Sword into Chrysanthemum?
Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese 30s.)
WRITING over fifteen years ago in that indispen- sable guide to the understanding of modern Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ruth Benedict commented that 'Japan, if she does not include militarisation in her budget, can, if she will, provide for her own prosperity before many years, and she could make herself indispensable to the commerce of the East. She could base her economy on the profits of peace and raise the standard of living of her people. Such a peaceful Japan could attain a place of honour among the great nations of world. . .
Today that prophecy, written in the shadow of Hiroshima during the first years of the MacArthur era, has come dramatically true. Japan's steel production is greater than that of the United Kingdom's, her super-tankers and transistor radios are sold all over the world, and there seems no reason why the present govern- ment's ambition of raising the standard of living to equal that of Western Europe by 1970 should not be attained. Yet even more important than the achievement of the Japanese economic miracle is the extent to which the traditional and the modern elements in Japanese life, whose imbalance led to the tragedy of the Pacific War, have been fused. In one way or another these three books are fundamentally concerned with this problem.
Professor Beasley's volume, to begin with, covers the history of Japan from the early nine- teenth century to the present. He is particularly good in describing the ossified social feudal structure which has developed during the country's centuries of isolation from the rest of the world. He also discusses the far-reaching social attitudes which accompanied feudalism, many of which persisted after Japan's opening to Western trade with Perry's expedition of 1853 and the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate together with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the events which signalled the birth of modern Japan.
Yet the progressive Westernisation of Japan during the last decades of the nineteenth century, a process which so impressed the rest of the world, was accompanied by the transmutation of traditional patriotism into a virulent national- ism. First came the wars with China and Czarist Russia, then the annexation of Korea in 1910, followed by the carving out of special rights in Manchuria. Most important of all, during the First World War Japan became a fully indus- trialised country. As Professor Beasley sees, in the 1920s the dichotomy between liberalism and militarism in Japanese life was unresolved; only in 1931 with 'the Manchuria incident' when the Kwangtung Army presented the Tokyo govern- ment with a fait accompli did the road to Pearl Harbor become a likely possibility. And so, in this perspective we are led quite clearly to see that the new Japan was only possible with the defeat of 1945, . . a catharsis, exhausting the emotions which Japanese had previously brought to their relations with the outside world, as well as opening a way for experiments in social and political institutions.'
There is hardly a better book to read after Professor Beasley's history than Masao Maruyama's study of modern Japanese politics— the author, now professor of political theory in Tokyo University, was called up during the war and stationed three miles outside Hiroshima when the bomb fell. This collection of essays really consists of two parts. In the first the writer considers the underlying theories and values of Japanese nationalism, a preoccupation which leads to the heart of the book in the two long papers on the nature of Japanese fascism and the behaviour of Japan's wartime leaders. These two essays are extremely good indeed It would he impossible to summarise their contents here but the author's general analysis shows without a doubt how the fascism of the Tokyo militarists was really 'pluralistic rather than totalitarian on the pattern of the Third Reich or even Mussolini's Italy. When war came it was the result, not of a deliberate conspiracy aimed at world mastery, but of blundering, hysterical and irresponsible be- haviour by the politico-military groups in control. This is an interpretation which is of course con- firmed from the opposite side, and with a completely different approach, in the immensely detailed American studies by Herbert Feis and Roberta Wohlstetter of the events which led to Pearl Harbor. Maruyama's achievements in these essays is to show not only how and why Japan's decision to take on the United States in 1941 was an essentially irrational act of policy, but how the decision was deeply rooted in the contradictions of Japan's national life since the Meiji Restora- tion.
Yet another perspective again with James Cary's first-rate piece of reportage on post-war Japan, written by an Associated Press newsman who lived and worked in the country for six years. For Cary the story of the new Japan starts on that brilliant autumn afternoon in November, 1944, which was the prelude to the apocalypse of the B-29s, `. . as if painted by a giant
invisible hand, a white vapour trail seemed to etch itself across the Tokyo sky . . the un-
spoken message of the first American aerial
reconnaissance flight from the new bases in the Marianas. . . .' The writer goes on to discuss the
MacArthur period, the economic miracle, the rise and fall of the Kishi administration, the new Labour movement and the Zengakuren. Like Professor Beasley, Mr. Cary thinks that Japan has not yet come to terms with the spiritual problems to which her modern development has given rise. But unlike the professor who con- cludes with the reflection that such malajustment is no more than evidence that Japan has at last become modern, Mr. Cary thinks that the forces of the revolutionary left, the militant neutralists, and the authoritarian right may yet engage in a spectacular triangular conflict which could wreck Japan's new-found, but precarious, stability. In 1970, he reminds us, the much-debated security treaty will expire, and it is highly likely that this will mean the withdrawal of American bases and the end of the ambivalent relationship with the United States which has sustained Japan since 1945.
On the other hand, what Mr. Cary fails to see is that such a break might at last mean that Japan, just a century after the Meiji Restoration, will have found a stable and acceptable national identity. But in any case, it would certainly be rather unwise to predict too closely the course of events in this country which has experienced such a remarkable rise, fall and renaissance in less than a hundred years.
DAVID REES
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