Read Online Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering by John W. Dower - Free Book Online

and their own obligation to protect or at least humor them. Similarly, dominant social and political classes commonly affirm their privileged status and inherent right to rule by dismissing the masses as irrational, irresponsible, and immature. In its softer guise, the elite sense of noblesse oblige masks class inequalities with a paradigm of parent-to-child obligations.
    The resonances of this broader conceptual world also help clarify how Japan’s attack on the West revitalized other fantasies. It is characteristic of the paranoia of self-designated master groups that even while dismissing others as inferior and “less developed,” they attribute special powers to them. The lower classes may be immature to the elites, but they also are seen as possessing a fearsome potential for violence. Women may be irrational in male eyes, but they also are said to have special intuitive powers and the Jezebel potential of becoming castrators. Where Western perceptions of the Japanese and Asians in general are concerned, there is in fact a provocative congruence between the female and Oriental mystiques as expressed by white male elites. Thus, even in the war years, the “femininity” of Japanese culture was indirectly if not directly emphasized. Traits attributed to the Japanese often were almost identical to those assigned to women in general: childishness, irrationality, emotional instability, and “hysteria”—and also intuition, a sixth sense, and a talent for nondiscursive communication. It even was said that the Japanese, like women generally, possessed an exceptional capacity to endure suffering. Put negatively, these latter intuitive and emotional qualities could be equated with nonrationality and simply integrated into the argument of arrested development.Positively framed, they became suprarational powers—impossible to explain, but all the more alarming to contemplate.
    Because nothing in the “rational” mind-set of Western leaders prepared them for either the audacity and skill of Japan’s attack or the debacle of British, Dutch, and American capitulations to numerically inferior Japanese forces that followed in Southeast Asia, it was natural to look to nonrational explanations. Scapegoating helped obfuscate the situation—the United States commanders at Pearl Harbor were cashiered, and the West Coast Japanese Americans were locked up—but this was not enough. It also became useful to think of the Japanese as supermen. Graphic artists now drew the Japanese as giants on the horizon. Rhetorically, the new image usually emerged in a more serpentine or backhanded fashion. Thus the United States print media from 1941 to the end of the war featured a veritable “between the lines” subgenre debunking the new myth of the supermen. Battle A proved they could be beaten at sea, battle B that they could be beaten in the jungle, battle C that they were not unbeatable at night fighting, battle D that the myth of the “invincibility of the Zero” was finally being destroyed. The New York Times Magazine took it upon itself to address the issue head-on with a feature article titled “Japanese Superman: That Too Is a Fallacy.” Admiral William Halsey, the most blatantly racist officer in the United States high command, later claimed that he deliberately belittled the Japanese as “monkeymen” and the like in order to discredit “the new myth of Japanese invincibility” and boost the morale of his men.
    The myth of the superman was never completely dispelled. To the end of the war—even after most of the Japanese navy and merchant marine had been sunk; after Japanese soldiers in the field, cut off from support, had begun starving to death and were being killed by the tens and hundreds of thousands; after the urban centers of the home islands had come under regular bombardment—Allied planners continued to overestimate the will and capacity