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

“Westernizing,” the Japanese were painfully aware that they were still regarded as immature and unimaginative and unstable—good in the small things, as the saying went among the old Japan hands, and small in the great things.
    Thus Japanese racial thinking was riven by an ambivalence that had no clear counterpart in white supremacist thinking. Like the white Westerners, they assumed a hierarchical world; butunlike the Westerners, they lacked the unambiguous power that would enable them to place themselves unequivocally at the top of the racial hierarchy. Toward Europeans and Americans, and the science and civilization they exemplified, the national response was one of admiration as well as fear, mistrust, and hatred. Toward all others—that is, toward nonwhites including Asians other than themselves—their attitude was less complicated. By the twentieth century Japan’s success in resisting Western colonialism or neocolonialism and emerging as one of the so-called Great Powers had instilled among the Japanese an attitude toward weaker peoples and nations that was as arrogant and contemptuous as the racism of the Westerners. The Koreans and Chinese began to learn this in the 1890s and early 1900s; the peoples of Southeast Asia learned it quickly after December 7, 1941.
    For Japan, the crisis of identity came to a head in the 1930s and early 1940s, taking several dramatic forms. Behind the joy and fury of the initial attacks in 1941–42, and indeed behind many of the atrocities against white men and women in Asia, was an unmistakable sense of racial revenge. At the same time, the Japanese began to emphasize their own destiny as a “leading race” ( shidō minzoku ). If one were to venture a single broad observation concerning the difference between the preoccupations of white supremacism and Japanese racism, it might be this: that whereas white racism devoted inordinate energy to the denigration of the other, Japanese racial thinking concentrated on elevating the self. In Japanese war films produced between 1937 and 1945, for example, the enemy was rarely depicted. Frequently it was not even made clear who the antagonist was. The films concentrated almost exclusively on the admirable “Japanese” qualities of the protagonists. The focus of the broader gamut of propaganda for domestic consumption was similar. In its language and imagery, Japanese prejudice thus appeared to be more benign than its white counterpart—by comparison, a soft racism—but this was misleading. The insularity of such introversion tended to depersonalize and, in its own peculiar way, dehumanize all non-Japanese“outsiders.” In practice, such intense fixation on the self contributed to a wartime record of extremely callous and brutal behavior toward non-Japanese.
    The central concept in this racial thinking was that most tantalizing of cultural fixations: the notion of purity. In Japan as elsewhere, this has a deep history not merely in religious ritual, but also in social practice and the delineation of insider and outsider (pure and impure) groups. By turning purity into a racial ideology for modern times, the Japanese were in effect nationalizing a concept traditionally associated with differentiation within their society. Purity was Japanized and made the signifier of homogeneity, of “one hundred million hearts beating as one,” of a unique “Yamato soul” ( Yamato damashii , from the ancient capital of the legendary first emperor). Non-Japanese became by definition impure. Whether powerful or relatively powerless, all were beyond the pale.
    The ambiguity of the concept enhanced its effectiveness as a vehicle for promoting internal cohesion. At a superficial level, this fixation on the special purity or “sincerity” of the Japanese resembles the mystique of American “innocence.” Whereas the latter is a subtheme in the American myth, however, the former