A famous victory

Murray Sayle

Tokyo Back in Japan to find Fuji smothered in snow, the last of the autumn's persimmons plopping from bare trees and exports moving briskly, I see by the calendar that here it is Pearl Harbour Day again. December 7 rolls round every year, of course, inescapable as a birthday. But this anniversary is the 40th, which has moved the Japanese press to a rash of meditations, mostly devoted to the dangers of military rule and the wisdom of Japan's present peaceful policies.

The Mainichi Shimbun, probably the only daily newspaper in the world which is actually called 'Daily Newspaper', is running a 35-part series on the subject (there's productivity for you!) disclosing that most Americans were livid about having their Pacific fleet all but wiped out, and offering the opinion that the whole operation was a thoroughly bad idea. How much better, the commentators chorus, Japan has done making cars rather than war. Peace and productivity, aren't they wonderful.

Productivity is, indeed, much in the air as the Day of Infamy enters vigorous middle age. Japan will celebrate the 40th this year with a trade surplus against the United States of some $16 billion, against Europe of $12 billion, and an overall surplus somewhere between $15 and $20 billion. Britain's share of all this unrequited trading (or slice of Japanese consumer goodies) will be a deficit of $1.4 billion, which is another record.

Here in Japan unemployment is officially 2.2 per cent, inflation 4 per cent, and the banks are awash with money which they are eager to lend, to Japanese only, and especially for anything with export potential, at a shade over the discount rate of 6.25 per cent. In short, in a world staggering into depression Japan seems to be doing enviably, not to say indecently, well. A convenient starting-point, perhaps, for a counter-meditation of our own.

What, we might ask, does the averagely but not absurdly well-informed man know about Japan — a Times reader, say, who occasionally glances at Newsweek, but doesn't take the Spectator? Echo answers, 'not much', but from a blur of swords and Samurai, Sonys and Sukiyaki most people could probably dredge up: (1) Japan's stunning victory over Russia in the war of 1904-5, the first time Asians had decisively defeated Europeans since the days of Genghis Khan. Admittedly, the Japanese were handsomely furnished with warships, advisers and heavy guns by their good friends Britain and Germany, the Russians were even more disorganised than usual, and their empire is rather awkward to defend. Still, it was a famous, ominous victory.

(2) Pearl Harbour, and we might as well throw in Malaya, Singapore and Burma. More famous victories.

(3) The dazzling rise of hungry and defeated Japan, living off American doles, to the status of an industrial super-power giving mighty IBM and General Motors a hard run for their money. With Asia's first intellectual challenge to the West since the lord Buddha, Japanese industry seems set to win the most famous victory of all.

At this point, the ordinary man's Seiko alarm-watch might well rouse him from a disturbing reverie. Are these events somehow connected? Apart from being made in Japan, there seem to be common threads: speed, surprise, careful planning, devastating execution. One hears a lot about the New Japan, and certainly the old days of military glory seem to be dead and buried, or relegated to your Sony screen. But one hears less about new Japanese, and the islanders seem to be just as unfathomably industrious, disciplined and patriotic as ever.

Is it possible that the folks who brought us Pearl Harbour and Singapore are behind Japan's industrial triumphs, with the same plan in mind? And, if not the same, actual, chopstick-licking people, then the same ideas and institutions? Will crowing Japanese tourists one day crowd the abandoned car factories of the West, as they now flock to Pearl Harbour?

Before you run out to try and buy a Metro, we might pause to observe that Pearl Harbour is unforgotten, not because it was a neat way to start a war, but because the problem it raised remains unsolved. What is Japan's place in the world to be? It seems clear that the Japanese are uncom monly gifted people, although exactly what at, less so. Hard work? Organisation? Salesmanship? Devilish Oriental cunning? More ponderously, we might say that Japanese attitudes and institutions seem to match up extraordinarily well with the needs of advanced technology at this end of our century. Is there a plot behind this? Are all our industries about to roll over on their weedy, rusty bottoms, to distant shouts of `Banzai'? Are we being, in three words, Economically Pearl Harboured?

This is just the sort of striking generalisation that looks well on a T-shirt, or as the story line of a television documentary. There may even, in my view, be something in it. Whole nations do not change their fundamental modes of operation, or bury their cherished aims overnight. The perceptions of your ordinary, Toyota-driving man in the street are here quite sound. What he may well misread, in the case of Japan, is the train of events that led up to Pearl Harbour. From there, it is all too easy to misunderstand Japan's current industrial blitzkrieg.

Conquering the world has, it is true, popped up from time to time in Japanese thinking. In 1592, about the time the British Empire was getting under way, General Toyotomi Hideyoshi sent 80,000 picked Samurai warriors to invade China, via Korea, only to be caught in an interesting predicament when the Korean Admiral Yi sank his supply ships. This reverse Pearl Harbour was followed by Japan's two and a half centuries of isolation, postponing dreams of empire from the 17th century, when such things were fashionable, to the 20th, when they were not.

As early as 1823 the Samurai scholar Nobuhiro Sato in his Secret Strategy for Expansion was writing, 'Japan is the foundation of the world', which was destined, he said, to become 'provinces and districts' of the Empire of the Rising Sun. He recommended that the first instalment should be Manchuria, 'so easy to attack and hold'. Considering that Japan then was about as technologically advanced as Tibet is now, how did he propose to do it?

The Japanese national experience has been dominated by proximity to China, until a century or so ago when the industrialised West took over as a mode to be copied, envied, admired and resented, all at the same time. Like most barbarian peoples defiantly maintaining their independence on the periphery of a great civilisation (our own Teutonic forbears included) the Japanese believed that they were actually superior to their mentors in qualities of character, will and persistence. In a word, they excelled in fanaticism.

This makes for a national personality which swings wildly between arrogance and abasement, self-confidence and self-doubt. It also makes for a nation of sincere, sophisticated copycats, ever on the lookout for a good idea and indifferent as to where it comes from — unlike the excessively selfassured Chinese, who followed their unique civilisation all the way down to disaster, and are now convinced that their communism is superior to everyone else's.

Samurai Sato, as well as being a Japanese patriot, was characteristically a student of 'Dutch Learning', as Western technology was called in those days. It was not cheese and tulips which attracted him, but ships and guns. Japan's ancient gift for imitating and then improving other people's ideas was to be the secret weapon which would give her mastery of Asia, and then the world. Pretty much, technologically speaking, the way it is turning out.

In 1868 Samurai from Satsuma and Choshu, in south-western Japan, overthrew the Shoguns, Japan's last exponents of the Confucian ideas of moderation and balance. The rebels' revolutionary slogan, `Rich Country, Strong Army' was itself lifted from the Chinese school of legalist philosophers, the great opponents of Confucius. (This may well revive memories of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao was himself incomprehensibly reviling the memory of the sage. The Japanese Samurai in fact beat the Chairman by nearly a century to the proposition that `power grows out of the barrel of a gun'.) And, indeed, it did. The young Samurai wrote their own constitution, which gave the new Japanese national army and navy a veto on all civilian governments (by the convention that the ministers for the two services had to be serving officers, subject to military discipline) and control over the Emperor, as nominal commander-in-chief, and the military budget (which was supposedly set by the Emperor, on the 'advice' of his officers).

The `Dutch Learning' was now taught in Japan's new compulsory schools, the first in Asia. By this time it was in fact mostly British learning: steam engines, railways, shipyards, textile mills, naval gunnery. On the ground the Japanese, quick to spot a winner, picked Prussian weapons and tactics. In 1895 Taiwan was seized from the expiring Ching dynasty. In 1904 war with Russia began with a surprise attack on the Czar's Pacific fleet lying at anchor at Port Arthur.

Most right-thinking people at the time considered the Czar's empire was quite big enough already, and the sneak attack aspect was widely praised. 'Your Jap', wrote Rudyard Kipling, 'is a plucky little chap, and under British officers they would make the finest troops east of Suez'. Japan's winnings were a free hand in Korea (annexed 1910) and rights over the South Manchurian railway, the spur running through Chinese territory from the Trans-Siberian to warm-water ports in Korea and Manchuria. Japan did even better out of the first world war, firing scarcely a shot, manufacturing for a hungry sellers' market, and being awarded the former German concessions in China and a ring of Pacific islands which were turned into naval bases. War, Japan was learning, pays off.

But Japan of the 1920s was still a long way from being a military dictatorship. Business was booming, girls bobbed their hair and young men studied Western political theories. A lot of them became, in the Japanese-English of the day, 'Marxboys'. Only when they directly attacked Japan's sacred monarchy did dissidents attract the attention of the famous `thought control police'.

Mhe military were theoretically para mount in the Japanese state, even then. In practice, they had to compete with business and the bureaucracy for power, and the frugal Japanese objected (as they do now) to paying taxes to support an army and navy in the absence of any credible threat or opportunity for profit. The Japan of the Twenties was getting on for a pluralist society, Japanese-style, based on the oldboy connections of graduates of the top universities in the military, the bureaucracy, business and even left-wing political parties, the spirit of compromise and the Japanese idea of giving everyone (Japanese) his share and breaking nobody's rice bowl.

The first world depression overturned this nest of singing birds. The latecomer to the industrial scene was the first to get the boot from the markets of Europe and the United States and, what hurt even more, Japanese products were tariffed out of the colonial empires of Britain, France, Holland and the US, all natural markets handy to Japan. A series of scandals with a familiar ring shattered Japanese confidence in civilian politicians, who were accused of taking bribes, toadying to big business and being under the thumb of the Americans.

One by one Japan's new export industries collapsed (particularly silk, where Japan had a monopoly on the raw material of ladies' stockings) and with them, Japanese admiration for the way Westerners conducted their affairs. The shining exceptions were Benito Mussolini and his promising acolyte Adolf Hitler, supposedly pointing the non-communist way forward from the wreck of capitalism. Where trade had failed, force might be the answer.

In 1931 a group of junior army officers, captains and majors of the garrison in Korea moved to rescue the fatherland by appropriating the raw materials and agricultural resources of the Chinese province of Manchuria, using as an excuse an explosion they had themselves set on the South Manchurian railway. The general staff in Tokyo and then, more reluctantly, the largely civilian cabinet agreed to the military occupation of Manchuria and the setting-up, by the army, of a Japanese puppet state called by them Manchukuo, the Kingdom of the Manchus.

In most armies this sort of insubordination would, or at any rate should, lead to a quick trial and a firing squad. In Japan it is quite a common occurrence and it even has a name, gekokujo, 'the lower ruling the higher'. It is, in fact, pretty much the way most Japanese companies work, with the ideas and the drive coming from groups of junior executives, or even from the factory floor, the role of the nominal bosses being simply to lead their prestige to decisions which have already been made far down the organisational chart. As well as being effective, it is what makes negotiating with Japanese so maddening, unless you happen to speak the language and have the time and intestine to sit up drinking sake with several score of young zealots who have already made up their minds anyway.

In China the Japanese army was acting like a Japanese company which has temporarily subdued all the others, Honda, say, chasing all the Nissans and Toyotas of the MI. The military turned 'Manchukuo' into a business and, with the help of keen young bureaucrats specially imported from Tokyo, made a great success of it. The style of 'Capitalism without Capital' which evolved there owed a lot to the thought of Mussolini and his friends and, transferred to Japan during the war years, laid foundations which are with us yet.

But we are getting ahead of our story. The resources of Manchuria were rich, those of China proper richer. In July 1937 a clash between Chinese and Japanese troops at the Marco Polo bridge near Peking escalated in the 'China Incident'. Troops from Manchuria crossed the Great Wall and set about the conquest, or coercion, of the whole country. Once again the impetus came from well down the Japanese army s chain of command. Diplomats in Tokyo, inquiring at the Japanese foreign ministrY how far the army proposed to go, were told that the Japanese government had not been informed. The stopping-line, if any, was a 'military secret'.

From there, the road to Pearl Harbour was an easy canter downhill. The invincible Japanese army was soon bogged down in that Asian speciality, a war which can neither be won nor ended. A million troops held the ports, provincial towns and railways, and no more. Convinced that China's 'insincere' refusal to join their 'greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere' was being sustained by American loans and supplies, the army moved to block one supply route by occupying the then French Indochina in July 1941. Next day President Roosevelt by executive order blocked Japanese assets and Britain and Holland followed suit, cutting off the oil which was sustaining Japan's war effort. They would be resumed, said Roosevelt, when Japan got out of Indochina, and China as well.

Go on or give up? Napoleon and MacArthur are not the only generals who have been tempted to widen a war they could not win. The Japanese Army Field Regulations enjoined 'confidence in certain victory' and awarded the death penalty to 'any commander who concedes a strategic area to the enemy'. Oil to continue the war was to be found in the Dutch East Indies, the only obstacles being the American Pacific fleet in Honolulu and the British naval base at Singapore. Both could be battered down, the army hoped, by an appropriate use of the 'Japanese spirit', Banzai charges and hand-to-hand combat.

The navy disagreed. With luck the fleets could be eliminated. The indispensable foreign model was to hand: the year before, torpedo planes from HMS Illustrious had cut Italy's battleship strength from six to three in a sneak attack on the anchorage at Taranto, for a loss of two lumbering Fairey Swordfish. Italy was, however, still in the war. 'I can promise two years of victories', said navy chief of staff Admiral Osami Nagano. 'After that, I am not sure'. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who was going to lead the lads to Pearl Harbour, considered that the prospects of finally defeating the US and Britain were zero. Still, friend Hitler seemed to be doing well, Tokyo was full of placards advising 'Don't miss the bus', and the trade barriers plus the ultimatum were being interpreted as a monstrous 'ABCD' (American, British, Chinese and Dutch) conspiracy to starve Japan out of the industrial world.

The decisive argument was a report by army intelligence that the troops in China would refuse to come home, if so ordered by Tokyo. Even the pessimistic Yamamoto advised that once his carriers had left for Hawaii it would be no good trying to recall them, because the navy would mutiny. In the event, the Pearl Harbour raiders missed three American aircraft carriers, out for a Sunday cruise, and they in turn sank four Japanese carriers and Japan's last hopes of victory at Midway barely six months later. Pearl Harbour thus emerges, not as the master-stroke of a plan for world conquest Which came unstuck, but a desperate at tempt to salvage reputationsby a military clique who had managed to talk themselves into an impossible corner. No clearer example of the Samurai spirit, defined by the Japanese historian Saburo lenaga as 'recklessness, absurd persistence beyond the point of no return' could be offered — unless, perhaps, we are now witnessing another Banzai charge, by Japanese manufacturers this time against the rest of the industrialised world?

Who, if anyone, is in charge in Japan now? Who is listening to the rumbles of protest from Europe and the US, presaging perhaps a new 'encirclement'? Have the Japanese export industries seized the wheel, as the army did 50 years ago, to steer the ship straight for the rocks? These are interesting questions, but they must, our Editor says, wait until next week.