Teacher in Japan

by PERRY MILLER

1

THE one thing I most insist upon — because Americans ask me, with an obviously skeptical implication, whether the Japanese spoke honestly — is that the conversations were utterly uninhibited and, after the ceremonial phases got over, completely ingenuous. No topic was barred, evaded, or taken too solemnly — not the atrocities, the atomic bomb, the irresponsibility which is both the charm and exasperation of Japan, the pom-pom girls, the Japanese lust for suicide, nor the thousands of babies left, by the Occupation for impoverished orphanages to cope with.

One expects, when dealing with Europeans since 1945, that they will inevitably hold some livings back from Americans; they have a pride. But the pride of the Japanese is curious, and to Westerners it may seem a flat inversion. It takes the form, often, of opening a conversation by asking, “What is the most ridiculous thing you have discovered in Japan?” Yet it does, strangely enough, facilitate the flow of talk and gives the visitor the feeling that no deceptions are being practiced.

The most analytical insist that the defeat has not really stirred the social structure, and that a Western conception of personality cannot emerge until the basic relationship of children to parents is changed — and this means redesigning the house itself! There is a strange serenity about these selfcondemnatory analyses. It may be, as I am told, a trait of the society rooted in immemorial tradition; but today it is also something else: a calm realization, everywhere understood in Japan, that the Japanese stand on the firing line, and that if things go wrong in the world, they and the land will suffer horribly.

One of my good friends — even in a short summer in Japan, one makes very good friends indeed, though not too many — put the issue simply: can he be pro-American without sacrificing his intellectual integrity? The wish to be friendly, the good will, exists; Americans would not doubt it could they have participated in the conference we held on American “civilization” in Hiroshima. I do not recommend the experience to fastidious consciences, but the people of the city do all in their power to shield you from the ravages of self-accusation. There is in this culture a quality of acceptance which is, I should say, hardly comprehensible to us; with it there goes a quiet but ruthless objectivity.

At the University of Tokyo, President Tadao Yanaihara opened our seminar by saying that a Japan which in the past looked for guidance to Europe had supposed that there was nothing of intellectual or cultural value in the United States; but. now that the two peoples — this was his way of speaking — have inflicted terrible hurt upon each other, it is incumbent upon Japan to study with the utmost seriousness American doctrine, history, and practice. Our students did not need his exhortation. It would be hard to imagine students, graduate and undergraduate, more eager, avid, insatiable, even when the communication had to be agonizingly slowed up by an interpreter. For the American instructors, the drain was exhausting. I assure you that there is in Japan a hospitality toward, a resolution to comprehend and to emulate, the American way of life which is sincere’, clear-eyed, burgeoning with affection. How widely diffused it is, I am unable to say, but it is certainly vigorous; it constitutes, in the situation, as openhearted a gesture as was ever made in modern international relations, and it puts an immense responsibility upon both our intellects and our hearts.

These students did not want praise; they sought, they demanded, criticism. But precisely there the difficulty commenced. We instructors had to contend with a habit of mind which soon came to seem ineradicably Japanese. I call it an ingrained conceptualism. a disposition to take every term ending in “ism" as a solid chunk of the universe, to be trundled about like a box or a trunk. Their adoration of the instructor (he can resist the seduction for, at the most, a day or two!) was untroubled by the frenzy of his mounting denunciation of isms; if nothing else would serve, after he had expended himself, they would make an ism out of his antiismus and name it after him. The mystery of Japan, I am tempted to theorize, runs something like this: how can a mentality which in aesthetics finds joy in a miraculous seizure of the specific — the branch, the leap of the fish — manage to conceive of itself historically and psychologically as swathed in such thick bandages of abstraction?

Astute observers see a hidden but vital connection between this kind of thinking and those conditions in the culture which keep alive, even among the most cultivated, an exorbitant concern with “face” and which therefore militate against a further increase of any sense of personality. “Yes,”said my friend the professor (he had studied at. Harvard), “that is the problem with our students: you must break them up like eggs.”

In such a setting the problem of Japan and Communism is formulated. The ism — if only because it is an ism—starts with an advantage. To make of America an Americanism introduces profound metaphysical confusions— which are important in a metaphysical community. “If I am proAmerican,”the argument constantly ran, “must I not then do everything in the American fashion? But how can I, when the American fashion constantly contradicts itself?” Americans need to be told — as they are not — that radical reversals in our Occupation policy, and in the more compelling pressures we still exert, create a ghastly confusion among those who are, or would like’ to be, out friends — among a people for whom the ideal of integrity cannot be separated from that of a consistency of concept. Our enemies, who are not stupid and take pains to study cultural mutations, exploit to the utmost this genuine bewilderment of the Japanese.

Japan attested the sincerity with which it. accepted defeat by writing into its Constitution Article IX, which declares that in the name of international peace the nation forever renounces war as a right of sovereignty, and that it will never maintain land, sea, or air forces. Likewise Japan enacted American-inspired legislation against trusts and monopolies, and — also under our tutelage — guaranteed freedom of speech and enthusiastically released political prisoners. In 1945, for the first time, the Communist Party obtained legal status and freedom of action. But now, every visiting American businessman I encountered told me— as he certainly was vociferously telling the Japanese — that the dissolution of the trusts was a hideous mistake, and that as for the Communists, they had all better be back in prison! By 1950 the country — barred from the indispensable China trade, offered no compensatory advantages by American tariffs, facing stiff and not always “fair" competition in the sterling area — was up against an economic wall as blank as the featureless stones which bring to an abrupt termination the flamboyant shrine of Nikko. Then the Korean conflict started; the American procurement of arms, ammunition, and services has — for the moment, only for the moment — saved Japanese heavy industry. It alone has slaved off disaster.

2

WE WENT about freely, dealt with virtually all classes of people, and nowhere encountered overt signs of “anti-American sentiment.”But that it is a factor, there is no reason to doubt, nor that it is fomented by the Communists, nor that if could, in suitable circumstances, be blown up into terrifying proportions. Even we could get glimpses into the situation expounded by Rodger Swearingen and Paul Lunger in Red Flag in Japan. We perceived it most dramatically when we found our colleagues in the universities — led by such stalwart liberals as Yanaihara or President Tatsuo Morito of Hiroshima University — trying to promulgate the doctrine of academic freedom and yet having to counter the ruthless tactics of Communism among the students. They attempt to defend the ancient sanctuary of the dormitory against invasion by the police (even under the old regime it was respected), but certain students avail themselves of it in order to manufacture Molotov cocktails. In July of 1952 an association of Tokyo businessmen imperiously informed the presidents of the city’s universities that unless the schools would certify the economic orthodoxy of the graduates, the firms would continue, as of old, to disregard the claims of ability and to employ 1 he grandsons and nephews of executives. President Yanaihara talked back. Nevertheless, one of my best students cried in anguish, “Do you understand, in Japan there is no social mobility whatsoever—just simply none at all!”

Here then was the time and place for frank speaking. What it basically portends, our friends agreed, is a resurgence of the “Bight,”which you need go no further to document than the list of former imperial colonels receiving commands in the expanding police force permitted Japan by the National Security Act. In the summer of 1952 the Diet passed an Anti-Subversive Bill which, like some legislation nearer home, seems less addressed to the real and extremely present danger than to the brute act of suppression as an end in itself.

“We do have our childlike aspects,” as another friend said, “and we did trust the father-image of America. You came in big and strong; you told us that we were the supremely favored children of history, because we should now stand in the vanguard of peace, because we should not be allowed to play with the wicked toys of armies and armaments, with which we had so wantonly harmed both ourselves and others. We were proud of our chance, our unique chance, of becoming suddenly mature. We felt, that, after all, our misguided youth had not died in vain. We — after those miserable years of militarism and arrogance — even we were to be the first really pacific nation of the world! Now, if you reverse yourself, and tell us to pick up again the accursed toys, what do you expect from us — from a people as docile, as abstractly-minded, and as emotionally excitable as are the Japanese?”

Compared with any other oceupation, the American one in Japan was admirable, and the Japanese know this. But, to use a phrasing not original with me, the policy of our Occupation was an effort to make of Japan a new Middle West — not, of course, the Middle West as it is, or in fact ever was, but as it perpetually dreams of being. Japan was to be made over into the image of Main Street: hence no trusts, no soldiers, but full freedom of speech. And it must be said that the implementation of tins policy (to use the lingo of officials) was largely entrusted to persons conditioned by Main Street whom the Japanese soon learned to call “carpetbaggers.” (They knew, if only by report, Gone with the Wind.) There is no more comic chapter in the history of “imperialism than the efforts of the Japanese bureaucracy to save, by making themselves ridiculous, the faces of their American conquerors. They contrived to take upon themselves the blame for some of the more idiotic decrees and speeches, and interposed a calculated inefficiency between American ignorance and the consequences of ignorance.

The Occupation identified democracy with a renunciation of war, with the breaking up of industrial combines, with a complete separation of education from religion. But many Japanese know about America; some visit us, and thousands of them read our books and periodicals. I was teaching Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis, yet somehow questions even of style and form always came round to the question of America. Is war there renounced? Are corporations Kept small? Is education really separated from religion? What is the democracy you expect of us?

Most of them say that they do not expect to die peaceably in their beds. Their pessimism is deepened by what seems to them an image of American power riddled with self-contradiction. My students would take heart when presented with American scholarship, wilh the novel, with the fecundity and spontaneity of American thought. Could this picture of America be presented the masses, they were certain that the effect would be tremendous. But the masses see only the corporal (on precious leave from Korea) picking up the pom-pom giri at Shimbashi Station; they don’t resent his having the girl, but he seems to them a callous barbarian, utterly devoid of ideas, poetry, or manners. All Japanese, of whatever class, shudder at the mere suggestion that he should be invited to their homes.

Repeatedly when you are taken through the countreside you are shown a cliff or a gorge and told that it is “a favorite place for committing suicide.” The choice confronting the young Japanese as between America and Communism is not, as most in the West might suppose, the same thing as a choice between life and death. Those who know the country say — and the newcomer learns to appreciate—that nothing in Japan must ever be allowed to fail; consequently, in Japan nothing succeeds like success, and no conception prospers so well as one that remains consistently conceptual. Other peoples, we know, have their ways of going with the party in power, often with a cynical disregard of consistency. The Japanese do not have that agility, that superficiality. So far, American rule has not spelled out the sort of coherent rationality which keeps believers loyal or dissuades partisans from suicide. Nevertheless., we may still at this moment (how much longer is a problem) count upon an aptitude which comes nearer than any that prospers in Europe or America to deserving the name Josiah Royce gave to the highest fidelity; loyalty to loyalty.

These islands face immense problems — overproduction of goods and of people (the former encouraged by our procurement, the latter by our soldiery), and a desperate need for markets. No American who looks carefully about him can come away without praying (to this resort he is brought) that America shall not make the fatal mistake of aiding the very forces it fought to destroy —that it shall not end by assisting those who in their heart of hearts are, although not at the moment outspoken, the most implacably anti-American.

The United States has become in Japan a foster father who, however unwillingly, has taken up the obligation, Can we let this child be himself, let him develop according to his own deep genius (not that false genius imposed upon him by the militarists), without trying to force him into our own image — or worse than that, into a sentimental image of our image? If we cannot, we shall be. bound, sooner or later, to excite his revulsion. But there is among the Japanese — of this I am certain — a genuine desire to understand, to work with us. The ways of frank communication will prove, if they are utilized, more reliable than the opportunisms of policy. Those leaders who can and may yet, lead Japan in the direction which offers the real hope for America and for the Pacific need in this crucial hour that which alone can sustain them; the assurance from Americans of a rich and sympathetic comprehension of their predicament.