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| Fuji from the air |
BY PHILP J CUNNINGHAM
Listening to the news these days you’d think Japan had won
the war. Prime Minister Abe is staunchly unapologetic about Japan’s past
misdeeds and his adherence to the cult-like veneration of fallen war criminals
at Yasukuni Shrine is more provocative than commemorative. Former Prime
Minister Aso Taro has gone so far as to praise certain aspects of Nazi policy.
NHK governor Hyakuta Naoki claimed this month that the Nanjing Massacre “never
happened” while another Abe associate, NHK Chairman Momoi Katsuto, has
indicated that the sexual slavery of “comfort women” is a topic unfit for NHK’s
quasi-governmental station which has a remit to show “what a wonderful nation
Japan is.” Former Abe advisor Ayako Sono has suggested an Apartheid-type
sequestration of foreign workers.
Listening to these hawkish men and women, one could escape
with the mistaken impression that Japan’s fascists had won, not lost, the
reckless Asian war of invasion and plunder. What's fair ground for a fiction writer can be outright toxic for a politician. Ishihara Shintaro is a case in point; he was a sensitive and nuanced fiction writer but a terrible, tone-deaf politician.
‘What if’ scenarios about Japan winning World War Two have
enjoyed traction in novels, manga and film ever since the US Occupation lifted
a tight censorship regime in 1952
and after ANPO tensions in 1959, Revisionist literature written by Japanese
authors ranges from the starkly self-critical to shockingly unapologetic; some
of the greatest works of anti-war art and literature have been produced in
Japan, such as “Barefoot Gen” by Nakazawa Keiji, Ichikawa Kon’s “Fires in the
Plain” and “Grave of the Fireflies” by Takahata Isao but there is also a
cottage industry producing schlock for sore losers which either whitewashes
Japan’s many documented war crimes, or finds laudatory nuggets of heroism
amidst the general nastiness that help shore up a fantasy vision of “Japan the beautiful.” Kobayashi Yoshinori is a virtual
cottage industry of provocative revisionism unto himself, with titles such as “On
Yasukuni” “On Taiwan” and “On Okinawa.”
One of the most outstanding works in the ‘what if’ genre was
written not by a Japanese lamenting loss or fantasizing about a non-existent
victory, but by an American writer wondering what the world would be like had
things unfolded differently. Philip K Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” which won the Hugo Award for science fiction in
1963 has just re-entered the media conversation, having been green-lighted by Amazon for a series after the successful online release of
the pilot film in October 2014.
The time is the early 1960’s and the setting is a divided
US, occupied by the Nazis in the east and by the Japanese in the west. One of
the many rich ironies in Dick’s work is that even though the victors in his
imaginary world win battles beyond the wildest dreams of Hitler and Tojo, they
are still not happy, for, having vanquished the US and UK, the USSR and China,
it is only inevitable that their lust for power should put the two victors on a
collision course.
In this upside down world where New York’s Times Square is
bedecked with swastika banners and portraits of Hitler, and San Francisco has
taken on the appearance of its charming Japantown writ large, where Americans
struggle to get by under a relatively benign dictatorship symbolized the
‘Nippon Times Tower’, the tallest building in the occupied city.
Judging from the book and TV series pilot, it is tempting to
compare the two imaginary realms and say, hey, I’d rather live under the
Japanese than the Nazis. Amazon’s pilot episode of “The Man in the High
Castle” reinforces this distinction through
its brilliant set design in which New York is unremittingly dark and gloomy
while San Francisco, although also a fallen city, has snatches of color and a
pronounced aesthetic of “wa” harmony.
Dick takes us into a world where Americans can get ahead by
aping Japanese values, whether it be mastering martial arts, showing deference
with deep genuflection or in rare cases, risking cross-cultural
friendship. In a way it’s a color
negative of US-Occupied Japan, in which opportunistic ne’er-do-wells tend to do
better than earnest loyalists to the old way of life, though all share a similar
nostalgia for the past. The imagined glory of the past before the foreigners
came marching in is part of the occupied citizen’s toolkit for coping with the
indignity of foreign occupation.
Seventy year’s after war’s end, there are few Americans
around who lived under Japan’s wartime boot, but there are many registered
legal aliens living under the ‘silken slipper’ of democratic Japan who are
uniquely well-situated to understand the depth of Dick’s insight and humor in
imagining how Yanks would feel if the boot were on the other foot, so to speak.
As “High Castle” suggests, there’s a lot to like about
Japan, even when one is in a subordinate relationship to it, as long as one can
avoid conflict with authority. It would be a different sort of challenge for
any author to imagine cottoning up to Hitler’s occupiers in the same way, and
Dick later stated that he couldn’t write a sequel to his novel because the idea
of creating true to life villains of Nazi caliber was too repellent to him.
But to say that’s Japan’s crimes against humanity are, on account
of the incomparable horror of the Holocaust, less horrible than Germany’s is
not to say that fascist Japan was less than horrific. Killing competitions and
countless summary executions took place, especially in China, where racism and
rape were widespread, predations against civilians were brutal and heartless
policies that lived up to the name of “kill all, loot all, burn all” (politely
known as ‘burn-to-ash strategy’)
In fact, it could be argued that for the fighting man, at
least, being taken prisoner by Nazi Germany offered a better outlook than being
taken prisoner by the forces of Imperial Japan in the Pacific theatre of the
war where Geneva-inflected wartime conventions were mostly observed in the
breach. Hollywood has dealt with this topic in some depth and breadth, ranging
from the relatively anodyne internment camp portrayed “Empire of the Sun,” (Spielberg, 1987) to the torture and brutality of
the newly-released “Unbroken” (Jolie, 2014) and the classic “The
Bridge Over the River Kwai” (Lean, 1957).
The Japanese-British production “Merry Christmas Mister Lawrence” (Oshima, 1983) offers a hard look at the POW issue
as well. In short, you wouldn’t want to be an enemy combatant in any camp, but
the survival rate was higher under the Nazis.
This important anniversary year in the global remembrance of
World War Two has already seen Japan paint itself into a corner in regards to
its neighbors because of the intransigent and cavalier way Japanese politicians
talk about the war. In contrast, the German government has come to terms with
its sordid past because it does not minimize or whitewash the horror of
Germany’s historic crimes, but strives to make amends to past victims and its
contemporary neighbors in a way that Japan has failed to do but might yet
emulate.
Perhaps the best advice one could share with the gaffe-prone
politicians cited above is that they should abandon the high castle of
political hate speech and war revisionism and stick to fantasy and fiction. The
nuanced work of political compromise, accommodation with neighbors and the
pursuit of peace are activities better left to those with more forbearance and
less fantastical ambition and imagination.
