Post-War Setting

Holding the Yankees at Bay

Although the need to rebuild Japan must have been clear to everyone, knowing where to begin must have been understood by few.

Humble and Not So Humble Reassessment

Having spent more than 60 years in the belief that one's national mandate was to protect and rule East Asia many Japanese must have found it difficult to believe that it was all a lie. Surely there was plenty of evidence that something had gone wrong, but was a confession of one's own emperor reason enough to doubt 60 years of successful empire building? Few people throw away everything for which they have spent their entire lives to build and maintain, just because their national leaders misjudged the military capability of their enemies and overestimated their own industrial and military strength.

Furthermore, it was not Japan's Asian neighbors who brought an end to Japan's empire; rather, it was a Western power, who in the eyes of both Japan and other East Asian nations was just another empire building colonial power. In the end losing the war with the United States probably did change Japan's view of itself vis-à-vis the US, but had it changed Japan's view toward East Asia? Many Japanese -- both young and old ­ still claim that Japan harbors feelings of inferiority toward the West and superiority towards its Asian neighbors.

Moreover, the rubble which lay before Japan was not Japan's doing; the people who had dropped the bombs and pulled the triggers on Japanese citizens, were not Japanese. The soldiers who now occupied Japan were the very same whose presence Japan had struggled so hard to avoid. Indeed, was not their impending arrival the very reason given by Japan's leaders for building it's empire in the first place? Certainly, many Japanese could take a fatalist attitude and argue that despite every preventive measure, domination by the West was inevitable. In this sense cooperation with the United States could be more easily justified, and losing to one's military and economic superior was hardly something of which one must feel shame.

Nevertheless, is it not difficult to trust someone who can barely speak your language and has little understanding of your culture? In the end Japanese could to do as they were told, because they had little choice. Moreover, Japanese could justify to themselves that doing what they were told was the correct thing to do under the present set of circumstances. Such a basis for cooperation is hardly the basis for a solid friendship, however. And so the reconstruction must have begun.

The Other Side

Now let us try to put ourselves in the victor's place. What a miserable lot the Japanese nation must have appeared to them. Many Japanese were without either food or shelter and had little or no means to produce. US troops had come to Japan neither as an old neighbor seeking reconciliation after a bitter squabble, nor as a good friend; rather they came as an alien race and embittered enemy that shared little in common with the Japanese nation. By way of comparison consider Germany and France who form the pivotal axis of the newly formed European Community. For hundreds of years these two countries fought wars and occupied each other's land. Not only was each intimately familiar with the other's language, culture, and history, as well as political, economic, and legal institutions, but each shared important cultural, linguistic, religious, racial, and historical roots. The relationship between the United States and Japan was very different.

For the United States Japan had never been more than a distant trading partner and at worst a rather eccentric, reclusive host to a geographical half-way house along a commercial trade route with China. Culturally and linguistically these two countries shared little in common. Politically and philosophically they could hardly have been more alien.

What Japanese saw as meaningful, carefully designed pictures, that had taken many hours to learn to read and write, USAmericans saw as meaningless symbols of an archaic writing system drawn by an overworked hand. What Japanese saw as convenient, multi-purpose, easy-to-use, dignified eating utensils, USAmericans saw as a pair of unwieldy, crude, wooden splinters ­ certainly too big for picking one's teeth. Many Japanese wore no shoes and others only sandals, while US troops shined their handsome leather boots in preparation for up-coming inspections by their battalion commanders. These same troops saw Japanese squatting and defecating in open fields and bathing nude with one another in the same spring water. They probably wondered very seriously just how Japan had ever learned to build MIG fighter jets. Japanese manners, customs, and habits were all very strange, and Japanese had little to offer in the way of souvenirs that would not have been viewed as bizarre or useless trinkets back home. Japanese bowed before these troops like servants to a master and huddled together in small groups in low voices with occasional laughter. Had US troops any idea what was being discussed? Perhaps they thought someone was planning to steal their next lunch.

Was it not the Japanese, who had killed their cousin's family in a surprise attack early one Sunday morning only several years before. Was it not the Japanese who had dismembered their closest friends in mortar attacks. Was it not Japanese who had torn them away from their newly wedded wives and denied them the opportunity to watch their own sons and daughters mature, because they had just spent the past four years under mosquito nets in tropical heat. Were they not still cursing the day they experienced their first monsoon? Like the Japanese the memories of war were still fresh in their minds.

Was an armed attack on Pearl Harbor even comparable to the forceful landing of Admiral Perry almost a century earlier? It is likely that neither they nor the Japanese, who they observed huddled in small groups before them, had ever witnessed the mushroom clouds that had billowed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki earlier that summer. Even if they had been unlucky enough to see the destruction that resulted, would they have not stood in wonder at the awesome destructive power of their own military, and felt gratitude that it was their government -- not Japan's -- that had learned to build the bomb first.

They were not visiting anthropologists, neither were they tourists, nor adventure seeking travelers. When the war broke out and they were drafted, they had probably requested to be assigned to the European front where at least they might have the opportunity to visit their grandfather's birthplace. Indeed, the first time they had likely ever heard of Japan was in Jr. High School when they saw in their local newspapers caricatures of Samurai warriors chopping the heads of Chinese laborers in Manchuria. Oh yeah, they may have seen Chinese pottery in a museum once, or even a Japanese fan in their doctor's office and wondered where it was from. Practically speaking, they had little or no knowledge about Japan. USAmerican feelings toward Japanese must have been a mixture of hatred, pity, and curiosity, and the compassion which Japanese received from them could not have been more than that required of USAmericans by their own religion when confronted with those less fortunate than themselves.

Both sides must have been warned to treat the other side with the best manners possible under the given conditions. Unfortunately, neither side would have been able to distinguish good manners from bad, because neither side had the slightest idea about the manners and customs of the other.

Conflicting Goals: Communicating with the Enemy

Under such circumstances who was to teach whom the other's language and culture, so that even a minimum level of communication became possible? Certainly, it was not the average USAmerican soldier eager to go home, nor was it the average Japanese still hurting from a humiliating defeat. Rather, it was those few truly adventurous soldiers who were able to appreciate their new exotic surroundings under conditions of peace on the one hand, and those many more numerous Japanese, who remained baffled by the kind, but strange behavior of their unwanted guests and saw new economic opportunity, if only they would take the initiative, on the other.

It was not a question of Japanese being too difficult a language for foreigners to learn. Neither did it have anything to do with hidden mysterious qualities of Japanese language and culture, that made these latter possible for only Japanese to learn. Nor did it have anything to do with Japan being an island country, suspicious of the outside world, and unwilling to teach its language and culture to foreigners. Japan had not spent the past 60 years teaching the rest of Asia how to industrialize and run their nations in the English language -- the language of instruction was Japanese! The reason that many Korean, Taiwanese, and Chinese speak Japanese today is because they were either compelled to learn it by their new ruling protectors, or like Japanese only decades before wanted to learn how to modernize as quickly as possible, so as to ward off further imposition from their new Japanese masters.

Surely, Japanese must have felt a sense of inferiority toward their victorious guests, but it was not likely cultural in nature. The near totality of the Japanese nation had never stepped foot in the United States and was not in a position to compare. Moreover, Japan's deference toward the West could not have been so very different from that of the United States toward Europe only decades before. It was German, French, English and Dutch culture and technology that had formed the primary bases for Japan's development -- not that of the United States. Moreover, the USAmerican Constitution, that Japan had adopted during the Meiji era, had long since disappeared from Japan's political scene.

Similarly, misguided thoughts about the inferiority of the Japanese people could not have dominated USAmerican thinking, ­ this despite Japan's relatively lower level of industrialization. Much of what they saw in Japan may have appeared rural or backward, but it was hardly a backward, uneducated people who imposed their will on neighboring nations much bigger than themselves, sent expeditionary forces into distant corners of East Asia, and reached half-way across the world's largest ocean to drop bombs on their newly declared enemy deep in slumber. What likely did prevail in the minds of most USAmericans was an utter fear of another NAZI Germany in Asia, which would rise out of the dust and ashes of its fallen empire and wreak havoc still again on its neighbors and themselves in still another world war.

Although the world must have taken a sincere interest in Japan at the war's end, it could not have been very keen. Certainly Japan offered a fascinating history, interesting language, and well-developed cultural traditions; notwithstanding, it was hardly an interesting place for foreign economic investment at the time, and Japan had little money to attract interested scholars. The Japanese economy was shattered. With regard to the United States in particular, even before the war US interest in Japan was very limited. While Japan was spreading its arms across East Asia, the United States was still developing its own Western frontier. It was only a few years before Admiral Perry first set foot in Edo that the California Gold Rush had begun. Shortly thereafter the United States fought a major civil war, entered into a border conflict with Mexico and Spain, and became embroiled in World War I on the European continent. Thereafter, it was beset by the longest domestic economic downturn in its history. Although the United States did have some interest in Asia, it was severly limited in both scale and scope. Moreover, the number of people living outside of Japan, who could claim Japanese roots was small compared with other immigrant populations of the world, such as the Chinese.

Without doubt World War II had compelled the United States to look toward Asia in a far more serious way. Moreover, the collapse of the Japanese empire had created an enormous power vacuum that would have been quickly filled by the communists under the leadership of China's Mao Tse Tung and Russia's Joseph Stalin, had the United States not acted quickly. Great Britain's empire had been greatly weakened, and the other major colonial powers including Holland, France, and Portugal were either preoccupied with Europe's postwar reconstruction at home or had suffered dearly at the hands of the Japanese in East Asia. In the mind of USAmericans there was only one enemy worse than Japanese imperialists and German nationalists -- ­ the quickly spreading hands of communist ideology. Helping Japan to rebuild and South Korea and Taiwan to establish themselves as self-determining political and economic entities provided the United States with an important opportunity to develop lasting friendships in East Asia. The fear that Japan would someday return to haunt them as did Germany after the Versailles Treaty at the close of World War I was ever present. The communist threat and fear of Japanese revenge must have been the primary driving forces for continued US involvement in East Asia.

Then too, there was the world's Christian community who saw an opportunity to reestablish itself in Japan after two and a half centuries of persecution. Although Christians were allowed to practice their faith openly under the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese state offered no encouragement. At no better time since the landing of Francis Xavier in 1549 and the subsequent banning of their faith by Tomoyoshi Hideyoshi did the Christian church have a chance to deepen and spread its roots in Japan.

In order to achieve its objectives US government needed to reeducate Japanese about the virtues of democracy and economic liberalism; Western capital, machinery, and technical know-how were positive incentives for Japanese to learn. Moreover, in order to pay back its loans, which it had obtained through the US Marshall Plan, Japan needed US dollars, which could only be obtained through the direct sale of exports to the US. Since Europe had faired little better than Japan during the war; only the United States had sufficient buying power to purchase Japanese manufactured goods. Thus, learning the English language satisfied two important objectives for Japan: one, demonstrate to the United States government Japan's sincerity toward reform and improve communication with GHQ; and two, establish new business ties with the United States.

In summary, the immediate postwar period as viewed from a cultural and linguistic perspective can be divided into two major, sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping movements: one, placate the USAmerican government and thus minimize its intrusion into Japanese domstic affairs; and two, acquire the friendship of the USAmerican people who stood ready to help Japan back on its feet. Let us now try to imagine how these two movements likely played themselves out against one another.