considering the full range of alternatives open to U.S. war planners. What a study of the first century of American representations of Japan can bring to the foreground is the relative role played by wartime stereotype, myth, discourse, ideology, and propaganda in the framing and sifting of alternatives. Even if we accept arguments that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to hasten the war and save American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Kyushu--the traditional view--or instead that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were meant as object lessons for the Soviet Union--the most controversial rival interpretation--it still is worth emphasizing that in either case the lives of Japanese civilians must have been construed as acceptable losses (as indeed they must during the entire incendiary bombing campaign of Japanese cities). Surely war hates and racism played a significant role in this calculation, even if (or especially if) it was done unthinkingly.

What actually took so long was setting up and analyzing my examples. Next talk: more examples!