The Atlantic | Dec 1991 | Remember Pearl Harbor How?

More on politics and society from The Atlantic Monthly.

From the archives:

"The Kamikazes Rise Again" (March 2001)
This time, to help Japan confront its past. By Murray Sayle

"Victory at Sea" (March 1999)
For the United States the war began as a contest of sea power. The naval struggles in the Atlantic and the Pacific were vastly different but ultimately proved to be militarily decisive. A distinguished historian looks afresh at how the Second World War was waged upon the oceans. By David M. Kennedy

"Japan: Let Them Defend Themselves" (April 1989)
Unlike nearly everyone in Japan and the rest of Asia, Americans want Japan to spend more on its military, thinking that will equalize economic competition. It won't. By James Fallows

"I Thought My Last Hour Had Come" (August 1980)
An eyewitness account of the atom bomb explosion at Hiroshima thirty-five years ago. By Robert Guillain

From Atlantic Unbound:

Flashbacks: "Pearl Harbor in Retrospect" (May 25, 2001)
Atlantic articles from 1948, 1991, and 1999 look back at the attack on Pearl Harbor from American and Japanese perspectives.

Interviews: "Doing Battle" (February 1997)
Paul Fussell—historian, literary critic, and veteran—wants to change the way Americans remember the Second World War

The Atlantic Monthly | December 1991

Remember Pearl Harbor How?

Neither Japanese nor Americans know quite how to commemorate the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Japanese spend much more time worrying about it

by James Fallows

.....

t was almost three years ago, near the beginning of 1989, when I was living in Japan, that friends started to mention the "upcoming anniversary." I didn't know what they were talking about, but since I often didn't know what was happening around me in Japan, I decided to wait for enlightenment. I began to get the point when someone mentioned "the upcoming fiftieth anniversary," which he then nailed down with a date: December 8, 1991. By Japanese reckoning that is the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. As Americans will be reminded this month, the Japanese planes came in on a Sunday morning, when U.S. sailors could be expected to be hung over and sleeping in. By that time it was already Monday, December 8, in Japan.

Americans old enough to remember that day certainly remember it vividly, but there are fewer and fewer of them around. For most of the American public this month's TV documentaries and commemorative ceremonies will be very much like the other documentaries and ceremonies we periodically see. Within the past two years the news media, ever alert to anniversaries, have invited the United States to take a look at Vietnam fifteen years after the fall of Saigon, at the space program twenty years after men first walked on the moon, and at Germany fifty years after Hitler rolled into Poland. This month we'll look back at Japan—with magazine features, a speech by President George Bush at Pearl Harbor, and a commemorative postage stamp—and then we'll move on to something else.

However the United States responds to the Pearl Harbor observances, it cannot possibly meet the expectations that have been building up in Japan. Indeed, by far the most interesting part of the fiftieth anniversary is the way Japan's opinion-making class—its popular press and foreign-policy specialists—has prepared the public to cringe in dread of U.S. outbursts this month.

Not every recent Japanese article about U.S.-Japanese relations has begun with a phrase like "As the clock ticks toward the anniversary of Pearl Harbor... " But a lot of them seem to start that way. Last summer a magazine called Foresight told readers about an ominous statistical indicator. In the previous forty-nine years a total of eighty-six books about Pearl Harbor had been published in the United States, but fifteen were scheduled for publication in 1991 alone. "A bipartisan bill has been submitted to Congress to set Dec. 7 aside as a national memorial day," Foresight said. "There is no doubt that the 50-year anniversary of Pearl Harbor is the big event for both Japanese and Americans." Shukan Gendai, a very popular weekly magazine, reminded readers that Bush was going to Pearl Harbor, and said,

The United States is a most barbarous country. In Western movies, people always say, "If you have a complaint, come and fight me!" ... Anti-Japanese feelings have reached the point that Americans are saying, "Now it's time for you to pay us what you owe us! If you don't surrender, the only solution is a war."

Shukan Themis, another weekly (shukan means "weekly"), carried an article saying that "fearful White Anglo Saxon Protestants, led by President Bush, have launched a retaliation against Japan.... The WASP is a white supremacist. He cannot tolerate non-whites taking the initiative in a single area." Shukan Shincho reported on the success of a recent American book called The Coming War With Japan, which, like most books on U.S.-Japanese relations, is vastly more interesting to Japanese readers than to Americans. The magazine said that sales of the translated version of the book should reach 350,000 copies by Pearl Harbor Day.

It is a little misleading to quote at length from these magazines, collectively called shukanshi, because they occupy a peculiar niche in the Japanese press. Their look, heft, and nationwide following make them seem similar to People and Sports Illustrated, but they are known to be cavalier with the facts in a way much closer to the Weekly World News—"Latest Photos of Bigfoot" tradition. The same Shukan Shincho report on sales of The Coming War said that the book was also hugely popular in America, where in fact it has never appeared on any best-seller list. A somewhat higher toned magazine called Sapio, whose name is apparently derived from "sapience," said in all seriousness that with U.S.-Japanese tensions on the rise, a certain anti-Japanese joke was being "widely circulated" in the United States. Here is the joke, in its entirety as reported by Sapio: "Officers of the Ministry of Finance, Japan's elite, piss cold as ice. And an abacus is implanted in their brains." Forgive me if you've heard this one before.

For all their excesses, the magazines do shape public opinion, leaving the Japanese reader with the impression that Americans are waiting to run amok in December and meanwhile telling incomprehensible jokes. The Pearl Harbor mania in the weeklies seems to parallel more-respectable views. Every time I have interviewed a Japanese official in the past year, he has asked me how I thought Americans would react to the upcoming anniversary. A year ago in Tokyo a Japanese politician summoned me to his office. After we'd sipped tea for forty minutes, he said, "By the way"—the phrase that in practice means "Now let's get to the point." "What do you think about the reaction ...?" I've enjoyed looking for stories in the U.S. press about the countdown. They are almost always by correspondents in Tokyo who get the "by the way" treatment from nervous Japanese contacts every day.

he obvious question is why? Why should so many Japanese be counting the days until the anniversary, while so few Americans seem to have given it a thought?

There are a few time-honored and partly satisfactory explanations. The United States as a rule pays less attention to any given country than that country pays back. This is a source of strain in U.S. relations with Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, and many other countries, including Japan. In a way it would be more flattering to the Japanese if Americans really were telling "piss cold as ice" jokes: at least they'd be thinking about Japan. Also, Japan is famous for its edginess on the whole subject of the Second World War. Its experience with China and Korea, whose governments are always complaining about Japanese history textbooks and signs of nascent militarism in Japan, seems to have left it with the belief that old resentments can bubble up at any time.

From the archives:

Politics & Prose: "A Barbarous Frenzy" (November 1997)
New details about the Second World War's "forgotten Holocaust." Jack Beatty on Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking. But something more must be involved. Japan has less to be apologetic about this month than it did, say, four years ago, during the fiftieth anniversary of the "Rape of Nanking." (At least 100,000 Chinese were killed in Nanking, as compared with fewer than 3,500 Americans at Pearl Harbor, and the Chinese were nearly all civilians. This anniversary passed almost unnoticed in Japan.) The way the Japanese Imperial Army fought was sometimes atrocious, and Japan's relations with China, in particular, are still colored by both sides' awareness of this record. Americans tend to lump the attack on Pearl Harbor with Japan's war crimes in Asia, and to equate Japan's aggression with Hitler's. Few people in Japan see it that way.

The U.S. complaint about Pearl Harbor involves one very specific and one sweeping charge. The specific complaint is that the attack began while Japanese emissaries in Washington were still purporting to negotiate in good faith. For this the Japanese government has freely apologized. The broader complaint is that Japan brought America into the war by striking first. The Japanese response to this charge is a much more complicated matter.

For provoking the United States to fight, Japanese officials have often expressed "regret. " The regret is understandable and sincere, since the consequence was a war that turned out, as Emperor Hirohito tactfully put it in his surrender message, "not necessarily to Japan's advantage." But there has been nothing like an outright "apology" for Pearl Harbor, and there is not likely to be one this month, because of the widespread Japanese view that the main thing to regret about the "Pacific War" is that the country unwisely took on a much more powerful foe.

Japan, of course, tried to occupy its neighbors by force in the 1930s, but it was hardly the first country to do so. As many Japanese writers emphasized at the time, the same countries the Japanese army was conquering had previously been conquered by armies from Britain, France, Holland, or, in the case of the Philippines, the United States. Japan's strategic ideal would have been to hold on to this empire without colliding head-on with the United States. Ben-Ami Shillony, an Israeli specialist in Japanese history, has said that if Japan had

taken the side of the Western Allies in World War II, as she had done in World War I, or had she remained neutral, as she had been before Pearl Harbor, her prewar attempts at establishing a regional hegemony and her wartime violations of human rights might have subsequently been condoned in the context of the Cold War, as was the case with many Asian countries.

Within the Japanese military government, the case for attacking Pearl Harbor was that America would sooner or later intervene to push Japan back in Asia. If war was inevitable, Japan's best chance lay with a first strike. Some Japanese strategists thought that even after Pearl Harbor the United States would lack the stomach for a long war, and would agree to a kind of demarcation line down the middle of the Pacific, separating Japanese and American zones of influence. For the Japanese, then, the tragedy of Pearl Harbor was that it indicated their inability to avoid a direct showdown with the United States, in addition to being a disastrous miscalculation of how America would respond to a sneak attack. Each of these was a failure for Japan; neither, in the general Japanese view, was an unpardonable sin. Even in the days of total humiliation immediately after the war, Emperor Hirohito expressed deep "regret" but declined to "apologize" to General Douglas MacArthur, saying, "It was not clear to me that our course was unjustified. Even now I am not sure how future historians will allocate the responsibility for the war."

Shortly after the United States finished pummeling Saddam Hussein's army, a magazine called Bungei Shunju, Japan's counterpart to, well, The Atlantic, published an article with the charming title "Victor Nation America, Do Not Be Arrogant: Japanese People Should Discard Their Blind Trust in White Man's Society." After the Second World War, it observed, the United States "passed judgment on Japan, saying that 'Whatever reason there may have been, the side which started the war is in the wrong.' Japan ... became stricken with shame."

A familiar chestnut holds that Japanese society is driven by shame more than by guilt—that people are more attuned to whether they are offending the sensitivities of others than to whether they are violating their inner "thou shalt not" rules. A sense that they are about to be subjected to a shaming ritual may account for the exaggerated countdown in Japan.

But perhaps the most powerful explanation lies in another Japanese instinct—the "victim consciousness," or higaisha ishiki, that governs many of Japan's relations with great powers from the outside world, which for the past century has meant the United States. Japanese leaders of the Tokugawa era felt victimized by Commodore Perry's arrival; the leaders of the 1930s felt victimized by American and British determination to deny Japan its place in the sun. Over the past twenty years the Japanese press has emphasized the country's victimization by American demands to open up the market. The preparation for Pearl Harbor is essentially a warning that Japan is about to be victimized again.

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