NOT FORGETTING PEARL HARBOR

The fiftieth anniversary approaches. Murray Sayle remembers

to remember

Tokyo AN ENEMY reconciled, says St John of the Cross, is an enemy truly vanquished. A noble thought, apt for these anxious days. Why then, we may wonder, are Americans Preparing so busily to mark 7 December, the fiftieth anniversary of the Japanese navy's ill-advised attack on the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor? Why, come to think of it, are Japanese getting uneasy as the memorable day draws near? Is transpacific reconciliation less than complete?

True, President Bush planned to visit Japan in the week before the fateful day, for the sole purpose of addressing the Japanese parliament. Bush was to deliver a 'Declaration of Tokyo', outlining a new basis for the staunch 46-year-old Pacific Partnership, now that the anti-communist bond of the post-war years has frayed away. Last week the Bush trip was cancelled, but he still intends to be at Pearl Harbor itself, Perhaps to reveal what the new basis might be,

,fl the meantime, what an opportunity is g missed! Emperor Akihito, fresh from a tour of south-east Asia where he expressed well-received Japanese regrets fill* past misdeeds, has no plans to visit Pearl. The new prime minister, Kiichi MiYazawa, has announced none either, per- haps because he is — purely by coincidence ----, nun, with other problems, such as Japan's soaring trade surplus, soon expect- ed to reach $100 billion a year (some $60 billion with the United States). And by, no doubt, another coincidence, the refurbishment of the museum at Hiroshima, including the enlargement of its most Poignant exhibit — the diorama of a dishevelled mother and child wandering through atom-bombed ruins — has just ueell completed, and the museum has reopened in good time for. . well, for the Increase of visitors normal about this time of the year. From Nagasaki, where a strik- tug statue representing the sorrows of war Mints a mute accusing finger at the sky, a surge of interest is also reported. No spe- cial commemoration of Pearl Harbor is planned in these places, either.

It seems clear, then, that Pearl Harbor is largely an American obsession. Odd, per- haps, considering that it was only one event in the deadliest of world wars. American friends have suggested that desperate edi- tors and writers, short of copy, may be cal- lously reopening old wounds for a few opportunistic dollars, yen or pounds. Words are, indeed, like weapons, a traded commodity. Supply points to demand. Someone over there, it seems, must badly want to remember Pearl Harbor. We may well wonder, why?

In all 2,403 sailors died aboard the five American battleships sunk or badly dam- aged, a grievous loss for a nation that believed itself more or less at peace. But this was, of course, only the overture: some 10,000 Americans and Filipinos fell on the Bataan Death March the following year; 840 British sailors and their brave admiral went down with Prince of Wales and Repulse off Malaya; 80,000 British and Commonwealth troops surrendered at Sin- gapore, a quarter to die in barbarous cap- tivity; 12,500 Americans died taking Okinawa; a quarter of a million Japanese

died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another million were killed in American fire raids; perhaps ten million soldiers and civilians died in Japan's war in China. For this del- uge of death, Pearl Harbor was a relatively modest beginning.

And, historically speaking, Pearl Harbor was a disaster for Japan, not the United States. The sunken battleships were obso- lete, as the raid itself pkoved, and were not missed in the great naval victories, all American, which followed. Pearl Harbor shocked America out of a dangerous neu- trality and the lingering demoralisation of the Great Depression, ended painful inter- nal dissension, doomed the Axis and launched the United States on its ir- resistible rise as the world's only genuine superpower. The mourners over Pearl Har- bor should be Japanese, not Americans.

Not to forget the British, who did not exactly do well out of the second world war, either. True, the Japanese embassy in Washington bungled the vague 20-minute warning that was supposed to serve instead of a formal declaration of war, although the US Navy had been put on alert status against a possible Japanese attack two weeks earlier. The United States was, at the time, subjecting Japan to an oil block- ade, a risky exercise against a warlike nation with an oil-fired navy — the same navy which had, moreover, begun its war against Russia 36 years earlier with an unannounced attack on the Tsar's fleet peacefully at anchor in Port Arthur.

That the Japanese navy would some day attempt a knockout blow against the Amer- ican Pacific Fleet had been forecast by a lowly British journalist and part-time spook named Hector C. Bywater as early as 1925 (his book, The Great Pacific War, got a rave review from Franklin D. Roosevelt's cousin Nicholas in the New York Times). Aircraft from a lone British carrier, HMS Illustrious, had shown how it's done by knocking out three Italian battleships anchored in Toronto harbour in a sneak attack scarcely a year before the replay in Hawaii. The sur- prise of Pearl Harbor was that anyone was surprised.

So incompetent, in fact, were the US Navy's defence arrangements that suspi- cion has lingered ever since that FDR deliberately left the expendable parts of his fleet in harm's way as bait for the impetu- ous Japanese. Discussing the Japanese threat with General George Marshall and secretary of war, Henry Stimson, in the White House on 25 November 1941 (the Japanese carriers already at sea), FDR said that 'the question was how we should manoeuvre them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves' — or so the minutes of the meeting, later read to Congress, recorded for suspicious posterity.

Winston Churchill, too, took the news of Pearl Harbor with suspicious calm, at least in private. 'Our joint embargo is steadily forcing the Japanese to decisions for peace or war,' the Former Naval Person wrote early in November 1941, for the eyes of his highly placed American friend only. Get- ting news of the American disaster, the Prime Minister poured, we can guess, a generous nightcap and later wrote: 'I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.' The Japanese had, it seems, decided the right way. Next day, Adolf Hitler, another blunderer of genius, was even more obliging and declared war on the United States off his own bat, without the need for any plotting at all on our side.

We must, of course, be grown-up about the true history of Pearl Harbor. No one has ever taken FDR for an early version of naïve Jimmy Carter, and most of his coun- trymen now agree that he was right to manoeuvre them into war against the Axis — even if, in the real world, it takes two to make a day of infamy. In truth, the Japanese can hardly have surprised Roo- sevelt all that much by opening hostilities, seeing how hard he and his cigar-smoking friend were working to persuade them to. At the same time, FDR may genuinely not have expected them to make the meal out of it that they did — the Japanese, as we know, have over-the-top tendencies which sometimes surprise even themselves.

In the end, however, it all worked out for the best, at least for the great Republic. The shock of Pearl Harbor 'completely solidified the American people', just as the partners had hoped. American Nazis were dished, Japanese-Americans interned. American factories, long silent, sprang to life. US unemployment fell overnight from 13 per cent to zero. Pearl Harbor ushered in the longest prosperity American capital- ism has ever known, only now really begin- ning to run out of steam, under relentless competition from . .

But before we get personal about the living, let us recall how the other partner in the plot, or misunderstanding, of 7 Decem- ber 1941 got along. Fully 20 hours before the bombs started falling on Hawaii, the Japanese moved against the flimsy British defences of Malaya and Hong Kong. No warning of any kind was given, or intended. Seven weeks later, the fall of Singapore effectively ended British power east of Suez, put paid to the Empire, and thus fin- ished off the world's first, most constructive and, to date, longest-running maritime superpower. Franklin D. turned out to be no better friend of British imperialism than he had been of Japanese. The people to keep in with, he thought, were Uncle Joe and his democratic Soviet Union — and only death, in April 1945, spared FDR a nasty disillusionment.

As the fiftieth anniversary of these mournful events draws nigh, Britain, too, is celebrating — with a four-month Festival of Japan — marking, not the greatest disas- ter ever to befall British (and Australian and Canadian) arms, but the hundredth anniversary of the Anglo-Japanese Friend- ship Society, an organisation which has, let's face it, known its ups and downs over the years.

Curiously enough, it is the impetuous, forward-looking New World which seems to be harbouring the historical grudge, while the elderly lion of the Old extends a moth-eaten paw of reconciliation. Even as this is written, a party of British ex-service- men, all survivors of Burma, are in Tokyo paying their respects to the Japanese war dead. Jolly good losership, perhaps, carried to the point of masochism — but there may be a more rational explanation, hidden in the chain of events that brought Japanese and Americans to their fiery rendezvous over Hawaii 50 years ago next month.

Britain, France, Holland, Germany, Spain and Portugal had long been set up in the Far East with flag and cash register when the two Johnny-come-latches, Japan and the United States, arrived neck-and- neck a bare century ago. In 1895, already launched on the stunning industrialisation which has made her the world's second economic power, Japan seized the Chinese island of Formosa. Her aim was to join the civilised powers of Europe who all had empires, to coal her new British-built war- ships from the Formosan mines, and to secure supplies of sugar, difficult in snowy Japan.

Three years later, Admiral Thomas Dewey of the US Navy, sailing from Hong Kong, sank the rusty Spanish fleet in a brisk 20-minute engagement in Manila Bay. Believing that the Americans had come to liberate them, the trusting Fil- ipinos cheered from the shore. But one thing led to another, and soon General Arthur MacArthur, USA (father of the more famous Dugout Doug) and 30,000 American troops were fighting a full-scale guerrilla insurrection against their uninvit- ed presence, inventing the term 'gook' and pioneering the zapping and counter-zap- ping later to become the style of 'Nam.

Judge William Howard Taft, the first civilian governor, called for an end to the slaughter, urging the Americans to accept the Filipinos as their 'little brown brothers'.

I love the word 'fraternity', the troops sang, on their way to the next ambush, But still I draw the line,

'Don't put yourself down, Ben.'

He may be a brother of Big Bill Taft's, But he ain't no brother of mine.

By 1903, the first independent Republic of the Philippines had been crushed. Some 250,000 little brown brothers and sisters, and 5,000 Americans, died along the way.

We should not be too critical of the American adventure in the Philippines. Rudyard Kipling had specifically urged them to take up the white man's burden, and there was always the argument that if they didn't, someone else would. On the business side, Manila, they believed, would become 'the great trade centre of the East', America's answer to Hong Kong or Singa- pore. From the strategic viewpoint, how much better it was (and is) to have their main line of defence on the far side of the Pacific instead of the exposed coast of Cali- fornia. Here, too, they followed their British mentors. The sea gates of Eng- land', said Lord Anson, 'are the harbours of our enemies.' Unfortunately, Manila is barely 400 miles from Formosa, or Taiwan, as the Japanese called their new posses- sion. America's new colony was, if not inside the sea gates, at least in the home waters of the only home-grown naval power in the Pacific, one rising fast. To make things worse, the British had fallen in love with the Japanese, first time round. There seems to be a natural affinitY between Eurasia's two sets of tea-drinking, rainy, royalist offshore islands, and Britain was looking for a counterweight to Russia. In 1905, the Japanese navy smashed the Tsar's Baltic fleet which had sailed halfwaY round the world for the encounter. The Japanese flagship, HUMS Mikasa, was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness. Their admiral, Heihachiro Togo, learned his trade aboard HMS Worcester at Greenhithe. Rightly, the Royal Navy celebrated Tsushima as one of their more notable vic- tories. Soon the Japanese were building their own battleships. To avoid accidents, they struck a tacit deal with teacher: the Japanese navy kept out of the Indian Ocean, the British never went north of Shanghai.

After the first world war, everyone (except Japan) wanted to cut down expen- sive navies. Under protest, Japan agreed to a battleship ratio of 5:5:3 with Britain and the United States; the Orientals to get the thin end, on two conditions: 1) Japan could keep the unfinished battleship Mutsu, Paid, for by contributions from every schoolchilo in Japan, and 2) America would not fortifY the Philippines or any of its islands closer to Japan than Hawaii. (Mutsu eventuallY went down in Leyte Gulf, in the Phihr pines, in 1944.) To soothe the Americans and Australians, Britain gave up its naval tutelage of Japan as part of the same deal. Then came the Great Depression, and Imperial Preference, in some form or another, in all the European colonies, cut- ting Japan off from the markets she ha laboriously developed in south-east Asia. Japan responded with a new colony of her OWN, the puppet state of Manchukuo, carved out of northern China, in free and frank imitation of the British puppet states in Malaya, the French one in Indochina and the American puppet republic in the Philippines. There was, however, an impor- tant difference — while all the European colonies stagnated under some form or Other of the gin-swilling planter theme, Japan poured capital and technology into Manchukuo to develop heavy industry. Some 30 million Chinese crowded into Manchukuo for jobs, the biggest migration in history. The Japanese claimed that their bureaucratic-capitalist style of industrial development better suited east Asians than the irresponsible freebooting of Europeans and Americans. Sixty years on, history has proved them right. While Manchukuo hummed, things got SO bad in the United States that opposition began to mobilise against even the modest imports of Philippines sugar and tobacco competing with American domestic pro- duction, and the arrival of Filipino immi- grants looking for low-paid work as servants and labourers. In 1934, a couple of senators pushed through a bill for the 'Independence of the Philippines, which ended free trade from the former colony and cut the Filipino immigrant quota to 50 a year, leaving Americans in charge of the islands' foreign policy and defence Which was, of course, part of the outer defence perimeter of the United States itself.

In 1938, the Japanese army exploited a Chance clash on the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking to invade China proper, south of the Great Wall. This was not, of course, today's monolithic China of the Marxist mandarins but a brawling chaos of war- lords, communist rebels, the quasi-fascist dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek and a Patchwork of snobby foreign concessions and colonies. The Japanese encountered no serious Chinese resistance, but the size and complexity of the country made them ever more dependent on motor transport, which meant on oil, which meant on Hol- land, Britain and the United States — the very people who were locking Japan out of their own colonial markets. In return, the Japanese did their best to keep the busi- nessmen of those countries out of their China.

Meanwhile, the Japanese were building, behind suspiciously large bamboo mats, a pair of secret super-battleships, Yamato and Musashi, bigger than anything Britain had, or the United States could bring through the Panama Canal against them. Seeing a chance to get America into the war with Hitler, Roosevelt responded with an embargo on the Japanese navy's oil; and then an ultimatum to the Japanese to get out of China, or else — Churchill's 'deci- sions for peace or war'. How the Japanese responded to that, we already know.

The day after Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombers attacked Clark Field in the Philip- pines, destroying two squadrons of B17 bombers conveniently lined up on the ground. These were more likely the expendable bait Roosevelt had in mind, should the Japanese accept his challenge. 'This war is not of our making,' said Presi- dent Manuel Quezon of the Philippines, pleading with Roosevelt for •a chance to declare neutrality. 'The American flag in the Philippines will be defended to the last man,' said Roosevelt. Pointing to the arms pouring into Britain, Quezon asked for reinforcements. None ever came.

After five months of hopeless resistance the last American position on Corregidor fell. 'I shall return,' said the conqueror, Arthur MacArthur's son Douglas, as he left. Return he did, three years later, to expel the Japanese and make Manila, with Warsaw, the two cities most severely dam- aged by ground fighting in the entire war. Not surprisingly, the Filipinos have been uneasy ever since about the presence of American forces in the islands, considering how much trouble they brought for how lit- tle protection. It has taken the combined efforts of a volcano near Clark Field and a resolution of the Philippines Senate, earlier this year, finally to persuade the Yankees to go home. Most of them have, in fact, gone to Japan, now the source of the capi- tal and industrial development the Fil- ipinos never got from their big white brothers across the Pacific.

he reader who has stayed the course is now in a position to fathom the fuss over Pearl Harbor, 1991. The second world war in the Pacific was, unlike the one in Europe, fought over interests and not ide- ology. British interests in east Asia for a long time paralleled those of Japan, then diverged for the more urgent need to get reluctant Americans into the far more dan- gerous war against Hitler. Now British and Japanese interests have converged again, the signal for the Friendship Society to sur- face. The new common interest is not, alas, a fair split of the opulent East, but another just as compelling in these difficult days. Japan sees Britain as the unguarded back door into Europe, their plan B if the ambivalent Japanese relationship with the United States goes sour again. Britain sees Japan as a source of capital and technolo- gy, spelled J-O-B-S. Here is the hard core of a great international romance. The rest, the flower arranging, the sushi and sumo wrestling, is mere love-play.

Japan's relationship with America is more complex. Any marriage counsellor will instantly spot the way in which the par- ties are storing up old scores, just in case. In truth, Japan's America problem has never gone away. For Japan, national sovereignty, prosperity and self-respect demand ever widening markets, to buy ever more raw materials and set up ever- expanding sales networks. But the US Navy .controls the seas over which all this has to travel, and the American market takes 40 per cent of Japanese exports. As in the 1930s, the path to Japanese self-sufficiency in fact leads to ever greater dependence, with no guarantee — in fact, every sign the other way — that America will not use its weapons of embargo and blockade a sec- ond time, to just as nasty effect.

Conversely, America's Japan problem has never gone away, either. If the United States wants its defence line on the western side of the Pacific instead of in sunny Cali- fornia, there is no alternative to bases in Japan, for which the wily islanders can, and will, extract a high price. But the United States has already been driven economical- ly out of Asia, where a new and ominous consortium of industrialised nations is forming before our very eyes. Not only does Japan run a huge trade surplus with the United States, but China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea all have big US surplus- es too, and matching deficits with Japan -- so that Japan actually accounts for almost all America's trade deficit, approaching $100 billion or so a year. It seems unlikely that this can go on indefinitely. And now, taking the place of China, there is a disin- tegrating Soviet Union to squabble over.

In fact, the cement in the United States- Japan relationship now, such as it is, is cer- tainly not a shared admiration for Thomas Jefferson, much less Adam Smith, but a bizarre and unacknowledged coalition of Japanese pacifists who are more frightened of Japanese militarism than anyone else's, and American consumers whose lavish lifestyle is being further subsidised every time Japanese products are dumped in America, and Japanese consumers ripped off to pay for them.

War over economic rivalry, war as part of a complicated political manoeuvre — this kind of self-interested war can be hard to justify, especially by a nation founded on the ideology of liberty. An act of treachery, an atrocity, is a causus belli no one can argue with. Remember the memorable slo- gans that ring through American history — 'Remember the Alamo!' (before the acqui- sition of Texas from Mexico), 'Remember the Maine!' (before the Philippines adven- ture), and let's not forget Pearl Harbor. Japan's response is, characteristically, the more enigmatic, 'No more Hiroshimas!' No intelligible warning was given in that case, either — but Japanese, if anyone, can read- ily understand that a clear warning rather tends to blunt a surprise attack.

No one, of course, really expects that nagging trade imbalances or mutual recriminations will ever lead to a second Pacific war. Still, contests over who is to be the technological top dog picking the bones of a moribund neighbour have led to Asian wars in the past. And, come to think of it, hardly anyone on 7 December 1941, apart from readers of Hector C. Bywater and possibly FDR and WSC, could really have expected . .